Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:00]:

Today on episode number 551 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, relationship rich education at scale, otherwise known as the too many bodies problem with Peter Felten and Kassidy Puckett. Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential. 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. I’m grateful today to be welcoming back to the show Peter Felten. He’s the executive director of the Center For Engaged Learning, assistant provost for teaching and learning, and professor of history at Elon University. He’s published 6 books about undergraduate education, including, most recently, his coauthored book, Connections Are Everything, a college student’s guide to relationship rich education.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:01:23]:

Joining us today as well is Kassidy Puckett. She’s a 20 24 graduate of Elon University, where she received a bachelor’s in history and secondary education. Currently, she’s pursuing a master of arts in higher education at Elon while working in the undergraduate admissions office. Kassidy has collaborated with doctor Peter Felten on various research projects with their most recent work focusing on relationship building in higher education classrooms. Passionate about fostering inclusive learning environments, she aims to contribute to the field through research and practice. Peter Felten, welcome back to Teaching in Higher Ed, and Kassidy Puckett, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Peter Felten [00:02:09]:

Thanks, Bonni.

Kassidy Puckett [00:02:10]:

Awesome. Thank you.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:02:12]:

I have been looking forward to this conversation and need to caution both of you that a while back, and I’ll link to this episode in the show notes, I had some guests tell me that especially during the height of the pandemic, they would get people together, faculty, colleagues, and they would talk about what they called dirty words in in higher ed. And I I now have started to when I do speaking engagements, I’ll ask people, what would be the equivalent of me just coming and cursing like a sailor up in front of your faculty? And that it really does get down just asking the question in that way to some really important cultural information for me to know before I go and have a chance to work with faculty. So I need to caution both of you that in that conversation, the word scale came up for them as one in which they have a very visceral reaction to. And, Peter, I’d like to begin just by having you share, you know, have you heard these concerns prior to, and some of the background around that? And then I know you’re gonna welcome Kassidy then to tell us about some of the research that you’ve uncovered around this word scale.

Peter Felten [00:03:25]:

Sure. Thanks, Bonni. And and I’ve gotta say, you and your podcast mates have much more polite dirty words than I usually use. But still, it’s it is. It should be seen as a dirty word in teaching in higher education. I think too often institutions, sometimes institutional leaders, think the way to be efficient, the way to do our work really well, the way to not break the bank is to just cram more students into fewer class sections, you know, more people in the room, more people on Zoom, however it works. And that might be efficient if you see teaching as really just about transmitting knowledge, and that’s it. But we know, and this podcast illustrates over and over and over, there is so much more to teaching than simply transmitting knowledge.

Peter Felten [00:04:16]:

And so scale becomes a huge problem when faculty are trying to connect with students, when faculty are trying to understand who their students are, when faculty are trying to help help students connect with each other even in a class because, you know, active learning is a great thing. But if you’re in a room with 800 other people and you look down at the tiny little professor at the front of the room, you know what’s supposed to happen in this room. You’re supposed to listen to the tiny little professor say stuff, and then you’re supposed to give them that information back, and that’s how the class is supposed to work. So when the tiny little professor says, now turn to your neighbors and work on this problem, you’re like, that’s that’s not how class works. So it’s not scale isn’t simply a problem for those of us who teach. I actually think it’s a problem for students too because they see that the bigger the room, the more passive they assume they’re gonna be, the more anonymous they are, and that makes education harder for them. It makes it less engaging for them. It primes them to not connect, so that is too bad, and that’s why I would say scale is a dirty word.

Peter Felten [00:05:26]:

The challenge is we don’t usually get to choose what the scale is we teach. And so one of the things that Kassidy and I have been working on is trying to understand how faculty see the task of building relationships with students in a class and among students in a class sort of regardless of their context. Right? And so really briefly, I’ll set up the research that Kassidy’s gonna talk about. So over a 3 year period, I did a bunch of workshops on relationships in teaching and learning, and in many of these, I used Mentimeter, and I ask students, one of the not students. In these workshops, I would ask the faculty participants, what are barriers to building relationships with and among students in your in your particular context. And I have we have about 1800 faculty respondents to this data, so quite a large data set. And one of the problems with the data is it’s anonymous because it’s meant to meet. So we know about 3 quarters of them teach in the United States.

Peter Felten [00:06:29]:

About a quarter teach out of the United States. They’re all higher ed teachers, but we don’t know disciplines. We don’t know contract status. We don’t know things like that. And so what happens, Kassidy analyzed this data looking at what faculty say about barriers. One last thing before Kassidy speaks is for this question in the Minty, I was gonna create a word cloud with the barriers. So the responses were single words or very short phrases. So, Kassidy, why don’t you talk about how you analyzed it and what you found?

