[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 376 of The Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast, Dan Levy’s back. This time we talk about on improving our teaching.

[00:00:13] Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, Maximizing Human Potential.

[00:00:22] Bonni Stachowiak: 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.

Dan Levy has been a faculty member at Harvard University for over 15 years where he has held various positions related to promoting excellence in teaching and learning. He currently serves as the faculty director of the public leadership credential, the Harvard Kennedy school’s flagship online learning initiative. He co-founded Teachly, a web application aimed at helping faculty members teach more effectively and more inclusively. He’s won several teaching awards, including the university-wide David Packard award for teaching and mentoring.

Dan is passionate about effective teaching and learning and enjoys sharing his experience and enthusiasm with others. He recently published the second edition of his book titled, Teaching Effectively with Zoom, which I highly recommend as a side note. You can find more information about in the show notes.

Dan’s teaching was recently featured in a book called, Invisible Learning with David Franklin, and I had a chance to interview David Franklin previously and also recommend checking out David’s book, Invisible Learning, and that episode. For now, let’s connect with Dan levy. Dan, welcome back to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:02:08] Dan Levy: Thank you very much, Bonni.

[00:02:10] Bonni Stachowiak: It seems like forever ago that we first had an opportunity to connect. What have you been up to in the last year?

[00:02:19] Dan Levy: Thank you. I think the last time we talked, I had just published the book, Teaching Effectively with Zoom and since then a few things have happened. One of them is that I got to teach on Zoom much more than I had prior to the writing of the book. The way I like to describe the experience, it’s much easier to write a book about how to teach on Zoom than to actually have to teach on Zoom.

I learned a lot in the process and I think we all collectively learned a lot about how to do this better. In some way, the first position I hope was helpful to the people that wanted to know how do I do it. Earlier this year I published a second edition to try to take into account some of the things that I was learning from other educators to incorporate more perspectives and to incorporate some of the features that Zoom has added to their platform.

[00:03:18] Bonni Stachowiak: I am going to totally rip off a question from two podcasts. I’ve heard this question be asked on Ezra Klein’s podcast and also on my own husband’s podcast, which is called Coaching for Leaders. Dan, what have you changed your mind about in the last year or two about teaching?

[00:03:36] Dan Levy: Thank you, Bonni. I love that question and I have been reading a little bit about how we should not attach our beliefs to our identities. I think it’s good to be flexible and not to try to be like you have to believe the same thing that you used to believe before. I think in terms of teaching I would say a few things have changed.

One, maybe not a very star change, but I think has had profound implications for how I approach teaching with Zoom, which is that of the channels in which we have our students participate in a Zoom class, the things that I pretty I believe now to be true are that there are two channels that is of students writing through chat or students working together through breakout groups where I believe that online works better than in the in-person classroom.

I think we can all sort of agree that there are so many things that work better in the in-person classroom than online. These two things have really changed my mind in terms of how, not only how to teach more effectively using Zoom, but now that some of us are going to attempt to return to an in-person classroom, my brain is constantly thinking, is there any way that I could bring some of that thing that I was doing in Zoom for these two features into the physical classroom?

That has been an important shift, and I would say if I could stick a step up, in a physical classroom before COVID and before we all sort of had to teach with Zoom or similar software, I don’t think I was as deliberate and as conscious about what are the different ways our students can engage in our class? I defaulted to the verbal as a way to engage with our students.

Now because in Zoom, it’s so important to engage in these other ways, now, if hopefully, we go back to the in-person classroom, I’m hoping to keep that frame of mind. Okay, what is the best way our students can engage? Is it speaking? Is it writing? Is it voting? Is it working in groups? Is it sharing their work for this pedagogical that I now have for this part of the class?

[00:06:09] Bonni Stachowiak: As I was reading the second edition last night, I was struck by this and exactly what you just shared and this idea too, that you write about where we think that it’s about covering the material. As soon as you have a lens for recognizing, how do I even know that learning’s happening? It’s very rarely actually going to be happening, but how would I know? My first job out of college was teaching computer classes, and this is back a day or two ago.

