[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 310 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Remi Kalir joins me to talk about Professional Learning in a Time of Pandemic.

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[00:00:12] Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

[00:00:21] Bonni: Hello and welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

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[00:00:50] Bonni: Candidly, it feels awfully strange to be saying those final words in the introduction, “to be even more present for our students,” as so many of us struggle with all of the implications of the pandemic in our own lives, we also still have that desire to be present for our students, to be present for our lives, to show up. Remi Kalir and I have a conversation today as we look at his doctoral seminar on educator professional learning in the light of our crisis and the many educational implications.

He invited his students to write an alternative paper. In this episode, you’ll hear us talk about a letter that he and his colleagues wrote to their students that is linked to in the show notes. There is so much to wrestle with in terms of contrasting the business, as usual, educator professional development, and what needs and realities are emerging today? I hope you enjoy this conversation with Remi just as much as I did.

We’re looking forward to hearing, from you, any of your thoughts that you’d like to share with us on the kinds of things that you’re struggling with and the kinds of things that you’re succeeding with during this time. I do also want to mention that in addition to Remi’s bio, which you can find on Teaching in Higher Ed, to learn a little bit more about his work at the University of Colorado Denver School of Education and Human Development, that he also is a faculty member for this year’s Digital Pedagogy Lab, which has gone online.

I invite you to go and click on the link in the show notes to learn more about that event. We are continuing our partnership. Of course, our hope had been to join everyone there, including Remi in Colorado, but that is not going to be the case for this event, which is disappointing, yet also points to some opportunities that we have to engage in new ways and reach people who would not have been able to join us there physically. I’m really looking forward to you hearing this conversation. I hope you’ll go check out the Digital Pedagogy Lab information to see if it’s something you might want to participate in online. I’m just looking forward to this conversation with Remi. Remi Kalir, welcome back to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:03:13] Remi Kalir: It is a pleasure to be here, Bonni. Thanks for reconnecting.

[00:03:16] Bonni: People who I know who have gone through times of significant grief in their lives, there has been something that has been a pattern for those people. It is instead of asking them how they’re doing, many of them have expressed to me that they prefer to be asked, “How are you doing today?” because that’s an easier question to answer. I’m going to ask you, Remi, how are you doing today?

[00:03:41] Remi: Thank you, Bonni, for framing it that way. I certainly appreciate that. I’m doing okay today. Today’s actually the day before my birthday, which is always awkward since it comes at the end of the academic calendar, and people are busy, and it’s hard to celebrate when everyone’s stressful anyways and then in this particular circumstance, during the semester in which everyone’s academic lives and livelihood has been offended.

If not, people are dealing with so much more, again, trauma, uncertainty, and pain. I’m doing okay today. I’m thinking a lot about ritual and transition. It’s the end of the semester. People should be graduating and maybe they are, but in different ways. People are having their final faculty meetings of the year but in, again, strange in different ways. I have a birthday tomorrow and yet I’ll be celebrating with my wife and my 11-month-old son. The idea of social connection is very different now, and certainly, again, that resonates with all of us who are educators. I’m doing okay today, and thanks for asking.

[00:04:41] Bonni: I’m just seeing this increased need for self-awareness. I mentioned that I’m on this COVID-19 leadership team, and I’m working with people that I really have never either worked with at all before or certainly not this closely. They chuckle at me because I just think we just have to be self-aware such that any of our personalities, any of our default settings, they just get radically amplified during this time, which our strengths when the volume gets turned up, that can be a really good thing. Then it gets turned up a little too much and all of a sudden, it goes into being a bad thing. Are you noticing any of your default settings that are really just-

[00:05:20] Remi: Yes.

[00:05:21] Bonni: -being magnified?

[00:05:23] Remi: I’m chuckling a little bit because I said this to my wife a few days ago. I said, “I think that our own personal emotional register is much more similar to that of our young son,” which is not that young children or infants have emotional registers that are inappropriate or that are not authentic, it’s just that they really fluctuate so dramatically from “Now I’m laughing and playing,” to “Now I’m screaming my head off, to “Now I’m visibly annoyed.”

