Bonni: [00:00:00] Catching student cheating can evoke all sorts of feelings: frustration, disappointment, anger, ambivalence. Today on episode 19 of Teaching in Higher Ed, Dr. James M. Lang joins me to talk about lessons learned from cheating

Production Credit: [00:00:18] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni: [00:00:30] Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. This is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to increase our personal productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

Bonni: [00:00:54] I’m so happy today to be welcoming an author and a professor Dr. James M. Lang to the show. Jim, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

James: [00:01:03] Thank you for having me.

Bonni: [00:01:04] I am so glad to have you here I’m going to start by talking a little bit about your bio you are the a professor of English and the director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College in Massachusetts. You teach courses in British literature and in Creative Nonfiction writing.

Bonni: [00:01:23] You’re the author of four books although it’s probably hard to keep up with that on your bio since you seem to be a voracious writer and more than a hundred reviews or essays on topics ranging from higher ed to British literature.

Bonni: [00:01:39] And you write a column I really enjoy every time it publishes on the Chronicle of Higher Education and have contributed a number of other places as well. And you have a book that you’re working on right now.

Bonni: [00:01:50] Tell us about your George Orwell book.

James: [00:01:53] The George Orwell book looks at his early nonfiction writings which have sort of been neglected in favor of his more popular famous final novels 1984 and Animal Farm.

James: [00:02:05] I think for a lot of people don’t realize before he wrote those books he had spent a long career writing these really interesting and provocative nonfiction works about economics and poverty and so on to try and look back at some of that work and try to resurrect its value force and try to understand what it still has to contribute to debates about poverty and social justice today.

Bonni: [00:02:27] And you’re on a sabbatical right now for working on that book is that correct.

James: [00:02:31] I am I’m working on that book and I’m working on a teaching book also the teaching book is schedule is actually due in March. So that’s my first priority. So that’ll be turned into in March I hope will be out in January of 2016.

Bonni: [00:02:45] And because that wasn’t enough on your plate. You also have a wife and five children at home and a dog and a dog. What’s the dog’s name?

James: [00:02:55] Dog’s name is Finn. And he’s sitting right here and hopefully he won’t bark during the podcast.

Bonni: [00:02:58] We’ll edit Finn out later unless Finn has something good to contribute. I have been so excited to have you on the show since we first got in touch and I read your book by the way.

Bonni: [00:03:11] For anyone listening. His book is called Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty and it came out in 2013 and it explores the root causes of cheating in education and considers how we can best inspire our students to learn and I have to say I don’t know if you’ve gotten this reaction from other people who have read it to you. I felt like you were saving a lot of us money on therapy.

Bonni: [00:03:34] Out here in Southern California you might pay 140 dollars an hour for therapy and I thought, “He’s giving it to me in these first couple of chapters.”

Bonni: [00:03:42] Tell me about that first for you those first experiences of catching students cheating and one that was like for you I felt like you could really relate to those of us who were upset by that.

James: [00:03:54] Yeah. I mean it’s a very disheartening situation and I actually heard from people that I’ve been going around and talking on campuses about cheating that you know people have told me that they know faculty members who are almost tempted to leave the profession because they get so upset by catching students cheating.

James: [00:04:11] It feels very personal and it does feel like as if a student is cheating on you. When you catch someone. And so you know I’ve had that same experience as myself and I would say to people the first thing that I felt when I caught a student cheating was you know this sense of wanting to say to them:

James: [00:04:30] “Do you think I’m an idiot? How could you do this and not expect me to see it?” It’s like you’re insulting me. But, you know, you have to really step back from that because what I have found from looking at all this research and just thinking about it in talking to students is that you’re the last thing on their mind.

James: [00:04:47] But you know when a student is cheating, they’re not cheating on you. They have all kinds of other things that might be going on. And their cheating it’s not some kind of assault on you or your values. So you have to kind of try to step back from that to craft a response that’s going to really be a helpful one.