I can recall I became a manager fairly soon in my career, so then my job became teaching other teachers. I’d be sitting in the back of a 24 person computer classroom. This is back in the day with giant monitors on all the desks so I can see the monitors, but the instructor would stand at the front of the room and they would say, “Are y’all with me?”

I could see that hardly anyone was with them, but they were just … right along, and so what you’re describing Dan is– and when you talk about the affordances that I can see so much better now, how they’re engaging, what they’re thinking about in pretty magnificent ways that when you’re teaching a computer class might have been possible if you went to the back of the room, but this almost just negates all of the back of the room, in front of the room ideas in my mind.

[00:07:33] Dan Levy: Right. If I can say if you had asked me the question, what have I changed my mind, and instead of the last year or two, the last 10 years or so? I think in teaching, I would have said that the main thing is I no longer trust myself to know how much my students are understanding and following. My mantra is I can be rather clueless about this and therefore I need evidence of that happening all the time. That evidence can come in the way of students voting, so we know what they’re thinking in a particular question.

Students writing in the case of chat, when you ask a question and see what is on their mind in maybe a less structured way than a vote, or when they working groups, students documenting what they are producing. I have this experience that happened many years ago when I was experimenting with polling and ask a question, give the students a poll and in-person classroom. It was a question that had a right answer.

If you had asked me before launching the question, what percent of my students would get the right answer, I would have said, “Well, this is a warmup question, at least 80%.” When the results came back, I think it was probably one of the only moments in my entire teaching career that I stayed one minute paralyzed in silence in the front of the room, because I could not believe how far reality was from my beliefs.

[00:09:18] Bonni Stachowiak: What you’re reminding me of so much has to do yes with learning, but also with biases. I remember way back I had, this is gosh, back on episode 23. This is would have been 2014, 2015. I had someone named Jay Howard on the show, and he introduced me to the term, Civil Attention. We talked so much about pay attention, pay attention, pay attention, but sometimes we talk about it. I don’t think people do it intentionally, but they’re really talking about faking it, that I have a smile and my eyebrows are up and I’m showing you that I’m interested but even that

doesn’t really work for just how interested someone is in whatever you have to say, because some of us, myself included by the way. I was with my colleagues– when you’re on Zoom, your face is right there. Apparently Dan, I don’t know if you’re aware of this about me, but I apparently have a really good ability on my face to look like I’m interested when I’m completely checked out.

[laughter]

Bonni Stachowiak: Apparently I learned that somewhere along the way. I don’t know who I learned it from, but yes. That’s, that’s so powerful. The other thing that I really want to be able to explore with you today requires a little bit of background for anyone listening who may not know about it. Before I ask you my real question, could you give us a little bit of a brief review for some of us or an overview for some of us of this thing called backward design? What is it and where do we bump into something called backward design?

[00:10:52] Dan Levy: Sure. I’m going to give you my perhaps own interpretation or own view of how I implement that in my own teaching. I’m sure there are experts out there that know more about this than I do. The basic idea and this is the thing that was most powerful for me the first time I heard it, is that at least initially when we start teaching, we tend to approach the class with the frame of what is it that we’re going to cover in this class? What material, what subjects they are there.

The way we build our syllabi reflects that it’s about content. What is it that we are going to talk about in this class? The thing that was most powerful for me about this backward design framework is to think about the class or the course or whatever learning experience you have in terms of what is it that you want your students to be able to do or master at the end of that learning experience.

It sounds super obvious, I guess it wasn’t that obvious to me when I first heard it, but it completely changed my mind and the way that I think about teaching. If you think about what is it that you want the students to be able to do at the end of class, you design the activities in class to help make that possible. Then very important, you find ways to assess whether that actually happened. I know it sounds super simple, but I don’t know that we are as good at doing that as I think we ought to be. I include myself in this.