There’s a little less of a filter for an 11-month-old than there is for somebody who’s decades into their life. Yet I agree, Bonni, from moment to moment, hour to hour, to be very, again, honest and transparent, and I think reflective of this moment, this is still happening almost every day for me, which is, there’s a lot of trepidation around opening my email inbox or the messaging that I use, the messaging services I use with my courses.

Just yesterday, I received yet another message from a student who was saying, “I’m sorry that I had to check out for a few weeks. My father got sick with COVID.” That’s become so regular now. The ritual which has become so habitual of just opening my email, which is often seen as an annoying task previously, now can become a very significant emotional trigger and a reminder that people are suffering in very serious ways, whether they’re losing jobs or like a student of mine just yesterday whose father was ill.

Unfortunately, I’ve had students whose families have experienced much worse. Again, from moment to moment, hour to hour, and day-to-day, as you say, “How are you doing today?” that register of my emotion is just so variable. That also adds to the challenges of the moment and of being an educator in the moment, of being responsive to the needs of students and colleagues in the moment. Yes, this is hard work.

[00:07:30] Bonni: A lot of our conversation today is going to be framed around something that you wrote. It started, I believe, as a series of tweets talking about some changes, some reflections on your teaching this semester, and then you wrote a post. I wonder if you would start just our conversation around, where did you just start to see this bubbling up of change, a need for change, a need to rethink things, enough to prompt you to write such thought-provoking words?

[00:07:58] Remi: Thanks, Bonni. I teach a number of doctoral courses at the University of Colorado, Denver. Among the courses I teach is one specifically about professional learning. I’ve taught the class for a number of years now. There are a number of important themes that emerge in this class about professional learning that always come up for our students.

One of the major themes and also tensions in the class is the difference between more conventional professional development or PD and some of the more open-ended, more flexible, and more grassroots approaches to what we might call professional learning, and those types of communities and networks and interest-driven experiences that contribute to the professional learning of educators that sometimes look very different than the more mandated, dare I even say, authoritarian approaches to PD.

That’s a big tension that my doctoral students wrestle with every year. They do so because many of those students in that class, in another context, are themselves educators, or maybe school principals, or they have the responsibility to design and facilitate, perhaps, approaches to professional development that they want to look a little bit more like professional learning. We talk about that every semester.

Every semester, we talk about notions of community and, maybe, more critical approaches to the types of networks and experiences that shift us more towards the more humanizing approaches to professional learning than a knack to many of the critical dispositions that I think are important in teaching and learning today. Also, that happens every semester anyways.

When you have a layer on top of that, the current COVID crisis and all of the educational disruptions and transformations that have occurred over the past few months, the students in my course again, who have their own classrooms of students, some of whom are in K-12 contexts, some of whom also teach in higher ed or might be leading maybe educational non-profits, they are now really wrestling with what it means to be a leader, what it means to be a learner in this particular moment in time and ultimately, what it means to learn professionally when many of the assumptions, many of the rituals, many of the routines of education, schooling as usual now just no longer exist.

In that context, my students and I began to open up a series of conversations. I ultimately changed that course’s final assignments to invite discussion and invite provocation about what professional learning looks like at a time of pandemic. My initial thoughts were written haphazardly but from a place of emotion and concern, additionally, on Twitter, you’re right, and then that thread became a more substantive blog post.

It is now also an instructional resource for my students as they’ve begun to shape their final representations, their own final thoughts, at least in the moment, about how they themselves as professionals are approaching, are navigating, and are making decisions about their professional learning to advance, whether it’s their own institutions, whether it’s their own sense of well being, whether it’s their own professional practice during a very challenging moment.

[00:11:27] Bonni: I also teach a doctoral class that is not about professional learning but is about professional learning. [laughs] It’s a technology and leadership class. I also changed my final assignment, sounds very similar to what you did. I wanted to just talk you through attention that I saw before COVID-19 with having taught the class, I think, for seven or eight years now. Then, also, it echoes my work in faculty development.

I think that I naively thought, and I really wrestled with this for longer than I feel like I should have, I feel like I should have figured this out sooner, but I just thought that if you put structures in place in a class or perhaps even, I should say, a lack of structures to rid the class policies, class structure from this authoritarian voice, in my experience, you actually get more resistance than I ever would have expected because I really treasure autonomy, I love it.