Kassidy Puckett [00:07:00]:

Yeah. Of course. So for our blog post that we ended up working on together, we tried to group, the 4 main barriers, kind of put a couple of our codes together just so it’s a bit more digestible in digestible in a blog post. The number one barrier was time, which a lot of people are not surprised by. I’m sure everyone that even heard the question, that’s probably the first thing and the most popular thing. But number 2, we grouped together. We named this

Peter Felten [00:07:25]:

institutional factors, and

Kassidy Puckett [00:07:25]:

about 35% of our participants listed some and about 35% of our participants listed some sort of institutional factor. And 40% of those, it was directly related to class size and how many students they were having to deal with in their classrooms. So lots of things to do with, like, not being able to get that one on one time with individual students is really limiting their ability to build those relationships.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:07:51]:

Oh, and keep going because I wanna hear about 2 more and

Kassidy Puckett [00:07:54]:

a half. Yeah. Of course. So number 3, we had, was well-being. About 29% of the participants said some sort of well-being was a barrier. This could, apply to themselves. So maybe they feel like they lack confidence or they fear, rejection in the classroom from the students, or it could be well-being of the students. Maybe they’re stressed, maybe they’re burnt out again because these are one word answers.

Kassidy Puckett [00:08:21]:

We can’t always tell what exactly they were implying. So that’s why we tried to group that together a bit more. And it was about 18% of the total responses fell into that well-being category. So those are, like, the 3 main categories that we worked off of. For our barriers, they were, like, the most represented.

Peter Felten [00:08:40]:

And just to lift up one thing Kassidy said, time and well, all three of these things are connected to scale. Right. Because time, faculty time, student time is extra precious if you’re teaching 100 and 100 of students. You just don’t have that much time with them. And then, obviously, class size is explicitly about scale, but well-being too. The stress that students feel, and I think the stress that faculty feel when you’re teaching a really large course. You often don’t get the kind of interpersonal feedback from students, like, this is interesting or this is challenging or I I just learned something. And so you feel more isolated, ironically, in a giant room full of students as a professor.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:09:22]:

I wanted to give an example, because I don’t tend to teach what would typically be classified as a large class, but I’m teaching a lot more online. And as much as I experience really re rich relationships online, I recognize how much unlearning has to happen from prior learning experiences in a context like that. So I learned on this podcast from Tracy Addie and her colleagues work around a survey that’s called who’s in class. And and we it seems so silly, probably not to the 2 of you, but it seems silly to me as I think back. I used to just wanna ask if if a student was a commuter or not. And I felt like that was sufficient information to glean helpful data to be a better teacher. And then in her her their research and then subsequent survey, no. A commuter can look like driving 2 hours to get to campus or driving 15 minutes to get to campus.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:10:22]:

And those two things are entirely different experiences in higher education. So when you talk about scale, I even think about in my relatively small classes, a small intervention, like doing this who’s in class, which has already been researched. I’ve refined it a little bit to meet our context, but I can really build upon the work that these researchers have done in thinking through what will be I mean, I have not talked specifically about the time efficient nature of it, but I can only assume that to do a survey, you’re looking for some time efficiencies in there. So it reminds me so much of just the small things that we could do, which in terms of your findings that you described, Kassidy, that, yes, it’s gonna take me less time to be able to put that survey in place, and especially then when I do it in subsequent semesters or terms, how much time is being saved every time, and then to be able to report that back to the class. So I think that’ll be helpful as we go and you explore the research a bit more to be thinking about those really small interventions that can contribute to these air areas. How helpful. So talk to us a bit then about what then you know, as we look at these barriers, what then is some of your advice for faculty?

Kassidy Puckett [00:11:47]:

Yeah. Of course. So a second question that Peter asked later in his research was what did these teachers do now? What are they doing as of right now to try and combat these barriers? And these were fortunately for me in the coding process a bit longer responses. So they had about 200 characters. So I had a little bit more to work off of when coding these. We were able to get 4 different strategies kind of grouped together largely again. But the number 1 we titled empathy, which I thought was really cool. It’s a bit of a vague title, but everything from active listening to meeting their students where they are, asking them their prior experiences with, this course topic so you can be there for them.

