[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode 455 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Teaching at Its Best with Todd Zakrajsek.

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

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Todd Zakrajsek is an associate professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. He’s also president of the International Teaching Learning Cooperative. Todd was a tenured associate professor of psychology and built faculty development efforts at three universities before joining UNC. At UNC, Todd provides resources for faculty on various topics related to teaching, learning, leadership, and scholarly activity.

Todd has served on many educational-related boards and work groups including the Journal of Excellence in College Teaching, International Journal for the scholarship of Teaching and Learning, college teaching and education in the health professions. Todd has consulted with organizations such as the American Council on Education, Lenovo Computer, Microsoft, and the Bill and Gates Foundation. He’s delivered keynote addresses and campus workshops at over 300 conferences and university campuses in 48 states, which I just can’t wait till we get to 50, but that’s another story and 12 countries. [chuckles]

Todd publishes widely on the topics of student learning, effective teaching, leadership, scholarly activity, and assessment. Todd Zakrajsek, welcome back to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:02:02] Todd Zakrajsek: Thank you, Bonni, looking forward to the conversation.

[00:02:04] Bonni: It has been a couple months since we saw each other, and we actually saw each other not– I mean we still see each other when we record, but we actually were able to be in the same location that was San Diego, California, January 2023. Thank you again for the invitation and what a spectacular time I had.

[00:02:25] Todd: I’m glad you had a great time, but a conference is only as good as the people who are there, and you did a phenomenal job kicking things off and was right there with the– people just love talking to you the whole time, so thank you for coming.

[00:02:36] Bonni: I loved being able to spend time, I took so many pictures and it was so fun. Today, we are celebrating something else besides another successful of your Lilly Conferences and that is a new edition of a book called Teaching at Its Best. I know the fourth edition came out about six years ago, but the book launched 20 years ago. We are going to be getting into some of the aspects of the book, but since you co-authored a book about teaching at its best, can we start, Todd by just Teaching at its worst?

[00:03:12] Todd: [chuckles] Teaching at its worst. Oh, crazy thing, Bonni, you probably don’t know this, but I wrote a book called Teaching at its worst, not really, but let’s pretend for a minute. If I did, you know what? First of all, I don’t think it would sell, so I didn’t really write that book because nobody would buy that one, but if they did buy it, I think it would be fun to do. You could do Chapter 1 and how to be mean to students, and Chapter 2, how to lecture all of the time, and Chapter 3 on not accepting feedback. You could lay that book out pretty well, and I think we could do a teaching at its worse.

[00:03:44] Bonni: Yes, but as you said, it’s not going to probably reach the bestseller list on anyone’s list, although I think you actually could do satirical, and I actually think you could. Did you ever read that book, Dear Committee Members? It was satire.

[00:03:56] Todd: [crosstalk]

[00:03:56] Bonni: Oh, Todd.

[00:03:57] Todd: It better be good.

[00:03:59] Bonni: I’m telling you, Todd, next time you’re on an airplane, you got to get Dear Committee Members, it is amazing satire. Then there was a follow-up to it that was about their Shakespeare curriculum and whether it stayed or went in their university and oh, precious, precious, precious things. Now you have a reading assignment. You co-authored a book about teaching at its best, but I mentioned, it started about 20 years ago, a lot has changed since then. Can you tell us about one of the biggest changes in the fifth edition?

[00:04:32] Todd: There actually quite a few changes. I probably would go with the biggest change is overall, just language. When I say that– I mean, there are people out there that say, “Oh, that’s just how you say something.” That’s not true. Words mean something. If I take a moment to just talk to a student and say, “I think you can do this, I really believe you can do this,” yes, it’s just words, but if I walk by the student and say, “You got to get the work done,” it means something. I think that’s really changing, and it’s taken a long time in my career coming, so I’m really glad to see that.

In the material on inclusion, which goes along with that same thing we, and I know you’re right there too, Bonni, we’ve been doing this for a long time, we have been waiting for inclusion to really take off. I don’t want to discount the people who’ve been working in this area for decades because, without your work, we wouldn’t be where we are and where we’re going, but it’s finally really on a front burner discussion, and what an exciting time to be around. Inclusion and just the voice and how we talk to students, has changed considerably.

