[00:00:00.09] ERIN HAGAR: Welcome to Moving the Needle, casual conversations about ways, big and small, to impact student learning. Brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Erin HAGAR, let's move the needle.

[00:00:19.47] Today's episode features Dr. Corey Shdaimah, the Daniel Thursz Distinguished Professor for Social Justice from the School of Social Work. Corey has degrees from Bryn Mawr College Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, and the Tel Aviv University School of Law. Corey was named the Maryland Educator of the Year by the National Association of Social Workers.

[00:00:41.91] Today we'll talk about how the pandemic provided Corey an opportunity to rethink her course from the inside out. We'll also talk about the importance of knowing your students and the support a faculty member can receive by participating in a community of practice. Corey, welcome.

[00:00:57.00] COREY SHDAIMAH: Thank you, I'm happy to be here.

[00:00:59.29] ERIN HAGAR: We're so thrilled that you're our inaugural guest on Moving the Needle, and I'm really excited to talk with you today.

[00:01:05.26] Let's just start by having you tell us a little bit about the courses you teach at the School of Social Work.

[00:01:09.96] COREY SHDAIMAH: Well, I teach courses at both the master's level and the doctoral level. I've been teaching the qualitative research doctoral-level class for about six years. And that is a required class that students take in their first semester when they're in the doctoral program. So they come in new and fresh, and a lot of ideas, and a lot of questions, and a little bit of trepidation sometimes as well.

[00:01:40.25] And in the master's program, I teach the required basic social policy class that all social work students must take. And then I teach a couple of different or have taught a couple of different classes, that often relate to the intersection of social justice and the practice of social work.

[00:02:02.33] And several of them are interprofessional. So I've done a joint course with students at the School of Law, and I've also done some international courses. We are currently resuming this class virtually for the spring with law, nursing, and social work students with partners at the University of Haifa in Israel.

[00:02:24.83] ERIN HAGAR: That's wonderful. So tell us a little bit about how your approach to teaching changes when you're working with your PhD students as opposed to your master's students.

[00:02:35.60] COREY SHDAIMAH: I mean, some things are very similar, in the sense that I always try to come into the classroom and get a sense of who the particular group of students are in front of me. And how they're coming to the class, what's their prior knowledge, what's their interest, do they have any concerns? Often, particularly when I'm teaching qualitative research, although about social policy as well, do they have any assumptions or ideas? Possible misconceptions about the topic? So really just to take the pulse of the class. And I would say that is similar.

[00:03:19.62] MSW students are there to get a practice degree, most of them, although some of them do have plans to continue on and get a PhD. And so in that sense, making sure that I'm thinking about examples when I'm talking about things to really connect the conceptual ideas to their practice.

[00:03:41.71] I'm also very aware in social work, there often tends to be a split between people doing what might be considered more therapy or case management, what we call clinical, which is the majority of our students, and students who are more interested in policy, practice, or community organizing, or careers in administration. We group that all together as this common social work under macro practice.

[00:04:06.42] That's the minority of our students, but those are the courses that I teach. So I also try and really think, well, what would a connection between these areas look like on the ground? Whereas the social work students were in a very research-focused PhD program.

[00:04:23.52] And so I also am very conscious of trying to connect the conceptual ideas of the course to practical skills that they're going to be using, and how they would use it. But those are more research skills. So it's practice with practice of research, often about practice.

[00:04:40.86] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, it sounds very much like having an awareness of where your students are as they come to you, and also where they see themselves going, really informs how you approach your classes.

[00:04:51.48] COREY SHDAIMAH: Yeah, I think that's a really good way to put it. I don't know that I would have thought about it, but yeah, that is really true. And in terms of both of those, where they are and where they see themselves going, I try to think in a holistic way. This has been really true, I think for many of us, during the pandemic as well. Because that's sometimes connected to what's happening in their personal lives that we often see.

[00:05:19.11] And so when I talk about the concerns that they have, it might be what do they think about their own assessment of their own skills as well, in that journey from-- I love the way you put it-- from where they are and where they want to go.

[00:05:32.71] ERIN HAGAR: Yes, COVID certainly has shone this light on so many aspects of teaching and learning. I want to reassure our listeners that this podcast is not specifically about teaching during the pandemic. But as we record this episode today, we're still very much in the throes of the COVID pandemic. So it's very topical to what we're doing and thinking about. It's actually how Corey and I met.

[00:05:55.23] And so Corey, I thought maybe you could talk a little bit about how the COVID shut down and the move to online prompted you to rethink your qualitative methods course and how that experience played out for you.

[00:06:06.63] COREY SHDAIMAH: So it became very clear-- well, I sit on the campuswide Didactic Learning Committee so, we had been talking a lot about what's it like to teach and learn, and what were some of the shifts we might have to be making pretty early on. And I think that might be where I first learned about the Center for Teaching and Learning.

[00:06:34.38] Christina Cestone came in and gave a presentation. And I remember listening to her talk about some of the wonderful resources that we have available to our faculty to help us, not just throw our courses online, but to really think deeply about the fit between pedagogy, and the learning goals, and the methods of delivery. And so we were still on the call, I think, when I sent an email saying, I want to do that. And that's how I got connected to you, Erin.

[00:07:11.76] And so I had taught hybrid, in the past, so I had some familiarity. And I knew from work I'd done with our-- at the School of Social Work, we had the idea team, a great idea team. I had done some work with them where, I remember my first thought is, well, how do I just transfer what I'm doing in the classroom and replicate it online?

[00:07:36.72] And the biggest lesson I learned from them was that it's better to take a step back and think, well, is there something about this medium that might actually help me do this better or differently that we can take advantage of? So I think the idea of seeing this as an opportunity to just improve my teaching.

[00:07:59.10] And many of the things that we did together were certainly connected to setting up a virtual class. So what happened is I had to take my class, that I always think of as very intimate, and necessarily, in-person and personal, and shifted to fully virtual.

[00:08:15.45] But the process, also, was really useful in going back to bare bones and thinking about the syllabus. I mean, things I should have been doing with my class regardless of whether it was going to be virtual, or in person, or hybrid.

[00:08:27.17] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, sometimes I think these curve balls that get thrown into our lives give us such an opportunity, like you said, to rethink how we're doing things and what we might keep going forward. Could you tell us a little bit about the changes you needed to make with your qualitative research course, and which changes you might keep when we're back in a traditional environment?

[00:08:47.45] COREY SHDAIMAH: Well, working with you, Erin, and with Becky, I had long been feeling that the syllabus was OK. That it had all the elements. But as I change the syllabus, from year-to-year, I try to keep my readings fresh, somehow it had morphed and become more patchworky. And I didn't feel like it had the cohesion or the arc that it needed to have as a syllabus. Things felt like they were in the wrong place.

[00:09:20.54] I remember, at some point, maybe last year or the year before, teaching the class and thinking, while I was in the class, why did I put this here? This should go someplace else, or I don't like this article anymore, or-- and also, I learn a lot from the students. So I might read the same article several times, or the same reading, or have the same exercise, and a group of students will respond very differently. And that might make me--

[00:09:45.05] So I had some of those instances where I was thinking, I really need to do this, I really don't have the time. Many of us when we're in graduate programs, if we're not in a program about teaching, we don't actually learn how to teach. So I didn't really have a mechanism to systematically think. I mean, I knew how to look at the syllabus, but not really to look at it from a pedagogical construction of the class kind of way.

[00:10:11.75] I was very lucky in my graduate program. I was at Bryn Mawr. Like I said, we didn't have a teaching class, but we had a group of graduate students from the sciences, like neurobiology and chemistry, there are very many graduate students there, and then a group for social work.

[00:10:28.25] And we sort of started meeting with a group of professors from the education department at the undergraduate level. Someone who is a neurobiologist and someone who's from gender and women's studies, who's still one of my mentors and good friends today. And they just started meeting with us.

[00:10:45.33] We created this space that was a cross between a self-help-- so we were all thrown into classrooms, I mean, I was teaching without knowing how to teach. We would come with like, this happened to me this week. And we were also reading about pedagogy and some of the classic readings about Peggy McIntosh and Eleanor Duckworth. And we were kind of doing it on our own as a group.

[00:11:13.14] So I'm very lucky that I had some of that input, but once we left graduate school there was very little of that. And so when I met with you, you sent me a storyboard. I didn't know what a storyboard was. And so those kinds of tools for really approaching your course and thinking about it are things that helped me find the coherence, figure out how the parts of it together and what the role of each part was, and then what the whole should look like.

[00:11:47.97] ERIN HAGAR: I just love how you use the words cohesion and arc to describe your syllabus creation because I think it reminds us that designing a course is really a creative act, in addition to being an analytical one. Your experience at Bryn Mawr, it sounds like you formed an impromptu community of practice, which is such an important part of any faculty member's professional development.

[00:12:09.03] COREY SHDAIMAH: We did, it's funny because it was a long time ago. I graduated in 2005, so this is 16 years ago. And like I said, I'm actually still very, very close to one of my fellow students and one of my mentors who's there. And we continued that group for years, even after I graduated, and then I was teaching at Maryland, it morphed in different ways.

[00:12:34.24] And one thing that's very interesting, I'm a qualitative researcher, obviously, because I teach qualitative research, but best practices in qualitative research is also working with what we call peer debriefing groups. And so we use those groups for every aspect of the study, when we're building a study, when we're trying to get a sense of what biases we might have, or how our coding scheme is.

[00:12:59.22] And so the idea of a community of practice, and a place for reflection, and growing, and learning is really inherent in that part of my work, as well. And I kind of feel that way about pretty much everything I do. So that is tremendously important.

[00:13:19.53] We have, in addition, to the resources that you provide and that we also have at the School of Social Work, I have wonderful colleagues. And we help each other out a lot. Often, it's on an ad hoc basis. I am newly course coordinator for our required Foundation of a Policy class.

[00:13:40.32] Before that, there were other people who were course coordinators. Haksoon Ahn was the course coordinator just prior to me, and I would go to her for assistance. And now I'm providing that, particularly with courses like that, where we have adjuncts and faculty members teaching. It's really important to provide support.

[00:13:59.19] And it could be just technical questions like what do I do with Blackboard, but it could also be this class isn't working, or maybe there's a particular concept that is difficult, or maybe do we use an example for vaccines now because it's really lively and people will be excited or will that be troubling for people; even sort of questions like that. And so communes of practice, I think are really, really crucial.

[00:14:28.11] The other thing-- and I like your idea of creativity, talking about the syllabus, that kind of thing as well. And one thing that I think that you are really helpful to me, Erin, is sort of thinking about also the class itself. What is the purpose of every exercise that I do? I think sometimes we set things up and we kind of forget. And so refining the way I describe an assignment, is an assignment necessary, is a component of a class necessary, should this small group, should this be large group, why am I even doing this in the first place? So I think thinking about the purpose of the things we are asking students to do, are they necessary, and how do they have to be done, as well.

[00:15:19.35] I don't know if this is getting ahead, but I remember there was a point in my semester where I, kind of, called an emergency meeting or sent an email up to you. And I said, you know I'm really worried. I have a student who is participating from another country, another time zone. And I was concerned. She had spoken to me about the difficulty of maintaining a huge time zone difference and could we think about making some parts asynchronous, or making a change.

[00:15:54.72] I have to be honest, my first reaction was like, no we can't possibly do this. The in-person component-- sort of, very stuck on the way that I had it. And then I took a few deep breaths. And I emailed you. And I said, OK I'm feeling like I'm not sure I could do this. Can you help me think through how to decide? Is it possible to shift something? And then what are some creative ideas that might accomplish the components that I feel are necessary for this class and these assignments, while also meeting the needs of the moment and the particular students in my class.

[00:16:34.92] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, I think that is such an important point that you're making here. There are so many ways to accomplish a course goal. And sometimes, as faculty members, we just have to articulate not only the academic part of the experience that matters to you but also the social and emotional experience that the students will have. Sometimes that can be a bit of a hidden agenda.

[00:16:55.60] And so putting light on that and saying, no it's really important to me that students in this particular activity to see each other's faces, or have the comfort of real-time interaction for this activity. It's important to articulate that from the very beginning, and step back, and really say to yourself, what do I value from both an academic standpoint, and also what kind of learning experience do I want the students to have?

[00:17:20.25] I think when the pandemic hit and you had to revise your course, I think you did such a great job dismantling all the course elements and looking at them in a unique way. Instead of just saying, well, this is how it's always been done and this is how I've always done it, you really took each piece and evaluated it, and thought about how you wanted to make those changes meaningful for your students.

[00:17:45.18] COREY SHDAIMAH: And I think that's where your help comes in. I think some people might think, well, I teach x and it's a topic area. So how does somebody, whether it's instructional technology in social work, or whether it's in terms of teaching and learning, not just instructional pedagogy-- I think that's the part where pedagogy is its own science and art.

[00:18:10.95] And so I could come to you and say, well, it doesn't necessarily matter what I teach. But part of what you help us with is figuring out a process. So I'm not sure I would know to ask those questions. That's what happened. You said to me, OK, well, think about this.

[00:18:25.26] And then the other thing that I feel like you were able to help me with, and Becky helped with this as well, is well, hmm, if this is what you need to do, then that allows you to be able to give me suggestions so that we can brainstorm together whether it's appropriate. And so that sort of combination of skills, that could be applied to any teaching area. So I would recommend to anybody, regardless of their teaching area, that these are things that we could apply.

[00:18:55.86] And it does kind of circle back to it. At Bryn Mawr I was sitting with students from biology, and we were asking the same kinds of questions. You know, you asked very early on what were some of the differences between my PhD class and my MSW teaching, and one thing actually, that as we're talking, I'm thinking about that happened in this particular case and I always tell my students, is that PhD students, many of them will be teaching.

[00:19:21.57] They might not ultimately go on to careers in teaching, although many of our adjuncts are wonderful MSW alumni, but with the PhD, many of them are thinking about jobs where teaching will be a significant part of their work.

[00:19:38.44] And so I actually always tell them I'm like the Wizard of Oz with the curtain drawn back. I want to share with you. I want to model for them. I think coming to them, making people feel like everything is always complete and we know how to do it is sometimes a disservice.

[00:19:55.24] So obviously, you want students to feel comfortable like they're in good hands, and that you are professional, but I think it's really OK, particularly with PhD students and particularly when there's a crisis, but even if there isn't, to say OK, these are the things I'm thinking and letting students know that there might be a change and this is what I'm thinking.

[00:20:16.35] And for them to see that I go to professionals for help in teaching, that it's OK. That it's OK to take a step back and think about things, and it's OK not always to have the right answer. And then it's OK for somebody to ask you a question and challenge you, and not take it as a personal affront but to think about it as, hmm, OK, let's think about this. So I feel like that modeling in the teaching is another parallel thing that happens when you're teaching PhD students.

[00:20:47.04] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, that's such a great point. Like you said, you don't want the students to feel like you're coming into class without a plan or that you haven't thought this through. But at the same time, there are changes teachers make on the fly or circumstances that present themselves where you, as the educator, need to shift gears or maybe you're trying something new.

[00:21:07.50] My experience is teaching Spanish, and I used to teach lower-level students, freshmen and sophomores. Even with that demographic, if we were trying a new activity, I would just let them know. I'd say, OK, I'm trying something new. I don't know how it's going to go here's why I'm trying it, let me know what you think. And just inviting students to be a part of that process shows a respect for them as learners, and that we're all learners in this space.

[00:21:32.01] I never had an experience where a class didn't come along with me and at least give it a try. I think as educators, it's easy to feel as though we always need to be projecting this aura of expertise, but I think you're absolutely right. That's a disservice. Because as our students go into their own teaching experiences, it's helpful for them to know that there's this whole back-chatter happening as you're teaching about what you're doing and how you're doing it. And I think shining a light on that for our students can only help them going forward as they become educators.

[00:22:04.14] COREY SHDAIMAH: I'm also listening to you and thinking about some of the early readings that we did. Like the "Feeling Like a Fraud" reading, which is sort of a famous one in terms of pedagogy, what happens when you stand up in a classroom and your level of confidence.

[00:22:18.94] And so I think, actually, in terms of achieving that balance, I know that I'm good at what I do. I know I'm a good qualitative research. I know that I have the skills. I might not know how to convey that. And so I think knowing what your expertise-- if you're teaching Spanish, you have expertise there. And so it's not that you're coming to them with nothing going on, you're coming with expertise, and sort of recognizing where we need to be humble or show that we can both have expertise and be learners is really important.

[00:22:47.73] And I can't not say, though, that I think there's definitely a gender component here. I think very often as women, our expertise is challenged in different ways. And so I think that that can sometimes feel particularly challenged to feel confident and comfortable enough, and to know that your class respects you enough, and your knowledge, for you to then be able to also say, I'm going to try something new, or you're right, this might not be working with this class.

[00:23:22.44] So I think I want to point that out. Because I think it's important.

[00:23:26.17] ERIN HAGAR: Absolutely. And it's so interesting you say that because so much of what we know about teaching and learning involves bringing the students into the experience and engaging them actively. But what's typically seen as, quote unquote, "expertise" is that sage on the stage. So let me just stand here and tell you all the things that I know. And that can create the illusion of expertise, but as far as the learner, goes it's actually one of the least effective methods of transferring knowledge and information.

[00:23:54.45] So it's kind of ironic that what we think of as projecting expertise can actually work against the student if it's done in such a rigid way. It's so interesting.

[00:24:05.19] In what other ways do you notice your research and teaching informing each other?

[00:24:10.32] COREY SHDAIMAH: Well, I think there's just so much of it. So in qualitative research, one of the things we often try to do is to understand what we call an emic or insider perspective. So generally, people, humans make decisions that, when viewed from inside their own head or through their own lenses, are rational and often ethical. And many of us when we're not thinking [INAUDIBLE] are like, why is someone doing that? Why would they possibly do this? That is not a smart decision, that is not a thoughtful decision.

[00:24:53.55] There's a premise that no, actually, if you understand where people are coming from, then, actually, it might make sense. And so if we understand why people do what we do, then we can be partners with them, we can understand how maybe something might be harmful, that we don't intend it to be harmful, we might recognize that people have expertise in their own lives. And so that's an important part of qualitative research.

[00:25:22.89] Thinking about where students are coming from, how does this classroom look to somebody when they walk into that room or they click on the Zoom link? I think that's important. And it's important not just because if we're good humans or ethical humans, or teaching in social work, we care about their learning as educators, but if we want to be efficacious in our teaching, then we also want to know. So there's both, I think, a moral component to that, and then there's an effectiveness component in that. So I think it's really helpful to think about my teaching that way, and I think that's a connection.

[00:26:06.84] And even doing it for myself. Recognizing my feeling of I can't possibly change this, is me trying to think in my head, well, what is going on, Corey? And then reaching out to you and helping me walk through it to help me have a little bit more awareness. So I think that that's a similarity or something that's maybe mutually fruitful.

[00:26:26.31] ERIN HAGAR: That's great. If you could go back in time, maybe during your Bryn Mawr days in that learning community of practice, and share with yourself something that you've learned as an educator, what would that be?

[00:26:39.91] COREY SHDAIMAH: Well, this isn't exactly the answer, but I think it might do what the question to do is. So when we were creating that community of learning, there was a PhD student in chemistry, Cheryl. And she and I took the lead on creating a certificate for teaching and learning.

[00:26:59.62] We thought, oh, this will be good on our resumes, and then also, it gives some coherence to some of the things we're doing. And we created it together. I think only two people, myself included ended up-- I don't know what happened to it when we left.

[00:27:12.09] But what it was is, we had this ongoing series of lectures. And so you had to attend x out of, however many lectures. And then there was, sort of, a menu, like choose two items from column A, and three items from column B that you could do. So it also allowed people to choose areas that they wanted to.

[00:27:30.76] And so one of the areas that I chose to do from my self-imposed required list of things, was I observed. I did two teaching observations, and then I reflected and I wrote about it. So one of them, I observed my very wonderful, dear friend, was a professor of education, at the time, and she's now still teaching, Jody Cohen. And she gave this terrific interactive teachers' education. Students we're moving around, and writing on boards, and all this really wonderful stuff. And I was like, this is really great.

[00:28:09.30] And then I watched my dissertation chair, who is also my mentor, Jim Baumohl, a fantastic, wonderful teacher. I loved his classes. And he gave a very different kind of lecture. So he is more sage on the stage, in a very small classroom, so it's really not bad. The classes were small.

[00:28:31.47] But he gave a wonderful lecture. And it was erudite, and gripping, and interesting. And there were some questions, but it was really much more of this lecture style. And the class that I was observing was actually a class that I was going to teach for the first time the following semester. And it was in social work.

[00:28:54.81] And I was like, that's the way I have to do this because this is his class. And I remember standing up and trying to emulate him. He was great at what he did. I learned so much. I was his student. And the students really, I think, learned a lot in the class.

[00:29:14.32] And it was a disaster. It wasn't me. I couldn't do it. I can't lecture that way. I mean, I've learned a little bit more since, in terms of how he prepares, which I didn't know it at the time, but it just wasn't me. And the class didn't go well.

[00:29:31.09] And so I think the biggest thing that I've learned that I really try to remember, from those days, and that was from those days, is yes, be prepared. Yes, think about your teaching, and put an effort into it. But you also have to be who you are. And if you try to be someone else, it's not going to work. You're not going to feel good. The class, probably, isn't going to go well. And for good and for bad. So if I'm a little bit more enthusiastic, or I go a little faster, if that's who I am, that's who I am.

[00:30:03.96] Which doesn't mean you shouldn't improve. But be who you are, and then think about crafting the best lesson and the best classes you can, that are true to who you are.

[00:30:20.47] ERIN HAGAR: Oh, that is such fantastic advice. I think I want to make t-shirts and hand them out to new faculty. It's almost like wearing clothes that don't fit. It's so true. You need to teach in a way that feels authentic to you. It's wonderful, wonderful advice.

[00:30:36.34] So we've gone back in time. And now, if we were to jump forward in time, are there any innovations or approaches that you're seeing, as an educator, that excite you?

[00:30:46.60] COREY SHDAIMAH: I think, to some extent, that's still in formulation. So I'm very excited about the virtual, interprofessional, internet global/local class that I'm developing. And I'm actually working as a GLOBALtimore fellow with the Center for Global Initiatives, who are also terrific. And they're creating a community of learning and all that kind of stuff. So I've been really excited about making some changes there. I'm listening to what other people are doing with their classes and, sort of, rethinking the model.

[00:31:21.46] So I'm very excited about the opening up of accessibility. So for example, when we're doing this international exchange, I would bring students to Israel. And we didn't have funding for students. And I felt pretty uncomfortable about that. And that was one of the reasons that I stopped teaching it for a little while, to rethink that and try and raise some money. Because you don't want to teach a class on social justice where actually some people can afford to go and others can't.

[00:31:49.21] And so the opening of accessibility, providing opportunities to more students to engage in international programming, and to be sitting in a classroom with people from two countries. So I'm really excited about more accessibility. What does that mean, making educational opportunities accessible to all?

[00:32:08.38] Similarly, we were reading an article and I brought in a guest speaker. We were reading an article that I had assigned. I know the author. She wrote a piece that was self-reflective. So it was an autoethnography of herself as a doctoral student doing research. [? Dalit ?] [INAUDIBLE] and she teaches in Israel.

[00:32:31.57] And the students had a very strong reaction to what she was writing. Both in terms of her research process-- and she did interviews with men who had been abusive toward their partners. I felt like the class was very fraught. Not in a bad way, but it was loaded.

[00:32:54.13] And I said, well, you know, I know the author. I said, why don't I see if she'll come to class next week? So I emailed, and I said, [? Dalit, ?] my class was really excited about your article. There's a seven-hour time difference. I mean, we're on two different continents. And we arranged for her to come. And then it was made even easier, the sort of pen palling thing.

[00:33:13.33] She wanted the students to write a really brief reflection. Well, I already had a discussion board going. And I said, you know I didn't want to create extra work. I said, instead of answering my discussion questions, this is what [? Dalit ?] wanted to know about you. You answer it. They posted it. I was able to send her their answers, so she had some sense of who the class was. Now, this was a small class. So it was easier to do. And then she Skyped in.

[00:33:40.03] My classes 2:00 to 5:00, it was 9 o'clock at night. She stayed with us till 10:30. And so I'm excited about those kinds of possibilities that allow not just for more accessibility, both to a larger group of professors, or to or for students to have opportunities, but impromptu.

[00:33:58.72] I mean it also meant that we didn't have to prepare so much. You didn't have to get on a plane. So not just as much money, but that sort of time and thinking about it. It just wasn't such a hard thing for me to send an email. So I think making things easier, I'm really excited about that.

[00:34:15.49] ERIN HAGAR: Oh, that is so thrilling. And it really connects with what you were saying earlier, about being a GLOBALtimore fellow, and in fact, we're going to have Dr. Carlos Faerron Guzmán on our guest list, for this podcast. And we're hoping to talk with him more about global education, in a future episode. So stay tuned for that.

[00:34:32.92] And yes, that ability to respond on the fly to your students' energy around that article and make something happen, 20 years ago, it would have required so much effort. It wouldn't have even been possible. The planning alone would have made that so difficult. And here you can just take advantage of that immediate energy and enthusiasm, and expand that learning experience in such a deep way. It's really amazing.

[00:34:55.39] COREY SHDAIMAH: Yeah, and it's not just the global. So I'm also doing my PhD students, they have to do-- which you know about-- they also have to research, learning by doing. So, they're doing interviews. And the interviews they're doing is, we had set up a study-- and it's actually a real study, it's gotten IRB approval.

[00:35:12.70] So they've been interviewing people. And I've been reading through the interviews about their experiences as graduate students during COVID. So, I would say that some of those things about accessibility and affordability are coming through in those interviews. So it's not just the international, but it's what happens to our students when they need to be caring for somebody, or how much easier it is if, let's say, they don't have to commute.

[00:35:38.19] And on the flip side, we're also learning that there are certain experiences that people miss, or there are certain intangibles. And so what is important to students around education? The networking, the creating communities of practice that you're talking about, people missing hallway conversations. So I'm also excited about what I'm learning through these interviews, about what are some of these intangibles for students that the pandemic is bringing to light, that will then carry forward. Yeah, we always try to do mixers and informal opportunities but hearing from students that these really matter and the ways in which they matter.

[00:36:23.94] So that's a stay tuned that I'm wondering how to address, but happy to have it flagged for me as something that matters.

[00:36:33.46] ERIN HAGAR: That's so great. One final question we're hoping to ask all of our guests. If you had to identify your teaching superpower, something that comes naturally to you; or through lots of hard work, you feel, now is a strength of yours, something you feel very confident about, with respect to your teaching; what would you say your superpower is?

[00:36:55.47] COREY SHDAIMAH: That's a hard one. I think maybe it's the personal connection and the curiosity. And that's maybe the connection between the research and the teaching. I really like people. I'm really curious about people. And I want to connect with them. And I hope it comes across in the teaching. And I think that brings just a lot of benefits.

[00:37:31.06] It signals to people, hopefully, if they're getting it the right way, if I'm able to convey it the right way, that I care about their learning, that I care about them, that I want to have a connection with them. And I think that that makes people more open to learning, and more open to taking risks, and more open to sharing where they want to learn.

[00:37:53.82] ERIN HAGAR: Absolutely, I can see that. That came through just in our conversation today. Every time you talked about your students, you could just feel your care, and compassion, and curiosity for them coming through.

[00:38:05.46] And Corey, we cannot thank you enough for joining us today. What a treat this has been to have you as our very first podcast guest. We are so grateful. And just thank you for the work that you do.

[00:38:17.78] COREY SHDAIMAH: Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's been really fun to talk to you, and it's been so wonderful to work with you.

[00:38:23.89] ERIN HAGAR: Thank you for joining us today on Moving the Needle. Visit us at umaryland.edu/fctl to hear additional episodes, leave us feedback, or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

ERIN HAGAR: Welcome to Moving the Needle. Casual conversations about ways, big and small, to impact student learning. Brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Erin HAGAR. Let's move the needle.

Today's episode features Dr. Carlos Faerron Guzmán, Assistant Professor of Global Health at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Trained as a physician, Carlos directs the Interamerican Center for Global Health in Costa Rica, where he designs practical and experiential learning for students in global health. Our conversation today explores things to consider when designing on the ground experiences for students, the importance of a democratic perspective when teaching, and what he's learned by being a student and a faculty member in different countries. Carlos, welcome.

CARLOS FAERRON GUZMÁN: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

ERIN HAGAR: Oh, it's our pleasure. We're really excited for today's conversation. Let's start with your current work. You currently run a small academic research center that, among many other things, places students in experiential learning opportunities where the students are really on the ground getting their hands in the field of global health. Your own career changed after a similar experience. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

CARLOS FAERRON GUZMÁN: Sure. I should start by saying that I actually studied medicine and I'm an MD. However, that really last portion of my medical degree I spent three months away from the hospitals and away from the clinics of central San Jose, which is the capital of Costa Rica. So I had never lived in a rural area before, I had never encountered working with populations that are considered vulnerable.

When the opportunity arose to actually go far from home and live in a rural community, I chose the farthest places I could go. I actually wanted to go really, really far from home. So I chose this little town in the southern region of Costa Rica which borders with Panama which is called San Vito de Coto Brus. San Vito de Coto Brus became basically my home in the future.

And what I encountered there was work with indigenous populations and with migrant populations. And sometimes those two overlap. Sometimes there is indigenous migrant populations. Being there and having really good mentorship from a person who I still keep a close to my circle of friends, which is Dr. Paolo Ortiz, who had worked 30 plus years in the region really led to an expansion of the understanding of health.

I went from understanding health from being it a lack of disease. And when you're studying a health profession, you're actually studying to become a disease expert. And that is the case for most curriculums around the world when you're studying a health profession. You're actually studying disease, not health.

So going to this place and working with someone that has a human rights perspective, a social justice perspective, and a health determinants perspective, you understand that health is much more than just lack of or the absence of disease. So it really opened up my understanding of what is health and also my understanding on how to work effectively with communities. Something I had never learned through my six year medical career was how to actually encounter, and talk, and work with communities. I was always I was always taught to work very, vertically. And in this experience I really, really got the opportunity to work horizontally with community leaders and other institutions that were in place.

One of the other things that really changed during that period of time was the fact that I had never encountered critical literature, what I call critical literature. I will encounter mainstream medical texts and this is how you do things, and this is the theory, and this is where it come from. And that's also a very from the global North perspective. I started reading a lot around Latin American authors that had critical perspectives on not just history and development in general, but also about health and interculturality among others.

I think those combinations of factors really opened my brain up. And my first decision back then was to actually postpone going into a residency program and becoming a specialist to actually explore what it meant to be a community health worker, what it meant to work as a health professional in the community for a couple of years. And during those two years that I had taken off to work in the community setting, it actually just veered my career completely and started working in public health. Eventually led into grad school again and the rest of the story is that I don't do any medicine formally for the last six years now. And I basically work in public health, global health, and the intersection of those things with a higher education.

ERIN HAGAR: Well it's certainly not an understatement to say that that experience moving to that rural location, working with that community really set your life on a different trajectory. And there's two things that I'd like to follow up on and the first goes back to some phrases you used. I wondered if you could explain what you mean by them a little bit. You talked about the difference between vertical and horizontal engagement. And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit how you interpret that in medicine and what do you think it might mean for education as well.

CARLOS FAERRON GUZMÁN: Sure. So I'm borrowing these terms from the development field. And for anyone out there listening asking what is included in the development field I would say any work that someone is doing that is trying to change something for good is development. You might think of everything that people that work in infrastructure building to actually education and health and human rights. If they're working to change something for good, then they're working in development.

And then the importance there is that good needs to incorporate what the people that are benefiting from this work consider good. And that's a little bit of one of the principles of horizontality is actually including the people that you're working with in not just the outcomes, and what do you think is a good outcome, but actually in how do we get there. How do we evaluate these outcomes? Who is included in the work? Who takes the decisions? Who manages the accountability? All those things are considered when we think about what is vertical.

Vertical would be a very top down approach, where there's a very hierarchical power structure. There isn't a lot of transparency around accountability. The power, the decisions are made somewhere far away from the place where work is being done. And horizontally is very much about integrating those people that you're working with or those communities that you're working with in those processes. So horizontal versus vertical is what I'm meaning. It's also called top down or bottom up approach.

Then how do we incorporate this into education? Well the principles still remain. And unfortunately, university and institutional structure don't always allow for those things to happen. Sometimes you'll have to stick to a specific format on how you want to build the course that is recommended by your institution. But in reality is that in development there's this mantra that I evangelize people around, which is nothing about me without me.

And when you're thinking about learning, nothing about me without me includes the student. So the student and the student perspective should be included in the design process. And again, if you're an educator out there listening to this you're thinking, well, how am I going to do that? How am I going to include student in a design process if he or she's not even enrolled in my class before I start designing it? And that's where what I mean by then institutional structures don't allow us to be as effective as possible as we want to when we're designing courses for students.

So meeting students at where they're is one thing that is key. The learning process is not the same allowing for those diverse learning processes is very important. Allowing for a method to evaluate student outcomes that take into consideration the student capacities is something really important and also.

And again, if you're out there listening it's like, this sounds very burdensome. And the learning process sometimes is burdensome if you want to tailor it, and you want to make this a worthwhile experience for those students and actually shift and transform perspectives and values and attitudes. It's not just about that knowledge transfer, it goes beyond that. Those are some of the thoughts I had around vertical, horizontal and how you do that.

ERIN HAGAR: Yeah. It sounds as you're talking the word that comes to my mind is really the idea of empowerment. We're empowering the communities that you're working with and for on the community health side, but also empowering your students to really take ownership of where that educational process is going for them, where it's leading them, what it's connecting them to.

CARLOS FAERRON GUZMÁN: Yes, indeed. It's about empowering, but it's also about recognizing their agency in the learning process. It's also recognizing their expertise that they bring based on their experience. They're also knowledge holders of other types of knowledge maybe not the that content based, but they're definitely owners, and have experiences that they can build on and learn on, and they can share with their peers. So it's definitely about promoting that agency and, as you say, empowering them to take control of their learning process.

ERIN HAGAR: Yeah. Given the way that our educational system and our university system work here where we pride expertise in one's discipline. A PhD is really a testament to expertise in one area of research. And I think sometimes faculty can feel uncomfortable with the idea of maybe not being in a position to share all the expertise that they have and turning that over a little bit to the students.

Have you ever experienced that? Have you encountered that? Either in the health setting or in the education setting? And what do you recommend for faculty to ways that they might become more comfortable with making their courses a little more horizontal, a little more democratic?

CARLOS FAERRON GUZMÁN: Well let the burden of the teaching fall a little bit into the students I would say. It's their also their responsibility, and you want them to take that responsibility. It's not just about giving handouts, it's about as you were saying providing that agency to students to feel that they can build and create.

So I would say if you let go a little bit, if you allow spaces for conversation instead of just professors speaking to student, open up spaces for dialogue to happen not just among you and students, but among the students themselves. That is a really easy way to get conversation going and to take the burden off yourself as an educator and hope, let's say a two hour class can become a dialogue. It can become a conversation. It doesn't have to be content heavy and top-heavy. It can be really, really relaxing.

I remember with great esteem the first time I encountered a classroom like this one. And it was in Scotland in which I was preparing for a very top down, theory based social justice class. And the first class the professor introduced himself and he just presented a picture of a scene in Italy of the city, just the city of Milan, I think it was. And it was just a picture of the city.

And there were some situations happening in the picture. And we just talked about the picture for two years and extracted what we had learned from the theory that he had left us to read. And then we just talked about the picture and how that related to the theory.

And I thought that was much better than having him speak to me. Oh, this person invented this theory, and this person contraposed this other theory, and these are the basics of this theory. But we actually applied them in the classroom.

I remember that very vividly because that wasn't 'til my masters. I had already finished my medical degree and no one had ever taught in that way. It was always content top down, six years of this. Six years of content top down. And the first time I encountered someone saying, look, there's another way of teaching it was amazing. So allow yourself to just let go of the power in teaching and you'll see how enriched your students and the learning experience will become.

ERIN HAGAR: Yeah. You mentioned earlier the role of your mentor during your experience in the rural community and it seems as though the role of the mentor in this approach to education is going to be not just a special relationship, but something very important to the structure of this kind of education. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your mentor, about how he approached training you, developing you in this new space you were in.

CARLOS FAERRON GUZMÁN: Sure. I must say that I as now being a mentor myself, I recognize some of the things he did back then. And then some of the things I also want to step away from. And he was at the end of his career. He was ready really soon to become an pensioneer and retire when I encountered him in my last year of medicine.

But I think because of that, he was really skeptical of some things that were happening and so he taught me how to see things through skeptical eyes. And that kind of biased me to also be very skeptical. I think I'm trying to stay away from that and trying to impose skeptical views in students. I think if they want to be skeptical, I'll just allow them to be skeptical by themselves and through their own critical thinking process. So that's one thing.

And then the other thing is that he was really hands off. And again, he was at the end of his career and he was really hands off. He literally said I would come home sometimes and have coffee with him and I would ask all these questions. Why is this happening? Why can't we do this? Why can't we do that? What's the reason why these things are continuously happening wrong?

And he wouldn't give me an answer. He would just point to a book. He's like I'm going to send you an email, just read that, or go to my library. Take this book. So very hands off.

But that learning process, I mean, I was an eager learner. I was super going through this very reconstructive phase of my life. I was about to graduate. I didn't know what to do with my next steps. So I was really an open sponge to all of those things.

And again, I recognize that not everyone will be able to have a successful learning process in that way with a very hands off approach. There's some students that are going to need a little bit more of reinforcement. And I've encountered students that actually benefit a lot from that. And so that would be one thing.

And the other thing would be about learning about mistakes. And because he was really hands off I really learned from my mistakes. But looking back, some of those mistakes actually cost the health of a community, or because I took a wrong approach. I delayed a process that could have been quicker, that could've been beneficial for a community. Or I might have threw up a process of design which didn't include a community voice. Then I had to go back and redesign that in the future. And that was research of an institution.

So all those things, I think, have unintended consequences and learning from their mistakes was something that I would have preferred someone told me up front. But again, hands off learning or mentoring really didn't get me to that point until further down. But that's something that when working with people in communities I think learning from mistakes is not something that should be part of how you design your mentoring students early on.

There should be an intervention from a mentor that says, wait, you might make a mistake here, consider this, consider that. And not allowing the course to just run itself and run the mistake, and then having to come back. I would say I've stepped away from a little bit from that.

ERIN HAGAR: It sounds like the stakes are too high for that kind of mistake based learning, as important as that can be. So one of the things your center does is to place students who are coming to Costa Rica from all over the world into practical experiential learning opportunities in global health, which I would imagine involves engaging with local organizations, communities community organizations. What kinds of things are involved in designing this type of education and what do you think classroom teachers can take from it to improve their classroom based instruction?

CARLOS FAERRON GUZMÁN: The components of what that looks like are very similar if you're doing a field course or if you're doing a more practicum based experience. And because we work with mostly health professions, these practical based or practicum based experience a lot of times do require community interface.

So because of that, you're going to want to include the community perspectives in the design process of that experience, of that learning experience. And when I talk about community perspective, I also am including being able to map appropriately their assets, and their challenges.

And this is one of the approaches that we take which is we go beyond just identifying challenges and then filling the gap. Which is what a lot of institutions do. They're identifying a challenge and they try to fill that gap. We go beyond that approach and look at the assets that the community has in order to be able to include them in the learning process. Because that is one of the key learning outcomes is being able to transfer that ability to students in order to have them identify what assets are.

Allowing that to happen including community perspectives. But also including what the student desires to learn, what they want to learn, and what they're able to do also. A lot of the times we get requests from universities that want their students to do xyz. And when we go back and interview the students, we noticed that they don't have abilities to do xyz.

And this goes back a little bit to my previous comment on your question, which was related to learning from mistakes. There are certain things that are acceptable to learn from mistakes, but there are certain things that aren't. Especially when you're spending communities times and resources in that learning process.

You have to be very careful that the actual end product of the learning process, if it's a practicum-based experience, that that end product can be utilized. And it's not something that is faulty, and then when applied or when used is going to lead to a detriment to the health of the community. So you can't allow those things.

So meeting the students at where their capacities are is incredibly important. Working with communities and not allowing them to just build their skills because the stakes are high as you were saying. On the other hand of that equation is the health of the community. So those are things to consider when you're working with communities for sure.

So how do we transfer some of these experiences or some of the things we do in these more experiential basic learning experiences into the classroom? I would say one of the most important things that we try to do with our students, whether it's a field course or practicum based experience, is have a continuous process of reflection and a praxis. What I mean by that is we constantly open up the opportunities for them to have dialogue amongst themselves about what's going on, what they're learning, what their challenges are, but also with the mentors, with the preceptors.

By opening up all those spaces, we also can monitor how the student is advancing, where are areas that need to be strengthened, and how can we then move forward in the learning process. Because these are not short. These are usually four, six, eight week processes. And reflection can happen anywhere. Reflection can happen in a classroom based setting or in an experiential based setting. And it's as important in both.

And again, having students do that taking the time and opening up the necessary spaces in your classroom, be it abroad or locally, is incredibly important for the learning process to be successful. I would say that with one thing classroom based educators can do easily. Be it via forum, via a chat, via a conversation, a group breakout etc. So a lot of opportunities can arise from it.

ERIN HAGAR: Yeah. That's wonderful advice and when you think about the context of health professions education where there's the clinic experience, and then there's also the classroom experience. You really have to be intentional, it seems, about building opportunities for reflection in there to really help students cement that knowledge, that experience, to track their progress. But it sounds like being intentional about that reflective process is very important for faculty to consider.

CARLOS FAERRON GUZMÁN: Indeed. And I would encourage educators that are out there looking at incorporating reflection to actually look at different frameworks of reflection. It's not just about asking, oh, how did you feel? There's much more to the how you frame the question, how you get to that how do you feel question, or what did you learn question. Before that there's a process that needs to be planned. It can be flexible, but there needs to be planning. And as you said, you need to be intentional about your reflections.

And I do think that a lot of the times I've seen people say, oh, I do reflection. It's mostly superficial and it requires preparation on both sides. And so it's not as easy as it sounds. It takes time to master, I think, for the student and for the educator. So it's a process in which an initial reflection from a student might be actually superficial, and then you can actually take that as an opportunity to do a formative assessment for the student in that initial reflection.

Be very transparent. What are you looking for? I'm looking beyond just what did you experience, I'm looking trying you tell me why do you think you experienced it that way. Why do you think you saw that in that particular way? Why do you think this is wrong and why do you think this is right?

Because you said, oh, they were doing this quote unquote "weird" or "different" thing. Where do you think that different perspective comes from? So being very transparent about those processes with learner is incredibly important because then they get into that groove on how you want them to be thinking about reflection and how reflection should happen.

ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, this sounds like a very interesting opportunity to explore more in the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning ways to structure reflection, facilitate it, provide feedback on it, that seems something that's very important. I work a lot with folks who are doing service learning and as part of their traditional class experience and the everything about the growth and knowledge gained from service learning really comes down to reflection. So it's so true that structuring it well is really important.

Going back to your biography a little bit. You, either as a student or an educator, you've experienced educational systems in Costa Rica, Scotland, the Netherlands, the US, there may be more. And I'm just wondering what you have learned about education or yourself as an educator through this experience, through seeing these different approaches to education.

CARLOS FAERRON GUZMÁN: Well as a learner I think I stopped seeing big names in university titles and it's not about the level of expertise that the educator, or the facilitator, or the professor has. It's how good of an educator are they. So I think I've been able to kind of dissociate as a learner from big names and appreciate more teaching styles and ways of learning.

By that I mean, we have the classic example about the extra successful, super published professor who is basically a very vertical, top down educator. And the experience might be very bland to students. And then you have people at smaller universities that are incredibly dynamic and have support from a great educator support system such as centers for teaching that there are spread out throughout different universities and university systems. So I would say as a learner I've learned to step away from the big names and the flashiness of those big names and look more for the quality of the learning experience.

As an educator, I try to follow that also. And try to make my classroom as dynamic as possible. And as we were saying earlier, it's horizontal or the other term that sometimes we use is democratic. And trying to involve student perspectives. I would say stay away from big names if what you're looking is try to find quality, sometimes you'll find quality in big names of course, but those things don't always match.

And then the other thing I've learned as a student and as a learner is that actually small classrooms are really, really unique. There's a balance there on how small is small, and how big is big. And it's going to depend on group dynamics, peer to peer learning, the level of those students.

But once you get that fine tuning right and you manage to create the necessary breakout groups and have different perspectives involved from the different students in the classroom, I would say a smaller classroom is preferred from a large classroom. Which is in dissonance with a lot of the higher education models, which is how do we get more students into a classroom and not less students into a classroom.

I do actually push back a lot on that when someone asks me, well I'm going to send the group of 25 students to your center. And I usually say, well, no. We usually have a policy of if it's a lower level, a class will allow something like 15, 16 students. If it's a higher level, like a grad student, will actually want smaller classroom sizes because the farther you go in your education process you're probably going to have more to share, more to say, more to actually learn from each other. So we do want that to be a key component.

And if you have 25 people speaking in a two hour period, you're not going to get anywhere. Instead if you have half that amount with the limited time that you have, and this is one of the most important things that we have, is we have limited time with students. They go do other things, you want to keep them forever, but they go do other things. So in that limited time it's important to get their perspectives. So small is good.

Those two things, I would say, is added to the other things I've said in the past I think are useful to consider. And again, sometimes institutional structures work against us in that way.

ERIN HAGAR: Yeah. But what I hear in your comments there is being very mindful about the form and the function of the educational experience and making sure that those are in alignment. Because your approach is so democratic, is so horizontal, then you need to be mindful of how many bodies are in that space, who can take advantage of that. I think if you were coming at it maybe from a different mindset, those same considerations may not bubble up to the top of the concerns. So it really seems as though your mindset, your approach both to health care and education with such a social justice, equity lens really informs everything about the decisions you make as an educator.

CARLOS FAERRON GUZMÁN: Indeed. Indeed. I mean that's spot on. Thanks for summarizing it that way.

ERIN HAGAR: It's impressive, and it's inspiring. This is such a great opportunity for our audience just to hear new approaches and new ways of coming at this educational experience that may be very aligned with how they approach health care, but may not they may not translate that necessarily to the classroom. So it's exciting to hear.

What about your teaching, how has your teaching changed over time? If you could go back and talk to past Carlos and tell him something from future Carlos, what might you go back and say to yourself as an educator?

CARLOS FAERRON GUZMÁN: I think a lot of things I would say like, get a different haircut and stuff like that. But I would say, similar to what I was saying earlier, I would say let go a little bit. I remember my first teaching role, I was incredibly nervous to appear as the content expert. So I had to spend all this time trying to prove students that I was the content expert. And I did have a lot of imposter-- not a little, a lot of imposter syndrome as I was actually quite young when I got my first teaching role.

I did know I wanted to go into teaching early on in my career, but I didn't actually get into teaching. After I graduated of course, I could have done some opportunities as a TA or as a learner of educators in my University. But again, as a med student, you rarely have the opportunity to have spare time to do more learning than what you're already trying to memorize. Because that's what you do in med school, you try to memorize a lot of things.

And so because I've had this imposter syndrome I really really, really, really spent a lot of time thinking more about what I was supposed to teach and not how am I supposed to teach. So I would say I would go back and say, let go a little bit. Allow the students to talk amongst themselves. You don't have to prove to them you are the expert. You're already in front of a classroom and they have a lot of valuable experiences to share with you so allow that to happen.

I would say I would also do a little bit less heavy on the reading for them. I would ground them and say, three readings for tomorrow, and then three more big readings for the next day. But by doing that, I was actually not allowing them to soak up the experience. So instead of three long readings, now I would do one reading and then some maybe some journal reflecting. And that's your job in the afternoon is one reading and then a little bit reflecting on a journal. Because if you have them do three big readings, then they won't be able to think about anything else than trying to read.

So I would say again, go back Carlos, let go a little bit. Let go of the power that you think you have in the classroom and democratize a little bit more a horizontal lines a, little bit more your classroom.

ERIN HAGAR: That's great. It takes a lot of confidence, and also vulnerability, to come to that place I think. Because you have to be confident that, like you said, you're not an impostor, you're there for a reason. And you don't have to prove anything. The number of readings does not equate to the amount of knowledge that can be instilled necessarily. It's a matter of facilitation and drawing that out of the students. It's not just about shoving it in, it's about drawing it out it sounds like.

CARLOS FAERRON GUZMÁN: Indeed. Indeed. That's the way I like to see it right now.

ERIN HAGAR: Is there's something, Carlos, that's on the horizon in global education a new approach, a new philosophy a new strategy new technology, really anything that you're seeing coming in the future that you think can move the needle. To go back to our show's title. Something that can really move the needle in global education that we should know about?

CARLOS FAERRON GUZMÁN: Yes, that's a good question actually. What excites me is that there's this emerging movement of recognizing interconnection in everything. And I work a lot in a planetary health education, which combines environmental health, global health, political sciences, economy, among others, and trying to understand how what we're doing to the environment, what we're doing to our natural system is actually coming back to hurt us and in detriment to our health. So we try to understand those connections between health and the environment, but also try to create and imagine solutions for these challenges ahead of us.

I think the COVID pandemic has really hit the nail on the head when we say interconnection. Not just interconnection with nature, but interconnection with everything. Global systems, economic systems, pharmaceuticals, science, travel, etc. Trade. It just comes to really demonstrate how interconnected our world is.

And in the recognition of that interconnection, and putting the interconnection at the core of a learning process, be it whatever you're doing. You suddenly start recognizing that then there's other things, other moral imperative, other ethical frameworks, other ways of learning that you should be incorporating in the learning process.

