# data[].attributes.headline
Podcast : Mandulak - Metaphor as Conceptual Anchor - Teaching in Higher Ed with Bonni Stachowiak

# data[].attributes.subject
Podcast : Mandulak - Metaphor as Conceptual Anchor - Teaching in Higher Ed with Bonni Stachowiak

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 457 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, metaphor as conceptual anchor with Kerry Mandulak.

[music]

[00:00:15] Bonni: 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.

[music]

[00:00:43] Bonni: Kerry Mandulak, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:00:48] Kerry Mandulak: Thanks, Bonni. I'm so happy to be here.

[00:00:50] Bonni: Normally, when I start many episodes, I ask people to take me back to their childhood. Okay, not really, but back to earlier times. You and I are going to go back to January of 2023. I had an unusual experience meeting you [laughs] and we are going to possibly recreate it in 60 seconds or 90 seconds. You want to start and tell the first part?

[00:01:13] Kerry: Well, sure. I was attending the Lilly Conference in San Diego for the very first time. I was really looking forward to possibly meeting you there as the keynote speaker. I had never been to that conference and I was presenting. I was really excited about it. I think I crossed paths with you once outside and then I was like, "Tomorrow, I've got to make a point." During your keynote, you talked about mantras and I really resonated with that. I wanted to tell you about how my mantra for class was very similar to yours. You were standing by yourself at the registration desk. I was like, "Okay, just go introduce yourself," and then-

[00:01:52] Bonni: Dot, dot, dot. [chuckles]

[00:01:54] Kerry: Next thing you know, we were like, "Let's talk about mantras over lunch." Three or four hours later, we were still talking. [laughs]

[00:02:01] Bonni: I don't know if you get this very often, but I feel a little bit like I skipped stages of disclosure with you. I had just no filter. Actually, when my husband and I first started to realize our relationship was taking a turn toward romantic, I was in the hospital with a- I was having to have my gallbladder removed and I had something called pancreatitis, which is life-threatening.

They'll put you on a lot of drugs in a situation like that, so I literally just had no filter at all. That's how I felt with you, where I was like, "Oh, you mentioned knowing Katie Linder and I know and feel very safe with Katie Linder." You just felt very safe to me. I felt like I was experiencing all the bodily functions of like, "I am really hungry. I am also feeling somewhat socially awkward because I don't feel like I know how to do this anymore," because it was my first in-person conference. There was a lot of people there.

Then I was also not wanting to get COVID, so there was that. I was like, "Could we get some food and could we sit down outside so I could feel more safe? Can we tell each other our deepest secrets," or whatever, and so we did. I got such a kick out of it. Then one of our favorite parts is that I have a- This is not our favorite part. This is our least favorite part, is I have an injured shoulder.

Just even getting into the car and thinking through the parking gate that I was going to have to probably get out of the car so that my right hand could do the job of waving the key. I wanted to make sure that it all worked and everything. Then I realized that someone had parked their car really, really close to my rental- Not a rental car. It was my car. Close to my car, so I was like, "Okay, I'm going to need to get in the passenger side and then just scooch myself right on over." We're walking together and you take the story from here. [chuckles]

[00:03:50] Kerry: Right, and then I was mentioning how I could not get my things out of the passenger side of my car because the person on the right-hand side of my car had parked so close to me. I think we had that simultaneous recognition as we-

[00:04:06] Bonni: Oh yes.

[00:04:07] Kerry: -entered the parking garage that we were talking about each other and our poor parking skills. That's I was simultaneously so horrified, but also I was like, "I know she will think this is hilarious."

[00:04:23] Bonni: Oh, not only did I think it was hilarious, but we each get to discover- and I have photographic evidence of this-

[00:04:29] Kerry: It's true.

[00:04:29] Bonni: -that it was totally me, totally me parking too close. Kerry, since then, we actually have gotten a new car. We are living in the future now. Some people I know are going to have cars like this and be like, "You're not living in the future. You're living in the present." It has one of those cameras that will literally show you how you're doing on the parking job. Kerry, I'm getting better, but I have a lot of healing to do to be able to park straight in the middle of a parking space. [laughs] I have a coach now.

[00:05:01] Kerry: I'm so glad you have the support now you need. Also, I was secretly like, "Phew, it wasn't me."

[laughter]

[00:05:10] Kerry: Because I was driving a rental and, of course, you're not always as good at driving a rental as your own car. That was a really funny moment. I loved how long we laughed about that too. [laughs]

[00:05:20] Bonni: Well, I have loved getting to know you and just so treasure already our friendship as it emerges here about a month later. So fun. I'm also really intrigued about your background. I just think you're an interesting person with a unique set of skills as they say. Would you talk a little bit about you and about your scholarly background?

[00:05:43] Kerry: Sure, so I am currently an associate professor at Pacific University, which is a small liberal arts college just outside of Portland, Oregon. I teach in the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, which is an undergraduate program that covers speech-language pathology and a few audiology classes. Then we also have a master's program in speech-language pathology.

I'm a speech-language pathologist by trade, been practicing since 1998. Being at Pacific, it's my second academic appointment. I've just really enjoyed the uniqueness of working at a small liberal arts college in a program that is typically at larger universities. Speech-language pathology isn't usually at sort of smaller liberal arts colleges. It's really afforded me the opportunity to reimagine what scholarship means. Pacific uses the Boyer model for scholarship.

To see the work that I've realized I really want to do, which my line of research is in holistic review for graduate admissions to really trying to diversify the workforce of speech-language pathologists, and to realize that that is an absolute line of scholarship. There is science to admissions and it fits directly really squarely into the scholarship of application, which I didn't even know was a way I could imagine my research. That's really wonderful. I feel like I've really found who I want to be as an academic. Pacific has really allowed me to be that.

That meshing of values has really just allowed me to really blossom, I would say, as a professor and a teacher and a scholar. That's where I am right now. One of the courses of graduate courses I teach is in stuttering. I teach a course in voice disorders. My clinical focus, and I get to teach a little bit of it this semester, is in cleft lip and palate and craniofacial disorders. That's really where my research started. About five or six years ago, I took a bit of a left-hand turn and went into this whole new area of scholarship. I'm really excited about where I've landed at this point.

[00:08:00] Bonni: I know just from my very, very limited knowledge, but also from getting to talk with you a little bit about this, that there are indeed a lot of misconceptions about stuttering. I'm sure we could just do probably 16 episodes just on that topic. I'm going to ask you an unfair question and just ask you to share a little bit about, I'm going to say, the tip of the iceberg. By the way, for people listening, that is- What do we call that? Foreshadowing.

[00:08:26] Kerry: Yes, that's a preview for sure.

[00:08:27] Bonni: My analogy there is some foreshadowing for what is coming later in the episode. Give us the iceberg of misconceptions about stuttering.

[00:08:35] Kerry: Of stuttering? Sure. First of all, I want to start off by me saying I teach a course in stuttering. I remember speaking to one of our business faculty members who work up on this hallway. He said, "Where are you going?" I said, "Oh, I'm going to go teach my class." He's like, "Which class?" I said, "Stuttering." He's like, "You're teaching people how to stutter?"

I was like, "No, I'm teaching graduate students how to work with people who stutters." The first thing he said was, "You can have a whole class on that?" I think that's a misconception actually, is that stuttering is a small thing or it reflects the under-emphasis that's received in our field. That's one misconception, is that stuttering is just a speech disorder or just something that you can see.

It's just someone blocks on sounds. They repeat sounds or syllables or they prolong them. That's stuttering and that's all. That is really the tip of the iceberg. I think the idea that is what we see in a person who stutters, we see the actual behaviors that we characterize as stuttering. What stuttering really is, is the entire iceberg, right? There are all of these things that happen underneath the surface that happen over the course of a person's lifetime that really characterize what stuttering is to a person.

One of the first things I teach students is a person who stutters can say, "I stuttered today." That means sometime during that day, they repeated their speech. Stuttering has affected me my whole life. Stuttering as a concept, we call that capital S stuttering, where it's also the feelings, the attitudes, the thoughts they have about speech or the thoughts they have about themselves, the way it affects how they participate in the world.

All of that is also part of stuttering, but people don't see that. They don't understand that right away. I think that one of the other unfortunate misconceptions is that stuttering is really portrayed poorly in the media. There's not much representation in the world in general about stuttering because stuttering is something that's low incidence. 1% of our world stutters. Across all different countries, across all different languages, it affects 1% of people.

The minute we say, "Well, only 1% of the world stutters," that's a signal that it should be underemphasized when really 1% of the world is- I don't want to say the number exactly, but it's millions of people. I think that is really important for us to think about that the people who really do need support and could be seeking treatment for maybe the speech part or maybe the effects of stuttering. Both of those are really important. Kids stuttering starts in childhood. It starts when children start talking.

They've already started talking and then stuttering can come. It can just happen overnight. That can be really upsetting for parents. Of course, it looks like a loss of function. 80% of children recover from stuttering, but there's 20% of people who stutter that persist in stuttering. We can't predict who those 20% are. When children start stuttering, there's not a specific type that you're like, "Oh, that's the type that's going to persist on." We have to just meet families and children where they are. When that stuttering starts, assess, decide on treatment, and then go from there.

[00:12:06] Bonni: You talked about how the difference between, "I stuttered today," versus stuttering affecting someone their whole lives. When you talk about that 80% having recovered, would we consider someone like the current president of the United States, Joe Biden, having been challenged by stuttering his whole life? Does he count as having recovered even though, on occasion, we might see some behaviors showing up or is this a gray area? Because it will seem pretty neat and tidy as far as recovery versus the 20% who don't.

[00:12:39] Kerry: Yes, there is a specific definition about recovery, which is that recovery is really determined by, there is no stuttering to borderline stuttering, and it really does mean complete recovery. Again, deep respect for Joe Biden and his experience and what he goes through also with the media around his speech. That also could be another topic. He is a person who stutters.

He still works through it. He still uses strategies. It still shows up in his speech. He has been reticent to talk about it a lot just knowing the ramifications that come with admitting something that is not exactly perfect about your speech or about your communication. Especially when he is in a position to communicate all the time, that can have really large ramifications.

I think that is something, though, that is shifting in our world, is that people are more willing to admit or talk about, I would say, the fact that stuttering is still something they are working through, are managing, and still have effects from. You'll hear it from other actors in the world. Emily Blunt, for example, talks about stuttering, that when she uses her voice in an acting context, there isn't stuttering, but she may stutter in other situations. I don't want to necessarily speak for anybody, but I think that we still see stuttering in Joe Biden's speech for sure.

[00:14:07] Bonni: It's been interesting to watch him navigate it in the sense of- My heart feels so tender toward him when he will name it specifically with someone else who has struggled with stuttering and encouraging them along their own journey toward whatever it might look like for them to be part of that 80%. My gosh, we have such ableism in all this.

[00:14:30] Kerry: Absolutely.

[00:14:31] Bonni: As you said, we could talk at length about the ableism and where it shows up in the politics and all of that. Well, speaking of, maybe I'm allowing myself to do this twice. I'm going to say the tip of the iceberg again, but this time really to have you introduce to us an analogy that you have incorporated into your class. It's got some visuals around it and you've incorporated your students' creativity. Tell us about your use of an iceberg as a metaphor in your teaching.

[00:15:01] Kerry: Yes, absolutely. Thanks. The iceberg has been used as a metaphor to show that there are things that you can see and then there's other things that you can't see below the surface. With a number, I'm seeing it a lot with people of ADHD or maybe people who have anxiety that there's things that you see and things that you don't. The metaphor of the iceberg has been used for a long time to describe the experience of stuttering or just stuttering as a condition.

Joseph Sheehan is a person who named this as the metaphor maybe in the '50s, '60s, '70s to explain and illustrate what stuttering is like in ways that can be more widely accepted. I think that I've always introduced the iceberg metaphor at the beginning of class. I teach a graduate course in stuttering. I should say, I am not a person who focuses or is a specialist in stuttering research.

Through my clinical career, before I went back for my PhD, I worked with people who stutter, have a deep heart for working with people who stutter partially because of the compassion I feel that I talk so much. I talk very fast and I never have to worry that when I speak, are the words going to come out? When I was a doctoral student, I was teaching a course and there was a person who stuttered in my class.

He approached me and said that he had worked on his speech over the summer. He wanted to become a lawyer. Now, he could finally do the job that he wanted to do because he had figured out how to manage his stuttering. I said, "Well, do you want to talk to the class about stuttering? Because better a person who has this experience." He said, "Of course." He walked out. It turns out he was really anxious and practiced and was so nervous about it.

To me, he seemed he was just ready to talk about it. He came into class that day to speak about it. I watched him address the class, tell these stories about how he could never call the plays as an athlete. He always had the coach do it because of his stuttering, how he had not given a speech in front of a group of people since the fifth grade, and he was a senior in college. I had gotten cornered in this room.

I was standing close to him while he was talking. I could see the sweat dripping down the lectern from his hands and my heart just went out to him. I just thought, "Wow, what a brave, courageous moment I'm witnessing. What am I witnessing here?" He finished. He did a great job. He told his story. Later, I emailed him and said, "You really went outside your comfort zone." He told me the whole story and it was an immediate connection.

Since then, he still guest lectures in my classes and we have this really strong friendship. He recently sent me a eulogy from a funeral that he did where he talked about his stuttering. He's just showing me like, "I'm still doing it." He's run for public office. To me, that was one of my first experiences where I was like, "There's so much more I have to teach people about stuttering, not just how do we fix their speech," right? "Fix," you can see my air quotes.

As I moved now into teaching at Pacific, we have nine big areas. They call it "The Big Nine" literally that we have to cover in all of our programs and stuttering is one. Here's my class. We have to teach knowledge and skills, right? There's the content knowledge and then there's the skill development. Part of those skills that we have to teach students is what is happening below the surface. How do you work with that?

It's not a counseling program, but we still have a responsibility to our clients to counsel them with respect to their speech condition. I used to just mention it at the beginning of the term and then refer to it throughout. In collaboration with one of my close thought partners here at Pacific, her name is Robbie, she and I were redesigning my course for the 90th time. I love to redesign my courses.

She was like, "What I hear you saying is that this metaphor carries all the way throughout your course. The metaphor of the iceberg, the knowledge, and the skills, but you're also teaching this other emotional part of working with people who stutter." I was like, "You're right." That is how I realized that the metaphor of the iceberg was there was a common thread throughout all of the work that I was doing.

I was like, "I need to talk about this more often." When you think about the facts about stuttering like that, there's a whole chapter about the prevalence and the incidence. I was like, "That's the tip of the iceberg," right? What does that mean for a person who stutters? For kids, when kids begin stuttering, what's the facts? The 80% versus the 20%, but also what's happening with parents? What are they going through? How do we support?