Kassidy Puckett [00:12:33]:

So I just as a student, that was really nice to see that empathy was definitely the number one with about 18 percent of the participants, including something that we felt fall fell into the empathy category. Number 2 is collaboration and group work of any kind. So about 17% of participants mentioned this. So things like think pair shares or even, like, long extended group projects. One person even mentioned they let the students pick a team name and a mascot. So I feel like that’s really fun. Make it more competitive. Number 3 was prioritizing individual interactions.

Kassidy Puckett [00:13:09]:

So about 16% of our participants talked about making their office hours accessible, requiring 1 on 1 meetings, things like that that really entice the students to utilize that one on one time that they might not otherwise. And the number 4 was finding a way to integrate personal stories into the classroom from both the, professor and the students. So about 14% of our participants mentioned going beyond the basic icebreakers on day 1 and allowing students to truly share their experiences while also allowing, the professor space to share their experience in said field, things that they’ve experienced. So it’s not just, content being talked about, but it’s personal experiences.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:13:54]:

One of the things that comes up a lot both in the research that I have read and learned, but also in my own experience, is that the 4 things that you just talked about can be so powerful. They can be so transformative, yet, along the way, we can meet just natural human resistance. It’s a very natural and normal thing. I think about when I walk into a room, I typically want to sit as close to that exit as possible and as further furthest back. And, of course, you know, most people who are educators or facilitators, please, you know, come forward. I can’t wait for us to engage. So I try to remember that’s not a personal thing. That’s not a personal attack on me as a as someone attempting to teach.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:14:42]:

Boy, anytime I cannot take something personal, I’m gonna show up with with more effectiveness. But would love to hear anything that you’ve uncovered either from your own personal experience or from your research around just this inevitable resistance that we might meet as we think through incorporating some of these suggestions?

Peter Felten [00:15:03]:

So let me start with a story from some research that we haven’t published yet that I’m doing with some other people. And and I love this example so much, and I find it really inspiring and a little bit humbling too. I interviewed a professor at Carleton University in Ottawa in Canada. Her name is Martha Mawale, a brilliant biology professor. She teaches a very large enrollment, and scale can mean large enrollment. It can also mean just teaching lots of students over multiple sections. But, anyways, Martha teaches very large enrollment introduction to biology course for people who are gonna be in the sciences, so future health science students, future biology students, things like this. Super high stress, high content course.

Peter Felten [00:15:46]:

Martha has used structured active learning. She’s been a leader in Canada on doing all this, and she said after the lockdown and COVID lifted, she changed something about how she talked with her students about connections and relationships because she was so concerned about students. She said she stopped using academic phrases, and she started telling students, 1st day of class, one of the first things she says is one of her goals for the course is that students will make a friend in this class, and she’s, she doesn’t say you’re gonna have peer connections or you’re gonna build relationships. It’s like you’re gonna make a friend, and she says she uses that word deliberately because they know what it means, and she does a couple things. She explains on that first day, why I want you to make a friend is because, first, the world is better when we have friends, but, secondly, you’re in this room with hundreds of other people. Some of them are gonna be nursing students or are nursing students. You’re gonna be in multiple courses with them. Those courses will be more fun and actually you’ll do better if you study with your friends, so you should make friends for those reasons.

Peter Felten [00:16:50]:

Right? And then she says, because this is a goal of my course and it is literally a goal on her syllabus, one of the learning outcomes is you will make a friend in this course. Because it’s a goal, on every exam, she has a one point question. Yes or no? Have you made a friend in class so far? And you get a point for answering, not for saying yes. But if you answer yes, there’s a space where you can write their name, and Martha says she does that. That’s a social science intervention to just reinforce that Bonni and Kassidy are my friends in this class. Right? And then the last thing she does is every time she has students get in and do active learning, she is really intentional about always saying, get with your smart friends. Right? And she says she always calls them smart friends because she wants to tie those things together. Martha hasn’t studied this extensively and have some publications that prove that this causes that or anything, but she says there’s always 2 things she’s noticed about the class since she started doing this.

Peter Felten [00:17:51]:

One is typically at the beginning of the semester, big lecture hall, it’s super quiet before class starts. And she says by about week 3, it’s so loud in the room, she has a hard time getting students’ attention to begin. Right? And so they are starting to connect in the in between spaces. And then secondly, she says when students come up to talk to her before or after class or in office hours, now they almost always come with at least one other person. And they the thing she loves is they tend to introduce each other as friends. So they say, this is my friend Bonni. And she said they they would come. Students would come sometimes in the past with other people, but they would be like, I’m Peter.