For example, we're using this word this framework that we're borrowing from the ecological sciences, which is interconnection within nature. So it's about recognizing your place in nature, your interconnections with different beings, species, trees, water, both live and non live objects of this earth. And how the recognition that you're part of that, when you are able to design a learning process in which a person is able to strengthen that interconnection, their behavior, their attitudes, their values are likely going to be different.

So what happens after that is you have maybe a businessperson who suddenly isn't thinking of damaging the environment and the bottom line. What you have is an engineer that might be doing things and finding solutions for global challenges. What you have is a doctor or a nurse who is not dissociated from what's happening in their community and their local environment, but they're actually very aware of it. So that the concept of interconnection within nature can actually take us a long way.

And I remember having a conversation with a brilliant Italian who works in future studies, and she's a futurologist. I would of summarize it like that. And I asked her about this education process that she was creating and she told me the first thing in any learning process is you have to care about what you're learning and you have to care on why you're learning. You can't just go into a learning process without caring. And I think that's important. And we've left that out of the higher education system. We've left that caring component.

And she used another expression that I won't use in this case because it includes a swear word, but she said, first you've gotta, fill in the blank. So that caring component. That caring component is incredibly important. And as institutions we've forgotten that that is incredibly important.

And then comes the next question then is how do we design learning processes that actually then lead students to care? Not just sympathy, and going beyond empathy is compassion. Is that ability to act, is that, not just the ability, but the desire to actually change things. So thinking about that, those big questions, really excite me on how we might move the needle forward as your show is called. And how we might redesign how institutions do things transversely. Starting with care, I think, is incredibly important.

ERIN HAGAR: Yeah. And I honestly believe. I don't think this will be a heavy lift on the part of the students because I've been doing a lot of reading about how on the student side they are desperate to care. They are desperate to see the relevance of why am I taking this particular class in this semester of my university, and how does it connect, and even if I don't know what I want to do with my life what is the why behind this? And I don't think that that will fall on deaf ears.

When we figure out a way to communicate that caring to our students, I think they will be very, very hungry for that. And be very receptive to that philosophy because they are also looking to make meaning.

CARLOS FAERRON GUZMÁN: I completely agree. I completely agree. I mean I feel that this a lot has been actually pushed by students. So I'm really excited to actually work with very good student communities that are wanting to see more of this in higher education.

ERIN HAGAR: Yeah. It's so exciting. What a fascinating conversation. I could do this all day. Carlos, Thank you, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk with us about these big ideas.

CARLOS FAERRON GUZMÁN: It's my pleasure. It's been really good to be able to throw these ideas out there.

ERIN HAGAR: Thank you for joining us today on Moving the Needle. Visit us at UMaryland.edu/fctl to hear additional episodes, leave us feedback, or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

 

[00:00:00.09] ERIN HAGAR: Welcome to Moving the Needle, casual conversations about ways, big and small, to impact student learning, brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Erin HAGAR. Let's move the needle.

[00:00:18.75] Welcome, everyone. And thanks for joining us today. We're very excited about this episode. In a show about teaching and learning, we want to be very intentional about giving space to student voices as well as faculty voices. Students, of course, are equal partners in this process, and they have very important insights to share with us as you'll hear today.

[00:00:37.77] This episode features three graduate students from different programs within the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Aishwarya Iyer, who also goes by Aishu, is a third year MD PhD student conducting her thesis work in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. She did her undergraduate work at UMBC, where she was also a Division I tennis player. Here at UMB, she is involved in student government and serves on the university's Sustainability Committee.

[00:01:08.13] Our second guest, Chris Goodis, is a second year PhD student in the pharmaceutical sciences department, where he's studying small molecule therapeutics for a variety of cancers. Chris did his undergraduate work in his home state of Michigan. Here, he serves as the USGA representative of the Queer Student Alliance, helping different LGBTQIA+ groups on campus come together and grow an environment of exclusivity.

[00:01:35.79] And Jeff Lee is studying to become a physician assistant here at the university. He's in his first year of PA school, where he serves as president of the class of 2022. A College Park grad, Jeff took some time off to pursue his passion for music, which he still enjoys before being called back into the world of health care. Jeff Chris and Aishu, welcome to Moving the Needle.

[00:01:58.59] JEFF LEE: Thanks so much for having us.

[00:02:01.41] ERIN HAGAR: Really, what we'd like to start with is exploring the teaching strategies and approaches-- you're each in different kinds of programs, balancing research and didactic learning and clinical learning. And we'd really love to just get a sense of what teaching strategies you've noticed since you've been in graduate school that really work for you, that resonate with you. What have you learned about yourself as a learner in your graduate studies? Aishu, why don't we start with you?

[00:02:31.74] AISHWARYA IYER: So in terms of strategies, I really appreciate that I think faculty know that different students learn differently. And one thing I really appreciated in med school is that all the lectures were recorded. And so professors speak at different paces and at different rates.

[00:02:50.64] And with recordings, you can speed up or slow down a lecture, and you can watch it multiple times. And there's just-- it really helps because that's not something that I had in undergrad. And that's something I'm noticing now in graduate school that like a lot of-- because it's online, a lot of the professors are recording their lectures. And I don't know if that was something that happened pre-COVID, but it's really helpful in studying for exams, and I hope that's something that they take forward.

[00:03:17.80] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah. Yeah, thanks for sharing that. Having that flexibility to receive the information at a pace that works for you, and so you're not missing something just because you might have literally missed hearing it while you were thinking about some-- thinking about what you had just heard. That's great. Jeff, how about you? What are some teaching and learning strategies that you've learned through your undergraduate or your time in PA school, strategies that faculty employ that really work for you?

[00:03:47.06] JEFF LEE: Yeah, so one thing that I really appreciate the faculty does is there's so-- they're like 100% behind you, so like, the ratio of faculty to students, it's almost a one to one in essence, because they're just-- you can reach out to them, like, any hour of the time-- any hour of the day. Professor Newman, one of my professors, she-- I know she works, like, 24/7.

[00:04:10.67] And anytime I email her, she can instantly email me back with a question, any questions I have. And she just answers right away. And any students who are struggling any way, they do-- they'll set up meetings. And so it's very personal. And so-- I mean, pretty much, it's like no student left behind kind of thing, where yeah. So they just make sure that they give you all the resources possible to succeed.

[00:04:38.64] ERIN HAGAR: Oh, that's wonderful. There's a growing field of research in education around the social, emotional side of learning. And it sounds like feeling supported and knowing that your faculty really have your back and are on your team rooting for you really makes a big difference for you. That's great. Chris, how about you? What are some teaching and learning strategies that you notice? You have a little bit less of the clinical focus, but more in the research side and the academic side. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

[00:05:11.06] CHRIS GOODIS: The way I would explain this is like, if you remember back in undergrad, when they would give you those post-class surveys or those course evaluations, and you fill them out. And then let's say your freshman year, you fill out a bunch of surveys. And then senior year, you talk to the freshmen. You're like, oh, did they change this, this, or that?

[00:05:30.17] And they're like, no, they just-- everything's completely the same as it was four years ago. I find that in graduate school, the, like, inertia, let's say, is a lot less. So for example, last year when I was taking the courses that now a new first year is taking, it was completely different. Even though they kept the same structure of like exam, exam, exam through online, now they're doing less exams, more like essay questions, more like collaborative stuff.

[00:06:02.37] And I would just say on the research side, definitely, 100%, you need an advisor that's like behind you and want you to succeed because-- and you just need-- that's kind of the onus on the student somewhat, where you need to find someone who's on your wavelength, basically. I need someone who's in the lab all the time or is open to questions and always help me with reactions. So that's why I joined the lab I'm in now, Dr. Fletcher's lab because he's always in lab, will always answer my questions, and will always talk about chemistry with me.

[00:06:35.47] ERIN HAGAR: So this has obviously been a very unprecedented year with COVID impacting everything in our society. But academics are certainly at the top of the list. I was wondering if you could share your experiences about how COVID has impacted your studies and tell us a little bit about how your faculty have adapted and what you think of those adaptations. Aishu, do you want to talk to us about that?

[00:07:01.72] AISHWARYA IYER: Sure, so studying-wise, nothing actually really changed because I was in my second year of medical school when COVID hit and because during medical school, I think Chris pointed this out, like you're just studying full time. And so that's what I was just doing I was just-- instead of studying at the library or at the Campus Center, I was just studying at home.

[00:07:24.33] And I was actually very, very impressed on how quickly our school was able to adapt with our Office of Medical Education And our Office of Student Affairs had great communication between the students. I know they were meeting constantly. I remember that week, we had an exam.

[00:07:43.50] And within a matter of a day or two, it was quickly transitioned to like, we take it at home with the honor code. Classes were immediately transitioned virtually on Zoom. We had our tech department on call every single day if any technical difficulties happened.

[00:08:01.77] However, our clinical experiences, seeing standardized patients, seeing actual patients, were canceled, rightfully so, due to safety issues. And then we also-- after second year medical school, you have your first USMLE licensing board exam. And it was postponed by a few months because they canceled 50% of students exams because of space. You want a reduced capacity of those centers by 50%.

[00:08:32.04] And so that was postponed by a few months. So my research rotation after was postponed by a few months. So it was a little disheartening because I felt like I was a little bit behind. But then I had to remember, this is-- COVID is a huge issue. It's a huge health care issue. And things will work out, and safety is of the utmost importance. So you got to-- you got to live and learn and adapt.

[00:08:57.25] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, absolutely. But it sounds like your faculty were able to do that in a way that, other than the logistics and the timing of things. But as far as keeping up with the program, it sounds like you were able to do that.

[00:09:11.19] AISHWARYA IYER: Yeah, no, they were-- I was just so very impressed because I think they did a better job than I think a lot of the other schools were handling it at the time. And the faculty put together a COVID course to help us as future physicians learn more about what's happening, whether it's the emergency responses or COVID on the basic science level and the virus and everything like that. So I thought that was pretty amazing.

[00:09:41.95] ERIN HAGAR: That is amazing because there isn't a deep pool of knowledge yet about COVID to pull from. So that adaptability, not just in terms of creating a new course and creating new content, but content that is still evolving and changing what we know about it every single day. But what dedication that shows on the part of your faculty to do that for you guys.

[00:10:04.63] Chris, how about you? On the research-- with the research curriculum, how did COVID impact what you were doing? And how did your faculty adapt?

[00:10:13.86] CHRIS GOODIS: I give a lot of kudos to my department, the PSE department. Because of how grad school and PhDs are structured, at least in our department, you need to pass a defense after you're kind of in the middle of your second year, start of your third year. And then you needed to defend your thesis, obviously, to get your PhD.

[00:10:32.73] And I had a friend who had his PhD defense, his thesis defense scheduled for March, mid-March, when everything was shut down. And he still had everything set up for online because our department had a good grasp on Webex. And he was able to get his PhD and leave his apartment, get a job, move, all within the first few weeks of lockdown, like end of March.

[00:10:59.61] So it was really like-- I didn't really recognize that until Aisha was talking about it. But like the responsiveness of the faculty and kind of the focus of like, we have a dedication of the students to keep them on schedule and not just eh, your defense, your PhD's kind of up in the air. So because of that-- my defense is coming up as a second year-- so I don't feel as stressed.

[00:11:29.37] There's already the stress of trying to defend, but there's no added stress because I'm not freaking out about, oh, is it actually going to happen on the date they say or the date I set? So it's a real-- it's a real accomplishment, I think, for a lot of faculty to keep everyone on track, not only in my department, but other schools as well.

[00:11:49.78] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, absolutely. We talk a lot in education about this concept of cognitive load, kind of how much people can have on their minds at any given time. And the stress of COVID and the stress of every routine we have in our life being disrupted and also the stress of worrying whether your academic plans are on schedule, on track, going to be delayed because of this, it all adds to people's load.

[00:12:15.60] And the fact that your faculty recognized that and responded to it by doing everything they could to keep things on track as best they could, that's a real testament. So what is something you wish faculty understood a bit better about the student experience or the student side of the teaching and learning equation? If there was something that would help you as a learner for your faculty to do, what might that be?

[00:12:45.18] AISHWARYA IYER: We give our feedback very intentionally and with the hopes that they implement it. And so I find that in a lot of cases, they actually do. And it changes every year. They're making the curriculum better, they're making their course better, they're listening to our feedback.

[00:13:00.39] But then there are some cases where I'm not really sure if this is going to do anything and if the course is actually going to change, and they're going to take our feedback. And so I want faculty to know that when we give feedback, we're being very honest, and we're trying to do it so that students later on are given either more up-to-date material or just improved in the way that the lecture's being formatted or the way the classes run. And we hope that they take that very seriously.

[00:13:37.31] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah. Yeah, no, that's really important. That feedback is such a two-way street. You know, it's such an important part of that teaching and learning process. And it's so important for all of us to remember that we're all growing and learning and changing and adapting to new teaching scenarios.

[00:13:56.22] So yeah, being willing to see that feedback and to consider it, yeah, that's really important. And it's great that you've seen that in action also. Chris, how about you? What are some things that might be helpful for faculty to know about the student side of things?

[00:14:13.54] CHRIS GOODIS: One thing that I noticed worked really well is actually the course manager role in classes. So you have students in their priorities, and you have faculty in their priorities. And it's not enough to just say, well, students are busy, so faculty should be more on how students are engaging with their material because you also need to realize the faculty are also busy.

[00:14:34.13] So there needs to be sort of a role, and in this case, we have course managers, which essentially kind of join the priorities of both students and faculty in order that faculty have the resources, students are on time, and the software is working. And also the student's priority is that the faculty are on time, all the resources they need to learn are there, and that if they have any questions or any other needs that they kind of default to the course manager.

[00:15:06.02] ERIN HAGAR: No, that's absolutely true. I think there is so much to teaching and learning on both sides that recognizing that there is a role for support on all of that-- there's a-- my title is actually instructional designer. And we provide that support for faculty when they're transitioning to an online space because there's a lot of new things about teaching and learning in an online environment.

[00:15:31.07] But I think it just highlights the need that it's a lot for one person to do, while also managing their research agenda and their administrative responsibilities and all the things that they have going on. So there's room for support, definitely, in this space. Jeff, in the PA program, you're in your didactic year. So your classroom experience was really disrupted by COVID, like everybody's. But can you talk a little bit about what had to change in how your faculty adapted?

[00:16:06.10] JEFF LEE: Yes, so I was never pre-COVID for the program. So when I jumped in, it was already COVID. So I won't be able to speak to pre-COVID, but during COVID, I mean, it's definitely-- the dynamics is very different than I would like. So I mean, as with anybody, We need that in person, human interaction and being able to read body language.

[00:16:35.25] And like, on Zoom, you can't do that, first of all. It's so hard. I mean, sure, you see the person. But when you have like 40 people in a Zoom, you don't see everybody. And it's hard for the professors too. I mean, they can't read the room as well.

[00:16:52.85] And also, being in person, it's easier to interject and be like, oh, I have a question. And the professor's able to see that. On Zoom, I feel very stifled. And so it's like, I want to ask so many questions. I want to like, answer all these questions they're saying. But I'm like busy typing. And then I have to go over to Zoom and unmute myself.

[00:17:14.99] And just literally that two-second delay is enough to have such cognitive dissonance and kind of like that uncanny valley. I mean, that's not the definition of the uncanny valley, but like kind, of that thing. It's just so unnatural. So I mean, we're doing the best we can with it.

[00:17:33.97] I mean, it kind of is what it is. And that's how I've always viewed it. But I mean, the faculty, in terms of how they are adapting though, sometimes with medical, you need to be in person to do physical exams, to do any kind of physical skills. And so the first semester, the summer semester last year, it was purely virtual.

[00:17:56.17] And so we had to learn how to do a physical exam virtually, which was-- I mean, as you can imagine, that doesn't make much sense. And so we did it on teddy bears and on friends and family that were, like, close to us. And so that helped to have friends and family.

[00:18:15.55] But even with COVID, I mean, you're still scared. And doing a Teddy bear is not ideal. They don't have organs like we do. But then I did notice that as the faculty got more leniency from UMB themselves. They were able to incorporate more in person. So the following semester, the fall semester, that one, we went in, like, once a week.

[00:18:41.02] And then this semester, the spring semester, we are going in twice a week. And so it seems like they are-- they're trying to push it as much as they can per COVID regulations. And it's definitely helped a lot now that we are in person and are able to practice on each other because that's-- ideally, that's how the program works is that you practice the physical exam on each other, like the students.

[00:19:04.63] And yeah, and so I mean, I think they are adapting as much as they can. And they're trying to give us as many resources. I mean, again, they reach out-- I mean, we can reach out to them any time outside of the class. And so they're doing their best. But I think it's just a learning curve for everybody.

[00:19:23.86] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah. Chris or Aishu, do you have anything to add to that, anything you think might stick around?

[00:19:30.13] CHRIS GOODIS: What Jeff was talking about with kind of the literacy of online programs has just gone up exponentially. I don't think-- well, I don't know why any teacher would want to have physical office hours anymore. If I'm a professor and my office hours are at the end of the day, I'm just going to say, hey, hit me up on Webex from 4:00 to 5:00 while I'm home.

[00:19:55.90] Like, I think that's a real-- and it's a positive, but I think it's also looking in the future however many years until we get back to normalcy. I think it's-- and it still needs to be a balance. I would definitely still take in-person classes over only online if I had the choice, but it's always a good thing for people to be more literate with computers, I think.

[00:20:24.01] ERIN HAGAR: Aishu, what do you think?

[00:20:27.06] AISHWARYA IYER: Yeah, I think-- I definitely agree with both Chris and Jeff that a lot of the Zoom and online platforms are going to persist, especially with meetings. I'm curious with attendance and things like that, if someone is unable to make it to class, there will also via Zoom link that people can just join in so you might have like a hybrid. Some people in person, some people not able to make it can just be there virtually.

[00:20:59.50] I'm really curious in terms of the clinical side. So I'm now in the graduate school, so I'm not really sure what's going on. But I'm curious if telehealth and a lot of the telemed virtual appointments are going to stay, especially with people who might not be able to make it to their doctor's appointments physically and if that's something that's going to be incorporated into medical education and preclinical and clinical years, in addition to in person because in my opinion, you can't really replace the in-person physician or any health care professional appointments because that's so important.

[00:21:42.85] You need to be able to do a physical exam because that's how you diagnose and treat patients. And you need to be able to have that human contact and talk to them because that human connection is so important in developing a rapport and a relationship with all your patients. So I'm really curious on that front, how telemed and telehealth are going to find a balance with the in-person, especially with that incorporation into education.

[00:22:07.05] ERIN HAGAR: Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. I know that in clinical education, finding clinical sites and placements for students is always a challenge. And telehealth has really opened that up. And it's also a medical skill. I think that will be affecting your lives going forward.

[00:22:27.07] So in that sense, it makes sense to add that tool to your clinical toolbox. But certainly, it sounds like on both the education side and the medical side, the human contact isn't going anywhere. I think COVID's really reminded us how important that is, how special that is. I'm wondering if any of you have had an opportunity to dip your toes into the field of education yourself, either-- I think Chris mentioned his experience as a TA, or any other kind of teaching, and if that's something that you might see for yourself on the horizon, being involved in medical education, health professions education. Is that something that interests you? Chris, do you want to start?

[00:23:09.03] CHRIS GOODIS: I can definitely see myself in 10 years, if I continue-- when I continue down this path, I can definitely see myself taking on interns or graduate interns and teaching them things about that. I'm more of like a mentor or a coach than I am a teacher. And the one thing that I guess I would say for people who are like-- who are like me is kind of like, I think first and foremost, and this thing also applies with the larger teaching format.

[00:23:42.03] I think respect is kind of the number one thing that you should try to come across-- come off as to your students, no matter what you're doing. Like for example, I have a master student that just joined the lab. And she has basically zero chemistry background. And I was explaining to her all these fundamental things. And I kind of had to stop myself and just say, OK, just to check, I'm not patronizing you, right?

[00:24:06.93] I want to make sure what I'm telling you is actual information and not like, I'm just talking to you like you're a dunce or something. So I think no matter what, that's my one piece of advice. Even though I don't plan on being a professor per se, like in a general sense, where I'm teaching 70-person lectures on the daily, I still think respect is the number one thing.

[00:24:28.99] ERIN HAGAR: Absolutely. And that mentorship is such an important part of anyone's formation. I don't think anyone gets to where we want to be in our career without that mentorship. So we need both. We need that faculty experience and the mentor. And you're right, that sense of respect and mutual respect and awareness of what someone's experience is and factoring that into how you engage with them is so important for any kind of faculty or mentor.

[00:25:00.94] CHRIS GOODIS: Right, just real quick, real quick before we move on, I just-- it's really funny because I'm talking about mentorship and grad school. It's like, when you talk to someone who doesn't have experience with grad school, and I tell them about my position, they get really-- like it gets all, like wow, you work with cancer and stuff like that. But it really is like an apprenticeship, like a trade.

[00:25:21.28] It's like, at a certain point with your profession, you can't just read a book. You need to go up to someone and ask to be mentored and looked after. So I think that's-- I think that's just kind of funny, after like 20, 21 years of reading books, studying, taking tests, it's like, all right, now you're basically an apprenticeship, like I'm in an apprenticeship right now.

[00:25:43.47] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah. Yeah, that's great. Aishu, I saw you nodding your head about the idea of mentorship and apprenticeship and books-- books aren't going to do it forever.

[00:25:52.32] AISHWARYA IYER: Yeah, no, I can completely relate, especially with-- whether it's on the clinical side, where you're talking to patients, seeing patients, doing physical exams, it's all about experience. And you can't just read a book and know how to do that 100%. And on the lab research side, it's all about experience and really immersing yourself in critical thinking and different lab techniques.

[00:26:15.99] You can't read a book and know how to do that. There's all these nitty gritty details that no one's going to write about. And your person mentoring you is going to be like, oh, don't do that, do this, or this is how you do this technique. So 100%, I agree with what you said, Chris.

[00:26:31.62] ERIN HAGAR: Do you see yourself in a mentorship role going forward or in a teaching role?

[00:26:37.00] AISHWARYA IYER: Yeah, so I actually TAed, did supplemental instruction, tutored a lot in college. And when I was a research assistant in my undergraduate lab, the way that it worked there is that a lot of the undergrad students were trained during their first summer in the lab. And then they would train any students coming in after.

[00:26:57.40] So like, you were trained by students who are already there, and then you're training the new students that come after. And I learned-- I learned that I learned so much, as redundant as that sounds-- I learned so much when students were asking me questions because I'd be like, I don't know the answer. OK, I'm going to look that up. And then we can learn together.

[00:27:15.88] So having the opportunity to do mentor and train new students made me a better researcher and also helps you with developing skills on how to be a mentor and something that you're always improving. I can't say that I'm a great mentor, I know everything there is to know about training people because the way you mentor one person isn't the same way that you mentor another person.

[00:27:43.69] I think Chris touched on that earlier too because there might be someone who has no background in, example, with the research side, no background coming in. And so you have to start at the basics and making sure you're catering to their experiences, as opposed to maybe someone with a lot of experience. And they might want you to be hands off. So you're going to be like, OK, just come to me when you have questions so I'm not stepping on your toes or making you feel like I'm patronizing you. You want to make sure you're respectful of their experiences.

[00:28:17.90] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah. And in our other episodes of this podcast, we talked so much about knowing your students and really adapting your teaching style and your approach based on what you know about their backgrounds and their experience and their interests and to the extent that you can do that. And so it's fascinating to me that even with maybe not as much formal teaching experience, you are touching on exactly the same thing.

[00:28:41.86] Your instincts are exactly the same. So I think that bodes well for any kind of instruction or mentorship you're thinking about in the future. You can tell you already have that mindset. Jeff, how about you? Do you see yourself maybe being a preceptor later on or working with students in other ways as you become a PA and enter that clinical space?

[00:29:02.95] JEFF LEE: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I totally agree with what Chris and Aishu said. So, I mean, I don't think I would get into academia, but definitely some kind of a preceptor mentorship kind of thing because I used to teach music, like guitar and piano. And I did private lessons. I did that for like eight years, ish.

[00:29:21.64] And I mean, like I just know how rewarding it is to have somebody under your belt and you just guide them through. And every time they are able to succeed and the little baby steps that they take, it's just-- to me, it's nothing more rewarding. And I can imagine that it's the same thing for being a preceptor.

[00:29:41.02] ERIN HAGAR: Well, this has been such a great conversation. You know, I know as students, you are receiving health professions education. But as you think about your fields, your disciplines, and teaching and learning in those fields, is there anything that you see on the horizon that you think could really move the needle for students who are studying what you're studying now? Is there anything you're excited about in your field from the education side?

[00:30:06.97] CHRIS GOODIS: I would-- so I kind of have a thought. Let's see if I can string this along. But going off what Jeff said about, learning "is kind of cool now," quote, unquote, I think, yeah, with all the resources that people have, even at a young age-- I mean, I still think it's become more-- it's becoming more and more apparent, how much stuff, like, a 13-year-old can learn.

[00:30:30.86] So what I'm excited about in 20-ish years is I'm excited to kind of look back at students who are currently in the same position I'm at, and I'm excited just to see how much they know off the bat and kind of like, I'm excited to see how faculty kind of factor that in. And I sort of see education becoming less and less textbook, quiz, textbook, exam. And I'm seeing it more evolve into, you can kind of carve your own path.

[00:31:05.33] I'm very individualistic, so I hope that's the outcome. But I just don't see if your students are on average here, and your material is kind of here, it's no longer going to-- it's not going to cut it anymore. I think faculty are going to have to evolve with students, evolve with technology, evolve with the common, quote, unquote, "knowledge that's out there." So that's what I'm really excited for. I know there's a concept called the-- I think that's the Flynn principle-- the generations go on, they become smarter. But I think technology is just a huge catalyst for that. So I'm excited for more individualized learning in the future.

[00:31:47.73] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, so less people coming from this shared formation and more people carving out-- like you said, carving out those niches for themselves and really taking those forward. That's so interesting. Yeah, anybody else--

[00:32:01.32] CHRIS GOODIS: Right, and even-- sorry to jump in, but what I also like about the advent of YouTube and all these other things for either free or cheap, like it's no longer-- I don't think necessarily you have to put your kid through the top private school, high school to get the best education anymore. I just don't.

[00:32:17.91] I don't think-- I think the financial barrier is lowering and lowering, and I only-- you know, we can talk-- this is not really a politics podcast, but I think more people learning is, in general, better. So yeah, I rest my case.

[00:32:31.75] ERIN HAGAR: That's great. Anyone else have any thoughts about kind of what's on the horizon?

[00:32:36.90] JEFF LEE: Yeah, to go with what Chris said, so it's very interesting to see the new school versus an old school way of teaching. And I've seen that with just my program. I mean, we have some younger professors, some older professors who've been in the game for quite a long time. And the old school way is very, like, read this textbook. You have to know everything in this textbook, and we're going to test you on that. And that's just how they kind of teach it.

[00:33:02.97] And then the new school is more like, yeah, we use textbooks, and we're basing everything on textbooks. But like, here are all these videos online that you can also watch to supplement. So I mean, all the other younger professors will give us a lot of videos, like Khan Academy is a really good resource. Osmosis is really good for medical. I mean, that's saved my life.

[00:33:28.29] And I do still read the books, but there's just infinite amount of knowledge in there that you will never be able to fully remember and/or grasp, besides getting the big picture. So these videos definitely-- they help to just kind of consolidate all the information to something that's a little bit more digestible. And then also, to go off what Chris about like, you don't need the top education to do whatever.

[00:33:57.99] I mean, you can say that for-- I think Bill Gates, a lot of billionaires, they didn't even go to undergrad. And they don't have the best education. And so yeah, today, in today's world, you can-- talk about if you measure success in terms of how lucrative your career is, there are people who are YouTube stars who make six figures, and they just-- they're living their life.

[00:34:27.75] And I'm kind of jealous of that. But I'm in medicine because I love it, so it's not all too bad. But there's definitely-- you can do trade schools. I've heard about-- like in terms of technology, if you want to make a lot of money pretty quick, you can go to these-- it's like these bootcamps for programming or some kind of software programming. And it's like a six-month program, and then people come out making six figures. So it's definitely changed the way we think of a career, conventional.

[00:35:00.99] ERIN HAGAR: Kind of like what Chris was saying with a more equalized approach to getting on those different pathways. Yeah. Aishu, what do you think? What do you see on the horizon?

[00:35:10.89] AISHWARYA IYER: Yeah, so I really think that the conventional way of teaching with lecturing to students is kind of evolving, as Chris said, to more individualized learning. I think that more faculty teachers and professors are open to the idea of this flipped classroom, engaging students, this discussion. And that's really great because it's helping students who may not thrive under just having someone lecture at them and into having this engaging discussion where you can be more open to asking questions in a more comfortable environment and being able to learn from your peers in addition to your professors. And so I think with that evolvement, I think it's really exciting because now we're allowing for more engaging discussion and allowing for all types of students to thrive, not just the ones who work well with just this lecture style of teaching.

[00:36:10.23] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, yeah, it is a big shift for faculty to transition from a lecture-based approach to these more active learning strategies. But just like in medicine, we have to catch up a little bit sometimes to the literature. And I think that's happening now in education. We know that learning improves the more students are engaged in it and the more that they do. But it takes a while sometimes for those practices to trickle down into practice. But I'm glad that you're seeing that because that makes me really excited about what's on the horizon for all of our students.

[00:36:45.57] Well, I cannot thank you enough for sharing your time and your insights with us today. This has been so interesting. And it's just been such a great opportunity to get to know you and to hear a little bit about the student life here at UMB, both the pre-COVID and during COVID. And we'll look forward to talking to you post-COVID and seeing-- checking in, seeing how things are going for you. But thank you so much for taking the time. And we really, really appreciate hearing from you today.

[00:37:13.37] [MUSIC PLAYING]

[00:37:14.22] Thank you for joining us today on Moving the Needle. Visit us at umaryland.edu/fctl to hear additional episodes, leave us feedback, or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

[00:00:00.06] ERIN HAGAR: Welcome to Moving the Needle, casual conversations about ways big and small to impact student learning, brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland Baltimore. I'm Erin Hagar. Let's move the needle.

[00:00:18.83] Hi, everyone, and welcome to this episode of Moving the Needle. I'm excited to introduce our guest, Dr. Roger Ward. Dr. Ward is interim provost, executive vice president, and dean of the graduate school here at the University of Maryland Baltimore. He's overseen campus initiatives related to compliance and transparency, risk management, and accreditation. He is currently co-chairing the university's strategic planning efforts.

[00:00:43.58] But despite this full plate, Dr. Ward always makes time to teach. In today's episode, we talk about some universal principles of good teaching, how leadership and teaching overlap and intersect, how to recognize and reward good teaching at a Research I institution, and the similarities between creating a syllabus and a strategic plan. Dr. Ward, welcome.

[00:01:05.18] ROGER WARD: My pleasure.

[00:01:07.00] ERIN HAGAR: One thing that strikes me about your bio and your history is that you have been an avid consumer of education in so many disciplines and in so many different contexts. You've studied at community colleges, four-year institutions, law school twice. You've studied online and in person in many different disciplines. And I was wondering, given your experience as a student in all of these settings, have you learned any universal truths or patterns about teaching and learning that have stayed with you now that you are a leader in higher ed?

[00:01:48.93] ROGER WARD: Sure. I think one of the things that-- and I have been in many educational settings, and regardless of the setting, I think one thing that is clear to me that can be described as a universal truth is that good teaching is good teaching. And good teaching happens at every level. And for me, based on my experiences, I think preparation is the key.

[00:02:25.01] For the teacher, the faculty member, of course, knowledge of the material and the content is very, very important, which is why you're in front of a classroom to begin with. But preparation is key. Good pedagogy is key. Structuring the course in a very effective way is key.

[00:02:52.63] I also believe what is also very important is expectations, setting expectations for your students, and believing in their ability to be good learners, are not teaching down to individuals as students. And I think I saw that most in the community college context, where the really good teachers came in, and you could tell they believed that everybody in that classroom was there to learn. They set those expectations. And they didn't teach down to anybody in the classroom.

[00:03:42.18] The not-so-effective faculty members came in and, I would argue, presumed that perhaps some of the students in the classroom weren't prepared to be there and, again with that mindset, taught down to the students. So I think good teaching is good teaching, preparation is the key, and believing in your students' ability to learn are important.

[00:04:15.21] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, absolutely. Do you think there's anything inherently different between a community college and, let's say, a Research I institution with respect to, let's say, the faculty's ability to or the time that they have to prepare? I'm thinking about all the pressures that faculty at Research I institutions have to maintain their research agenda and to publish. Do you feel like there's anything that leaders in Research I institutions can do to support faculty in their efforts to learn new pedagogies, to learn new techniques, to prepare to engage with students in the way you describe?

[00:04:58.04] ROGER WARD: Sure. I think you touched on it. It's definitely different teaching at a community college and teaching at an R1 institution. Not only did I start my own educational journey at a community college as a student, I started my higher education career as a professional at the same community college, in fact.

[00:05:25.94] And so I got to understand what it took to become a tenured faculty member at a community college. And a lot of it, emphasis was on teaching. There was an emphasis, as well, on scholarship, but nowhere near the level in terms of expectation as you would expect at an R1 institution. So at a community college, teaching is what is valued in the appointment, promotion, and tenure process.

[00:06:03.19] When you get to an R1 institution, as should be expected, of course, teaching is important, but so is research and scholarship, and so is service. And then, if you are an R1 institution like ours, you may also have clinical responsibilities. And so those are additional pressures on the faculty member to perform in all those areas if they are to advance their career as faculty members.

[00:06:38.28] So the pressures at an R1 are definitely, I would suggest, more intense and much higher than it would be for a faculty member at a community college, say. And so with those realities, I think it's important for people like myself, provosts, deans, presidents, in terms of supporting teaching at an R1 institution is to make sure that we value teaching first and foremost in the appointment, promotion, and tenure process, as much as we value research. And I think sometimes we don't do that enough.

[00:07:25.07] We certainly celebrate our faculty members, as we should, when they receive big awards and grants, especially the prestigious ones, R1s and so on. We celebrate that. We celebrate our researchers for their discoveries that lead to major advances in science and that can be translated to vaccines, for example, and so on. So we should absolutely value and celebrate those things.

[00:07:58.22] But I think because we are so focused on celebrating those things, sometimes we neglect to also celebrate teaching and valuing it in the appointment, promotion, and tenure process. And I think we have to be committed, or more committed, to doing that.

[00:08:19.23] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah. I think one of the ways, Dr. Ward, that you communicate a value of teaching is that even with all your responsibilities here on campus, you still do teach, or have taught within the last couple of years. Do you want to tell us a little bit about the courses you teach and your approach to pedagogy in teaching?

[00:08:38.55] ROGER WARD: Sure. I've been teaching now consistently-- and by consistently, I mean every semester-- for the past 15 years. So that started before I came to UMB. When I was in New York, at the New School, I started teaching at the New School. And I also taught at DeVry, master's-level courses in the MBA program, courses on ethics and organizational integrity. I've taught courses in legal issues in higher education online, for the most part.

[00:09:20.44] And that's my preference for teaching. So I prefer to teach in the online environment or the hybrid environment, and I prefer to teach adult learners. And that's just me, because I was an adult learner when I started college, so I'm passionate about the education of the adult learner. So that's where I gravitate.

[00:09:46.13] And so I've taught at Stony Brook University. I continue to teach there. I'm teaching a course right now at Stony Brook, Legal Issues in Higher Education.

[00:09:59.86] I've taught Student Development Issues in Higher Education. I've taught cybersecurity courses at the University of Maryland Global Campus focused on data security and privacy issues, and how do you manage those at the enterprise level from the point of view of an organization? I'm teaching a course now in the School of Law, Law and Leadership.

[00:10:29.40] And so I've been teaching consistently for the last 15 years. And I think-- and my colleagues know this-- I believe in order to be an effective academic administrator, you have to understand the student experience, but you also have to understand the faculty experience. I grew up in student affairs, as I like to say, so I have a good understanding of what it takes to support the student learning experience and the co-curricular experience. And I have consistently taught so that I stay engaged and have a good appreciation for what it's like to be an educator in the academy.

[00:11:16.11] ERIN HAGAR: That's 15 years with all your responsibilities as an administrator, too. I think you must be one of those humans who don't need to sleep.

[00:11:25.61] ROGER WARD: I absolutely need to sleep more.

[00:11:28.53] ERIN HAGAR: More sleep for all. That'll be our mantra. Could you give us an example, Dr. Ward, of perhaps something that you gleaned from a teaching experience that later informed a policy or a philosophy that you brought into your leadership role? Did you see something, with your experience as a faculty member, that made you say, you know, we need to make some adjustments, because this can't work this way? Or something that a student brought to you as part of the class that made you rethink the student affairs side of your work?

[00:12:06.79] ROGER WARD: So, this is going to sound pretty straightforward and simple. The answer to the question is yes. But having a course syllabus that is very detailed, laid out with the assignments, the readings that are due week to week, a clear description of those assignments with due dates, clear student learning outcomes for the course. The students understand what they're expected to walk away learning from the course. And making it a requirement that every course-- every faculty member should be able to provide every student in his or her course with a detailed, well-developed syllabus.

[00:13:01.64] And as simple as that sounds, that does not happen universally across academic institutions in the United States. And so that's certainly something I've learned from my own experiences. I think that has gotten better over time, as accreditors themselves have come to realize the value in making sure that we have these syllabuses that are well developed and that are informative and clear if we are to facilitate student learning success. So I think, as a very simple example, that that's one example.

[00:13:50.12] And then I think the other thing I would say, flowing from that-- I mentioned student learning outcomes. Clearly well crafted student learning outcomes and working with the faculty on teaching them and demonstrating to them and helping them write good learning outcomes. I think more and more faculty members are recognizing the importance of student learning outcomes, but writing them in a way that then you could build out the assignments and everything else from that takes time and faculty development.

[00:14:38.91] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah. When we at the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning work with faculty, whether they're teaching online for the first time or coming to us with some other kind of pedagogical innovation question, I find that sometimes they're surprised that that's where we start our questions, that it's not, let's talk about the tool, or let's talk about the buttons we can click and the effects we can have with that, but really tell us where you want these students to end up. What's the finish line? So we can help you get there in an effective way.

[00:15:11.31] And sometimes you see that light bulb go off with faculty. They know it, but maybe they haven't articulated it in a particular way. But as soon as they do, I say everything else is downhill after that. Once you can articulate these in a way-- it's like writing a good research question. The rest of it just flows after that, but it can take a little back and forth.

[00:15:33.54] ROGER WARD: Yeah, I talk about it in terms of reverse engineering, reverse engineering your course, where you start with the end in mind and then you build backwards from there. And I think then that leads to an effective course.

[00:15:50.20] ERIN HAGAR: Absolutely. Absolutely. And we've talked a lot on this podcast with other guests about having a good recognition of where your students are coming from, what educational background do they have with this material before they even start, so that you can fill in any gaps that you need to along the way. I think sometimes when faculty teach individual courses, seeing it as part of a broader curriculum can be a really important conversation to have, recognizing sort of where this course fits among all the others.

[00:16:23.10] ROGER WARD: Absolutely.

[00:16:25.26] ERIN HAGAR: The university is in the process of updating its strategic plan. And you and your colleagues are tasked with leading that ambitious effort. And I was wondering if you could talk to us a little bit about how you see the role of teaching manifesting itself in that strategic plan. What kind of preliminary conversations are happening around that, if you're at liberty to say? Just kind of what can we look forward to at University of Maryland Baltimore in the next few years with respect to teaching, do you think?

[00:17:00.36] ROGER WARD: So there are a few things I could say about that, and they are preliminary, especially as it relates to the strategic planning process. In our current strategic plan, which expires in June, by which time hopefully we would have adopted our strategic plan for the next five years, there's a theme on student success. I would imagine that in the next strategic plan, the one we're working on now, there'll be a similar theme.

[00:17:28.98] And when we talk about student success, of course, it's students success in and out of the classroom. And so I think teaching will obviously be something that we'll be focusing on, especially in terms of thinking how we teach based on what we would have learned from the past year having to pivot to teaching, for the most part, in the online environment. And we're already hearing from students and faculty, by the way, that even as things get better with the pandemic, and even as we return to whatever the new normal is, let's not lose some of the valuable skills we have developed, expertise we have developed, having to teach online for this past year. And let's take that into what the future of teaching looks like at UMB.

[00:18:28.57] So I think we'll continue to invest in our Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning. I think we'll continue to deepen our understanding of what it means to teach with technology and what it means from the student's perspective to learn in that environment. President Jarrell has talked openly-- one of his top priorities as president is recognizing teaching excellence. So we've been talking about an academy for educators where, going back to what we were talking about earlier, recognizing and celebrating teaching at UMB as much as we recognize and celebrate research. So I would expect those themes and those strategies to feature pretty prominently in the next strategic plan.

[00:19:22.54] ERIN HAGAR: That's wonderful. I think one of the great values of going through this process of strategic planning is that it feels like it creates a campus vocabulary, or a kind of a shared language, that everyone can use as we're all feeling our way in this new environment, this new normal. But to have that as a touchstone of where we're trying to go I think could be really-- will be really helpful.

[00:19:48.34] ROGER WARD: I absolutely agree. And it's interesting, because just yesterday we had our third steering committee meeting, and one of the things we did talk about-- we weren't talking about teaching, per se, we were talking about core values. One of the conversations we had was around definitions and making sure that there's a shared understanding in terms of what these terms mean. And one of the ways we get to that shared understanding is through the strategic planning process, as we come up with these terms, attaching clear definition to them. So I think the same thing is true having to do with the language around teaching and learning and making sure that there is shared understanding of what the terms mean.

[00:20:35.87] ERIN HAGAR: Absolutely. As you were speaking, I was going back to what you were saying about the syllabus. And it makes me think that the strategic planning process is very similar to-- it's the leadership working in collaboration to sort of craft the, quote unquote, "syllabus" for the campus, for where we're going, just the way the syllabus is a roadmap for the students. I feel like a lot of that same kind of thinking backward design, as you called it, reverse engineering-- where do we want to be, and how are we going to get there, and what's the language and the values that we're going to use to get there? It seems like you're doing those exact same things, just on a more broad level.

[00:21:16.55] ROGER WARD: I think that's a great thought, Erin. It's exactly the same concept. Where do we want to be in five years? And so we set these big, bold, ambitious goals for ourselves.

[00:21:31.04] And then we say, all right, this is where we want to be, and then we ask ourselves, what it's going to take for us to get there? And we start to imagine what those things are and begin to put those things in place. So, yep, that is exactly right.

[00:21:46.18] ERIN HAGAR: As you look on the horizon, say in the next five, 10, 15 years, you know, with all your experience in higher ed and having seen trends develop over years throughout your career, is there anything on the horizon that you think is particularly exciting, that might, as we say in our podcast, move the needle with respect to higher education?

[00:22:12.76] ROGER WARD: Yup, absolutely. And again, this comes out, actually, of the research space, which is one of the wonderful things about being at a Research I institution. I think just as we're beginning to see artificial intelligence used more prominently and effectively in research and in clinical care and what have you, I think we're going to begin to see a lot more use of AI in teaching.

[00:22:42.49] And I think that's on the horizon and will be quite interesting. I would like for us, UMB, to be a trailblazer in that regard. So that's something we should be thinking about and maybe something that we could advance under our next strategic plan.

[00:23:02.93] I think also on the horizon-- it's here, actually, but I think on the horizon more institutions will begin to be focused on it-- I think it's the extension of the learning continuum, where there's this 60-year lifelong learning continuum. Traditionally, in higher education we are focused on those traditional learners, 18 to 22 years old. I think it's safe to say that the learning demographic, the student demographic, has shifted for several years. We talked about is shifting or will soon shift, but it has shifted.

[00:23:43.56] And so now, as a public state university, I think we have a responsibility to educate learners all along that continuum. And so we have, for the last several years, and I think that will only continue to grow, been focused on these various student demographics. And so it's not the traditional students that come into our traditional professional degree programs. We've started, as you know, launching professional master's degrees for people who are already in the workforce, certificate programs, and thinking about other ways in which to offer other forms of micro-credentials. That I think that is, again, here in some measure, but in terms of the horizon, will just continue to become more prominent.

[00:24:46.11] And along with that, because these are adult learners, again, many of whom are already in the workforce, I think what's on the horizon-- even for institutions like us, and I'm talking for institutions like us in particular-- a closer partnership with industry in terms of educating their workforce and keeping their workforce educated. We're in a knowledge economy now. Things change very quickly, and people will always need to upskill and up-educate, if I could use that word.

[00:25:23.64] And I think we can't, because of the type of institution we are, say that's not the educational market space we're in. I think the state will have expectations of us, and do, in helping to educate the workforce in that way. And I think, of course, the workforce itself will have those expectations of us, and we should have those expectations of ourselves as well and be prepared, again, to work closely with industry to help educate the workforce and to help educate students who leave here and are better prepared for the workforce of the future. So those are some of the things that, particularly as an R1 institution, I think will feature prominently for us on the horizon.

[00:26:18.19] ERIN HAGAR: That relationship between industry and higher ed it seems like could really be a mutually informing relationship, so that we know what's on the horizon with the workforce and can properly prepare, but you know, conversation as opposed to a top-down approach.

[00:26:37.39] ROGER WARD: Absolutely.

[00:26:39.04] ERIN HAGAR: Well, all of those things that you mentioned-- the introduction of artificial intelligence, and preparing for a diverse student body with respect to age and all the demographics, and this industry partnership-- is enough to keep any administrator busy for a long time, much less with having a strategic plan to draft and all the other responsibilities that you have. So we cannot thank you enough for generously spending your afternoon chatting with us about these topics, and we're really excited to share these thoughts with our listening community. So thank you so much for your time.

[00:27:21.10] ROGER WARD: It's my pleasure being here, Erin. Thank you for affording me the opportunity. And I would be remiss if I didn't say that the only way I could find the time to come sit with you is because I have so many very capable people doing all the work on our collective behalf. So I think the university as it relates to teaching and learning is supported by an extraordinary team, so we are fortunate in that regard.

[00:27:51.70] ERIN HAGAR: I could not agree more. And thank you for all your efforts to bring that team together. And we really look forward to having you back for another conversation sometime soon. We hope you'll join us again.

[00:28:03.13] ROGER WARD: I look forward to it.

[00:28:06.08] ERIN HAGAR: Thank you for joining us today on Moving the Needle. Visit us at umaryland.edu/fctl to hear additional episodes, leave us feedback, or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

 

[00:00:00.09] ERIN HAGAR: Welcome to Moving The Needle, casual conversations about ways, big and small, to impact student learning. Brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Erin Hagar. Let's move the needle.

[00:00:18.38] Our guest this week is Dr. Sandra Quezada, associate professor of medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore. She is the associate dean for admissions for the University of Maryland School of Medicine, assistant dean for Faculty Diversity and Inclusion, and course director for the medical Spanish elective, a course she helped launch when she herself was a medical student here at UMB.

[00:00:44.86] I'm so excited about this episode. Since my own college teaching experience is in Spanish, it's really fun for me to get to geek out about language learning and what it can reveal about teaching more broadly. We'll ask Dr. Quezada how her medical Spanish course integrates and reinforces the rest of the Medical School curriculum, how teaching language overlaps with culture and cultural humility, and how she creates a relaxed learning environment where mistakes aren't just OK but expected. Let's get to the interview. Dr. Quezada, welcome to Moving The Needle.

[00:01:17.84] SANDRA QUEZADA: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

[00:01:20.31] ERIN HAGAR: It's so great to have you here today. So I guess I just like to begin by having you tell us a little bit about the medical Spanish program at UMB. How did it come to be?

[00:01:30.95] SANDRA QUEZADA: So it's actually been around for a long time, but it's definitely evolved over time. I feel really proud to be able to say that it started while I was a medical student there. I was a second-year student, and it really was, I think, a group of students and a few faculty who advocated for having some form of a medical Spanish initiative or program at the Medical School, really just recognizing the growing Latinx community in the country even then, 20 years ago. I don't think we even realized how things would continue to grow in the decades to come, not only across the country but in Baltimore.

[00:02:11.21] So even at that point, just recognizing that our students that are graduating, practicing medicine all over the country, could potentially find it very useful to have a medical Spanish program available to them. So it started off more informal, and it still was mostly faculty-led, which was great. And it was held over a lunch hour. It was kind of like a brown bag lunch kind of practice your Spanish.

[00:02:43.67] They originally had two different levels-- a more beginner level and then the intermediate, advanced level. And so the beginner level would focus more on I think very introductory kind of conversation and some grammatical kind of instruction. And then the intermediate and advanced really was I think more of the medical Spanish course because it was designed to provide some medical terminology to students who, even though they might be quite proficient in Spanish, might not necessarily have all that terminology.

[00:03:21.18] So one of the examples I like to give is I am fluent in Spanish, and I started off myself, actually, before medical school, I was an interpreter at a hospital. And I remember when I was doing my training thinking, oh, this is going to be-- this should be pretty straightforward. This should be pretty easy. And then I was like, wow, there are a lot of words I didn't know. It's you don't know what you don't know, and as you were learning it, you're like, right, I've never had to say spleen before. It just doesn't come up in common conversation.

[00:03:51.44] So even students who are quite advanced and proficient in Spanish really do benefit from a course that provides them that kind of terminology. So over time, it's now evolved to become something that was more of a all-comers get together over a lunch hour and practice some conversation, let's learn some terminology, to now a course curriculum-approved credit-granting elective in the Medical School program.

[00:04:22.52] And it is more structured now so that it includes a-- usually, it's actually about 90 minutes time every week, a weekly session of didactics, classroom or Zoom room, I guess, again, going by system and reviewing terminology, both anatomical terms as well as symptoms, and how would you communicate a diagnostic test or result, for example, and really giving the students an opportunity to practice putting all of that terminology into a conversation, and in practice, taking a medical history, as well as walking their patient through the physical exam.