Bonni: [00:05:07] Yeah that’s one of the things that’s been helpful in reading your book and also talking with colleagues over time is that that really can be a downfall for us when we take things personally.

Bonni: [00:05:16] I know we’re going to talk more about that when we get your advice. I did also want to mention that there is sometimes that defensiveness of where they must think I’m an idiot. And then there’s also the – when you feel disappointed in yourself that you really were an idiot. That you think, “Wow, I think I really was [an idiot].”

James: [00:05:37] It’s a moment that is I think it really is the low point of teaching for many of us.

James: [00:05:42] And so yeah it can cause the questioning to go back to the student or it can come back to you. And I guess the other thing just to you know when you look at the research and cheating and you start delving into it one of the things that you see is how often it happens.

James: [00:05:56] And that is also kind of a heartening thing because it helps you realize that it’s not just you know a problem that you’re seeing or it’s not just because you have poor students or you know your teaching methods are somehow contributing to this.

James: [00:06:10] Those sometimes can be the case. But, it happens a lot. And it has been happening ever since we’ve had formal education. So I think knowing that can be very helpful to people as well.

James: [00:06:21] So that was part of what I was trying to do in the first few chapters of the book is just to sort of say look – Here’s a variety of historical situations in which cheating has flourished. As well as, here are the numbers that you know in terms of how many students are cheating in higher education today. And when you look at all those things in combination you see this is a long-term and persistent problem in education.

Bonni: [00:06:44] And we can look at it as [a] problem with the students. One of the things you help us do is turn the camera around and point it back at ourselves. What are some of the ways we’re actually inadvertently incentivizing cheating?

James: [00:06:59] So the argument that I make overall in the book is that the learning – the shape of the learning environment can make a contribution to cheating and that can make a positive or negative contribution.

James: [00:07:09] So it may be that you know sometimes students cheat for their own reasons they’ve got problems you know maybe they’re in school for the wrong reason. Their parents pushed them there. There may be other things that are happening outside in their lives that mean they just can’t get it done and their degree is important to them.

James: [00:07:27] So those kinds of cheating things happen and there’s good reasons for those from the students perspective. But there are other cases in which I think the learning environment can make a contribution to students cheating. And that learning environment can include actually both the curriculum and the individual classes.

James: [00:07:43] So sometimes I think when we look at curricula we see that a lot of times we like to structure curricula in ways that would make students take certain required courses that they don’t have any particular interest in before they can get to the courses that they really care about.

James: [00:07:56] And to a certain extent that’s kind of a recipe for fostering extrinsic motivation. I just need to get through this hoop to get the stuff I want. And so when students look at courses like that they’re more likely to cheat.

James: [00:08:09] But I think once you look at the classroom environment you can see that there are a small number of factors in the research that seem to suggest or seem to encourage students to cheat. One of the easiest ones to understand is infrequent high stakes assessment.

James: [00:08:27] So if you look at examples of where cheating happens and cases in which researchers have looked at real classroom situations and measured rates of cheating in comparison to different types of classes.

James: [00:08:41] One of those results was that you know when students only have one or two opportunities to demonstrate their learning on say like a midterm in a final exam and that’s it and that’s how they earn their grades. You’re intensifying the pressure on each of those two things.

James: [00:08:57] You’re not really letting them know whether have learned the material and can do well on those exams so they’re more likely to cheat in those cases. And it totally makes sense.

James: [00:09:06] I mean I think all these things when you look at the research and talk about them, they’re kind of intuitive. If you only have one chance to do well on something you get to be more likely to cheat than if you’ve got ten chances and you know each one is only worth a little bit and you can get feedback and try again and improve.

James: [00:09:23] So we’ve inherited this structure from higher and higher education. Sometimes in certain disciplines where that’s the tradition there’s two midterms and a final and that’s it. Well that structure I think lends itself to students cheating.