[00:05:33] Bonni: I’ve had an opportunity to speak with you so many times and so many other people who I admire as superb facilitators of learning, and a big thing has to do with both the words and the ways in which we think about others who are different than us. I know both of us really stress in our teachings, assuming the best of others, and that’s been not just an evolution, I think, in books and speaking about it, but it’s just a part of my being.

It becomes– I don’t know that it’s always can be my natural default setting. If I’m having a bad day, I may start to assume some intent that may or may not be there, but I can write myself pretty quick to go, “Okay, this is not a script that you really want to follow very well,” especially not with whatever words come out of my mouth or however I decide to respond to something, but I’m so grateful.

Like you were mentioning, all the people that have done such incredible work on inclusion for all this time. Inclusion to me, is that shift of really assuming the best of others and that takes some empathy. If that empathy doesn’t come naturally, we can, I think, behave our ways into greater empathy until it comes a little bit more naturally to us.

[00:06:47] Todd: Oh, so much so, and I’d say this repeatedly, Ian MacLaren I think it was, that quote of everyone’s fighting a hard battle, it’s attributed different ways in terms of everyone’s fighting a battle, you know nothing about fighting a hard battle. However you say it, that concept that when you really internalize the fact that everyone you walk up to and speak to, is fighting a battle, what I’m telling people, and I believe it myself, is I no longer need to know what the battle is.

If I run into somebody who’s having a rough time, and they’re being a little gruff about something or whatever, I can just sit back and say, “I know they’re having a tough time with something.” Again, as long as I know everyone’s fighting some battle, I don’t need to know what the battle is, and I can still show some patience from that. It’s been a big transformation in my life.

[00:07:36] Bonni: A big component of any book about teaching, particularly one as expansive as this, is defining where we’re going, and a lot of that has to do with learning outcomes. Another writer that I’ve read and actually got to see him speak many decades ago, he’s no longer with us, but Stephen Covey, a famous expression of his that he talks about among other things, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, is this saying that the map is not the territory. We recently have acquired a new vehicle and, Todd, who [chuckles] we hadn’t– let’s just say a lot has changed in the world of cars in more than a decade of owning the same cars.

Where I go, it has some navigational capabilities, and it is something else to let go, [laughs] and it’s making me think a lot about maps, but it also has what you might expect in terms of maps, where you’re looking at a map that is like the Thomas Guide some of us grew up with, but it’s digital, but it’s not the same thing as actually being there, and seeing your surroundings, is it raining? Is it not raining?

I try to explain sometimes to our kids that if they were ever to see something on Google Maps, for example, that those cars that you see parked on that picture, are not actually parked there right now because that’s just not something that they necessarily have a concept for, although, little do I know, they just learned it yesterday. Sorry, kids, if you’re listening, and you actually understand this already, they’re constantly learning.

When it comes to learning outcomes, I think a lot, Todd, about how the map is not the territory, and I’d love to hear you share a little bit about your thoughts on the degree to which we can clarify what those outcomes are and the degree to which once we get in there with a whole new group of students, things might look a bit different.

[00:09:36] Todd: Well, this is a really tough topic, and I don’t think this is as clear as a lot of people think it is. Everyone talks about smart outcomes, and we got outcomes that are specific and measurable and achievable, and we do that, it’s going to be fine. We should have three objectives every time we walk into the classroom, and we should do this all the time, but the tricky spot, is sometimes you just don’t know where a class is going to go. There are folks out there who push back against this a little bit, and say, “Maybe we shouldn’t be writing all these outcomes all the time,” but then if you don’t have outcomes, you don’t have some kind of parameters in terms of what you’re going to go do.

Then you also don’t know in another class when somebody looks at what you’ve done in your class, they don’t know what you’ve done, so there’s some middle ground that’s got to be there, and we can’t have a perfect representation of reality, but we can construct it a bit, so we have a sense of where we’re going. I think that’s really important, not only to have these basically smart outcomes but also thinking about lots of different things. There’s a lot of different outcomes. We talk about cognitive all the time, but you can write psychomotor outcomes, you can do affective outcomes, which are cool, looking at social or ethical outcomes. “What do you hope to happen by the end of this semester?”

My students will, with respect to ethics, I think that’s really important. Overall, we’re talking about an ultimate outcome, just like an overarching big outcome we’re doing, or are we looking at some kind of a foundational thing? What I’ve gotten this particular chapter, is looking at different functions and ways of doing outcomes, and then you could pick at the level you want to be at, so if you’re interested in doing certain types of outcomes, you can do those, but they don’t have to be cognitive all the time. Most of us know Benjamin Bloom stuff, but there’s a lot of other types of outcomes.