Peter Felten [00:18:34]:

I’m Bonni. Right? And so she’s giving them permission and encouraging them to think about their classmates as friends, and I just find that really powerful as a simple intervention that she’s reinforcing. It’s not just the 1st day of class, make friends, and she’s really clear. I’m not your friend. The the goal of this class is not to become friends with me. I’m your professor, but there’s 100 of you. You can find a friend in this room. I think that’s really inspiring.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:19:03]:

So powerful to put it in a language that’s relatable. First, tell us a little bit about the research that and and covers what what you refer to as educationally purposeful peer relationships? And then what, if any, of that research you might suggest would be helpful to share in a class context?

Peter Felten [00:19:23]:

So, Bonni, there is literally decades decades of research going back to the 19 seventies about the importance for student satisfaction, student well-being, student learning, student retention, student success on the importance of the quality of relationships students have and the quality of interactions students have with faculty and with their peers, and so we know that is true. The challenge is how do we do it in our own context because you might be teaching online, you might be teaching a graduate course, You might be teaching classes of 20, but you might have 6 or 7 of them in one term, and so you still have hundreds of students. So I think one of the things we need to recognize is that time spent helping our students connect purposefully with their peers or with us is time well spent for their learning, their well-being, and their success. Now the key is purposefully. It’s not just the because the point of my class is to learn specific things and develop specific skills. It’s not simply for us to hang out. Right? And so helping students see this is the purpose and helping students see that there are things they can do that will help them meet those goals. What we have found in our research is there’s really three things to say to students and help students understand about relationships.

Peter Felten [00:20:50]:

1, we need to help students understand that relationships matter for their learning, their well-being, and success. Often, students don’t know that, especially first generation students. They think the point of or the way to be successful in school is to do everything on your own. So we have to teach them that this will help them. Secondly, we have to help them develop strategies to connect purposefully. Right? So how how do you form a study group, and what does the study group do? Or what do you do when you go to office hours? So we have to help students understand what their strategies are and how to act. And then the third thing is we have to help students become brave enough, engaged enough to actually act on them. I’ve interviewed a lot of students who said, you know, I knew I should go talk to my professor about this, but I just couldn’t I couldn’t cross the threshold.

Peter Felten [00:21:41]:

You know, I couldn’t get all the way there. So one of the things I say to my students a lot now, and I think we all might think about ways of saying, is we need to emphasize that successful students are the ones who talk to their professors outside of class. Successful students ask peers for help on things and work with peers. That’s not a sign that you’re weak. That’s not a sign that you’re not smart or something like that. That’s that’s a sign that you’re doing college right.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:22:07]:

I think another helpful thing there too, I’ve just have found myself first of all, I try to remember what I was like in college, which is to say, I went to one professor’s office hours, and it’s because I was failing economics. I was, you know, just didn’t know what else to do because I hadn’t failed a class and I didn’t think that was a time to start. So I mean, it but it that’s the only time that it occurred to me. And so I try to remember back to those times and then work to be that much more transparent and precise to actually let them know I enjoy it when we get to be together. I enjoy it is one of the greatest joys of what I get to do to sit down and learn more about you and some of your goals and some of your challenges. And so it just to to really be a little bit more precise about it. And I know we’ve talked a lot in previous shows about how to make those office hours even that much more welcoming, including meeting them somewhere that is not my office, including going for a walk and being in a context in which we’re not, you know, sitting down like it’s some kind of a intervention or something like that. But just we we live in such a beautiful place.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:23:17]:

Our campus is in such a beautiful place. Why not head down to Back Bay and go for a walk during that conversation too? So yeah. Kassidy, what have you experienced or have you uncovered in terms of this how to be appropriately? And I don’t mean that in terms of professionalism, but, like, helpfully precise about that research to build that confidence around these recommendations.

Kassidy Puckett [00:23:41]:

Yeah. Of course. So I feel like I really I’ve been thinking a lot about my undergraduate experience myself lately, which sounds ridiculous because I just graduated in May, but I’ve had a lot of opportunities to think about it in my graduate courses. And I really relate to what Peter was saying about 1st generation students not understanding that it’s not a solo endeavor to get through, a college degree. As a 1st generation student myself and in a unique way where most of my graduate cohort is 1st generation as well, we’ve all been able to talk about the ways that we weren’t taking advantage of opportunities to build relationships with professors because it didn’t feel as important to us. We saw going to office hours as something you only do when you’re failing. You don’t stop by and just chat because in my head, my teacher was only there to give me what I needed to know, and I was gonna go home. And I think it took me a long time as an undergrad to realize that there were people like Peter out there who wanted to talk with me not just because I was having a hard time, but just to get to know me and support me.