[00:05:08.82] So I redesigned the course so that it would really parallel and follow the Medical School curriculum that they're also taking in English. So as they're learning, say, in their gastroenterology block, they're learning about the GI anatomy and function and disease processes. Then in our medical Spanish class, we're really reinforcing that and discussing those terms again in Spanish on a higher level, and just reviewing some of the anatomical terms in Spanish, and then also how would you take that history, what are some of the common and important questions you should be asking for that particular system.

[00:05:49.39] And then in addition to the classroom time, I thought it was really important that there would also be a service-learning component, and really just more of a community component where the students would have an opportunity to be in the clinical setting, working with Spanish-speaking patients, and really putting those skills into practice, really applying what they've learned in the classroom. And every year, the students always confirm that this is super rewarding and just one of the most valuable parts of the course and of their experience overall.

[00:06:24.77] ERIN HAGAR: That's great. I love that it began as a student-led initiative. In some of our other episodes, we've had a common thread about a democratic approach to teaching or a horizontal approach to teaching where really the dynamics between the faculty and the students are presented in a more equal way or thought about in more equal terms. And just the fact that you could suggest this, and lead it, and be heard by your faculty, and now have it morph into something that is such a formal part of the curriculum, that must be really rewarding.

[00:07:02.21] SANDRA QUEZADA: It really is, and I think it's great for the students to see that. And that's just one example, honestly. I think there are a lot of now existing threads in the curriculum, and certainly a lot of student-run or led groups that also include faculty mentors, but certainly a lot of things that are ingrained in the curriculum now that our students, I think, provided the impetus to get those things moving. So our students are always driving us to be better, and I think that's great.

[00:07:34.76] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, that is great. So what are some of the strategies and approaches that you use to teach medical Spanish? You've described a little bit what the curriculum entails, but how do you go about it? How do you go about working with different levels of language learners, that kind of vulnerability or anxiety that might come from not being able to say what you want to say? And what strategies have you found that really help the language stick?

[00:08:01.79] SANDRA QUEZADA: Yeah, so actually, I guess one thing I didn't mention that as the course evolved to the for-credit elective, that elective that is for credit became really focused on that intermediate-to-advanced proficiency level, but recognizing that there are a lot of students who may not be at that comfort level. And sometimes even we just-- because there is such a huge interest that we couldn't always accommodate all the students that wanted to participate, that we also have actually what I call the sister student-run course of medical Spanish that my own students who've completed the full medical Spanish elective teach. And so it's students teaching each other.

[00:08:49.61] In some cases, they develop some of their own materials, which I've seen, and it's awesome. And then I also share my materials with them too. So I wanted to make sure that there was always still something for everyone to be able to have a chance to refresh or learn their skills in Spanish.

[00:09:07.79] So I feel like in my course, even though it is intermediate-advanced level, there is a fairly broad range still of proficiency within those two levels. And maybe what's even broader than the range itself is the confidence level, and those who are on the maybe more intermediate side tend to have more of that little bit of anxiety or shyness, self-consciousness about what their accent might be like or if they make a grammatical error.

[00:09:42.23] And definitely, one of the things I think I definitely reiterate multiple times throughout more so the beginning of the course-- I think it becomes less needed, fortunately, as we move along the year, but in the beginning, somebody who maybe isn't quite as advanced as some of the other students will have a tendency to apologize frequently as they're trying to express themselves. And yet, as you notice listening, the apologies are not necessary. They're doing a great job.

[00:10:13.58] And so it's just first just affirming them and letting them know, hey, that was great, and that sounded perfect. Or, I completely understood your message, and that is always the most important thing, and here is maybe another way to say what you said that might be even more clear. So never really say that was wrong, actually, because at the end of the day, what's important to me is that I want the patients to be able to understand what is being said to them. Also, I want them to be understood when they speak, so I really, really always stress that is the most important thing.

[00:10:56.00] I also remind our students that for any proficiency level, regardless of how fluent or not you are, sometimes the word just doesn't come to you, and that's OK. And that if that's the case, then just take a detour and walk your way around the word, and just say what you mean to say sometimes even when you know the word.

[00:11:17.72] Like let's go back to spleen. You might remember that the word for spleen is [NON-ENGLISH], but maybe the person you're talking to still is not super familiar with that term. Or they've heard the word, but they're like, but what is that really? What is your spleen really? What does it do?

[00:11:32.78] So as we're talking about-- even if you forget the word for spleen, then just say, so it's an organ that sits on the left side of your body, and it helps do this and this. So basically, just finding your way around sometimes that and not getting caught up or hung up specifically on that word. But just making sure that you're communicating the message that you need to communicate, and by all means, just reinforcing that we're here to make mistakes. That's the point of the class, is this is the place to mess up, say something funny, and we'll all learn from it together, and then together learn what's a better way to say that so that you're prepared when you're interacting with your patients.

[00:12:17.24] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, that's great. I don't know if I mentioned to you before, but my own teaching background is in Spanish. And even in a nonmedical context, that deer-in-the-headlights look that students can give you when they're stuck on one word, and their whole sentence, their whole message was coming through, and then they freeze on that one word. And that's such an important skill to just be able to unfreeze.

[00:12:40.28] And like you said, there are 10 ways to skin this cat. You can describe this in so many other ways. But what strikes me when you're describing this scenario is that now we have this added layer of medical terminology, which may or may not be familiar to the patient in the first place.

[00:12:56.43] So even if the provider uses 100% perfect, perfectly grammatical, perfect vocabulary to describe all of the procedures, and diagnostics, and molecular structures, and all these things, there's still this layer of understanding that may or may not be coming through to the patient that has nothing to do with the language itself. Can you speak a little bit about how you manage that?

[00:13:20.72] SANDRA QUEZADA: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the themes that I like to reinforce and remind people with respect to that is, in some ways, it gets back to what I was saying before about the importance of the message being what gets through, is that that can happen in English or in Spanish. So it can certainly in English.

[00:13:42.56] You could be-- you're speaking your primary language, it's the patient's primary language, and you're communicating a diagnosis, or you're discussing what the treatment plan may be. And you're making assumptions about what the patient understands and what they can take in. And it could be very much that you have the right words, or you feel what you think are the right words, but they're not the right words, actually, if your patient doesn't understand. Then it's of no use to your patient, and it's of no use to you as a provider if you're not able to communicate that in a way that it will be understood, received, and applied by your patient.

[00:14:22.01] So I feel like that's also the same in Spanish. So I remind my patients oftentimes that there might be a medical term, this is the technical medical term for this in Spanish, but if you use this, it's a high likelihood-- or many of those patients are probably not going to understand that word. And so be ready to give an explanation or to follow up with a quick description of what that is or what that means. And then I just add a paraphrase, like, by the way, you're probably going to want to do that in English too.

[00:14:54.47] So it's not about the language. It's not about the patient population. It's about the fact that medical terminology is a whole different language too in and of itself. So I think that that's-- it is an important thing to reinforce, that at the end of the day, you're a great communicator when your message is understood.

[00:15:16.06] ERIN HAGAR: Right. And whatever words it takes to do that.

[00:15:18.51] SANDRA QUEZADA: Exactly. Yep.

[00:15:19.32] ERIN HAGAR: Learning a language is about the vocabulary, and the grammar, and the terminology, and the phrasing, but it's also so much about culture. So how do you approach that with your students? You mentioned, for example, the service learning. You want to talk a little bit about that and any other strategies you use to help your students appreciate the culture that's behind the language they're speaking?

[00:15:44.55] SANDRA QUEZADA: Yeah, so the service learning, I think, is a great opportunity because they are rotating in clinics that are currently serving Spanish-speaking patients that also oftentimes are either uninsured, underinsured, maybe undocumented. And we explore that, and we talk about the implications of the barriers, really, that that patient community is facing in addition to the language barrier, which, in and of itself, is a significant one.

[00:16:16.69] And it really is I think a wonderful experience for our students to be immersed in that setting and to be able to see how does one approach that. What are some of the resources that are available? What are some strategies that providers that are doing that wonderful work in the community are finding ways to provide excellent service to those patients that are in that scenario? So I think that that is a really great way to give that kind of insight to our students.

[00:16:44.39] But another thing that we do in the course is I wanted to have something called current events. And I remember thinking, if you translate current events directly into Spanish, it just sounds weird. So it has a little rhyme, so I decided to call it [SPEAKING SPANISH]. So events happening at this moment.

[00:17:03.37] And so every week, one of our students-- it's very informal. Just a student gives maybe 5 to 10 minutes of a quick oral presentation update really on some event or issue that impacts the Latinx community in the US or potentially just the Latino community abroad that preferably is health-related, although it doesn't directly necessarily have to be. And our students are very creative. And honestly, I always learn from our students so much, even in those brief presentations.

[00:17:41.25] But then towards the end of the course, they've come to a place now where they've reviewed and learned so much terminology at that point. They've had opportunities to practice their skills. So now they give a more formal presentation, usually a 15-minute PowerPoint presentation on usually a disease process or some other health disparities-related topic that impacts the Latinx community.

[00:18:11.14] So that's another, I think, really important opportunity where our students learn and ultimately teach all of us about some of the different cultural and social aspects that impact health and that are particularly relevant to the Latinx community. Other ways that it's sort of like here and there I think infuse culture-- I mean, I certainly remind our students that I'm teaching you this word for this particular maybe-- especially if it's food. This might be a word for this fruit, for example, but I can tell you that there might be 10 other terms in different countries.

[00:18:47.05] So just to remind people that the Latinx culture is a very diverse culture, and it's a diverse language. There are different words in different countries for different things, so that it's not a monolithic language, and that there's a lot of variability, and to just be flexible, and prepared, and open, and curious about learning about that. I actually often learn, again, from our own students who themselves have a background in different countries, and we get to compare what we grew up learning, how to say pear, for example, or something like that.

[00:19:21.75] ERIN HAGAR: That's great. What lessons do you think that teachers of other topics, other disciplines, can learn from the strategies and the approaches you take to language teaching?

[00:19:33.93] SANDRA QUEZADA: I think maybe one of them is that I really do try to make this a very interactive experience for the students. It was always this way, even before COVID. But I felt like it was so much more important, even after in a pandemic and trying to teach this remotely, that it had to be engaging. It had to keep their attention, and keep them thinking, and basically in action together.

[00:20:07.44] So it's really trying to minimize the amount of time that I'm just presenting information to them and amplifying the time that they get to practice speaking, that they get to practice interviewing each other. So we'll do breakout rooms. And even before, when we were in person, I would basically do small pairing up in the room, and they would take turns speaking and interviewing each other, doing some role planning, and basically simulating, immersing themselves in that experience.

[00:20:38.96] And I think that sort of active learning is just a really, really great way to keep your students having fun. And I think when they're having fun, they learn more and probably appreciate the experience that much more. And then again, they're very much a part of the education process when they're presenting for us, and we all learn from each other. So I think maybe just keeping things very, very interactive and really providing a lot of opportunities for the students to be teachers themselves in the process I think is a pretty neat thing.

[00:21:16.72] The other-- I forgot to mention, another interactive learning tool has been working with standardized patients, which I originally incorporated solely as an assessment tool at the end of their program. And it was a way for me to see how comfortable they were interacting with the standardized patients, if they were getting hung up in any way with any vocabulary. And they also got that very helpful feedback that our standardized patients are always so great at giving.

[00:21:47.83] It was also, again, a nice additional practice session for them because they had to do that in English too. So it was another opportunity for them to get acclimated to the whole format of being videotaped while you're interviewing a standardized patient, which makes everybody self-conscious. So I think that they always do a great job.

[00:22:08.24] But because I could tell the students really valued that standardized-patient experience, and it really was a great learning opportunity for them, I decided that I wanted to use it really for both as a teaching tool and as an assessment tool. And even what I did this year was-- I did one actually at the beginning of the course, and then we'll repeat it at the end. So it even also maybe-- both for me and for the students, ends up being a nice basis of comparison, and they can see how far they've come at the end of the program.

[00:22:42.17] ERIN HAGAR: Absolutely. Oh, there are such good points here. That idea that assessments are also teaching and learning tools in and of themselves is such a valuable insight as a faculty member, because so often it's easy to think about, this is how we get the score that goes in the grade book that demonstrates competency. But that experience of interacting with a standardized patient or practicing another kind of assessment really becomes a mechanism for learning, and that's so important.

[00:23:11.83] And your comments about active learning really resonate with me because I mentioned my teaching background is in Spanish. I taught college-level Spanish in the early levels, the beginning and intermediate. And then I very much got interested in teaching as a field and teaching in higher Ed and morphed into the role I have now.

[00:23:30.67] But then learning about active learning as a concept, for me as a former language teacher, my thought was, well, how could you do anything else? If I stand up in front of the class and speak Spanish at them all day, maybe their listening comprehension goes up a little bit, but all those other things that are so important in a language, the oral, the written, all these things that they need practice with. So for me, it was like a boot camp in active learning strategies because that's just what you have to do. So now--

[00:24:04.39] SANDRA QUEZADA: You just have to. Right.

[00:24:05.06] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah.

[00:24:05.92] SANDRA QUEZADA: I mean, whenever we talk about language, people always say, if you don't use it, you lose it. But it's so funny because that's everything. If you don't apply the things that you're doing, you'll forget them.

[00:24:17.47] ERIN HAGAR: Absolutely. And I think also what I remember most, and probably most fondly about my teaching experience in language, is the opportunity to play and to have a little bit of a lighter tone than maybe what they had in other courses that they were taking at the same time. And that we could get away with some playful things because they were reinforcing grammar concepts or vocabulary.

[00:24:41.86] So for example, I would always take cartoons, and I'm dating myself, but I would have them on the overhead projector as they walked into the classroom. And so they could just come in and see a little Mafalda from Argentina every day, and maybe it connected to what we were doing or maybe it didn't. But it was just a nice way to set the tone, to create that space recognition of, OK, now we're morphing into whatever you were doing before. Now we're morphing into Spanish time, and let's have a little fun. There's certainly tricks you can do in other disciplines, but I felt like it gave me a little freedom to try some of these things because I knew at the end it was also reinforcing what our objectives were.

[00:25:22.55] SANDRA QUEZADA: Absolutely. Actually, you reminded me of something that I did. It overlaps with other ways that I try to infuse culture throughout the course. Sometimes as we're waiting for everybody to sign on into the Zoom meeting-- and I'll have to think about it, how [? well-- ?] it's actually not that hard. I did do this in person sometimes too.

[00:25:40.01] Basically, I'll just be playing music in the background. So maybe I'm playing salsa. Maybe I'm playing merengue, or bachata, or something like that. And I'll do that on Zoom. I'll even share a video sometimes, and sometimes it's pretty neat because you can see it might show-- the last one we saw shows Havana, Cuba, and you just see as they're playing beautiful salsa music.

[00:26:00.74] And then I'll ask them questions, like, who recognizes-- does anybody know what rhythm that is or what kind of music that is? And did you recognize what city that was? So that's fun. But one other thing I did was I split up the group into two halves, and then I showed-- and this was easier to do actually in breakout rooms than it is in person. I basically had to trust the one half of the room to just cover their eyes.

[00:26:25.85] But basically, I would show them a painting. One painting was a Frida Kahlo painting, and then another one was a painting from Botero who is a Colombian artist. So they each got a minute or so to look at, observe, and absorb it. And then I paired them up across the two groups, and they had to, in Spanish, describe what did the painting look like so that the other person could envision it. And then I showed them both paintings.

[00:26:59.33] And it was just fun to see their reactions, like, oh, yeah, OK, now I see what you were telling me. And again, it's playing. It's fun. You're not going to get graded on how you described it. But it was a great way I think to just get people loose and get them warmed up, so to speak, and speaking Spanish. And in the process, many of them learned about these two very well-renowned artists, Latinx cultures.

[00:27:24.41] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, and then this other layer of the culture. And then also, another thing that has been fascinating me lately since I've been at UMB is this idea of using the humanities to reinforce medical education. And there's so much literature that demonstrates a connection between exposing medical students to art and the process of observing art and an increase in their medical observational skills. So you were hitting the trifecta with that because you had the playfulness, the language, and then also sharpening the eye, which is a transferable outcome to actually working with patients and seeing things. It's just so fascinating.

[00:28:06.11] SANDRA QUEZADA: I know. It's trying to keep it fun. And I actually feel like I can't take all the credit for that idea because I remember-- you said something about humanistic-- I can't remember exactly what you said, but there is another elective called the Humanism Symposium in the Medical School.

[00:28:26.00] And a couple of years ago, I remember one of my students who was doing both of those told me about one of their-- the field trip activities was to go to an art museum and to look at different paintings and then describe them to each other. And I was like, oh, we should-- we easily could and should do that in medical Spanish. So yeah, so it translated very nicely into the course.

[00:28:52.93] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, and I just want to call attention a little bit to the hesitancy you have, oh, this wasn't my idea or da, da, da. I think that so much about what we know about teaching is shared, and it's communal, and it needs to be. And it's tricky because of the nature of the way that we teach is in our boxes, in our classrooms, or on our Zooms privately.

[00:29:15.35] And I think one of the best things we could do for education would be to open up those conversations the way that we're doing right now and to share what's worked for us and what hasn't. And to not be nervous to say, I borrowed this great idea, and it's working great. Or, I borrowed this great idea, and I tweaked it and made it my own. I just think that that is how the field advances. So I want everyone to feel very comfortable taking, and borrowing, and sharing. And that's how the world goes.

[00:29:44.06] SANDRA QUEZADA: Absolutely. No, thank you for that. I definitely appreciate that. And right, I think part of that too required on my part some openness and flexibility to be like, oh, how could I add this into my course? This is not a change. It's an addition. I'm enhancing my course in this way.

[00:30:04.67] And similarly, it's been awesome to invite some of our other faculty in the School of Medicine that I know speak Spanish and are specialists in various areas to be guest speakers and guest presenters in the course. So for example, Camilo Gutierrez in the Department of Neurology presents to them how to take a great neurohistory and perform the neurophysical exam. [? Madeline ?] [INAUDIBLE] has presented on the gynecological exam and taking a good OB history and GYN history.

[00:30:42.06] So I remember in the beginning being a little nervous, like, OK, are they going to get the format? And is it going to be-- how this is going to go? And it's been so wonderful that I've just been every year inviting more people.

[00:30:55.14] And I think it really is wonderful for the students too. It keeps it very dynamic for them. A, they're meeting a lot of faculty rather than just me, and they get to see, oh, there is a lot of Spanish-speaking faculty at the Medical School. They're also hearing different accents because we're all from different countries. So that's another, as you're saying, fine-tuning their ear and really helping them get comfortable with different accents.

[00:31:18.03] And obviously, I'm a gastroenterologist, so if I'm teaching the neuro exam, I'm going to do a reasonably decent job, but a neurologist is going to do a better job. Let's be honest. This is their specialty. So I really feel like I'm giving my students the cream of the crop, if you will, within that field.

[00:31:35.34] And we can sometimes, together, the week after, we'll reinforce some of those concepts, just us, that-- it's worked out to be about maybe four or five guest faculty are sprinkled out throughout the year for them. And I think that that's been-- it's been fun, and I think it's also really enhanced the whole program.

[00:31:57.78] ERIN HAGAR: That's so great. It is a vulnerable feeling to invite people into your classroom, and I think that has a lot to do with how we viewed expertise in the past. And I think there's such power in saying, I could do this, but my colleague can do it better.

[00:32:15.82] And I think what's so exciting to me is that you're modeling that team-based mindset for these future health care providers to say, you know what? It's OK if you don't have the most expertise in this, but you're going to call in a colleague for a referral, and that's fine. Or you're going to bring in somebody to help, and it's all toward the greater good, which, in your case, is the learning experience. But it's also modeling how we could do this for the greater good of patient care or--

[00:32:41.55] SANDRA QUEZADA: Absolutely.

[00:32:42.24] ERIN HAGAR: So I think this is just so great. So is there anything on the horizon that you've seen or experienced as you've developed this course or as you've-- with your experience in the Medical School, is there anything on the horizon that you think could really move the needle, either in the teaching of medical Spanish or in the teaching of medicine in general?

[00:33:04.47] SANDRA QUEZADA: So I definitely think that for the teaching of medical Spanish-- I guess maybe I'll start first on a national level and then locally at our institution. I'm really grateful and fortunate that I get to serve on a national committee or task force for medical Spanish, actually.

[00:33:23.94] Because one thing that we've all learned just meeting each other at different conferences, and then certainly, we've certainly confirmed it now being on the committee, is that if there are a 100 different medical Spanish institutions, rather, that are teaching medical Spanish, that the program is different at every institution. There really isn't any standardization about what makes a good medical Spanish course and what should be, for example, recognized for credit.

[00:33:57.00] Or just in general, I think again, for two reasons, one is making sure that the student is really getting the best high-quality experience, but also, what are the expectations for what students can do that have completed that course? And how does that ultimately impact patient care?

[00:34:16.39] So is there an expectation that a student that's finished medical Spanish, are they now going in the hospital, and basically you don't need to call the interpreter because, hey, we have this student on the team who just came out of medical Spanish? So really standardizing-- that's the work that this committee is working on, is establishing what are at least the minimum criteria that should be met by a medical Spanish program, that it could be recognized as a for-credit medical Spanish program.

[00:34:51.66] What are best practices I think is probably the right way to say what we're trying to establish in terms of both delivering content, integrating the cultural humility and agility elements into the course, and then also what are the best ways to assess both the students and the program as you're evolving and going forth.

[00:35:13.83] So I'm excited about that. I think that it's going to be-- I think it is going to move the needle in terms of also empowering other institutions that currently don't have a medical Spanish program, to give them some really concrete tools and strategies to start one. Because I think a lot of places have interest, have a patient population that students potentially could work with but don't really even have the bandwidth or the wherewithal to where to begin with something like that.

[00:35:47.51] So we're putting together sort of like a toolkit for potential starting up new medical Spanish programs across the country or really upgrading existing programs. And then for us, I mean, I feel pretty fortunate, especially in hearing all the variability of what medical Spanish programs look like across the country, that I think our students do have a very well-structured, full experience in our medical Spanish course at the School of Medicine.

[00:36:20.74] The piece that I want to jump to next is that very much that what happens after the course. How do our students get recognized as someone who can contribute to patient care in the hospital, working with our growing Latinx population in Baltimore but also not be put in a position that they should not be in? Because they are not interpreters per se, and there are legal aspects and implications with respect to that.

[00:36:54.89] So definitely, that's also part of actually my preparation and education during the medical Spanish program, is for students to know what are their limits and where to say, this is where I can contribute, this is my wheelhouse. And then outside of that, if the team doesn't recognize this, the medical team or surgical team, then as the person that they're looking to to provide language to be able to say, this is the point at which we need to actually call in a medical interpreter here. So to have that insight as well.

[00:37:33.26] But I would like to be able to-- and I guess this requires funding, which is part of the reason why there's been some pause. But moving forward, what I'd love to be able to do is to have the students that complete the program also participate in a national assessment tool. And I know that, again, because of the lack of standardization there isn't really one tool or test that is recognized just uniformly across the country.

[00:38:07.30] But there are a few examples that are fairly well-known, and it would be, I think, pretty neat to have our students be able to complete that, just to get that additional validation and say, yes, I excelled, and I did well in my medical Spanish class, and I passed this national test.

[00:38:28.51] And so then maybe have a badge or something that says, yo hablo español, or something, in the hospital as they're rotating through so that patients can also recognize our students potentially as someone that they could ask a quick question. How do I get to the breast imaging center? Or something like that so they can really be identified and recognized as having that skill set.

[00:38:53.71] ERIN HAGAR: It almost sounds as though you're describing a competency-based model in the language itself, and that could possibly even track in a similar way to the way we recognize the different phases of medical education. You're a resident now, and that comes with this level of expectation as opposed to the time right before that.

[00:39:18.34] SANDRA QUEZADA: Absolutely. I mean, I do think that as our students are applying for residency, even without that test, I mean, I do think being able to say that they completed a medical Spanish program that was a formal for-credit elective as part of their medical school training is just a tremendously valuable skill that makes them that much more competitive and more, I think, useful on their teams when they rotate as residents in the hospital.

[00:39:45.04] ERIN HAGAR: And it must be so rewarding to know that, because of a program you envisioned in your own medical student days, there are people now in hospitals who can help direct patients to the breast imaging center or who can answer questions about their diagnosis or their health care. I mean, the impact that you've had, it must make you feel great.

[00:40:05.60] SANDRA QUEZADA: It does. I think actually I had something recently happen that has been extremely rewarding where many things have come together, and that is because at UMB, UMB has started-- well, UMB has been vaccinating people for COVID-19 for many months now. But just for a couple of weeks now at the Campus Center, UMB has also instituted on Saturdays a vaccination clinic collaborating with CASA de Maryland and the Esperanza Center. So really targeting and amplifying access to Latinx communities in Baltimore to come get vaccinated.

[00:40:45.55] And as they were setting up, because somebody knew that I teach medical Spanish at UMB, they called me, and they were like, we think we're going to need some help. They were like, nobody speaks Spanish there, and, well, we just thought that-- and I was like, you know what? This is a great opportunity for the medical students. I mean, I would absolutely recognize this as a wonderful service-learning opportunity for our students.

[00:41:11.32] And it's just one of those beautiful things. I've been to the clinic two Saturdays now. I want to try to go basically every Saturday that I can. It's so rewarding and wonderful to see my students there working with the patients, helping them navigate through the Campus Center, helping them get their questions asked, as well as just making sure that they're comfortable, and just seeing the relief and smile on the face of the patients as any of us walks up to them and starts speaking to them in Spanish.

[00:41:47.38] We've gotten awesome feedback from CASA and from the Esperanza Center that the patients said that they felt very welcomed, they felt very comfortable, and that's just been like-- just fills my heart. That has just been tremendously rewarding that patients and students are benefiting from this.

[00:42:05.49] ERIN HAGAR: That's fantastic. Gosh, Dr. Quezada, this has been such a fantastic conversation. We cannot thank you enough for your time.

[00:42:12.22] SANDRA QUEZADA: Well, thank you so much for having me. This was so much fun.

[00:42:17.93] ERIN HAGAR: Thank you for joining us today on Moving The Needle. Visit us at umaryland.edu/fctl to hear additional episodes, leave us feedback, or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

[00:00:00.09] ERIN HAGAR: Welcome to Moving the Needle-- casual conversations about ways, big and small, to impact student learning, brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Erin Hagar. Let's move the needle.

[00:00:18.85] Today's episode of Moving the Needle features Dr. Devang Patel, director of the pre-clerkship curriculum in the Office of Medical Education here at UMB. Over the last two years, Dr. Patel and his colleagues have completely revamped the first two years of medical school into what's now called the Renaissance curriculum. You can imagine this was a massive undertaking, an opportunity to rethink the sequence of the content and the methods to deliver it. This new curriculum launched in August of 2020, right smack in the middle of the pandemic. Dr. Patel will share with us the reasons for this curriculum redesign, and some lessons he's learned during its implementation. Dr. Patel, welcome to Moving the Needle.

[00:01:00.43] DEVANG PATEL: Thank you. Thanks for having me on.

[00:01:02.48] ERIN HAGAR: We are so excited to speak with you today because this topic of a curricular redesign, it is a biggie, it's a big effort, and we are so excited about what we can learn from you on this. So let's just begin by having you tell us a little bit about what drove the School of Medicine's curricular redesign. What needs were you trying to address, and what were you hoping to accomplish?

[00:01:27.19] DEVANG PATEL: Sure. I think this is something that has been in the works for many, many years at our institution. What has happened sort of nationally with medical schools is curriculums have been redesigned to shorten that pre-clerkship curriculum, so trying to get the students into the clinical space a little bit earlier. So traditional, the way it's been done for decades, if not centuries-- I don't know how long it goes back, but medical school education has been two years of basic science training, followed by two years of clinical training, which we call the clerkship years, the first-- when they start their clerkships in the third and fourth year.

[00:02:10.69] And many folks have said, you know, why are we spending so much time in the classroom when students really need to be doing the work in the hospital setting, in the clinic setting, where the patients are? So there's been this movement across the country, and many schools-- most schools, actually, I should say-- have done this already, even going back 15 years ago, to move to what we call a systems-based approach that's a shorter pre-clerkship curriculum. And what that means is our traditional exposure and the way that many of our attending physicians were trained was that you got anatomy and then you got physiology and then you got biochemistry, and then maybe second year you got the pathophysiology. So the students had to go back and remember everything about physiology from first year to try to understand the pathophysiology they learned in second year. It is not the most efficient way to probably teach that content.

[00:03:08.32] So the systems-based approach is that we go through each system holistically. So when we start the cardiovascular system, for example, we would learn about the anatomy of the heart, the physiology of the heart, and the pathophysiology, pharmacology of the heart all at the same time. We would learn about the cancers at the same time. Anything related to the heart would come together, and it wouldn't be temporally separated.

[00:03:35.32] So that was one of the big things, was trying to get this systems-based approach, which is a more modern approach to teaching medical students, into place. And the other part, as I said, is trying to get the students in earlier clinical exposure. So one of the big things that we're trying to do is, in this pre-clerkship time, before they're on the wards, before they're in the clinics, still having the students get that exposure to clinical medicine. So when they learn about the cardiovascular system, they get to go practice the cardiovascular exam at the same time. So you know, they're tying those things together, and it's not, again, temporally separated so that it's happening a year or two later.

[00:04:15.34] And then the last part of this, I think, is, as I said, trying to shorten that pre-clerkship curriculum, trying to get the students into the clinical setting earlier. And what we've found over the years is that there's a lot of redundancy in the pre-clerkship curriculum. There's a lot of content that's covered twice, right, because you're covering it in the first year, and then the second year, you're recovering it so that you can explain it to them better so that they can understand the pathophysiology. And that's, again, not very efficient. So trying to remove some of that.

[00:04:47.23] And also, one of the things that happens, I think probably in any curriculum, but when you have people that really love what they're doing, that's what they want to teach. And so we have folks that really want to go in depth, into the weeds on content that's really not quite relevant for a medical school education, right? It may be great for graduate school education, may be great if you want-- I'm an HIV doctor, and I could talk about HIV for six months, you know? But that's not what the medical students need. They need a very concise amount of information that's very relevant to them, understanding that, out of 160 students, only one student may actually go into infectious diseases or think about a career in infectious diseases.

[00:05:33.23] So I've got to make sure that what they're learning is relevant to all of them. So again, trying to cut out some of that redundancy, trying to cut out content that really wasn't relevant for the medical students, and again, shortening all of that so that the students-- the way we've got it now, they will enter the clerkship years two months earlier than previously. And that gives them a little bit more flexibility in terms of electives that they can do, exploring medical subspecialties that they may otherwise not have had the opportunity to explore. And if they can't explore it, how do they know that's what they want to do with their life? So those are things that are now possible that maybe weren't as easy to obtain for students previously.

[00:06:19.51] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, this sounds like a very student needs-driven approach to the curriculum, thinking about the sequencing so that it's easier for them to retain the information, giving them more flexibility to explore new things when they are in the clerkship years. It sounds really like you put the students front and center in all these decisions that you made.

[00:06:42.61] DEVANG PATEL: Yeah, I appreciate you saying that because I think it is important. When we launched our what we're calling the Renaissance curriculum process, we had students as part of the groups that helped design the curriculum. So we had different focus groups, we had different committees, and one of them was a student committee. And so the students were giving us a lot of input on what they thought worked and what they didn't think worked.

[00:07:09.00] One of the big sort of banes of my existence is something called Step I. And Step I is an exam that all medical students have to take. It's the first step of the US MLE licensing process. So it's called USMLE Step I. And the students have to pass that exam in order to take Step II, which they'll take later into medical school, and then Step III, which they typically take in their residency. And then, they can be a fully licensed physician.

[00:07:39.93] Well, Step I over the years has become this exam that schools-- sorry, residency programs use as an almost screening method to decide who's a good medical student and who's not a good medical student, do we want to interview that medical student. Not at all what this exam was designed to do. The exam was designed to measure minimal competency, right, so you can move to the next step. But because there's so much variation between school to school in terms of the education, this became a de facto how well you do on this test determines whether or not I'm going to interview, you like you see with an MCAT or an LSAT or SATs, you know, that-- but it wasn't designed for that.

[00:08:25.48] But anyway, the reason I bring that up is that our students are so fixated on that Step I score because they take that at the end of second year, before they start their clerkship years. So we needed to make sure that we addressed that, that we paid attention to the students' anxiety about Step I, and making sure that our curriculum not only fulfilled our objective-- our objective, the way I see it, and I think most of my colleagues see it, is we are preparing the students for their clerkship years, right? The idea of the first two years of medical school is to make sure that, when you're done with that, when you get to your third-year clerkships, you hit the ground running, that you are prepared to be in that setting, which we think is the most important in terms of your clinical success, right, is being able to do well in your clerkship.

[00:09:08.92] Married to that is your ability to do well on Step I. Right? And I think a lot of times, our students see that our objective of preparing them for year three is not the same as preparing for Step I. They see those as two different goals, but they're not. They're together. If I do a good job preparing you for year three, you should be prepared for Step I, as well.

[00:09:31.10] And you know, so making sure the students bought into that, that they were on board with that concept, you know, that was important. Making sure that we looked at student wellness, understanding from the students that a five-week block before an exam is not good. You know, it's not going to be good for their studying, it's not going be good for their retention, and it's not going to be good for their wellness. So taking into consideration all these things. And we had a great group of students that helped us, you know, give us feedback as we were developing our curriculum.

[00:10:04.75] ERIN HAGAR: That's great. I think that points to the challenges in health professions, where you have these externally-created, very high-stakes assessments that are designed to create this equity among institutions to make sure that everyone has these basic competencies, but it can butt up against a curriculum. And so always having to keep these-- I'm kind of seeing this balancing scale in trying to meet the students' needs and the accrediting body's needs, and the vision behind the curriculum, as well.

[00:10:43.42] DEVANG PATEL: Yeah, absolutely. And actually, I should point out here that one of the biggest wins for us has been the fact that USMLE, because of all the pressure from the medical student undergraduate-- what we call the undergraduate medical education side, to the chagrin of the graduate medical education side, the residency programs, USMLE Step I is now a pass/fail. So the first class that will be pass/fail is the first class of our Renaissance curriculum. So our current first-year students thankfully will be taking Step I without a score, they will know that they passed, and that'll be the end of it. And so I love that because it takes a little bit of that anxiety off of us in the first two years. You know, students will learn because they want to learn, not because they have to be fixated on an exam that happens, this assessment that happens at the end of their second year.

[00:11:39.48] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah. And it sounds like now the onus is on the graduate medical education to rethink its entry processes and its matching processes and things like that, to make sure that now we know that this is truly minimum competency, now what do we do. Is that kind of where the ball landed on that?

[00:12:00.09] DEVANG PATEL: Yes, yes. And I don't believe my colleagues on the GME side are too happy about it, on a national level. But as a person who spends more of my time now on the undergraduate medical education side, you know, this was long overdue. We would have top students that we thought were just fantastic that couldn't get an interview in the most competitive specialties because of a score on this exam. And what's very clear about all of that is that those exam scores don't correlate with the quality of that applicant or the ability of that applicant to perform in that specialty. It was just a way to sift through the 1,000 or 5,000 applications, or 10,000 applications. And I get that, right? It's really hard to do that. But it was to the detriment of many very talented and qualified people that were told they couldn't do something they really had a passion for.

[00:13:00.12] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah. Well, that sounds like a fortuitous sequence of events, at least on the undergraduate side. That's great. Could you talk to us a little bit more about how you structured this process of the curriculum redesign? Who-- you've already mentioned that the students were involved, which is fantastic. Who else was involved? How did you structure it? What kind of work did it entail?

[00:13:23.16] DEVANG PATEL: Yeah, so we had a curriculum council of a bunch of our education leaders here at the medical school, including [? Christina ?] [? Sistone, ?] who joined our group. And she's been just an invaluable resource. We were looking for folks that had successfully taught for many years in our curriculum. We were looking for people who had innovative new ideas of how we should be teaching, and quite frankly, just people that were really invested in improving the quality of the medical education.

[00:14:02.37] And it's a diverse group. It's a great group of faculty. And then as I said, we had the student groups. And we also actually put out an opportunity for any faculty that was interested in medical education to voice their opinion. So there were so many different work groups, with faculty from all over campus, different departments, from the basic science side, from the clinical side, you know, wherever, who could chime in and say, these are some thoughts that we have. And then we had a core group of educators that were really working on designing it.

[00:14:41.85] What we did as we tried to-- we have these courses that we've had for, I don't know-- it goes back a long ways. I feel embarrassed right now that I can't tell you when the last curriculum redesign was. I believe it was when Dr. Martinez, who is the current Associate Dean for Medical Education, was a medical student. So it's been a while. And so we've had these courses that have been the same courses for, what, 15, 20 years or whatever, and now we're saying, well, we're going to get rid of those courses, we're going to have brand-new courses, brand-new course leadership. And how do we organize this? Where do we decide the content goes?

[00:15:20.94] So what we did is we looked at medical school curriculums from all around the country. And I don't even know how many we ended up looking at the end of it all, but it was many. And we just sort of looked at them and said, oh, that looks like a great idea. We should look at doing something like that. I like the way this course was organized. I like the way that this medical school structured the chronology of their courses. You know, they did this system first, and then this system. And so we took a look at all of those things and tried to put together what we thought was the best amalgamation of those different medical school curriculums.

[00:16:03.88] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah. When you were looking at all of those curriculums from other medical schools, had you already decided on the systems-based approach, or was looking at their curriculum something that pulled you in that direction?

[00:16:17.10] DEVANG PATEL: No, no, we had already decided that we wanted to go systems-based. That is something that had, as I said earlier, I mean, it was something most schools had already moved in that direction. And in a way, we were a little bit behind the curve on that. So we wanted to make sure that that was the way we did it. Just a matter of how do you do it, right? How do you structure it so it makes sense.

[00:16:38.31] And I think there's going to be some growing pains. You know, we might find, well, we taught this a little too early because the students didn't have enough knowledge to really appreciate what they were learning. And maybe that's something, a piece of content that could be moved to a different course later in the curriculum. Our approach to this is that this is a very dynamic process, that this is a process that is not set in stone. We will need to continue to change things every year until we get the best possible curriculum product out there.

[00:17:14.55] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah. Well, how are you going to collect the data or the input or get the feedback in order to decide how things are working?

[00:17:22.50] DEVANG PATEL: So we have several different ways of doing this. One of the things is obviously the student feedback. We get student feedback on lectures, we get student feedback on the courses, we have focus groups with the students in each course. We meet with the students curriculum reps so that we can get that sense, as well. Of course, we can look at how they do on our internal assessments, as well as things like Step I, which, at the end of the day, has been the thing that everybody judges the success of a medical school on, fairly or unfairly. I would say unfairly. But those are things that we can all look at to see how it's going.

[00:18:04.44] We have a quality improvement group-- we call it the MEQI committee, Medical Education Quality Improvement-- that is looking at how do we improve the course from year to year. My specific job is the director of the pre-clerkship curriculum within our structure in the Medical Education Office. And so looking at how the courses that have completed have fared so far in the terms of the student evaluations, and then comparing.

[00:18:33.66] Well, look, this course did a really good job with this, maybe that's something we can incorporate in future courses. Those of our faculty that are leadership for the second-year courses are keenly paying attention to what's happening with the first-year courses, right, because they have time, although that time is getting shorter and shorter, they have some time to try to make improvements to what they thought their vision would be for these courses.

[00:19:00.75] ERIN HAGAR: Sure. So your brave pioneers are implementing away, and those kind of on deck are anxiously awaiting to see how that goes.

[00:19:10.20] DEVANG PATEL: Yes, absolutely. And you know, everybody-- it's a big team, right? Everybody's collegial. We're all friends. And so it's nice, right? You say, I saw that you did this, can you show me how you did that, we would like to do this in our course. And it's great. I mean, it's so fun to see people doing that. And you know, my job sometimes is just to, like, make sure that everybody hears each other and can learn from each other. But everybody's already reaching out. There's very little for me to do in terms of that sometimes.

[00:19:44.31] ERIN HAGAR: That's so great. It's exciting sometimes, I mean, this is a big initiative, it's a big change, there's probably some organizational culture and resistance to change that comes, that's just a natural part of any big initiative like this, but what I'm hearing from you is that even more important is this renewed creativity, this renewed sense of collaboration, this energy that's coming about. Well, we're all changing everything, right?

[00:20:13.32] It's not just me putting myself out there as a solo instructor, trying this crazy new idea. The whole curriculum is changing. And so do you feel that collegiality and that back-and-forth has really inspired some changes that might not have otherwise happened if the curriculum were staying the same, but individual faculty members were thinking about changes?

[00:20:36.81] DEVANG PATEL: Yeah, I think so. I think there would have been a-- we would have some incremental changes along the way, but they may have been limited to an individual course. If I really liked-- if I wanted to do something with my course, well, I did it, but then there was less crosstalk with other courses. And we have a whole new structure in the Office of Medical Education. We have multiple layers of leadership now that allow us to engage people in that way, under the leadership of Joe Martinez, as I talked about earlier, [? Nirav ?] [? Shah, ?] who is our Assistant Dean for Curriculum, myself, Norm [? Rettner, ?] who sees our longitudinal curriculum.

[00:21:18.48] He's the Director of Longitudinal Curriculum, which is looking at how the students go from year one all the way through year four, in terms of learning, physical exam skills, professionalism, humanism. We talk about diversity and equity and talking about health care disparities, right? That that's all under Norm [? Rettner. ?] And then Phil [? Ditmar, ?] who's my sort of counterpart on the other side, he's the Director of the Clerkship Curriculum. So he's overseeing how the third and fourth years of the curriculum look.

[00:21:49.20] And then we have Connie [? LeCap, ?] who is our Assistant Dean for Assessment. We didn't have that position before, right? So now, we have somebody who's dedicated to making sure that we do a really good job with our assessments, as well. And not just exams, but assessing our faculty and evaluating our faculty and assessing how our curriculum is working. So it's really a great team of folks. And then, as you said, looking at people who are excited about curriculum change, you know, we brought in-- I kind of think of myself as young, but I'm realizing that I'm not so young, so we bring in younger faculty who have great ideas about how to do small group teaching, team-based learning, trying to get the most out of these interactions with the students.

[00:22:39.51] And yes, you're right, there were definitely people that had been teaching for many years in our curriculum that had leadership positions that said, you know, this is not for me. And that's OK. Right? I mean, we thank them for the years of service that they gave to the medical school, but this is just not their thing, and that's OK. There's no hard feelings there. We have folks that are interested in trying new things, and let's give them a shot at it.

[00:23:06.90] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah. Has there been a new thing that you've seen that you find particularly exciting that you would like to share with our listeners, a strategy or an approach?

[00:23:17.06] DEVANG PATEL: Well, you're putting me on the spot a little bit. Yeah, we have to remember that we launched this whole thing in the middle of COVID. So it's impacted our ability to do-- well, one of the things that we really wanted to do was focus on team-based learning. And so with that in mind, with some generous donations from one of our alumni, we have the read rooms, which were formerly these small pods where we had students working with a preceptor with 16 students, 20 students in a small-- what we called a small group, right? 16, 20 students with one preceptor is not necessarily a small group.

[00:24:03.60] And that's what we had done for such a long time. We got those rooms renovated, read rooms, so that we had eight rooms that are now two big rooms. So we can have 80 students-- actually, 90 students-- in each room, with tables of-- we have small round tables, with five students per table. And the idea is that we would do team-based learning in that setting. And that was our objective. That was our goal.

[00:24:34.67] Again, I shout out to [? Christina ?] [? Sistone, ?] who was such a champion for this for us, as well. She even helped us get some of the scratch-off cards that we would use for team-based learning and all this, which I still owe you for, [? Christina. ?] We'll make it happen, if she's listening. But we did all that, and then COVID. So now, we had to figure out what we were going to do with all of that teaching innovation that we were going to do in class, now we're going to have to do online.

[00:25:04.31] We've adjusted. We've done it. We've been able to-- I think the most well-received online small group teaching that we do is actually our modified versions of TBL that we do on Zoom. So the students-- You've got to remember, the first year students came to campus in the middle of a pandemic, never having met another classmate perhaps, right, unless they went to the same undergraduate or something like that, were told to stay in their houses, you know, couldn't go out and hang out. We didn't have any social activities for them that were in person. We tried to do things virtually.

[00:25:43.21] And then we expect them to work together, and they did. And I think we put them in Zoom groups of five. And it started with Adam [? Puche, ?] who's an outstanding anatomy educator who's been doing this for years. And Adam completely just went with it. I mean, he put the students into these groups, and they would work in their groups. And then they would come back to the main room, and he would talk to them, and the groups could talk to each other.

[00:26:12.83] But it got to the point that the students were so attached to the four people in their group, that they didn't want me to change their groups midway through the year. And I was like, no, no, it's good for you. You guys don't know anybody. You've been in Baltimore for six months, and you don't know anybody except for the four students that are in your group. So you need to see other groups.

[00:26:31.19] And when we were able to get some of these in-person sessions, and we petitioned the university to allow us to bring a quarter of the class in at a time social distanced, masking, the whole business, they were so excited to see one another and work in person with one another. And that's what we want, right. We want the students to really have that experience where they're learning from each other.

[00:26:57.74] And what I've seen in terms of the feedback from the students, and what we've learned from them is, that they really enjoy these small group settings, where it's not a preceptor droning on in front of the classroom, but it's really them teaching each other. And then having this expert in the room to sort of clarify issues if there are any. And I think it's such a better way to learn. And it seems to be the way that the students prefer to learn.

[00:27:21.29] ERIN HAGAR: That's great. Well, a testament to resilience on all fronts, the faculty, the students, really layer upon layer of change and adaptation. It would have been a big change had COVID not thrown a monkey wrench into all of this, and then add that.

[00:27:38.60] But what I really love about what you're saying in this team based learning approach, and for our listeners, we have a lot of information on our website about TBL. It's a great strategy. There's a lot of information about how that works.

[00:27:52.89] But what I just wanted to call out was when I hear you speak about that, how much that approach really models what the future of practicing medicine could look like to this idea of, there are people who know more than me about this. I can contribute this, this team based approach, really changing the power dynamic of what you might have seen in a traditional medical classroom years ago, really reflects the way care is being practiced in an ideal world right now.

[00:28:26.66] DEVANG PATEL: Yeah, absolutely. You know, obviously, the hierarchy is a big part of medicine in the clinical realm. There's students, then there's residents, then there's fellows, and there's attendings. But the other big part of medicine in the clinical realm is teams, right, working in a team. And if you are a good senior person on your team, attending, or the fellow, you should be listening to everybody on the team, including the third year medical student.

[00:28:55.19] You know, I'll give you a great example. I was just on service last week, and I had my whole team there, and I had a first year medical student who has very little clinical exposure, right. And they are now allowed to do a little bit of shadowing. So he had asked, can I come shadow and see some of the stuff we learned in class. I said, sure, come.

[00:29:13.74] And I remember that we were on rounds, and we were discussing a patient, and all of a sudden he raised-- he didn't raise his hand, but it was almost like a little timid. And I was like, no, no, go ahead. What do you want to say? And he brought up a point that nobody else on the team had thought of.

[00:29:32.03] It was a first year medical student. Like, there were senior residents. There were interns there. And I was like, you're absolutely correct. We had a pharmacist, you know. And he was the one who brought up this very important point. And I think we value that. And I think it is important for students to learn how to work in a team. Because when they get to their clerkship years, everything is in a team. Everything is in a team.

[00:29:57.57] Regardless of the hierarchy, it's still a team, right. There's still a team of people working together. And I think one of the things that students may struggle with is in the first two years of medical school, it's traditionally been very individualistic, right. I need to do well on this exam. I need to do this on this. I got to get this score on my test. I want to do this on step one.

[00:30:20.33] But you're not working with other people to do that, right. You're just trying to get this individual score for yourself. I want to get honors. I want to get A. I want to get whatever. And then you get to the third year, and all of a sudden, it's not about that, right. It's about taking care of the patient. And it's about being a part of this machine, being a cog in this machine that functions well. And if it does function well, takes care of a lot of sick people efficiently, and at a high level.

[00:30:51.36] But if you're not used to that, you could mess that up, right, or you may not feel comfortable. And we see students that sometimes struggle. All of this to say, I think TBL helps again with that team approach to learning.

[00:31:04.97] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, yeah, and creating an atmosphere where it's OK to ask questions of your teammates, and it's OK to speak up and to question something. I mean, that the student raised that point with you and with all those senior level medical providers, is a testament to the culture that you helped create, that they feel comfortable to say it.

[00:31:25.43] DEVANG PATEL: He had no hesitancy.

[00:31:26.69] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah.

[00:31:26.87] DEVANG PATEL: None. I mean, you know, it was so refreshing. Because I mean, when I was a first year student, I would have been scared senseless to say anything in that setting. I would've just been there observing. But he knew something, and he wanted to share it. And it was the absolute right thing to tell us, and it was fantastic.

[00:31:48.53] And I think you're right. I mean, it's creating that culture. I think that's the other part of being in the first years of med school is these are type A personalities, right, us in medicine. And so you come to med school because you were the detail oriented person, and everything had to be correct, and everything had to be right.

[00:32:09.08] And guess what? You're not always right. And when you get to medical school, there's such a pressure to be always to be correct. And it's seen as a failure to not know something. Or you feel like, oh my gosh, I can't believe I don't know as much as that person, or whatever it may be.

[00:32:27.29] I think the team based learning really changes that dynamic, right. You're like, oh, well, they don't know either. OK. That's OK. It's safer, right. And I think that is what the students will convey to us, is that it feels safer than having again, a faculty member standing in front of the room ask you a question, and you feel put on the spot, and, you don't know how to answer. And everybody's judging you. And everybody thinks you're dumb. We don't want any of that. That's not a helpful way to learn.