[00:12:48] Bonni Stachowiak: The struggle that I see there, I see struggles in every area both for myself and for other people. In this particular moment, I see more people emerging in their ability to think about those learning outcomes. We have heard on the podcast, lots of conversations about assessment and how do we design assessment as authentically as we can, and we’re thinking about context and all that.

There’s a lot of conversation there. Not as much conversation and I find myself, I want to admit that this is one of those things I just do, but I don’t always know how it is that I’m trying to really, when I’m doing it recently, slow myself, way, way down to go, “What is it that’s happening in your brain right now as you’re designing these activities?”

That’s the real question I’d love to learn from you because whether it’s talking to you, Dan, or reading the book, Invisible Learning about your teaching, I know you’re so good at this, but how do you do it? How do we design these activities? You mentioned experiences. How do we do that?

[00:13:48] Dan Levy: Thank you. Thank you for such a nice comment. Bonnie, what I would like to suggest is one way of approaching this is to think about what is the background of your students in the topic that you’re trying to teach? What is it that they know, what might be misconceptions that they might have, and to try to design the learning experiences because students don’t come with blank mental slates.

They come with ideas, not all those ideas will be necessarily right or consistent with the evidence or with what you’re trying to teach, but they’ll come with ideas. They come with mental models of how the world works. If you can try to think about what is it that they come up with to the class and how can I engage those mental models or those ways of thinking so that in some cases they have to face that those mental models don’t work or are non-consistent with the skills that you are trying to teach.

I know this is going to sound not so good, but in some way, part of your job is to help students on many occasions, see that their model, their view of the world is not right, and accompany them in that realization and help them build better mental models on whatever it is that you’re trying to teach. The difficulty I find as a teacher is that I think it’s hard to know with what ideas, with what preconceptions, with what mental models they come. This is where I think two things are important.

Before class, if you can engage them in an online activity or some form of activity where you can collect some evidence of where they are. Sometimes it can be something as simple, a couple of questions. What do you think about this? What do you think about that? If you can collect that before class, then you come to class with at least an idea of where they are. That’s the blended learning kind of approach you see where they are and then adapt to the class.

Even if you can’t do that, to make sure that early in class, or at least frequently in class, you test your own gut in terms of where they are and how much they are learning. That to me is maybe if I could have a … way of putting this is, what is important is what your students are learning. That sounds obvious. Therefore, the only way you can be effective at that is to be able to monitor what’s going on in their minds, both before, during, and maybe after your learning experience.

[00:16:54] Bonni Stachowiak: I’ve been thinking about our conversation all week, and it came up even when listening to the T for Teaching podcast. They interviewed Doug McKee, who is part of the active learning initiative at Cornell. One of the things he says in that interview, which I think everyone needs to hear this was that the research they found, and I’m going to completely oversimplify here. I apologize, Doug, if you ever listened to this, I’m sure I’m going to get part of this wrong.

They were talking about how they’re designing all of these initiatives, and they’re really measuring. This is the scholarship of teaching and learning. They’ve got their essentially control group. Although I don’t know if that’s formally what they called it, but in my mind, that’s what it was. We don’t mess with it at all. We measure here. Then we measure the next term or semester and see what happens and what he said, and again, oversimplifying is they don’t really see the uptick until the next time so they’re learning.

I don’t know if I’m quite defining this correctly, but oftentimes it’s called double-loop learning. Chris Argyris is the person who coined the term double-loop learning. I’m extending the definition that he uses, but I think people need to hear that, Dan, that it’s not like you wake up one morning and you go, “You know what? I’m going to change this all up.” Then you’re done, and you’re a superhero and you’ve accomplished it. You never look at it again, and you’re on to the next thing. Would you talk about your teaching as iterative because I think that will be helpful to people?