I think that that metaphor has helped students ground themselves into that content, but the place where it really changed was when I came up with this iceberg assignment. That came from Jennifer Gonzalez's- I don't think it was her main idea, but Jennifer Gonzalez at the Cult of Pedagogy website, she talked about one-pagers. Robbie and I loved to send ideas back and forth to each other and she was like, "What if you took the iceberg and made it into a one-pager assignment for the students?"

I thought I've never done a recurring assignment in a class that I've taught, but I was like, "That sounds like a great idea." I give the students an outline of an iceberg on a PDF and I give it to them. After every chapter or a couple of chapters, they have to reflect back on what they've learned and frame the content no matter what it is into what are the facts, the figures, what's the content that you have to learn, but then also what's the deeper meaning of that content, or how does it affect people who stutter?

It's a low-stakes assignment. Now, I'm doing it just as pass and fail. They also have the choice. Not all students resonate with that assignment. Now, they can just choose to do a certain amount and students who do more can get some extra points. Also, I think it has high impact. It requires them to stop, reflect, go back to the work we just did. There's some retention practice there. Now, they have, essentially, a study guide too as they prepare for the midterms.

I felt like it has served many purposes in my class. I don't want to say "forces" because that's not the word I want, but it really requires them to stop for a minute and look back to then look forward. I think that I really value reflection. I not always practice it very well. I'm also trying to teach students how to do that in their own work so that they can also practice retention and learn the content as they move forward.

[00:22:18] Bonni: You did a poster session on this at the Lilly Conference. I got to see examples of some of the students' one-pagers. Isn't that so fun when something really resonates with you, but then you get to see it reimagined? You had mentioned that not all of them choose, in some cases, even to do an iceberg as their metaphor. Some of them branch out. I think you mentioned one doing a tree or all these different ways to consider.

I used to teach more consumer behavior than I have in recent years, but I loved this idea of having a metaphor. In this case, it was mostly a T-shirt, but there was a full person's body there. There were shoes and the shoes connected a little bit. There was a head and there was glasses and some sort of a hair accessory. I guess it wasn't just the shirt, but I did a lot of zooming in and then zooming back out because I had this fascination with the idea that you could go whole, part-whole, and that we could zoom in.

In one case, it was just a tattoo that was on the shoulder that looked at different types of- This has been a while, but I would hear from students years after they took the course and they would say, "I can see that T-shirt. I see that tattoo. I see the different-" It's pretty remarkable like you're saying when we allow them those opportunities to stop, look back, reflect.

Then I get the sense too that it goes beyond, as you said, the knowledge and the skills, but that you're also getting them to think about their own emotions and how they're processing their learning, which is just so powerful. I also love this friendship that you and Robbie have. Those are the best. It's part of why I love this podcast so much. I get to meet people like you where we can geek out and talk about teaching for hours.

We don't always have that necessarily at our institution. When we find them, we got to just cling onto them. Not in an awkward way, but we got to stand by each other's side so we can continue to have these great continuing iterations. I hope also Robbie helps you though because I have friends who do this too, where it's like you mentioned constantly wanting to change it. We need some people who are also like, "Okay, you're done for the semester."

[laughter]

[00:24:32] Bonni: "Yes, you're going to need to stop now." [laughs]

[00:24:34] Kerry: Yes. Robbie. She really stretches me. One of our origin stories is that she really was challenging me once about an idea around a rubric and I was like, "I can't do that." She was like, "Okay, I'm sensing some resistance." I was like, "No, you're not." It was so funny that we had this and she remembers this conversation very differently, but I really respected that about her that she was willing to say, "I'm sensing this is not something you are very interested in."

I was like, "Okay." Sometimes we have to take that minute to get out of our expert mode that we think sometimes, as academics, we know all of the answers. At the same time, she's so generous with her words to affirm the efforts I'm doing because sometimes teaching can be thankless. She's like, "You're doing the right things. You're being inclusive. You're thoughtful about your teaching."

I was like, "Okay, thank you." It's a really great thought partnership. I like that she can see the connections between my work and all of the pedagogical knowledge that she has and all of these instructional design ideas and can connect what I'm doing to that to help me see it. We do. I tell her often that she has been transformational in my teaching, so it's wonderful to find that. You hold on to those people with two hands for sure.

[00:25:59] Bonni: Hold on, hold on.

[00:26:01] Kerry: Not in a weird way, but yes, absolutely.

[00:26:03] Bonni: Just in not a weird way. I want to make an invitation to people because I'm super intrigued by this use of analogy that Kerry has described and it carrying across the whole class like this. Anybody listening who does something similar in your class where there's some kind of analogy that carries across or if you've done some of this zooming in and zooming back out, I know we'd love to hear from you.

You can send an email to feedback@teachinginhighered.com and I'll pass those messages on to Kerry because I think we both would be super intrigued. If there's any images that you have that are associated with those analogies, those would be super fun to see. I would just invite people to do that. Before Kerry and I get to the recommendations segment, I wanted to take just a moment and thank today's sponsor, and that is TextExpander.

With TextExpander, you can save time. It helps us work faster and smarter and lets us spend even more of our time and energy on more important work. How it works is you get to type less and say more. You can quickly insert text anywhere that you're typing, whether that's in email or Microsoft Word or on the web, anywhere you're typing. You can expand what you type. These little shortcuts, they call them snippets. They expand into longer strings of text or even something that might be harder for you to remember.

If you head over to textexpander.com/podcast, you have an opportunity to try out TextExpander and get 20% off of your order. If you do that, please let them know that you heard about TextExpander from Teaching in Higher Ed. I'm a huge fan. I've been paying for it all these years, even though they have sponsored, and would continue to do so. It's one of the first things that I install on any new device.

I love how easy it is to set things up to continue to grow my knowledge and get curious about other ways to use TextExpander. I love that they have a community of people that will essentially create these little dictionaries or encyclopedias of snippets that I can download and begin to make use of in my own workflows. There are a lot of creative TextExpander users out there. Take a minute and head over to textexpander.com/podcast and see if TextExpander is right for you. Thanks once again, TextExpander, for sponsoring today's episode.

All right, this is the point in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. I have two and then I'm going to pass it over to Kerry for hers. Mine are musical again. It's funny, Kerry, because I spent a couple of years not recommending music and then I've just been doing a lot and keep finding more. These come from my dad again. I shared over email that my dad and I have not really had the same kind of closeness that I may have had from other parents, just randomly speaking here, where we really do connect always because it just goes beyond words is through music.

He likes this artist named Tony DeSer or DeSare. Sorry, Tony, if you're listening, [laughs] because Tony's probably not listening. Tony does a lot of big band, jazz, swing-type music. The one thing I'd like to recommend that my dad shared with me is a Ray Charles Medley that he does that is so phenomenal. He does it with the Terre Haute Symphony. If you do decide to click on the link and watch, I encourage you to take a look at the end and consider what a great example he provides us of engaging an audience.

I am fascinated by people that are musicians, yes, but also are so into sharing that in very compelling ways. He's playing. He has such a childlike character about him as he gets the whole audience to engage. While I do prefer typically not live recordings of most music when they nail it like this, then it's just the best to imagine what it would have been like to be there, but almost to feel like I am there. Because if there's no one else in the room or even if there is, you could still chant back and get to singing with him.

The second song I'd like to recommend, also from Tony, is Just One of Those Things. That's just such a wonderful song. His version of it is delightful. Both of these are the things that you could just really move your body to and try to change your frame for the day. These are my two big recommendations that we listen. Maybe we dance a little and that we sing along with Tony when he invites us to do so, or even when he doesn't. Those are my recommendations. Kerry, I'm going to pass it over to you for yours.

[00:30:50] Kerry: Thanks, Bonni. I have three recommendations. I have a movie, a book, and an app. One thing about me is that I am a chronic recommender of things. To narrow it down to just three was even tough. I love to share things that are bringing me joy. I wanted to recommend a movie for people who want to learn maybe a little bit more about stuttering. The movie is called The Way We Talk.

You can find it at thewaywetalk.org. The film's creator is Michael Turner. Michael Turner lives here in Oregon just a little bit south of Portland. He and his partner, Alyssa, put together The Way We Talk. It is an introspective, thoughtful, quietly beautiful movie about one person's experience and journey with stuttering. I met Michael in 2012 when he came to the stuttering support group, which was in Portland, something that my colleague Glenn Weybright and I restarted with a graduate student.

We brought it back to Portland. He showed up one Wednesday and said his name, introduced himself at the meeting and then didn't talk at all for the rest of the meeting. At the end of the meeting, I invited him to come and speak to my class that I was having that Friday. That's really the time between the stuttering support group and my class that he just decided it was time to make this movie about stuttering.

This movie has fundamentally changed how I teach stuttering. Every year, one of the traditions of my class is that we watch the movie together as a class. Then I, surprise, Zoom in Michael Turner at the end for a Q&A and it's really, really special. He has been such a partner in the work. I love the movie so much. I am a little bit in the background of it. I'm in the background of a few scenes and you can hear my voice in the background.

That's where I really want to be in this movie is completely in the background because it's such an excellent way to learn about stuttering. I think it's a really special, different type of experience. I want to recommend that and you can get it on Amazon Prime or anything like that. If you google it, you can find it. Secondly, John Hendrickson wrote- This is the book. He recently wrote a book. It just came out called Life on Delay. It's about his experience with stuttering over his lifetime.

He is the person that interviewed Joe Biden about stuttering and wrote the article for The Atlantic, which then thrust him into the spotlight talking about stuttering. I think he wasn't excited about it, but he still appeared on TV and spoke. Maybe it was with CNN and was interviewed, but he has written this book. From what I've heard from people who've read it so far or my friends who stutter, it's one of the best representations of the experience of stuttering. That's my second recommendation and I'm really excited to read it.

Finally, I want to recommend the Merlin app. The Merlin app is put out by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. I just want to do a shout-out to those of us with ADHD out there in the world, which, of course, includes me that have the ability to hyper-focus and get very enthusiastic about very specific things. I didn't realize that was a characteristic of ADHD but have learned that since. It explains a lot. A few years ago, I participated in a bird project with my son as part of his kindergarten project or when he was in kindergarten.

I never cared at all about birds. Birds flew in the sky and I was like, "That's nice." Once I understood that you could see a bird, hear its song, identify it, I was just hooked. The Merlin app is just so fun. You can take it outside and birds will do their songs and it will identify the birds for you. You can take a picture and it will identify it for you. It just does the work of identifying birds and it's super fun. Everyone I show this app, they get real excited about it. I had to share it. I'm a novice birder now, Bonni. [chuckles]

[00:34:58] Bonni: I love it. I love all of these things. I'm looking at the clock and I'm thinking, Kerry, I want to know one or two that got left off your list. Because if these three are this good, there's time, Kerry. There's time. Do you have one or two that you're like, "Man, it was right there, but I had to force myself not to do it"?

[00:35:21] Kerry: Oh, wow. Well, which direction do I go in? Do I go in the direction of my favorite floss called Cocofloss. It has coconut oil on the floss and even my dentist loves it. That's something I really love. The other thing is that I have been completely spoiled by waterdrop, which I'll show it to you. It's just little squares that you drop in your water and it flavors it and it has micronutrients in it, which I'm not sure what all of that means, but I just know it makes my water taste so delicious.

I get to drink so much more water during the day because of waterdrop. None of these are paid endorsements by any means. They're just things I really love. For those who are local, I could tell you about my favorite dentist, but I won't do that. These are the things I love to tell people about the stuff that I love. I am an enthusiastic recommender, so I'm always trying to convince people to get different things. That's part of who I am.

[00:36:21] Bonni: We were talking about Robbie and how when you find a teaching friend like that, you need to really hang on to them. When you find a dentist, you can't ever let them go.

[00:36:33] Kerry: I won't.

[00:36:33] Bonni: Ours is so good and he wants to retire. I literally don't know what I will do when he retires. I think Cocofloss might have been showing up for me maybe as an advertisement on Instagram perhaps. Does it also have a different texture than normal floss that it gets better in between your teeth? Is it the same thing I'm thinking of? Because I literally thought about buying it.

[00:36:55] Kerry: Yes, it has a texture and it has coconut oil. It has different flavors. It's really all-around.

[00:37:02] Bonni: If this was an advertisement or sponsorship or multi-level marketing, you might have just gotten yourself a customer. [laughs] Every time, I'm intrigued like, "Oh, yes, that looks like it's really getting in there." [laughs]

[00:37:17] Kerry: It does. It gets in there. [laughs]

[00:37:19] Bonni: It does.

[00:37:20] Kerry: I do love my dentist as well and my hygienist. Whenever they move, they know it's going to be traumatic for me. [chuckles]

[00:37:28] Bonni: We want them to hold on. We've got to all, I don't know, find healthcare providers that are significantly younger than us. They never get to retire. I don't know. I don't know. All right.

[00:37:40] Kerry: Absolutely.

[00:37:41] Bonni: Kerry, I'm so glad that I met you. I'm glad for our emerging friendship and I'm so glad that you came on the show and looking forward to the next time already, but also to our text messages and emails and for recommendations to continue that don't even show up on the show.

[00:37:58] Kerry: Absolutely, Bonni. It's been an honor. I'm so grateful that we got to meet and it was really a highlight of the conference to connect with you. Thank you so much.

[music]

[00:38:08] Bonni: Thanks once again to Kerry Mandulak for coming on today's episode of Teaching in Higher Ed and thanks to each of you for listening. Today's episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever-talented Andrew Kroger. Podcast production support was provided by Sierra Smith. If you've been listening for a while and haven't signed up yet for the weekly update from Teaching in Higher Ed, I'd encourage you to do so.

You'll get lots of links from the most recent episode, the show notes, but also some other recommendations and goodies that don't show up on the regular episode show notes page. Head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. I appreciate you're a part of the Teaching in Higher Ed community and I'll see you next time.

[music]

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.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Metaphor as Conceptual Anchor, with Kerry Mandulak - Teaching in Higher Ed

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kerry Mandulak shares about metaphor as conceptual anchor on episode 457 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Sponsored by Chill Expeditions and Kiddom

Have you heard the whispers about one-pagers in the online teacher hallways? The concept of a one-pager, in which students share their most important takeaways on a single piece of blank paper, has really taken off recently.

The one-pagers I see on Instagram draw me in like a slice of double chocolate mousse cake. The artistry students bring to representing their texts on a single piece of paper, blending images and ideas in creative color, is almost hypnotizing for me. Perhaps you've had the same experience.

But it's the very beauty of the models that get posted that can drive students and teachers away from the one-pager activity. Sure, it's great for super artistic students, we tend to think, but what about everyone else?