[00:32:58.70] ERIN HAGAR: I also think the advantage of TBL, particularly in this context, is that it emphasizes information seeking, asking the right questions, and then gathering the information. I think the volume of medical information that's available, you couldn't possibly teach it all, right. You couldn't possibly teach everything there is to know.

[00:33:20.57] And so creating those systems where students are comfortable asking those questions, evaluating the literature, making decisions based on what they're reading, you know, that's going to be so important for them as they move forward in their careers as well.

[00:33:38.63] DEVANG PATEL: Absolutely. I mean, you hit the nail right on the head. We worry so much about critical thinking skills. I've had physicians that trained me that say, you know when I learned this, the book was this thick, and now, it's six volumes. You know, there's no way you can know that all. And learning that you can look stuff up, where to go look it up, you know.

[00:34:01.52] And it's one of the things I try to teach residents and students when I'm working with them on the wards all the time is that, I don't know all the stuff. You'll see me on the computer looking things up. And you know, I think you've got to model that behavior, so that people feel like you don't always have to know anything. In fact, if you think everything, then we're in a bad place You're not going to be a very good physician.

[00:34:26.18] So knowing how to go look for stuff, and doing it regularly. Not assuming, oh yeah, I remember this, but let's just double check and make sure we're OK.

[00:34:38.09] ERIN HAGAR: Right, right. And normalizing it to the point where you don't have to shut your door and pretend like you're hiding while you look this up. This is just what we do, right. Yeah, that's great.

[00:34:49.22] So speaking of working with students on the floor, you know, again, we talked about COVID hitting during this curriculum change, but you also work in infectious diseases during one of the worst infectious diseases that any of us could probably ever remember. So how did your life as a medical practitioner, as a medical educator, as you know just a human going through this, how did all of those intersect and inform each other? And how did you get through this year, I guess is what I want to know.

[00:35:23.90] DEVANG PATEL: How did we all get through this year? So my wife is also an infectious diseases physician. So you know, just going on a personal level, you see this pandemic. And we had all the same fears as everybody else, except that we were both people that would very likely be taking care of people with COVID when we knew very little.

[00:35:49.04] And my wife is not in academic. She's in private practice. But she was seeing COVID patients every day. And you know, because my time is split between clinical work and with the medical school, and stuff, it wasn't the same for me. But you know, that was a big thing. I mean, you know, does she come home and hug the kids? Does she go and take a shower first? You know, all this stuff that at the beginning was so scary and you didn't know. And all you worried about was your family and children.

[00:36:17.93] And then for us, there were two of us. And how is that going to play out? Well, are you going to be on? Are you going to be clinically doing this? It was a little bit stressful in the beginning when we just didn't know very much, and trying to figure out child care. And everybody's been dealing with all of the same stuff, right.

[00:36:38.12] And then of course, the colleagues that I work with are all doing the same thing. They're all physicians that are working. Dr. Retner, who I just spoke to you about, he works in the intermediate medical care unit. So that's our step down from the ICU. So he's taking care of patients there with COVID.

[00:36:56.90] Dr. Shaw is an intensivists, so he's taking care of patients in the ICU with COVID. Dr. Martinez is an emergency medicine doc, taking care of patients and-- you know, Dr. [? Lacap ?] is a psychiatrist. Patients still come in, and she's seeing them in clinic. I mean, I think her situation is probably the scariest. Because you didn't know who had COVID, and who didn't, right. And Dr. Ditmar is a hospitalist.

[00:37:18.14] So we were all seeing these patients to some varying degree, and we had to keep doing all of that while trying to-- let's not leave our legacy curriculum out of this, our now third year students were in their second year. And you know, we're planning our new curriculum. The first and second years are in their legacy curricula, what we call the legacy curriculum. s

[00:37:44.90] We had to pivot and make sure that they got all their education completed via Zoom for the second year and for the first year, to get them through to summer. Our curriculum service support staff, the IT folks here are just amazing, and really helped us to navigate Zoom. Zoom has become our best friend. I don't know if that's good or bad. It's bad.

[00:38:12.50] And so they helped us with all of that, so we were doing that. And then trying to take care of really sick people in the hospital, and trying to stay on top of the literature. But I think what good got us all through that was our colleagues, our collegiality. We're all in the same boat. We're all working together.

[00:38:31.31] And whether it was on the clinical side, or the medical school side, that was what we did. And we sort of pulled together and knew that we had to help each other. And you know, it's nice because there are people that understand your language, right. They understand what you're going through. It's not something that maybe you can explain to family members, or neighbors, or friends. But these are all folks that are going through the same thing.

[00:38:57.83] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, yeah.

[00:38:59.51] DEVANG PATEL: And we have an awesome team, so that helps.

[00:39:02.25] ERIN HAGAR: That comes through loud and clear. And just on behalf of all of us here at the university, I mean, we just cannot thank you enough for the level of service that people contributed this year, and always, but especially this year. It does not go unnoticed. And we just want you to know how grateful we are.

[00:39:21.35] Looking to brighter horizons, I guess, as we're hopefully on the waning side of the outbreak, crossing fingers here. We're recording this at the end of April. And looking at now that you're getting ready to launch year two of this curriculum, what are some things on the horizon that you find that you're particularly excited about, or that you think might really continue to, as we say on this, move the needle in medical education.

[00:39:53.06] DEVANG PATEL: Well, first and foremost, we are excited to have students back in person. The worst part of all of this for us has been not having that interaction with students, and seeing them in the hallway, and having them come up to you randomly to just discuss something. And we started doing-- we call them wellness meetings, all of the faculty over here in Office of Education, and Office of Student Affairs.

[00:40:23.99] We set up Teams, Microsoft Teams meetings. What is it called? Bookings, they have bookings, where you can make yourself available, and people can just click on and say, I want to meet you on Friday 12:15 for 15 minutes. And so we started doing that, because we saw that a lot of the students were struggling with COVID, and the isolation, and all of this.

[00:40:48.99] And it's the one constant. I just wanted to say hi. I hadn't talked to any faculty, and I wanted to say hello, and I just wanted you to make sure you remember who I am, or that I'm a student. And I was like, yes, we remember. But I think that was a part that we didn't probably appreciate up front would be so difficult for everybody. Not just the students, but for the faculty as well, because we get energy from the students, right.

[00:41:19.97] The learner provides us that enthusiasm and joy that allows us to do these things. So when you're not in-- yeah, you can do it over Zoom, but it's not quite the same. It's so funny. I've done so many lectures this year for the first year medical students. And we had them coming in person a little bit in the fall. And then when the numbers went up, we didn't. And then after spring break, we had them coming back.

[00:41:48.14] And when I wander upstairs to see how things are going up in the read rooms, where they're coming in for small groups, they're like, that's Doctor Patel. That's that guy. That's that guy from the Zoom. And I'm like, yeah, I'm real.

[00:42:05.25] ERIN HAGAR: Now you know how celebrities feel.

[00:42:08.03] DEVANG PATEL: It's a little-- I didn't want to say it. But it's a little weird. It's like that. It's like, you know, I'm just an old guy that teaches. But because they've only seen you on Zoom, it's like, oh my gosh, there's a person that we've been learning from. And they're here. And we can have a conversation with them, and all this stuff.

[00:42:29.84] So I think that's not moving the needle. That's moving back to where we should have been to begin with, right. I know your question was what's moving the needle. But I think that alone is a big win for us.

[00:42:44.21] But in terms of moving the needle going forward, I think it's more about trying to implement keeping TBL going, but trying to implement other ways to improve active learning. We are trying to shorten all our lectures, so that we're making sense of what we know about adult learning. People don't want to sit for 50 minutes straight in a chair. It's just not a good way to learn.

[00:43:13.20] So trying to shorten the duration of lectures, giving more lectures. And you know, like, instead of doing two 50 minute lectures, do three 35 minute lectures, or something like that. We use Turning Point, or audience response systems, trying to find other ways to engage students, so that this material isn't just memorization, but it actually sticks.

[00:43:36.95] And as I said, critical thinking for us is such a big part of what we do, and making sure that the students can apply the knowledge. And that's where I think I'm still really going to be leaning on some of our faculty, especially the younger faculty who are so enthusiastic about teaching, to come up with some newer innovations of how we can do this better.

[00:44:00.68] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, that's so great well. I hear two things loud and clear, which are engagement and connection. And I think that we can look at all these innovative approaches, and new technologies coming down the pike, and that's so exciting. But I think it's important to remember as you've described so well, that the essence of teaching really comes down to those two things, making those connections, which you which you felt the lack of during this distance. And then seeing this engagement as you've changed the curriculum to really get the students more involved.

[00:44:35.87] I think our medical students are so lucky. It makes me so excited for education and the future of health care, just to know that these students are going to be out in the world having had this foundation. And it's really great. Thank you for the work that you do. And thank you for sharing it with us today.

[00:44:52.35] DEVANG PATEL: Absolutely.

[00:44:54.68] ERIN HAGAR: Thank you for joining us today on Moving the Needle. Visit us at umaryland.edu/fctl to hear additional episodes, leave us feedback, or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

[00:45:09.56] [MUSIC PLAYING]

[00:00:00.09] ERIN HAGAR: Welcome to "Moving the Needle", casual conversations about ways big and small to impact student learning. Brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Erin Hagar. Let's move the needle.

[00:00:15.71] [MUSIC PLAYING]

[00:00:18.92] Welcome back, everyone. If you're a faculty member, what do you remember about your first year? The first time you had to plan a course, write a syllabus, create assessments, and then greet that sea of expectant student faces all on your own. You had to learn who was who in your department, where the post-it notes and the coffeemaker were, and then stay on top of your courses while serving on committees, and then somehow keep your research agenda front and center. It's a lot. And the truth is college faculty often don't have a ton of support when they make this transition.

[00:00:53.17] Our guest today is Beth Budny-Buckley, a faculty member in the Physician Assistant studies program at Frostburg State University. Beth just completed her first year. And in this episode, she speaks with us about the transition from practicing medicine to teaching it, adapting her PA courses to online during COVID, and the support she received from a nine-month fellowship program specifically for clinically practicing PAs who are entering academia. You'll hear her refer to this program as PALLA, which is the PA Leadership and Learning Academy, a statewide initiative led by the University of Maryland, Baltimore to advance PA education, research, and policy. Let's dive in. Beth, welcome to "Moving the Needle".

[00:01:36.94] BETH BUDNY-BUCKLEY: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here, Erin.

[00:01:39.76] ERIN HAGAR: We're so excited to dive into this conversation today. So I guess I'd like to start just by having you tell us a little bit about your history. You recently made the transition from full-time clinical practice as a physician assistant to PA education. So tell us a little bit about that transition why. Why did you make that switch?

[00:02:02.68] BETH BUDNY-BUCKLEY: I think there was a lot of reasons. I had been in health care practicing either as a PA or in some sort of clinic for about 25 years. I started in health care when I was 15. I always knew that science was something I loved and taking care of people was something that I loved. But I really didn't quite understand the capacity I was going to do that in. I thought about being an RN.

[00:02:27.25] And we had a project in school-- we were in high school-- it's kind of similar to what you sometimes have in middle school where you're supposed to talk to somebody in a field that you think that you will enjoy. And there was a local dermatologist that was a family friend that had just come to the area. And we had talked. And they needed help, so I had helped there in the office.

[00:02:47.29] And I started filing slides. They then taught me how to be a medical assistant. That was before that you needed to be certified. So I learned everything on-the-job.

[00:02:56.83] And then after I finished schooling, I went to Western Maryland College. I got my biology degree. I was still working there during the summers. And afterwards, I work there full-time as a medical assistant. And we had this conversation where they said, you know, I think you should do more. So I went back to PA school.

[00:03:11.71] And I loved medicine. I love taking care of people. It came naturally. I love the rapport that I had with patients. But after a while, medicine changed. Medicine started to become a little bit like a business. And I think the changes in medicine, where we were trying to make strides for patient care and having more metrics with patients, sometimes took away from not only the time that you had with patients, but the rapport that you could make with patients, the ability to be advocates for your patients. And that was really important. It's something that I experienced in my own family and in my own life. And that was kind of the reason why I went back to school.

[00:03:49.76] So when kind of your why changes for what you're doing, it kind of makes it a little bit harder at the end of the day. And when I realized that I wasn't really learning as much as I wanted to and I wasn't growing, I realized I needed to do something else.

[00:04:03.14] ERIN HAGAR: So how did you make the leap to education?

[00:04:06.50] BETH BUDNY-BUCKLEY: So one of the things that I loved about patient care was teaching the patients and helping them to understand why they needed to do what they needed to do. If you just write a prescription and say, here, do this, it's more difficult if you don't understand the reasoning behind it. What I didn't understand is there's a big difference between teaching difficult concepts to your patients and then teaching difficult concepts to your students. So that was kind of a little bit of a learning curve.

[00:04:34.57] I actually had taught in person before COVID for about six weeks here at Frostburg. They had a need for teaching anatomy, both the lab and the in-person portions. So I'd had some in-person experiences. And I really enjoyed it. I enjoy the interaction with the students. I really enjoyed the light bulb moments.

[00:04:54.94] One of the great things that I had when we were in-person-- I didn't teach the patient assessment class when I was going back to full-time-- was we had a patient who was struggling with learning how to palpate the thyroid. So we had a student what I could tell could be a model for this. And it was that light bulb moment that he finally realized how to do this. And he was so grateful.

[00:05:18.49] And you never really know as an educator, whether or not it's in health care professions or whatever, how what you're going to teach that student somewhere along the line can help them. I think in life it kind of comes full circle that maybe one day he'll be able to palpate a thyroid and find somebody's thyroid cancer.

[00:05:34.52] ERIN HAGAR: So it really sounds like in both your clinical practice and in your connection to teaching now that really what comes front and center are the people you're serving, either the patients that you are treating or the students that you're working with. It sounds like this is kind of a people forward point of view. How did COVID impact this approach?

[00:05:57.07] BETH BUDNY-BUCKLEY: I think the students had a hard time connecting to us. And I think the students had a hard time connecting with each other. I know they created study groups, but I think it's different when you can be in person. And you can kind of have that human interaction. And I think we missed a lot of that with COVID.

[00:06:14.98] I didn't really realize how that difference between the online platform and being in-person is different. I think it was different not only with the connections with the students, but connections with each other as faculty too to be able to kind of lean on each other. You can have a conversation and somebody can say, this is how you do it. And you can't really read their facial expressions, obviously, when you're talking on the phone.

[00:06:39.70] There was also difficulty with the online learning platform too is that a lot of students didn't purposely have their cameras off. But because they would have bandwidth issues, they wouldn't be able to listen to the lecture appropriately if they had their camera on. So I think that gave them more of a free pass sometimes, not necessarily intentionally kind of to tune out a little bit. But also, it was more difficult to watch 25 tiny facial expressions on a screen then kind of surveying the land of facial expressions when you're in the classroom. So that made it a little bit more difficult too.

[00:07:14.80] But yeah, the human interaction, I think is important too because you kind of learn to care for one another as a cohort. And you learn to care a little bit-- and not that you don't care about your students, but you learn to have connection with your students because you can have more side conversations with them and learn a little bit about them when there really isn't the opportunity to do that when you're in the online environment. You kind of start the class. You end the class.

[00:07:42.37] And they're so screen fatigued by sitting there five, eight hours a day, and then studying on their computer for so many hours that they really don't want to chat with you at the end of class. They've just kind of had enough of the screen. And I think it made it hard to have a connection as much with students.

[00:08:00.47] I don't necessarily think it changed their ability to learn the subject matter. It just made it a little bit more less interactive. And then they were less engaged.

[00:08:12.47] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, absolutely. So currently, you are in the first full academic year as a faculty member in the PA program at Frostburg University. So just tell us a little bit about your first year as a PA faculty member. What were your responsibilities? What did you teach? What kinds of things surprised you?

[00:08:35.54] BETH BUDNY-BUCKLEY: So I think what I didn't realize-- I think that I alluded to a little bit before-- is the difference between teaching your students and teaching your patients. I also did not realize that there is an art and science to teaching. I think as you go through your education, you're kind of a sponge, and you're absorbing anything. But you really don't realize not only the time, but just like there's an art and science to medicine, there's an art and science to teaching. And I think it's never taught in PA school because it really isn't needed to be taught in PA school.

[00:09:08.99] The PALLA program, which is where I met you, Erin, was tremendously helpful to help to learn that as you go along. And I highly recommend to anybody, if it's not a PALLA program, I know PAEA has a jumpstart program for new faculty, just so you can learn kind of the art and the science of the curriculum. And why we do the things you do.

[00:09:27.49] So when I came on board, we were in our second semester. I was teaching anatomy, which, obviously, has a lab component to it. And then I was teaching basic science. Both of these were really content-- and I think most of PA school-- but these are really kind of content dense really kind of difficult subjects. Basic science kind of put together, it was a myriad of kind of all your difficult classes, like your biochemistry. It was a little bit of genetics kind of all rolled into one. And then human anatomy, obviously, is human anatomy.

[00:10:01.93] Like I said, what was really tough was kind of taking that hands-on learning. We have an Anatomage table. So the students did not get the opportunity to do dissection on human cadavers just because we couldn't have that many students in one room during COVID. But we did have the Anatomage table that we could employ. We kind of split up our classes into two days. And then we had two Anatomage tables, so went to smaller classes.

[00:10:30.52] The interesting thing about that is we found that that is something that we're going to keep. It was a positive thing of COVID. The smaller groups and the separation of classes into two days allowed everybody to have access to the table easier. It allowed them to have more access to me because me teaching 25 students at once, versus me teaching 13 at once kind of in two smaller chunks of kind of seven or eight in each classroom really worked well. The students seemed to enjoy that. So that was a positive thing that came out of COVID.

[00:11:00.99] I think the difficult thing was trying to teach hands-on learning in an online environment. As an instructor, you have to have assessments so you kind of see as you're going along that our students are kind of learning the concepts. So when you have this one Anatomage table, and you can watch them kind of interact all around it, you can kind of correct things if they're having difficulty with dissecting. Or you can kind of hear them talking amongst themselves if they may not quite be getting it, or they're more apt to ask questions.

[00:11:33.31] But if you're trying to find on a screen a way for them to dissect things and understand the concepts, it's really hard to do that because, really, only one person on their screen can be dissecting at once. They can kind of talk to each other, but you don't really know if they're kind of learning the skills, and they're learning the concepts because you can really only assess one person at a time. And if you have 15 people that you're trying to do that in a short period of time, it really makes it hard.

[00:12:01.71] ERIN HAGAR: Wow. So you had this transition to online learning at the same time you were making the transition to becoming a full-time faculty member. That sounds intense. What was it like?

[00:12:12.87] BETH BUDNY-BUCKLEY: I think what kind of drove the point home of how really difficult it was going to be to transition to the online learning concept for kind of hands-on concepts is I talked right before we switched over to entirely virtual for our classes, like in mid-November. And instructors who had been teaching for 25 years were really struggling with how they were going to do that. I mean, here they were seasoned professors who have done this for so long. And they were struggling.

[00:12:39.75] So I think that kind of gave me a little bit of reassurance that it wasn't just me. And it wasn't just me kind of starting out. So that was really helpful.

[00:12:48.27] As far as the responsibilities, something that kind of changed between just adjuncting and being in-person is the extra responsibilities. The fact that, at least in my program, which not a lot of PA programs are, that I was on a tenure track. So understanding the extra responsibilities that's involved in that, like, the requirements for service, the requirements for research, the requirements, obviously, if you're going to be teaching classes. So that's kind of the easiest part. But trying to understand how that played into things as well. And I didn't realize that that was part of what it means to be a professor.

[00:13:27.09] So yeah, there was a there was a lot of eye-opening moments. I think what was probably different between my experience starting out, at least full-time online versus in-person, was the moments like the lonely moments. And what was really interesting when I reflected back on it, is I think that's what the students were feeling too, but nobody really talked about it.

[00:13:54.18] My kids go to school close to where I am. So I would drop them off, and I came in here. And I would literally be here by myself in complete silence for like months. And I'd have interaction with the students for hands-on. But, again, it comes back to that same point of like human connection, and how that not only helps you to be engaged and helps you kind of learn your craft, but it's the same thing that the students need. That that human interaction for one another when they bounce ideas off each other help them to learn as well. So I think that's what kind of changed the learning curve for people who may have started out in full-time teaching in kind of the online COVID environment.

[00:14:37.17] ERIN HAGAR: Tell us about the support that got you through this year.

[00:14:40.68] BETH BUDNY-BUCKLEY: I think that was the important part of the mentorship. I think that's what's helpful for either having a mentor in your university. We have a mentor program with a faculty member that's tenured completely outside of our department. So you can kind of ask the difficult questions. You know? Is this OK? Is this what I'm supposed to be doing? Is this is how I'm supposed to be feeling?

[00:15:03.15] And then if you have another level, if you have the chance to participate in PALLA. So PALLA, I probably should say with that, is the Physician Assistant Leadership and Learning Academy that's through the University of Maryland system, or PAEA that offers the jumpstart program. That it kind of helps you to understand that what a lot of the feelings that I had and a lot of the feelings that you have kind of the interaction with your students is normal. And I think that's helpful to have that no matter whether you start in an online environment, or you start in an in-person type setting.

[00:15:38.92] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about some of that support. So can you describe a little bit what your experience was like in the PALLA fellowship program?

[00:15:50.88] BETH BUDNY-BUCKLEY: Yeah, so I cannot say enough for the PALLA team. I think it's such a wonderful and amazing opportunity just because, like I said, you don't realize what the art and science of teaching is, and what really goes on. It's kind of like you're watching a play. And you really don't understand like all the components that are going on the behind the scenes.

[00:16:16.93] So as a student, you're there, OK, I have a syllabus. I have to follow the syllabus. They give me exams. I'm done. But you don't really realize what's really going on behind the scenes. So this kind of gives you a chance to kind of break everything down and to learn what you need to do to allow the students to have the best experience and to be engaged.

[00:16:37.30] I will tell you that I was one of those students that I had-- I don't know if it was necessarily anxiety, but I didn't understand the team type learning environment. Like, that like created major anxiety for me. Like, I didn't understand what the benefit was of learning as a group. Like, I just kind of went and did my thing.

[00:16:58.02] But through the PALLA experience, I learned that when you work as a group, and you know that it's going to be a safe environment, that you kind of bounce ideas off each other. And things that I say may be said in a way that somebody helps to learn a concept. They may say things in a way or explains the things in a way or draw things in a way that helps me to learn a concept.

[00:17:21.66] And what's interesting is I learned ways that students learn not only through PALLA, but interacting with the students that now have helped me. When my students this week-- as new students they have to come see us at week two of their program-- to help them to learn. Because they would come to me and say, like, five out of five students came to me and said, I'm overwhelmed. I said that's completely normal. Like, what do I do? What kind of instructional ideas do you have for me?

[00:17:50.83] And I think the first thing, like I said, to new faculty that came on too is, number one, give yourself grace. That you're going to have times that you're going to be stressed. And I think the other thing that helped me through the PALLA experience too is that it gave me instructional strategies for myself to help the students. But it also gave me a way to help students to help themselves with different ways of learning.

[00:18:19.54] And I didn't really understand. I knew that we all have our own kind of unique way of learning, but what I didn't understand is if you employ like more than one of your senses, like if you go and listen to the lecture, and you write it out, that you're going to have an easier time with learning things. And I didn't realize, too, like one of the ways that I learn is I either listen, or I look. I have to write everything down as I'm going along. Like, that's just my way of learning.

[00:18:45.55] And what I learn through the science of education and the science of instructing and teaching and learning is there's literally kind of a way that the synapses come together when you're writing versus typing. So one of the first things that I do now at the beginning of the semester is I send out the article that talks about this, reminding them you can use your iPads. But if you're struggling, try changing from typing out your notes to writing out your notes and see if it makes a difference.

[00:19:11.84] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah. What advice would you have for clinicians who are thinking about making the move to health care education?

[00:19:21.24] BETH BUDNY-BUCKLEY: I think first off I would suggest they either adjunct or guest lecture multiple times just so they can get a feel whether or not this is something that they enjoy. There's a lot of extra stuff that's involved with education, like advising, kind of service to your university, kind of service to your team. There's a lot of meetings and committees that you're involved with. But if you can just understand whether or not that teaching is for you, I think that's a starting point.

[00:19:55.27] Another thing is to don't be afraid to ask kind of for guidance and to ask for mentorship. I think in the beginning we're all kind of a little bit in survival mode. But I think to kind of keep yourself going and to keep that light at the end of the tunnel to don't be afraid to ask for any kind of guidance as you're going forward. And lastly, I think I alluded to this a little bit before, is to try to find some sort of program that helps to teach you how to teach.

[00:20:23.46] ERIN HAGAR: So maybe kind of bringing this back full circle to the connection between educating health professionals, future health professionals and patient care, is one thing that I'm curious about is have you seen anything on the horizon in health profession education that you think really could move the needle in terms of patient care and ultimately the health of our population?

[00:20:51.57] BETH BUDNY-BUCKLEY: Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting. So COVID really taught all of us to be flexible, flexible in so many ways. So I myself have three children. And I was trying to help them while I was home. So it kind of taught us flexibility not only in the workforce, but kind of flexibility with ourselves.

[00:21:10.15] And I think a big thing in health care, which I think surged just because we had to, because we had to keep people safe, is telemedicine and telehealth. That was something that I really as a health care provider did not have much exposure to, just because we expected our patients-- like, how do you take care of a patient when you can't lay your hands on them? Can you take care of patients through a screen?

[00:21:39.27] And I think as we teach students, because this is something because I was practicing for about 15 years before I switched over to academia, if we teach students that telehealth is just part of the medical model and teach them how to utilize it appropriately, I think it's going to continue to grow and continue to help our under-served populations because it's just going to be kind of their normal. And to kind of then allow patients to just be comfortable with it. Because if your provider's comfortable with it, then you're going to be more likely to allow your patients to be comfortable with the concept and just get better health care in the end.

[00:22:23.40] ERIN HAGAR: Absolutely. And I think you raise such an important point about the way that the evolution works both ways. So there's the evolution in the industry, which has to have a subsequent evolution in the way that the next generation of providers is taught and trained to take advantage of some of these methods or approaches. I think that's always such an interesting back and forth when you're thinking about curriculum and instruction and just moving a profession forward.

[00:22:55.92] BETH BUDNY-BUCKLEY: No, absolutely. And I think it's something that it has to be accepted within the professional environment, first. And then it kind of trickles in to kind of the population. So there's usually studies that are going to occur within that professional environment. So then the professionals kind of have the background to kind of help disseminate that information to your patients, understand that it's OK too. That it'll you have more mainstream articles then. You see it in New York Times, like telemedicine, its surge in health care.

[00:23:30.45] So I think you're absolutely right as far as kind of changing your curriculum. And then helping to change the future of the profession as a result.

[00:23:42.37] ERIN HAGAR: Well, Beth, we are so glad that you are in academia. And we're so grateful for the time that you took to tell us about your first year as a full-time faculty member and all of the curveballs that were thrown your way in terms of a pandemic and new technologies. And just for all those other faculty members who are listening getting through their first or second year, just you're not alone. Take advantage of the resources around you. And thank you so much for sharing that experience with us.

[00:24:13.27] BETH BUDNY-BUCKLEY: Oh, my pleasure. Thank you so much, Erin. I really appreciate the opportunity.

[00:24:17.99] ERIN HAGAR: Thank you for joining us today on "Moving the Needle". Visit us at umaryland.edu/fctl to hear additional episodes, leave us feedback, or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

[00:24:32.77] [MUSIC PLAYING]

[00:00:00.12] ERIN HAGAR: Welcome to Moving the Needle, casual conversations about ways, big and small, to impact student learning brought to you by the faculty center for Teaching and learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Erin Hagar, let's move the needle. Hello, everyone and thank you for joining us for this episode of moving the needle.

[00:00:22.62] Today we're talking about team based learning with our guests, Dr. Christina Cestone and Dr. Violet Kulo. Let me introduce you to them now. Dr. Cestone is an educational psychologist who earned her doctorate from UT Austin, where she conducted research on faculty learning communities, instructional methods, and interprofessional education.

[00:00:42.54] She spent more than eight years in medical education, serving as the Associate Dean of assessment and evaluation at Drexel University. Currently, she's the executive director of the Faculty Center for Teaching and learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, where she also serves as the program director for the health professions education degrees.

[00:01:01.01] Dr. Violet Kulo earned her EDD in instructional design and technology from Lehigh University. Before joining the health professions education faculty at UMB, Violet worked at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine for nine years, where she oversaw curriculum mapping, medical student assessment, and program evaluation for the pre-clinical curriculum. Her research interests include instructional design, learner engagement, and student assessment.

[00:01:27.05] Team based learning is a really interesting instructional strategy and I'm so excited to share it with you today. It was developed in the 1970s by Larry Michelson at the University of Oklahoma. Who noticed that as his classes got bigger, the students seem to get less engaged. So he designed a very robust sequence of learning events that facilitates collaborative problem solving. For those of you who might be processing a little bit of trauma around doing group work, you're going to learn how this strategy brilliantly tackles the challenges of student preparedness and social loafing through what's called this readiness assurance process.

[00:02:02.00] In our conversation today, you're going to hear some acronyms thrown around that I want to clarify before we begin. The IRAT is the Individual Readiness Assurance Test and the GRAT is the Group Readiness Assurance Test. You'll learn all about how these work in the flow of team based learning during our conversation. So let's get to it. Let's start by having you tell us a little bit about yourselves. How did each of you land in the world of Health Professions education? And Christina, let's start with you.

[00:02:32.19] CHRISTINA CESTONE: Good morning, Erin. It's great to be with you today. I guess I came to health professions education, a very circuitous route. In that, most educational psychologists are trained to really go into colleges of education and be traditional faculty roles, but I was fortunate enough to have some seminal experiences where I design health care interprofessional cases for a group of students who were in pharmacy, social work, nursing, and medicine. And I think my interest was piqued at that time, over a decade ago.

[00:03:16.11] And so at that stage, then I really thought this was something that I would stick with and be the educator in the room full of clinical folks and be able to bring that perspective to their training trajectory. So that's really how I got involved.

[00:03:35.78] ERIN HAGAR: Oh, that's great. Thank you. Violet, how about you?

[00:03:38.78] VIOLET KULO: Good morning, Erin. Thank you so much for chatting with us today. So my background is in instructional design. And I was a high school teacher before I went to graduate school. And just like Christina, I was planning to teach in a college of education after graduate school. Then I happened to see a job opening at the Hopkins School of Medicine that caught my interest. So Hopkins had just gone through a curriculum revision and they were expanding their newly formed medical education office and I saw an opportunity to make an impact in medical education.

[00:04:10.25] And I was at the inaugural instructional design at Hopkins working with faculty designing active learning environments and I was also responsible for the student assessment and conducting program evaluation in their preclinical curriculum. So I realized that there was a lot more need for faculty development around cost design using various instructional strategies and designing different types of assessments.

[00:04:39.87] I was also collaborating with faculty on conducting medical education research. So I enjoyed doing all these things. And my desire for teaching came back. So I now became interested in teaching in a formal program in health professions education to help faculty to advance their teaching assessment and research skills.

[00:05:01.73] ERIN HAGAR: Oh, that's wonderful. I think those circuitous routes are some of the best ways to land in interesting places. So I'm so glad that worked out for both of you and that's what brought us here today, which is great. So we're here today to dive into this instructional strategy called team based learning. And it might sound familiar, it might be familiar to many of our listeners but for those for whom it's new, Christina, would you mind giving us a bird's eye view about what we're talking about when we talk about team based learning or TBO as we might mention it here today?

[00:05:39.78] CHRISTINA CESTONE: Sure. Sure. Well, team based learning has its roots really in business schools and more traditional undergraduate universities. And it was started to get around this idea of being in a ginormous lecture hall with several hundred students who would just be facing forward and working with the instructor in a passive way. And the instructor wanted to try something different. And so he developed team based learning as a mechanism to engage students, even if they were sitting in a lecture hall so that they would have interaction with one another.

[00:06:24.03] And team based learning is really defined by a sequence of phases that I think we'll talk about a little bit more as we go through this podcast. But essentially, it is a flipped classroom approach, a lot of people refer to it that way. And it begins with advanced preparation by students' preparedness assessments, application of the content to extension exercises, and then the evaluation process.

[00:06:58.57] So the aim is for there to be deep development among the teams in their communication, in their social behaviors with one another, and their ability to give one another earnest feedback. So that's the big picture of TBO, its origin. And obviously there are a lot of articles. We're not going to go into that today. But there is a deep literature on it. And that's really the high level summary, if you will.

[00:07:28.32] ERIN HAGAR: That's so helpful. Thank you. I think orienting ourselves in that bird's eye view is really helpful. And some folks might be listening to this Violet and think, I do that already, sometimes I put my students into groups and I'll have them discuss a topic or work on a worksheet together in a group during a class session, so are they doing team based learning? How are those things different?

[00:07:53.98] VIOLET KULO: Team-based learning is different from group work. So in group work, you might put students in group at any time and there's no refined structure, but like Christina, mentioned team based learning has a defined sequence and it's repeated over time. But group work you can put students in group work at any time and tell them, discuss this or maybe turn to your peer and do this, I think pair share, but for team based learning you have to follow--

[00:08:24.63] First who form the teams before the class starts then you write the tests, so the individual test and the group test, then you do the application exercises and the peer evaluation. So you repeat these four elements over time, which is not done in group work.

[00:08:45.09] ERIN HAGAR: Sounds much more formal.

[00:08:47.03] VIOLET KULO: Yes, it's more formal.

[00:08:48.83] ERIN HAGAR: OK, great. Well, since you've already touched on that idea of a sequence already, let's go to that. Christina, could you walk us through the sequence of team based learning? What happens before class, during class, after? How it all works.

[00:09:07.22] CHRISTINA CESTONE: Sure. So I think Violet alluded a little bit to this and that there is advance preparation by the faculty because it is more formal than group work, which you can initiate in a classroom at any time really. But TBO would require the instructor to have materials that they want the students to focus on in advance and a mechanism for assigning that work. What we've seen in the last year is many using learning management systems like blackboard or canvas to place materials in advance into a site for students. They would study, read, view those materials.

[00:09:49.70] And then the next stage they would come into the classroom or meet virtually and they would engage in active learning sessions where the very start of the second phase of team based learning is the readiness assurance process. And that consists of an individual test, which the student does on their own and then a group test, which the entire group that the student is assigned to engages in collectively.

[00:10:20.73] So there's some consensus building around the answers to the questions on that readiness test. That allows the instructor to gauge where there are gaps in broad student understanding across the classroom. And points are usually awarded for both of these activities. And then I guess next would be the application phase where there is perhaps clarifications first by the instructor around the pre-work that students got wrong from the readiness process that were clear, that they were misunderstandings, and then the next phase would be a new activity or new exercise where the student would apply what they learn the principles from that pre-work and that readiness process to a new scenario to extend their knowledge and enhance their transfer in understanding what they learned.

[00:11:19.94] And then from there, they can have a number of application activities. They're called four S activities. And Violet will correct me if I'm wrong here. They're specific. They to have a single answer--

[00:11:37.94] VIOLET KULO: They work on the same problem and then they report their answers simultaneously.

[00:11:43.25] CHRISTINA CESTONE: Correct. So there's no like I got this problem and I'm going to answer it this way. And then another group has a different problem and they report out their answer. It's designed where everyone works together at the same exact time, on the same exact problem so that they can all come to response at the same time. And then that's where the interesting part begins.

[00:12:09.02] So you may have groups that have different answers from one another. And this stimulates that discussion phase. So students may be standing up and reporting out what we thought it was this answer, we thought it was B, and another group says no, it was C, and the instructor is acting as a facilitator in that instance where they have to elicit from the students, well, why do you think that is the answer? What is it about that answer that you felt compelled you to choose it? And then that begins this rich discussion base in the class.

[00:12:50.84] And then finally, the final phase is there may be a brief clarification lecture by the instructor and then a peer evaluation process. Which is often by instructors overlooked or not seemingly important, but this is like the meat of TBO Where students learn to give each other feedback, where there is sort of temperature taking on group process and group functioning, and it helps the professor or the facilitator to understand what kinds of group formation, how the group is functioning over time. Violet, would you want to add anything else to that?

[00:13:33.47] VIOLET KULO: Yes. Yes. I just wanted to reiterate the importance of immediate feedback during the group test. So it's important for students to get feedback to see if they selected an incorrect answer to see why the answer is incorrect. So the students can use immediate feedback assessment technique form, where they scratch off the answer until they get to the correct answer. And if they get the fast answer the first time, they get full credit. And then they can get partial credit if they don't get the answer the first time.

[00:14:10.34] Then also something else is team appeals. Teams can appeal their answer if they can defend the answer they selected using materials from their readings.

[00:14:25.64] ERIN HAGAR: So it sounds like there's readiness assurance process, where students first take an individual test to be accountable to the team that they've done their pre-work and they've done as best they can to understand the material before the group activity even begins, and then the chance to take that same test as a team, really works to mitigate that phenomenon of social loafing. I think lots of students and faculty have maybe some traumatic memories around.

[00:15:01.19] We've all been in groups where you feel like you have to carry the load for the entire group or suffer the consequences in terms of the grade. So that is that why that was designed that way or are there other rationales for having those readiness assurance activities?

[00:15:19.86] VIOLET KULO: So the purpose of the readiness assurance process is not only to motivate students to come to class prepared, but also to give them some several experiences to give feedback to others. And also in terms of social loafing, that can be accounted for by peer evaluation. So students provide both formative and summative feedback from their teammates about their contributions to the team's success.

[00:15:47.30] So things that they can evaluate others is about preparation, how their peers came prepared, their contributions to the application and exercises and the GRAT and also how they helped others to contribute to the team in general. So I'll pass it over to Christina if she has something to add.

[00:16:11.90] CHRISTINA CESTONE: I think that is exactly right. And the individual readiness assurance test allows students to get credit for what they know and what they took from the pre-work. And so there's a percentage there of I'm accountable for this because I took my test and got 100%, for example.

[00:16:40.44] And so Violet was describing that as teams go through and maybe scratch off the answers in the group process if they're using scratch offs, which are part of this system, if they're doing that in person, then they do lose points if they have to attempt to scratch off for the right answer three times. And so the group loses. So there's that group accountability to don't scratch off until we've reached consensus together.

[00:17:11.10] So I think that there is that social connectedness that evolves or is created over time to the group. And it's not to say that there aren't maladaptive groups or poor functioning groups because that can happen as well. But for the most part, the system is designed to prevent social loafing to the extent possible because it has both individual accountability elements and group accountability elements with the most important piece being as Violet mentioned, the peer feedback.

[00:17:45.98] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, that's great. So if we could talk a little bit about what some of these applications might look like, especially in a health professions education setting. So I would imagine that when they're taking these readiness assurance tests, individual and group, that's pretty maybe cut and dry black and white information. Just do you understand the basics of the material that you're going to need in order to apply it? But what might some of these application activities look like? What might they be hashing out as a group to come to that group consensus on the one answer? Violet, you want to take that?

[00:18:29.48] VIOLET KULO: In health professions education, the activities might be case vignettes like patient cases, things that students might see in real life. So maybe if it's medical students, they're working with a patient and they see a case so the groups might work on a differential diagnosis to diagnose the patient or also maybe work on a treatment plan. So this works out very well in health professions because students can work on real patient cases that they'll see when they go into clinic.

[00:19:02.65] CHRISTINA CESTONE: Yeah, I think those are great examples and you can even use application exercises that include psychosocial or clinical ethical dilemmas as well because they can be really ripe for good conversation and debate within the groups.

[00:19:24.41] ERIN HAGAR: So they would be reading a case and there would be some details presented or some contextual information and then maybe the question would be something like, what is the best option out of these four? Because at the end of the day, it's still a forced choice that the students are being asked to make in the application activity. Is that right?

[00:19:46.13] VIOLET KULO: Yes, that's correct. So remember all the groups they are working on the same problem and the problem has a specific answer. So if it's a differential diagnosis, they walk through the patient case and they have to come to a specific answer of the diagnosis.

[00:20:05.84] ERIN HAGAR: So this must be interesting from a faculty member's point of view during the actual implementation of the class session. The class probably looks very different than what some faculty might be typically used to seeing or facilitating during class time. So can you talk us through a little bit about what it might look like from the outside and what sort of feelings might come up for a faculty member who is doing this for the first time. Christina, you want to walk us through that?

[00:20:37.90] CHRISTINA CESTONE: Sure. Sure. So Violet has been facilitating an interprofessional team based learning workshop for faculty at UMB. This past, I guess six months, we've had two sessions and we'll have another one coming up. In those workshops we get a lot of questions from faculty about what the experience is really like. And I think there's a tend towards perfectionism. Like I have to design this perfectly for it to work.

[00:21:13.79] And I think what a new faculty member might encounter in those that we've spoken to is a little bit more on the logistical planning of like how does this go, what does this look like in the classroom or lecture hall if that's the space that's being used. And so really thinking through the steps that you're going to engage in when you're in that setup or that classroom setting.

[00:21:42.25] And then I think the second piece is that the assessments themselves have to be built. So a lot of times you have the lecture content, you have the subject matter, you know what the reading is, your slide decks are probably already prepared for a traditional lecture. So it's more of how do I change things up in terms of the order, the logistics. And then if there are no assessments available around the content, developing the assessments.

[00:22:12.61] Violet, that's what I think we heard in some of the workshops and post workshop for those who have been interested in integrating this into their teaching.

[00:22:25.12] VIOLET KULO: Yes, absolutely. That's correct. So it's mostly around the logistics, that's where a lot of the questions come. If the faculty member is doing alone in a large class for the first time, how do I do this?

[00:22:39.46] ERIN HAGAR: I can imagine. And also I can imagine, well, as an instructor, when I first started using active learning techniques, I had to remind myself that I was still teaching even though I may be in a quiet moment and the students are doing a lot of the work. And there are moments where it just felt a little strange. If somebody walked in right now and saw me just walking around and checking on students and the students really doing the bulk of the work, will they still think that I'm teaching? Have you come across this with TBO?

[00:23:12.01] CHRISTINA CESTONE: Yes. I think that is a really important observation, Erin. That faculty do feel a little bit less like the sage on the stage, which is a common phrase that we hear, and a little bit more of a facilitator on the side or a guide on the side. But that isn't intentional. That is the purpose of the instructor. Because just coming in and not really seeing where people's prior knowledge is on a subject may cause the instructor to inadvertently overlook people who don't have a good grasp of the material, and for those who do have a good grasp of the material, perhaps they become bored.

[00:23:58.12] And so this calibration as facilitator helps allow students to work with one another and to provide some of that scaffolding and differences in prior knowledge, but then also for the faculty to really hear the students verbalize what they don't understand. And we know from the research evidence that things like self explanation assessment and retrieval practice in the IRAT process or the GRAT process, the readiness process, are really critical for effective learning.

[00:24:38.26] ERIN HAGAR: That's great. So why do each of you think this is-- So particularly useful. This strategy is so useful in health professions. You said it started in the business world and that it started primarily an undergraduate, so in your experience working with health professions educators, what have they told you about its applicability, its usefulness? How is it being received in this world of health professions? Violet you want to start?

[00:25:09.67] VIOLET KULO: Yeah, sure. So in the health professions, it's being received well because it mimics what happens in real life, the interprofessional team. So it help work together interprofessional teams in their clinics, in their work experiences. So also working on patient cases and clinical vignettes, that's how also makes it work well in health professions.

[00:25:39.25] ERIN HAGAR: That's great. Christina, anything you'd want to add on that?

[00:25:41.59] CHRISTINA CESTONE: Yeah, I think I'd also add about giving and receiving feedback. I hate to harp on the peer evaluation piece, but I think that sometimes instructors feel like it's not necessary. And even if you're giving it a small weight in the overall course grade if you're using TBO, I think it's really important to highlight that sometimes students at the early stage of their clinical or health professions training may not be comfortable giving and receiving feedback.

[00:26:14.95] And this starts that practice I think or helps them in that practice. And yes, it may be lower stakes, which is good because there's no massive implication like there would be in a summative environment. It's very much a formative activity. So I think that peer evaluation helps them give feedback to one another and learn about being comfortable with that process, which as we know is very important in health professions throughout their careers, whether they are instructors or learners.

[00:26:54.01] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah. And it seems like since this is a strategy that in a course is repeated over time, students could really see improvement in how they're giving feedback or how they're communicating with their peers. So it's not just a one and done cycle. They really get the chance to experience that again. Is that right?

[00:27:15.13] CHRISTINA CESTONE: Correct. Yes.

[00:27:17.08] ERIN HAGAR: Well, that's great. Well, we're really excited to have the chance to talk about this. For those of you who are interested in learning more about TBO, I would recommend you visit the Faculty Center for Teaching and learning website umaryland.edu/fctl. And there are a lot of resources and references about TBO that you can find there.

[00:27:41.30] But before we go, we like to ask all of our guests to share with us something that they are particularly excited about in the world of education. It does not have to be TBO specific. Just is there's something on the horizon, in the world of education that you think could really move the needle with respect to teaching and learning. Violet, do you want to start?

[00:28:03.98] VIOLET KULO: Yes. Thank you. I'm really excited about a HyFlex. This is not really a new thing per se, but the HyFlex course model. But in the light of what we've gone through for the last 1 and 1/2 years with the pandemic, instructors and students having to go to remote learning, I see that HyFlex course model might be implemented more in classrooms. This is where students take part in online and also face to face classroom.

[00:28:40.43] So students are giving that flexibility to either take 100% of classes online or either 100% in-person or have a mixture of both. So I think that will see that-- and also with the social distancing that classrooms are required to do now, maybe HyFlex course model might be used heavily in future.

[00:29:07.69] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, that's so interesting. All the ways that COVID is disrupting things and moving us forward and enhancing our creativity, that's great. So HyFlex for you. Christina, what about you? What are you excited about?

[00:29:22.18] CHRISTINA CESTONE: I think what I'm really excited about and I think what we've been talking about at the university system level is the shift towards the HyFlex as Violet mentioned, but at of the root and the foundation of that is this move towards student centeredness in learning, which is going to increase accessibility, it's going to map to the changing learner demographics that we see of our applicants and our matriculants.

[00:29:56.50] And so I feel like the HyFlex is a wonderful example of how that student centeredness is actualized or operationalized in the educational space. And so that's what's exciting to me, is that we're thinking about things that are putting the learner at the center of what their higher education graduate and professional training experience is really about. It's about them and their development on this professional trajectory.

[00:30:30.98] So I think that's what I'm really excited about and how this centeredness towards the student can open up doors for people to enter a space that maybe they didn't think about before.

[00:30:43.93] ERIN HAGAR: That's so great. Well, I just consider myself so lucky to be able to work with both of you and I'm so glad that all of our roots brought us here together in this field and in this hour here today. So thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us.

[00:31:01.75] CHRISTINA CESTONE: Thank you, Erin. This has been a great chat. Thank you.

[00:31:05.47] VIOLET KULO: Thank you, Erin.

[00:31:09.28] ERIN HAGAR: Thank you for joining us today on moving the needle. Visit us at umaryland.edu/fctl to hear additional episodes, leave us feedback, or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

[00:31:24.10] [UPBEAT MUSIC]

 

[00:00:00.12] ERIN HAGAR: Welcome to Moving the Needle. Casual conversations about ways, big and small, to impact student learning. Brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and learning at the University of Maryland Baltimore. I'm Erin Hagar, let's move the needle.

[00:00:18.46] Welcome to this episode of Moving the Needle. Written assignments can give educators a powerful look into the learning process. Through writing, we can see how students absorb ideas, wrestle with them, and share that new understanding with others. But assessing that writing, oh man, that is such an awesome responsibility layered in complexity. I'm excited to dig deep into this topic today with our guests Dr. Isabell May and James Wright.

[00:00:46.03] Dr. May is an associate professor in the graduate school at the University of Maryland Baltimore where she's also the Program Director for the Science Communication Program. Professor May is also the director of the Writing Center.

[00:00:57.82] She recently co-authored a chapter for a collection of essays titled Teaching Writing in the Health Professions that will come out in 2022. A native of Germany, Dr. May identifies herself as a multilingual writer and uses that experience to inform her approach to teaching writing and evaluating student work.

[00:01:17.01] James Wright is the Assistant Director and Multilingual Writing Specialist at the University of Maryland Baltimore's Writing Center where he collaborates with peer consultants, faculty, staff, and students on writing pedagogy, curriculum development, faculty development, and Writing Center practices.

[00:01:33.45] His doctoral research draws on identity, critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, sociolinguistics, and labor theories of language to engage translating quality, anti-racism, and anti oppression in the teaching and learning of writing.

[00:01:47.70] During our conversation, we'll explore the current scholarship in writing studies that addresses linguistic diversity and standards of English as well as some concrete assessment strategies faculty might consider in their courses. We're excited for this conversation and we hope you enjoy it. Let's dive in.

[00:02:04.17] Isabell and James welcome to Moving the Needle.

[00:02:07.11] ISABELL MAY: Our pleasure, Erin. Thanks for asking us here.

[00:02:09.24] JAMES WRIGHT: Thanks for having us.

[00:02:10.66] ERIN HAGAR: Well, we're so excited this is such an important topic. I can't wait to explore it with the two of you. Isabell, let's start with you. Could you just tell us briefly how you came to your current role as Director of the Writing Center at University of Maryland Baltimore?

[00:02:24.03] ISABELL MAY: So I started at the University of Maryland Baltimore in February of 2017 which seems a long time ago. And I came from another institution in our system and my position was created and the official title at the time was Faculty Director of the Writing Center. And so a large responsibility of that position was overseeing directing the Writing Center, but there was another piece there where I was hired, at the time, lecturer in the graduate school for the science communication program.