Learning is one of my strengths on the StrengthsFinder instrument. I wrestled with that for a long time because I think it’s just like, “Release the doves and they’ll fly out of their cage and never be the same again.” What has your experience been both before COVID and then now, did you see a difference in terms of lifting that authoritarian nature of what some people come into an experience like that thinking you’re going to do for them as a teacher?

[00:12:50] Remi: That’s great, Bonni. I think that there’s two contexts here that we’re talking about, one is within a course context, what am I inviting students to explore? What kinds of, again, constraints or opportunities are presented that they themselves may pursue, but also they see what this may look like, again, before professional learning, whether it’s for faculty in higher ed or those you teach or lead and other types of higher ed class in their settings that they might want to pursue.

Let me first suggest that in the context of a class, I think it’s critically important to provide those constraints because then people know how to identify a boundary. They can then push against those boundaries, and they can find opportunities to creatively say, “Oh, okay, I can see now how to cross this line.” I think, again, good examples of that are possible, whether it’s in how you frame an online discussion, how you approach all kinds of how pedagogy for assignments and arrangements.

I want to, first of all, say that it was important to invite students to play that space a little bit, to push against the envelope, so to speak. I think in this particular moment, that’s very easy to do because those standard routines, those standard expectations, those standard ways of doing things have all been maybe for better maybe worst, they’ve all been thrown out the window.

I think it’s already a need to rethink some of those things anyways, and a lot of that is coming from the experiences of our learners, the experiences of our educational leaders, the experiences of our colleagues, which suggests to me then the second context that I want to orient to is the professional learning context, which is that a lot of the immediate response to the COVID crisis has been rather technical.

We’ve been saying to faculty and to learners and to others, here’s how to transition into this so-called remote or so-called emergency remote modality, “Here’s how to put stuff online, here’s how to use certain tools.” As a professor of learning technology, I’m honestly often very skeptical of many technical solutions to very complex human problems. I’m also particularly skeptical of technical determinism that says, “Here is your silver-bullet solution to, now, some very challenging social circumstances.”

All of which is to say that the questions that inspire me now come from the educators in a variety of settings who’ve always said, “I’ve always been curious about how to amplify student agency in my teaching and now is the time to really do so,” or “I’ve always been curious about how to be a more anti-racist educator. Now is really the time to do so.”

“I’ve always been curious about more interdisciplinary connections and how to really draw upon more real-world examples that allow my students to critique systemic injustice from whatever disciplinary lens I bring. Now is the time to really do so.”

One of my fears in the initial transition of our educational institutions because of the COVID crisis has been, “Here are some tutorials and more technical-oriented solutions or fixes to some very serious problems.” My bias, because it’s a bias, and the conversations that I’m having with my students suggests this is an opportunity if one invites it and if one embraces the challenge of it to say, “Yes, we can do the technical stuff but there are some longer-term opportunities that are being opened here to pretty radically rethink what it means to be an educator.

Now is an opportunity to embrace professional learning opportunities that allow me to question, to embrace, and to design toward some very different dispositions and practices, professionally, ethically, socially, and that we can embrace those too.” We may not have the technical guide book to do that yet but we can build it now, and now is the time to do so.

[00:16:58] Bonni: I have been so challenged by this because, as someone who just loves teaching so much, I recognize the need for the kind of foundations that you’re describing, most classically in my institution or one that’s nearby where I work, a different one but they’re nearby, on the same block, maybe in the same building where a lot of questions and challenges are coming up around assessment.

I definitely bring, to the table, my own biases around assessment. Also, I feel incredibly grateful to the people that have been willing to come on this podcast in the past. I just think about the education it’s been for me, and I know so many people who have listened where I’ve been able to wrestle with some of these things, around, what is assessment, how do you have that be meaningful and authentic and what have you?