[00:11:19] Bonni: Todd, when I first started teaching, I was really into those outcomes. I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I’ve been teaching almost 20 years in a higher education context, I think we’re ready for this. I would have 45 learning outcomes for a 16-week class.

[00:11:37] Todd: Which falls into about three a day, which is class period, which is what people will do.

[00:11:42] Bonni: That’s a big thing for me, is the learning outcomes for the class as a whole course, which should be tied to the program outcomes, which should be tied to the university-wide, but then, I think what my answer is, we don’t get rid of those. You just already went naturally to it, we think a little bit about our class session planning. When it comes to class session planning, we should have goals for those as well. I know you and I, we enjoy going on roads we hadn’t necessarily planned on going and aren’t part of our mapped-out route. [chuckles]

How do you navigate that in terms of bringing–? You’re really good at it, Todd, you’re really good at it, and I enjoy that I’ve been able to see you present on so many different occasions and I love trying to imagine I can be inside your head because I’ll see you go, “Yes, we can do this.” Every once in a while, I might notice you just briefly, briefly glance at your watch and go like, “All right, we’re going for a ride I hadn’t thought we were going on,” but then, you also have the discipline to realize they can’t all just be off the cuff. How do you think about that in terms of planning out a class session?

[00:12:49] Todd: Well, first of all, Bonni, yes, there are lots of things we can talk about, but I do struggle with that, that’s a challenging area for me. I do have ADD. I have to tell you quickly, it’s funny because I told a group one time, “Hey, everybody, I’ve got ADD, so those of you with ADD, you’re going to have fun today and those of you without, just buckle up and hold on the best you can.” Afterwards, this woman came up, and she said, “This has been so helpful for me. My son yesterday was diagnosed with ADHD, and my husband and I were fearful of what he could become, but now, just watching you, I know that he can do this. He’s going to be okay.”

I said, “Oh, I am so glad that that’s helped you out, but I said I had ADD, not ADHD.” She said, “Yes, right,” and walked out. I thought, “Wow.” All of a sudden, the hyperactive was all over there. Yes, so what I try to do, is think to myself, “What is the overarching thing that I really want to do?” Like the ultimate outcome. “By the end of this session, I really want this to happen.” It could be lots of different things. “By the end of today, I really want students to understand what variability is. That’s my ultimate outcome if they just get variability in a statistics class.” From there, I don’t know where we’re going.

The reason I like that I don’t know where we’re going, is because it keeps me from getting bored. Based on somebody asks a question or a thought I have, we can take off and go down a tangent and I will often signpost, “Hey, we’re heading off in this direction right now.” Then, I will tell for faculty tips out there, is I use the room a lot. When I go on a tangent, what happens, is I have an anchor point in the room and I teach from that point, you probably didn’t even know this one because I walk around a lot, right? You’ve seen me walk around.

I teach from my anchor point, and then if I go on a tangent, I stroll away from it. Then if I go on a sub-tangent, I take another couple steps in a different direction, and then I actually physically walk back to those spots, to get back to the original place. It’s a way for people to talk about some things and have conversations with students but get back on track. I do think what you’re talking about too, for roadmaps and everything, is we should have a general idea where we’re going, we need to have a sense of the class and what we should be doing there, and then we should have some fun along the way.

[00:15:03] Bonni: Yes, those tangents can be sometimes the best most memorable parts of that ride. I appreciate your authenticity to just be willing to admit, not always, [chuckles] as someone who has gone– I do have to be disciplined to go, “How am I able to bring my strengths to this moment and stay in the moment and notice what’s happening?” You talked about a strategy of movement to both, I am assuming Todd, keep yourself on track, but also people are watching you move and whether or not they realize the intent behind that movement, psychologically, we’re just going to, “Oh, now we’ve come back.”

There’s something nice there. I learned from a professor when I was getting my doctorate, whenever someone would ask a question, he would walk to the opposite side of the room, which has some advantages both in terms of encouraging that person to project their voice more if they are in the size of a room where people can be clearly heard, otherwise, we should always be having microphones, please, let me be clear about that. Then the other thing that’s nice about it, is that the people who might have not felt as interested in the question, there’s less of a temptation then to have a little side chat if the person is standing too close to the one asking the question.