Turns out it CAN be great for everyone. As long as you know how to structure it.

What Is a One-Pager?

Let's backtrack a bit and talk more about what a one-pager is. It's pretty simple, really. Students take what they've learned-from a history textbook, a novel, a poem, a podcast, a Ted Talk, a guest speaker, a film-and put the highlights onto a single piece of paper. AVID first developed this strategy, but now it's widely used in and out of AVID classrooms.

But why is this seemingly simple assignment so powerful?

As students create one-pagers, the information they put down becomes more memorable to them as they mix images and information. According to Allan Paivio's dual coding theory, the brain has two ways of processing: the visual and the verbal. The combination of the two leads to the most powerful results. Students will remember more when they've mixed language and imagery.

Plus, one-pagers provide variety, a way for them to share what they've learned that goes beyond the usual written options. Students tend to surprise themselves with what they come up with, and their work makes for powerful displays of learning. Plus, they're fun to make. Let's not pretend that doesn't matter.

So, assuming you're sold on trying this out, you're probably wondering what exactly goes into a one-pager?

Students might include quotations, ideas, images, analysis, key names and dates, and more. They might use their one-pagers to make connections to their own lives, to art or films, to pop culture, to what they're learning in their other classes. They might even do it all. You'd be amazed at how much can fit on a single piece of paper.

Many teachers create lists of what students should put inside their one-pagers. Knowing they need two quotations, several symbolic images, one key theme, etc., helps guide students in their work.

The Art Problem

When creating one-pagers, artistic students tend to feature more sketches, doodles, icons and lettering. Students wary of art tend to feature more text, and can be reluctant to engage with the visual part of the assignment at all.

It was this issue-the issue of the art-haters-that first drew me into one-pagers two years ago. I had seen some stunning one-pagers posted in my Facebook group, Creative High School English. But the comments that followed were always the same. "That's amazing work! But so many of my students don't like art...."

Those comments struck a chord with me. For years I had dealt with comments from some of my own students about their distaste for artistic materials when I would introduce creative projects. No matter how much I explained that it was the intention behind their choices that mattered, I always got some pushback if there were any artistic elements involved in a project.

Was there a way to tweak the one-pager assignment so every student would feel confident in their success?

Another problem was one of overall design: Though they knew they needed to hit all the requirements their teachers listed, students still seemed to be overwhelmed by that huge blank page. What should go where? Did colored pencils really have to be involved?

A Simple Solution: Templates

As I thought about the problem, I wondered if students would feel less overwhelmed if they knew what needed to go where. If the quotations had to be in the middle, the themes in the upper left, the images across the bottom, etc. I began to play around with the shapes tool in PowerPoint, creating different one-pager templates.

Then I began shaping my requirements, correlating each element with a space on the paper. Maybe the border could be the key quotations. The center would feature an important symbol. The themes could go in circles around the center. I developed a bunch of different templates for varied ways to respond to novels. Then I tried podcasts. Films. Poetry.

As I shared these templates with other teachers, I kept getting the same feedback: "It's working!"

That little bit of creative constraint actually frees students to use their imagination to represent what they have learned on the page without fear. They know what they need to put down, and where, but they are also free to expand and add to the template. To choose their own colors. To bring out what is most important to them through their creativity and artistry. And those super artistic students? They can just flip the template over and use the blank page on the back.

Beyond Novels

There are so many ways to integrate this creative strategy into your classroom. While one-pagers lend themselves beautifully to final assessments after reading independent novels, literature circle selections, or whole class novels, that's really just the beginning.

You can use them to get to know students better, as with a name tent or "about me" one-pager at the beginning of the year. One school used templates to have every student create a one-pager about their own lives, collecting them all into hallway displays as part of a project they called "Tell your Story."

You can also use them to help students focus in on the most important information in nonfiction articles and books. One EFL teacher in Croatia used the templates to have students share key takeaways from articles they read about social media. Not only did students have to analyze the text deeply to figure out what was most important, but the dual-coding theory suggests the process of creating the one-pagers will help them remember the information better.

Another great use for one-pagers is to keep students focused while absorbing media. When students are watching a film, listening to a podcast, or even attending an assembly with a guest speaker, they can be creating one-pagers as they listen, a kind of formalized version of sketchnotes.

Simple Steps for One-Pager Success

Whenever you're considering your options for assessment, throw one-pagers into the mix. The steps below should help you in creating an assignment for which every student has a roadmap to success.

1. Choose the elements you want your students to put onto their one-pagers. For example, quotations, key themes, literary elements, discussion of style, important characters or dates, connections to other disciplines, connections to their lives, connections to modern culture.

2. Create a layout using the shapes tool in PowerPoint or something similar (or grab a free set of templates here or here).

3. Connect your instructions to your layout. Make it clear which elements should go in which area of your template.

4. Create a simple rubric with the key categories you want your students to succeed with. With literary one-pagers, I use "Textual Analysis," "Required Elements," and "Thoroughness."

5. As you introduce the assignment, show students some examples of one-pagers to give them a sense for how they might proceed.

6. Give students time to work on their one-pagers in class so they can ask you questions. Consider providing some artistic materials if you can, or inviting students to bring them in. You can always let them complete the work at home if necessary.

7. Do a gallery walk of the one-pagers before you collect them, or have them present to each other in small groups. The students will learn a lot from seeing each other's representations.

8. Create a display after you grade the one-pagers with your rubric.

You can find more of Betsy's great ideas on her website, Spark Creativity.

Come back for more.
Join our mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration that will make your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to our members-only library of free downloads, including 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, the e-booklet that has helped thousands of teachers save time on grading. Over 50,000 teachers have already joined-come on in.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Simple Trick for Success with One-Pagers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
These visual tools allow students to synthesize learning, but some kids don't think they're talented enough to make them. A bit of creative constraint helps.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
HANDOUT : Inclusive Teaching in a Graduate Stuttering Course - ASHA 2023 - Mandulak, Stead, McGill

# data[].attributes.headline
Jesse Stommel on Teaching in Higher Ed : Just released!

# data[].attributes.subject
Jesse Stommel on Teaching in Higher Ed : Just released!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Podcast (tihe_podcast):

Jesse Stommel shares about Undoing the Grade on episode 483 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Quotes from the episode

For us to be talking about something like unlearning or ungrading, there's an irony in that because we are the people who need to do that work the most and the people for whom that work is probably the hardest.
-Jesse Stommel

The only wrong way to do something is to do it unintentionally, to do it in a way that isn't carefully thinking through what we're doing.
-Jesse Stommel

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Undoing the Grade, with Jesse Stommel - Teaching in Higher Ed

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Jesse Stommel shares about Undoing the Grade on episode 483 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Without much critical examination, teachers accept they have to grade, students accept being graded, and none of us spend enough time thinking about the why, when, and whether of grades.

# data[].attributes.headline
David Clark on TIHE : Arbitrary Limits (more about flexibility in the classroom but SO GOOD)

# data[].attributes.subject
David Clark on TIHE : Arbitrary Limits (more about flexibility in the classroom but SO GOOD)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 443 of the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast, arbitrary limits in our classes with David Clark.

[music]

Bonni: 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 am so excited about getting to finally talk to today's guest. I read his blog voraciously, and every time I've hopped on his website, I just devour what I see there. I actually get to talk to David Clark today. David Clark is an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics at Grand Valley State University.

He earned his PhD in 2012 at Michigan Technological University. David is a leading proponent of alternative grading in higher education and spreads the word about progressing assessment by co-organizing the annual online grading conference. His book, Grading for Growth, which is co-authored with Robert Talbert, whose side note has been on Teaching in Higher Ed many times, who wrote the forward for my book, and who I also treasure in terms of all that he gives to higher education. I can't wait for that book to come out. It's not out yet as of this recording. David, who's online with me now as I share these words has already agreed to come back and speak about the book.

I'm so excited about that. We all won't have to wait too much longer as of this recording, it's coming out in early 2023. Beyond assessment, David studies discrete mathematics, especially via undergraduate projects and serves on the senior staff for MathPath, a month-long residential enrichment program for middle school students. He's also an avid backpacker and board gamer. David Clark, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:02:13] David Clark: Thank you. It's great to finally be on here.

[00:02:15] Bonni: I went back to your website, which I have gone to many times before. Every time you have something new to give me, and this time I got fascinated by- I think it's maybe the first thing I see on your about page where it says, "I study combinatorics," and I think I may have said it wrong when we spoke earlier. Do you want to pronounce it for us correctly?

[00:02:35] David: You got it. Yes, you got it. Combinatorics. It's combinations almost.

[00:02:39] Bonni: You have a subtitle here on your about page, "The art and science of counting interesting things." David, the first thing I wanted to ask you is, if I were to go get my PhD in this thing, does it come out of the box this simple, or did you have to do some work as a communicator to make it that simple?

[00:03:00] David: Yes, that's something I've worked on is finding a really short way to describe it. I've leaned into the I count things. People will sometimes look at that and say, "Counting? I can count, right?" "Yes," and then that opens a conversation at least because that's where it begins with counting, and that gets more complex from there.

[00:03:18] Bonni: Yes. What I love about it, though, it's not just counting things, but it's counting interesting things. Then the next thing down on your website are some of the interesting things that you've counted, and you also do that in combination with undergraduate research. Would you talk about some of the interesting things we could learn about what you and students have counted together?

[00:03:38] David: Oh, yes, absolutely. I really do all of my disciplinary research nowadays with students. I'm at an institution that really values that, and I just love working with students and introducing them to that. The main type of things I do, I like to use games. You mentioned I'm a board gamer. I like games, I like studying games. I will study things like guessing games. I'm thinking of a number from one to a million, and you can ask me yes or no questions about it. Can you figure out my number? Then here's the counting part. Can you figure out my number in fewer guesses? What's the smallest number of guesses you need?

What if I'm allowed to lie sometimes? What if I'm thinking of two numbers, and I only tell you how many of mine fit your question? All these variations, they're about counting, they're about how numbers work and how they're arranged, and they're really easy to introduce. I think your readers right now can be imagining questions they would ask me, but we can really dig really quite deep during the course of a summer-long project or something.

[00:04:36] Bonni: One of my favorite classes if I combine my masters and my doctorate was actually a prerequisite, not even in the curriculum for those things. I had to go back and take an undergraduate statistics class, never having taken it way back when I first did that. It literally was the best class, again, if I combine all of that, and it was because he made it interesting. So many times I think we fall in love with our disciplines and then forgot maybe why we fell in love with them in the first place, and then realize that other people might fall in love with disciplines for different reasons and might be curious about different things.

Are you finding that you are able to have them curious from the beginning, or do you have to start with something in common, like games? By the way, this guy, he brought in lots of games when he started teaching probabilities that you might play if you went to gamble, and I don't really play those games. I had to learn how the game worked before I could even start to look at the probability, but he did capture just my curiosity, even though I'm not really terribly interested in gambling. You start with something general before students can get curious about something specific or how does that work?

[00:05:49] David: Yes. I think people naturally engage with games. Yes, I think that a general idea like that, I'm thinking of a number from one to a million game. People can engage with that immediately. We begin with that. Then the variations and digging into the, "Let's look at the math about this." It's almost naturally motivated because people care already like, "Oh, yes, I want to be able to solve this. I want to be able to do this." It's the thing that I think is lucky that combinatorics can be expressed that way, but I think it's something that I really value as being able to engage people quickly with these ideas.

It's fantastic that you had a good experience with the statistics class. Because so often, I say I'm a mathematician and people's first reactions is, "Oh, yes, I hate math." "Oh, man, come on. I bet I can make you be interested in something, but you might not know it's math."

[00:06:42] Bonni: Yes, that's the thing. I don't know much about math, [laughs] but I know a decent amount about technology. It seems similar to when people say, "Oh, I'm just not good at technology," and it's like, "It's such a broad field. You couldn't possibly be bad at all of it." To think of it that way as a binary thing, you either are good at math or are not, that's the danger, right?

[00:07:07] David: Some people almost like define math as the things they think they're not good at, and if they're good at it, that's not math or any technology, too. Oh, I can use this, but that's not what I mean. That's not the technology I'm talking about. I think people having positive experiences with math is a good thing, and we all know some math, it is a thing.

[00:07:28] Bonni: I mentioned as I was reading your bio and started to go off script, as we will, how excited I am about your book coming out, and you've already said that you'll come back and share a lot about alternative grading. Today's conversation is actually a little bit- I don't know, is it a cousin of the topic? It's just a tiny slice where we'll touch on that, but I hope we are going to be getting people really curious about the topics, so they'll be really excited about your book when it does come out and our future conversations. Today, we're going to be looking at something called artificial scarcity. First, what is that, David?

[00:08:06] David: When I'm talking about artificial scarcity, we're looking at something that is limited in some way, and it's an arbitrary limit. When I say arbitrary, I don't mean random. I don't mean capricious. Just it's limited in some way that's not inherent to what it is. A non-example of that would be seats in a classroom. There's a hard limit to the number of students you can have seating in a classroom. That's a hard limit, and it's not arbitrary.

[00:08:33] Bonni: Then what is the danger in artificial scarcity and how might we be more intentional in how we choose to embrace it or avoid it in certain cases and in certain classes?

[00:08:49] David: Yes, I think the danger of artificial scarcity is if something is limited- I think a good example of this is thinking of grades as a limited resource. If you think of

There should only be so many As available in a class, or that the class average needs to be within a certain range. That's an artificial limit. There's artificial scarcity of grades. The danger there is then that by enforcing this artificial limit, you are leaving out people who are doing genuinely good work, or you are cutting out something with this limit that is valuable and is worth knowing or seeing or engaging with. Because we're focusing on complying with a limit, it's out, it's gone.

I think that's a really common thing in higher education, and artificial scarcity often shows up. This is really the point of thinking about it. It shows up in things that we don't even think about in considering because they're just here, or they're in the air as automatic things we do in a class or in our teaching or in our grading or something like that. Leaving people out, they risk not showing us the brilliance of our students when they're showing us what they know because we have limited them in an arbitrary way.

[00:10:05] Bonni: Yes. That so much of what I've gleaned from your writing and your work in this area has to do with that intentionality and asking questions. When I first came into teaching in the context of higher education, I get disappointed in myself sometimes because I don't think I asked a lot of questions. It was, "This is how it works. This is what we do." Some of that in a very intentional way, I think the most, I would call it egregious, way that this shows up is what we call grading on a curve. You just described it, but in case anyone hasn't made that connection, and I didn't necessarily think of it because it was like, "Oh, no we have to fight against,-" Oh my gosh, I'm forgetting the expression.

[00:10:51] David: Against grade inflation.

[00:10:52] Bonni: Yes.

[00:10:53] David: Yes. That's a phrase.