They want to go right to taking what they do in their existing practice –By the way, as do I. I don’t want to, “Them against me,” no, I don’t want to phrase it that way. Just because I feel like I’ve had more time to reflect, gosh, I could just spend the entire episode, sharing the failures I’ve had just around assessment alone, it would just barely be getting started, but they want to instantly go to, “Okay, can we invest in a proctoring tool for all of us?”

It’s like, “I don’t even know where to start” because there’s such a fear. I keep thinking about Josh Eyler, we were engaging on Twitter around the topic of curiosity. He was talking about one of his findings for his book How Humans Learn. Curiosity really gets minimized when you’re in crisis mode. I wish I could ignite our curiosity around assessment and have these great professional learning conversations and be in community and sharpen each other’s thoughts, but I literally don’t know how to start when the house is on fire, and they just want you to come with a hose.

[00:18:54] Remi: I think, Bonni, what you’re suggesting to me is the necessary set of first steps in asking the kinds of tough questions that may allow the leaders of educational institutions and faculty, whether on their own or in a collective, to begin to really disentangle core assumptions about things that have often been presumed in the life and in the day-to-day flow of a classroom, like assessment.

As another example, we might say that it’s very important that students collaborate with one another. I would be disappointed, for example, if coming out of this COVID crisis, most faculty don’t learn how to facilitate better online discussion. That’s okay, that’s good. I actually happen to care a lot about things like online discussion and collaboration. If this entire, incredible upheaval of the educational norms and ways that have been presumed to be useful, many of which we should say already were not very useful for many, many reasons, to begin with. I think it’s important to get under the table as well that many of the so-called normal that existed did not work for many students, to begin with. Again, we’re presented with– I think we, and I speak “we” as faculty across many different types of institutional contexts, we as instructional designers, we as those who lead educational institutions can take this opportunity to say this is the time to say, “Assessment, question mark. Collaboration, question mark.”

What are core assumptions that are built into these practices? What was already not working? When we see initiatives around things like ungrading or we see initiatives around things like inquiry-based learning or interest-driven collaboration among teams of students, what is it about those that was already provocative in the so-called pre-COVID era? What now can we learn from those models or those strategies and retrain ourselves as professionals, question some of our professional biases, think about our own professional practices in new ways so that we don’t try and reinvent what’s previously existed and some new reality, but we say there is no return to normal?

There cannot be, for so many reasons. Our educational institutions and our classrooms will look very, very different, as they should, given what’s happening right now. What can we do to create more humanizing, to create more equity-oriented, to create more socially-connected, and to create more politically-critical classrooms? What kinds of professional learning are necessary right now across disciplines and across institutional contexts to make that happen?

I’m not suggesting that I have answers to these things, but these are the types of questions and tensions that I’m very curious about right now, as our classrooms change, as our constitutions change, and the students in my classes are also curious about these kinds of questions. I think that kind of productive wrestling, those questions burning that you’re asking, that’s what is needed right now. Perhaps people who are not asking the kinds of questions that you mentioned a few moments ago, how can we help nudge those folks to begin rustling with the types of tensions that you’re raising? That, to me, is the important work right now.

[00:22:21] Bonni: Yes, it’s really tough because I think that there’s a tendency to want someone else to provide some concrete things in a very, very fluid time. I’m not going to be great at providing that because I don’t– The more that I learn about teaching, the more that I learn about using technology to enhance our methods of teaching, the less I realize I have all the answers or that all the answers exist in any one source because learning is so complex, and every class is so different. It’s amazing.

[00:22:57] Remi: That’s right, Bonni. We’ve always– Again, when I say “we” here, I think I’m speaking in this context about those educators who are a little bit more critical and a little bit more creative. Again, there’s a continuum there, but I think that there’s always been a useful kind of counter-narrative to the idea of best practices. Once you begin to disentangle that idea, you can see that the idea of best practices falls apart pretty quickly, based upon different types of students and different types of learning contexts and different types of institutional arrangements.

All of kinds of things that we’ll suggest, best practices may provide some guidance for how to plan or how to design, but once we start to get into the messy work of teaching and learning, those practices will, inevitably, shift. New technologies come along, new students come along, new policies come along. All of a sudden, now we’re reinventing, as we should, what those practices are and the context within which we may say they are, “effective” or “meaningful” or “productive.”