[00:02:55.80] Since then, the graduate school has adopted official, or traditional, faculty roles. So I have since been promoted to Associate Professor in the graduate school. And I also started directing the science communication program and also directing the Writing Center. So I wear a few different hats on this campus which is really exciting.

[00:03:13.62] ERIN HAGAR: Well, one of your first colleagues to join you at the Writing Center was a position titled Multilingual Writing Specialist. Can you tell us a little bit about how that position came to be? How it was envisioned? And the rationale behind it.

[00:03:31.29] ISABELL MAY: You know, that's a great question, Erin and I love talking about this and I do need to give credit where credit is due. And when I started in February of 2017, that position was already in the work. So my predecessors and the deans and the provost folks and the provost office had already thought this through. So I inherited a great start. And so there's two major reasons why this position was created.

[00:03:55.08] Number one is that in the Writing Center, we have seen a lot of our clients, and I say clients because we serve not just students, we also serve postdocs, faculty, staff, community members, everybody is affiliated with University of Maryland Baltimore with UMB. So we serve a broad variety of clients.

[00:04:13.57] And we've seen a lot of clients come and I want to say about close to 50%, if not a little bit more than 50% of our clients, tend to be writers with multilingual backgrounds. And just about the term multilingual that many of some of our listeners might not be as familiar with, we now use the term multilingual instead of second language learner or English as a Second Language the acronym for that is ESL because multilingual is a more inclusive term than second language learner. It really-- and it's more of a term on a spectrum.

[00:04:43.45] So we understand language learning now as a spectrum. It's not like native language versus non-native language, but we all, I think in a way, language learners. And we're certainly all our language learners of academic English because I don't think anybody is born knowing how to read, speak, and write academic English. So the move towards multilingual instead of second language learner is a really important one.

[00:05:05.71] So we've seen a lot of multilingual learners come to our center either self referred or referred by faculty, friends, staff, whomever. And so we wanted to honor that and really hire and develop a position and hire somebody who can focus on developing programs and policies for this population. And train our consultants with develop certain sensitivities around working with such a diverse population. So that's one reason why we created this position.

[00:05:33.69] The second one is that a lot of my faculty colleagues and this happened to my predecessor as well as to myself would often approach us in the Writing Center and ask for support to help students who can't write English very well or their grammar isn't good enough or can you help us fix their English?

[00:05:52.95] And I'm not disparaging these comments, I appreciate when faculty come to us and express themselves in the language they have available. But we have a lot of research available to us now that we know that fixing somebody's English isn't the solution. And I know James is going to talk more about this because he's really the expert in this.

[00:06:09.13] But we realized that we also needed to do some education, not just for-- well, we did do some work not just for our state and for our clients, but also for our faculty to work with particularly the students of multilingual backgrounds and to really have somebody on campus who can advocate for us multilingual learners. And I identify as a multilingual learner myself of English. My first language is a German and Slovak. I was born and raised in Germany. So English is not even my second language. So ESL would never apply to me in the first place.

[00:06:41.66] So again, those two reasons, developing programs and policies to work with multilingual writers as well as having somebody on campus who can help us advocate on behalf of us multilingual folks both with faculty and administration. Those were the key rationales for this position.

[00:07:00.32] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, that's great that's so helpful by way of context. And so, James, you saw this position posted. Tell us a little bit about your background and what drew you to apply and join us here at UMB.

[00:07:16.48] JAMES WRIGHT: Well, one of the things that has always fascinated me has been working in collaboration with folks who are concerned about the ways in which language gets taken up and used, perceived, in the Academy and beyond the Academy. So when I saw the post and I had the interview, I knew immediately that this was going to be a position that was going to be wide open for bringing to the graduate level, especially Health and Human Services and Sciences here at UMB.

[00:07:48.84] The ongoing, and I want to emphasize this, the ongoing deliberations around how we approach the teaching in the classroom of multilingual writers, welcoming and understanding ourselves in the act of making language and meaning in the sciences, in the social sciences, beyond that in our communities and trying to understand exactly how all of these parts connect.

[00:08:14.11] Isabell mentioned linguistic dimension. She mentioned an advocacy dimension. She mentioned a social justice dimension. So these positions, that are now called Multilingual Writing Specialists, kind of evolved out of deliberations and challenges that are already occurring in English as a second language disciplinary circles.

[00:08:34.93] And so it's moved much beyond some of the more structural ways of looking at language, for example, as if making good clear language means just weaving together units and pieces of language out of context. But Isabell mentioned all these multiple contexts that are involved. That's right up my alley and that's what I've been interested in. That's the life I've lived in multiple countries and cultures and at home as well with my family.

[00:09:03.08] And so it reaches me on multiple levels. And you can see too what's exciting about the position. And this, I think, is reflected in a lot of multilingual writing specialist positions, not all, but many. It's developed alongside writing centers as writing centers move closer to the core of the curriculum. You heard Isabell talk a lot about how we're working with faculty. This has evolved beyond kind of-- and I do a lot of this work too. The one on one with language learners in consultation over their writing.

[00:09:34.57] But it's evolved much beyond that to extensive and rigorous training of the consultants that work with us and for us and with the writers to faculty, to faculty programs in terms of admissions in terms of foundational writing experiences for their first year students across campus.

[00:09:52.28] For example, I've worked a lot with the Master's of Public Health program. Isabell and I have worked with the nursing school and many other programs. And we continue to develop and enrich those relationships. And when I interviewed and when I saw the post, I could tell from the way that it was worded this was going to be that kind of position. And so I could not turn that down.

[00:10:12.22] ERIN HAGAR: Well, lucky for us that you didn't. Tell us a little bit about how your position, Multilingual Writing Specialist, was received by faculty when you first started and how that's evolved over these last few years.

[00:10:26.78] JAMES WRIGHT: That's a great question and a very important one. First of all, I think Isabell alluded to this. Faculty are deeply committed to their students, I've noticed here on campus. They're interested in the teaching of writing. They're interested in mentorship of graduate students on multiple different levels and multiple different contexts.

[00:10:46.91] For example, I know that we have programs that are beginning to take shape around teaching assistantship or graduate assistantships to bring students into the classroom to collaborate with faculty. That's been a recent development, didn't have as much to do with my position, but I think it has to do with a greater understanding since graduate assistants work a lot with writers. The importance of writing. Nursing school, for example, has had writing help over in their Academic Center. The law school has its own Writing Center. We're all collaborating and communicating.

[00:11:17.03] In response to faculty concerns about how to shift pedagogy, both conceptually but also in everyday practice, toward more understanding of multiple different linguistic repertoires that are showing up in all of the diversity that UMB is experiencing at this time.

[00:11:36.98] So as more and more students come into the classroom and they present multiple different kinds of English, multiple different strategies for combining multiple languages, how do we honor those repertoires? How do we hold ourselves answerable as well to the fact that many of these students represent the global norm?

[00:11:55.43] You can look this up. The statistics are clear that most users of English are now using English as a second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth language. And so much of this diversity we see reflects that code meshing, the translanguaging thing we call it. Bunch of fancy words for the different ways that people take their linguistic repertoires, put them together and communicate, and do so beautifully and very clearly. And reflect the linguistic facts of life.

[00:12:23.21] I'm drawing on a scholar named Lippi-Green who talks about the fact that languages are constantly changing, that language is-- that grammatically is not the same thing as clarity and communicative. So how do we respond to that in the classroom? And so that's how I've entered into dialogue with faculty. And, for example, in the public health program with Dr. St George, we have really developed a relationship over time.

[00:12:51.11] It is definitely a work in progress, and she'll tell you the same thing if you talk to her about this, it takes time to develop a-- to become in sync because so many programs use specific genres. They're talking to specific audiences. They have to practice certain practices in order to communicate in terms, not of just publishing, but have actually doing public health work out in the world.

[00:13:12.84] And so we've really spent a lot of time hashing out differences and coming to collaborative compromises about what students need and want to learn. And it's been a beautiful experience.

[00:13:26.39] ERIN HAGAR: Well let's talk a little bit about the faculty response as they notice over time this increasing linguistic diversity. What is some of your experience, both you and Isabell.

[00:13:40.97] ISABELL MAY: You know, like with anything else in life, responses are very varied. Very varied sounds weird, but they're varied, and rightfully so. Everybody comes from a different place in terms of experience around language learning and so on.

[00:13:54.89] I think the most common response and most, I would say consistent response that we tend to get, is some concern and worry about that, if we focus on different types of Englishes that we're not really teaching our students what some people have referred to me as industry standards of English or industry level standards of writing.

[00:14:20.12] I'm thinking of some of our doctoral students in our GPILS Program and GPILS is our acronym for our Graduate Program in the Life Sciences. So folks who are getting degrees in biochemistry, neuroscience, and so on, that they are not-- that if we don't focus on the standards that they're expected to perform at, in terms of publication, if we don't emphasize those, that we're not preparing our students well for their future careers.

[00:14:48.17] And there are a variety of responses to this, especially from our colleagues who have done a lot of work on anti-racist writing assessment and social justice oriented teaching of writing predominantly at the undergraduate level, but also more and more at the graduate level.

[00:15:04.23] And I think our response is often sort of like, well, let's unpack that. Let's unpack what we mean by standards. And I think what happens in those situations, Erin, is that we need to have some really uncommon-- or we have to have situations that will make people-- we will need to have conversations there and with folks that will make people uncomfortable. And especially people like me, I identify as a white, cisgender woman.

[00:15:30.15] So I think a lot of other white faculty might be uncomfortable with this because we do have to talk about white supremacy as it shows up in standards of writing. There is no way around it and scholars, like Asao Inoue, Baker Bell I'm blanking on her first name, James.

[00:15:46.28] JAMES WRIGHT: Yeah, April Baker Bell.

[00:15:47.39] ISABELL MAY: April Baker-Bell. And a variety of other particularly Black, indigenous, and people of color. The acronym we use often or has been used lately as BIPOC scholars. So Black Indigenous People of Color, BIPOC scholars have pointed out for, gosh decades probably if not longer, that white supremacist practices show up in everything that we do in our culture. And so they show up in our rubrics. They show up in the way that we write introductions, discussion sections, reports, systematic reviews, whatever those genres are.

[00:16:21.01] So the goal is not to completely, and I think that's the fear I think that's some faculty might have that we're going to stop teaching students how to produce these texts, but we do-- I think we need to do a variety-- and I think this approach of really looking at it from an anti-racist lens is to-- we can actually--

[00:16:42.00] We have an opportunity to actually really teach these things and also look at and investigate, what is the history behind those genres? Because let's face it, if you look at, especially in our context at UMB Medicine, let's just use an example. There have been a lot of very racist and exclusionary practices and discriminatory practices in medicine.

[00:17:00.78] And I think we're all unpacking those. And institution's unpacking them which is fantastic. So let's unpack them in our writing classrooms or in our classrooms that use writing as well. And there are lots of great approaches and practices that we can do that by even including our students because the students don't come to us as a tabula rasa, as you know like we don't know anything, please fill me, I have to bring no prior knowledge.

[00:17:25.05] On the contrary, they bring a lot of knowledge, especially for students of diverse backgrounds of who have had a different very varied experiences throughout their lives. Let's listen to them and find out where they're coming from and then supporting them and getting to places where they can make conscious and well-informed decisions about the standards they want to continue using or maybe why they, at some point, don't want to use them.

[00:17:51.36] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, so there are two things that I really take away from your response, Isabell, and then I'd love to hear from James on this too. But the first is that the intentions of so many faculty member that you work with are coming from a place of wanting to support their students and help them succeed, right?

[00:18:11.00] So this commitment to, what we would call standard English or industry standards those kinds of things, are coming from, wanting to make sure that their students advance in the field.

[00:18:23.27] And what I'm hearing you say is it's time to question where those standards come from, not to hold our students back or to put them at a disadvantage, but rather to help all of us unpack where they came from in the first place. And move the whole field forward, move the whole--

[00:18:44.24] ISABELL MAY: Well put, Erin. And if I may add to that, I think at the same time, it's also an opportunity to actually really educate our students around the genres because I think what faculty, who are content experts in their fields, often don't realize or forget, and I'm the same. I'm raising my hand right here, guilty as charged any time. Well, we often forget some of the basics like, well don't students know what a good introduction should look like? What should go in a results section?

[00:19:10.70] They're reading them all the time. Yeah, they're reading them all the time. They're usually skimming them because they have a boatload of those to read. It's certainly what I did when I was in grad school. Now so much on these students plates. So, yes, they're absorbing them and they are exposed to them, but they're rarely taken through it systematically in a repeated way that they can really understand.

[00:19:29.34] So what are some of the genre conventions like an introduction section for a typical research manuscript? You have to, for example, I teach this in my course, look at the research gap. That's an important, rhetorical move we call it in our field. A common way that authors, and many authors have internalized this, if they're successful, published authors, they have totally internalized this.

[00:19:50.12] They probably couldn't even articulate it. They're like, oh, yeah don't you know how to do this? And so they're often not teaching it, not because they don't want the students to know, they don't realize what they know, but their students don't know. If that makes any sense.

[00:20:05.51] ERIN HAGAR: Absolutely. James, tell us how you're responding to this and what you're thinking about.

[00:20:10.91] JAMES WRIGHT: Absolutely and I think the notion of working with students through rhetorical analysis is such an important genre for teaching, especially in that, when we look at the history of the different kinds of writing that we do in all the different disciplines, we rarely, as Isabell said, think about the histories behind it, how they've developed, what they developed for. They have meaning, they have purpose.

[00:20:35.12] And importantly, just like all languages, just like all of us who are working with many different linguistic repertoires across now social media channels and so forth our daily lives, that are so hybridizing, so complex. Genres change and it makes room for us to recognize opportunities for innovation.

[00:20:54.38] When we talk about some of our efforts on campus around interprofessional education, for example, interprofessional education at its heart is all about figuring out ways to improve the health of society around us by learning to communicate across genres, across disciplinary languages, across discourses, in order to meet the needs of very diverse patients and very complex, pathological challenges and epidemiological challenges. I think the pandemic has really shown us a lot about that.

[00:21:28.61] And it's important too to remember that some of these changes and shifts practically speaking in a classroom, yes they involve explicit discussions about the ways in which standard English has been taken up as a tool. Any language can be taken up as a tool for positioning certain groups of people for social power and political power, which is what's happened with standardized English, in terms of the history of the Academy, in terms of the history of our country.

[00:21:54.11] And as we wrestle with all kinds of reckonings at this point, but especially racial reckonings, it's important to recognize how our insistence and the way that we perceive writers is tied up with colonialism and white supremacy culture. And doing that doesn't necessarily mean that we have to have these all the time explicit conversations. They have to be in tandem with actual practical practices that Isabell was speaking of.

[00:22:21.56] I'll give you an example. At one point Isabell when I were working with a group of nursing faculty a few years ago and a nursing faculty member said, you know well, this is hard. I don't know how to do a lot of this stuff, James. I I'm not a linguist. I'm not trained in education. I have a degree in my specific field. I'm going to need some development on this, and showed a lot of willingness to learn more about it.

[00:22:44.85] And that's what we should do as faculty, is to have constant improvement through self-reflection and practice learning different practices from the research. But she said, and this is what clued me into it, I asked, I said, well, what do you do when you look at student writing? And she said, well, I do what I think I know best, I look at grammar.

[00:23:03.79] And so she would go through and she felt like it was her obligation, as Isabell so wonderfully explained earlier, her obligation to help students to move forward by pointing out every single, what she perceived as grammatical mistake. And the research-- and I shared with her some of the research.

[00:23:19.96] Well one of the issues with that is that can actually prevent or discourage students from engaging in learning more about the standardized language practices that may be expected in the classroom and in the discipline. Because where do you start when the page is just full of marks?

[00:23:38.11] And some faculty were kind of like, well, that's what the publishing experience is like. And, yes sometimes it is and Isabell and I are talking about is also not just changing the classroom ecology, but changing the ecology of programs, curricula and the publishing industry to come to more of an awareness of the labor that's involved in doing all of this. And we'll get to that in a second.

[00:23:59.72] But as I had this conversation with the faculty member, I said, well, research seems to show us that if you look for patterns that you're concerned about that are unfamiliar to you and you ask questions about those, what's the story of those patterns? Just choose a few of them. It's our classroom. One classroom, my classroom is only one side among many, many, many, many, many where the students are going to learn to do these things.

[00:24:23.59] And where they're going to show us where their linguistic repertoire can facilitate innovation. So I ask her, I said, well, you know so what would happen if you found out from the student you that feedback became a dialogue with the student?

[00:24:37.78] To learn more about where the student came up with these different choices. And the faculty member thought about it. And I said, if you choose a couple of patterns, research shows that it's much more manageable for students. They're more likely to take up that conversation with you.

[00:24:52.09] And that, to me, reflects more of the revision process that's involved in publishing. We do respond to publishers and editors when they leave us comments. That is part of the disciplinary activity of our fields if we want to have careers in publishing.

[00:25:08.53] When we go into the public and we negotiate with patients or we negotiate with clients, we still have to listen to them. We still have to ask questions about what is meant when folks are saying certain things and how can we adjust both our speech and our written language in order to reach the best possible conclusion.

[00:25:25.52] So it all connects and it all is revolving around opening our ears and eyes more to recognizing that students aren't just making errors as we perceive them. But they're human beings who are drawing on repertoires and long histories of education from so many different backgrounds, that once we hear those stories, once we acknowledge that labor, students are much more likely to respond to our work with them.

[00:25:53.59] And to develop further as writers in many different directions, not as just folks who are just going to repeat back what we think are standard, unitary patterns of standardized English. But are actually going to be those critical writers that Isabell was speaking about, critically reflective writers, that Isabell was talking about. And we as faculty then too also learn about how these things come about in multilingual folks' lives.

[00:26:18.51] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah. I'd like to dive in and explore a little bit how this looks from the student side. And you have a very unique perspective because students come to you in the Writing Center and maybe they're bringing a paper that has been evaluated by a professor using some of these standardized rubrics, a standardized mindset. And they come to you and they say, OK I'm getting this feedback on my writing.

[00:26:48.27] And I just wonder if you could talk us through the process of how you would work with that student. What you would say to them, and what you notice-- what's the impact that the student experiences when their linguistic diversity comes up against these standards.

[00:27:07.02] JAMES WRIGHT: That's such a great question, and I think it's one that a lot of folks, a lot of faculty, we work with bring this question up as well because they're so concerned about their students. And it's something that goes on frequently in the discipline. We deliberate this all the time. In the Writing Center here and other writing centers where I worked over the years, students come in feeling as though they are deficient. They're often sent to writing centers they don't voluntarily come.

[00:27:35.37] By sent, I mean they're either explicitly or implicitly challenged to come to the Writing Center out of fear, out of possible failure. And failure for many students, especially students who are racialized and minoritised and marginalized, are worried about failing not just in the eyes of the Academy, but the eyes of their community, the eyes of society, especially in a society that consistently racialized them and casts their particular linguistic practices and cultural practices as deficient or inappropriate for academic knowledge production.

[00:28:07.12] So they come in with this and my job is to find out the story. And I'll ask them, so tell me more about the feedback. They'll say to me, well I'm a terrible writer. My teacher said I need to come work with you, or, it was implied through the syllabus,

[00:28:21.40] I need to come work with you or I got a certain grade on the paper that the feedback suggested I come talk to you. And so we'll sit down and we'll talk about that. And come to find out they've had this long history of feedback that can be uneven, inconsistent.

[00:28:40.68] Often one classroom and faculty will use particular language around feedback. Another classroom will use a very different one. Everybody seems to use flow and grammar and we think we know what we mean when we're talking about those things, but they can mean very different things depending on the discipline, the class, the content, and the audiences, and the purposes for the writing. So we unpack all of this.

[00:29:03.75] And I point out, very clearly as we do that, is that even though the student may feel like they're not meeting the standard and they've had that communicated to them in multiple ways across the academy and across the institutions and across society in many ways, they belong here. They were admitted to the school. They took the tests. They were admitted by admissions committees. They were vetted and admitted and they belong here.

[00:29:32.73] It's also when they come up against these standards and feel like they've lost a lot of hope, I very clearly communicate to them that these things can be learned. Writing can be learned, but it cannot be learned in a situation where we assume that the learning is politically neutral. Their labor and what they have come up against in order to be in this Academy needs to be acknowledged and it needs to be acknowledged in writing assessment.

[00:30:00.06] It needs to be acknowledged and the teaching of writing, because at the very foundation of their survivants has been the languages that they use. It's not just that their identities are wrapped up and connected to all of this. It's also that they have done work and they have arrived and they deserve to arrive fully.

[00:30:18.21] And so we unpack this kinds of things. And I work with students for example like and these are composite, drawn from many, many different moments with students. But students who get a lot of grammar supposed errors marked on their papers.

[00:30:33.70] But then we look at the rubric together and the rubric only designates maybe three points out of all the points available for grammar for standard grammar that matches say the APA guidelines. And so the student becomes confused since there's an outsized marking of grammar on the draft and the feedback seems to spend so much time on, for example, how well the student uses articles or not, but the rubric only grants a certain number of points to that. The student is confused.

[00:30:59.94] Well, it looks like I did everything else really well or up to par at least, but then there's this problem with grammar. Why are there so many comments about that? So the students can get really confused.

[00:31:10.44] And so I think it's really important from the student's perspective for us faculty members and educators to pay attention to that and to come up with strategies that mitigate that confusion to get on the same page about some strategies and tricks and practices that we can use to more justly approach providing feedback to students that doesn't discourage, but that does what we want it to do.

[00:31:37.46] Look, we're not reviewer number two. We're not we're not that we're not here to necessarily scrutinize everything in every situation a student does in every classroom. Our job is to collaborate among classes, among faculty, to make each site a moment where we can move the needle, was going to do it, a little bit so that the students can gradually learn over time.

[00:31:58.99] But the root of it is they are not deficient as human beings. Their language practices are not deficient. They will take up standardized English as plural, nursing Englishes, social work writing Englishes, legal writing Englishes. And they will learn to use those.

[00:32:16.64] And the difficult and most challenging thing for us to recognize too, and I do this with students, I have open conversations. And these are not what just students, but postdocs, colleagues, that even though students who are racialized and marginalized pick up and use these different English as to position themselves as writers in a discourse, it doesn't get rid of racism. White supremacy culture doesn't disappear and this is the entanglement of the political realities and the racialized-- processes of racialized in our country the realities of these contexts.

[00:32:49.90] They still go out into the world and because of the ways that white listening subjects or audiences view their names, their phenotypes, whatever it may be, still perceive their reading or their writing or their speaking as deficient or inappropriate or informal. Scholars who are writing this research actually talk about this happening to them as they've developed as students as well and researchers.

[00:33:19.18] ISABELL MAY: Yeah it's quite a lot of stories about that. If I may add to this because I wanted-- James mentioned reviewer two and some listeners might not be familiar with this trope or this reviewer two tends to be the sort of-- most folks might be familiar with just in case they aren't.

[00:33:35.89] That most academic manuscripts are reviewed by two reviewers and somehow reviewer two has gotten the reputation as being the tougher one and the meaner one. And I think there's been a statistical analysis of how often reviewer two becomes the mean reviewer and that have shown that reviewer two tends to be more frequently the mean reviewers so just FYI, just adding to that. And I wanted to add to what James was saying as well. Well put.

[00:34:04.38] I've had these situations happening to me and I've also and more frequently I've worked with students who've been in these situations. It's demoralizing and I can speak from my own personal experience. I don't think that the faculty who put me in this position when I was a student meant to be harmful. Actually, I think they actually meant to be helpful.

[00:34:26.35] They really wanted to support me and help me become a better writer or more effective writer. And so we often unknowingly do harm to each other and to our students or harm is done to us as well unknowingly by the perpetrator in these situations.

[00:34:43.04] So I think we need to really move the needle on that for sure that we're becoming more aware of how some of these practices that, for so long in the academic communities in academia have become standard and normal, are really harmful and have been harmful to a lot of people for a long time. But certainly now it's these reckonings that James mentioned have brought them to the surface.

[00:35:06.91] And in my courses that I teach in a science communication program, I talk a lot about quote unquote standards, or conventions. I'd like to call them conventions because it implies a little bit more flexibility than a standard even though sometimes the word standard even comes into my language, what can I say? We're not perfect, right?

[00:35:25.21] But these, I talk about these conventions in research writing. And I try to be very transparent in both my written communication and my video communication. The class I teach are mostly asynchronous. So I don't interact with my students via Zoom or in the classroom.

[00:35:41.69] So I try to be very clear about my own biases like, for example, I don't like when people start a sentence with though because I think although is the better term, it's more formal. However, I've seen plenty of published articles with though is used instead of although. So I say like listen in my experience to my ear or my eyes, this looks or sounds better. But that's just-- keep in mind that's my own bias.

[00:36:08.45] And I think that developing that sensitivity is really important because I've seen a lot of my colleagues and I've worked with faculty not here, at other institutions, who would use, and I use the phrase myself when I started grading papers of students back when I was a grad student, I used the phrase awkward a lot. I would write awkward-- and this was still when I got paper submissions.

[00:36:28.69] And what the heck does that mean? You know, awkward, like jeez a lot of things are awkward. And I've learned over time that, and usually my instinct is a good one. Something isn't-- I'm not getting something you as the reader.

[00:36:40.88] So as I just phrase that, I have to pull back and be like, OK, as a reader right now, what am I not getting from the text what the writer is presenting to me? And then I can engage with the writer in a conversation. I can ask questions. I'm thinking you mean this or do you mean this? I'm not quite getting the connection between this or that.

[00:37:00.80] It sounds like it's more laborious, so I really pick my battles when I go through it when I work with student papers. But I think that those moments from the student's perspective, because I've been on the receiving end of comments like this as well, are so much more useful for growth and for learning than just marking everything as much as possible, but just with short little pithy remarks like awkward flow.

[00:37:25.91] And I explain what I mean by flow very clearly to my students. We talk about paragraph structure and it takes me a long time to explain it. So just adding those marginal comments on the side, students and writers need more context than that from us as evaluators.

[00:37:41.66] ERIN HAGAR: That's so important and it's so-- what I love about this is because I feel like we're transitioning now into some concrete strategies that faculty members who might be listening who are saying, OK I appreciate, this I understand this mindset, I understand the slippery slope when we start talking about standards and standardized writing, but I have been brought up in this system, I have been trained in these ways myself.

[00:38:08.90] And so it is very hard to separate yourself in the act of teaching, of evaluating, of providing comments on written work. And so this idea of changing this-- I almost saw when you were describing the awkward, Isabell, just like a stamp that just gets stamped right on there. And it's such a judgment. There's nothing there, but what I heard in your approach is really changing that to more of a conversation even though it's an asynchronous, distant conversation.

[00:38:41.51] But it's you when you're reading, writing to the writer, and then the writer receiving that after you've read. It's not a real time conversation, but it invites just a thoughtfulness to, oh, what am I trying to say here? Or, why didn't this land with this particular reader?

[00:38:58.76] And it individualizes it rather than making some grand proclamation that the Academy sees this as awkward. It's, I, Isabell, as your instructor, am trying to figure out what you mean here. Can you help me out a little bit. Does that-- is that the feeling that you're going for is that--

[00:39:18.92] ISABELL MAY: Absolutely. I think that's really well put, Erin. And it has a lot to do-- and you know the irony I always find is when I talk with faculty like, oh I don't know how to approach. And struggling rightfully because they have been brought up. We've all been up in a system-- brought up in a system that has this pithy remarks that's been standard for a long time.

[00:39:38.16] And so I get that people use that as their toolbox, they have nothing else in there. So we really are proposing that there's a plethora of tools out there. There's a big toolbox out there and it's been out there and it's been used and it works really well.

[00:39:53.46] So let's take a look at it. And one of them is the sort of from their leader's perspective, which is how James trains our consultants. That is what our consultants-- I mean that is their second nature is the leaders had. And that's how when I do peer review in my courses, I tell students when they review their peers writing I said, come from a perspective as a reader and it's amazing.

[00:40:13.07] I just reviewed a few months-- a few weeks ago some assignments on my students. And I think everybody at some point in the site [? comment ?] said, as a reader, I'm struggling with what you're saying. And I thought, that's exactly what I tell them. [INAUDIBLE] they copied me like, yay, excellent. That's what they should do. And so I think it leads to a conversation around, James mentioned earlier, really foregrounding the labor because I think when we're engaging with our students or with a student writers around what are they meaning here?

[00:40:46.40] We're recognizing the labor that goes into what they put in there. And I think sometimes as faculty we have the tendency, because we're stressed out, we have a lot on our plate, it's like everybody in the world, I get it, it's not an easy life at times. And so we get to this place where we feel like, oh I don't think my students put a lot of work into this. And they might or they might not. I don't know. I wasn't there.

[00:41:09.66] But in most cases I have found, students have put work into their writing. Even though it might not look to me like it's a first draft. And the first draft, my first draft, are not something to write home to anybody about because they're my first and even my second drafts at time because I'm still experimenting and I'm allowing myself to mess up. So I wish we would give-- I think giving our students that grace is important.

[00:41:33.39] And so the other suggestion I have for a lot of faculty is to really take a look at the syllabus and look at the right assignments. And it might seem like it's a lot of work to do first to do drafts or allow students to revise something more frequently throughout the semester because you're like, oh my God, I got to add another writing assignment to my grading repertoire.

[00:41:54.93] But what I can say in my own experience and experience with lots of faculty I work with over the years is that, when we do that and we just try it with one or two assignments and give students the opportunity to revise again, and we focus our feedback on the we call them higher level [INAUDIBLE] it's a kind of a weird language to put around it.

[00:42:14.58] But basically we don't focus on the grammar and where's the article and awkward or whatever, but we engage with the text and the writer. And we do that for just not for everything that the writer is writing, but for a few select moments.

[00:42:27.66] It actually reduces our time in grading and ultimately-- oh, and giving feedback and it really gives-- it's a better experience overall both and for faculty and I think for students as well. So that's another strategy that I suggest to really be like, hey where could I think of a writing assignment as something not just towards the end the want of time. And not just an outline, but really having students write a page or two of a larger paper early on.

[00:42:56.40] And for students to know it's OK that's not perfect, but then give feedback just like a reviewer would. We all know as faculty when we publish, as researchers ourselves, the review of feedback can be brutal and it's a lot. And working-- you know walking through that can be tough. And so it is usually feedback that is focused on the content.

[00:43:18.54] I mean, there are always comments about language whatever it's another conversation we can have another time. But in most cases, feedback we get from our reviewers is very much focused on what we would call flow, but they're asking very specific questions. So let's do that for students as well.

[00:43:35.87] ERIN HAGAR: Another area that I'd love to talk about in terms of the toolbox, and I see this a lot in my work supporting faculty with their online courses, comes in the rubrics for writing assignments. And typically what I see is a rubric that's been designed with three or four criteria that are specific to the learning outcomes of a particular assignment, writing assignment.

[00:44:00.16] And then there's always that last 10% or 15% section of the rubric that has to do with mechanics, grammar, style, APA, all of those things. So, James can you tell us a little bit about how you see the inclusion or exclusion of that component of a rubric fitting into this approach?

[00:44:20.11] JAMES WRIGHT: Sure, I think it's important. And I think you alluded to this, Erin. And I think Isabell did earlier too that rubrics, as well as writing assignments and their connections to objectives and so forth, are part of the entire ecology of a course. They're connected to the entire ecology of a program, which is connected in turn to an ecology, a much broader ecology, for an entire discipline or profession.

[00:44:44.12] And so I think we have to look at all of those different structures across different scales to figure out exactly what we're asking students to do. That's the first thing I recommend. So being aware of how a rubric may align or misalign with some of the goals and commitments of particular professions. Right now, there's a lot of discussion around diversity, equity, and inclusion in terms of cultural competency and so forth.

[00:45:06.86] I know that our diversity Action Council has a cultural competency statement on their web page. How does that rubric, particularly that section you were discussing, Erin, how does that connect to our commitments to greater equity and justice in the Academy and beyond the Academy into the professions we're training folks to enter?

[00:45:28.75] So if we take a very standard structural approach, a very prescriptive approach to that particular aspect of the work that students are doing, often we're asking them to meet a standard or a convention without unpacking the labor they've gone through to get there.

[00:45:45.62] So this overt focus on quality and writing, in terms of rubric grading and assessment, can often, while we think it's doing a lot to help students unpack exactly what they need to do, often what it does is obscure what they're doing and erase sometimes what they're doing.

[00:46:03.64] And just stamp it with that convention and say, you have to meet that particular, you have to check that box, which is, I think, something we're really trying to avoid in terms of equity, inclusion, diversity, justice, and so forth.

[00:46:17.09] So what I've often-- it depends on the kind of writing. It depends on what the students-- and this is an important part. Asao Inoue, Mya Poe, Baker-- April Baker-Bell, many, many, many other scholars. Jonathan Flores and-- sorry Jonathan Rosa and Nelson Flores, others who do this work, talk about taking a look at ourselves first, understanding ourselves as we're dramatizing the reader when we look at these things. And when we set up a rubric, we're also dramatizing ourselves as readers.

[00:46:45.76] As a reader, what do I want to see in the language for this particular kind of writing? There may be particular kinds of moves, rhetorical moves, structures, organization, where and how a paragraph is set up that are expected. But then there also may be moments where things can be innovated. And I think leaving that space open in the rubric in every section for innovation is very important.

[00:47:11.18] So what I work with faculty to talk about is where in this particular kind of writing can innovation be part of what we're looking at as we dramatize ourselves as readers who ostensibly are folks in the discipline who are looking at the students practice writing. Because, let's face it, to assay means to give an attempt, to make an attempt.

[00:47:32.53] So as a student's making an attempt, we recognize this as an attempt and not a polished product. And we look at these particular sections about where does linguistic innovation happen? Where does the student actually pay attention carefully to the particulars of the American Psychological Association's section on gender inclusive language? And they use the singular they instead of the old standard he or she. And why? Does the student know why?

[00:48:03.70] And I think we're getting to that point too. It's part of developing the rubric is trying to picture ways to get students of talking about those choices. If they're going to make particular innovative choices where they see them as innovative, what's the story behind it? Can they talk about it?

[00:48:18.46] And that's when we get to the point where critically minded writers are coming out of our classrooms. And it forms a tapestry across programs. And each class becomes a site where students are learning to deepen that critical thinking. So that when they get to the reviewer number two, they can explain, if they need to, why they made certain choices

[00:48:37.52] ISABELL MAY: Erin, can I add something? Can I add something on rubrics? Because I've actually-- so you're asking about rubrics. I actually stopped using rubrics and it's a personal decision. So if I've adopted a labor based grading approach in my courses, and I've started using guideline-- or checklists for my paper. It's actually one suggestion that you made, Erin, if I remember correctly. So my students have a checklist of things that should be in the assignment. It's kind of a short version of the longer assignment description.

[00:49:06.65] And I've started using those this past summer and it's been amazing. And it actually, it frees me to really focus on the text and each text rather than trying to figure out the rubric. And again, I've seen rubrics work really well. And I've used rubrics my entire grading life and I think they have a great-- there's great rubrics that one can use. I just decided to do away with them and see where that takes me and I've been really liking it.

[00:49:31.02] And I've also noticed that talking about another tool and faculty tool and faculty toolbox is, when in fact when we assign a certain paper, a certain genre, let's say we assign a genre of a literature review. Then let's give students a sample paper. And I like using, when I teach my courses several times and I do what teach them every year, I have started using students papers from the previous year as an example.

[00:49:58.37] And I've asked a student of course for permission. And I either anonymize it or not whatever their preference is. And on top of that, I started doing this this semester actually, on top of providing this paper, I also recorded a short video explaining why I chose this paper as an example for this genre and what is done really well.

[00:50:18.24] So the students get not just the description, the checklist, they get the sample paper. They also get me talking about, so here this paragraph does a really great transition. In this paragraph here the author is really doing a great job and including other sources and juxtaposing different arguments. This is a great example for a conclusion. Here's a great thesis statement, whatever those are the compound and said I might use in a particular genre that I ask my students to write.

[00:50:45.95] And I found that extremely useful, especially for those of us who teach online or we can't always have these in class discussions that just erupt, but we can go over these things in greater detail. But to think that student-- need multiple exposures to the content and sample papers are the number, I think, the best thing. And I speak from my own perspective as a student at some point. When I know what something needs to look like, then I can be like, OK how can I emulate that? And then I can start also varying it.

[00:51:15.56] And like I'm learning the scale, like you're doing on the piano, and I want to become a jazz pianist I started experimenting with the scales. But I got to look at a scale first and know why it's there, how to use it. And then I can start also developing a bigger repertoire and also drawing on repertoires that I bring to the table myself.

[00:51:35.45] JAMES WRIGHT: I think that's a really good point too and you know by aligning those different samples students can see where there's so much flexibility within genres there's so much flexibility in different kinds of purposes for writing and quite those out as faculty members we can see that because we've been reading this stuff for a long time point out those differences look this person organized it differently or this person used language and conventions differently than the person who wrote the other paper.

[00:52:01.67] ERIN HAGAR: It sounds like really what you're advocating for is intentionality on both sides, that there's intentionality in the design of the assignment and some deep thinking about what the faculty as reader is hoping to experience. And then also equipping student writers with the tools to know that they're not just doing this as default.

[00:52:22.13] That if they are activating their linguistic superpowers, that they're doing it with knowledge that, I'm doing this and I'm doing it for a particular purpose. Or, if I'm choosing to play the standardized language game, I'm recognizing that I'm doing that and I'm doing it for a particular purpose.

[00:52:42.77] JAMES WRIGHT: Yes, absolutely.

[00:52:43.85] ISABELL MAY: I like the linguistic superpowers. I need to think on that a little bit and play with that.

[00:52:48.71] ERIN HAGAR: Well you guys will get the first capes. And then we'll get a little cape going. This has been such a fantastic discussion. I'm so excited to know you personally and to be able to extend this conversation and to offer it to our listeners. So I cannot thank you enough for taking the time. We will put some links in our description of this episode to some of the scholars that Isabell and James reference, this is a whole field.

[00:53:17.00] We could have probably done this episode for six days and still not tapped into everything that needs to be discussed. But I really do appreciate how you both balance this philosophy and this mindset with concrete, practical tools that faculty, in our specific context of graduate Health and Human Services professional education, can really run with. So thank you, both.

[00:53:42.57] ISABELL MAY: Thanks, Erin, it was a pleasure being here. Bye, everyone.

[00:53:45.33] JAMES WRIGHT: You're welcome, Erin, and thank you so much for having us.

[00:53:48.09] [MUSIC PLAYING]

[00:53:50.50] ERIN HAGAR (VOICEOVER): Thank you for joining us today on Moving the Needle. Visit us at umaryland.edu/fctl to hear additional episodes, leave us feedback, or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

[00:00:00.12] ERIN HAGAR: Welcome to "Moving the Needle," casual conversations about ways big and small to impact student learning, brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Erin Hagar. Let's move the needle.

[00:00:18.53] Welcome to this episode of Moving the Needle. As we record this, we're approaching the Thanksgiving season the second Thanksgiving of the COVID era. So it's a natural time for our thoughts to turn to our communities, their needs, and their strengths. Engaging with the community can add such richness to all aspects of university life, but as today's conversation reminds us, this engagement needs to be thoughtful, collaborative, and in a spirit of true partnership.

[00:00:47.60] Let me introduce you to today's guest, Dr. Lori Edwards, an Assistant Professor of Family and Community Health in the School of Nursing at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Laurie directs the Interprofessional Program for Academic Community Engagement, an initiative that's designed to develop, support, and expand educational curriculum, and service learning, and community experiential learning, to build community engaged faculty scholarship and research, and to support professional development related to community engagement for faculty, staff, and students.

[00:01:21.23] On today's episode, we'll discuss the evolution of community engagement and service learning and higher education, and we'll explore what's involved in designing these kinds of learning experiences, and talk about how rewarding they can be for students, faculty, and the community itself. Let's get to it. Dr. Edwards, thank you so much for joining us today.

[00:01:41.43] LORI EDWARDS: My pleasure.

[00:01:42.77] ERIN HAGAR: Dr. Edwards, the first thing I was hoping you could do is break down some of the terminology for us, particularly the terms "community engagement," and "service learning." You often hear those in tandem, but I think it would be very useful to understand them as discrete ideas.

[00:01:59.60] LORI EDWARDS: Historically, the concept of community engagement, which in this context means how academic institutions work in collaboration with communities, that terminology and that concept came from, I think in the 1940s, maybe sooner than that, around how academic institutions were developed with the concept of civic engagement, so that university students would ultimately become engaged in civic society so that the institutions would facilitate students to learn so that they would commit to, basically, the greater good of society. So in the last, I don't know how many years now, but in the last several, 20-plus more years, the terms "community engagement" have evolved for universities and academic institutions.

[00:02:57.42] One of the founding documents around this is, or the institutions around this, is the Carnegie Classification around Community Engagement. And Carnegie, that definition, specifically describes community engagement as this collaboration between institutes of higher learning and their larger communities. It could be local. It could be global, regional, et cetera, and that the focus of that level of engagement is the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources, but specifically around partnerships and reciprocity.

[00:03:35.03] So those are two key concepts-- how do these universities and academic institutions work in collaboration with communities for the mutual benefit of really both, but within the idea of partnership and reciprocity being a part of that? Service learning is-- I would consider this a methodology for how we do community engagement work. So service learning is a structured approach to facilitating student learning.

[00:04:08.09] And a service learning course specifically honors the principles of community engagement, and honors the principles of effective partnerships, and honors the principles of student learning. But the student learning is focused on a deeper reflective learning. Some would call it like "soulfulness learning," so that there's a meaningful transformation in the learning experience. It's not just knowledge, but it's actual deeper transformational learning, ultimately to facilitate students to be engaged in civic society and lifelong learning.

[00:04:47.43] ERIN HAGAR: Well, it's so important to start with that to ground us as we move forward in thinking about this as an education topic. So I hear loud and clear coming from you this idea of partnership and relationships. Can you describe for us how those partnerships might look between universities or faculty, students, research, and the communities around those universities?

[00:05:16.23] LORI EDWARDS: The opportunities for universities to improve or work towards improving the lives of people who reside surrounding the universities themselves, generally challenged communities on a variety of levels, the opportunities can vary in how the universities and the communities partner or engage, and how collectively and collaboratively they work towards improving those communities. So it could vary in terms of the topic.

[00:05:51.13] So from an academic university standpoint, as universities go, they're involved with service, they're involved with education, and they're involved with research. And so the approach to partnership can vary. And there are different frameworks that have been developed over time within those various mechanisms.

[00:06:12.08] So one of the frameworks for community engagement around research is a now pretty well-renowned framework called "community-based participatory research." So that framework means that a researcher would initially work with a community. The idea for the research, in the best of circumstances, would come from the community itself, who has a research-type question or need to be addressed-- say it's high rates of cancer. And so how would a researcher look at the community's perspective on that, and look at ways to improve research around cancer predictors, for example?

[00:06:58.76] So it just depends upon the topic. So the framework for community-based participatory research means that there's mutuality in the research process. You include the community members in every step of the research endeavor. So from a research perspective, that's one way.

[00:07:15.26] Another way from a service perspective, meaning there are particular programs or projects or ideas that a community may want to have conducted in a particular community, then you might bring on a particular person who has expertise in program development or program evaluation to participate in facilitating that program. From a university side those service entities could include faculty. They could include students. They could include the university staff in the process of conducting service programs for and with communities.

[00:07:56.20] The partnership process would mean that the community themselves would really identify what those priority areas are, and then respond to that. One of the examples I often think about is how many communities often want health fairs done. That's a service.

[00:08:14.17] And the research and the evidence shows that health fairs don't make a big difference in community health outcomes. They're screening opportunities for a lot of people in a community, perhaps to get their blood pressure taken, or some cancer screening done, or some blood glucose screening completed. But the health fair itself, in terms of impacting major community health outcomes, is pretty minimal.

[00:08:40.78] I often think of that endeavor as a way to build relationships with communities. People from a health care entity or health professions may get to know people in the community. The community gets to know some of the health professionals. It's a networking building opportunity.

[00:08:57.88] And all of that, to me, is a way for the community to say, this is what we want. This is what we believe is an opportunity to get our health care needs met. And so I think that health care services continue to be provided in that respect, because it's a way of a community saying, this is what we think we need. So let's just go forth and continue to support that.

[00:09:19.15] The other side to an academic institution is then, obviously, teaching and education. So in a real partnership process for academic institutions to facilitate student learning, there's the pedagogy of what to do that effectively is to engage in service learning. So the learning occurs where students are experiencing a service-related program or project, and then the community experiences and the learning happens within a community setting.

[00:09:52.79] And then there's a whole pedagogy of how to make a service learning effective, but that's a different, another level of what it means to bring in community members in partnership with the learning experience. So again, a university is involved with research, service, and also education. And you can build on those aspects in a variety of ways to create this mechanism of connecting with community members, community leaders, and community organizations in partnership.

[00:10:23.24] ERIN HAGAR: Well, I'm so glad you grounded us in that bigger picture of the idea of partnership with communities and thinking about all of the aspects of university life that can interface with those communities in partnership. I'd love to continue on with this idea of service learning and talk about that for a little bit. As we record this, it's almost Thanksgiving, so it tends to be a time of year when people are thinking about service and service projects.

[00:10:52.82] I'd just like to ground us in the terminology of service learning. Just by way of an example, so let's say that I'm a faculty member, and I want my students to go out and maybe work in a food bank or do a toy collection or something during the holidays. And we coordinate that as a class and make our deliveries. Would you call that service learning?

[00:11:16.64] LORI EDWARDS: What a great question. And I would say that if a group of individual students, faculty, want to provide service in a community, it could be service learning if it includes a couple of things. The thing that I would want it to include most of all is that the community itself has asked for the process of having students participate. And secondly, and even more importantly, the learning part of that is not just service but it's the reflection of the experience that students have after the experience.

[00:11:56.54] And that reflection is critical. And that's why it's often called "critical service learning," because the critical thinking, the critical reflection post a service experience, allows the students to have a synthesis of what they actually learned. And that can include many things.

[00:12:19.58] So there's a variety of strategies towards that. So for example, the simplest way I would have a group of students, and come together with them after a service experience, I would say, "So what just happened? And what did you learn from that?"

[00:12:37.44] And then what I often like to do with students in that regard is even push that further, so not a simple learning but a deeper learning. And that's the whole focus of service learning, is how do we facilitate deeper learning. And that deeper transformational learning allows them to, I would say, learn on an affective level and have a transformative personal experience in this that leads to lifelong learning or lifelong commitment to service.

[00:13:07.50] ERIN HAGAR: So it's clearly deeper than it may be a one-off activity or just something that's done and kind of left hanging out there. Could you maybe give us an example or walk us through what this experience might look like from a student's point of view? If I'm in a course where service learning is one of the pedagogies of the course, what kinds of things am I experiencing as a student?

[00:13:32.83] LORI EDWARDS: In a course that's designed specifically for service learning, the first and foremost-- not that students read course objectives-- but the course objectives would actually state something along the lines of the intentionality of the service, what the service experience may lead to in terms of how much the community partner was involved with the design of the course itself, and then that critical reflection is going to be a part of what they learn in that course. So the objectives would clearly state that. From a student perspective, reading the objectives-- and often, students do like to match the learning to the written objectives, which is our contract with students-- so it would state that up front.

[00:14:21.04] Secondly, as a student, I would want to hear directly from the community members themselves that were involved in this. So whether it's a guest lecture, whether it's out in the community that community partner participates in providing some of the teaching, that to me is pretty important-- for the students to hear it not from me as the faculty, but really directly from the people that are part of the experience and the service.

[00:14:49.45] And then, I think more importantly, if I was a student, what I would like to know and hear and see is-- well, I'm hoping students have said this-- they want to see that there's opportunities to continue to be involved sometimes so it's not just a one-time experience. They want to see how it relates to some of the questions that they may have around the disparities that they experience. So from a student perspective, what I've heard a lot is they're often left feeling a sense of uncertainty about how to make a difference in all of this disparity that they see.

[00:15:38.62] So I hear this a lot-- oh, my god, how can I possibly change this? How can I possibly make a difference? Because when they're in this learning experience, they want to get in and they want to fix things.

[00:15:51.41] And the truth is there's so much that's left hanging that you can't fix it all. But they often say, what can I do? What can I do? And so to provide for them an opportunity to determine one way they can make a difference, I think, is important from a student perspective.

[00:16:09.11] So whatever that might be for each student, I think that's important. So I often will say, choose one area that you're particularly passionate about, and continue to work towards changing that one topic area or one thing. I have a student right now who's really committed to improving women in the community and their breastfeeding practices.

[00:16:31.88] So if she can work on that in her career path, and that's something she feels she can tackle. And working in community agencies or places where that can happen, and she can do that teaching, that feels like something concrete she can wrap her head around, as opposed to trying to improve all of Baltimore City and all the housing issues. It's like the concrete and the contextual components-- if you can provide that context for people, I think that gives them a direction to move into.

[00:17:04.24] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, what I hear in what you're saying is the importance of anticipating students' emotional response to some of this work and some of these experiences, and giving them a space to reflect on that, explore some of those themes, and feel empowered to take on what they can take on.

[00:17:22.75] LORI EDWARDS: Yes, that's correct. And the purpose of service learning per se is not just that they're aware of the issues, but they're also aware of their own biases, their own ways of thinking that can possibly be transformed. Historically, what we have seen in many academic institutions, and continue to see, is a growing awareness around the privilege and the power of academic institutions. And the narrative around that has really been expanding in recent years.

[00:17:56.63] And so the more students see their awareness around, and have a growing and deeper understanding of their own bias, their own power and privilege, coming into this work-- even if they don't have that background of power and privilege themselves in their lives, that being a part of an academic institution, that comes with it to some extent. So seeing those structural components and then personally experiencing that allows them to have a greater openness, come at this work with a greater sense of empathy. And I think that allows them to be in a more real space with people who are hurting and vulnerable, and then work towards advocacy and changing either the systems themselves or their own ways to advocate within this.