[00:10:55] Bonni: Now, I'm more bold. Where I'll say, "That's not really a thing." I'll try not to sound dripping with sarcasm, but you probably have more practice at this than I do. How do you describe that's not really a thing that we need to be concerned about when you're talking to colleagues and probably do it better than I sometimes do?

[00:11:13] David: Yes. I want to start by saying intentionality is a great word right there, just intentionally think about our practice. Thinking about about grades, grading on a curve and grade inflation is a critical one here. The way that I like to think about grade inflation is if I ask someone to say, "What is grade inflation? What do you mean?" Usually the response is, "It's grades getting higher," or, "My average grade getting higher," or something. That's not wrong, but I would say, "I think I would add something to it." Basically, nobody objects to this, which is it's grades getting higher when they don't represent more learning. Because grades getting higher and more learning, cool. That's what we want grades to represent.

When you put it that way, I think it really undercuts what people are thinking about with grade inflation, which is they're thinking that just grades getting higher is somehow letting kids get away with stuff. It's letting our students get away with things that they shouldn't. One of my core beliefs is that if we're going to have grades, then grades need to represent learning. They should represent what students know. As soon as you start thinking of grades that way, that opens the door to the possibility that maybe all of my students really know and understand this or maybe a lot of them do. If they're going to get a grade for that, it should be a high grade.

That would look like grade inflation. If all you're thinking of is just higher grades. As soon as you say, "It's linked to actual learning," and I can point to the things that they've done to demonstrate that learning, it's not grade inflation. It's just awesome. I've got a bunch of students who really understand this well. I think grade inflation is a topic that is not at the front of my mind because the way that I think about what grades mean, they're inherently linked to learning. Inflation is not the question that matters there.

[00:13:04] Bonni: Something I'm going to be changing about myself moving forward is I'm going to start with that question, what do you mean? That's really helpful. I think sometimes the conversations I've had, they want to be protective of the reputation of the school as it comes to employers or to graduate schools. I attempt to, I'm sure, clumsily break down those arguments. Back to what you talked about, if this represented actual more learning, then we wouldn't really have anything to protect. Because what would be students who would be going into these graduate programs or who would be going to work for these employers would be better equipped with more learning. Then it would never come down to, "My goodness gracious. Do you ever give a lot of A in your classes."

[00:13:53] David: I don't want to pretend that grade inflation isn't a thing. I've interviewed a number of instructors usually from really high powered institutions like Ivy Leagues, who are genuinely afraid of not giving high enough grades to their students. That's like the students come in expecting this. There is such a thing as grade inflation there if the reason they're going higher isn't related to what they actually have learned.

[00:14:19] Bonni: Yes. When I have said it, I don't say it quite that way in the sense of I say of all the problems that we have as an institution, this particular- First of all, we should create a shared definition so that what you mentioned is going to be really helpful for me going forward. Also, if it is a problem in the way that someone might be posing that it's a problem, it's going to be so low on the list as opposed to seeing if grades match learning. I know this is a conversation for the future, if we could put grades way over here and just focus on learning, there we go, then now we're really talking at that point.

I want to actually go back just for a moment because I took us on a path right away of artificial scarcity as a bad thing. You point out to us that it's not always a bad thing. Could you talk a little bit about libraries and how libraries have made use of artificial scarcity?

[00:15:11] David: Yes, absolutely. This is really important. Talking about artificial scarcity, it can sound like I'm saying, "Throw out all the limits. Get rid of all the limits." I think libraries are a useful thing to think about because it's something most of us have experience with. A common experience is a due date for a book, or you have to return the book by a certain date. That's a form of artificial scarcity because it arbitrarily limits your access to a book. I can only keep it for so long. It's not like the book burst into flames if I keep it longer than that. It's not this inherent limit. It's just something we've decided, three weeks or whatever.

There's some questions I like to think about here. It's not just thinking, "This is arbitrarily limited, but why? Why is it arbitrarily limited?" I think there's some really good reasons for that. A library, I'm thinking public libraries, their mission is to have access to this information to all of their patrons, not just to one person. Having a deadline, a return date for a book means that more people have access to it. More people can have access to these things. If the date isn't really, really short, then you'll all have a reasonable chance to read and learn from it. It makes sure that the mission of the library can actually be achieved. This is maybe me, I love my library.

I will go there, and I'll start looking around and, "Oh, I'd like to check this one and this one and this one," and just end up with this huge pile of books that is not reasonable for me to actually all read in the next three weeks. Knowing that there's a due date actually makes me a little more careful with the genuinely scarce resource of the number of books that are in the library and the number that people could check out. I'm a little more intentional about, "This is what I actually want to do and read for the next few weeks." Then when I have them at home, knowing that they're due means I don't tend to keep them just sitting on the floor and ignored.

I'll actually engage with them a little more. Those are all useful things. I also want to point out anyone who's ever checked a book out of a library knows that the deadline for returning that book is not a hard deadline. This is not totally a, "You return it now or else." We can renew books. Most libraries will work with you to get the books back in. They'll send you some emails or give you a call or whatever. Different books might have different amounts of time you can check them out for, like newer books that are more popular. They have a shorter date so that more people can see them. Older ones have a longer date.

Those are all ways you add in flexibility that respect why there's a limit in the first place. Like, "Oh, yes, we want people to be able to read our books, but we also want more people to be able to read our books. Let's be flexible in a way that respects that."

[00:17:47] Bonni: We talked about intentionality, the person who leads our library, we have the course reserves. I suspect that lots of places do this where a professor might put their textbook on reserve in the library if a student is unable to purchase that book, at least they can use it for two hours. Those are arbitrary limits where we really should be asking the questions with intentionality because what if we were to break through that barrier and more classes were using open educational resources so that artificial limit could just be released. Anyone, whether you attend our university or anywhere in the world, are just interested in this topic. We really should be asking those questions.

I know librarians have been for some time now asking questions around the ethics of late fees for books and how that may or may not drive the best outcomes and behaviors or arbitrarily affect in a disproportional way the people who you'd most want to be making use of your library. Then I also think about the studies. I've read about late fees for people who pick up their kids from school or daycare or something like that. How they started where they said there was this social contract that said, "Pick up your kids by 5:00," I'm making this up, of course. Then, "Oh, If you're going to be late, then we're going to need to charge you."

Then it just became a- That makes sense. The dollars that I would pay, and then I could not have to get there. They actually made their problems worse by setting up arbitrary fees. I don't know if this is fitting, is this fitting with arbitrary limits in terms of that?

[00:19:24] David: It is. Yes, sometimes limits have unexpected consequences. Actually, I like your mention of open educational resources because it brings up a few things. One of which is it's not always an easier or immediate thing to change these arbitrary limits. Textbook availability is an arbitrary limit. It's definitely something that prohibits or can stop a lot of students from taking a full part in higher education. It does, "I'm going to go make a free textbook," is not an easy, immediate thing to do. I think that's an excellent way to go, but that's a big job to reduce this artificial scarcity, these limitations.

[00:20:04] Bonni: We've been talking about due dates as it relates to library books. Would you talk about due dates as it relates to assignments?

[00:20:13] David: Yes. This is a place where once I started thinking in the language of artificial scarcity that I really started to see a lot of it in my own practice. Due dates for assignments are a totally standard part of education where you say, "Hand this in by such and such a date." That's artificial scarcity. It's limiting the opportunity for the student to show you what you've learned, especially if that's a hard deadline. I'm not going to accept anything after this deadline. The student can still learn things. Students can still know things. They can still complete the assignment successfully, but I'm not going to look at it, and so they're going to get a zero in my grade book.

That's artificial scarcity. I have always been a sucker for, "Sure I'll extend that deadline, whatever." When I start thinking about the artificial scarcity of deadlines, I realized it's the same as with grades. I care about what students have learned. I really want to see what a student knows rather than focusing and doubling down on compliance and saying, "You got to comply with my deadline or else," because that's not about learning. On the other hand, deadlines are there for a reason. Why is there artificial scarcity? Because I got great stuff sometime, and it's a lot easier if I grade it all at once. I'm not trying to say that's not a real thing.

That's the life of educators, thinking about how to organize our time and make it efficient or just doable. For me, thinking about, "I've got this artificial scarcity, but I also have this need to just be able to manage my own time when it comes to grading." Thinking in these terms, I started to use what I called grace day. I got the name from a colleague. You get a little bit of grace. A grace day is just every student has maybe three of them during the course of a semester. It's just an automatic, no questions asked extension on a deadline. I usually said it would be to the next class day because I have things due on class days, and then they can just hand it in.

The result of that would be I knew some students would always be using a grace day, but I knew that they'd be coming in in a certain amount of time. I could plan my schedule around that. I'll grade a bunch of them this day and a bunch of them one class day later. It adds flexibility, and it shows me what students have learned without just forcing them to comply with my arbitrary deadline. That was a way of ameliorate the artificial scarcity a little bit in a way that students could. They didn't need my permission to do it. They didn't need to worry about complying with my rules. They just could say, "Yes, I need the time, and here it goes."

I've gone further than that recently because as soon as there are rules, there's a game to play, if that makes sense. Then it's almost like you're saying with the fees for picking up your kids too late. It's like, "if I'm limiting the number of grace days, then students start playing around with, 'Am I going to use one now, or am I just going to not going to do this assignment? Do I want to save it for later?'" That kind of thing. I have gone not deadline free. I have deadlines on everything still, but I have gone total flexibility on deadlines. I actually just have a form. I got all of these ideas from other people. Nothing here is original to me. I have a form, a student can fill out this Google form, and it just says, "What do you want the new deadline to be for which assignment?"

Then there's a couple questions about, "Do you need any support or help from me or others." I have really been amazed at what comes out of that, that giving students that responsibility and that freedom to say, "I want to set my own limits. I don't want the artificial scarcity of your hard deadline." They use it really responsibly almost for the most part, put it that way. They suggest shorter deadlines than I would have suggested that I would've given them. I have been really happy with the result of that. I see better work. I get to see what students do. I get to see better work if they have just a family emergency, or they didn't sleep well, or they're feeling sick or whatever.

They make smart choices, and I get to see what they did as a result of it. I have about the same amount of difficulty of cases where students are consistently missing deadlines as I would even if I had the hardest deadlines in the world. It's no worse than it has ever been.

[00:24:30] Bonni: That is such an important point. I think we forget about sometimes. To factor into thinking about how we might want to make these kinds of choices with intentionality. I wanted to share way back when I had Annemarie Perez on the show. Because part of the problem that we haven't discussed yet is when you do have rules, there are going to be some portion of students who don't know that they can ask. Just like you, I used to really have super hard- It's got to be in by that time or it's a go, no go kind of thing. Then, yes, of course, if someone comes to you and explains something that has happened, she had a story, I'm not going to tell it again, just such a heavy story to share.

A student experienced such a tragedy, and she only found out way after the fact what it was and thought, "My gosh, if I had known, of course." Talk about grace, all the grace in the world, and the student just didn't know that it was okay to ask. By making these things more open and transparent, we're minimizing the incentive to be dishonest. We're minimizing the incentive, and you talk about this, too, of just turning in shoddy work. It's not really great work. It's just like, "Just throw it in there, so I can see anything I can get out of this game that this is. Let me see if 5% effort might get me 5% of the points," or something like that.

There's so many positives to it. The second thing I wanted to share is that you didn't say this explicitly, but you implied having no deadlines, not such a good thing. You're not saying just free for all entire flexibility, just get to it when you can. Would you talk a little bit more about the benefits of that structure?

[00:26:21] David: Yes. I'm a big believer in structure with flexibility. Yes, you're absolutely right. I very deliberately have deadlines but flexibility within those deadlines. I think when people hear I am flexible with deadlines, they immediately go to thinking there's just no deadlines. It's just a free for all. Humans work well with structure. That's a fundamental human trait is that it helps if we know what expectations are and what we can do and where we can push and where we can't push. For students in particular, in higher education, a lot of our students are coming in, and they are just learning how to structure their own lives outside of a more controlled family environment.

Having clear deadlines, having a clear structure in organization is really helpful. Just like I was talking about, I don't want to focus on students complying with my rules arbitrary or not. That's also something, structure is great until it becomes rigidity and that there's no flexibility, that it's just about complying with my rules and not about why they're there. If I have clear structure and deadlines, that helps people understand what they need to do to help make their own time, work out the way it should to get it done. Then the flexibility recognizes that we're all humans, and just like you were saying about that story, things happen to humans, big and small, and we need to have a little bit of grace to just allow that to work.

Yes, have deadlines. I know people who go totally deadline free, but I think it's more useful to have that structure and have the flexibility around it. Actually, I want to say one more thing, too. You began mentioning making expectations clear but also making the hidden curriculum clear. Knowing what you can ask for and what you can't, that's a huge thing. If a student knows they can ask me for free to extend a deadline, then they're more likely to use that than if I don't say anything. Only the students who have the background or the experience, they're like, "Oh, Yes, I can ask for this. I can request it."

Then the only people who I'm allowing to show me what they've learned beyond the deadline are the ones who already have some advantage and know that they can do that. Making it really clear and explicit, this is my policy, and this is how it's flexible. That's incredibly valuable. If they ask, I'll let them extend however much they want. It's asking for only certain students to benefit from it.

[00:28:52] Bonni: One of the ways that people such as yourself, and I know you give credit where you've learned so much of this from other individuals, whether it is a grace day or some type of a token for resubmitting assignments to get feedback and do those again, you talked about having students fill out some kind of online form. I'm curious then, what does that logistically look like when it comes to the learning management system? Because every recommendation I've ever seen, these forms are filled out, whether it's Microsoft forms or Google forms, it's not something inside of a learning management system. What's the system then to track what that looks like inside of a learning management system?

[00:29:33] David: That's a good question. I am not a huge fan of a lot of learning management systems. We have one that we use. The form I'm talking about, everything I've ever used has been separate from a learning management system, like you say. I set it up, so whenever a student fills it out, it comes to me in an email. Then the way that I track this, I'm recording things in a spreadsheet, so I'm not recording them directly in an LMS. That spreadsheet, wherever the assignment's recorded, I just type a note, "Okay by Thursday night," or whatever. That's recorded for me, and students get a receipt from the form that reminds them that they filled it out and when they said it was going to happen.

In terms of recording it on an LMS, this is an internal problem for how do you do anything that isn't just enter a number in an LMS. I don't think I have a good answer to that, unfortunately. For myself, recording it in my own spreadsheet works pretty well.

[00:30:25] Bonni: Do you keep track of, in that spreadsheet, that they've only used there however many you're allowing at this point? Do you just figure that it's not worth tracking or checking?