I wanted to bring up one more thing before we move away from this that came out in your answer. You recognize the challenges that get brought with yourself in terms of ADD, but it would seem to me that you are not trying to act as if, or behave as if, think as if that’s not a part of who you are, but bring some of the assets into the mix. Would you reflect a little bit about the assets that you get to bring that those of us without ADD may not have the ability to do quite so much?

[00:17:03] Todd: I will say, I have a daughter on the spectrum, and she said it’s okay to talk about this, and I have learned so much from her is, we can have situations, and it’s wonderful to have those that are well-structured and people know what’s going on and living their life as neurotypical people. I think that’s great, but I think that there’s really good advantages that can come from looking at things from different perspectives. I’ve had multiple people say that I have an interesting perspective on how I pull things together, and I present things to other individuals.

Part of that comes from, quite frankly, looking at things from like six or seven different directions at the same time. I have so many thoughts bouncing around in my head and it’s so quick to say, “Well, I wonder about this, and what about this?” I try things out. It does give me lots of different perspectives, the same as my daughter on the spectrum, and just little things that come from that. For instance, on the first day of class, she told me one time, she said, “If a teacher walks in and says on the first day of class, “Turn to your neighbor and get to know your neighbor,” it freaks her out, just the most stressful thing in the world.

She says, “If you say, “Turn to your neighbor, learn one thing about your neighbor, and in 60 seconds, we’re going to come back together and talk about what we learned.” She says, “That’s a really interesting exercise.” She says, “If you tell me to turn to the neighbor and tell them something I’ve not told anybody else,” she says, “What’s the matter with you? Why would I tell a perfect stranger something that I’ve not told my closest friend?” She got me going down this path of thinking about what’s really happening in a classroom.

The reason I’m bringing this up, Bonni, is I think if we see everything in a regular way that we tend to think about things regularly, and we just do them, which is nothing wrong with that. I’m saying there’s nothing wrong with neurotypical people, they’re okay too, but looking at things from different directions and different perspectives, I think, has some really interesting richness to it.

[00:18:51] Bonni: I enjoy the serendipity of it, and I, again, have watched you ask questions, and you almost seem like you’re dancing in this sense of– I used to do swing dancing, which I’m particularly interested in the form of dancing where it’s not been choreographed before. You obviously have some basic moves that you’re aware of, there’s 6-count dances and there’s 8-count dances, but you don’t know what that particular dance is going to look like on any given time. While I have hung up my dance shoes many years ago, I still do enjoy.

It’s one of the most commonly watched videos I enjoy on YouTube, is to watch people, and they draw a follower, and they draw a lead out of a name of buckets, and then just to watch this dance happen that’s never happened before, and they also don’t know what kind of music is going to be played. Sometimes the music is fitting of a Lindy Hop dance or a West Coast swing and other times, it’s completely not a thing that I’ve ever seen dance with that form of dance. I think about you when you’re answering questions, that you seem to be at your most energized as opposed to some people who there is that fear of, “Oh my gosh, what if I don’t know the answer to this question.”

Are there any strategies you would suggest to those people who are a little bit more fearful of those questions? Particularly, the whole, “Oh my gosh, what if I don’t know the answer to the question?”

[00:20:20] Todd: First of all, I’d pay a chunk of money to watch you do swing dancing right now [crosstalk] I’m telling you.

[00:20:28] Bonni: [laughs] I wish I had videos from those days.

[00:20:31] Todd: It would be good times, wouldn’t it? One of the things that I felt like it was always a big deal when I started teaching, is you needed to know the answer. I can remember being petrified that a student would ask me a question and I wouldn’t know the answer because it would devalue and delegitimize me being in front of the classroom. We do have to be very mindful of the fact that for a lot of different groups, a lot of different individuals, that can be a problem right out of the gate, so we do have issues.

If you’re from an underrepresented group and a marginalized group, women tend to have more difficulties than men in terms of legitimacy in the eyes of students, so I don’t want to minimize any of that, I totally get that. I was petrified that someone would ask me a question I wouldn’t know. I got to a point where I realized as long as I was authentic about it and said, “I don’t know the answer to that one.” I typically will word it and say, “That’s a fascinating question. I’ve never been asked that before. Let’s think through that.”