All of which is to suggest that in this now current moment of crisis and the unfolding waves of what will inevitably change our classrooms and our institutions, the notion that we might have best practices guide professional learning, to me, is just not possible. There’s a need for us to now rethink much of that. I’ll just mention briefly that some of my colleagues and I in the Learning Design and Technology program at CU Denver wrote an open letter to our students at the beginning of when it became clear this crisis was going to fundamentally change not only the semester but for many semesters to come,

In that letter, we did not prescribe, dare we say, perhaps best practices for our program, but we listed some values, values around notions of privilege and care, of inviting feedback, of trying to listen deep to their concern, and of being reflective of our own practice. Again, I think that those commitments, those dispositions towards pedagogical care and wellbeing are values that can then guide the professional learning and then can guide sets of practices. Even then, those should not be codified or held out as, “This is the recipe for how to approach teaching and learning and professional learning in this current moment.” It may work for some people, but we’ve really got to be flexible right now.

[00:25:18] Bonni: I loved that letter so much. I would love to hear you talk about the origins of it a little bit more because I don’t think you just sit down and go, “You know what we need to do today, we need to write a letter.” [laughs] Tell me more about the things that were happening that wound up with that beautiful piece of writing.

[00:25:35] Remi: Thank you. Again, we can share a link to that from this for everyone to have a look at. I would suggest many similar letters were being written and were being promoted to various audiences. Faculty were writing to other faculty, some faculty were writing to students. Certainly, formal university memos were being sent to students about things that were policy-oriented, like grading and assessment and pass or no-pass policies and all kinds of things.

My colleagues and I began a conversation about the fact that we care about our students, we want them to know that, and we want them to know that in a way where we’re holding ourselves accountable to a broader public. We are, after all, public educators at a public institution. We’re not only writing to our current students but to our future students as well, those students who will join our program in semesters and in years to come.

We wanted to craft something that was human, first and foremost, but was also simple. It, very clearly, described our shared commitments to our students and that would also be a model for other educators, a model for other educators, whether it’s at our school, at our university, or elsewhere. After some drafts and some language-tweaking and stuff, we came up with what we hope is a pretty short, sweet but effective letter.

Just a reference to something that you and I have previously talked about, some of our students have actually gone in and annotated using the hypothesis tool, the public version and also some private versions of that. For example, we say in the letter, we will privilege care. One of our students’ close collaborators came in there and just highlighted that and annotated it and wrote the word “hurt” in response.

I just think that we’re trying to make a public statement about the kinds of values that will then guide our decisions and guide our practices. That’s where that letter came from. Hopefully, that serves as a useful model to other educators that may then inform their decisions and perhaps even their professional learning commitments pedagogical decisions in the future.

[00:27:50] Bonni: You and I were talking about plexiglass barriers in some institutions that either already have purchased those or are in the process of procuring them. Of course, just the symbolism, it’s just dripping with symbolism. Talk about the radical act of removing those barriers, the liberal and the figurative ones, and the challenge of it because I never want it to come across as that’s the easier road to take.

[00:28:20] Remi: That’s so important, Bonni, because I believe that many institutions are grappling with all kinds of technical solutions to very complex human challenges that, are in our case, related to teaching and learning, whether it’s plexiglass, which metaphorically has its own hilarious and very challenging implications. One of the things that my institution’s wrestling with right now is the idea of very flexible, synchronized classroom sessions so some students can come to campus if campus reopens, some students can join on Zoom.

Again, the idea here is to invite student agency and flexibility. It again raises all kinds of very challenging circumstances around, who shows up and where? How do you design for that? What if you have 35 students on Zoom and 2 students in a classroom? How do you group students? How do they talk? How do you do a think-pair-share? All kinds of things come to the fore.