[00:30:37] David: Yes. If I have a limited number of, say, grace days, so there's artificial scarcity again, I've artificially limited the number of times that a student can do this. I usually track it. I highlight perhaps with a special color or something. Again, instead of holding them to a hard limit, if a student uses up their grace days really quickly right off the bat, then that's a conversation, "Let's talk about this." This is even true with the unlimited flexibility where I don't limit students to how many times they can request an extension. If I see that they're using it all the time, that's a conversation, too, and interesting stuff comes out of it.

I have a number of students this semester where they're like, "Oh, yes, I work until midnight, and these deadlines are midnight, can I just always hand them in the next morning?"

"Oh yes, totally." You don't need to use this limited resource for something that's a systemic issue. You always are going to have this happen. That's how that conversation often goes. Sometimes it's just, "Oh no, I'm really terrible at managing my time. Even when I know the deadline, I just keep missing this." That's a different conversation. I think the important thing to think about there is that when a student is butting up against these limits, it's important to talk about why. To ask why.

I'm in the job of helping students figure out how to learn things and how to make their own life work the way they want to and figuring out how to organize your time and ask for what you need as part of that.

[00:32:03] Bonni: Something else that comes to mind as you're talking about this, whether it's with deadlines or things like people showing up on time. I used to be pretty punitive about people showing up on time to things. Speaking of those conversations, it was out of that in a conversation with a student many years ago that I recognized my own cultural incompetence at the time of not really fully recognizing, or I certainly knew, but I didn't necessarily have it showing up in this context about the different ways that different cultures look at time. It was a great conversation because she could hold me to count from the family that she is from, from the culture she is from.

This is just not part of that culture. Yet I could say quite candidly and truthfully that in a business context, which is the discipline that I teach in, yes, there are differences in different parts of the world, but, yes, you are going to need to shape yourself a little bit more if you're planning on working here, at least in the United States and the region in which we work, to be able to be more disciplined about showing up on time and fulfilling those commitments. It was fun, though, in the sense that she's educating me and pushing back, I think, in a very healthy way. I'm also educating her, pushing back in a healthy way.

It opens up the opportunity for both parties to learn more about one another and meet in a different place than if you just had this hard cold deadline or rule or that kind of thing, a limit. Then you're not ever able to be able to learn in that two-way, both about what the individual might be experiencing, let alone just the kinds of skills, habits, character that you're trying to build up over time that doesn't happen from a pass or fail experience.

[00:33:48] David: Yes to all of that. I think that having those conversations and actually just listening to what a student tells you is such a valuable thing. I do think often, especially when it comes to due dates and getting in homework, for example, it's just really easy or at least it's easy for me to ascribe to a student what I think is going on. I think they're being lazy about this. I think they should just try harder and start earlier. When you talk with a student, and you believe them, you learn a lot. It's basically never what I think. I've learned that lesson over and over, and it's a thing that I keep learning over and over.

Also related to that is examining I have all of these artificial limits, due dates. Thinking about attendance coming to class. There's all these things that are built into higher education. The thinking about which of them are based on something that matters, it's just always been that way. I'm just doing it the way it's always been. Which of those do I actually want to keep and which ones am I willing to get rid of out of my own practice?

[00:34:54] Bonni: I could keep talking to you for hours and just be getting started. Thank you once again for already agreeing to come back on the podcast. [laughs] I didn't mention this in the beginning, but I invited you to come specifically for an article that you posted on your Grading for Growth blog that you co-author with Robert Talbert, and the title, it'll be in the show notes, Artificial Scarcity. We really only touched on just a few components. It's a very brilliant piece. My first recommendation to people who are listening today is to go read that piece, and sit down and talk about it with colleagues, and start asking questions and wrestling, and really hone in on that intentionality.

Are your intentions showing up in healthy ways for how you have structured things? In what way might you benefit by asking more critical questions of yourself and of other colleagues for how you might be able to facilitate learning and growth over time? The second recommendation I have is that back on Episode 399, that was an episode where I read a piece of satire from McSweeney's. In the recommendations segment, I talked about my nephew, who, at the time, was pursuing a PhD in chemistry. He had given me permission to take a co-authored journal article that he had written and put it into this website that at the time was called Too Long, Didn't Read, as in TLDR. Then I was able to ask him because I, of course, could not understand [laughs] the journal article. The abstract I could, but it was pretty heady for me.

I was, "Is this actually what your journal article was about?" He definitely said, "Yes, that really makes sense." This idea of simplifying our research into easy-to-digest information is one of the reasons David I mentioned early in our conversation today just how much I love your website and how you've made your work of counting interesting things. That's just instantly something that captures my imagination. I was very fascinated by this website, and as I was looking at your website, I was trying to think, "Now what was the name of that website?" It's funny how our brains were because I tried to find it, I couldn't do it.

Then I thought, "You talked about it with Nick and his research, so just go look for his name on your own website because it's got to be linked in there." Sure enough. The name of it has changed. It is no longer called TLDR, it's now called Elicit as an E-L-I-C-I-T. I'll put a link to this in the recommendations elicit.org. It also seems to have evolved, and I didn't have time before David and I started talking today to go and see what happened because I was able to earlier just paste in all of Nick's journal article verbiage, and then get this plain text, plain spoken type of explanation. Then now, it seems it's gone in a different direction, and now I'm just that much more fascinated.

The other day we had been having some conversations as colleagues as to the many reasons that go into why women tend to be paid less than men with the same experience, et cetera. You can go into this website now and just type that, "Why do women make less than men?" You're basically getting, using natural language, a pretty fascinating literature review. I did see in there that of course there's going to be limitations to using artificial intelligence in this way, but rather than just never using artificial intelligence because there might be limitations or by the way, thinking our students won't use artificial intelligence for things like this and writing to go explore more.

I have so much more that I need to get into here. I'm so excited to have something. I am so curious now. I want to learn more about this website and that kind of thing. I'd encourage anybody else who's curious about this to head on over to elicit.org and just see what happens maybe in your field or a field you're curious about, a discipline you're curious about and start to see what happens when you start to type into it. I'm curious about that and recommend that people go check it out.

[00:39:03] David: I need to go check that out myself. I had never heard of that before.

[00:39:07] Bonni: So funny. I was so glad I was able to just pick apart where on earth I had heard about that and find it again, only to see it's really entirely been redesigned. I'm curious about that now. I know you have some things to recommend for us as well, David.

[00:39:23] David: I do. I'm going to do these in decreasing order of relevance to the topic of this episode. Most directly, anybody who heard us talking about grading on a curve, and they wanted to know more, or they're very skeptical, there is a very recent article in the Journal of Chemistry Education by Bowen and Cooper. It's called Grading on a Curve as a Systemic Issue of Equity in Chemistry Education. Almost nothing they say is specific to chemistry, though. They do this fantastic job of looking through the history of grades and where did grading on a curve come from. They list 12 different issues that are all really important that have to do with grading on a curve. Check that out if you possibly can.

It's good, and it also provides good arguments against grading on a curve that you could use with people. That's number one, is this article about grading on a curve. Slightly farther out, I'm going to recommend a book. The book is Grading for Equity. It's by Joe Feldman. It is a book that has really influenced my thinking and has gotten me considering, like, "What is it I do in my own practice?" Especially grading, but in terms of thinking about compliance and enforcing compliance versus flexibility, or focusing on learning versus compliance. Grading for Equity is a book. It's focused on K12, but the lessons from it directly apply to higher education. It has wonderful case studies.

It is very clear and illustrates well the issues with so many types of policies that we have. It gives really good concrete ways to fix them up and to change them in ways that are more equitable. Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman is a book that has influenced me a lot. Then furthest the field, I know that you have had a lot of guests who have recommended board games, and I said I was a board gamer, so I'm going to recommend a board game. One that I just played for the first time recently, and that is called Calico, a board game. Actually, I should have checked out the publisher. Calico, it's this very cute little game. The idea is you're building a quilt. There's little tiles that make a quilt.

They're very colorful. They have lots of patterns, and you have goals about the shapes or the arrangement of patterns or the arrangements of colors or things that you're trying to do, and that's how you score points. Visually, t's just really beautiful. You're making a beautiful pattern on your board. The part that I think is best is that the way you score points in this game or the way you record points, once you've put together one of these shapes or arrangements that fits the goal, a cat shows up and sits on that part of the board. There's a little cat token, and they're all worth different numbers of points, and they all have names, and they're all really cute.

It's exactly what cats do. If you love cats, or if you love quilts, or if you love board games, it's also a game that is, it can be as think-y or as casual as you want it to be. It can be as competitive or as everyone's on their own as you'd like it to be. I really enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun. It has cats, the points.

[00:42:18] Bonni: You are blowing my mind right now. You probably know Derek Bruff.

[00:42:23] David: Yes, absolutely.

[00:42:24] Bonni: Derek Bruff, when he was on most recently, recommended the board game Wingspan. My parents don't listen to this show, so I can tell you. You and I are having a conversation in the middle of November, and they're getting it for Christmas. Don't tell them, David. I'm always looking for ideas for them. My mom has been a quilter for as long as long as I've known that my mom was a quilter. It's just like that's been her life. It sounds amazing for her, but it's fun to sometimes have things be intergenerational. Our daughter loves cats, just loves cats. I'm picturing, would this be the game that someone would be able to play who was 8 and someone who's in their 70s?

[00:43:10] David: Absolutely. It is very quick to learn the rules. The rules are pretty intuitive. You put a piece on the board, and you're looking for those pictures of the shapes you're trying to make. Like I said, as casual or as hardcore as you want to be with strategy. If you just want to sit and make a board that looks really nice and see how many points it's worth, then you can do that.

[00:43:30] Bonni: Oh, it sounds perfect. It sounds amazing. You've just made my holiday. Is there anything else you want to recommend that will fit perfectly with my family?

[laughter]

[00:43:37] David: Let me, let me re-up Derek's recommendation of Wingspan. That is another favorite, and it's another one that's just visually beautiful, but it's also really fun, and again, as serious or as casual as you want it to be. The problem with recommending board games is there's no end to doing it.

[00:43:55] Bonni: Oh, it looks amazing. As we close down our time together, I'm realizing that I did have another recommendation. I implied it earlier, but I wanted to be explicit. Go look at David Clark's website. Go look at his website and just think about for yourself, how might you make what it is that you explore in your discipline a little bit more able to peak people's curiosity. There's so much there. You have an entire thing where, speaking of grading resources where you can go entire Google Drive folders full of resource, you got to have some time on your hands to do it.

Because you're going to be so curious about wanting to go- I feel like I'm still not done, David. I haven't gone through everything that's there. There's so much there. That's a recommendation I neglected to say explicitly, but I'll be including in my list as well.

[00:44:43] David: I think it's important to say this relates to my website but also a lot of the things I've talked about today, flexible due date policies, so many of these are taken from other people with their permission, of course. I don't know that I've had a truly original thought here at all. A repository of sample materials is managed by somebody else. My grading ideas are coming from other people, and there's a really friendly community of people out there who think about higher education and especially about assessments and want to help each other improve. I'm honored to be a part of that. I'm just one piece of it.

[00:45:20] Bonni: I appreciate you saying that there was a lot of, let's say, heated debate or a flurry of things on social media, specifically Twitter in recent weeks over someone who wrote a piece that was implying- maybe not implying, maybe I'm being too soft here, had explicitly said there's one way to do this alternative grading thing. A lot of people, "No, there's not one way to do this.: There's this danger to thinking that it's my way, and it's the right way. I appreciate your generosity with saying these are threads. I appreciate today's conversation, David.

These are threads that we're able to engage with each other and, yes, define some terms but to the extent that it's helpful then to build our practice, but not to the extent that it's helpful to build legalism into what we do. Because there's so much that context matters in this, people's own strengths and that matter and the course that you're teaching and how important is scaffolding for whatever it is you're trying to prepare. I appreciate the way that you come with your research and your communication that is so credible while also leaving room for diversity of thought and practice. Thank you for that

[00:46:38] David: Absolutely. I'm glad you brought up that particular tizzy on Twitter because, yes, it's true. Any of these things we talk about, if someone looks at them and says, "Actually, that will not work for me in my situation because of this thing." Perfect. What matters is you're thinking about it. You're thinking carefully and thinking about where those limits are, or why you're doing things the way you are and not just letting them go on uninspected.

[00:47:02] Bonni: I think some of the dangers, too, of conversations like the one we're having today or your book when it comes out, is thinking then that that means your thinking or my thinking has then ended on the topic. I don't know about you, but I never want to stop changing my mind about things. Because I want to keep learning and growing, and students are going to change, and our contexts are going to change. It's really important.

[00:47:23] David: Absolutely, yes. Teaching is not a static thing at all.

[00:47:28] Bonni: Yes. David Clark, thank you so much for coming on Teaching in Higher Ed today. Thank you for coming on it next year. Thank you. [laughs] I'm so grateful for just getting to have a two-way conversation with you today and look forward to those future conversations as well.

[00:47:42] David: It has been great talking with you as well. Thanks for having me on here.

[00:47:45] Bonni: Absolutely.

[music]

Bonni: David Clark, thank you once again for being a guest on today's Teaching in Higher Ed episode. Today's episode was produced by me, Bonnie Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever-talented Andrew Kroger podcast. Production support was provided by the amazing Sierra Smith. Thanks to each one of you for listening. If you have yet to subscribe to my weekly Teaching in Higher Ed update, head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. You'll get the show notes from the most recent episode. You'll also receive some other nuggets that do not show up in the regular podcast. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you next time on teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:48:48] [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.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Arbitrary limits in our classes, with David Clark - Teaching in Higher Ed

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
David Clark discusses arbitrary limits in our classes on episode 443 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
CSD 506 : Stuttering (Pacific University SLP Master's Program)

# data[].attributes.headline
Robert Talbert (author of GRADING FOR GROWTH) : Substack

# data[].attributes.subject
Robert Talbert (author of GRADING FOR GROWTH) : Substack

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Grading for Growth | Robert Talbert | Substack

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Research and ideas about reforming grading practices in higher education and beyond. Click to read Grading for Growth, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Grading for Growth: A Guide to Alternative Grading Practices that Promote Authentic Learning and Student Engagement in Higher Education

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Are you satisfied with your current and traditional grading system? Does it accurately reflect your students’ learning and progress? Can it be gamed? Does it lead to grade-grubbing and friction with your students?The authors of this book – two professors of mathematics with input from colleagues acr…

# data[].attributes.headline
CSD 506 syllabus : Language about alternative grading

# data[].attributes.subject
CSD 506 syllabus : Language about alternative grading

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A freshly updated edition featuring research-based teaching techniques that faculty in any discipline can easily implement

Research into how we learn can help facilitate better student learning-if we know how to apply it. Small Teaching fills the gap in higher education literature between the primary research in cognitive theory and the classroom environment. In this book, James Lang presents a strategy for improving student learning with a series of small but powerful changes that make a big difference―many of which can be put into practice in a single class period. These are simple interventions that can be integrated into pre-existing techniques, along with clear descriptions of how to do so. Inside, you'll find brief classroom or online learning activities, one-time interventions, and small modifications in course design or student communication. These small tweaks will bring your classroom into alignment with the latest evidence in cognitive research.