[00:18:21] Dan Levy: Yes. In some way, it relates to your first question. What is it that we have changed our minds? You asked about teaching, but about anything. Jusst in terms of iterating with teaching, I think it’s like any skill, you can always get better at it. For me in particular, one way in which I try to get better is by collecting feedback on where the students are, both in terms of understanding, but in terms of how they’re receiving the learning experience.

Sometimes that translates into us scholarship of teaching and learning project but often is maybe a bit simpler than that. Maybe not as scientifically rigorous, but you can sometimes– I think my simplest and favorite example is when so many of us use the one-minute paper at the end of class. We just give a piece of paper and Zoom. It’s a lot easier. You just ask them to type things in the chat and you just ask the students, varies but in essence, one version of the question, what did you learn? Today what takeaways you had, or maybe one point of confusion it is. The thing that’s most striking to me is that if I think before reading that, before … “Okay, what is it that I think it’s in their mind?” It rarely is what is actually in their mind because students they’re different

people who have different ways of processing and I think if we assume that whatever we sought to accomplish actually got accomplished, I think we can make much less progress towards being better teachers than if we confront the reality of, “Okay, end of class. This is what they are telling me they have learned or they have gotten.”

It’s very, very powerful. I’m not saying this, like, “Oh, I thought they learned a lot, and no they didn’t.” No, that’s not at all. It’s what is it that they latched on to. Yesterday, I was giving a workshop on teaching with Zoom and there were lots of things that happen in that workshop, and when, at the end of the workshop, I asked, so what were your key takeaways? One that came consistently was one that it wasn’t even part of the teaching plan.

It wasn’t even in what I was expecting to do, which was the use of silence as a powerful tool in your teaching. I said it casually. It was a one and a half minute exchange with a participant, but yet that’s what I don’t know 15, or 20% of them reported at the end was a key takeaway. That was important information for me, that I would have never been able to assess or know about, unless I ask them, “Okay, what is it that you took away?” That is not a scholarly research paper, but it’s a way of assessing what happened, and hopefully, make it better the next time.

[00:21:46] Bonni Stachowiak: Yes, those serendipitous things that happen can often be the most impactful. We can’t plan for them in terms of lesson planning, but we do plan for them in terms of how we approach our life and our work. Those are the kinds of things– Your silence is both a representation of your care that it’s not just only your voice that matters in the classroom, that you do care about hearing other people’s perspectives and how they’re taking things in and experiencing them.

That’s your character that you bring with you wherever you go, but we also have to learn those habits so that our habits match our values and our character so not all of us have got the habits down. I use something called the eight-second rule I used way back when I was a computer instructor because if you ask a question in a group of people, and then you answer it for them, you’re conditioning them that you don’t actually [laughs] want to hear what they have to say.

[00:22:42] Dan Levy: Absolutely. In fact, I once had a teaching assistant with an app in the classroom to try to measure my wait time, so how many seconds do I wait after asking a question because I was told that we all tend to think that we wait much more than we actually do and when the student did this, I was like, “No, I actually do wait.” And the students showed me that, “No, I didn’t wait.”

Certainly not the 10 seconds that I was aspiring to and that was, again, it’s a small piece of data collection that’s very helpful in, “Okay, you think you’re waiting for 10 seconds after you ask the question, but you’re not and so what are habits that you might be able to use to help you. This is totally unrelated to our broader conversation but the one tip that I learned from K through 12 teacher that I absolutely love to do the 10 seconds, is that she told me that she tries when she’s asking a question where she really wants to wait for her 10 seconds, she goes to one place in the room to ask that question and she has already measured before class, how far she has to walk for 10 seconds to transpire.

Then she asked the question and walks to that point in the classroom, and only then she breaks the silence and I found that an interesting technique or a habit that helped her overcome, as you said before natural tendencies or biases, in this case, not waiting for long enough, even though we think we’re waiting for long enough.

[00:24:35] Bonni Stachowiak: I have, of course, heard about this wait time for many, many years, but never in relationship to someone moving about the classroom. We had a Professor when my husband and I were getting our doctorates who would always walk on the opposite side of the room from the person who was either asking the question or he was asking a question of to be more all-inclusive that everyone this is not just a question between the two of us. It would help the person project more.