Kassidy Puckett [00:24:47]:

So I think that’s really important to keep in mind with all of this data is it depends on the group of students that you’re working with on how these strategies are gonna effectively implemented. Because if you’re coming from a background where you already understand what networking is and the importance of building those relationships early, you’re gonna stop by office hours and you’re gonna reach out to someone on the 1st day of class. But if you were someone like me who didn’t have that knowledge coming in, I very much kept to myself my 1st few years, and I doubt my professors knew too much about me outside what I shared in the classroom. So I think that’s something we have to make sure we’re taking into account when looking at this research is students are coming in with different, emphasis on relationships already, and they might not understand the importance of it when they enter your classroom.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:25:38]:

I’m enjoying that you have been able to reflect so much on that undergraduate experience. So, Kassidy, I’m gonna warn you that a question is coming your way. I wanna know in a moment from you about a time when you felt like a class or a professor really got you ridiculously curious about something in an unexpected way. Like, oh my gosh. Like, that wasn’t something maybe that you were curious about before, or even if you had been curious, it just sparked something new and and fresh and interesting to you. So, Peter, I have had the chance. I I need to go back and rewatch it again. I got to see a keynote that you gave, and this is some years ago.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:26:16]:

I think maybe 2017 or something. But I have been curious about curiosity for a long time. So when I happened upon that keynote, it was catnip for me all the way. So now I’m curious, what are you learning now, or what are you more curious about curiosity at scale? So as you draw from that prior research, what what’s kinda how are these two things if they’re if they’re at all melding together in your mind or sparking new research ideas for you?

Peter Felten [00:26:45]:

Oh, I I love the question, Bonni. And what I have had to unlearn, to use a phrase you mentioned earlier, is I tended to believe for many years of my life that curiosity was something innate. You know, you’re a curious person or you’re not a curious person. And I happen to be lucky enough to be a curious person, so I get to be an academic, and I get all this, but other people just aren’t. And reading the research, talking to scholars who study things like curiosity, what I found is curiosity is a practice. And it’s it was just mind blowing, liberating to start thinking about curiosity as a practice because then I could say to myself, first, how do I cultivate it in my own life and my own work and things like this? But also, what can I do with my students to help them develop the habits, the practices that curious people have because it turns out they may not be curious about what I’m teaching, but they’re curious about other things in life? You know, what’s gonna happen next in that show or how do you make really good music or whatever it happens to be. Right? And so I think everybody is capable of this practice of curiosity, and our job as faculty is to help students recognize that they have a curiosity muscle, if that’s so good, and that they can exercise it and they can get better at it and they can apply it in different places. And it might be hard harder for them to apply it in my class than it is in their passion project, but that they can adapt some things that motivate them, that keep them going, that drive their curiosity in that passion project.

Peter Felten [00:28:19]:

They can bring some of that in my class.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:28:21]:

And that belief that you just talked about reminds me so much of just the power of our own thinking. What we allow ourselves to think that maybe subscribing to a myth, these students don’t belong here. You know, they’re they’re, you know, some of the problematic terms, like referring to people as at risk students, you know, that kind of thing, that that what we believe about the students we are so privileged to serve actually makes a difference in their outcomes. And so similarly with curiosity and the power that it has in learning. So, Kassidy, have you thought of an example of a time when you remember getting curious?

Kassidy Puckett [00:29:01]:

Yes. So for reference, Elon, you take a 1st year seminar course that they call they changed the numbers recently, but core 110 is what it was called when I was a freshman. And any professor on Elon’s campus can teach this course, and they really kind of turn it into their passion projects. They talk about things that are important to them. And I took a class with doctor Ahmed Faddam, who is traditionally working in animation and communication design on campus, which is very far from anything I was studying. But he was actually using the class to teach us about his time living in Iraq and working as a professor there before he came to the US. And I had never really thought too much about Arab Spring or the Middle East, and it just wasn’t a region I had thought much about. But kind of relating to our findings, he had so many personal stories himself about his experience there.