James: [00:09:40] So I think we have to think more about how we assess students. So that’s one example there’s a handful of these kinds of things that I think can make contributions to the cheating environment and the fix is easy you know more frequent assessments can be it can be challenging if you have a very large class. But there are ways to do it.

James: [00:09:57] There are ways for all of us to engage in more frequent kinds of assessment to give students a chance to try fail and get feedback on their learning before they ultimately have to ramp it up for a really high stakes assessment.

Bonni: [00:10:09] One of the things I teach in business and management so one of the things that helps on our end of things too is to make things as much like the real world as possible and actually using the critical thinking that the business world is going to look for and reward. So instead of memorizing a set of formulas as an example.

Bonni: [00:10:29] But that’s that’s a my area by the way I’m not an accounting professor but I know enough to be dangerous. Instead of expecting them to memorize a lot of formulas that’s where a lot of colleagues and former colleagues would catch them with – they’ve got it on the water bottle or on the soda can or written on a ruler or that kind of thing and I think we’re just in a different age right now where information that’s memorized is not as valuable to today’s generation as it used to be.

Bonni: [00:10:58] So the idea of what if we could actually just say, “Hey, you can have all the formulas you want set in your table because if you’re out there working in the business world you need to be able to speak the language of accounting but you’re going to have a lot of tools and resources at your disposal to do that.”

Bonni: [00:11:13] So I think that’s in addition to more frequent assessments – assessments that are actually meaningful and require critical thinking. You actually talked about that in the book as well less stuff that I could just memorize or regurgitate versus things that I couldn’t plagiarize because it’s so unique. Can you tell me a little bit about your findings there?

James: [00:11:34] Yeah just I would want to add quickly about there are I think certain things that we do want still want students to be able to know and have at their disposal. So it’s not like we don’t want students to memorize anything anymore because I think one of the things that we’re hearing from cognitive theorists now is that you have to have a certain amount of foundational knowledge in order to be able to think critically. You can’t think critically if there’s nothing in your head to think critically about. So we still do want to make sure that, you know, we’re giving students content that they have at their disposal and are able to work with, but the trick is if you want people to remember things they have to practice remembering them and that’s another reason why frequent assessment is important because when students have the opportunity to retrieve something from their memory multiple times they’re more likely to remember in the long term.

James: [00:12:25] If you just cram for a test and then remember it for that test and that’s sort of all you do, you ‘ re going to forget it. But, if you have frequent chances to remember it and then do something with it – which is what you were talking about – sort of these more higher-order thinking skills – you’re more likely to remember. But again it’s the frequency that you’re doing that – that really makes a difference.

James: [00:12:44] The other thing the second thing that you were mentioning the idea of these sort of more uncheatable assignments I think is another way to think about this. And that one of the examples given the book and I’ve been looking at more recently is for example is service learning courses. Service learning courses where students are actually engaged in solving authentic problems in the community or contributing to sort of community organizations, or you know doing things that are you know authentic problems, questions, challenges, outside the classroom. Those things, we know, can help foster students intrinsic motivations because they challenge them with sort of real world connections between the things that they’re learning in the class and what they may ultimately do with their lives.

James: [00:13:30] But those things are great, too, because oftentimes they create these sort of uncheatable assignments. I’ve been teaching with service learning for a couple of years now and one of the things I realized that you know a student goes to an organization, you know, may do some volunteer work or we do a project together as a class and then has to write about it. That’s really an uncheatable assignment because it’s unique to that particular semester, that particular student, and that particular assignment.

James: [00:13:57] So I think we should be trying to do as much of that as possible. It’s not possible in every type of class. But what I think we want to try and do is make sure that every semester we are offering a unique learning experience so that you know we’re making sure that we’re not just sort of rehashing the same types of assignments same types of exams that we’re making connections of things that are happening in the world today.

James: [00:14:21] We’re finding ways to connect students to live as you know issues off campus or in their lives. All those kinds of things. First of all help motivate students but also create the opportunity for assignments are just achievable because they’re unique to that semester.