It would encourage them to do that without even realizing it, but no, that’s the first time I’ve heard that applied in that way. That’s great. Well, I know that the second edition of the book is just brimming with new examples, and I know that because you solicited them from so many people, you won’t be able to mention all of them, but could you just share a few that come to mind where you started thinking, “I’ve got to get some more of this out to people because this stuff is so good.” What are some of the creative examples or the really helpful examples you found in this?

[00:25:33] Dan Levy: Sure. One of the examples came from an instructor in Mexico, Cecilia Cansino. She teaches finance to her students and uses Excel to teach finance. You mentioned at the beginning that you taught in a computer lab, so you could already imagine some of the difficulties that she’s facing. One thing that I thought was very interesting that she did is that she had the students work in groups on some finance calculation in Excel, and then had a student present the spreadsheet with the calculations.

Then she used Zoom’s annotation tools to draw connections between the cells, why the student was doing things, and then would allow other students to ask questions, also using Zoom’s annotation tool, so that’s something that I was completely unaware. I knew about the tool, the annotation tool, but I just didn’t know how powerful it could be in a context like this.

Just to mention a second example. One of the features that Zoom incorporated after the first edition of the book, which is now included in the second edition is that now breakout rooms, a few months have transpired since then, but now students can decide which breakout room they go to, and I think that is in my mind opens a lot of possibilities that the students can decide what room to go to.

There are many interesting ways of doing that, but one practice that I found interesting, my colleague Teddy Svoronos, at the Harvard Kennedy School, he basically has a slide when he wants students to work on a problem that he gives them. The slide basically says, “If you want to stay work in silence, stay in this room. If you want to work with others, go to rooms one through four. If you want to consult something with a teaching assistant, go to breakout room number five.”

This is just one use, but the idea that in the same class you can basically have students, depending on not just their preferences, it’s easy to think about examples if you want to talk about A, go to this group or B this group, but about learning needs that you can organize the groups according to that, I thought was very interesting.

Another colleague of mine, Jen Lerner did the same thing in one of her executive education programs. Here, she wanted to create a community before class, and she encouraged her participants to come into the session before it started. Then basically when they arrived, they saw a slide that just said, “If you want to just network with other participants, go to room one. If you want to discuss some cost bias, go to room two, and if you want to discuss heuristics versus systematic thought, go to room three.”

This just happened to be two of the topics that she was interested in teaching the students, so it just opens up a lot of possibilities in our own executive education programs. We have had students break into two subgroups, and then have one instructor in each room and then swap the instructors. There are a lot of possibilities once you let people decide where they want to go, so that’s just like technological feature that wasn’t available before, but that sparked a lot of interesting pedagogical moves.

[00:29:30] Bonni Stachowiak: I’m so glad that you brought this example up, Dan, because I was seeing on Twitter this week, there was a lot of chatter around breakout rooms, specifically at academic conferences and I found that to be fascinating. It depends on the conference and who the presenter is and where I’m at that day, but I can distinctly remember about a year ago, attending a conference, and then they said, “Go into breakout rooms and be sure you turn your cameras on,” and I was not [laughs] in a position. I just wasn’t

prepared for it.

If I had been, of course, there’s a lot of benefits to engaging in that way but I quickly went, “Oh, no, I’m not doing that.” They were talking about more of a similar take on what you just said, where yes, you could go into these breakout rooms but if you’d rather stay in the main room, you could. I thought, “That’s really an interesting idea that I hadn’t even really contemplated.” I was treating it in a very dualistic way, when really, of course, that makes sense. You could stay where you are or you could go. I thought that’s something that I might be experimenting with.

Before we get to the recommendation segment, I did just want to highlight one other thing. I really want people to go to your website because this is both a book but also just a whole website full of resources. I think you had checklists up there before, but they sure felt new to me, because I sure need things like that. I’ve admitted before, to not always being great at having sufficient or even existing instruction screens.