What I wanted to get to, Bonni, is what I did in early days was say, “Ooh, I don’t know the answer. I’ll find out for you.” What I found out from that, by the way, is most students when you brought it to the next class period, they didn’t even remember asking the question, so it was that not important to them. Then I got to a point where I’d say, “Well, you’ve asked me a good question. If you find the answer and bring it back and teach the class in the next class period, I will give you extra credit points for that.” Which actually worked out well, but most students wouldn’t go and do it because they weren’t that interested.

What I turned it into, which I really like now, is just think aloud. I’ll say to somebody, “You’ve just asked a question about blooms, which is a really good one. You’ve got foundational aspects of bloom, and you go up to more critical thinking, but then once you start critically thinking, wouldn’t your vocabulary change? You don’t keep going back to the same question or that makes foundational materials. What you’ve just asked, is something I’ve never thought about, but that’s fascinating.” Then I start just explaining what I’m thinking, and then I start asking questions, “How would you interpret this?” It becomes this fabulous teachable moment, and the issue there is, it’s going to be fine.

Part of this boils down to– I said this so many times. I have pathological levels of optimism, and I know it’s going to work out, I just got to figure out how to get there. A lot of times when a student asks me a question I don’t know the answer to, it’s like, “Let’s take this challenge together and find something out.” The other thing is, there’s so much fun you can have, is put people into groups of three or four and say, “You’ve just asked a phenomenal question. We’re going to take five minutes, and I’m telling you all, this is not a waste of time, it’s going to show up on the test, and it’s going to be valuable. Five minutes, get into groups of three, you’re going to do a WebQuest. Go out online, you got three minutes to find something out about this topic, and then we’re going to talk about it for two minutes,” and in a few seconds, we do that.

You don’t need a lot of teaching skills and backgrounds to do a quick impromptu WebQuest. The students are very good at it, by the way. Just have fun with it.

[00:23:26] Bonni: I appreciate the advice to have fun, and it reminds me so much of my attempts to be curious. What we don’t want to do when someone asks a question, is instantly go, “Why are you asking that?” You use the phrase, “Let’s think through that together.” I have found that if I stay in the question-asking mindset for a while, that’s actually healthier, so I want to be curious about where did that question actually come from before I attempt to answer it. One quick example, I used to teach six different eight-hour Microsoft Excel classes. That was what I did for my first job out of college.

I knew that thing inside and out, although, once you understand the magnitude of an application like that, you’ll never actually know all of that. You could know what’s under every menu, what the functions are, and how to use them, but there’s a myriad of things that you could possibly do with this tool, so you do get adjusted to people asking you a lot of questions. Before I had that kind of confidence, I vividly recall a woman asking me how many characters you could type into one of the columns. There’s column A, column B, column C, “So how many characters could you type?” I was so nervous, Todd.

I thought, “Oh my gosh, I don’t know, I’ve never tried it before.” Those of you that use Microsoft Excel, probably have already jumped ahead to the end of this story. She was asking the question because she didn’t realize that you could adjust the width of said columns, so you never really would need to know how many characters could fit, plus we have proportional spacing with today’s fonts.

There really isn’t an answer to that because it would depend what characters you were typing as to how many could literally fit in the default setting before it overlapped. Then of course, the thing, could it overlap into the other thing because if there’s nothing next to it, you know where I’m going with all this. This idea of staying curious and actually staying in the question-asking mode, and you don’t want to put someone on the defense so asking the word why we got to be delicate with that.

Let’s think through that a little bit, and to get a better sense of why they’re asking because sometimes, they don’t have that foundational understanding, and you said that in your answer too, Todd, “Well, let’s explore this together.” I also think if we stay curious in our disciplines, yes, there are right answers in disciplines and that’s in bloom’s taxonomy and if we’re to understand and remember, then, yes, we do need to have a fundamental understanding of vocabulary and concepts and that, but once we’ve moved beyond that, there’s so many different directions we could go in our disciplines.

Hopefully, what we’re trying to do, is create scholars, create thinkers who actually are able to far surpass any of us that are currently in the academy, to even greater accomplishments and greater understandment, and there’s just so much that’s possible when we stay in that curious mode.

[00:26:32] Todd: Yes, and I think you’ve brought up something that’s fascinating. I hadn’t thought about it before, but as you’re speaking of it, is that last statement you made, is we want them to really excel and move forward. It used to be that the concept was, “I was the expert, you’re the students, and I’m going to convey this information to you.” Now, it’s how can you propel somebody into really being a solid thinker, which means I want you to go beyond me.