Bonni: [00:14:37] I suspect with all the speaking that you have done on this and other topics that you have probably met some resistance against that. I tend to be someone who was so frustrated and hurt in all of these things about the cheating when I first discovered that I rewrite the exams in my courses every semester. But I know I work with and have consulted with many individuals who just find that unacceptable.

Bonni: [00:15:03] So is there anything that you have found a convincing argument to say, “No, it is worth the work and maybe it’s not as much work as you think?” Is that something that you’ve encountered in your workshops?

James: [00:15:14] Yeah I mean definitely, you know, I’ll have faculty who will just sort of say, “Well, they shouldn’t be doing this.” One of the things that I like to do is say, “Everybody in the room raise your hand if you have broken the law in the last 24 hours.” And, you know, almost everyone has to raise their hand because we’ve all rolled through stop signs or exceeded the speed limit. Right?

James: [00:15:33] So the point is that, yes, there are a lot of things that we shouldn’t do and we see those things as unimportant right? You know going five miles over the speed limit we consider that is an unimportant thing. Well it’s possible [that] students feel the same way about cheating. This is not something that they perhaps – maybe they are a first generation college student. This is not – academic integrity is not something that they, you know, were sort of raised as being an important virtue or value for them.

James: [00:16:01] And so they see this as just a little minor thing, right? The same way that you might see speeding or rolling through a stop sign. So we want to make sure that we are talking to them about why it’s important.

James: [00:16:11] But we also want to help them by removing easy opportunities for cheating. I’m a big believer that we sort of have all hands on deck when it comes to this. We should be doing everything we can to create interesting fascinating classes with uncheatable assignments.

James: [00:16:25] But we also should be making sure that we’re educating them about academic integrity. And we should be helping them by making sure that we are removing easy opportunities for cheating. Another analogy I like to give is you know if you’re trying to not eat chocolate because you know it’s bad for you or your doctors told you not to do this.

James: [00:16:44] You know you should not eat chocolate and you should use your willpower for that but you should also take chocolate out of your house. Because that’s a way of structuring your environment to make sure that you that temptation is removed. I think we should be doing the same thing for our students by trying to help remove easy opportunities for cheating.

Bonni: [00:17:04] When we started talking about exams that are given in class versus the academic dishonesty we might ascribe to that scenario versus papers and maybe larger stakes papers and then we would start talking about plagiarism. Have you noticed a difference in the learnings there? The in the moment taking a test versus the I’m writing a paper and there’s that potential for plagiarism.

James: [00:17:35] You know I think that it can be a spectrum on both in both of those things because there’s easy sort of opportunity plagiarism where you just grab a quote off, you know, one sentence off of a website and stick it in your paper because your paper is due in an hour, right?

James: [00:17:48] And then there’s sort of more long-term planned plagiarism in the same way that there’s an easy exam cheating where you just look at it and neighbor’s paper but then there’s also much more planned exam cheating where you’re bringing something in and preparing it for days beforehand.

James: [00:18:01] So, no. I think there really is kind of it’s the same spectrum of plagiarism and cheating. There’s easy opportunity cheating and then there’s more sort of serious planned out long-term types of cheating.

Bonni: [00:18:14] That is one of the things – it’s unfortunately happened extremely recently to me – it still just shocks me that because of all of the things I’ll do up front where I have them read a document about academic integrity they have to practice doing some paraphrasing they have to practice doing some quoting directly and showing they know how to cite things properly.

Bonni: [00:18:36] My goal in doing those kinds of things up front in the class is to both instruct them because many of them might not have had anyone pay the kind of attention to it that I do in the past and I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt there.

Bonni: [00:18:49] But it also provides for me a foundation that says later on you can’t say you didn’t know that because you demonstrated these skills and still it happens it doesn’t happen as often as I think it would if I didn’t do those things but I still just go “ahh” and then inevitably will sit down and have the “I didn’t know,” come up, again, or not the “I didn’t know,” it’s the “I forgot.”