[00:18:51.45] Recently, I had a student in a service learning course that I teach who wrote a pretty profound piece to say that she could now see-- she was in a school of dentistry, and she could now see how the dental profession has its own ways of being biased. And this was her understanding of this, and that she really wanted to advocate to changing some of the professional aspects to the service of dentistry. And without having had that real-life experience, and encountering people in the community, and really getting to know people in a different context, she wouldn't have had that inside perspective of the way she could see this needed to change.

[00:19:35.05] So each student comes at this from their own perspective, their own discipline, but whatever ways they grow in their understanding of how to personally transform themselves, and then personally transform their discipline-- I think that that moves each institution forward in new ways, in different ways.

[00:19:55.44] ERIN HAGAR: What a powerful realization and a powerful outcome for that student.

[00:20:00.60] LORI EDWARDS: Yeah, it's always exciting to hear a student feel transformed in that way. Yeah.

[00:20:05.16] ERIN HAGAR: Could we talk a little bit about some of the boots on the ground, the logistics that faculty members need to consider to make these kind of experiences possible? Because I think about an initiative like this in the classroom, and I think about the duck who looks very calm and collected on top of the water, but whose feet are paddling furiously underneath it. And that's the image I'm bringing to mind for a faculty member who is coordinating all of this. Can you talk a little bit about what's involved before the class starts, as they're facilitating these experiences and these reflections with the students, and just what does that look like from a faculty's point of view?

[00:20:45.52] LORI EDWARDS: So I can give you a quick example even of what happened this week alone. So I coordinate a program for faculty and staff fellows to grow in their knowledge and application of community engagement. And so one of the fellows from last year works at a community agency, a major West Baltimore entity focused on community engagement and community service.

[00:21:19.17] And so he has done significant work. He was a fellow in our program, and he has done significant work towards partnering with community members to design community space, specifically gardens. And so I wanted to bring the fellows who are engaged in this fellowship to the community garden to see the space.

[00:21:43.86] And so I made some plans to do this. But in order to do this, I had to meet first with the partner of this fellow, a community leader who has lived in this neighborhood since 1969, as he told me. And so I had to meet with him prior to.

[00:22:04.49] So I met with him on Zoom, and the first question this gentleman asked me is, what are you going to do for us? What are you going to do? How are you going to commit to this in the future? What can you do?

[00:22:14.28] And so he wasn't hostile in this. He was asking real, honest questions. I've been in places where people are actually pretty hostile in those questions. And it's true-- if we go visit someone, are we coming at this work from a voyeuristic perspective or are we coming at this from a truly open, willing to help perspective?

[00:22:35.49] And so this gentleman and this community fellow gave up their time, a half a day, to have a group of visitors come visit the space. And what did they get in exchange for it? Honestly, the first time when he asked me this question two days ago I said, I don't know what we can do for you, but I can be open to see.

[00:22:57.53] But can I give anything in return? It requires time, and energy, and sometimes funding, and sometimes donating free time, et cetera. So it was a really tough question to be in that space. So it's a good example for me and I really took it to heart, that meeting, where it was an uncomfortable conversation to be asked.

[00:23:19.64] You're going to bring this group of people out and be reminded that they've had other groups of people come out-- visitors from Japan, funding agencies to come out and look at this great, beautiful space that's been transformed in a very blighted community. And you see it, but what do you do with that experience? You see it-- is that voyeurism? Is it just sort of looking at something from afar and admiring it?

[00:23:42.53] But what does it take to really do the engagement work? And so now I'm left with personally, the burden of what could we do? What could I do as a faculty member, to perhaps do a health fair, as he asked, or find other networks to support their continued programs, find funding agencies? His vision is to put a Marriott in that neighborhood in West Baltimore, and rebuild all of West Baltimore. And who could I know that could be a developer to take on West Baltimore?

[00:24:12.50] And so it means this continued passion towards making this happen, and also, even if it's a small endeavor, just to commit to doing that process. So he said to me very clearly-- he said, even if you save one person's life or help one person or one family, that would be enough. And I feel committed to and exploring how perhaps I could bring a group of students out to do a health fair in the spring or something like that.

[00:24:45.12] So what does that mean on my part as a faculty member? Well, I have to find a course where that fits in, or I have to get legal processes to facilitate a Volunteer Day. Because it all is about legal. I can't bring a group of students out to any website without having legal permission through the university.

[00:25:03.35] If it means being a part of a course, then I have to facilitate the structure of what that looks like. I have to find the supplies to do a health fair. I have to find a group of students. I have to find volunteers.

[00:25:16.94] I mean, I've done this endless times, endless, endless health bears, for example, or community screening events. But it just means all the background coordinating. And it means even the simplest thing of going on site-- how do you pick a day that you can do this, and find the time where the weather is going to be good if it's an outdoor event?

[00:25:40.67] I mean, the list goes on, and just coordinating things that are outside the classroom experience. And ultimately, how do I bring on this gentleman to be a part of the teaching experience? Because he's the one with the wisdom.

[00:25:54.99] I'm the facilitator, but he's the wisdom. He's the lived experience. And so how do I bring on him to provide the education?

[00:26:04.86] Yesterday, when we finally did meet on site at the space and had this half day experience with the other fellows, he was fantastic. He was very open. He was very receptive.

[00:26:15.72] I felt like I had a new friend. As a matter of fact, he kept saying, "You are all now friends of Kirby Park." And he said to come back, and be a part of these days, and do whatever you can.

[00:26:25.93] And he was recognizing some of the limitations that we have. And he wasn't feeling like we were just "being there" just for the day. He was open to saying, just come on back, and open and receptive to seeing how this space can be transformed, and eager to share the journey that's occurred in this process.

[00:26:49.97] So that's just one of many examples. It takes a lot of work, and a lot of constant presence, and a lot of constant being willing to be in uncomfortable spaces and conversations, and a lot of facilitation. And it's just a lifelong commitment.

[00:27:05.37] It's not easy to do this work, but it's also fun and it's engaging. And it means having this opportunity to hear from real people in real time, and see the blight, and see the beauty at the same time. Literally in the middle of this beautiful park that's called the Serenity Park, there's this boarded up housing and there's a dumping ground. So it's this juxtaposition of hope and despair at the same time, and being able to be present to that is pretty profound.

[00:27:38.49] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah. And really what comes through in this description and in this example, which thank you so much for sharing that, is the perspective that it would be really important for a faculty member to see this not as a means to an end for one course or one lesson. Because I could imagine that the need to build those relationships, the work involved in exploring and listening to the community, really happens beyond the bounds of a semester or an academic year. And so it seems like part of what's so important is being flexible enough when you have those relationships, and you have that sense of community and that sense of partnership, to know when you can plug in a class to a particular activity or project.

[00:28:33.36] LORI EDWARDS: Great point. It's important to have that constant vigilance and awareness around what's relevant and appropriate, and when you may not be able to do that on a given time period or given the community context. And a lot of times, community agencies, for example, are really overburdened by service. And also, there can only be so many asks along the way.

[00:29:03.00] So it's important from a faculty side to continuously attempt, at least, to offer perspective to the community partners, community agencies, community leaders, to say how we want to be able to be there to help and to ask them to participate in the learning is important and facilitate student learning, but also hopefully guide how those projects and those services can be of support to them. And sometimes, people say, sorry, I still can't do it.

[00:29:37.19] But I think in academic institutions, the one thing I've learned is students come and go. And if you can facilitate the community agencies to know that that's true, students will come and go and they have a relationship with some students and then they move on, that's a constant rotation. The strength of community-academic partnerships and community engagement is that a faculty member's there for the long haul because they are the ones that continue to foster and build those relationships. And that's what academic institutions need to commit to.

[00:30:12.14] For example, sometimes academic institutions will rotate the faculty that are involved with courses. And that has a huge impact for the community agencies because they're used to one faculty member. So it doesn't do a university any good to rotate faculty in and out of programs. I mean, sometimes that happens, but it's more important to recognize the value and the need for that continued relationship with a faculty member in the community agencies.

[00:30:39.14] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, I can see how important that would be. You coordinate a fellowship for faculty and staff here at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. And I was fortunate enough to join you in that fellowship, so I'm excited to ask you to describe it for us, and describe what your goals are, why you designed it, and what you're hoping to accomplish by weaving this even more deeply into the fabric of the institution.

[00:31:09.87] LORI EDWARDS: I'm happy to talk about the UMB IPACE program, an Inter-professional Program for Academic Community Engagement. And this program has been in the works for a while. And it's had a couple of iterations.

[00:31:24.72] And now, we have a fellowship for faculty, and staff, and community members who want to participate in growing in their knowledge and application of community engagement. UMB has a really meaningful and valuable commitment to the community, and also has a brick and mortar Community Engagement Center. And that's an incredibly growing and valuable place for communities to come to the center to participate in a variety of types of programs that really fosters community relationships, community needs being met in a variety of ways.

[00:32:09.76] The academic side of that, which is the program that I'm working within, is a way to foster faculty, and staff, and the university to grow in their scholarship around community engagement. And that scholarship means grants or endeavors that facilitate how do we strengthen what I would call is the pedagogy of community engagement. How do we strengthen staff who want to develop community projects, and strengthen it with a lens of what does it mean to do effective engagement, then effective partnerships.

[00:32:55.32] So there have been some faculty or staff that have been involved with the fellowship who have great ideas about community projects. And the fellowship facilitates those individuals to really refine how to do this in a partnership way. So for example, one of the fellows last year really had this great idea and has a really wonderful passion about water safety for kids.

[00:33:26.16] So she has this great idea around improving water safety for kids in our communities, particularly in West Baltimore. But she did not have an understanding of what it meant to work in partnership with communities to make that happen. So through a variety of networks, she was able to start building that program.

[00:33:45.64] And the way it can be more effective, and the way you can reach more people, is if you know your networks within communities, rather than being an outsider coming in and bringing a great idea and a program into a community. Often, what happens when you have great ideas and you come into communities, even to do health education programs, people don't show. But if you know how to work in partnership with people, you begin to build your network, and people give you that inside perspective about what it takes to deliver your message in a way that's going to reach people, in a way that's health literacy focused so you have the right ways of communicating about it, and you know where to deliver that program. And you don't know that unless you're working closely in partnership with people.

[00:34:28.48] And so that fellow from a year ago has now recruited a fellow for this new cohort. And they work together on doing this in a couple of schools, this water safety program. So the network builds.

[00:34:42.18] And that is, I think, one of the most valuable aspects of this fellowship as we grow this network of faculty and staff and community members within UMB, and the second cohort connects to the first cohort, and we begin to establish a group of faculty and staff within the university that is committed to this vision of effective community engagement in whatever areas they work within. And it's interprofessional, so we work with a variety of different schools. And we grow this group of people to transform their own practice in how they do this work, but also transform the university-- ultimately, that they become champions in their own school and champions within UMB to do effective community engagement.

[00:35:28.89] ERIN HAGAR: It's so exciting to hear about the continuity among the cohorts in the program, building and growing both as a fellowship and also people's individual projects as they learn this. Because like with service learning, it's not something that really can be mastered in the confines of a 9 or 10 month fellowship. It's really a commitment that people are making to adopting this framework of how to do our work.

[00:35:56.83] LORI EDWARDS: Very true. And because often, this work can be very lonely, it's nice to have colleagues and other champions to connect with, and then to grow that vision within the university. Fortunately, at UMB we have amazing leadership from the president, from the chancellor, from the provost, across many of the deans within our university, who are really committed to our community engagement as a university. So we're really privileged in this university to be a part of a great vision, yet we still have a lot of inside university work to do to really allow the time and energy and effort to really commit to this work.

[00:36:45.56] And so the more we bring brilliant minds together to think about how to be a community-engaged university, the stronger we will be. And I think the fellowship provides that level of support to bring the brilliance together to really make that happen, and to create some institutional change around this. So we now have a database that we've adopted or purchased as a university, and we're integrating this database called Collaboratory. So we begin to capture courses, and programs, and projects that do community engagement work in this database. And the more we begin to use that, the more we can tell the story how we as a university are doing this engagement work.

[00:37:31.24] ERIN HAGAR: That's great. Well, that leads right into my last question for us today. So that database is very exciting. Is there anything else, though, that is new on the horizon related to service learning, community engagement, that excites you as an educator in this space?

[00:37:49.24] LORI EDWARDS: I think that I'm really excited that service learning and the concept of that is really growing. It's been around for a while, but I think it's growing, and I really love when people want to do service learning and want to know more about how to do this well. So there's often the sense that service learning means just doing service projects.

[00:38:10.69] And so I'm excited to have more people on board to know that service learning is a full pedagogy, and how to do that most effectively, including the main components of it, which includes this critical reflection aspect and also working in partnership. So I'm excited about that. And I believe this database provides opportunities for people to learn more about that.

[00:38:38.63] And so I think that's really big in future on the horizon. And then, additional strategies for future conferences that we're going to put on regarding this, growing our partnerships with other universities who are doing this work, I think is another exciting thing on the horizon, including College Park. So there's a lot more movement across the board in this area, and I'm excited that we can grow this at UMB, and I can be a part of that process.

[00:39:12.64] ERIN HAGAR: It is so exciting. And we're so lucky at our institution to have you in this space, and your expertise, and your commitment to it. And we're just all better for it. So thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today about these important approaches to education and community building.

[00:39:30.22] LORI EDWARDS: Well, thank you for this opportunity to really share a passion of mine that I've been involved with this work for a long time. I feel like I'm constantly growing. I think back on how I did this work 10 years ago, and how I'm doing it today. And every day, I feel humbled by the process and have a lot more to learn.

[00:39:49.87] It's a lifelong learning process for me, as well. And I'm grateful for the opportunity to engage in this work with like-minded colleagues.

[00:39:57.86] [MUSIC PLAYING]

[00:40:00.16] ERIN HAGAR: Thank you for joining us today on "Moving the Needle." Visit us at umaryland.edu/fctl to hear additional episodes, leave us feedback, or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

[00:00:00.12] ERIN HAGAR: Welcome to Moving the Needle. Casual conversations about ways, big and small, to impact student learning. Brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland Baltimore. I'm Erin Hagar, let's move the needle.

[00:00:18.64] Welcome, everyone. So glad to have you with us for this episode of Moving the Needle. Today, we explore the role of the instructional designer in higher education. It is such a jargony sounding title, and my guest today talk about what that term means to them, how they got started in this line of work, and what they love about working on courses with the faculty members they support.

[00:00:41.35] Let me introduce you to them now. Dr. Eric Belt holds an EDD an educational technology from Boise State University. His interest in instructional design stemmed from a broader interest in the field of education, whether it was workplace training, his own experiences as an online student, and his role supporting faculty at Howard Community College. Kevin Engler holds a master's degree in instructional design from UMBC.

[00:01:08.08] Like Eric, he's always enjoyed the process of designing learning experiences. He worked for years in the K-12 space, where he quickly realized the value of active learning strategies and his role as a guide on the side. Becky Menendez has a master's in elementary education and also one in teaching English as a second language. Prior to coming to UMB, she did online course design for the International Baccalaureate program and Penn State University.

[00:01:36.40] She came to this work through an interest in the ways technology can be used to solve instructional problems. Eric, Kevin, and Becky are my colleagues here at UMB, so you'll hear me chime in about my own experience as an instructional designer as well. In fact, I wanted to call this episode shooting the breeze with the IDs, but that landed like a lead balloon.

[00:01:57.22] Whatever it's called, I really hope you enjoy this conversation. Eric, Kevin, and Becky, welcome, and thank you so much for joining us today.

[00:02:04.88] KEVIN ENGLER: Glad to be here.

[00:02:05.99] ERIC BELT: Thank you for having us.

[00:02:07.18] ERIN HAGAR: Let's just jump right in. So why don't we start with definitions? How do you think of this work that we do? How do you define it to others? Kevin, let's start with you.

[00:02:18.10] KEVIN ENGLER: Yeah, I think I would offer a really concise definition to start with, and I would say instructional design is the process of creating learning events, and by learning events, I would say those would include academic learning, skills training, behavioral changes, or trying to change somebody's attitude or opinion about some topic. But instructional design also involves a process of a systematic approach, I would say, to planning and developing learning events.

[00:02:56.53] And the other thing that I would add is that quality insurance is a key part to the instructional design process. So that's, in a nutshell, what I would consider instructional design.

[00:03:10.89] ERIN HAGAR: That's great. Thank you. Eric, how about you?

[00:03:14.43] ERIC BELT: Yeah, so piggybacking off of what Kevin said there, the quality assurance piece for me has always been about continuous improvement. So I see instructional design as always taking a fresh look or trying to continually improve your instruction or your course or some aspect of it.

[00:03:36.21] ERIN HAGAR: Becky, how about you? How do you define the work that we do?

[00:03:39.51] BECKY MENENDEZ: I mean, I probably would echo would what Kevin and Eric would say in terms of the basic definition as being we design learning events or learning experiences. I would probably add what that can actually look like varies very much from position to position, and so sometimes, it's design work and helping faculty plan and think through how they're going to structure the course and what kind of assessments or activities might be involved and sometimes it's project management, sometimes it's helping develop and build, sometimes it's helping with the technology piece. And while those aren't necessarily part of the core of what instructional design is, they're often involved in the axial position and what that looks like.

[00:04:19.65] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, I would agree. I think the only thing I would add from my experiences is emphasizing that role of a partnership with faculty. I think so often in higher ed faculty, we're asked to conceive of their courses and think about them in a vacuum and I think one of the things that we bring is just the role of being a sounding board and an ideal partner for folks as they're thinking about how they're going to approach their course, whether it's online or face to face. Let's talk a little bit about some of the responsibilities that instructional designers have.

[00:04:57.90] What do you think are some of the most important things that an instructional designer provides? What do you think our biggest responsibilities are?

[00:05:06.78] ERIC BELT: I would say some of the most important responsibilities for an instructional designer are time management, project management, but also people. You have to be a people person, because in just in my experience, there's always been a little bit of hesitancy or resistance to a new way of doing things or a new process or it just a new learning environment. So working with faculty as an instructional designer, I think it's important to be sensitive to the expertise that each individual brings to that collaboration.

[00:05:50.61] KEVIN ENGLER: I think I would have to break it down into two different levels, maybe, and I would call these the micro level and the macro level. And so on the micro level, I would say that the most important responsibility maybe is to guide faculty through a systematic approach for planning a course. And as part of that, the instructional designer many times is trying to remove barriers that might interfere with the planning and the development of the course. And we really want faculty to focus on their strengths, and their strengths of course being imparting subject matter knowledge and skills to students.

[00:06:36.13] So we really want them to focus on that and not get all involved in the software details and which tools to use and which buttons to push. And then on the macro side, and by macro, I would classify this as like the campus-wide view of things, I would say an important responsibility is to try to improve the learning experience of all UMB students. And I think we do this best by keeping an eye on quality standards and encouraging the development of consistently high quality learning events. And a few ways that we're doing this now in the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning, we have a website, Eric and Sharon and Becky have been instrumental in putting this together, especially-- there's a component called the Online Teaching Toolkit, which has a lot of resources for faculty to use, especially new faculty, faculty that are new to online learning and teaching.

[00:07:43.35] We also have individual faculty consultations and regular ongoing course development projects. So all these ways we're trying to improve the learning experience for our students.

[00:08:01.35] ERIC BELT: That made me think of stuff that I just wanted to chime in on the structure that we provide faculty. I think that there's a balancing act there. I think that we have to be flexible in our structures that we provide faculty, because the more rigid we become, that's typically where problems start to arise. If you have to do it this way or you have to do it that way, we expect it this way, those are all good things to help improve quality, but they can also be detrimental to the relationship-- the working relationship. So it's you have to be sensitive to that, you have to work with them, and everyone has different working styles.

[00:08:40.47] So I think that some degree of flexibility is needed in that approach too.

[00:08:44.96] BECKY MENENDEZ: Just thinking about what Eric just said in terms of providing that process and that structure and even things like quality assurance standards, it's super helpful to be able to offer that framework and structure, especially if a faculty member doesn't necessarily know where to start or you're really trying to pull out what are you trying to accomplish with this course outside of maybe how it's always been taught or how maybe someone else has been taught when they were in a grad program or a professional program. But I would say one of our responsibilities or one of the things that we add to this process is a knowledge of some of the whys behind learning and why some of these structures or these assurance standards are in place, because I think that's what offers some of the flexibility. I can take a Quality Matters rubric and go through a checklist and say, OK, this course meets this checklist in this way, and I've seen in some places that once you apply a rubric like that in a certain way, it can become very rigid and like oh, the only way to meet this standard is to do it this way.

[00:09:45.95] But when you come to the table with more of an understanding of why some of these things are important and what they're accomplishing when it comes to learning, it gives you more problem-solving capability. It gives you ways to do some of these things differently, like Eric was saying, and offer that flexibility of, oh, OK, so what are you trying to accomplish here? And these are some reasons why objectives are really important and why we want to include them and here's different ways that you can present that to a learner and different ways you can set up these activities that's not just meeting a checklist but that's understanding the why behind it and offering that flexibility.

[00:10:23.14] ERIN HAGAR: And I think one of the things that it's super important for people to know about Quality Matters is how grounded in the evidence it is. These aren't arbitrary standards at all. They're all evidence-based, research backed principles of teaching and learning practice, and then not just teaching and learning practice but also things like accessibility, which I think are is another big role that instructional designers play. Faculty aren't necessarily trained in ADA requirements for online courses and accessibility measures and things like that, copyright, things like that. Pitfalls that we know that are easy to stumble into unintentionally online, but it's good to have another pair of eyes to look out.

[00:11:06.88] It protects the faculty member, protects the institution, but most importantly, it's in the best interests of all the learners. So what do you wish every faculty member knew about working with an instructional designer? Have you come across common misconceptions or misperceptions of what this role is or something that you think just doesn't get enough air time about the potential of this relationship?

[00:11:33.67] ERIC BELT: That we care as much about the students. We want to improve the students' learning experience, and we want to bring whatever we can to the table to help that process. And so if we come from a common ground there that we're all in this together, we're all here to help one another, then I think that makes the work in relationship a lot easier to start.

[00:11:59.35] KEVIN ENGLER: Yeah, that's a really good point, Eric, and I'd like to piggyback on it because I was thinking along similar lines. I think it would be great if faculty understood that to a certain extent, IDs, our instructional designers are the voice of the student in the development process and the planning process. That instructional designers are not subject matter experts.

[00:12:25.30] They often don't know much at all about the topic that they're developing a course for, and so it's a really natural fit for them to become the novice. To serve as the novice role and say, I don't really understand this point or I don't understand this goal or this wording and ask for clarification and try to make stronger connections between, say, the stated learning goals and the learning activities or the evaluation that students are going to receive. And I think to Eric's point that I think this really does align with the intentions of the faculty generally.

[00:13:12.22] And let me just say, all the faculty that I've worked with at UMB are just fantastic. They're amazing partners and they're just great human beings and great to work with. So really enjoy that, but I also believe that their intentions in focusing on student success align perfectly with what we were trying to do as well, even though it seems like the partnership that we have is focused on the faculty, really, we're almost always focused on the student and student outcomes.

[00:13:46.78] BECKY MENENDEZ: I was just thinking about some of the common misconceptions that I feel like I've come across, and I think one of the common misconceptions is that we are like a help desk or tech support. And while that-- depending on the role, that is often something that we can offer, I've been in places or situations where that was maybe the role of an instructional designer or initially it was a role of people in that department and then faculty assume that that's the extent of what we have to offer.

[00:14:16.64] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah. No, I totally agree. I think one of the things that I feel like is a misconception is that instructional designers only work on online courses. I think that the kind of skills and insights that we bring into that student experience and the alignment between the objectives and the activities work just as well in a face to face. The nature of our role here in particular tends to be focused on online courses, but I think that the conversations we have would be relevant, and in fact, I've had faculty I've worked with tell me, oh, I'm going to try the activity in my face to face course or I'm going to restructure my face to face course to incorporate some of these ideas, and there's definitely some transferability with that.

[00:15:06.40] BECKY MENENDEZ: Made me think that I think I've said it before to some faculty, but if you designed your face to face courses as online courses first, you'd be amazed at some of the things you find and things you could it differently and ideas that you have and the technology you can incorporate. And to Becky's point about the instructional design versus instructional technologist point is it's an interesting thing. I think we always have to have a 3-minute elevator pitch about what it is we do, because there is so much research and study and theory about learning and learning in different environments that's out there, and I think that what we bring to that table is helping transition or bridge that potential gap that there is theory and research and study and logic and stuff behind the advice we're giving or the ideas that we're suggesting or things like that.

[00:16:07.21] ERIN HAGAR: Absolutely. And also that made me think of another misconception is that this job is all about the technology and that is the main driver of the work that we do, and because we all work together, I think you guys know that on our team, I'm probably the most skeptical in the technology realm. Like the technology has to be really good and really stable and meet all the needs before I get on board. I'm not like one of the bells and whistles kind of technology advocates, and I find it as creative and as exciting to work with faculty on the design of an assignment.

[00:16:43.69] Even if it's just what the topic of a discussion is or the topic of a written assignment or a group assignment something like that is, to me, could be as innovative as any new communication technology or new interactive technology. That said, the capabilities that some of these technologies afford faculty in these classes can be really interesting. Is there a particular technology that you guys have come across lately that excites you for its potential impact in teaching and learning?

[00:17:21.31] BECKY MENENDEZ: I mean, there's definitely interesting tools out there. Some of the ones we've been using a lot lately or VoiceThread, hypothesis, which is this annotation tools. I tend to be drawn to tools that can really support and facilitate collaboration in a different way or more of an interactive style of feedback. So tools that allow you to embed comments on a video timeline.

[00:17:45.67] But for me, I don't get excited about tools so much until I see a problem that the tool can help meet. So I get excited about problem solving, and then I happen to maybe know tools that can help solve those problems. So the problem solving aspect, to me, is what's exciting, and then the tools just happen to be what helped me solve those problems sometimes.

[00:18:04.84] KEVIN ENGLER: An observation that I can make here based on your recent comments really from everybody-- this is my eighth year now, and I've really seen a real evolution in, I think, the perception and understanding of online learning in particular and also the recognition of the role of the ID in the course development process. When I started eight years ago, I don't think any of the faculty that I was working with early on knew how I could help them or what I was supposed to be doing, and so there was a certain amount of education I guess that would go on at the beginning of the partnership to say, hey, this is what I do, this is how I can help you. These are some of the tools that are out there.

[00:19:03.71] But I've noticed a real change, especially over the last year and in particular, since the lockdown one of the few benefits of COVID is that so many people have gotten hands on experience with remote communication and distance learning and distance teaching in particular. Have gotten real familiar with some of the tools that are out there, and so that level of technology education isn't as important as it used to be. Now, the faculty are starting from a completely different level now, and so now, I feel like as instructional designers, we can focus more on the design elements and teaching strategies and things like that, whereas the technology is just a given.

[00:19:58.79] In some cases, they're even they're even asking me, do you know about this tool, and no, I'll have to investigate it and see how we can use it and that sort of thing. So it's exciting to know that is happening.

[00:20:14.36] ERIC BELT: It's an interesting point. It made me think of the diffusion of innovations model, where you have the early adopters and the early majority, late majority, the laggards, and that's-- you could arguably say that Zoom or Webex or things like that were probably in the late majority now at this point, where I think there's probably not a lot of laggards left with being able to use Zoom for work or teaching or things like that. But still, even with that, there's so much to be explored and studied still. There's a lot of affordances in all of these technologies that we don't really know if they have an influence or an impact on learning outcomes per se but maybe they have effective outcomes.

[00:21:01.40] Maybe it's a relationship building or community building. So for me, the technology piece, I think it's natural for everyone to get excited about a technology to solve some sort of educational problem, but none of these tools are a panacea. They're not going to solve things-- and there's a lot of different tools that do a lot of the same things.

[00:21:25.26] So it really comes down to really getting at that learning experience, that instructional design piece. What are you trying to do with your students, and can this technology help assist? But it's not going to do it for you and we as the designers are going to do it for you. So to me, the technology has always been an intermediary and it's really that the communication and the teaching has to come through that media for it to be effective or affective.

[00:21:56.81] ERIN HAGAR: Exactly. And the instructor's voice and presence will never be replaced by a technology. That sense of community, that sense of engagement with the faculty member, the feedback they provide, the connection, there are technologies that facilitate that, but nothing can ever replace it. So that's just such an important aspect of this work is making sure that the instructor can always shine through all of the barriers that are there.

[00:22:28.40] The technology barriers, the instructions, all those kinds of things really need to disappear so that the students can just focus on the learning and the feedback that they're getting.

[00:22:39.23] ERIC BELT: Yeah, that's what I get excited about. With online courses in particular, I think there's a tendency to think that they're less human, because in some ways, you could just have an asynchronous discussion board and put up an automated quiz or things like that, so where's my teacher, right? It's all about that teacher presence and that engagement in that communication. So I think certain tools can help create efficiencies for faculty to display or present their instructor presence to students.

[00:23:12.38] To me, that's the benefit of it, but it's not that the technology itself is something that's going to solve the problem.

[00:23:18.43] BECKY MENENDEZ: Yeah, I keep thinking about this quote by Richard Clark in one of his articles way back when there was this debate over educational media and whether it influenced student learning outcomes or not. And a quote that always sticks out to me whenever I give a presentation to educational technology is this comparison he makes to a delivery truck. And his argument was that educational media, and I think this applies to educational technology as well, doesn't impact student achievement any more than in his comparison than a delivery truck that delivers groceries impacts nutrition.

[00:23:50.50] And his argument was that it's the instructional method that makes the different, and the tools just help carry or deliver that maybe more quickly, maybe with more cost efficiency. But that's something I always like to keep in mind. The instructional method or the instructor presence, those things are what make the impact and the tool's just the delivery method.

[00:24:11.71] ERIC BELT: And there's a follow up to Clark by Cosma, and they had like an academic debate and Cosma's point was that it was instructional media can influence learning, we just don't to the extent. So there's a little push and pull there between the technology and what's happening but, yeah.

[00:24:33.40] BECKY MENENDEZ: That's a fun little instructional design wars in that series of articles.

[00:24:39.16] ERIN HAGAR: Our listeners are really getting the behind-the-curtain wizard plague going on there.

[00:24:43.63] ERIC BELT: Let's take some more dives into deep dives into theory.

[00:24:46.33] [LAUGHTER]

[00:24:47.47] ERIN HAGAR: But what I love is that it exists and that we can share that there just isn't any discipline. Like there's debates and discussions and points of view and all these things. This isn't cookie cutter and we're all figuring it out as we go along, too. Let's talk a little bit about some of the projects that you guys are working on. What are some interesting experiences that you've gotten to have as an instructional designer and how do you think having an ID on that project added value to it?

[00:25:23.53] KEVIN ENGLER: I can start. I'm working with Dr. Michelle Pearce. She's a graduate school professor and a clinical psychologist, and a few years ago she won a small grant to develop what came to be a MOOC, a massively online open online course that we put on the edX platform. And the name of the course was spiritual competency training and mental health, and the primary goal of that course was to try to change attitudes of mental health therapists for incorporating spirituality into their therapeutic practices.

[00:26:06.67] And it was such an unusual goal. Something that's-- because usually we're teaching. We're involved in courses that are teaching clinical skills or something more concrete than that, so I thought it was quite interesting to see if this could be done, particularly on a MOOC platform, which is available globally to any student that wants to register for it. And Dr. Pearce did some evaluation. She found out there were significant changes in the attitudes of the therapists and the other learners that were taking the course.

[00:26:45.98] So as a result, she was awarded a much larger grant, and so we've expanded it to include 20 instructors across the country, and they're using the online materials from that course in their in-person graduate level psychology courses. So it's morphed into a hybrid sort of training situation. So in terms of my contribution, I would say that well Dr. Pearce is an experienced online instructor and she's worked with Blackboard for many years, but she hasn't designed a course-- or at the time, she didn't design a course on the edX platform before, so it was my job to help guide her through the different features of the edX platform and how they might affect course design.

[00:27:41.92] And then the other thing that I think my value added was was navigating the course implementation process through the University of Maryland system admin office down at in College Park. So there's a certain level of administrative activities that have to go on in order to launch a course through edX. So I think I was hoping fully instrumental in doing that, but I just find that this course is so exciting because we're having a much broader impact on so many students, and I feel like we're-- I say we, but really it's Dr. Pearce and her group that are making a real impact in the mental health field.

[00:28:34.87] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, that's so exciting, and I think what could also tie back to the misconceptions about this field is that we only work on courses that are associated with University of Maryland Baltimore credit. I think a lot of the projects that we have worked on all of us are in support of research dissemination. So they are educational learning events that are tied to a faculty members research, and they may not be directly pointed at UMB students, but they might be pointed out more globally or more broadly.

[00:29:09.80] So that's a great example. Thank you. Becky, how about you?

[00:29:15.25] BECKY MENENDEZ: The project that I had in mind was also a MOOC. It was the first MOOC I worked on, but it was a MOOC designed to help health care practitioners work with victims of intimate partner violence, and it pulled in stories from IPV survivors and practitioners. And it was interesting to me also because it was a cross team collaboration, so we had faculty members at two different institutions the University of Michigan and here at University of Maryland Baltimore collaborating and splitting the work on different modules and working in edX, which was a new platform for me at the time and trying to guide the process with the faculty with the modules we were assigned to and coordinate with the work that was being done in Michigan and trying to make it all come together, trying to organize the process so it was less overwhelming.

[00:30:16.63] And I don't know. It was really fun watching it come from ideas to more of a plan to actually materializing into this course that's now out in the real world helping people and making an impact. So that was really exciting.

[00:30:32.65] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, what I love about both of your examples is that, even though the topics of those courses may not have been fields that you're academically trained in, it's very purposeful the kind of work and you can feel the importance of the work that you're doing, and I think it dispels the myth that this process is cookie cutter and that we're a factory assembly line of online courses. I hope everyone can hear that we really get passionate about the courses that we're working on, and for me, I can tell that a project has reached another level when I get so excited about whatever I'm working on that I want to take that course even though I've been working on it for months and months, and we really do get emotionally invested because we have these great relationships with the faculty member and because we care about the content that's going out there.

[00:31:31.27] And so I just I think those are great examples of that. Eric, how about you? What's a project that you found interesting lately?

[00:31:39.69] ERIC BELT: Yeah, well, these were all good examples. edX is so interesting. I wonder if we've designed so many courses in Blackboard that edX is the new thing that we're working with. But no, there's a couple of things that came to mind. So one was the masters in the medical cannabis program out of the School of Pharmacy. I've been working with the faculty over there on that program, and that's been really exciting, because it's a new-- I don't know if it's like the first degree in the country that's being offered about that subject, so yeah, so it's very exciting.

[00:32:17.91] But the other thing was-- and this hasn't happened yet. But I'm going to make a plug for it but having an instructional designer on a study. So if you're going to do research in your classroom or you're interested in doing the scholarship of teaching and learning and you want to maybe include a technology like VoiceThread or Flipgrid or any of these things and you want to design an intervention and do a study and publish on it, I think an instructional designer would be a wonderful addition to that project.

[00:32:52.11] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, so not just designing courses that are part of a research project but also partnering with faculty on educational research and really contributing so that we can have more informed discussions about does this technology make a difference with student learning? Yeah, that's a great example. The cannabis example is also interesting too.

[00:33:15.21] I was involved with that as well because of how many students are in these courses. I mean that was a real design difference from courses that we had worked on. Their applications just went through the roof when that program went live, and suddenly, you're instead of designing a course for 25 people, you're designing a course for hundreds and making sure that the same level of engagement and satisfaction and learning happens for that many.

[00:33:43.23] That was a fun problem to solve, a fun challenge. I guess the example I would bring up would be being the instructional designer for the curriculum of health professions education. I really like it when we're assigned to-- when we work with a lot of new programs and new curriculum and when we're assigned to a program from the beginning so that we can see not just in a course level but across all of the courses how the courses build on each other, how the students' experience grows and changes and evolves as they start from their first semester up through their capstone or their research projects, and I really love being able to have that bird's eye view and then also get down into the weeds of an individual course.

[00:34:32.37] So I think that would be the example that I'm working on right now that I find interesting because we're just getting through the development of the last year. So we're reaching the finish line and thinking about how to redesign them now, which is also part of that continuous improvement. Well, this has been such a fun discussion. Thank you all so much.

[00:34:55.37] One question we'd like to ask all our guests on this podcast is whether there's anything that they're seeing that they think could move the needle in the world of teaching and learning. Do you guys see anything on the horizon that's exciting you in this space?

[00:35:08.66] BECKY MENENDEZ: I think one thing I'm curious about and I think you've already talked about this in a previous podcast is working with different ways of grading or assessing students that get away from-- so the example I have is implementing a labored-based grading system. Isabel may have been working in her writing courses with that, and it's interesting to me because it can feel like it bumps up against some of those standards or quality standards where you need to have these objectives and you need to have the set rubric and you need to have these grade range for points so students know how they did, and it takes a very different approach that I think is still very valuable and valid and addresses a lot of inequities. I'm curious to see how practices like that can fit in with quality standards that we already have in place and with the idea of transparency and assessment and evaluation and alignment in ways to balance these innovative ways of going against traditional ways we assess and we grade and we assign value to work.

[00:36:21.38] ERIN HAGAR: That's great. Yeah, that's--

[00:36:23.03] BECKY MENENDEZ: Another half to that, but--

[00:36:24.35] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, Eric, how about you? Are there any things in the teaching and learning space now that you are finding interesting you think could move the needle?

[00:36:34.49] ERIC BELT: Yeah, I think that there's always trends. There's always trends in education. We always try to keep it on like where things are going. Micro credentialing, ungrading. There's a lot of hot items. Zoom fatigue. You'll hear those sorts of things.

[00:36:54.48] So I think what's what ultimately moving the needle in today's day and age, given the pandemic and things that have happened, are the faculty and the staff that are supporting it, because I think we are on the precipice of a greater change. I see this as this idea of flexibility and maybe it's not necessarily hybrid or blended or bisynchronous or where this is headed, but the nature of work and learning is starting to shift a little bit with greater flexibility.

[00:37:30.39] So to me, the educators and the institutions that are staying on top of that are moving the needle, and if you are waiting for something to happen or trying to go back to some old way of doing something, that's not going to move the needle. So it's about thinking forward, and I think that the faculty and staff and everyone at UMB is really trying to do that.

[00:37:56.75] KEVIN ENGLER: Yeah, and I would add to that view, Eric, in a more granular way, and I've been on this soapbox about HyFlex learning recently. So I got really excited about HyFlex learning, and if our listeners aren't familiar with HyFlex learning, it's an approach to learning, where the students have complete control over how they want to engage with the course. They can be in-person or they can be online on any given day, so it's completely up to them about how they want to do that.

[00:38:34.71] And I think kind of along the lines of what Eric was saying, I think that this may be the trend. It provides so many robust options for institutions and for students and for faculty for that matter. The issue, of course, is that it takes a lot of preparation to, essentially, what you're doing is developing two different courses or two different domains for that course to engage learners. So there is a bit of work behind it, but given the potential disruptions that are out there at any given time for any given location, HyFlex learning would really be a great insurance policy, let me put it that way.

[00:39:34.65] The other interesting thing unrelated to that that I heard yesterday in a webinar is the term snackable training, and I thought that was really intriguing to me-- snackable training-- which is the meaning of that is really short bursts of learning that fit especially busy students or just busy learners in general, the schedule that they have. So it could be information that's pushed out or very short video clips, two-minute video clips about a given topic or something like that. But I think in general, the trend is towards this is more an industry view, but I think it's going to seep into academics, where you're not going to have long engagements with students that are an hour and a half long or two hours long, especially if it's online.

[00:40:34.90] It's going to get smaller and smaller and shorter and shorter but maybe dispersed over time.

[00:40:40.39] ERIN HAGAR: Well, I'm down with any innovation that involves snacks, so count me in for that one.

[00:40:44.55] [LAUGHTER]

[00:40:46.75] Yeah, it's funny, what I love about this too is that there's not-- it's not a technology focused thing that we're excited about. These are really deeper than that. Really questioning the structures of education and thinking about that. I would add my area of interest right now, what I think can move the needle are teaching methodologies that-- we know lots of methods that help students in the cognitive domain that help them define terms and apply theories and all those things, but something that really interests me is how we influence students' affective domain.

[00:41:27.41] So how students learn compassion when they're getting ready to go into a health or human service field. How they really learn those people skills and what kinds of learning systems or learning design influences that, because it's a different kind of space and a different kind of outcome. So we could just talk about this all day, and there's just so much interesting things out there. And I can't thank you all enough for your time.

[00:41:55.07] This has been a great discussion, and I just feel so lucky that I get to have conversations like this with you on a random Tuesday or during a podcast interview, so thank you for the work that you do here.

[00:42:06.68] ERIC BELT: Thank you. This was great.

[00:42:08.14] KEVIN ENGLER: Yeah, thank you, Erin.

[00:42:11.95] ERIN HAGAR: Thank you for joining us today on moving the needle. Visit us at umaryland.edu/fctl to hear additional episodes, leave us feedback, or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

[00:42:26.80] [MUSIC PLAYING]

[00:00:00.12] ERIN HAGAR: Welcome to Moving the Needle. Casual conversations about ways, big and small to impact student learning. Brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Erin Hagar. Let's move the needle.

[00:00:18.70] ERIN HAGAR: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Moving the Needle. Do you ever feel like you need an outside perspective on your professional life? Someone who can help you identify your goals, think about what's working well and what might need some tweaking. We should all have mentors inside our institutions to help us grow. But sometimes even they are a little too close to our environments to help us see things in a truly different way.

[00:00:40.93] Enter the professional coach. Not someone who's going to be screaming at you from the sidelines, but someone who's trained to help you get clarity on where you want to go and what might be getting in your way.

[00:00:52.00] Today we're going to meet a faculty member who feels so strongly about professional coaching that she started a program to help faculty reap the benefits of this partnership. Dr. Michelle Pearce is a clinical psychologist and Professor in the graduate school at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Where she directs the Integrative Health and Wellness Graduate Certificate program. Her most recent book is called, Night Bloomers: 12 Principles for Thriving and Adversity.

[00:01:17.59] We're also going to meet a faculty coach pair, who worked together in this coaching program last year. So you can hear firsthand how this interaction works from both of their points of view. Laura Zauner is a certified professional development coach with a background in organizational development and human resources.

[00:01:36.01] She's certified as both a life coach and a career management coach. Dr. Melissa Mota is a professor in the Department of Neurology and Program in Trauma in the School of Medicine. In the hospital, she leads an interdisciplinary team that cares for patients with acute neurologic illness.

[00:01:52.93] As an educator and course director for the neurology clerkship, she shares her joy of learning an education with medical students, residents, and fellows. There are so many ways for us to get support in our lives.

[00:02:05.08] And I'm really excited to share today's conversation about coaching. Thanks for joining. Michele, let's start with you. Can you tell us a little bit about this phenomenon called coaching? What is coaching?

[00:02:17.72] MICHELLE PEARCE: So we can think of coaching as a working partnership and a series of guided conversations that happen between a faculty member and their coach. And basically, these conversations are designed to create self-directed changes that promote the faculties professional development.

[00:02:35.87] So you might think of like executive business coaching, but this is designed for the unique needs of faculty and academia. So in partnership, faculty are identifying what their goals are, what barriers might be getting in the way of achieving those goals, and then brainstorming what are effective strategies. And then using this supportive relationship to help them meet those goals.

[00:02:57.97] ERIN HAGAR: So what struck you about the culture here at the university that made you think coaching would be a good fit?

[00:03:04.42] MICHELLE PEARCE: So I'm a clinical psychologist. I'm also a Board Certified Coach. And I've been providing academic coaching for students here since 2012 and is a very helpful service for students. And I thought since the beginning, faculty really need to have the same resource. But the issue was, how do we do this without a budget? How do we make this free to faculty, and also not compensate the coaches? And if you're aware of executive coaching is certainly not cheap.

[00:03:32.79] So we came up with this creative idea, where we would have volunteer coaches that are trained, they've gone through an accredited coaching program. But they need coaching hours to get their national credentialing. So it's kind of a win-win. Faculty are able to have these free sessions, and coaches are able to get the hours they need for their national credentialing.

[00:03:53.94] ERIN HAGAR: So how is coaching different from other kinds of support that faculty might receive whether from professional development initiatives or mentoring or even therapy?

[00:04:04.08] MICHELLE PEARCE: Yes, so it is a really different model for faculty. I think we're used to advising like you said, mentoring, consulting, where there's usually a hierarchy or there's usually some sort of advice giving. And coaching is not any of that. It's also not therapy, because we're not addressing mental health issues.

[00:04:22.78] So basically, coaching is very present-focused, its future focused. Its skill-based, it's based on solutions and a strength-based approach. And the difference is that the client is in the driver's seat. So it's a client who's coming up with what they want to achieve, not the coach telling them what they should achieve. And that's I think the real difference between these other models.

[00:04:48.61] ERIN HAGAR: So it sounds like this is a very faculty focused and faculty led effort.

[00:04:53.08] MICHELLE PEARCE: Exactly.

[00:04:54.16] ERIN HAGAR: Can you tell us a little bit about what kind of training process these coaches go through? Who might be attracted to a field like coaching, and what kind of training do they get?

[00:05:03.91] MICHELLE PEARCE: So coaches come from all different backgrounds. They're usually interested in helping people and the coaches that we've brought on have gone through a formal training program. So there are schools out there training programs that are designed to train coaches.

[00:05:19.78] Now this is an unregulated field at the moment, meaning you don't have to be trained. You don't have to have a national credentialing. That's starting to change. And I think we'll see over the next 5 or 10 years that we will move towards having to have national certification for coaches. So that we could have best practices here at the university, I have chosen coaches that have done at least 60 hours of training. And that's what's needed for national credentialing that are volunteering with us to work with our faculty.

[00:05:49.90] ERIN HAGAR: Well, that's great let's meet one of those coaches now and hear a bit from her perspective. Laura, can you talk to us a little bit about what drew you to the field of coaching?

[00:05:59.53] LAURA ZAUNER: Sure. Yeah, so I've always worked with people. I had a long career as an HR professional before I started coaching. So some of my employers included consulting organizations and large government contracting organizations. And so I started my career as an HR generalist. And over time, I worked in various specialty roles. And the one I enjoyed the most was the position of learning and development consultant. I did this in an organizational setting for many years.

[00:06:30.74] And in that role, I was able to work with leaders at all levels of the organization on issues such as team building, strategic planning, talent development, employee engagement, succession planning, those kinds of things. And I also had the opportunity to coach leaders through 360 evaluations. Through that process, I realized I really preferred working with leaders in a more intimate and individualized manner. And this experience motivated me to explore coaching as a profession. And it was very new at the time.

[00:07:02.44] So this was around 2008 when the discipline was very new, and it's still very new but it was not even used as much as it is now. And I decided to pursue formal coach training a few years later, and I've been working with clients in both corporate and private settings. I also come from a family of helping professionals, physicians, and therapists. So that was definitely an influence as well.

[00:07:28.39] And as a psychology major in college, I always thought I would pursue clinical psychology. And throughout my career and business, there were many moments where I questioned that choice and I almost went back to school to study counseling.

[00:07:41.89] And I have a really clear recollection of a pivotal moment when I decided to pursue career counseling for myself. And I had an amazing counselor who helped me see how I could build on my psychology background, and HR, and business experience with coaching. And as it turned out, my business career led me to coaching and it all worked out for the best.

[00:08:03.47] ERIN HAGAR: So you were coached into coaching?

[00:08:05.33] LAURA ZAUNER: I was.

[00:08:08.06] ERIN HAGAR: How is working with faculty similar to or different from some of the other clients may have coached in the past?

[00:08:14.96] LAURA ZAUNER: Yeah. So through my training and experience, I've had the privilege of working with so many different types of clients. And I started working with clients primarily women in career transition, because that was the focus of my doctoral work. And I found that work to be really rewarding. But I also wanted to explore other niches.

[00:08:33.65] And I then started to work with clients on issues related to wellness and well-being and work life balance. And most of my clients were in various stages of transition in their lives. There was a lot of focus on what they wanted the next stage of their lives to look like.

[00:08:49.49] When I was coaching leaders in an organizational setting, the challenges were different but with some of the same focus on work life balance. And some of the other primary challenges for leaders in general were building relationships, building teams, managing priorities for multiple stakeholders, executive presence.

[00:09:09.98] And when I had the opportunity to start working with faculty members, I was able to draw on some of that experience. I had working with my corporate and life coaching clients. But I found there were some really unique challenges among faculty members. And as a faculty member at a university myself, I had some firsthand experience.

[00:09:28.28] Some of these new challenges involved balancing a lot of different priorities with teaching, clinical work, research, and managing department teams. It really was a different level of working with different stakeholders and trying to balance very conflicting and demanding priorities. So that would be the main difference, the balance of clinical teaching, leadership, and research work.

[00:09:49.50] ERIN HAGAR: Well, let's hear now from one of the faculty members that you supported in this dynamic. Melissa, welcome. Can you tell us a little bit about what attracted you to this coaching program? What were you hoping to get out of it?

[00:10:00.99] MELLISA MOTA: Yeah. I first received a notice that the UMB faculty center for teaching and learning was offering this to faculty when it first started. And it was just at a moment in transition in my career from junior faculty to mid-career.

[00:10:15.90] I had just prepared and completed my packet for promotion. And as a result of that, I've done a real assessment of what I'd accomplished in the seven years prior. And I recognized that there were things that I should be doing that more often sort of looking at the big picture, the bird's eye view.