Each chapter introduces a basic concept in cognitive research that has implications for classroom teaching, explains the rationale for offering it within a specific time period in a typical class, and then provides concrete examples of how this intervention has been used or could be used by faculty in a variety of disciplines. The second edition features revised and updated content including a newly authored preface, new examples and techniques, updated research, and updated resources.

How can you make small tweaks to your teaching to bring the latest cognitive science into the classroom?

How can you help students become good at retrieving knowledge from memory?

How does making predictions now help us learn in the future?

How can you build community in the classroom?

Higher education faculty and administrators, as well as K-12 teachers and teacher trainers, will love the easy-to-implement, evidence-based techniques in Small Teaching.

Product Details

ISBN-13:

9781119755548

Publisher:

Wiley

Publication date:

08/24/2021

Edition description:

2nd ed.

Pages:

288

Sales rank:

141,409

Product dimensions:

6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

JAMES M. LANG is Professor of English and Director of the D'Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College. He is the author of five books.He is a sought-after speaker and workshop leader on teaching and learning in higher education. He writes a monthly column on teaching for The Chronicle of Higher Education, and is a Senior Academic Consultant for OneHE.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Preface to the Second Edition

Introduction: Small Teaching
Part One: Knowledge
Chapter One: Predicting

Chapter Two: Retrieving

Chapter Three: Interleaving
Part Two: Understanding
Chapter Four: Connecting

Chapter Five: Practicing

Chapter Six: Explaining
Part Three: Inspiration
Chapter Seven: Belonging

Chapter Eight: Motivating

Chapter Nine: Learning

Conclusion: Beginning

Bibliography

Index

Customer Reviews

Open the pockets of this Halloween countdown calendar to reveal magical Dark Arts surprises inspired by the Harry Potter films!
With over a dozen exclusive Harry Potter collectibles inspired by the

A unique and beautiful gift book celebrating the art of Jim Kay — 366 magical moments from J.K Rowling's Harry Potter novels, evoked in spellbinding brushstrokes, characterful ink work,

Celebrate your love of the Harry Potter films for an entire year.
This 12-month undated planner features iconic imagery and beloved quotes from the Harry PotterTM films and is a perfect gift for Harry

Celebrate the magic of the HARRY POTTER™ films with this lock and key diary.

Featuring the Marauder's Map and a magic-reveal pen to help you find invisible ink surprises concealed

International phenomenon Angie Thomas revisits Garden Heights seventeen years before the events of The Hate U Give in this searing and poignant exploration of Black boyhood and manhood. A Printz

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * NAMED ONE OF TIME'S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE * PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST *

Lois Lowry once again creates a mysterious but plausible future world. It is a society ruled by savagery and deceit that shuns and discards the weak. Left orphaned and physically flawed, young Kira

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning|Hardcover

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A freshly updated edition featuring research-based teaching techniques that faculty in any discipline can easily implement Research into how we learn can help facilitate better student learning-if we know how to apply it. Small Teaching fills the gap in higher...

# data[].attributes.headline
Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT-HigherEd)

# data[].attributes.subject
Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT-HigherEd)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The following resources from the Transparency in Learning and Teaching project (TILT Higher Ed) can help faculty, educational developers and administrators to apply the Transparency Framework (of purpose/task/criteria) in contexts including assignments, curricula, assessment and strategic initiatives, all toward the goal of enhancing student success equitably.

# data[].attributes.body
https://coi.athabascau.ca/coi-model/#:~:text=An%20educational%20community%20of%20inquiry,meaning%20and%20confirm%20mutual%20understanding.

# data[].attributes.body
https://operations.du.edu/inclusive-teaching/community-inquiry-model

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This chapter discusses constructivist learning theory. Constructivism is a learning theory that posits that learners actively construct knowledge and make meaning, based on their experiences, individually or socially. Confrey describes constructivism as a belief that all knowledge is necessarily a p…

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This piece was revised and expanded for a book from Hybrid Pedagogy, Critical Digital Pedagogy: A Collection, available now in paperback and Kindle editions.

In the past two years, when I've been asked to sum up my approach to pedagogy, I've said "kindness."

I didn't always think this way. My graduate education encouraged me to think of students as antagonists, always trying to get one over on their instructors. I was urged to be on the lookout for plagiarism, to be vigilant for cheaters, to assume that the students wouldn't do the reading, and to expect to be treated as a cog in a consumerist machine by students who would challenge their grades on a whim. I was once advised by a senior graduate student to "be a bitch" on the first day of class so that my students never wanted that version of myself to show up again, advice that I dutifully repeated to several of the graduate students who came after me. I was a stickler for deadlines, and memorably once refused to excuse the absence of a student who was battling a burst pipe in his house when class was in session. I look back on that now and wince.

I gradually learned, through a great deal of trial and error, that this combative way of approaching teaching was counterproductive at best, destructive at worst. Students didn't communicate with me easily, since many of them didn't see the point. They knew (I realize now) that I approached them with suspicion, and so returned that sentiment in kind. It quickly became clear to me that I needed to build relationships, not defensively prevent them from forming, and that trust was a vital part of creating the circumstances under which learning could happen. There was no space for trust to grow in the learning spaces I'd been trying to create, and so I learned to ease up, to let go of rigid control I'd tried to impose upon the classroom, and to make room for the unpredictable and unexpected. I thought, twenty-three years into my teaching career, that I was doing a pretty good job. And then I went to the Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute at the University of Mary Washington in the summer of 2017.

The entire Institute was predicated upon the concept of kindness. From the pronoun buttons available at the registration desk, to the probing questions of the session leaders, to the time people took, one-on-one, to talk about syllabi and assignments, there was an ethos of care running through the whole four days of my residency. I had signed up for the Intro track, and had expected to spend my time evaluating digital tools to bring into my classroom. I did do that, but first I was asked to think about why I needed those tools at all, whom they would serve, and how I would build in accommodations for students with disabilities. My fellow attendees and I were constantly asked to consider why we were doing things the way we were, and what subtextual messages we were sending to our students about who they were. I took a good long look at my syllabus, and realized I had communicated everything in it from a position of absolute authority. The language I used to describe the college's Honor Code, for example, expressed the suspicion that everyone was going to commit some awful academic offense at some point, and my attendance policy made no room for the idea that my students were adults with complicated lives who would need to miss a class now and again.

Why? Why did I posit my students as passive novices who couldn't contribute to their own learning? Why did I require students to jump through hoops to prove that they deserved an extension on a paper? Why did I dock points if my students missed three classes in a term? No one had ever asked me to defend my pedagogical choices before, and once they did, I found much of my pedagogy indefensible. I felt regret and no small amount of embarrassment. My teaching was undone by the presence of a question that was never articulated quite this directly but was everywhere around me:

Why not be kind?

And so I chose kindness as my pedagogical practice. Telling people this has often elicited a baffled response. Kindness is something most of us aspire toward as people, but not something we necessarily think of as central to teaching. In part this is an effect of the pressures that are brought to bear on our classrooms from outside them, symptomatic of a nationwide clamoring (in some circles, at least) for standardization, testing, and rote assessment. Instead of kindness, we're more likely to hear about standards and rigor. (The national professional organization to which I belong says that " good teaching entails accuracy and rigor," but never mentions compassion, for example.) And when we are urged to be kind within an educational setting, it's too often to make up for a lack of institutional support for students and faculty in need, asking a particular service of women and non-binary individuals of all races, and men of color. Kindness can be a band aid we're urged to plaster over deep fissures in our institutions, wielded as a weapon instead of as a balm. And too often people confuse kindness with simply "being nice."

But, to me, kindness as pedagogical practice is not about sacrificing myself, or about taking on more emotional labor. It has simplified my teaching, not complicated it, and it's not about niceness. Direct, honest conversations, for instance, are often tough, not nice. But the kindness offered by honesty challenges both myself and my students to grow. As bell hooks memorably wrote in Teaching to Transgress, "there can be, and usually is, some degree of pain involved in giving up old ways of thinking and knowing and learning new approaches."

Yet in practice, I've found that kindness as pedagogical practice distills down to two simple things: believing people, and believing in people.

When a student comes to me to say that their grandparent died, I believe them. When they email me to say they have the flu, I believe them. When they tell me they didn't have time to read, I believe them. When they tell me their printer failed, I believe them.

There's an obvious chance that I could be taken advantage of in this scenario, that someone could straight-up lie and get away with it. But I've learned that I would rather take that risk than make life more difficult for my students struggling with grief and illness, or even an over-packed schedule or faulty electronics. It costs me nothing to be kind. My students have not, en masse, started refusing to meet deadlines, but the students who are struggling have had time to finish their work. My students have not, en masse, started skipping class, but they're not required to undergo the invasive act of telling me personal details about their lives when they can't show up. My students have not, en masse, started doubting my abilities or my expertise, but they have stepped forward to direct their own education in meaningful and exciting ways that I could not have thought of.

That's believing students. But what about believing in students?

Believing in students means seeing them as collaborators - believing they have valuable contributions to make to the way in which syllabi, assignments, and assessments are designed, and life experiences that should be respected in the classroom.

In Fall 2017, I asked both classes to give me questions about the topics we'd be covering - American Indian history in one class, and the history of gender and sexuality in the U.S. in the other. I was then able to craft a syllabus for each class that wove together my own sense of important historical context together with answers to the questions they had posed. The students were offered a sense of ownership in the course, and I was alerted to things I might not otherwise have considered - basic terminology around which there was confusion, for example, or, say, a strong interest in understanding changing concepts of masculinity over time.

I drew on the wisdom of teachers who had gone into this 'kind space' before me, and made significant changes to the way in which I graded work in those classes. Rather than distributing a finished list of grade requirements, I shared some suggestions, and refined those with my students' input until we'd reached a consensus about meaningful assessment. When my students turned in a paper, they also filled out a self-evaluation of their work that asked them what they'd do differently next time, how pleased they were with what they produced, and what they learned about themselves. These adjustments are possible in any class, be it one like mine, with twenty-five students, or a much larger lecture course at a different kind of institution. Both approaches give students greater ownership over their grade and the way that it's awarded; grading becomes, to whatever degree possible, a collaborative venture. In smaller classes it's possible to go further; my students and I sat together and talked over the answers on their self-evaluation, and I asked my students to give themselves a grade. Together, we entered into a conversation about why that grade felt right to them, and why it did or didn't feel right to me, before reaching a consensus on what grade they'd earned.

I've also begun to think of my classes in terms of universal design. For many years I taught with the idea that there was a well-established, academic norm that was fair and impartial, and my job was to make accommodations available for those students who had particular disabilities, or faced particular challenges in meeting that norm. I no longer believe in such a practice. My job, as I see it now, is to make my classroom accessible to everyone. I've begun the long work of redesigning my lessons and assignments so that everyone is a full participant, and no one needs ask for extra time or a note-taker, because those needs have already been addressed. Because I don't believe students with disabilities should have to out themselves, I no longer ban laptops in my classroom, or have quizzes that some students have to take across the hall to get their necessary time-and-a-half. Instead I've experimented with take-home quizzes, options for students to record videos as well as write papers, and final project guidelines that allow students to create anything that will demonstrate to me what they've learned over the term. This, too, is about belief in my students, and believing that by designing my class to accommodate all types of learning I'm demonstrating something important about the ways in which we should be creating a more just world.

I feel more comfortable as a teacher now than I ever have. The subconscious sense that students were antagonists lingered inside me for a long time - long enough that it has been a marvel to teach these past two academic years and experience a teacher-student relationship without that default expectation. I was less stressed; I didn't have reservations about walking into the classroom. My students rose up to meet every new challenge I presented to them, and vocally affirmed that they appreciated the new approach to grading. Crucially, they articulated that when I looked them in the eye and told them what they had done well in a paper, they believed me, whereas when the same info was written at the end of a paper, they didn't. They saw it as pablum - something that I had to write before I delivered the bad news of what they could still work at (which they interpreted as "what I did wrong.") I see that shift, from their exasperation and disappointment to them becoming partners in the assessment of their work, was emblematic of the fruits of a pedagogy of kindness. It was, and is, transformational for all involved.

A pedagogy of kindness asks us to apply compassion in every situation we can, and not to default to suspicion or anger. When suspicion or anger is our first response, a pedagogy of kindness asks us to step back and do the reflective work of asking why we're reacting in that manner and what other instances of disappointment or mistrust are coming to bear on a particular moment in a particular student-teacher interaction. This can transform the student-teacher relationship - but it's not only on an individual-to-individual level that it can alter our working world. To extend kindness means recognizing that our students possess innate humanity, which directly undermines the transactional educational model to which too many of our institutions lean, if not cleave. Transactional models of education identify students as consumers and teachers as retail workers who must please their customers (an inhumane model for retail sales as well as the world of learning). Administrators become managers in this model, looking for cents they can save rather than people they can support. This drains the entire system of its humanity, and leads to decisions at every level where the personhood of a student, teacher, or administrator is diminished.

To value and practice kindness is to resist such models. Even where institutions are leaning away from investment in personhood in favor of hedge funds, we as teachers have the ability to insist that individuals matter. We have the means to hold a line, to see the student without shelter - or food, or safety, or a laptop, or an internet connection, or health, or confidence, or a support network - as someone who matters exactly as they are and even because of the challenges they face. We can refuse to dehumanize our students and presume an adversarial stance. We can prioritize kindness.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kindness is something most of us aspire toward as people, but not something we necessarily think of as central to teaching.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: On today's episode of Teaching in Higher Ed Number 467, A Pedagogy of Kindness with Cate Denial.

[music]

Bonni: Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I'm Bonnie 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 am thrilled to be welcoming today's guest, Cate Denial to Teaching in Higher Ed. She's the bright, distinguished professor of American history, chair of the History Department and director of the Bright Institute at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, a distinguished lecturer for the organization of American Historians.

Cate is the winner of the American Historical Association's 2018 Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award and a former member of the Digital Public Library of America's Educational Advisory Board. Cate currently sits on the board of Commonplace: a Journal of Early American Life. Her historical research has examined the early 19th century experience of pregnancy, childbirth, and child rearing in upper Midwestern Ojibwe and missionary cultures, research that drew from Cate's previous book, Making Marriage: Husbands, Wives, and the American State in Dakota and Ojibwe Country.