James: [00:19:13] Right, right. You know this is one of the things I’ve been looking at more recently actually is trying to think about sort of combining my two sort of areas of research right now which has been cheating and then sort of what I mean sort of recent research in cognitive theory tells us about how learning works.

James: [00:19:30] I mean you have to think about cheating as something… I mean you have to think about academic integrity as something that has to be learned.

James: [00:19:38] And it actually has sort of you know tentacles sort of in multiple areas. There’s a knowledge area here and when it comes to academic integrity you have to know what counts as cheating and what doesn’t. There’s a skill area you have to be able to write essays and cite properly and think in ways that are going to not lead to cheating.

James: [00:19:57] And then there’s a value, too, right? You have to believe that it’s important – that academic integrity matters. So if you think about it like that, right?

James: [00:20:05] So academic integrity is a value and a skill and the concepts that have to be learned. Then kind of flip your mind to the other topic, which is learning, right? And we know that active learning tends to be more effective than having students just sort of listen and be lectured about something.

James: [00:20:26] So when you think about that, you know, we need to be doing more of what you’re doing which is engaging students actively in learning academic integrity and that might mean not only doing the kinds of tutorials that you’re doing and you’re practicing with plagiarism and citation, but also I’ve become kind of intrigued by campuses which are asking students to create academic integrity campaigns or for projects in courses like you know marketing or graphic design courses. Because those are real sort of real, again, the real world authentic activity-based kind of learning experiences where students are tasked with: all right – how are we going to convince people on this campus that academic integrity is important?

James: [00:21:09] Those are the students that are really going to sort of learn that value and take it to heart, I think. And you know not everyone on campus is going to be able to do that but I think we have to do more than just lecturing students about academic integrity. We do need to engage them actively in the same way we try to engage them actively and everything that we’re teaching them.

Bonni: [00:21:27] I don’t remember the name of the university but, you might. You linked to them and wrote about them in a blog about that graphic campaign and I’ll actually put that in the show notes for anyone listening. It’s at teachinginhighered.com/19 because we’re in the 19th episode.

James: [00:21:42] And it’s Lamar. Lamar University.

Bonni: [00:21:44] Lamar. Oh! It was delightful and it was so great. Just that – that was another way to get those conversations happening and make it part of the culture.

James: [00:21:52] Yeah and I felt I was inspired enough by it that I spoke to my Dean about it and so we are doing. We have a PR class at Assumption now and the Dean and I are the clients and we we’ve gone into the class and we presented them with a problem and we asked them to come up with a campaign that is sort of a multipronged approach that’s going to include social media.

James: [00:22:14] It’s going includes you know sort of more traditional types of media and we’re going to see what they come up with and we promised them that we will take their ideas and put them into practice on campus next year or so and we actually did a survey on campus about attitudes towards cheating by the beginning of this semester and we’ll do a survey again after we’ve put the campaign into practice.

Bonni: [00:22:35] So we started out talking about the feelings that come up when this happens and that might come up when you first start out teaching, or are still, all these years later. What about when we’re putting these things in practice, we have followed your advice – and anyone listening – I don’t make any money off of telling you – you got to go buy this book!” It is just wonderful because it leaves you with so much hope that you can actually make a difference and you can not just fight in an offensive way against this really bad thing that you don’t want to happen but actually engage in helping more learning happening while creating less of an environment that fosters the opportunities to cheat.

Bonni: [00:23:20] Having said that we’re still going to have students cheat. So what advice do you have for us if we’re putting so much work in in what you’ve described and your research. What about when that still happens? What advice?

James: [00:23:34] So, first of all, you know, step back emotionally. That’s the main thing. And give yourself a little bit of time to kind of think about it, process, try to understand why it’s happening.

James: [00:23:43] You know I just saw student post on a former student who many now friends with through social media who posted something about the fact that she had been, you know, two years ago at this time she had been in a psychiatric unit in the middle with suicidal thoughts. And now she was in my class that semester and I knew nothing about that. And that’s the kind of thing I always try to keep in mind when I encounter an act of cheating. Is there something going on behind this that I know nothing about that the student doesn’t want to share with me?