Kassidy Puckett [00:30:01]:

And also, conveniently, he’s a fantastic artist. So from memory, he could draw out these beautiful drawings on the whiteboard that really made me feel like I was there. He actually is working on or has recently finished a graphic novel. So it was cool to see his own experience, and you could tell it was very personal to him that he tell his story truthfully and addressed any misconceptions any of us might have had about the region. And it actually led to me taking a history class called the modern modern Middle East after that just because I, by random coincidence, had been placed in this class by my academic adviser at the time. And, like, to this day, if I ever see him around campus, he’s like a celebrity to me because I thought his class was so interesting because he had so much life to tell us about. And he had lived, I felt, like, a 1000 lives before he came to be an Elon professor. And so even though he was typically an animator, he became my, like, history professor for a while.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:31:04]:

Oh, that’s so fascinating. As I think back on my own undergraduate experience, I don’t have a lot of pride in the quantity that I learned during those 4 years of my life. I feel like but I but it’s interesting you mentioned art. And so I’m thinking back to a co taught class, which was very rare for me at the time to I mean, it’s I haven’t ever I think that might have been the only co taught class I’ve ever experienced in all these years of education, actually. But these 2 history political science professors would come in and always play music, and they would play music by Paul Simon. And a lot of Paul Simon songs that they would play, I now know were related to apartheid. But at the time, I don’t even think I could have told you what apartheid was. So it’s kind of interesting how and then this is not, of course, the example that you just gave.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:31:54]:

You learned a lot about the Middle East, and I feel like I got only got to experience deeper learning as I echoed back and thought about all those years ago because those melodies and the musicians that he worked with during some of his recordings would come back into my mind, and then then it would make me even more curious. I wonder what how much I missed when I in those classes when it must have just gone right over my head, you know, at the time. But art and music and the ways that can be so transformative, both in the moment for you and your story. And then for me, it was probably, like, a decade later that I actually started to learn a little bit more and and go deeper into some of those things, but still the those songs and the lyrics stayed stayed with me for sure. Anything coming to your mind, Peter, as far as, anything that we’ve been talking about?

Peter Felten [00:32:41]:

Well, you were making me think of a song that I’ll tell you about later.

Kassidy Puckett [00:32:43]:

Oh, okay.

Peter Felten [00:32:44]:

But, you know, I I was thinking about my own experience as a student and how just the mind blowing 1st semester, 1st year experience, not like Kassidy’s, but perhaps a similar sort of effect, is I was in a philosophy course, and I wrote a paper actually about, apartheid. And the professor this was back in the stone age before we had the Internet, and the professor mailed our final papers back to us, home to us after the semester was over. And professor Kluge wrote on my paper. She gave me an a, and she wrote, Peter, this is a really good paper, but you could have written a better paper, and I’d love to talk to you about it in the spring. And, Bonni, it like, my head, I couldn’t I couldn’t make sense of this because, like, I got an a, so why would I write a better paper? Like, what could be better than an a? And so what she did really was this huge gift of sort of opening up my mind to seeing that education wasn’t fundamentally about getting a grade. And so in some ways, it connects back to exactly why relationships matter so much. I trusted her, and her saying that was really transformational to me, not because, you know, some random person on the street could have stopped me and said, Peter, you could have written a better paper than you just did, and it wouldn’t have mattered at all. And honestly, I think if my parents had said that or something, I would have been like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but doctor Kluge saying that to me really, really stuck.

Peter Felten [00:34:14]:

I’m still telling this story a 1000 years later. So in some ways, I think that’s why we need to think about how do we create these connections with students where we can help them see what they’re capable of. We can help them see that the Middle East can be really fascinating or that personal stories are amazing or that animation is cool and that music matters or whatever it is.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:34:38]:

Alright. One last question before we get to the recommendation segment. So many of us get challenged around group projects and specifically about team formation. And you talk about a researcher from Sweden, Annika, and I’m not gonna be able to get the last name right. Maybe you can help. But about some of the ideas that you gleaned from her on this relationships at scale as it relates to group projects. What can you share with us about that?

Peter Felten [00:35:09]:

Yeah. I I love this research. I think it’s so interesting. Anika Phil, p h I l. We can get the citation for you, Bonni. She’s a business professor in Sweden, taught in introduct teaches and has taught for 15 or 20 years now, an introductory course with 100 plus students in it for 1st year business students, and one of the, and this is really project based work in preparing people to be effective business people in Sweden. And what Annika said is, so lots of group work in her classes, and if she let students form their own groups, they formed really homogeneous groups in in in a number of different ways, native Swedish speakers versus immigrant students or non native Swedish students, commuter students in groups, students who live on or near campus in groups. And Anika said one of the challenges of that is as a business program, their one of their goals is to help to prepare students to work and be successful in businesses with lots of different people.