[00:10:33.12] And that there were things that could have done differently and things that I wanted to moving forward do differently in various spheres of my job. And I'd also been asked to take on a new responsibility as a clerkship director for a course in the School of Medicine. So as of course director, that was a new task for me.

[00:10:53.02] And so when I first saw this notice I thought, well, this is a great opportunity for me to get help to gain some clarity on what I'm doing, where my priorities are, and what are my goals, where do I need to focus?

[00:11:06.69] And that's how I initially used the resources from the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning. I really found it very useful to talk to someone, to get a different perspective. I think as Michelle pointed out, I have mentors within my department and my division and peer mentors.

[00:11:27.60] But this was a different experience in that I was really led to really think about and question where I was putting my efforts, and what were my big picture goals, and how to set priorities and then sort of drill down to one specific thing and really figure out what the steps to take to work to make progress on that thing. And so I really wish I'd done it sooner, because I found it incredibly helpful.

[00:11:57.85] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah. I really appreciate what you're saying about that. That we don't need a major milestone like a new position or promotion to really take a bird's eye view about what's going on in our careers. So Laura, can you walk us through the coaching process? When you work with a faculty member, how do you get started? How frequently do you meet? Who does what in the dynamic? Can you just paint us a picture?

[00:12:22.05] LAURA ZAUNER: Sure. The process starts with a welcome email to the faculty clients, which explains what coaching is and how the process works. And that email would also include a coaching agreement that the client would sign before we get started. And also there's a series of questions to answer so that as coaches, we can get a general sense of the client's background, their current situation, some of the areas that he or she may want to work on through coaching.

[00:12:50.04] As a coach, I would oftentimes I'm available to meet. We would set up the first session. They can be over the phone or on Zoom, depending on the client's preference. The first session is usually an hour. And I would take some time to explain coaching, give an overview of my background and answer any questions. We'd also discuss confidentiality. That's really important.

[00:13:13.86] So we would discuss that and make sure that client is comfortable with that. I would then focus the rest of the session on exploring and discussing the answers to questions that were completed in the welcome packet. And after the first session, the remaining sessions could be either 30 or 60 minutes in length, depending on the client's preference or schedule.

[00:13:35.00] For each session, the client would fill out a prerecession form. It's not required, but it's helpful that they fill out sort of a preparation form if they can. And that would allow me to see what they want to focus on in that session.

[00:13:50.90] And the session would start with me checking in to see what actions they completed or what insights they had since the last session. What did they learn or what have they implemented. And we'd spend some time exploring that topic or issue and I would use skills such as active listening and reframing or powerful questioning to facilitate forward movement or a change in perspective.

[00:14:16.61] The session would end with some actions the client agrees to take or move forward toward a goal they've set. Each session is different, and each client is different in terms of what kinds of goals and actions they want to set for themselves, and what they prefer in terms of accountability.

[00:14:32.58] ERIN HAGAR: Well, let's hear about this now from the faculty members point of view. Melissa, can you walk us through how these sessions worked for you. Maybe what you did in between sessions as you were preparing to meet with Laura?

[00:14:44.48] MELLISA MOTA: Yeah. So the initial as Laura mentioned, questionnaire that faculty receive is very helpful to start to think about what we're hoping to get out of the coaching session. And it also prompts you to think about what are your significant commitments, and what things are working well in your professional life, what parts are not working so well, and then where there might be pinch points that you might want to think about more. And so they're very general questions, but it sort of prompt you to start thinking about those things.

[00:15:31.20] And then once I met with Laura as she mentioned, that first session was very open-ended, and we talked a lot about me and where I was dividing my time, and then identified or gained some clarity on what my goals were for that particular coaching session. And it helped me develop.

[00:15:54.41] I thought I had a vision of what I was hoping to get out of the coaching session. So I imagined the end result but it wasn't quite clear. So the first part was that Laura helped me with was just gaining clarity on what exactly was my goal. For instance, as I mentioned, I'm the course director for this course. And I was facing some challenges around online engagement for the students in the course.

[00:16:21.59] And I was trying to tackle this problem, and I envisioned for-- the first part was just gaining clarity on what it is that I was hoping to accomplish. And then the next step after we developed that in the previous-- in the next session, we talked a little bit about how we could tackle it. What resources would I need? What tools I would need? How would I go about doing this?

[00:16:51.96] And so what I first did was collect data. So in between the sessions, I developed a survey and administered it to students, obtain some information about why or not, how they wish to engage with the course and then sort of came back and chatted with and brainstorm about how do I use that information, and what are the next steps.

[00:17:19.14] And so that's the kind of instance that really helped me think through the problem initially identify what the problem was and then think through the problem, and try to come up with steps to have a solution.

[00:17:34.14] ERIN HAGAR: So Laura and Michelle, what other kinds of topics or issues might a faculty member want to discuss or think out with the help of a coach?

[00:17:42.62] MICHELLE PEARCE: You're right. And there are so many different things a faculty member could work on. I think it's important just to emphasize again, that it's always the faculty member that gets to decide the focus of the session. So I can tell you from the survey data that we collected, the top four things the faculty said they were working on in coaching.

[00:18:00.92] And that was enhancing their professional performance, they were increasing a sense of fulfillment at work, they were working on better managing their time and prioritizing tasks, and also working on improving work-life balance.

[00:18:15.95] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, this is really interesting. Because I bet a lot of people tuning in might be thinking that coaching is something that can help us with these concrete performance-based goals. But it sounds like from this data that it's possible even just to work on how you're feeling about something, not the actual performance metrics.

[00:18:35.67] MELLISA MOTA: Yeah, the example I gave you if my work with Laura was focused on the classroom. But prior to working with Laura I had also done another session through the same Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning program.

[00:18:50.21] And that was my first session with a coach. And that was a much more broad session. And at the end of that, one example, we identified after chatting that my clinical time-- one of the things I was making me very unhappy is that when I was in my clinical time, I would have very long days.

[00:19:10.23] I show up at 6:30 in the morning and I'd get home at night at 7 o'clock at night and put my son to bed. And I'd still have to write notes, and I'd be writing notes until 10 o'clock at night. And that although I really enjoyed my clinical time, that was not making me-- that was not a happy situation for me.

[00:19:27.71] And Kerry, who's the coach I work with, she and I talked about how to address this problem and I collected some data with some tools she gave me about tracking time for my clinical time. And at the end of that session, we developed a solution where I modified my schedule and how I tackled writing my notes. I basically shifted my schedule half an hour in the morning.

[00:19:52.34] And it was a really tiny change, but it had a tremendous effect on my efficiency at work and also on my quality of life at home, because I could get home and now focus time on my family and not have to do work after hours. So yeah, so that was a tremendous improvement in a variety of areas as a result of the coaching session.

[00:20:14.90] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, if we're not happy in our professional life, that's going to butt up against how we're doing in our personal life and vise versa. So I can see how working on each of these areas is going to have impacts in the other. Laura, do you have any other examples of faculty interactions, things that other clients of yours have wanted to address during the coaching process?

[00:20:36.59] LAURA ZAUNER: Yeah, I would definitely echo what Melissa and Michelle have already talked about in terms of some of those types of areas of focus that can come up. So definitely, some work life balance is definitely something that comes up, whether it's something intentional or it sort of emerges throughout the series of sessions but it becomes clear at some point that, that has been a very important area to address and even question as a coach for many clients. Because as I mentioned, they are they're juggling so many different priorities.

[00:21:15.89] And a lot of times their own self-care becomes the last priority. So that does come up in one way or another. And in addition to that, I would say boundaries, personal and professional boundaries, the power of being able to say no or-- what to say Yes to, what to say No to, and how to prioritize those things.

[00:21:40.91] ERIN HAGAR: So Melissa, is this an experience that you found fulfilling? Would you recommend it to other faculty members?

[00:21:47.30] MELLISA MOTA: Oh, absolutely. I think that it's a part of our professional development that's needed. I immediately after having engaged in the sessions emailed other faculty that I work with and said, I tried this and it was a really helpful experience.

[00:22:05.64] I think for faculty sometimes, we see our calendars are already booked, and we see one more activity one more commitment that we won't be able to do it. But I would advise faculty to give it a go. It's not a huge time commitment. And it's very high yield in that it really allows you to gain a different perspective on what your goals are, perhaps think about time management or your priorities on a day-to-day.

[00:22:32.04] Learn strategies to increase your productivity. And also identify things that you might be doing that you don't need to be doing or new areas that you might want to look into. And so it's really a way to really examine your professional life and your personal life, and how it's all working.

[00:22:53.49] And Michelle, for those faculty members who are interested in possibly working with a coach going forward, how can they learn more?

[00:22:59.92] MICHELLE PEARCE: Yes. So they can go to our website it's on the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning. And if you go onto under the tab that says Programs, you'll see a box that says coaching. And there's a really nice description of what coaching is, what you can expect, what it's not.

[00:23:15.94] And then at the bottom, a very brief request form. So you can request a coach. I think you just enter your name and your program, what you're looking for. And then I will get that email. And within 24 hours, I assign you a coach. And within 48 hours, a coach will reach out to you.

[00:23:30.98] ERIN HAGAR: Well, this has just been great. Thank you all so much. I'm glad this program exists here at the university, and I'm really happy that this field is getting the recognition that it is. It seems like something that can add so much value to our lives as humans and employees and family members and just all of it. So thanks to all three of you so much for taking the time to speak with us today about coaching.

[00:23:55.44] LAURA ZAUNER: Thank you for having us.

[00:23:56.92] MELLISA MOTA: It's a pleasure.

[00:23:58.03] MICHELLE PEARCE: Thank you so much.

[00:24:01.68] ERIN HAGAR: Thank you for joining us today on Moving the Needle. Visit us at umaryland.edu/fctl to hear additional episodes. Leave us feedback or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

 

[00:00:00.12] ERIN HAGAR: Welcome to Moving the Needle, casual conversations about ways big and small to impact student learning. Brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland Baltimore. I'm Erin Hagar. Let's move the needle.

[00:00:18.62] ERIN HAGAR: Hi, everyone. Welcome to this episode of Moving the Needle. I don't know about you, but until recently, I never thought about the course syllabus in anything other than a perfunctory way. A schedule of events, an outline of policies, some contact information. That's really about it.

[00:00:35.76] But as you'll hear in today's conversation, the syllabus can be so much more. It's an invitation, really. An invitation into a relationship with a faculty member, a course, even an entire discipline. And the way we word that invitation can have a profound impact on the way a student feels welcomed or not welcomed into those spaces.

[00:00:56.78] As you'll hear in this discussion, rethinking our approach to the syllabus can open up an opportunity to question our entire approach to our teaching, and also the way we view our discipline in the constellation of all the other disciplines, just from rethinking a single document.

[00:01:12.93] Let me introduce you to today's guest. Dr. Cynthia Cravens is the Inaugural Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. She joined the faculty of UMES in 2014 in the Department of English and Modern Languages.

[00:01:28.85] As an associate professor of English, she's taught writing, literature, and film courses for undergraduates and facilitated writing workshops for graduate students. In her work as director of the Center for Teaching Excellence, she develops programming to support faculty in the areas of course design and delivery, social justice and inclusive learning, writing for the public, and adding the humanities, the arts, and social sciences into what we traditionally think of as STEM.

[00:01:57.65] In this conversation, we're going to talk about an article written by Dr. Sherria Taylor called "The Social Justice Syllabus Design Tool: A First Step in Doing Social Justice Pedagogy." We will have the full citation for this article on our website and in the show notes. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

[00:02:18.29] Well, Dr. Cravens, welcome. We are so happy to have you with us today. Can we start just by talking about the term inclusivity? What does that mean in higher education, and why is it so important?

[00:02:31.25] CYNTHIA CRAVENS: Oh my gosh. That's such a huge topic. And I think right now, inclusivity means-- or people are more tuned in to what inclusivity means now than we have been in the past.

[00:02:43.59] So for different reasons and different populations, inclusivity certainly has a lot of different contexts. I'm going to use the example of UMES as an HBCU. And when we are talking about inclusivity for a specific kind of an institution, then we have to broaden what our initial reactions are or what our initial thoughts are about what it could mean.

[00:03:14.12] So for instance, at a PWI, inclusivity initiatives tend to focus on racial dynamics between faculty and students. And in a lot of DEI training programs that I've been involved with-- I helped launch a pilot program here through Lumen Learning-- there have been other external consultants that we've talked to.

[00:03:42.59] And just what I've noticed even in the literature is that the DEI training focuses on PWIs and specifically on white faculty members and underrepresented students. So the dynamic--

[00:04:02.14] ERIN HAGAR: And can I just clarify? A PWI, is that Primarily White Institution? Is that what that stands for? OK.

[00:04:06.65] CYNTHIA CRAVENS: Yes, predominantly white institution, Yes. Or traditionally white. So the focus is already on the assumption that the faculty member is from a privileged position. And then they start working in internal biases and recognitions of privilege. And I find that that approach just doesn't apply in an HBCU, and for two reasons.

[00:04:37.23] Number one, we tend not to have that differentiation quite so strongly so that our faculty tends to match our students. But also, we have faculty who come to us from PWI, and these might be a faculty of color who come from different institutions where they have been the ones who in the classroom were met with bias from the students. So the power dynamic shifts when we shift the faculty identity.

[00:05:17.90] So to get back to your original question about what does inclusivity mean in higher education, I think first we really have to broaden what our perception of inclusivity means. So for us at UMES, we're starting to look at inclusive measures for things like accommodations. Our students who are hearing impaired, who are speech impaired, sight impaired, these kinds of impairments that if their accommodations aren't attended to really prevent success.

[00:05:54.68] So especially on online courses, we've all just had this huge pivot to, wow, what does it mean to be teaching online? And if we have videos that we're putting online and they don't have closed captioning, how is that going to affect the success of some of our students? Same thing with PDFs. If they're not set up for the sight impaired, how is that going to affect their success?

[00:06:24.93] So we are starting an initiative where we are really looking into how our technology is inclusive. And that doesn't mean that we're not still dealing with different kinds of racial dynamics in the classroom. Certainly, we are.

[00:06:41.42] But it's not just racial. It's cultural. We have a lot of international students and those kinds of cultures-- cultural responsivity, if that's a word. So the inclusivity is more about cultural responsiveness. So that's how we are trying to measure the effects that we're having on student success in terms of, are we being inclusive in all these different ways?

[00:07:10.58] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, thank you. Thank you for setting that stage for us. The word that kept popping into my mind as you were describing that is really the idea of feeling welcome, right? And obviously, someone who has an immediate barrier like not being able to see the material, that's a concrete example of a way to not feel welcome.

[00:07:29.81] But could you talk a little bit about that? Like, what in addition to those barriers-- are there things that may not be as severe or drastic, but can contribute to a student feeling welcome or unwelcome in a class?

[00:07:42.86] CYNTHIA CRAVENS: Oh, sure. Sure. And this was the topic of the workshop that we held most recently for our Winter Faculty Institute last month, and that's about how faculty, how we set the tone for the classroom. And is it what students would find welcoming?

[00:08:04.33] And this is a very-- it's a very simple concept, I think. But at whatever level of teaching, whatever year of teaching we're in, we find ourselves identifying ourselves in a certain way.

[00:08:21.99] So for instance, when I first started out as an instructor, I had just finished my PhD. I had just come from a very high-research kind of institution. And there wasn't a lot of warmth between students and faculty. And so I carried that with me, and I tried to bring that to UMES, to this institution, where we don't have that kind of-- well, I mean, it was a coldness. It was.

[00:08:53.84] And we all talked about it. We all felt like we-- but of course, we're graduate students. We weren't undergrads. But we definitely felt like we had to earn our way to being considered worthy. It was weird.

[00:09:09.59] And so what else do we know except that? And we bring that to our own teaching. And it didn't work for me. And I quickly had to just sort of reevaluate, who do I want to be in this moment?

[00:09:26.54] And I wanted-- I thought I wanted to be that gatekeeper. I hesitate to use the word authoritative, but that's what it was. If you don't turn your work in at this point, you're going to be penalized. And as graduate students, when we're teaching graduate students, we know that that's important. In a professional world, you don't get to turn things in three times, right?

[00:09:55.01] But it's also a matter of changing the tone on our syllabus. And if we can do things like-- something as simple as the course description, instead of saying students will do this, students can't do this, we say we will look at these things. And I as the faculty, I will be there to guide you to success. Something that is a revision of a sentence can actually change the tone.

[00:10:35.93] And we've all talked about how most students don't read the syllabus. Sure, they don't. But it's not exactly a welcoming thing. We don't read user agreements either. We have no idea what those say. So if we want our students-- if we'd like to make a syllabus that our students read, then it has to be readable and it has to be welcoming.

[00:11:01.16] ERIN HAGAR: And that is like the handshake between a course, a faculty member, and a student. It's that very first meeting. I often think of teaching a lot like hosting a party. And your approach to that, to being a host is, do you know somebody? You don't know anybody here? Let me make an introduction. Are you feeling a little nervous because you've never seen this material before? Let me take your coat and put you at ease and show you where the snacks are, and that kind of thing.

[00:11:31.79] So what are some techniques in syllabis? You mentioned a little bit just kind of maybe changing that point of view in the syllabus itself, using a lot of inclusive we language. We're all in this together. It's not me versus you as a student. Are there other techniques that you can see in a syllabus that can reduce those barriers and make students feel more welcome?

[00:11:54.11] CYNTHIA CRAVENS: Yeah. Yeah. And we've had a lot of conversations about the extent to which you can be inclusive and welcoming and still sort of have control of your classroom, because we know that the one thing that very quickly gets out of control is classroom management. And that's not about the content, and it's not about the pedagogy. It's about, who is present? How do I keep track of attendance?

[00:12:23.67] And these are the places where I know for myself, I wanted to be very, very firm, because there's that feeling, like, if you just give a little bit, it's all just going to go into chaos. And it really does depend on how many students you have and how lax you can be.

[00:12:45.03] So things like several of our faculty members were talking about how they invite their students, particularly grad students, to help write the syllabus so that it's not a contract that I'm presenting to you for you to sign, but it's not even a negotiation, right? It's a conversation. Just like everything else we do in our coursework, this is how we dialogue about what we are going to experience over the next 16 weeks or four weeks or eight weeks.

[00:13:25.55] I as faculty, this is what I would like to accomplish, and I've done it in this way. Can you give me some feedback about where you think there might be some conflict?

[00:13:40.86] And this is easier said than done, of course, because in all sorts of disciplines, you can't be accommodating if there are regulations, if there's accreditation. There are things that absolutely cannot be negotiated. But a lot about how we move through the days that we spend together can be.

[00:14:03.25] And so that's where that kind of tweaking or that kind of-- maybe even just a relaxation can come in, because the regulations are already there. You know that this is what you need to get an A, B, C, or D. And you know this is what you need in order to graduate. If you need to get no less than an 85% or no less than a 70%,

[00:14:25.56] OK. I will keep you aware of where your percentages are, but you have to understand that this is how the attendance is going to affect that. This is how this is going to affect. So it comes up more organically as a dialogue rather than a top-down sort of authoritarian measure. And again, easier said than done.

[00:14:48.15] ERIN HAGAR: Well, what I hear in that approach is recognizing that students may have different priorities and perspectives on things like what their grade needs to be if I'm auditing a class or if I'm taking this as an elective because I'm interested and I need some credits, but I don't see this as my career path. I think it's just sort of recognizing that there are different mindsets and different doors that bring students to us and where we can be flexible thinking about that.

[00:15:23.82] CYNTHIA CRAVENS: Right. Absolutely.

[00:15:25.41] ERIN HAGAR: So at your Center for Teaching Excellence, you are working with faculty on a program to help them rethink their syllabus. So can you tell us a little bit about how you're structuring that, what the faculty are working on, how they're reacting to these ideas?

[00:15:40.02] CYNTHIA CRAVENS: Oh, yeah. Well, this all came about from the Winter Faculty Institute that we had January 22. We invited external speakers to talk to us about things that they had done in their universities to either bring it into the syllabus or the course design or to take students into communities or projects that were outside of the classroom.

[00:16:08.25] But the entire focus was on the pedagogy of social justice and critical race theory. So we're always already talking about, these things exist. We're already talking about them. Now how can we bring them into the classroom in really beneficial and effective ways.

[00:16:24.97] So one of the workshops that was very, very popular was based on an article that was just published in 2019. I'm just going to read the title of this article. "The Social Justice Syllabus Design Tool: A First Step in Doing Social Justice Pedagogy." And that emphasis is in the title.

[00:16:46.68] So that's very important for us as a starting point, how we can go from talking about it to doing it. And the researcher who did this article, Dr. Sherria Taylor from San Francisco State University, we invited her to take us through what this article, what this research study was.

[00:17:09.81] And her sort of in a nutshell was this inclusive language in the syllabus. And we had a really long conversation, all of us-- and there were about 150 people in the Zoom call-- about these very sort of simple tweaks that really sort of have an effect on our identities as faculty members. And as I said, that sort of who we want to be as instructors. And moving the line from being the authoritative-- we use this analogy all the time-- the sage on the stage to the guide on the side, and how we do that in just small, incremental ways.

[00:18:00.55] So the feedback from that session-- and again, this was an hour-and-a-half session, so the conversations were a lot more complex that I'm representing here. But the feedback from that was so positive that we're going to invite her back to do small group workshops where we're actually going to take our syllabi and we're going to start going through them in a workshop format where we're giving feedback, we're revising and tweaking certain sentences. And as we're revising the sentences, we're rethinking how we are approaching the classroom dynamic.

[00:18:38.64] And then of course, it makes us vulnerable when we think about, oh, I'm going to be-- this means that I'm going to be more flexible and nurturing. And then believe it or not, we get into those conversations about what nurturing means and the gendered notion of nurturing.

[00:18:59.97] And I know that I as a woman, I'm both open to the idea of being more nurturing and also fearful of the idea that if I am nurturing and the students see that, then is that going to take away a little bit of that authority that I've-- it's difficult when I hear my students call my male colleague Doctor and they call me Miss, even though we're on the same level. We're both associate professors. We're both in the same field. We both teach the same classes.

[00:19:39.37] So it's like, well, I had to tame that internal sort of Grinch that says, well, no. I'd better tell them to call me Doctor. And then of course, if I correct them and say call me Doctor, then I sound-- you know what the word is. So we're always negotiating our identities and giving ourselves permission to feel vulnerable.

[00:20:04.48] And that's something that nobody teaches us that in teacher training school. So that's something that I think a lot of faculty have to come to on their own. And it's a journey. And as long as we as faculty stay open to different ways of being, then we can find those ways in the notion of how we conduct our classes and what we say in our syllabus. So that was a very roundabout way of saying that all of these topics come up when we are talking with our colleagues about something as simple as changing a sentence on our syllabus and the effects that that has.

[00:20:46.11] ERIN HAGAR: Yes. That's what struck me so much as you were talking. I've worked in centers for teaching and learning for about 20 years, and I remember how the workshops in syllabus design used to be. And really, it was a lot of, hi, faculty. This is what needs to be in a syllabus. Here's how you write a learning outcome. What's your attendance policy going to be? All of that kind of thing. And it's like we were modeling the exact dynamic of being welcoming or unwelcoming that you're describing with your students.

[00:21:15.21] But what's so striking to me about the program you're describing now is how something as concrete as a syllabus can really become an invitation to rethink your values, the dynamic you want in the classroom, your identity as an instructor. Really all kinds of deeper thinking about your approach to education, while also making sure that those nuts and bolts are being addressed.

[00:21:39.65] CYNTHIA CRAVENS: Mm-hmm. I mean, it really is therapy.

[00:21:42.50] [LAUGHTER]

[00:21:43.60] You know?

[00:21:45.81] ERIN HAGAR: Who knew?

[00:21:46.69] CYNTHIA CRAVENS: Right. And it's free.

[00:21:48.15] [LAUGHTER]

[00:21:50.67] ERIN HAGAR: You can call it professional development. You can call it therapy. It's all good. [LAUGHS]

[00:21:53.91] CYNTHIA CRAVENS: Right. Right. Right. It all comes from the same place.

[00:21:56.22] ERIN HAGAR: Oh my gosh. It's so-- it's so interesting. Now this is just getting off the ground, so your faculty are in the process of doing this important work right now. But what would you say success would look like? If we came back and spoke in a year or two, how would you describe the success of this program?

[00:22:16.18] CYNTHIA CRAVENS: Well, I am starting to think of success in much different terms than data. So already we have an offshoot of these workshops where we have a faculty working group that wants to take this idea and they want to create interdisciplinary courses.

[00:22:38.02] So we have some momentum for taking this idea of a welcoming syllabus and turning it into a welcoming curriculum so that, for instance, we're thinking about in terms of taking our STEM courses and our humanities and intentionally bringing them together either in a single course or in co-requisites or something-- we have to work out the logistics, of course.

[00:23:07.74] But we like the idea of environmental humanities, so we're bringing the best of our environmental sciences courses and the best of environmental literature. Or something like a course in environmental disasters on film, whether that's the Titanic, documentaries or feature films. Whatever it is, taking these things that have common themes or common motifs and creating a framework from this idea of inclusivity.

[00:23:42.55] So my idea of success from this is the different offshoots that come when faculty are starting to talk about similar things and finding common ground that goes beyond discipline and starts from this core of, yeah, we want to transform something here. And if we can transform the sentences on our syllabus, then we can certainly transform the way that we are bringing academic programs to students on a macro level.

[00:24:20.95] ERIN HAGAR: This is so thrilling. In fact, I think we should talk again in a year about how that offshoot has developed, because I'm just so excited hearing it. And to me, on the surface you could say, well, how did that come to be from the syllabus?

[00:24:35.95] But from our discussion already, it seems as though the work on the syllabus, reevaluating the syllabus is about questioning those boundaries between the faculty member and the student or between the rigidity of the content versus maybe increasing some flexibility based on student needs. So it seems to make perfect sense that an offshoot of this would be, let's just continue questioning these boundaries. So exciting.

[00:25:05.41] CYNTHIA CRAVENS: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And like I said, it starts with something that's so simple that you wouldn't think would raise so many kinds of [LAUGHS] fruits. But it really does. And as you said, it-- or maybe it lowers our-- not inhibitions, but it lowers the walls that we have automatically put up, the rigidity that you were talking about. And it's like, well, yeah. This is all possible.

[00:25:36.43] ERIN HAGAR: So as you know, Dr. Craven, the university ecosystem is so complex, and there are all these networks of relationships that students have. They have friends, they have roommates, advisors and tutors. What is it specifically about the faculty relationship that's so crucial to a student's sense of belonging?

[00:25:57.33] CYNTHIA CRAVENS: Oh, yeah. We talk about this all the time, especially with issues like retention. And we as an institution at UMES, we are really, really focused on how we can-- well, everybody's always focused on how you can improve your retention rates.

[00:26:21.18] But what does that mean? Like, what are the points of contact where students have the most kind of-- or where people have the most impact on students? I can say it that way.

[00:26:35.77] And I was just talking to our dean of pharmacy the other day. And even when we talk about graduate students when we're talking about health professions, we're looking at the ways that-- and this really, it touches on inclusivity, but it goes beyond that because the faculty-student relationship, we all know this. We all intuit this. But it's almost immeasurable.

[00:27:03.91] But when it's not there, it's hugely impactful. So it's sort of like, well, we know it when we see it. But what are the ways that we can focus on it before it becomes the-- suddenly our students are disappearing and we can't get the feedback from them, so we don't know why they left.

[00:27:27.81] And creating that-- well, you know, it's a mentorship so that when faculty see students often, in more than one class, when students start to get into their majors or if they're graduate students, you're seeing them multiple times over the course of several years. It really is that sense of mentorship that I think students can respond to even if they don't know what it is they're responding to.

[00:28:01.05] So it is that inclusivity and it is that feeling of belonging that we're talking about that students might not even know that that word exists in academia or know what it means in academia. But knowing that you can talk to your advisor, if it's the professor in this class.

[00:28:28.38] And even when I was a faculty-- I still am, but when I was teaching freshman in a freshman composition class, I would have freshmen from across disciplines all in one room. And when we had our open discussions, so many different things came up from their experiences with other faculty, with other classes that had nothing to do with whatever the topic was of the day.

[00:28:57.93] But they wanted to talk about the experiences they were having, and they didn't have a format or a forum in order to do that. And they weren't necessarily complaining. There was certainly that. But they wanted a shared experience. And they wanted to say, hey, this is what happens when we go to the math lab, or whatever.

[00:29:20.85] And if there was something that they didn't know how to negotiate, then I could say, oh, as adults, we know how to ask for help. We know who to go to. And oh, I need this done now. But as students, 17, 18, 19, they don't know that they can do that yet. Certainly they weren't able to do that in high school.

[00:29:42.81] And I would venture to say graduate students as well are still sort of feeling that am I worthy kind of a thing. So there's that very real-- that imposter syndrome. Everybody has it.

[00:29:55.77] And I think it's a really, really important factor for faculty to remember, that they can actually-- [LAUGHS]. I want to say they can be mentors without losing that sense of, I am this entity. We don't have to fall into our sort of parent role, because I think that's a whole different thing.

[00:30:26.80] But we have to find a way that we can make that connection. And if we don't think that nurturing kind of belongs in our discipline-- and there are probably some that it has to be regulated. You can't slide by on this. But there are certainly ways that we can make those connections easier for students to find rather than, well, you know, if they need help they can go to counseling or something like that.

[00:30:58.87] So yeah, I do believe that that connection between faculty and students is-- I mean, I think it's far more impactful than-- really, yeah, than anything else. This is their careers. And we really are gatekeepers.

[00:31:12.28] ERIN HAGAR: I was struck in the article that sort of prompted this whole discussion in the whole program. One of the things this article talks about is in this generation of college student, they may not be on campus in the way that we remember being on campus. So they may be popping on campus to take a class or two and then leaving to go back to their family or their job. So a faculty interaction may be the primary source of contact and support that students juggling all these responsibilities actually can consistently rely on.

[00:31:49.93] CYNTHIA CRAVENS: Yeah. I think that's absolutely true. And I was going to mention that when we were talking about the syllabus and having that conversation or that dialogue with students about attendance or late papers. We don't know their situations and we don't need to feel pressured into thinking about every possible situation when we go into the classroom. We just need to allow the students to let us know what the situations are from the outset.

[00:32:20.17] So yeah, if students have full-time jobs-- you know, so many more students now have full-time jobs than 20 years ago. And so they are looking for ways that they can accommodate a very tricky and complex schedule with this endeavor that they really want to succeed at. But where's the give and take for them?

[00:32:44.69] And again, when we're adults and we have families and we're already juggling all these different things, we kind of have a sense of how to do that. But when you're at that very young age, 18 to 25, you're still figuring out how to do it. And you kind of want to please everybody, and you can't.

[00:33:02.56] So that's another part of that mentorship is, how can we say, it's OK. It's OK. Let me know when you can do this. And yeah, we are going to get taken advantage of once in a while. But I think more often than not, we'll be helping rather than being taken advantage of.

[00:33:24.28] ERIN HAGAR: One last question before we sign off. I like to ask this of all of our guests. And the question is this. Is there anything that you see in the world of teaching and learning that you think could really move the needle in terms of student success?

[00:33:39.13] CYNTHIA CRAVENS: Oh my gosh, yes. And again, I'll return to the interdisciplinary courses. It is such an innovative and approachable-- and it's not easy in terms of the logistics. But faculty I think want to collaborate. And showing students how collaboration is done across disciplines will open so many doors for them as far as how their careers can be shaped by it, where they can move to.

[00:34:16.26] If they're not sure that they want to go into, say, engineering, it's like, well, there are other ways you can do the same skill sets and just broaden everything into just a bigger mindset, you know? I don't think careers are as--

[00:34:34.60] ERIN HAGAR: Like, siloed. Not as siloed.

[00:34:36.10] CYNTHIA CRAVENS: Yeah. Yeah. As they were, especially now after COVID and we've done all of these Zoom things and technology has taken off in startups and everything. Everything is so much more accessible and there's so much more collaboration that we can do across the world, that sticking to-- and I'm in English, so this is even more so true for humanities now.

[00:35:05.86] It's like we have these tools and we have the scholarship and the research and the interest and-- oh, there's so much that we can do if we just pool our different scholarships together. So I really think that there is starting more and more to be these initiatives, but it's really kind of untapped.

[00:35:31.01] And I know for certainly our university, we are looking at models that we can use to kind of make this an easy kind of transition. And of course, we have to start with a pilot and then maybe grow it small at first before we can scale it. But I think that that kind of curriculum transformation would-- oh, we just have so much to offer higher education.

[00:36:00.41] ERIN HAGAR: It's so exciting. I think we've got our next interview topic all cued up, so stay tuned for that invitation from us.

[00:36:07.40] CYNTHIA CRAVENS: Oh my gosh, I love it.

[00:36:08.75] ERIN HAGAR: [LAUGHS] Well, thank you again so much for taking the time to talk with us today. We really appreciate you and your work and are so grateful for your time today.

[00:36:17.71] CYNTHIA CRAVENS: Oh, it was an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

[00:36:20.69] [MUSIC PLAYING]

[00:36:23.16] SPEAKER 1: Thank you for joining us today on Moving the Needle. Visit us at umaryland.edu/fctl to hear additional episodes, leave us feedback, or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

[00:00:00.12] ERIN HAGAR: Welcome to Moving the Needle, casual conversations about ways, big and small, to impact student learning, brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Erin Hagar. Let's move the needle.

[00:00:15.74] [MUSIC PLAYING]

[00:00:19.01] Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Moving the Needle. A question for you, when you were in graduate school, did you have an opportunity to explore the field of education, alongside your discipline? Did you have any kind of mentored experience to learn about learning?

[00:00:34.58] I'm guessing a lot of you might say no. And you're not alone. Many faculty don't have the chance to develop their teaching skills during graduate school, meaning that they're thrown right into the classroom in their first job and left to figure it out for themselves. Others may have had the chance to become a teaching assistant or receive some other kind of mentored experience around the educational mission. But maybe they felt or were told explicitly that focusing on teaching wasn't the best use of their time, that really every minute should be focused on developing their research skills. Does that sound familiar?

[00:01:09.32] Were you told or do you maybe even think today that focusing on teaching holds graduate students back with respect to research? Some interesting studies recently explore this very question. And we'll link to them from our show notes. We're going to tackle all of this today with our guest, Dr. Scott J. Riley II.

[00:01:28.58] Scott is a faculty member in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, where he develops courses that marry the fields of data analytics and pharmaceutical sciences. His interest in education goes way back. He was the kind of graduate student that embraced educational training early on, serving for many years as a TA, a guest lecturer, even a mentor to our own UMB CURE scholars on the weekends.

[00:01:54.53] He's very interested in the ways that we nurture and develop graduate students in all aspects of faculty life. And I'm really excited to share this conversation with you. Let's get to it. Scott, welcome to Moving the Needle.

[00:02:07.10] SCOTT J. RILEY: I really appreciate you all having me. I'm a big fan of the show.

[00:02:10.16] ERIN HAGAR: Thank you. This topic of preparing the next generation of faculty is near and dear to my heart. It has been part of every job that I've had in Centers for Teaching and Learning over the past 20 years. I think it's so important, particularly in a research context where we find ourselves now. We both work at a research 1 institution. And we understand the value of preparing graduate students to do research.

[00:02:39.86] But let's talk a little bit about the value in preparing them to become educators. Why should this also be a priority?

[00:02:47.45] SCOTT J. RILEY: Well, that's a great starting question. And you're going to have to stop me because I could probably talk about it all day. But I like to think about this in four different parts.

[00:02:57.56] When we're talking about the benefit of preparing graduate students to teach, even in the setting of an R2 institution, I think about it in terms of benefit to the graduate student in the fact that this individual student is gaining self-confidence by going out and teaching others what they know. They're improving their teaching efficiency, which has tangible benefits all over campus. And they're learning transferable skills which will make them more competitive in the job market. It's not enough nowadays to be a specialist in your field. You also have to be able to effectively communicate it and teach it to other people.

[00:03:37.25] But it doesn't just stop for benefits to the grad student. You can also think about it as a benefit to the department. You're going to produce higher-quality students who get more effective teaching from their TAs. You're going to have more efficient faculty support in the fact that they're going to be able to allow graduate TAs to have more autonomy in the tasks that they're assigned because they know that their quality teachers. And there's going to be an enhanced reputation of the graduate students coming out of that department.

[00:04:06.23] And then the last way I kind of think about the benefit of teaching graduate students teaching skills-- funny how they say that-- is that it improves student morale overall throughout the institution. And, when, inevitably, the state or the federal government comes to kind of install these programs in different institutions, if we're ahead of the game, we get to maintain our autonomy. They're like, oh, they're already doing it. So they must know what they're doing. It also demonstrates a commitment to the institution's vision right of teaching people and getting them ready for the job market. It's a wise use of resources.

[00:04:44.75] And then an abstract, more romantic thought that I always have, it's for the greater good.

[00:04:50.81] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, absolutely. And your point about specialization is so interesting to me. I think about this a lot. I think one of the challenges of a junior faculty member coming right out of their PhD program is that they have really reached that pinnacle of specialization, where they're down into the really the nitty-gritty of this particular protein and this-- you know, how all these very specific focus.

[00:05:21.20] And then you come to the institution. And now you're teaching Bio 101. And what has motivated you and what has interested you and what you've spent your life doing for the past however many years is now too advanced for the level of student that you're coming. And that can be a real challenge.

[00:05:40.64] You can feel like you're, as an educator, you're not giving it all because you're not sharing everything you know about this particular thing with your students even though it's not appropriate for their level. Can you talk a little bit about that? Have you experienced that yourself?

[00:05:54.83] SCOTT J. RILEY: So, yes, actually, one of the first positions I took after graduating was a high school teacher. And I had gotten my doctorate in advanced lithium ion battery chemistry. And I was teaching a class of introductory physics and chemistry.

[00:06:09.41] We were learning about valence shells and force equals mass times acceleration. So I couldn't talk about solid phase lithium ion diffusion through a three-dimensional crystal structure, which, believe it or not, I did kind of have an itch that I wanted to teach that. And so this goes back to the original question and the value of teaching students how to teach is that there's always a way to incorporate your passion into anything that you're teaching. If you go back to what you mentioned earlier about someone who is advanced-- they know protein kinetics. Or they've studied a protein in depth, but they're teaching Bio 101.

[00:06:49.46] Every story-- because I think of teaching as a storytelling-- is every story has a beginning. But the beginning introduces the students to the basics that they need so that they can understand the complex things later on. So, in my opinion, there's no reason that, at the end of that series of lectures or that class, that you can't sneak your passion in and really fulfill your need to teach your expertise while also giving the students the knowledge they need to succeed in the class.

[00:07:18.14] ERIN HAGAR: And that enthusiasm can be contagious. Even if someone maybe isn't 100% understanding the idea, they're catching that energy. And they're realizing, oh, people really get jazzed about this kind of stuff. And that's very cool. It's always contagious.

[00:07:33.38] So I think a lot of times faculty and institutions have the sense that teaching pulls them away from their research responsibilities, that it creates a distraction from the important mission that is research. But you found that developing teaching skills actually enhances research skills. Can you talk a little bit about that relationship?

[00:07:56.30] SCOTT J. RILEY: Sure. First, because I'm going to lose the thought before I get through my explanation, the research that I found that I want to give to anybody listening to this podcast, there's this great paper by Shortlidge and Eddy called "The trade-off between graduate student research and teaching". And then they leave a question, a myth. And this whole idea of professors or research faculty being concerned that teaching is not a valuable use of graduate students' time comes from the idea that they should be focused on building those research skills. And the paper does a really good job of creating this-- painting this picture, if you will, of how there are cognitive skills required for both research and teaching that overlap.

[00:08:43.05] And so, as a scientist, I had to break it down. I had to categorize what are considered the five primary research skills based on the literature. And so if we think about research skills as statistical analysis or quantitative analysis, information seeking, problem-solving, communication, and research methodology.

[00:09:02.37] If you think about those five categories with a relationship to research, there are actually a lot of parallels to teaching, especially when we think about communication skills and problem-solving skills. And so the paper and other papers found that, by providing graduate students with evidence-based teaching experiences that there was a measurable improvement in their communication and problem-solving skills.

[00:09:30.30] As well as-- they were slight. I won't I won't sugarcoat it. They were slight positive correlations to a boost in research methodology, as well as information seeking. And if you really dive into the literature they have proven tools or quantified tools to determine whether or not these skills are improving because it's kind of hard to quantify those.

[00:09:52.06] ERIN HAGAR: I wonder too, just zooming out a little bit, if there's some benefit to showing this next generation of faculty that there are evidence-based teaching practices, that this is in itself an area of research and rigor. And so if they are feeling as though these are two completely different universes-- there's my research skills, where I need to be analytical and focused, and then there's my teaching life, where I need to be human and relational and connected and not realizing that these things intersect with each other.

[00:10:27.84] SCOTT J. RILEY: I think there's a whole lot of value in that I have spent a lot of time-- and I'd love to brainstorm with you at some point-- about how the best approach to convincing faculty and other people, that that is valuable because communication of science or effective communication of science is one of the biggest-- or most important, paramount skills that a scientist needs when they graduate because it's great if you're the foremost expert on this protein, on the protein analysis. But if you can't effectively communicate and teach others how to do it, you're kind of standing on an island by yourself.

[00:11:03.42] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, absolutely. So, when we're thinking about training this next generation of faculty, when we're talking about graduate students and pedagogy, how do we do this? What are some of the best ways to develop their skills as educators?

[00:11:20.79] SCOTT J. RILEY: Oh, wow, yeah, this is a great question and deserves an episode in and of itself in a lot of ways. When I think about an effective training program for graduate students, especially for teaching them pedagogy, what I've seen in other programs and what I've seen from my own personal experience is that mentorship is almost always at the forefront.

[00:11:43.77] You need a good mentorship program in two relationships. You need a good superior/subordinate or better to say experience versus inexperience mentor/mentee program, as well as a peer-to-peer mentorship program. And if you have that strong pillar for your mentorship program to teach students pedagogy, the other things, like resources, cultures of encouragement, and opportunities for application, almost build themselves out.

[00:12:13.80] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, yeah, the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning is running a graduate teaching assistantship program. And one of the most valuable parts of that, I think, is when we all gather together the students and the faculty mentors. And the first half of that meeting is really, what's on everybody's mind? What's coming up for you in your classes? What are some challenges you're facing? What's something that's working well?

[00:12:37.89] And the level of sharing not just among the graduate students but from the faculty as well, the questions that are asked, the support that's given, I think it is really valuable as showing that there can be safe spaces to talk about the things that come up in the emotions that come up around teaching and learning.

[00:12:58.17] SCOTT J. RILEY: Yeah, that's a really good point because, going back to my personal experience, one of the things that I was always looking for was a safe space to provide my ideas. When we first started this episode, one of the things I mentioned was building graduate student confidence. And you'd be-- a lot of people would probably be surprised that even when a graduate student's getting ready to graduate and they are a six-year expert in their field, many of them aren't confident in a lot of their knowledge because there was no place to bounce potentially bad ideas off of or ideas they weren't sure of. So this program that you're talking about from the faculty-- facultal-- Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning-- I always mess that up-- is so-- it's unique. But it's so necessary to allow students to have that safe space to share.

[00:13:52.44] ERIN HAGAR: So tell us a little bit about your experience as a graduate student. Were you a teaching assistant? What kind of mentorship did you have?

[00:14:00.63] SCOTT J. RILEY: Yes, I was a teaching assistant. And I can't remember. We used to have a funny phrase between me and a couple of the other senior teaching assistants that we were, I think it was, we were overripe because you're supposed to-- if there's an ideal world where funding is everywhere and you never have to worry about it, you're supposed to teach for your first year. And then do research for the rest of it, become a research assistant.

[00:14:23.73] But, during the time of COVID and a little bit before that, funding was a little bit harder to come by. So some of the teaching-- or some of the students that were in my cohort and myself had to teach for an extended time. And, in that time, it's actually where I really found my passion for teaching.

[00:14:41.49] At first, I also considered it a necessary assignment, if you will. Oh, let me get this year of teaching over. And then I'll graduate in four years. And then I did it for a first year-- I did it for my first year. And then I did it for my second year.

[00:14:56.25] And then I actually volunteered. There was a funding opportunity. But I volunteered to do it in my third year because, at that point, I had been doing it for so long in my career. I couldn't think of not doing it.

[00:15:07.74] And that actually led to me becoming a private tutor for some of the students who were struggling in general chemistry. And the head lecturer of the general chemistry lab at my third year of teaching was like, do you just-- do you just want to lecture for the lab? And I was like, yes, yes I do.

[00:15:25.71] And I didn't-- going back to what you were talking about about teaching initiatives, I had no idea that was even a possibility. It'd never even occurred to me that I could teach one of the lectures. And so that opened the floodgate for me.

[00:15:38.36] I started bugging professors like, hey, do you want to take a day off? I could teach that statistical analysis lecture. I could do that lecture on IR. I've been teaching it for two years. Just let me slip into your class and teach it for you.

[00:15:51.32] And that was the best part about the experience. But, as far as specific programs for mentorship, I really didn't have any. It was all trial by fire.

[00:16:02.19] ERIN HAGAR: God, so interesting. And I think that makes it even more valuable that you had that year after year experience because so much about what we learn about teaching is done through reflection and through that trial and error. And if you don't have a chance to redo it or rethink it and try it on that next group of students, that that may be some insights that are harder to unearth the next time around.

[00:16:25.38] SCOTT J. RILEY: Oh, agreed wholeheartedly. I didn't know how poor I was doing at the first year until I did the reflection. And, not to toot my own horn, but, by the third year, I was getting teaching assistantship awards. Because I'd done it for so many years, I was really good at it.

[00:16:42.96] ERIN HAGAR: What were some things that you noticed improving during that time?

[00:16:46.98] SCOTT J. RILEY: two things. One was effective communication. The first year, I wasn't-- again, I wasn't concerned about how well I was doing or the effect I was having on the students because it was like, it's a responsibility. It's one year, and it's over.

[00:17:01.56] But, when I started to think of it more as something I wanted to do, something I was passionate about, I began to reflect on how I could effectively communicate the science to students better. And that led to the next thing that I saw improving was my ability to create rapport with students. Every student's different. Every student learns differently.

[00:17:23.25] And so I didn't realize how necessary the relationship between the teaching assistant and the student was as far as trust, rapport, things like that. It really makes a difference in the students learning if they can approach you. And you don't brush them off.

[00:17:40.29] ERIN HAGAR: There's a book I'm reading now. It's called Relationship-Rich Education. And they look exactly at this. And study after study show that the relationship students have, particularly with faculty GTAs, staff on campus at tutoring centers, support centers, learning support, that kind of thing, is absolutely pivotal to their success in their graduation rates. And so something that you really felt intuitively that this really matters is borne out in the research again and again. So that's great.

[00:18:15.09] Those aha moments I think as educators-- I remember one of my big-- my early teaching, I got a teaching evaluation from a student that said I really like the activity she designs. But we never have enough time to finish them, because I felt so anxious standing up in front of the classroom with them working and them doing an activity that I felt, well, I'm not doing my job if I'm not saying something or doing something or herding this along. And so realizing that it's OK to give them an extra five minutes if they're not finished. And just those kinds of things where you have to get out of your own head a little bit. And stop thinking about yourself and start thinking about, what is it that the students are needing right now?

[00:19:01.29] So you had that GTA experience for a few years. And now you find yourself as a full-time faculty member here at the school of pharmacy. And, as you think about your teaching now, what skills do you have now that you think were born during that GTA experience? And what would you describe as your teaching superpower?

[00:19:21.92] SCOTT J. RILEY: Oh, great question. So the skills that I think were most important that I developed during that teaching tenure, as I'll say, is the ability to effectively understand my students' needs. And from that was born-- what I consider my teaching superpower-- is I'm very quick to build rapport with the students.

[00:19:45.90] And, for me, that has gone so far. It's gone such a long way in making me an effective teacher is when you can break down the barriers of this, oh, they're a professor. They have a PhD. I'll never be able to talk to them. When you can break down that obstacle and students feel comfortable approaching you, teaching becomes so much easier. And I think that's my teaching superpower is I can make students feel safe and comfortable around me.

[00:20:11.01] ERIN HAGAR: That's so great. Can you share a little bit about what that looks like?

[00:20:14.67] SCOTT J. RILEY: Sure, I can. I can think of a lot of good examples. But if I had to pick one, it kind of circles back to what I just said. I remember a student coming up to me very upset about a general chemistry exam. And I wasn't teaching general chemistry that semester.

[00:20:32.13] But they came to me and said, you were my TA last year. And it made all the difference that you were willing to send emails to me at 8 o'clock and that we talked about-- we both had a mutual love of a card game called Magic-- The Gathering. I really just felt like if I could reach out to you, even though you're not responsible for this at all, that I could get a good idea of where I'm supposed to go.

[00:20:55.32] And so we-- again, I was not responsible for the student at all. But we spent about an hour over zoom discussing what the next steps were. And I introduced them to a new TA who needed to become a private tutor as part of a certification program.

[00:21:12.40] And that student did exceptionally well on the next two exams just because they weren't afraid to reach out to me. And I was able to point them to a resource that they used. So I think that's a good example.

[00:21:22.93] ERIN HAGAR: So that was really a two-way process. The student taking the initiative to come to you and ask for help but also you not being tied to, well, the student isn't in my direct line of responsibility. This isn't part of what I'm doing right now. So by that student making connection and you receiving the connection and passing all along another connection, really, just rooting that student in some relationships. What a what a powerful story.

[00:21:52.72] So, when we're thinking about graduate teaching assistants or any kind of program that's preparing graduate students for the academy and the teaching side of the academy in particular, you mentioned that idea of mentor and mentee relationships. What do you think-- what have you been reading about what makes that relationship work?