Cate is the principal investigator on a $150,000 Mellon-funded project called Pedagogies, Communities, and Practices of Care in the Academy After COVID-19, which brings together 38 faculty and staff from different institutional types to think about and take action on care work in Higher Ed. Cate will soon be publishing her new book, A Pedagogy of Kindness, with West Virginia University Press. I do also want to mention that today's episode has a brief mention of PTSD, the common symptoms, and sometimes the diagnosis of PTSD being related to sexual assault. No depictions of that type of assault are discussed, however. Cate Denial, it is absolutely a joy to welcome you to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:02:58] Cate Denial: Hi. It's great to be here.

[00:03:00] Bonni: I feel like we've been having conversations even though they're just in my imagination. Thank you for this wonderful book. Thank you for all the other work that you do. You have been such a generous contributor to the community of people that care deeply about teaching.

[00:03:15] Cate: That is very sweet, and I think of you as someone who's central to that community, too.

[00:03:21] Bonni: It's fun to be in conversation even if they're in my dreams. [laughter] We're going to start out maybe not on the happiest of notes, but perhaps some joy in it for what it's done for you. Would you tell us about an experience that you've had where kindness was not a part of a person's pedagogy?

[00:03:42] Cate: The things that come to mind most often are my experiences as an undergraduate student. I was an undergraduate student at the University of Nottingham in England where I grew up. My professors were really interested in a life of the mind that left no room for the body or the spirit or anything else, certainly not for feelings. I can think of a couple of really good examples. One was that I was meant to take an end-of-year exam. These are very important in UK higher ed, the cumulative exams that you take right at the very end of the year. I was sick. I had an upset stomach.

I told my professor who sent me to student health. Student health then gave me Kaopectate and a little bit of morphine and told me to sit the exam anyway. I honestly think that's probably the best I was ever going to do on that exam, regardless that they probably gave me a little leeway and the way that they marked it. I just am struck looking back on the fact that there was no compassion there. There was no sense of, "Wow, you're ill. We should take care of you." There was just, "How can we prop up your body for two hours so that you can write this exam on schedule?"

Another of my professors, and this is a great story, I took a course on the African American civil rights, movement. We had as our book, a textbook, The Eyes on the Prize primary source reader, which is a big, thick book. We were looking at a document about young Black single men in Chicago in 1967. I leaned across to my friend and said, "What about young, Black, single women in Chicago in 1967?" She and I then got the giggles because it was clearly not a moment where we should have been expressing these thoughts to one another. Then the professor asked if we had something we wanted to share with the class. I said "Yes. What was going on with young, unemployed, Black, single women in 1967?"

He took the book, he threw it at my head. I ducked out of the way, thankfully. He said, "I teach about one minority group already. I don't have to teach about any others." That was the atmosphere in which I was doing my learning. Those professors really set up for me an example of who I did not want to be as an educator.

[00:06:21] Bonni: That was immediate. Obviously, you have a visceral reaction in the moment. That took root in you immediately?

[00:06:29] Cate: Yes. I had a very clear sense that there had to be a better way of doing things in the way that these professors were doing it.

[00:06:38] Bonni: Walk us through more some of the other things early in your wrestling with kindness in your teaching, the kinds of questions that you asked.

[00:06:48] Cate: I think things came to a head for me quite early in my career as a faculty member. I started at Knox College in 2005. I had undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder. I was very, very depressed. I would move to a new town. I was trying to form a community. I was trying to teach all new courses. The way that I tried to cope was by being authoritarian. I suspected that my students were going to get away with all kinds of things if I wasn't going to be a hardliner. There was no room for creativity or spontaneity in my classes. I had a terribly draconian attendance policy that I remember. The things I asked them to do were really boring. [laughs]

I remember that there was a student who was clearly not enjoying the class, and I asked him if he would join me in office hours, so we could talk about how perhaps he might have a better time in class. When I expressed this to him, he looked at me very derisively and said, "You're just not Knox material." I was so floored, completely taken aback by this. Now. I think that student probably had some ideas in his head about who was a proper professor and a young woman did not fulfill his idea of what a proper professor was, but he was still telling me something very important. It wasn't that I didn't belong at Knox, it was that I was not teaching well.

I was not making a welcoming environment for students. I was not making a good environment for myself. I gradually began to try and unpick the sense that students were my antagonists, that students should be viewed with suspicion at all times, as if they were going to try and get away with something monstrous if I wasn't constantly vigilant. To just ease up on this white knuckle grip that I had on trying to battle through everything that was happening in my life.

[00:08:51] Bonni: Once you started to have these questions about how your pedagogy perhaps did not align with the values of how you might wish to show up, what were then some of the experiences that you had that began to help those things take shape even further in your pedagogy?

[00:09:11] Cate: I worked with a project in Iowa from 2001 to 2011 called Bringing History Home. It was a professional development program for teachers funded by grants from Congress. We set out to teach teachers how to teach with primary sources, how they could do history with their students instead of just telling students about history. We focus initially on kindergarten through fifth grade, which is an age where most people do not think of students as doing history as really doing the work that historians do, but they are absolutely capable of it.

I worked with a series of master teachers who were just incredibly kind to one another, to me. I worked with the director, Elise Fillpot, who was also incredibly kind. Their example and their patience really were such an example to me about how I wanted to be as an educator. Then in 2013, I went to the intergroup dialogue training at the University of Michigan with two of my colleagues, Janice Cervantes and Gabrielle Raley-Karlin, and three students. We went to investigate whether we should have intergroup dialogue on our campus. Intergroup dialogue is a really structured forum of conversation between people who come from very different social groups, and it tackles areas of real conflict and tension.

You might have a dialogue about race or about sexuality or about gender or about religion. We not only had to learn about the theory of doing dialogue, but we had to actually participate in dialogue circles, and that was incredible. It was so hard. It was so challenging. I got to see what it was like when there was real emotional vulnerability brought into the room when people trusted each other very quickly and risked trusting each other very quickly. We went back to our campus and we said, "Yes, we think we need a program." The president said, "Okay. Make it happen." [laughs] I have been co-director of that program with Gabrielle Raley-Karlin since then.

Dialogue has a habit of just slopping out of its bucket into everything that you do. You really can't ask people to show up as their authentic selves in one class and then not show up as their authentic selves in another one. You also can't be vulnerable in a dialogue class and then go to your regular teaching and just be like, "I'm going to leave that behind. That doesn't matter in this space." I realized I had been asking my students to show up and be vulnerable for years, and I had not reciprocated. That really was a turning point in me saying, "I need to really think about this differently. I need to be a partner with them in this learning process."

Then the big aha moment was 2017 going to the Digital Pedagogy Lab at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia. Everything there was predicated upon kindness. Everything from the things that we read and the things we talked about, the exercises that we did in our little streams, to the fact that it was really well catered, and there were pronoun pins when we checked in and all kinds of little touches that really showed care. It was at that particular institute that Chris Friend and Sean Michael Morris posed the question to the intro stream that I was in of, "Why not be kind? Why were we struggling so hard to hold the lion against what?"

It was a great question. It was a question that absolutely caused my pedagogy to disassemble in the best way because I realized I hadn't been very kind and that I really should be. I said about recreating my pedagogy over time to be as kind as I possibly could so that I could answer that question, why not be kind?

[00:13:24] Bonni: In order for us to be kind and show kindness in our teaching, we need to be able to be kind to ourselves. Before I ask you how to show kindness to ourselves, I would first like to hear you share a bit more, what does Cate look like when she shows up as her fully authentic self in learning spaces as opposed to who you thought that you were supposed to show up as before that?

[00:13:51] Cate: I show up as Cate. For a long time, I showed up as Catherine. I never insisted that people call me Dr. Denial or Professor, although many of my students just call me Professor anyway, but I made a very distinct decision to have my students call me Cate once I decided to engage in this pedagogy. I show up looking different. I should say, for people listening in right now, I'm wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt and a Ted Lasso baseball cap. I feel okay with being more informal in the way that I dress now. I will show up in a pair of jeans once in a while instead of this very carefully crafted look that I had when I started out teaching that was meant to project authority and authoritarianism. It wasn't just authority.

I show up looking forward to class. I used to be tremendously nervous before I walked into a classroom. That lasted for years. It wasn't until I started teaching with kindness and realized how thoroughly I had positioned my students as my antagonists that I realized that was why I was nervous. I was walking into classrooms prepared for battle, and now, I don't. I walk into classrooms prepared for collaboration and for discovery with my students, and that has changed absolutely everything.

[00:15:12] Bonni: I mentioned having my teaching and my learning shaped by you, and it's also been shaped by many of the names and people and programs that you've spoke of already. What does it look like when we think of our students as antagonists? What are some of the things that might come into our practices and our mindsets when we think of students as they might be? You mentioned some examples. They might be getting away with something, but what are the kinds of things that our minds allow ourselves to think students might get away with if we think of them as antagonists?

[00:15:51] Cate: We think they're mocking us. We think that their comment aren't sincere. We think that they will plagiarize. That they will collaborate in a bad way with other students to subvert the norms of academic conduct. We think that they will do as little of the reading as possible, that they will lie to us constantly, that they are looking to get one over on us, basically, in every way that they can. That's just such a profoundly damaging way to enter into a classroom space, and it makes learning impossible because when you are inviting people into that space, but you really are just standing there waiting for battle to commence, even if that is subtextual for you, it just makes for a rotten teaching experience.

It makes for a teaching experience where you can never relax, that you can't find comfort, where you can't find genuine expressions of who you are, where you're constantly guarded both against your real self and against who these students might perceive you to be.

[00:17:04] Bonni: It is also unkind to ourselves and our sense of meaning and our sense of significance. Would you now share a little bit about what kindness to ourselves looks like? Don't think I'm going to forget to then extend that over to our students and come back to that.

[00:17:23] Cate: Kindness is not niceness. I live in the Midwest and there is such a thing as Midwest nice, but Midwest nice is a façade. It's a way of having general pleasantries so that there's never conflict, even though it just means that conflict is sublimated. Kindness is not niceness. Kindness, I think, is taking the principles of sincere self-care and extending them. Kindness says, "I am going to screw up at times, but I will extend my self-forgiveness and understanding when I do. I will also learn so that I don't repeat my mistakes, and I'm going to hold myself accountable." Niceness is not about accountability.

I think that being kind to the self is about a little grace, a little breathing room, but very much so not excusing things that are inexcusable. When people ask me how they can implement kindness to themselves, I tend to go to some really gritty practical solutions. Boundaries are so, so important in carving out time for us to be our whole self. I tell people to limit the number of hours that they spend on email, for example, and make sure that there are long stretches of time where they are not constantly hovering over their phone or at their computer. For me, I log off about eight o'clock every night, and my students know this, it's on the syllabus, and I tell them.

I try not to check my email on a Saturday or a Sunday so that I have time to recharge. That's how I explain it on my syllabus, too. I do that also to model that recharging is a thing my students should do as well. I take time for myself that is completely free of all academic responsibilities. That's really important. Putting things on my calendar like eating and rest are super important. The calendar can be so tyrannical, and we tend to fill it with all of our obligations without thinking about the things that sustain us. I was diagnosed as a type II diabetic about 18 months ago, and that was a big wake-up call for me because I realized I couldn't just get along by eating string cheese anymore between classes.

I had to put a dedicated lunch hour on my calendar because I needed to be able to either go somewhere and eat something real or go home and make something real. Then it just changed the dynamic of the whole day to be able to have that particular break. Forgiving ourselves for accidental things like writing on the whiteboard with a permanent marker, realizing that students are not going to remember for the rest of our lives that day that we spilled coffee down our shirt. I have forgotten some of the other things [chuckles] that I said. Let me think. Getting pedagogical training in whatever way we can is a kindness to ourselves. We shouldn't, first of all, be thrown into a classroom without any pedagogical training, but that happens to so many graduate students and early career scholars all the time.

If structurally, the institutions for which we work on not supporting us, then we need to find the places that will. That means looking for online communities whether there are often professional development opportunities that are free or very low cost, finding whatever form of social media works for an individual where they can connect to other people who are wrestling with many of the same things that they might be wrestling with, whether that's in terms of the discipline that they practice or the business of teaching. All of those things are so important so that we are not just replicating that sense of panic that we might feel when we're thrown into a classroom for the first time.

[00:21:32] Bonni: Yes. The sense of panic and also the complete and utter lack of an opportunity to unlearn some of the things we were taught that we, at least in my case, was not cognizant of that I was taught both in terms of my experience in college and my subsequent degrees as well, as well as what other colleagues modeled for me very early and were formative. It wasn't until I was able to connect with a online community, as you describe, that I could see other ways and see a different view of students. I want to encourage people who may be wrestling with some of the things that Cate's describing here as difficult.

It is both incredibly difficult and easy all at the same time because it's incredibly freeing. Again, I just want to express my gratitude to you and ask you more about what does that look like, Cate, to believe students in practice?

[00:22:30] Cate: One of the tenets of teaching with kindness is to simply believe students when they tell you what their experience of their education is, of what their experience of their life is. When my students tell me that they're sick, or that the printer died, or that the dog ate their homework, whatever it is, I choose to believe them. There is an obvious risk that someone might put one over on me and get away with something that someone might think they shouldn't, that I would much rather enter into a relationship with my students that is based on me extending them trust and then deal with exceptions to that rule as when if they occur than to risk disbelieving someone who's in really genuine crisis.

If I say to one student like, "I don't believe your grandparent died," not only do I risk their emotional health, their emotional responses, but that's going to travel. All of my students are going to know that I am that professor at that point, and all the students that I would like to teach in the future are going to hear about that. That's the kind of stuff that passes through the grapevine. I think it's super important to simply say, "I'm going to trust you." If I become aware of something that needs my attention, sure, we'll deal with it, but I'm going to trust you.

[00:23:54] Bonni: Sometimes I think it's easier for us to have empathy when we've experienced something similar to what the person may be describing. Obviously, all of our experiences are different from one another. We should never assume, "I know exactly how you feel because I had 'the same thing happen with me,'" but I do think it can be more challenging to have empathy, but what a wonderful opportunity it is when we haven't experienced something. You mentioned earlier being diagnosed with PTSD. That is not something that I have been diagnosed with.

Would you give us a couple of examples that come to mind with that specifically what someone like myself who has not experienced that might not have a broad enough imagination to understand what that experience might be like, and specifically what someone in an educational context may need that someone like me may not even think about in terms of being kind to someone with that diagnosis?

[00:24:55] Cate: The thing that most quickly comes to mind is the issue of trigger warnings or content warnings. This is, of course, a hot-button issue in academia if the discussion rolls around with predictability. What I think people don't know about PTSD and being triggered is that it is a full-body experience. It is not simply something that's happening in your brain. It happens to your whole person. You cannot learn under the circumstances of intense stress that come with being triggered. For instance, if I were to be surprised, and I have been in educational context before by, for example, a depiction of sexual assault, my body, and my brain are going to react.