Peter Felten [00:36:13]:

So it wasn’t okay for her that students formed really homogeneous groups, but when she assigned the groups and made them more diverse, what she found is her student well-being went way down. Students were stressed out by working with people they don’t know. They feel like they’re different than them. And so Anika’s question, and it ended up becoming her dissertation research, was how can I help students choose to be in more diverse groups without adding anxiety and stress to their lives? And what she found is if she starts the semester with lots of low stakes, so lightly graded student project work where she is assigning the groups. So the groups are deliberately diverse, and students are churning through lots of groups over the first, let’s say, 4 weeks of the term. So students are getting the chance to work with lots of different people, but it’s not high stress work. And then as the semester progresses and you get towards higher stakes graded work, bigger projects, students then get to choose their own groups. And what Anika’s research documents is that students choose to be in different groups after that initial experience than they will choose in the 1st week of the class.

Peter Felten [00:37:26]:

Right? So the groups are more diverse and the students are feeling control, and so they’re not feeling stressed and they’re feeling more comfortable in those groups. And I find her findings really helpful, but I also think the process of thinking that through, how do we give students practice doing something that we know is hard? Because it’s hard for humans. It’s not just hard for students to work with people who they think are different than them. Right? So how do we help our students get practice doing that and then raise the stakes? Don’t just start high stakes.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:38:00]:

You’re reminding me so much of the power of thinking about our own teaching and reflecting on our own teaching and the extent to which one would need to do that in order to have your dissertation be centered on such work is a really powerful example for us. And so helpful for us to be able to draw draw from her example. Well, this is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. And my overarching recommendation for today is to try this stuff out and then tell us about it. I wanted to just give a couple of quick examples as I was reading through this research that came to mind in my own teaching, and I’ve talked about it actually for almost the whole decade that I’ve been doing this podcast. But in case any of you missed it along the way, one is that I love playing a game called heads up in a class. And heads up is where you hold your device, a phone, or a tablet above your head, and there’s a word or phrase that is written on there, and then the people have to get you to tell them, you know, to describe it to you. And we we’ve done this I’ve done this in classes.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:39:05]:

I’ve done this with our new student orientation, and it was really funny actually because this last time as the semester we’re starting, our kids came up and helped us host an open house for new students in our library, and our daughter got so animated because she she she was, noticing that some of us were having difficulty like myself getting very simple things like our our student union or our student commons, like, location. And my husband’s trying to give me clues to get me to say that for the life of me, even though I’m the one who came up with the deck of cards that were being held, I still had trouble with it. So it’s just one of those games that kind of invites you to start to build relationships. And the person who does our podcast production support, I say her name at the end of every episode. Her name used to be Sierra Smith and is now Sierra Priest, but there was an episode just of her talking about her undergraduate experience. And she specifically mentions in that episode, the game called Heads Up, that it and and another one, that quizlet does, quizlet live is another great group game to get people having conversations with each other. It actually mixes people up either online or in a class. It’ll do that shuffling that Peter was talking about, you know, the low stakes early on in a semester.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:40:20]:

It’ll mix people up. And she said that that game, Quizlet live, helped her form relationships, not just in our class, but in so many of her other classes. It was just really a foundation. So as I was reading through this, I thought, try this stuff. And the first time that you pull out a game, it may not go well in the sense of there is that resistance to, I’m not here to play a game. I’m here to listen to you. Give me a lecture. You know? It takes some time and some confidence and purpose and intentionality and risk.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:40:50]:

Taking that risk to be vulnerable enough to try something that you may find meets with resistance. But knowing that there’s all these people from all over the world that are doing similar things, we can have that confidence that overcoming that initial potential resistance makes a difference. And then the last thing I just wanted to share, again, I teach relatively small classes, but just in my encouragement to you to try this stuff out and then tell us about it, I teach a class called personal leadership and productivity. And there it I mean, I will meet resistance. I understand that I resist my own efforts to be, quote, unquote, productive sometimes too, like, doing something called a weekly review. This is from the getting things done methodology. I’ll sit down, and my current weekly review has been stretching for more than 3 weeks, if that gives you any indication how hard it is to just sit down and to rise above, you know, the things that are flying at you, that kind of a thing. But so what I do at the end of each semester is they do a group project, and it’s called operation something good.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:41:55]:

And they are supposed to go out into the world and do something good in the world. And I encourage them to think very small about that. Try to give them some examples because sometimes that’s, you know, hard for them. I say, we’re hosting a holiday open house. You could host the hot cocoa bar, and you could be part of, you know, what’s that gonna look like and greeting students as they come by the library, what have you, or you could do a beach cleanup and, you know, this is how how that might look. And what they’re supposed to do is take the things that they’ve learned in the class and put some good out into the world and tell us about it after the fact. And it it really I think about the relationships that it brings. It’s just so hard.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:42:33]:

I feel like, I don’t know how how Kassidy, you or Peter feel about this. Whoever came up with 16 week semesters, oh my goodness gracious. It’s just an agonizingly long time. So the fact that this class tends to taper down at the end, and this is really something that they have a fun time doing and and makes these fun connections. One thing I would tell myself, by the way, as a side note before I pass it over to you for your recommendations, I wanna draw from today’s conversation because they they I really feel like they got in those groups too late. And then if you have any stragglers who are experiencing anything for any reason, it’s very hard for them then to do that. So I wanna I wanna redesign that aspect of this class next time and get some of those low stakes things that Peter was talking about, and then, you know, build those teams much, much sooner even though they might not actually start doing their actual project until a little bit later, but just so that all could be cemented and it didn’t create needless stress. So those are my recommendations.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:43:35]:

And, Peter, I’ll pass it over to you for yours. I did notice that you were nodding and and maybe had some if you wanna comment at all on anything I just said as a wrap up and then whatever you’d like to recommend.

Peter Felten [00:43:45]:

There’s so many things I wanna

Bonni Stachowiak [00:43:47]:

comment on,

Peter Felten [00:43:48]:

but I am going to try to constrain myself, and I’m just gonna have 2 recommendations. Well, no, I’m gonna have 3 recommendations. The first one is practical, which is there’s this wonderful book by Rebecca Glaser. It’s called Connecting in the Online Classroom. It came out in 2021, and I think it’s really smart. It’s really easy to engage with, just full of really good ideas that aren’t only useful in online courses. But I think one of the barriers a lot of us face is thinking about how can we possibly do this online. And so there’s there’s lots of good resources on this, but Rebecca’s book, I would say, is one.

Peter Felten [00:44:25]:

2nd, recommendation, Bonni, just inspired by something you were talking about, there’s a song I wanna recommend to people. It’s by a South African group called Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and the song is called homeless. And Paul Simon actually put it on one of his albums. It’s just a beautiful, beautiful song, deeply meaningful to me in a variety of ways, but I don’t wanna put my meaning on top of it. I just think it’s lovely. It showcases their work really well, and it’s amazing. And then I wanna recommend a book that I read fairly recently because one of my children said, you have to read this book, and then they harassed me and said, you have to read this book, and you have to read this book. The book is called Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.

Peter Felten [00:45:08]:

And it’s by an author named Gabrielle Zevin. Came out a couple years ago and won a ton of awards. And it is not about education, but it’s fundamentally about this really complicated, very human, really beautiful, and difficult relationship between 2 fascinating people. And that unfolds over a period of time. Video games are involved. It’s anyways, it’s it’s a joy to read, and, also, you learn some things about yourself and life and everything else along the way. So I couldn’t recommend a book more highly.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:45:44]:

Oh, intriguing. And, Kassidy, what do you have to recommend for us today?

Kassidy Puckett [00:45:48]:

I had to narrow it down a lot, but I finally decided I’m gonna recommend it’s a Netflix documentary called Will and Harper about Will Ferrell and his friend who went through transition, and they’re road tripping across the US. And it’s just a very beautiful demonstration of friendship and how, like, no matter what’s changing in their lives, like, these two people are friends and they are going to remain friends. And just like the support that is able to be shown by Will Ferrell is really awesome. And he’s very vulnerable with his curiosity, but it’s also it’s just a really fun watch. There’s some hard points in it, but overall, it ends really beautifully.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:46:32]:

Boy, you just described it so well. It’s been on it’s been bubbling up. I also saw it, and it’s been bubbling up on my recommendations too. But I now I feel like I don’t know that I could ever do that justice because you really described it. You described it so well. It is such a powerful story. And, yes, as you said, it was a beautiful story. Thank you for bringing that up.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:46:51]:

I’m excited that that will get out there on the recommendations. Alright. This has been a wonderful conversation, Peter. Thank you for introducing me slash us to Kassidy. And, Kassidy, I wish you the best on your continued research and and work in higher education, and and congratulations on your recent graduation, and they you’re already on to more.

Kassidy Puckett [00:47:09]:

Thank you so

Peter Felten [00:47:10]:

much. Thanks so much, Bonni.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:47:15]:

Thanks once again to Peter Felten and Kassidy Puckett for joining me for today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. Today’s episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever talented Andrew Kroeger. Podcast production support was provided by the amazing Sierra Priest. Thanks so much to each of you for listening. And if you’d like to get even more learning happening from your listening, consider subscribing to the Teaching and Higher Ed Update. You’ll receive the most recent episodes show notes as well as some other resources that don’t show up on those usual show notes. Head over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:48:01]:

Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.

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.