Again, I want to present today less a set of discrete solutions but rather to provoke us to think very critically about all the circumstances, the scenarios, and the questions that will arise whenever we’re presented with these potential solutions, whether the potential solution is plexiglass barriers in a larger lecture hall or a potential solution is running synchronized, hybrid sessions, and students can show up however they want to show up. We can think of all other kinds of potential circumstances to having a class and having people come together. All of these solutions, for me, raise as many challenging questions as they do, at face-value, an answer that will work. In these, all of that, my hope is that educators find ways of supporting their own acts of radical pedagogical love for their colleagues and for their students because none of this will be easy. If faculty show up in the fall, teaching in a lecture hall with plexiglass barriers, that will be very challenging, and how do we provide professional learning supports to create then meaningful learning opportunities if that’s the learning environment that faculty are in?

In the same way that the faculty find themselves having to juggle from one class session to another, some students in the classroom, some students in Zoom, does the audio work? Does the video work? Are their microphones all over the room? Do they even have access to that hardware? Can students even hear one another? Can they even see the same things? How do they actually get together to do a gallery walk of responses to something like– Again, how do we have radical pedagogical love for the teachers and the students in that moment if that is the learning environment that we find ourselves in, in a particular classroom in three or four months?

[00:31:13] Bonni: There’s two things that I’m taking away from what you just shared. One comes from an unexpected book, at least I think it’ll be unexpected for you, is the Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. I recommended it before on the podcast. Who would think that a book about checklists could be riveting, it totally is, all the way through. One of the chapters, though, looks at types of architecture that have never been conceived of before, buildings that they’ve never built before.

How do you take the architects or the construction people, you can tell I’m very technical in this realm, then how do you apply it when you’ve never done this before? I keep thinking about less checklists that have existed before, instead checklists to continue to learn from your practice and your failures and your successes because it’s going to be hard, but especially if we’re not learning individually and collectively.

Then the second part is just that all of these needs to be aligned with our values. You’ve already done the very hard work, at least it looks hard, it may have been effortless, but it looks like just wrestling with those values that you expressed in such poignant ways, I think about that meme where they say, “You said the quiet part out loud.” I won’t mention the institution because I don’t feel like I’m even educated enough to reference it, but there is some college president that basically wrote about the plans for the fall semester in a very utilitarian format. Really, the values were right there of like, “No, of course, we don’t value this part of our society as much as we value–” It was right there in the wording.

[00:32:56] Remi: If you don’t mind me mentioning the university.

[00:32:57] Bonni: For sure, by all means.

[00:32:59] Remi: It was Brown University. I think it’s just notable, the president of Brown University is also a Deputy Chair of the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston. That editorial, to me, was shocking in that it barely mentions teaching. It did not mention notions of pedagogy, and I had to think of myself, “If I was a faculty member at Brown and this is my president’s letter, what kinds of questions would that raise for me about, again, my professional commitments to my students as an educator?”

I don’t need to give that university or that letter harder time now, but I do think that we are seeing statements about the viability of planning for the fall, and I recognize that there are very smart people who are making very challenging decisions right now and that every institutional context is different. The challenges facing every institution are going to be different.

Again, very smart people are making very challenging decisions right now about what it means to return safely to campus or what it means to return safely to teaching and learning,

but when that happens, I would encourage professors and instructors and designers and co-conspirators of all flavors of people, to ask themselves, as you said, “What are the things that we really, really value here about what it means to teach and learn, knowing that every educator is going to have a pre-COVID chapter of their professional life and a post-COVID chapter of their professional life?”

Every student who is enrolled, whether it’s an undergraduate or graduate programs, will have a pre-COVID chapter of their life as a student and a post-COVID chapter of life as their student. Things cannot return to normal, things will have to be different, so what are the tough questions and the tough conversations that are perhaps less to do with this kind of technocratic solutions, proctoring exams online, or trying to maintain the viability of our financial models and to say, “Can we really act critically and creatively to show how much we care for our students, to care for their learning and to care for their well being and then how do we, as educators, support that?”

That’s going to take a really different approach to learning, and I want to explore that. I want to try and design for that. I want to try and bring people together to do that hard work now so that we don’t try and approximate what existed before in a completely different educational reality, going down the road.

[00:35:29] Bonni: This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. I’ve recommended another column by this person, maybe even a couple of other columns, Aisha S. Ahmad. She’s been writing for The Chronicle about the broad topic of productivity. As someone who wrote a book about productivity, let’s just say I’m not talking about it a lot right now because it just seems like going for a walk seems so much more of an appropriate productivity approach for someone to be taking than any of the things I wrote about.