James: [00:24:13] And so, you know, I don’t want…, The last thing I want to do is take offense and sort of lash out in anger at that student. So if they got something else you know massive going on behind the scenes in their lives.

James: [00:24:26] So that’s the first thing. Step back emotionally. The second thing is I really do believe that every institution should have sort of an educational response to an act of cheating so that students can be referred to a central office or a person who then can either use something that’s already available or it can give them an assignment or some sort of project that enables them to begin engaging in that kind of active learning piece about why cheating is wrong.

James: [00:24:53] And I think the main thing that all of us have to do is we all have to report it when it happens. And I think the worst thing we can do is sort of strike private deals with students and say, “You know, you were wrong and we would give you an F on this assignment. Just don’t do it again and we won’t take this any further.” Because obviously just a moment’s thought can make you realize the student could get away with that 40 times over the course of a college career. So we don’t want to do that. We have to make sure we report. Ideally that reporting will lead to some kind of educational response by the administration.

James: [00:25:25] And all this will happen without sort of getting drawn into it emotionally. So those are things that I think we have to think about. But I you know I want to echo what you said which is that you can build the perfect class with the perfect students and eventually someone is still going to cheat for all these kinds of other reasons that are outside of our control.

James: [00:25:44] So you know I don’t think we’re ever going to solve – eliminate the problem completely, but we can do a lot to help.

Bonni: [00:25:51] What have I not asked you about teaching lessons that we should talk about before we get to the recommendations piece?

James: [00:25:57] I think that the main thing is, again, to just sort of take… I guess I would also want to just mention briefly the self-efficacy piece because it seems like an important one that faculty are able to make a difference with in terms of their teaching or the way they interact with students. The research that I’ve been looking at more recently is Carol directs research on mindset, which I hadn’t yet really discovered when I wrote the book as deeply as I’ve been looking at it more recently.

James: [00:26:28] And you know Dweck argues that students can have either a growth or a fixed mindset fixed mindset students are ones who believe that sort of their intelligence has been fixed at birth. These are the students that you’ll hear say, “I can’t write. I can’t do math. I’m no good at this discipline or this subject,” whereas students with growth mindsets believe they can get better and that practice can help them improve they can get smarter.

James: [00:26:52] Their skills can develop and that takes hard work and effort. And one of the things that work found in one of the studies I looked at actually after the book came out was that students who had a fixed mindset when they were asked given a scenario in which they failed an initial exam and then were asked what do you can do on the next exam. They were much more likely to report that they would cheat.

James: [00:27:12] So this is something that faculty can help with it to try and help instill a growth mindset in students by talking to them about the fact that you know learning is hard but you’re capable of getting better when you’re giving feedback to students you don’t say you know you’re smart you’re talented you said you worked hard on this.

James: [00:27:32] So how we pitch our feedback how we talk to them about learning and even how we structure the class we want to give early success opportunities so that students are not slammed by a first exam that you know makes everybody feel like they’re they’re no good at this discipline.

James: [00:27:48] We want to kind of try and maybe help them gain some confidence early in the semester so that’s an area that I kind of looked at more recently after the book has come out. But I think it’s a promising one.

Bonni: [00:27:59] Thank you.

Bonni: [00:28:00] This is the time in the show when we each give a recommendation and I’m going to have as my recommendation as corny as this is recommending you and some of the things you have to offer different campuses.

Bonni: [00:28:12] So I’d like to start out by sharing a little bit. You have a Fullbright specialist program that you are a part of. Could you share a little bit about that and how some non US institutions might get involved with that.

James: [00:28:25] So the Fullbright specialist program is one where for folks like me who have five children or have other things that might keep them from going away for a full semester. You have to apply for it, like a regular Fullbright. And if you are accepted, you get on a roster and you’re available to other institutions outside of the U.S. to come and do two to six week projects that are in any area that they might have need in.