Before I send you to a breakout room, I should have something both visual on the screen. A lot of people are putting that in the chat too. If that’s needed for people for accessibility reasons, or it’s just easier for them to take the information in that way, but I was noticing yesterday that you have some different checklists there so that if I am going to run a breakout, make sure that you do X, Y, and Z. I really found that to be useful and again, I don’t know if that’s new, or you had it there previously.

[00:31:26] Dan Levy: It was there from before. First of all, I’m a big fan of checklists, particularly after reading a book that I really liked the Checklist Manifesto from Atul Gawande. I think, particularly a big fan, when we have to do the thing that we had to do in the last year, which is all of a sudden learn a lot of new skills where it’s so easy to skip a step or miss a step that could be very costly.

Not as costly as in the context of a hospital, but the reality is that, for example, on breakout rooms the checklist basically says as you just said, “Display in a very clear way, and also verbally indicate what is it that you want the students to do in that breakout room?” Very clear instructions. Now, you might say if you miss that what happens is students report this is the main source of frustration with breakout rooms is they get there, and they don’t know what the instructor is expecting of them.

Now all of a sudden, you have 5, 10, 15 minutes of class time that are not being used as effectively as they could have, just because you forgot that one statement. The checklists are my attempt to help educators be able to not forget that. The idea is, maybe you have it on your desk if you’re teaching with Zoom. Perhaps after a while, you don’t need the checklist anymore, but at the beginning, I found them to be very helpful.

[00:33:07] Bonni Stachowiak: I’m a huge fan of the Checklist Manifesto as well. I just find them to be helpful no matter how many times I’ve done it because then you can just outsource the part of your brain, you don’t need to free it up for the more creative ideas. This is the time in the show where we each get to give our recommendation and I’m going to just quickly mention a recommendation of some newsletters that are coming out via a platform called Substack.

People might be seeing Substack newsletters coming out, there’s not that much unique about it other than it’s a pretty easy way to get started. If you wanted to have your own newsletter, and people can have it be paid as a means for income generation or free it depends. John Warner has a really great Substack that is called the Biblioracle Recommends, and if you send him the last five books you’ve read, he’ll recommend what you should read next and it is such a fun read.

Robert Talbert and David Clark started a substack called Grading for Growth. It’s a really a story of their evolution of thinking about grading and the harms that our traditional structures can do, and how to really do it with a growth mindset and so it’s all about mastery grading and their own journeys and it’s been fascinating to read so far.

Sarah Rose Cavanaugh has a substack called Once More with Feeling. Some of you might remember Sarah for lots of reasons, but one reason she wrote a book called The Spark of Emotion. She’s continuing her learning and thinking about emotions and motivation and neuroscience and teaching. That’s a great one.

I did also just want to mention that maybe you don’t want to subscribe to all of those newsletters into your email because my gosh our email searches growing by the day, and so your RSS reader if you’ve heard in prior shows me talk about real simple Syndication, I use a service called Inoreader, but there are lots of RSS platforms that are out there. That’s a way of getting everything into one place, including in many of these services, your newsletters.

Rather than subscribe to these different newsletters and have to get more email that I have trouble keeping up with, I get to control the times at which I do this reading. I have a special email address, I actually have a number of them by category. Is this higher education? Is this digital pedagogy? Is this news or whatever and they all can come into their little categories. I’m reading that amongst the other things that I’m interested in, in those categories. Those are my recommendations. Dan, I’m going to pass it over to you for yours.

[00:35:43] Dan Levy: First of all, Bonni, thank you. I took notes. I assume some of these recommendations will be in your show notes because I’m interested in this particular Siros. I’m a big fan of her and would love to see when that substack looks like. My recommendation for today, which I think is timely given that a lot of us are going to start teaching at the end of August or beginning of September, is an application, an app that we created at Harvard University called Teachly.