I would love it by the end of the class if you’re asking great questions and I have a harder and harder time answering them, so I think that’d be great. You’d mentioned before how long you’d been teaching, which is a fabulous thing to share. I always love to hear when people have been teaching a while. This is my 40th anniversary from my first class I ever taught, so it’s been 40 years.

I would say those of you who’ve seen me before or had conversations with me, I guess one time I was described as a Labrador puppy. [chuckles] It’s that much energy and I just love all of this stuff, but I think a lot of it comes from just always looking for new things and finding out ways that I can teach differently and learn different things from students. I’m not worried about whether or not I can cover the right thing at the right time and in a way that the students think that I’m some kind of expert, fabulous person, but I just want them at the end to say, “I learned so much when I’m around that person.” That’s what I’m after.

[00:27:49] Bonni: Before we get to the recommendation segment, I just wanted to talk a little bit about this book specifically, and that is there’s– [chuckles] You should never do this. There’s two types of books in this world. No, there’s a lot of different types of books, but when I think about books about teaching, there have been ones that I have read that are real treasures to me, that I’m unlikely to pick back up on any kind of a regular basis.

They truly have transformed my teaching. They still are a part of my absolute being. This is the kind of book that works great to keep on your bookshelf, or have right there because it’s so expansive. I don’t know if you’ve thought about it as an encyclopedia and maybe that has a negative connotation, but I mean in every best sense of the word, just that we can go back and as we’re struggling with or looking to grow in a particular area, it’s ready for us, and including, there’s information about how to set up groups and all that kind of thing. Todd, I was so ready because it’s been a while since I’ve done more of a traditional group project, and I am deciding this particular class, I’m in the middle of teaching.

We’re doing this again and here’s why, and I won’t go on about that, so I was so ready last night, Todd. It’s like, “Okay, buckle up, here we go. Setting groups is miserable. I feel like a matchmaker. I’m really not good at being a matchmaker,” so I was just so ready. Todd, it is the smoothest setting of groups I have ever had. All this to say, if we need that where we go, “It’s been a while since I’ve done that, or I just want to get some other ideas or last time I tried that, it didn’t go well.”

It just really is that kind of a resource, and thank you for co-authoring this most recent edition of it. It’s going to be– I was going to say it’s going to be on my bookshelf, but truly, I’ve read it digitally, so it’s going to stay in my digital bookshelf as a wonderful book to keep on referencing as I continue to try to grow my teaching skills.

[00:29:47] Todd: I appreciate you saying that. I would like to say before we wrap up here, is that Linda wrote the previous editions of the book, I came onto the project, and it was my task to update the things, but she had laid such a foundation and it scared me to death. I learned so many things in working through this book, it’s been fascinating, but it does, I mean, it has chapters on outcomes that we talked about, but different types of outcomes.

It gets pretty detailed, but then there’s a chapter on critical thinking and then how to pick out your technology, setting up a syllabus and copyright guidelines, and what is fair use, and it moves from there into establishing good environments and civility in the classroom, how to lecture well, how to do POGIL and scale up, looking specifically at STEM and inclusion issues, even down to things like assessing student work, but then assessing our own work.

It’s 27 chapters that each one is probably, I don’t know, half an hour to read at most. That was the whole idea, just give you a good breadth of stuff for a new faculty member, but quite frankly, I think almost anybody could pick it up and learn from it, so I learned a lot from it.

[00:30:55] Bonni: You actually just reminded me of why I don’t think an encyclopedia is an appropriate analogy because I did read the whole thing, and it didn’t feel like reading the encyclopedia in the sense of, it’s very expansive, but this is short. It’s easily referenceable, but it’s also an easy read, and I mean that in the best sense possible. This is not dense stuff that’s difficult to get through. What a wonderful reference both for reading it all the way through, but also being able to have accessible for us for all of our teaching careers, so thank you so much for the book. This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations, and this time, you are starting this out.

[00:31:31] Todd: Ooh, it’s always tough, Bonni, every time I come to the show, I’m never nervous about the questions you’re going to ask, I know that’ll all work out, but these recommendations are always stressful, so I’m going to go a little bold this time. I don’t know what will happen in a few months from now, but everybody right now is all a buzz about this ChatGPT, bots out there that are writing for us, and like what do we do? I’ve seen articles about the death of the essay and what do we do about students’ grading?