I am going to sweat. I am going to have physical pain in different parts of my body. My thinking will become foggy. I will be full of adrenaline. Adrenaline has certain relationships to certain bodily functions. I'm going to need the bathroom very quickly. Panic, my heart racing, becoming clammy, confused. All of these things are happening all at once. Sometimes when I'm triggered, it puts me in a position where I am remembering the thing that happened to me at the same time that I am experiencing the present. Those two things coexist in vivid, vivid detail. It is one of the things that is so hard when you experience it to reconcile because we understand that there's now.

How can there be now and then right next to each other and feel perfectly embodied in both spaces? I think a lot of people don't know what a range of physical and cognitive and psychological effects a triggering event has. I think a couple of things happen. Some people suggest, "Exposure therapy's great for people. It heals people all the time." Exposure therapy is not a thing that we should be doing in our classrooms. We are not therapists. It is not recommended for everyone when it is done. It's done in a very particular circumstances. This is not something a bunch of amateurs should be trying to engineer in their classrooms.

Then there's the opposition to trigger warnings just as a blanket position. What that does is it means it is impossible for some students to probably engage with the material they are supposed to be learning. A warning gives someone like me the opportunity to prepare myself, so I can put my coping mechanisms in place. I might have a student who says, "I can deal with a generalized discussion of sexual assault, but I can't deal with a graphic description of it happening." Then I will give them page numbers and say, "Skip these, but let's have a more general conversation."

That kind of accommodation is what makes it possible for people to weather distressing conditions. It's not a means of circumnavigating discomfort altogether, it's just about putting in place the coping mechanisms You need to do that better.

[00:28:23] Bonni: On a practical level, where does this show up? If I were to want to do better at this, where would I have these kinds of warnings show up? How might I put that into a practical application?

[00:28:35] Cate: I have a blanket statement in my syllabus that says, "I have tried to take into account common warnings that if there is something in particular that you need a warning for, please do let me know. I will be happy to make that happen." Then on the reading schedule or on my LMS, I have a warning before readings. I have page numbers for people to skip. I have alternate readings. Sometimes I will make accommodations by allowing people to watch movies or documentaries on their own time instead of in class, but I make sure that I communicate clearly and repeatedly where something might be triggering and to ask for my students to help me help them by telling me what else I can do.

[00:29:26] Bonni: Do we one day just arrive at a destination of kindness or is this more of a journey?

[00:29:33] Cate: I think kindness is a discipline. We are not going to feel kind. I do not feel kind all the time. I have not reached some level of enlightenment where I'm just magically putting out rainbows and sprinkles all the time. It is that I have trained myself to ask what is the kind response before I do things. When I get an email that perhaps irritates me, I don't fire up a response. I wait. I pause. I make sure that I'm asking myself how to phrase things in a kind and compassionate way before I send that email out.

When something happens in my classroom that I wasn't anticipating and that maybe is a little worrying or perhaps somebody says something that is offensive to someone, I don't simply fly off the handle? I take a moment to pause. I ask myself what the kind thing is to do, and then I act from that place. I may not feel wonderfully compassionate all the time, but I can pause every time and ask myself, "What is the kind thing to do here before I take action?"

[00:30:47] Bonni: I want to revisit the earlier parts of our conversation. Thank you for sharing those, I suspect, painful stories of your education particularly the one where the book gets thrown at you. [chuckles] I happen to have that book on a bookshelf upstairs. Our daughter has been asking me. She's actually asked this question of me a lot. Why do I keep books on the bookshelves that I never read again, I never pick up? Anyway, that one definitely comes to mind.

[00:31:15] Cate: It's big, right?

[00:31:16] Bonni: It's big. [laughter] I have a paperback version, so it may not be as large as the hardcover is. Would you take us back if you were going to revisit that? I'm specifically interested in the kindness you speak of of involving students in the collaborative experience of learning and how a group of learners, myself very much included, Cate, might go about finding some primary sources that could explore the questions that you and the person sitting next to you in that class had about women, and they're not being represented in that portion of the book.

[00:31:56] Cate: I don't know if they're not represented in the book to be honest. We were reading things that the professor had chosen. There may be documents in that book that I just had no idea existed. I think if that had been a moment that had happened in a classroom of mine where someone had said, "Where is this missing group of people?" The obvious thing for me is to say, "That's a great question. Why do you think they're not here?" To unpack the book as a constructed item, to be able to think about when it was published, about what was going on in the world at the time, what did the academy look like at the time, what things had currency within academia, who was fighting to have their stories told and who wasn't?

Then be able to say, "Can we go out and see if we can find something?" Taking them to websites that I know have those resources and setting them loose and saying, "What can you find that are going to fill in the gaps here?" I think simply acknowledging that students' questions are usually really good questions and then making space to unpack why things are the way they are instead of simply accepting that they are the way that they are. I think that's really important.

[00:33:23] Bonni: My final question before we get to the recommendation segment is a totally unfair one [chuckles] because there's so much we could talk about here. What comes to mind for you in terms of being kind to students and also to ourselves when it comes to grading? Specifically that, and you mentioned this earlier, we don't assign things that we would consider to be boring. Help expand our imagination for what not-boring grading might look like and not-boring assignments might look like?

[00:33:55] Cate: One of the things that I'm very passionate about is the fact that we tend to have almost monocultures, I'm not quite sure that's the right expression, but within disciplines. In my discipline of history, it is just assumed that writing about history is the best way to communicate knowledge. That is so untrue. [chuckles] That's just not true. Putting together assignments where my students have a range of ways to respond. This is one of the principles of universal design for learning, is that you have multiple points of access and that you have flexibility in the way that students can respond to things.

I might say to my students, "You can write a short paper, or you can make a short video, or you can audio record your response. It does not have to be writing." I design unessay activities where my students make things that show me what they have learned in their research rather than just writing another academic paper. I do focus on writing in parts of the class, but I also make space for people for whom writing is not their strongest suit to also express themselves and show me, "Hey, I'm learning. I just can't express myself through this particular medium." I think that is a really important kindness in the way that we design assignments.

Then when it comes to grading I am someone who un-grades. I am now at the point in my trajectory as an educator where my students are the ones who decide what their grade is every term. They have assignments with deadlines, after each assignment they get lots of feedback from me, especially about what their goal is for their next assignment, where we can really strengthen them as a thinker and a scholar. Then at the very end of term, they write a metacognitive paper where they reflect on the term, what they learned, what challenges they faced, how they overcame them, and then they tell me what grade they think they should get.

I reserve the right to raise the grades of students who I think are too hard on themselves, but I have let go of the idea that I will lower people's grades. This has yet to backfire on me. Now, I may have just jinxed myself, but I have been doing this for several terms, and everybody has been scrupulously honest in giving themselves grades at the end of term. That seems more authentic to me, to have it be a metacognitive project where students get to rate all kinds of things; their effort, their time, their curiosity, and not simply could they properly format a paper.

I'm a big proponent of finding ways to limit the number of times that we unilaterally put a number or a letter on a piece of paper or an exam book and say, "This sums up your learning," and to find other ways to be able to communicate with students about what that learning is.

[00:37:18] Bonni: That's such a big idea. I harken back so often to my earlier conversations years ago with Cathy Davidson who said it wasn't even good enough, these grades, having letters assigned to grades wasn't even precise enough for the industry and how could that be good enough for measuring something as unique as learning and difficult to measure. This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. I want to begin, Cate, by sharing a big, big, big endorsement for your book, A Pedagogy of Kindness. I was waiting for it. [chuckles] I know you and I went back and forth a little bit.

I love how you set boundaries even with having conversations like the one we're having today. I got my hands on that digital copy and just devoured it. What a delightful, generous, important, necessary book for challenging our thinking but also shaping our practice to help us expand our imagination for what these things could look like in practice. Thank you so much for that. I wanted to also recommend- You were talking about calendaring. We also spoke just recently about grading. I've been inspired, again, by people like you, by people like Jesse Stommel to not assign things that are boring to grade, and I've gotten so much better at that.

Another thing that has been a practice that's been important for me to do is also to be realistic about the time that it would take. If I've got a reflection journal, and each journal might take me X number of minutes to be realistic and kind to future me, as of us recording this conversation, we are nearing the end, I teach in the semester system, and how much better it is for me to have blocked out a lot of time this week to grade this particular assignment. Not just grading in general, but for me, it really makes a difference to go- It's worth it. You've asked these students to reflect on their learning. Set aside the time, just like you're asking them to set aside time to reflect on their learning.

It brings me to so much of a centered place where I don't overdo it. Cate, you were talking about blocking off times for lunch. That is something that I do as well. Blocking off times for every single day, getting outside and moving my body. Yes, blocking out time to hold in the highest regard. The learning that we're all getting to experience together and celebrating that and not allowing myself to vent in any circles really about that practice, what a joy it is to get to celebrate in that learning. That is a discipline that I continue to grow in. I don't think I'll ever be done, Cate, as you said earlier.

Boy, when I put a sense of intentionality and purpose and think about that calendaring as a way of celebrating learning, it is so freeing, so good, so fun. Many of the practices that you talked about I use as well. That final thing of just blocking out your calendar and thinking about it as a celebration of learning is a better frame for me than grading ever has been. Cate, I'll pass it over to you to respond to any of that and then to recommend whatever it is you'd like to share today.

[00:40:44] Cate: I think that's a wonderful recommendation. One of the things that I tell people as they're grading during their term or semester is to put grading on their calendar for two weeks after a thing is due so that you have the time built into your calendar for people to be able to turn things in late, so you can grant extensions without it then causing a problem for you as you continue to do all the other parts of your job. I love your framing, and I love this idea of making sure there is adequate time to actually do this well. I think that's so important.

My recommendation is a new book that I just picked up. It's called Work It Out: A Mood-Boosting Exercise Guide for People Who Just Want to Lie Down. It's by Sarah Kurchak, and it is a delightful book. I am that person. I would rather lie down every time than move my body. Absolutely. There are also things about me that make some moving of my body really difficult. The PTSD, for example, when my heart rate elevates, my brain goes- We recognize this, this is a panic attack. Then I get super anxious and end up having a panic attack. I have to be really careful about what ways I move my body.

This book is written by someone who is a trainer. They're also artistic. They have dealt with depression, and it is so kind. It is so understanding. It really gets why people might have trouble. It delves into the fitness industry and the way in which we're taught to think about bodies in some really destructive ways. Then it builds you up and says, like, "Let's find some way that you will feel good." Sarah has exercises you can do while lying in bed if you want to. If that is your situation, perhaps you have a disability that means you are in bed a lot. It is just this very very thoughtful, funny, and wise book that really came to me at a moment when I needed it.

[00:43:10] Bonni: Cate Denial, it has been a joy to get to have a synchronous conversation, even though, as I said, I feel like we've been having some asynchronous conversations, at least one-sided on my part, for such a long time. What a joy to talk to you, to have read this book a little earlier than other people might have the opportunity to. Thank you so much for your work, for your generosity and contributions to this community.

[00:43:33] Cate: Thank you so much for having me here. What a wonderful conversation this was.

[00:43:40] Bonni: Thank you once again to Cate Denial for being the guest on today's 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 Smith. I hope that today's conversations get you thinking more about how to incorporate kindness into your pedagogy. To be kind to yourself, you also might want to consider subscribing to the weekly update from Teaching in Higher Ed. Head over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe, and you'll receive weekly emails with the most recent episodes, show notes. Thank you so much for being a part of the Teaching in Higher Ed community, and I'll see you next time.

[music]

[00:44:40] [END OF AUDIO]

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.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Pedagogy of Kindness, with Cate Denial - Teaching in Higher Ed

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Cate Denial shares about her book A Pedagogy of Kindness on episode 467 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast

# data[].attributes.headline
PRESENTATION : Metaphor as Conceptual Anchor (many iceberg examples)

# data[].attributes.subject
PRESENTATION : Metaphor as Conceptual Anchor (many iceberg examples)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Metaphor as Conceptual Anchor - OSHA 2021

# data[].attributes.headline
Series of Student Icebergs (was given permission to share)

# data[].attributes.subject
Series of Student Icebergs (was given permission to share)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

# data[].attributes.headline
POSTER : Metaphor as Conceptual Anchor for Deep Learning about Stuttering

# data[].attributes.subject
POSTER : Metaphor as Conceptual Anchor for Deep Learning about Stuttering

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Copy of Metaphor as a Conceptual Anchor.pdf

# data[].attributes.headline
MY NOTES from a session about discussion forums ... lots of resources in here

# data[].attributes.subject
MY NOTES from a session about discussion forums ... lots of resources in here

# data[].attributes.headline
Boettcher & Conrad - Discussion Posts (in "my notes" file above)

# data[].attributes.subject
Boettcher & Conrad - Discussion Posts (in "my notes" file above)

# data[].attributes.headline
Research Based Practices - Online Discussion Boards (Aloni & Harrington, 2018)

# data[].attributes.subject
Research Based Practices - Online Discussion Boards (Aloni & Harrington, 2018)

# data[].attributes.headline
Howard (2015) - Making Online Discussions Work

# data[].attributes.subject
Howard (2015) - Making Online Discussions Work

# data[].attributes.headline
Woods & Bliss (2016) - Facilitating Successful Online Discussions

# data[].attributes.subject
Woods & Bliss (2016) - Facilitating Successful Online Discussions

# data[].attributes.headline
Stead et al. (2023) - Standardized patient + speaking valve trial + clinical communication skills

# data[].attributes.subject
Stead et al. (2023) - Standardized patient + speaking valve trial + clinical communication skills

# data[].attributes.headline
Stead et al (2023) - End of Life Care Conference

# data[].attributes.subject
Stead et al (2023) - End of Life Care Conference

# data[].attributes.headline
The Way We Talk (Movie) (Turner & Burge, 2015)

# data[].attributes.subject
The Way We Talk (Movie) (Turner & Burge, 2015)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Film | The Way We Talk: A Documentary About Stuttering

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Way We Talk explores the ways stuttering has affected my life―the journey of coming to terms with stuttering not being curable, and it being inheritable. My mom, dad, brother, and grandpa all stuttered; stuttering is woven into every thread of my family story.

# data[].attributes.body
Michael Turner is interviewed by Dave Miller on Oregon Public Broadcasting (SHOW : Think Out Loud) on the day of the Portland OR premier of TWWT

# data[].attributes.headline
Yaruss et al (2017) - Update on didactic & clinical education ...

# data[].attributes.subject
Yaruss et al (2017) - Update on didactic & clinical education ...