The goal of this application is to help faculty or educators more generally teach more effectively and inclusively. The way that this app works is very simple, or let me start with the problem it tries to solve. When we are in a classroom and call on different students or different students participate, we might not realize the participation patterns that might start emerging in our classroom.

Maybe we realize, “Oh, yes, I always have some of the same students participate,” but we might not realize that consciously or unconsciously, in our classroom, there might be patterns emerging that perhaps we don’t want to emerge. The app works very simply, it basically allows a teaching assistant or someone to click on a roster where they can click every time a student participates in class. Then the app displays participation patterns by demographics.

It also displays how many times students have participated in your class, a little bit of a measure of active learning, and so on. That allows you to immediately see, okay, I’ll use myself as an example. Four years ago, before I started using the app, I discovered that I had 46% of the students in my classroom that identified themselves as female, but only 36% of the comments in class were coming from female students.

I didn’t even know that this was happening and I started using the app and now my gender participation gap has disappeared. That’s because I had a constant reminder that look what was happening. The app also has student profiles that the students themselves submit. They can basically use those– Instructors can use those profiles to connect with students and see what their background is.

The app is anyone can use it. You just go to Teachly.me and Teachly is T-E-A-C-H-L-Y.me. We are a small group of people who are very passionate about people being able to use this app, Teddy Svoronos’s, in Victoria Barnum at the Kennedy School are the main people with myself that would like instructors all over the world to be able to use it.

[00:38:46] Bonni Stachowiak: Oh, I am so excited to learn more about Teachly, although some of us don’t have TAs but I used to have a colleague who could actually do that. I don’t think I could do it. I think I need some support, but I think we could think creatively just that it doesn’t have to be a TA. I don’t know what may be that responsibility rotate among the students in a smaller class.

[00:39:08] Dan Levy: Yes it could rotate. We also have a better feature where you allow students to record their participation at the end of class. That’s another possibility but maybe you don’t need to use it every class but maybe have one time one colleague or someone come and help you see what patterns might be emerging because again, the example I gave, I really didn’t know. I was shocked when I saw that female students were under participating in my class. I didn’t think that was what’s going on.

[00:39:44] Bonni Stachowiak: I always loved the idea of shrinking something down and you just helped me do it because many people are recording their Zoom sessions. You could. Not every class maybe but maybe you a few times a semester go and watch the recording. You could learn

a lot about your teaching by doing that in addition to gauging it in this way. That’s really helpful.

[00:40:05] Dan Levy: Absolutely, absolutely.

[00:40:07] Bonni Stachowiak: Dan, I’m so glad that you had an opportunity to come back on Teaching in Higher Ed, and I already today from talking before we started recording and even now, can you come back again because this has been wonderful? [laughs]

[00:40:19] Dan Levy: Thank you. Thank you, Bonni. It’s a pleasure and a joy to be here with you. I want to thank you for everything that you do for all of us who are trying to become better teachers. Really, really I know I speak for a lot of your listeners. We are so grateful that you bring in week in and week out people to help us and each other become better at our craft. I’m super grateful to you and super honored by you inviting me to be here as a guest.

[00:40:52] Bonni Stachowiak: It’s an absolute joy and it’s because of people like you.

[00:40:55] Dan Levy: Thank you. Thank you.

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[00:41:01] Bonni Stachowiak: Thanks once again to Dan Levy for joining me for today’s episode and talking about the things you’ve changed your mind about on teaching and other ways that we can engage our students. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you’ve been listening for a while and have yet to give the show a rating or review, I always appreciate you doing that and whatever service it is that you use to listen to the show.

I also encourage you to subscribe to the weekly update. You’ll receive the most recent podcast episodes, show notes, as well as some other things that only show up in the newsletter like portable words and other resources that I don’t mention on the show. Thank you once again for listening and I’ll see you next time.

[music]

[00:42:02] [END OF AUDIO]

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.