I just want to point out that I was teaching when the internet showed up, and I remember people wringing their hands and if you stop and think for a minute, anybody out there listening, stop and think for just a second about what life would’ve been like before the internet. The only way to get information was to talk to a faculty member or read a book. Ironically, Samuel Johnson, a few hundred years ago, said, “With the ready availability of books, teachers are no longer needed.” They went through this existential crisis when books showed up, we did when the internet showed up, and now we’ve got this GPT.

I think it’s going to be one of the most fascinating teaching tools in a few years, and I’m all buzzed about it. I think it’s great because right now, I can’t imagine teaching without the internet. I think 10 years from now, people are going to say, “I can’t imagine teaching before there was these writing programs that would do this stuff,” so I’m going to go with the ChatGPT and any of the writing bots out there, and I know it’s going to be stressful, but I think we’re going to come out great on the other side.

[00:32:55] Bonni: Absolutely. You talked about being nervous about the recommendation segment. I have been nervous to have conversations about things like ChatGPT because things are changing so quickly. You just talk about being fascinating, I’ve enjoyed too seeing articles where they talk about how much of artificial intelligence we already are using in our everyday lives, we just don’t know that’s what it’s called, and that both intrigues me, but also makes me feel a little bit more like, “Okay, this–” [chuckles] I mentioned the car, there’s a certain level of artificial intelligence in cars and some of the navigation systems and there’s a certain level of artificial intelligence.

I subscribe to a service called SaneBox, and it sorts out my emails, and that was given as an example of artificial intelligence for really, really smart email sorting. All this to say, I have been really, really nervous, Todd, to ever mention anything about Twitter because speaking of things that are changing on a regular basis, it’s Twitter and I suspect that when this airs and then– I mean, there’s going to continue to be changes, but one of the things I have been dipping my toe into, is a somewhat similar service called Mastodon.

It is different in the sense that it is federated, and that is just kind of a fancy word instead of everybody living all under this “for-profit” company’s service that you can– it’s open source, so you can have your own instance, but you can also subscribe to people that live in other instances, and that is my easiest most basic explanation. If you’re already bored with me talking about Mastodon, the good news is, what I’d like to recommend, is an article about Mastodon. If you want to start dipping your toe in and just see what is this thing about? What does it mean to be federated? What would this look like?

I think it’s really one of the best general introductions that I have seen, there are certainly a lot of them out there, but if you have been curious about Mastodon, I think it’s a great primer for you to read. I plan on sharing a little bit more about my practices in coming episodes because I am still learning and growing. I guess the second thing I would just recommend, is if you are on Mastodon, I’d love it if you’d follow me there because I’m just new to the neighborhood, [laughs] it’d be fun. I’ll have the link to my Mastodon account in the show notes and would love to have you follow me there, and maybe we could engage a little bit.

I’m still very clumsy, very, very, very clumsy, but clumsy is good in teaching and learning because it helps us refine our sense of beginner’s mind, and it helps us be more successful, I think, overall at facilitating other people’s learning.

[00:35:41] Todd: I think that’s where we do it. That’s where long-term potentiation comes from. It’s hard when you start it. The more you do it, the easier it becomes, so just keep working at it.

[00:35:48] Bonni: Yes, so much. Well, Todd Zakrasjsek, thank you once again for coming back on Teaching in Higher Ed. I feel like I need to go put the show on pause, so we can count how many times this will be, so we’re going to pause for a moment, friends, but you won’t know that we’ve paused due to the magic of podcast editing. Oh my gosh, there’s a lot, so this time is mine, Todd, and I can’t wait until the 10th, so until we meet again.

[00:36:19] Todd: We can’t have an odd number. I’ll get to work, I’ll do something that’s significant enough to show up on your show, so looking forward to the conversation that we’ll have in the future.

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[00:36:30] Bonni: Thanks once again to Todd Zakrajsek for coming back on Teaching in Higher Ed, episode 455. 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 Smith. Thanks to each of you for listening. If you’ve been listening for a while and haven’t signed up for the weekly email, I encourage you to do so. That’s over at teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. You’ll get the show notes from the most recent episode as well as some other resources that don’t show up except in that newsletter. Again, thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.

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

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