I’m just loving what she wrote. This particular column I’ll be linking to is called How to Salvage a Disastrous Today in Your COVID-19 Quarantine. What I like about it is that sometimes we might show up in our professions as very goal-oriented or achievement-oriented people, and that can be really frustrating during a time like this. I just love that she’s more speaking about more day-tight compartment aspects of measuring one’s success and really shrinking that down.

In a similar way, Remi, that you described shrinking down our assignments. You didn’t use the word “shrinking,” and maybe that’s not the right word to use, but I just think we need to rethink what it means to have a “successful” or “unsuccessful” day in these times. I also really enjoyed a Twitter thread that Dave Cormier, I’m not sure if I’m pronouncing his last name right. Sorry, Dave, I’ve only ever seen your name on Twitter.

I loved the thread he had about working from home, and it sounded rather tongue-in-cheek with how he started. He said something about with kids at home, trying to do homeschooling. Essentially, how do we measure success today? There were some really, really thoughtful posts, but what I took more out of it than anything else were the hysterical ones like Terry Green.

I can’t remember exactly what he wrote, but I just had tears coming out of my eyes because I thought, “You people see me right now.” It was just awesome. Those are the two things that I’ll be linking to in the recommendation segment, and I’m going to pass it over to you for yours.

[00:37:28] Remi: Awesome. I should ask you first, has Matt Reed been on the podcast before, Bonni?

[00:37:38] Bonni: Does he go by the Dean Dad or one of those?

[00:37:41] Remi: Dean dad.

[00:37:43] Bonni: I need to invite him.

[00:37:44] Remi: I’m going to recommend Dean Dad. This is Matt Reed. His Twitter handle is @deandad. He’s the Vice President of learning at Brookdale Community College. Matt Reed authors a column or a blog, I should say, for Inside Higher Ed, and that blog is called Confessions of a Community College Dean. He writes pretty regularly, like three or four times a week sometimes. Ever since the real implications for the COVID crisis emerged, I have been reading his blog, his column, whenever a new post comes up.

I found it to be indispensable, for a whole host of reasons, sharp intellect, creative thinking. As somebody who was at a public institution and one that is welcoming of, really, students from all walks of life. Our undergraduates’ population at CU Denver is primarily first-generation college students. We actually share a campus in downtown Denver with the Community College of Denver, and I’ve learned a lot about community colleges since coming to CU Denver.

Having his perspective as a community college dean, again, that’s the title of his post, and just his perspective on higher education reap large now in this current historical moment, has just been invaluable. Maybe that’s then also my next recommendation is, Bonni, get him on this podcast. I just think that he will be a wonderful guest and will have so much to share. For all of the listeners of certainly, this episode, definitely, do track down his column. Again, it’s at Inside Higher Ed, and it’s titled Confessions of a Community College Dean. Check it out.

[00:39:24] Bonni: It’s so great having this conversation with you today. Every time I get to talk to you, I just walk away feeling inspired and challenged in some really good ways. I enjoy every conversation with you. Thanks for coming back on Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:39:37] Remi: Pleasure to be here, Bonni. Thanks so much.

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[00:39:41] Bonni: Thanks once again to Dr. Remi Kalir for joining me for this conversation about Learning in a Time of Pandemic. If you’d like to view the show notes for today’s episode, they’re at teachinginhighered.com/310. They are also inside of your podcast player in the show notes sections there, and you can go access the links to the information that we mentioned there.

I just want to invite you, if you haven’t already, to go over and check out the Digital Pedagogy Lab information and find ways you might want to plug in, either informally or to register as a participant. There are a lot of wonderful classes there, wonderful workshop leaders on the faculty, and just a wonderful resource for our community. Thanks so much for listening, and I’ll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.

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The transcript of this episode has been made possible through a financial contribution by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). ACUE is on a mission to ensure student success through quality instruction. In partnership with institutions of higher education nationwide, ACUE supports and credentials faculty members in the use of evidence-based teaching practices that drive student engagement, retention, and learning. 

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.