James: [00:28:54] And so the institution just goes to the Fullbright specialist program Web site and then sort of makes the request for the person that they’re interested in. And it’s basically sort of free faculty development for that institution in my case area of specialty being higher education teaching and learning, or cheating, or honors programs.

James: [00:29:16] They would sort of get that Fullbright-sponsored faculty development for these two to six week periods.

Bonni: [00:29:21] And for US institutions you have also done and continued to do extensive speaking too. So for anyone listening that is in the U.S. which is most of our listenership I just encourage you to check out the show notes and look at Jim’s speaking page which I will link to and just lots of opportunities for him to come and contribute to your campuses.

James: [00:29:42] Thank you.

Bonni: [00:29:43] What recommendation do you have for the listeners?

James: [00:29:46] You know I think that the most powerful book that I’ve read in recent years that was related at all to kinds of you know work of teaching and learning has been Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s Flow: Psychology of Optimal Experience.

James: [00:30:03] And this book is really fascinating that we tend to think about the people are happy when they’re sort of relaxed and you’re sitting on the beach with nothing to do except me I and his colleagues did this you know had this great study where they gave people beepers that this was before you know people had phones.

James: [00:30:23] And had them and beat them multiple times per day and just ask them what are you doing and how are you feeling and what they found was people were happiest when they were deeply engaged with something that sort of captured all their attention and fully absorbed them.

James: [00:30:37] And the more that people did that kind of thing the happier they were. And so this is actually really interesting implications both for everyone personally, but also for us who teach.

James: [00:30:49] You know personally it means throw yourself into things and I found this is really true in my own life. You know what I sort of finished with a project from the I just want to say I’m going to take three months and relax. I tend to feel sort of unsettled.

James: [00:31:02] You know, I found I don’t need three months I need a few days. And then you know it’s best to just get right back into something and that’s when I’m happiest.

James: [00:31:09] And it also is true for our students that we want to try and create flow experiences for them through assignments or even class periods where they’re really absorbed and engaged.

James: [00:31:20] And not only are we going to be teaching them but I think actually will be helping make happier students and help people understand how to lead happier and better lives.

James: [00:31:29] And I think that’s important. You know I hope after this I heard a book and one of the I would like to write a book about learning and happiness and about how this book suggests to me that one of the most natural and best ways for people to be happy is to continually engage in new acts of learning. And I would love to be able to write that up. And so that’s a future project.

Bonni: [00:31:52] Oh, I hope so. That one I would want on my shelf and not anything – I have certainly learned about him through my degrees – and read a lot of his work or people referring to his work and read a lot about happiness. But I have not seen someone tie the happiness in with a learning. I think that’s a really unique topic that is much needed and would be a great a great next step, so sign me up.

James: [00:32:14] So, yeah. I need to make sure you post that link to his book. I’m saying his name but it doesn’t look anything like what it’s like.

Bonni: [00:32:21] I was cracking up because I was thinking in the back of my head. How long did it take you to learn to pronounce his name?

James: [00:32:27] Yeah I’ve said it many times to get it right.

Bonni: [00:32:30] Very impressed. Well it was really an honor having you on the show and getting to talk about your book and I’m looking forward to you coming in the future and sharing about your work as we continue on. I just it’s really it’s been great. Thank you so much.

James: [00:32:43] All right thank you very much.

Bonni: [00:32:46] Thanks once again to Dr. James Lang for joining us on this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. He talked about so many great resources and all of those could come into your inbox automatically every week without you having to remember to go check out the show notes.

Bonni: [00:33:02] So please subscribe to the weekly update if you haven’t already. It’s teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. Would love any feedback you have for future guests or future topics. That’s at teachinginhighered.com/feedback.

Bonni: [00:33:19] And we would also appreciate any review that you could write about the show on iTunes or stitcher to help other people discover all the great dialogue that we’re having about Tetun and higher ed. Thanks again for listening.

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