[00:22:15.82] SCOTT J. RILEY: Yeah, so there's a lot of things that one should consider when creating a mentor/mentee program with the idea of finding good mentors for your students. And what I've been reading in the literature really focuses on two things-- how the mentee perceives the mentor and vice versa, how the mentor perceives the mentee, as well as the actions of the mentor on behalf of the mentee.

[00:22:43.75] So if we start with the first point. When you want to create a good relationship, especially in a mentor/mentee setting, the prestige of the mentor is pretty critical, perceived credibility, demonstrated competence. If the student hears from other students that, oh, this professor is really good to take a class from. Or, this professor is really approachable and easy to talk to.

[00:23:09.61] That can make a huge difference in the initiation of that mentee/mentor relationship, as well as demonstrated competence. If a student goes into a class and is just wowed by the professor and their ability to convey this really complex information into a-- make it a palatable experience, a palatable experience for their student, that demonstrated competence goes a long way for the mentee to say, I really want that person to teach me.

[00:23:41.34] Another thing to consider is similarity to self. When you want to build rapport with somebody, if you have similar worldviews or if you have similar goals/ambitions, it makes it much easier for the mentee to perceive you as a role model, someone that they want to model their behavior after. And that can really take away some of the obstacles of building a strong relationship, which is necessary for this kind of program to work.

[00:24:11.67] ERIN HAGAR: Yeah, I'm thinking about the time commitment of being a good mentor, that it's not something that just happens instantly. It takes some time to build that rapport. It takes some time to know what you want from your mentee in terms of the work that's going to be performed if they're in a in a position maybe where they're supporting a faculty member or a graduate student might be supporting a faculty member in their teaching. What kinds of work am I willing to offload to this student?

[00:24:41.73] It can take some time. And it, again, might feel like this is pulling them away from some other priorities either in the research realm or the service realm. Why do you think faculty members should consider playing this role for future educators? What could be in it for the mentor?

[00:24:58.65] SCOTT J. RILEY: Good question. I think one of the topics that we could cover with regards to this is going back to-- I don't want to sound like a broken record-- but, when you're talking about getting help for your grading and your classes, you want to have that peace of mind that there's no loss in quality if a professor hands off grading or teaching to a graduate teaching assistant. And so the benefit to the professor is that, by putting in the time, you get a better, more efficient graduate teaching assistant. You want someone to be able-- you want to be, like I said, you want to be able to hand that assignment off to the graduate teaching assistant and say, I'm not going to have to worry about this because that's one of the big factors is you want the faculty, who are very busy people, to be able to focus on that hard-core research and really drive whatever project they're working on forward. But they can't do that if they have to constantly come in and check on their graduate teaching assistants.

[00:25:56.55] The other thing that I'll say-- and I'll circle back to some of the research that-- point to the research I didn't get to before-- is that it boosts their research skills. So if you take on a student as a mentee and you help them in training with teaching pedagogy, it actually helps them research more effectively. And this was proven in a separate paper that showed that there was no-- the two factors that I think faculty are really worried about that maybe they don't say is time to graduation. If you're spending time teaching, you're not spending time research. And that's slowing your graduation.

[00:26:31.62] And publications. And there are two really good articles out there that show that there are-- there's either no negative relationship between evidence-based teaching training and graduation rates and publications. And there's another article that shows there's actually a slight boost. There was a boost in publications by-- it was like 1.13, a factor of 1.13. So not huge but there's nothing that's saying there's a negative relationship there. And so it's only helping the students become more effective researchers. So I think those are the two big benefits that faculty can gain by teaching their students how to teach.

[00:27:13.41] ERIN HAGAR: This is so great. I really hope that faculty who are listening from UMB to this conversation will consider being a mentor to a graduate student in this way, particularly around teaching and learning. I think there's so much learning that can happen in a bidirectional way between the two. And the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning is certainly here to support that. And we're excited about this next generation.

[00:27:40.98] So one question we like to ask our guests as we wrap up the episode is, what do you think is moving the needle in higher education right now?

[00:27:51.32] SCOTT J. RILEY: Hmm, I think, if I have to speak from personal experience, I think what's moving the needle now, especially because of COVID, is the incorporation of technology and making the education more accessible. I know a lot of programs are now taking to, for instance, recording lectures and making them available for students who are self-isolating. And I think that is what's going to transform pedagogy in the in the future.

[00:28:22.98] And it's really going to-- it's really going to make for an interesting shift because we're going to, in my opinion, we're going to shift from this top-down approach of lecturing to students in a hall and, as you mentioned in previous episodes, potentially move more towards a horizontal approach, where students will see the lectured material before they come to class. And then that class time can be used for discussion and synthesis of new ideas. So I think that's what's going to move the needle in the future.

[00:28:54.03] ERIN HAGAR: It has been exciting as difficult as COVID has been. It's been exciting as an educator and someone interested in these topics to see how it kind of fast forwarded the way we think about tech-- education and where it lives and how it works and what we use it for and what needs to happen where. I think it's just invited all kinds of conversations around that.

[00:29:16.65] Well, thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been a wonderful conversation. We can't wait to have you back.

[00:29:22.17] SCOTT J. RILEY: It sounds great, Erin. I'm excited.

[00:29:23.52] [MUSIC PLAYING]

[00:29:25.95] ERIN HAGAR: Thank you for joining us today on Moving the Needle, visit us at UMaryland.edu/FCTL to hear additional episodes, leave us feedback, or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

[00:29:40.89]

01;00;00;01 - 01;00;26;27

Erin Hagar

Welcome to Moving the Needle casual conversations about ways big and small to impact student learning. Brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Erin Hagar., Let's move the needle.

 

 Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Moving the Needle. We've done a few episodes now on the support structures available to future faculty members.

 

01;00;27;09 - 01;00;52;09

Erin Hagar

Graduate students or post-docs who are looking to hone their educational skills while they're finishing their degrees. Today, we're excited to share a new initiative designed to support current faculty members here at UMB. It's called the Leaders and Education Academy of Presidential Scholars, or LEAPS for short. Envisioned by the university leadership and led by faculty members from all seven schools,

 

01;00;52;22 - 01;01;23;21

Erin Hagar

LEAPS aims to recognize and reward educational scholarship and innovation and also help advance the career path for you and be educators. Today, I am so pleased to speak to the co-chairs of LEAPS Dr. Donna Parker and Dr. Christina Cestone. Dr. Parker is a professor and the senior associate dean for undergraduate medical education in the School of Medicine, where she oversees the work of the Office of Admissions, the Office of Medical Education, the Office of Student Affairs, and the Office of Student Research.

 

01;01;24;11 - 01;01;49;14

Erin Hagar

She developed and launched the Medical Education Leadership Academy at the School of Medicine, and she was recently named one of Maryland's top women by the Daily Record. Dr. Cestone is an educational psychologist whose career has focused on workplace and professional education. Here at UMB, She is the Executive Director for the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning and the program director for the Health Professions Education PhD program.

 

01;01;50;07 - 01;02;19;13

Erin Hagar

Her expertise includes program evaluation models and techniques, assessment and curriculum and instructional development involving active learning methods. Her research interests include faculty learning communities, instructional methods, motivation, and inter-professional education. I'm so excited to share this conversation with you. Let's get to it.

 

Well, thank you so much Donna and Christina, for being here today. We're so excited to to speak with you and to learn all about LEAPS.

 

01;02;19;29 - 01;02;23;28

Erin Hagar

Can you tell us a little bit about LEAPS and what it's been created to achieve? Donna.

 

01;02;24;21 - 01;02;50;13

Donna Parker

Thanks, Erin. LEAPs is an acronym for Leaders and Education Academy of Presidential Scholars, and it's a presidential initiative that supports the themes and objectives of the university's strategic plan in order to recognize and advance educators by developing their skills and their knowledge as educational thought leaders and scholars.

 

01;02;51;04 - 01;03;13;20

Erin Hagar

That's excellent. Well, the word academy in in this acronym is is something that isn't new to health professions education, specifically medical education. Could you tell us a little bit about the history of academies in medical education and and how you're envisioning that playing out in our interdisciplinary campus?

 

01;03;14;05 - 01;03;56;09

Donna Parker

Yeah, that's that's right, Erin. The Academy movement really began in the early 2000s at two medical schools. Those being university California at San Francisco and Harvard. And they created academies with the goals of really fostering excellence in teaching, promoting curricular innovation and advancing scholarship. So to do that, they had a mission to support educators and their development and they had a membership composed of distinguished educators and really a formal organizational structure with leadership and dedicated resources to achieve that mission.

 

01;03;56;27 - 01;04;53;19

Donna Parker

And these academies were very successful in strengthening the identity of educators at their institution, increasing teaching education recognition, increasing educational innovation, increased scholarship, and garnering additional resources to support teaching. So as they put out their results and outcomes, other schools came on board and really tried the model to achieve the same things that their institution. So that academy model has now spread to many medical schools across the country, but also some other professional schools and even health care systems have employed it and there are few campuses like ours that have academies that are made up of membership from many of the schools on their campus.

 

01;04;54;19 - 01;05;08;02

Erin Hagar

That's great. Well, you mentioned the structure of the Academy model. And I'm wondering, Christina, could you talk a little bit about how LEAPS is structured? Who who is part of it? How. How is it organized?

 

01;05;08;10 - 01;06;04;20

Christina Cestone

Sure. And, you know, I think I'd like to just emphasize, as we talk about the structure that an academy is is a mechanism for people who do deep educational work to get promoted and to move through the ranks of a university in which they may not previously have been recognized for for that work. So that's a big emphasis of academies, is to provide that support for that advancement track. And in our structure, I think some of the things that Donna just mentioned in terms of the activities of academies are the structural components that we're seeking to build for faculty to tap into, to get to those resources around mentoring and guidance and scholarship as well

 

01;06;04;20 - 01;06;26;18

Christina Cestone

as innovation, technology education for faculty specific to teaching. And then also to have an outlet for their educational work innovations and an awards and grants mechanism that helps to support their continued advancement in that educational space.

 

01;06;27;07 - 01;06;38;03

Erin Hagar

So LEAPS was envisioned by the President and the Provost Provost's Office here on campus, but who makes up the membership of LEAPs?

 

01;06;38;15 - 01;07;02;16

Christina Cestone

Yeah, that's a great question. It's essentially faculty members, are driving the existence, if you will, of leaps and moving forward the initiatives and the strategic aims of the academy. So I don't know, Donna, if you want to add to that, but it's really a faculty centric cross-school entity.

 

01;07;04;07 - 01;07;33;14

Donna Parker

Yeah, thanks, Christina. I think those points are very important because this is really a school driven, faculty driven organization. But LEAPS is maybe maybe the way to put it is the overarching organization for some existing and some newly developed programs to support the mission that we that we stated at the beginning. So one major new program is the LEAPS Council of schools.

 

01;07;34;06 - 01;08;06;12

Donna Parker

And that group consists of education leaders from each of the UMB schools. And that group kind of serves a strategic and visionary function within the academy. And then reporting to the council is the LEAPS steering committee. And that group has a handful of faculty members from each UMB school. And those are people whose careers are devoted a lot to the education mission.

 

01;08;06;22 - 01;08;52;01

Donna Parker

And that group is, as Christina said, the group of faculty who maybe actualizeS the activities of leaps through four different teams that are part of that steering committee. And that would be programming and events, awards and recognition, technology innovation and educator development. And the council and the steering committee also actively collaborate with some of the existing educator groups already on campus, such as PALLA which is the Physician Assistant Leadership and Learning Academy, MELA, which is the Medical Education Leadership Academy, and then the Institute for Educators.

 

01;08;52;21 - 01;09;11;17

Donna Parker

So those are some existing programs that that collaborate with leaders. And there are also some formal education related training programs at UMB that we are incorporating under the umbrella of LEAPS. And then, of course, the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning is an important part of LEAPS.

 

01;09;12;14 - 01;09;31;05

Erin Hagar

I'm so glad that you mentioned that because I wanted to ask about the interplay between these organizations. The Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning is another relatively new entity on campus that supports educators. Can you talk a little bit about how LEAPS and the FCTL are different and how their work will overlap?

 

01;09;32;02 - 01;10;00;10

Christina Cestone

Sure. And we'll probably get there in a roundabout way by first talking about the fact that Dr. Jarrel was very instrumental in the formation of the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning back in probably 2018, 2019, when he was previously the provost and the Graduate School dean and saw this educational need. So this has really been something from an infrastructure perspective that he has championed for some time.

 

01;10;01;08 - 01;10;37;14

Christina Cestone

So as it relates to LEAPS, I think that it is a complementary function underneath this big umbrella of now the President's initiative on education. And so I think the Academy comprises one arm of that but works very collaboratively to help LEAPS as an entity of schools and faculty and teams achieve its mission. So I see the Center for Teaching and Learning being a resource to faculty members and to Dr. Parker and myself as the leads on the council.

 

01;10;37;22 - 01;10;49;27

Christina Cestone

And so I think we'll work very closely together to help operationalize some of these activities and provide support to the work of the council and its subcommittees.

 

01;10;51;04 - 01;11;14;02

Erin Hagar

Well, let's talk a little bit about those activities just so that we can provide some concrete imagery for for what where LEAPS is going, I know it's very new and the committees are just forming and getting to know each other. But when you when you think about some of the initiatives that excite you, some of the potential for that LEAPS has to have an impact on the teaching and learning culture on campus,

 

01;11;14;09 - 01;11;18;22

Erin Hagar

What kinds of things do you envision? What what are you excited to see develop over the next few years?

 

01;11;19;17 - 01;11;46;21

Donna Parker

Well, I'd like to reiterate that what we do as leaders will complement the terrific work that's already being done in each of the schools, and that the content that we put forth will be school-driven, faculty-driven. The steering committee already has some wonderful ideas about initiatives they'd like to launch, and we're really excited to work with them to make that happen.

 

01;11;47;12 - 01;12;43;10

Donna Parker

So far, we're hearing about an annual education symposium, an awards and recognition event with a LEAPS distinguished scholar educator award component. The faculty are very excited about developing peer observation and mentoring programs and some work around APT guidance for educators. For me, some longer-term goals might be thinking about really creating a culture of scholarship in education so that our faculty have the resources and the support to present and publish the great things they're already doing in education. And so that's an aspirational goal for me and I know to help with that goal,

 

01;12;43;22 - 01;12;54;29

Donna Parker

Christina and I have talked about developing some sort of an internal grant program so that faculty can apply for some support to to fund those types of projects.

 

01;12;55;21 - 01;13;34;10

Christina Cestone

Yeah, I totally agree. I think that that's one of the the pieces that we would measure kind of leaps success on is, the both the preparation and knowledge growth and teaching and education of those who participate and members of LEAPS, but also this broader presence nationally, internationally on the education, health, professions and legal education stage. So I think that contributions to scholarship in all forms are important to that aim.

 

01;13;35;10 - 01;13;55;24

Erin Hagar

So exciting. I can't wait to see what develops over the next few years. So for the folks who are listening and who are thinking, Wow, I'd really love to get involved in this, but who may not be on the on the current iterations of the steering committee. How how can faculty get involved and how can we keep up with what LEAPS is accomplishing?

 

01;13;57;09 - 01;14;21;26

Christina Cestone

So we have a website that's coming, and I think that would be one place to get information. Also reaching out to us or the members of the subcommittees, which will be listed on the website. And we have a centralized email address now which we can take inquiries into as well. Donna, you were going to add sorry.

 

01;14;22;13 - 01;14;42;09

Donna Parker

No, I was just going to say that sort of in a very concrete way that there are term limits also for the steering committee members. So if you really want to get involved in connecting with the members at your school, let them know that you're interested in participating in that way so that when there's turnover, you could be considered.

 

01;14;42;24 - 01;15;12;25

Donna Parker

And you can also work with your steering committee members at your school to promote LEAPS events and activities at your school and of course, participating yourself in those events. The the idea of LEAPS is to create a community of educators who can work together toward common goals so that participation is key to the success of of LEAPS and to the success of the individual faculty members careers.

 

01;15;12;26 - 01;15;23;08

Donna Parker

So I would say jump in with both feet, LEAP in with both feet, and participate in the activities that we are able to put out there for you.

 

01;15;23;29 - 01;15;30;22

Erin Hagar

That's wonderful. And we'll put a link to that website up in the show notes so folks can find it directly from there.

 

01;15;31;06 - 01;16;00;23

Christina Cestone

I just want to emphasize the community piece that Donna brought into the conversation, because this really will take everyone's participation for it to be actualized and sustained. And I was talking to one of the committee members recently, and she said to me, Oh, it just feels so lofty right now. It just feels so difficult to wrap my arms around like where this is headed and where this is going.

 

01;16;00;23 - 01;16;20;27

Christina Cestone

And I think that speaks to the idea that, you know, people are engaged, but it's so new and participation and sustained participation is important for it to continue to build and grow to be what the faculty at UMB need it to be for their professional development.

 

01;16;21;15 - 01;16;33;17

Erin Hagar

Yeah, it makes me think of that proverb. I think it's if you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together. And it it seems like leaps really embodies the spirit of that.

 

01;16;33;29 - 01;16;53;27

Donna Parker

Yes, indeed. I mean, Christina and I are just really, really excited to be co-leading leaps. And we're really looking forward to seeing what this journey looks like and what positive change we can bring with LEAPS to the community.

 

01;16;54;16 - 01;17;05;18

Erin Hagar

That's great. Well, thank you so much to both of you for for taking a few minutes to share LEAPS with us and with our community and we're just so excited to support you in this exciting endeavor.

 

01;17;06;02 - 01;17;06;21

Donna Parker

Thanks, Erin.

 

01;17;07;06 - 01;17;07;27

Christina Cestone

Thanks, Erin.

 

01;17;10;08 - 01;17;24;24

Erin Hagar

Thank you for joining us today on Moving the Needle. Visit us at U. Maryland, dot edu slash F C T L to hear additional episodes, leave us feedback or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

 

01;00;00;01 - 01;00;25;16
Erin Hagar
Welcome to Moving the Needle. Casual conversations about ways big and small to impact student learning. Brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Erin Hager. Let's move the needle. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Moving the Needle. As we record this today, we are on the cusp of a new academic year.

01;00;26;07 - 01;00;53;27
Erin Hagar
College students across the country, my own daughter included, are loading up and moving to campus. You can almost smell the pencils getting sharpened and here the printers chugging out, revised syllabi and new assignments. To me, this time of year always feels more energizing and invigorating than January 1st. And as we all gear up for the new semester, it's a great time to reflect and ask ourselves what we are doing in our courses to make them as accessible as possible to all of our students.

01;00;54;11 - 01;01;26;00
Erin Hagar
Our guest today is Deborah Levy, the director of Educational Support and Disability Services at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Deborah has worked in higher education for over 20 years here at UNB. She developed the ESD office, which provides students with disabilities three primary services, academic accommodations, educational programming and advocacy. She is a strong supporter of universal design for learning principles, which offer accessible education for all students.

01;01;26;21 - 01;01;42;20
Erin Hagar
Her background includes a master's in social work, a master's in adult learning and leadership, and a coaching certification from Columbia University. Ms.. Levy is also a past President of the Association of Higher Education and Disability for the State of Maryland. Deborah, welcome.

01;01;43;01 - 01;01;44;18
Deborah Levi
Oh, thank you so much for having me.

01;01;45;03 - 01;02;01;14
Erin Hagar
Well, let's just dove right in and start by clarifying a few of these terms. Can you tell us what you mean when you say disability and accommodation? What do these terms mean for students and faculty, and how does this process of requesting accommodations typically work?

01;02;01;23 - 01;02;36;06
Deborah Levi
Sure. So when we talk about disability, it's really coming from the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act from 1990 as well as 2008. They define it as a condition that substantially limits one or more life activity. So this may include sensory and motor conditions, but also it includes an individual's concentration, information processing and attention. So, in fact, in the CDC says there's 26% of students in the U.S. with a disability.

01;02;36;13 - 01;03;06;22
Deborah Levi
Now in higher education, 12% of all students in posts bachelor programs are living with the disability. So that means 12 out of 100 students on campus are living with a disability and it does impact their education. So the goal of academic accommodations is, is to provide equity to those with disabilities. Accommodations ideally reduces or removes barriers for students with disabilities so that they have the same educational opportunities.

01;03;06;22 - 01;03;44;29
Deborah Levi
And others accommodations may be in the form of, for example, notes or specific formatting, extra time on assignments or exams, the ability to leave the classroom, even to take care of themselves, medicine or or taking a break. Just to give a little bit more information in order for students to receive these accommodations. They work with our office and we do have a formal process where students have to self-disclose their needs using an online form, providing us only with the medical and psychological documentation that would substantiate their condition.

01;03;45;20 - 01;03;55;11
Deborah Levi
And most importantly, ESDS meets with every single student individually so that we can collectively best determine a reasonable accommodation for each student.

01;03;56;03 - 01;04;08;04
Erin Hagar
So then the process would be that the faculty member is notified that there is this this particular student has these particular accommodations. Is that is that the next step in that process?

01;04;08;10 - 01;04;21;15
Deborah Levi
That is correct. Once it is completed, the student receives a formal accommodation letter for that semester and it's up to them to send it to the instructor to help with the coordination of those accommodations.

01;04;21;24 - 01;04;40;24
Erin Hagar
So thinking about this from the faculty members point of view, so let's say I'm a faculty member and I just received this letter from the student acknowledging that these accommodations are necessary. What kind of questions do faculty members typically have at this point? And and how would you respond?

01;04;41;25 - 01;05;16;02
Deborah Levi
So I think they are a little nervous to make sure that they are doing what they're supposed to do. The majority of the accommodation ones may not be related to the instructor. That could include no taking or location of minimal distraction for exams. The majority of the students utilize our testing center. You hear things. You see things on the letter, including assistive technologies such as a screen reader that is provided to the student by our office.

01;05;16;11 - 01;05;52;13
Deborah Levi
The elements regarding the student could be more in the classroom, particular seating preferences, the ability to record. There may be students who are in need of transcribers, and so there might be other individuals in the rooms, whether they're transcribers or ASL interpreters. That's American Sign Language interpreters. So those are things that the instructors may be aware of. More specifically, accommodations around extensions on assignments really involve the faculty member as well.

01;05;52;27 - 01;06;22;06
Deborah Levi
We invite faculty members and students to work with this office as well as their liaisons for their school to determine that if they need that. But it is somewhat arbitrary for this office to say, student, you get three more days in a class that I'm not in. Right. So we really need the the instructors by in to determine what is a reasonable extension for specific assignments so that it continues with the flow and the trajectory of the course.

01;06;22;21 - 01;06;29;20
Erin Hagar
Mm hmm. So it really sounds like a three way conversation sometimes between your office, the student and the faculty member.

01;06;30;03 - 01;06;51;16
Deborah Levi
Absolutely. So this office at UMD, we work with over 400 students currently with disabilities. A lot of things we do in-house. But when it comes to the classroom, you're always welcome to reach out to us and have us a part of that conversation. And students are equally offered the same resources.

01;06;52;17 - 01;07;06;24
Erin Hagar
Yeah. And I'll just mention, too, for our listeners who may not be from UMD, that that these kinds of support services exist at every institution of higher ed is a very important part of the culture and work of a university.

01;07;06;26 - 01;07;11;21
Deborah Levi
Absolutely. We are not unique. There is an office such as this at every institution.

01;07;12;19 - 01;07;32;19
Erin Hagar
So one of the interesting things, Deborah, about your world in my world, right, your world of disability support and my world of instructional design is that we hear a term thrown around quite a bit called universal design for learning. Could we could you talk a bit about that, what it means and how it might change the way we think about accommodations?

01;07;33;03 - 01;08;00;11
Deborah Levi
Good question. You can think of universal design as a way to provide multiple modes of access to learning content for the student. It is an idea that you as the instructor provide on the front end of a course so that you can offer all the information and all the modalities ahead of time in a variety of ways so that the student can take control of their own learning and self-determine how to navigate the course best for them.

01;08;01;12 - 01;08;20;24
Deborah Levi
I like to use the analogy of a car and that the student is in the driver's seat needing to get to a destination. Okay. Well, universal design means that you equip as the instructor, you equip the car with all that they might need in order to get there. So one student may prefer utilizing a map. You have a map there.

01;08;21;08 - 01;08;52;28
Deborah Levi
Others perform Google navigation. Others prefer Waze navigation. Others might utilize it on a cell phone. Some students may need to take breaks. That's an example of an accommodation. Some students really need to see the highlighted route, while others like to hear the verbal cues, and some like both. So again, we are building a course so that multiple modes can be ignited when needed by students.

01;08;53;17 - 01;09;20;25
Erin Hagar
Yeah. And the destination is the same for all students. And what I love about this is that it really it really changes our perspective, not just to students who need formal accommodations and who've gone through that formal process, but really recognizing that every learner has a different, different preferred ways of receiving information, processing information, the frequency, repetition and all those kinds of things can vary student to student.

01;09;20;25 - 01;09;30;23
Erin Hagar
And what it sounds like you're describing is a is a proactive way to meet all of those needs, regardless of of a formal ADA accommodation situation.

01;09;31;03 - 01;09;59;16
Deborah Levi
Absolutely. You can make the assumption that we're trying to remove the work. Well, ideally, we're not going to remove the work, but we're proactively trying to build it on the front end so that the instructor and this office can reduce the need of accommodations is actually built for everybody. Another thing to think about is that there's only, like I mentioned before, 12% of students with a diagnostic statement of a disability.

01;09;59;24 - 01;10;43;07
Deborah Levi
That doesn't mean to say that there's not others in your classroom that could utilize these supports and these tools. So this enables the opportunity to capture those students as well and give them various tools such as live closed captioning the recording of the lecture PowerPoint slides ahead of time. PowerPoint slides with your lecture notes connected, just making it a no guessing game for students to capture and receive their content so that they can focus their attention on processing and sense of synthesizing and analyzing the material.

01;10;44;02 - 01;11;08;05
Erin Hagar
Yeah, we talk a lot about that when we're designing online courses that we we don't want students to spend any mental energy hunting for things, figuring out the system of a course, figuring out where to click. We want all of that to feel intuitive and almost disappear so that the content is really what is front and center and occupying the bulk of the student's energy and workload.

01;11;08;05 - 01;11;11;17
Erin Hagar
And it sounds like that's exactly what you're describing as well.

01;11;11;26 - 01;11;12;09
Deborah Levi
Yes.

01;11;13;19 - 01;11;46;03
Erin Hagar
Your your description of the car and the universal design, it makes me think of probably as a result of the ADA when sidewalks started becoming more accessible for people in wheelchairs. But the you know, the dipped part of the concrete, well, suddenly people using baby strollers were benefiting from that as well. And people who temporarily had crutches or, you know, something so something that might have been designed for a particular need really does benefit a much wider group of people.

01;11;46;03 - 01;11;48;17
Erin Hagar
And gives them choices and options for everybody.

01;11;49;01 - 01;12;16;29
Deborah Levi
Correct. So we are taking our world from the 1970s, eighties and nineties, and we have a new world, which is the World Wide Web. And we are trying to make those access points more available to all as well in forms of closed captioning and recordings, making sure that your design is accessible to all aspects like that.

01;12;17;28 - 01;12;33;22
Erin Hagar
So what are what are some practical concrete tips faculty can be thinking about as they're designing either in-person or web supported or or online courses? What can they adopt that would make learning more accessible for all students?

01;12;34;13 - 01;13;09;21
Deborah Levi
So tools may include the utilization and the opportunity to record, so enabling your students to have access to your lecture recordings, having automated closed captions, providing those PowerPoints and lecture notes ahead of time. Of course, having the links available to the readings on Blackboard. And I would say just be mindful of those readings, making sure that they're electronically based, not necessarily scans of Xerox copies, because that impacts students abilities to use assistive technologies.

01;13;10;04 - 01;13;34;05
Deborah Levi
Here at UNB, we utilize Blackboard as our learning management system. We also had recently purchased a tool called Blackboard Ally, which enables a host of accessibility features for students. So if you are a UMD faculty member, I certainly encourage you to implement the utilization of Blackboard Ally within your classes.

01;13;34;19 - 01;13;57;15
Erin Hagar
Yeah, it's very easy and your instructional support team in your school can can help you set that up. That's great. Well, just switching gears a little bit, I wonder if we could talk about etiquette. I wonder if some faculty might have questions about the etiquette of interacting with students who have disabilities. Maybe they're they're worried about doing or saying something insensitive.

01;13;57;24 - 01;14;00;25
Erin Hagar
Are there some best practices around this that you could share with us?

01;14;01;20 - 01;14;31;11
Deborah Levi
Absolutely. First and foremost, especially for the faculty members here at UMD, the majority of your students are graduate students. They want to be here. They made the investment in all the ways to be here. So it is important to consider them as your equal partners in the process of getting them through the course and the content. So they're adult learners.

01;14;31;11 - 01;15;02;20
Deborah Levi
They are here on their own accord. So I think it starts with that collaborative relationship and asking the student. Thank you so much for this accommodation letter. More specifically, how can I assist you? What can I do within my course so that you can learn best? That question alone will really allow a student to feel comfortable with you, feel as though you are an ally in support of their needs.

01;15;03;26 - 01;15;30;10
Deborah Levi
And I think that would be a great first step. Other etiquette things that we can consider include always being mindful of their privacy. So please don't talk about a student's needs and their accommodations in front of other students. Remember to be CC blind copy email. Students who do have disabilities. If it is related to an exam or a location to take their exam because they don't necessarily know each other.

01;15;30;10 - 01;16;05;26
Deborah Levi
So it's important to blind copy emails. And last but not least, stay in the role of educator. Even if you have a background in medicine or or counseling or psychology. So you unfortunately are not the you are not the student's provider. So you have to kind of stay in your lane as educator. So please don't ask them specifics about their condition, but more questions around the coordination and the implementation of the accommodations and the course content.

01;16;06;15 - 01;16;14;18
Erin Hagar
Yeah, it sounds like really keeping the focus on that, on the learner and the learning as opposed to the condition itself.

01;16;15;16 - 01;16;34;25
Deborah Levi
Absolutely. And I know that faculty members have the best thoughts in mind when they reach out and want to connect with students. But I think it's really important, particularly with the relationship of an educator and a student, that they don't blend that based on their own background in their field.

01;16;35;16 - 01;16;58;22
Erin Hagar
So when we were talking about these steps faculty can take to make learning more accessible for all the students, not in response necessarily to a particular accommodation, but things for everybody. How would you respond to a faculty who worries that, you know, for example, providing the lecture notes ahead of time or providing multiple modes of access to information?

01;17;00;17 - 01;17;14;09
Erin Hagar
How would you respond if they say that, that perhaps that spoon feeding a particular or particular class of students or, you know, is suddenly dumbing down the the experience of learning in in their course.

01;17;14;27 - 01;17;41;06
Deborah Levi
Sure. So while that verbiage is certainly not something I hear often, thankfully, because I do think that is hurtful and troubling. But what I will say is that the student is in your course, deserves to be there. Every one of us have a body, brain and situation that is unique from another's. In other words, our mode and our methodology to synthesize, process and analyze information is unique and individualized.

01;17;42;03 - 01;18;11;21
Deborah Levi
I believe all of us are naturally on a spectrum of ability, skills and talents. So if you give them access to the content in all these various ways, that does not mean going back to the car analogy that they're not going to get there to the destination. But you are providing them the tools so that they can take care of their own learning and manipulate the content in ways that are understanding and digestible for them.

01;18;12;18 - 01;18;36;08
Erin Hagar
Yeah, I think that's so important because again, when we talked about, you know, this idea of trying to make the technology disappear, of really trying to make the the effort to absorb the material equal for everybody but the process of learning it, the process of of, as you said, analyzing, synthesizing, applying that information in new situations, that's really where we want the focus to be.

01;18;36;09 - 01;19;05;19
Erin Hagar
So I guess, you know, from our point of view, as instructional designers in online courses, we we want that effort to be put forth in the actual acquisition of the knowledge as opposed to the finding it, the getting it, the figuring out the technology side of things. And once you remove those barriers or provide different kinds of access points, then all of those goal posts become about the content itself, not the figuring out how to get there.

01;19;05;28 - 01;19;06;12
Erin Hagar
Right.

01;19;06;13 - 01;19;34;16
Deborah Levi
We don't want students to feel lost at any point. If there is a our lecture and you have student A and student B, student A might complete the lecture with you and able to go right into the assignment or go right into the reading. But Student B might not fully have completed their processing of the lecture, and they may need to go back to the recording, or they need to go back to specific areas of the content and take a deeper dove.

01;19;34;22 - 01;20;04;14
Deborah Levi
These are examples of the uniqueness of our classroom. Right. So as the instructor, you can be helpful by providing everything on the front end so that they can utilize their time and energy to figure out how to learn best. And I will say that if you, in fact, do this, you'll probably find less students coming to you, feeling really anxious and overwhelmed and stressed because you have already given them everything they need.

01;20;04;14 - 01;20;16;22
Deborah Levi
And they have seven days a week and a whole semester to really take on the modalities and the process step by step, utilizing a time frame that's best for them.

01;20;17;16 - 01;20;24;08
Erin Hagar
What else would you like us to know, Deborah, about the work you do? The students you serve, and the potential of universal design?

01;20;25;20 - 01;21;04;05
Deborah Levi
So just a little history lesson, at least in our office. Before the pandemic, we were serving around 200 students at the university post-pandemic. I don't know from post-pandemic. But now, in 2022, we are serving upwards of 400 plus students. I think these numbers are going to increase as we continue. Just in the experience of the pandemic period, mental health conditions have skyrocketed as issues, and I just don't think that's going to go away today or tomorrow.

01;21;04;15 - 01;21;35;01
Deborah Levi
So to answer your question, I think if we start to focus on proactively impacting students needs with their learning, utilizing universal design that enables this office and then structure to then focus on things that you can't otherwise provide. So the sign language interpreting or extra time, my exams or talking to a student during office hours. It really is a proactive approach to all of our work.

01;21;35;13 - 01;22;06;00
Erin Hagar
Wow. Those numbers are really startling. You know, you hear that quite a bit. But but to put it in the context of the just the concrete number of students you've served, that's almost a that's a 50% increase just just since the pandemic. We are so grateful for the work that you do for our students here on this campus and for all of your colleagues across the country who are doing this work on behalf of of all students, really, and just making sure that our higher education system is the best it can be for all students.

01;22;06;00 - 01;22;12;17
Erin Hagar
So thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today. And just so glad that we could have this conversation.

01;22;12;27 - 01;22;16;01
Deborah Levi
Guys. So much for having there.

01;22;17;03 - 01;22;33;12
Erin Hagar
Thank you for joining us today on moving the needle. Visit us at u. Maryland that edu slash f cto. To hear additional episodes, leave us feedback or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

 

01;00;00;01 - 01;00;26;06
Erin Hagar
Welcome to Moving the Needle. Casual conversations about ways big and small to impact student learning. Brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Erin Hager. Let's move the needle. Hi, everybody. And welcome back to Moving the Needle. I'm Erin Hager, one of your hosts. Yes, you heard that right.

01;00;26;19 - 01;00;53;04
Erin Hagar
Starting today, I'm going to be sharing hosting duties with my colleague, Dr. Scott Jay Riley, the second I'm so excited to introduce you to him. Now, as I go through his bio, you'll see just how much he cares about teaching and learning and why he's the perfect person to join us here. Scott is a faculty member in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, where he develops courses to marry the fields of data analytics and pharmaceutical sciences.

01;00;53;22 - 01;01;23;19
Erin Hagar
He's been an educator for the last ten years. Always pursuing opportunities and certifications to expand his knowledge about teaching and learning. He earned a certification from Circle, the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning during his graduate studies at UMBC. He was named an outstanding teaching assistant not once, but twice there as well. He's taught middle school, high school, undergraduate and graduate students, and we're so lucky to have him on the Moving the needle team.

01;01;24;04 - 01;01;24;28
Erin Hagar
Welcome, Scott.

01;01;25;14 - 01;01;49;07
Scott Riley, II
Hello, everyone. I'm so excited to be here today and I'm really looking forward to talking about a topic near and dear to my heart. And I'm not the only one who thinks this is important. Recently, there has been increasing interest in the benefits and effects of developing graduate students ability to teach in and outside of the classroom. As with any new foray into research, many questions have arisen about the best approach to take.

01;01;49;19 - 01;02;21;17
Scott Riley, II
Is there a best way to train gays in the art and science of pedagogy? Could it be personal mentorship? Peer to peer observations, classical vertical teaching, or perhaps communal training? Today's episode focuses on a platform that tries to combine all of these approaches and what it takes to implement it at a university. The Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning, also known as Circle, is a platform that is becoming ubiquitous in our nation's universities due to its multifaceted and accessible approach to STEM education training.

01;02;22;00 - 01;02;56;03
Scott Riley, II
Because there is so much material to cover today's episode will feature two guests with a wealth of experience in this field. I'm excited to introduce our first guest, Dr. Tracy Irish. Dr. Irish is a clinical assistant professor in the STEM Master of Arts and Education Program at UMBC. Dr. Iris's research focuses on STEM education and the development of professional learning communities to assist K-through-12 schools in advancing STEM education for all students while committing time to teaching both STEM and education focused classes.

01;02;56;11 - 01;03;04;04
Scott Riley, II
Dr. Iris was chosen to lead the development of graduate student focused style content at UMBC. Welcome, Dr. Irish.

01;03;04;16 - 01;03;07;09
Dr. Tracy Irish
It's good to be here. I was I was honored to be invited.

01;03;08;09 - 01;03;28;02
Scott Riley, II
We really appreciate it. So I'd like to start things off by covering what certainly is so a lot goes into training graduate students for the outside world. And one thing that's recently got a lot of attention is preparing them to become educators. So certainly one way to do that. But can you tell us more about Circle? What is it?

01;03;28;19 - 01;03;55;29
Dr. Tracy Irish
Sure. Circle or the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning is a national network comprised of universities across the country, as well as, I believe, Puerto Rico and Canada at this point. It's a network of 42 different universities. And like most things in academia, it was started with four universities with the National Science Foundation grant and has really grown into what it is today.

01;03;56;16 - 01;04;45;00
Dr. Tracy Irish
And it's all about universities working collaboratively together to enhance excellence in undergraduate STEM education. Specifically, we see that, you know, we're not producing the numbers of STEM professionals that our nation needs to really be at its global economic best. And one of those issues has to do with with education, of course. And so this is all about looking at future faculty at the graduate school level and giving them more information and more knowledge and more experiences in teaching and learning and using, you know, quality strategies to really enhance the learning of the graduate students as they do their undergraduate work.

01;04;45;15 - 01;05;05;27
Scott Riley, II
Wow. That sounds like a great program. And from what you've said, the mission sounds like it's there to enhance the abilities of graduate assistants and faculty in teaching STEM to undergraduates. How does Style achieve that mission? What kind of methods does it employ to get there?

01;05;06;13 - 01;05;35;02
Dr. Tracy Irish
Well, it has a very good structure. All the universities involved go to network meetings. They share what's happening. They share success stories. They share what didn't work so well. And so universities do things within the network that they can offer their graduate students. So there is a lot of of these massive online courses that students can go to to learn a lot about.

01;05;35;13 - 01;06;15;06
Dr. Tracy Irish
Then there are specific online courses that students have to register for that are opened to all graduate students across all the different universities. And they they might be specifically about developing a teaching as research project, or they might be specifically about evidence based teaching and learning in STEM teaching STEM courses. So there's over the years they've developed all of these resources that they the small group that got together that started out, did a lot of co-development of these resources that they knew that they wanted to make available to all the universities that joined.

01;06;15;17 - 01;06;44;07
Dr. Tracy Irish
And then each university itself developed a lot of resources, including courses, workshops, seminars. And they, you know, sent them to Serval to be a part of this network of resources. And so the other thing that certainly did was they wanted to think about how can students sort of measure their movement and their participation circles. So they developed certificates.

01;06;44;26 - 01;07;07;09
Dr. Tracy Irish
And there's three levels of certificates depending on if you just want to know a little bit or if you want to get more in-depth, or if you want to do everything that you can to learn about circle, there's a highest level. And so it's a way for students to sort of track what they're doing and really make it more meaningful, knowing that they're not, you know, repeating and going through workshops of all the same type of topics.

01;07;07;09 - 01;07;29;23
Dr. Tracy Irish
But they're getting of a variety of of topics and strategies to implement their own teaching methods when they they become the faculty member. And a lot of the students that are involved have also been teaching assistant. So they have opportunities to even get started and do some of these things within their teaching assistant ship programs.

01;07;29;29 - 01;07;48;11
Scott Riley, II
That sounds amazing, especially the part about the certificate you give the students, this tangible thing that they can take with them as a credential, basically, that they can use to secure jobs and show that they've done a significant amount of work in this program. That's awesome.

01;07;48;27 - 01;08;06;05
Dr. Tracy Irish
I think it's really good and I know a lot of a lot of students have told me that they're a part of their portfolio when they go and apply for a job that they they want to showcase what they've done and learned about teaching and learning, which is, you know, I think universities are all starting to look at that now.

01;08;06;05 - 01;08;21;00
Dr. Tracy Irish
Certainly within the social network, there's a lot of students that have graduated from university and gone to universities in other states that also had sort of programs. And so this was a very important to those positions, you know, and then getting those positions.

01;08;22;10 - 01;08;45;20
Scott Riley, II
Agreed. Agreed. So following that train of logic, I'm curious, as a graduate of UMBC, I know that you all had a faculty development center. I think the FDC and I'm curious, why choose this program? Why choose bringing style to your university instead of incorporating graduate students into something like the FTC?

01;08;46;08 - 01;09;10;24
Dr. Tracy Irish
Well, the Faculty Development Center at UNB said does a fantastic job as a faculty member. I go to a lot of the events. I've been a part of faculty learning communities where we work together across the semester on on different types of topics. But I really feel like the leader, the director of the Faculty Development Center feels like some of those conversations weren't really appropriate for graduate students.

01;09;11;07 - 01;09;33;04
Dr. Tracy Irish
And I know that I have gone to some of the ones where it was open to graduate students, and you could see that the graduate student maybe had something to say or wanted to kind of express themselves, but didn't feel comfortable because of the faculty members around them in the room. Like I felt like they they really didn't have a voice there.

01;09;33;16 - 01;10;13;09
Dr. Tracy Irish
And I think what's unique about the The Circle is that graduate students know it's for graduate students. They feel comfortable. They're there with their peers. And they don't have to be worried about what kind of question they ask or what stance that they take on something. And there's a lot more conversation from the graduate students. When I host a shuttle workshop for just graduate students, then when I go to a faculty development center workshop that has faculty as well as the graduate students in there, and I think, you know, that comfort level and having a voice is really going to assist the graduate students.

01;10;13;09 - 01;10;21;09
Dr. Tracy Irish
And in learning a lot more, learning and learning more about the the strategies and how to implement them in their own classroom.

01;10;22;00 - 01;10;34;04
Scott Riley, II
Agreed. There's a lot to be said for something that's made specifically for you. And knowing that everyone around you is a peer, not necessarily a giant with 20 years experience in the field, right?

01;10;34;08 - 01;10;43;10
Dr. Tracy Irish
Well, not that that made them any better at teaching and learning, but it it has that it has that feeling when you're the graduate student and you're not the faculty member, right? Yep.

01;10;43;16 - 01;11;11;21
Scott Riley, II
Oh, I agree wholeheartedly. So with that, I'd like to transition into talking about your personal experience with Circle. So you were kind of the point person for developing graduate content for the UMBC campus. And so I'm curious, how did your journey start with cert or how did you find out about the network? And can you describe the process of how you became the point person for implementing the graduate material at UMBC?

01;11;12;05 - 01;11;39;08
Dr. Tracy Irish
Well, as you know, I'm a faculty member in the Education Department at UMBC, and the inaugural director of Circle was Dr. and Spence. And and Spence and I worked together for over five years on a national science Foundation grant. And so we knew each other well. And I knew she was the director of Circle. I'd asked her questions about it, and she was getting ready to step down from Circle, and she basically said, You'd be great for this.

01;11;39;08 - 01;12;00;11
Dr. Tracy Irish
Are you interested? And so that started several conversations with the dean of the graduate school and one of the people in her group. That was Dr. Janet Rutledge and Dr. Vonetta Tall. And I had some great conversations with them, and they were the the two leaders that really wanted to bring shuttle to campus. And so they told me more about shuttle.

01;12;00;11 - 01;12;26;08
Dr. Tracy Irish
They told me about their vision for it on on campus, but they weren't in the position of of doing day to day stuff and really developing workshops and courses and such. And so once I talked to them, I went to my very first sort of network meeting that was in Wisconsin, which University of Wisconsin was one of the lead universities to start this off.

01;12;26;15 - 01;12;58;20
Dr. Tracy Irish
And, you know, the collaboration, the, the really support from all the different people across the network was just so wonderful that I knew I could do this, that, you know, whatever I needed, they'd be there for me. And, you know, they really walked me through their website and showed me everything that they had. And to me, it made so much more sense to do something like this than just trying to do graduate student teaching and learning development on campus without such a network behind you.

01;12;59;12 - 01;13;25;04
Dr. Tracy Irish
It just made sense. And so, you know, STEM education has always been my passion. I you know, I currently work with K-12 teachers, but I feel like as I'm making, I feel like I'm making a difference in the K-12 world in terms of implementing best practices and teaching and learning and doing interdisciplinary teaching and learning through a stem viewpoint.

01;13;25;17 - 01;13;49;22
Dr. Tracy Irish
I feel like the next level for me was to work with people who would be teaching the undergraduates, because these are where all of the K through 12 students are going to end up, hopefully, or a lot of them are going to end up in, you know, in universities in the undergrad program. And, you know, I've been in, you know, in my undergraduate years, I remember going into the large lecture hall on to a course that I was so excited about, you know, genetics.

01;13;50;03 - 01;14;11;08
Dr. Tracy Irish
And I sat there with 280 students next to me, and there's a man in front of the stage talking, not necessarily teaching. He was doing a lot of talking. He didn't engage the students at all. He didn't follow the topics that were in the syllabus. He talked about what he wanted to talk about, and then we had to try to figure out how to study for the exam.

01;14;11;08 - 01;14;28;17
Dr. Tracy Irish
So there was not a lot of teaching and learning going on within the auditorium where I felt like it should have been going on. You know, we were sort of independent learners with the book and trying to figure out what we were supposed to know. And, you know, that's got to be a method of the past. We've got to get rid of that.

01;14;28;17 - 01;14;49;23
Dr. Tracy Irish
We've got to we've got to engage students. We've got to understand if they're learning on the spot, we've got to do, you know, formative assessments. We've got to really worry about whether or not we're really teaching and whether or not anybody is really learning instead of just standing on the stage and talking about, you know, our passions in life.

01;14;50;03 - 01;15;09;27
Scott Riley, II
So I can see why they chose you, Tracy, to be the lead at this project. It sounds like not only was it something you wanted to do, but it was something you're really passionate about. But it's a it's a complex ask to come in and create all this content for graduate students. I'm curious, what did things look like in the beginning for you?

01;15;09;27 - 01;15;16;12
Scott Riley, II
How did you even begin to create a framework for graduate student specific teaching and learning?

01;15;16;19 - 01;15;46;00
Dr. Tracy Irish
Well, I think some of the biggest things that were discussed at certain networks when I first got started was just, you know, evidence based teaching reflective practitioner, I think, is something that was kind of not there that I brought to the table. Because if faculty members as teachers don't really stop and think about what they really want students to know and understand, they're not going to understand what they need to share with their students.

01;15;46;00 - 01;16;13;05
Dr. Tracy Irish
So there's a process of developing curriculum and knowing what you're going to add and what you're going to have the students read about. And so we talked about that, and there was also a lot of teaching about inclusive teaching. And so I knew that these were things that I wanted to bring to campus and share. And then the way I kind of got started to sort of introduce myself to students was I held information sessions about every month.

01;16;13;21 - 01;16;32;24
Dr. Tracy Irish
I'd have pizza, hold it at lunchtime when there were no classes and put fliers up and emails out and invite any student that might be interested to come. And I was amazed at the large number of students that I came, and I was also amazed that each time I had an information session, the same students would still come back.

01;16;32;24 - 01;16;53;16
Dr. Tracy Irish
Even though they understood it and they were doing something with certainly already. They still wanted to come and just be a part of the conversation. And I thought that just shows how dedicated our graduate students are and how how really this is needed on campus. And so I just, you know, started developing workshops. I talked to people to find out who else could develop workshops.

01;16;53;16 - 01;17;23;20
Dr. Tracy Irish
I also definitely, you know, was in conversation with the Faculty Development Center. We didn't want to completely close ourselves off from them, so we still found out what they had to offer and what they, you know, the director of the Faculty Development Center also did two unique seminars just for graduate students. And we had, you know, university UBC also has a very large graduate student and postdoctoral development center where they have what's called promise.

01;17;23;20 - 01;17;43;16
Dr. Tracy Irish
And that has a lot to do with being a successful graduate student and making sure you graduate, not so much about the teaching and learning, but they also had some seminars and workshops that we overlapped with. And so there was a lot of collaboration on campus to make sure that we didn't we didn't offer the same thing. You know, we didn't double up on anything.

01;17;43;16 - 01;17;50;09
Dr. Tracy Irish
But also making sure that we are outreach included all those different venues to make sure that graduate students knew what was going on.

01;17;50;22 - 01;18;11;24
Scott Riley, II
Awesome. Yeah. It sounds like you took a very multipronged approach by creating, by in collaborating and making sure I've heard this a couple of times. And as a former student, I appreciate it making sure there wasn't a lot of redundancy, like there were unique experiences that you could get something from without having to repeat certain workshops. That's awesome.

01;18;12;12 - 01;18;24;11
Scott Riley, II
So with that, I'm curious, how long has certainly been active at UMBC? And looking back you I don't know if you mentioned this yet or not, but you mentioned that you're no longer the director of this program, correct?

01;18;24;26 - 01;18;25;16
Dr. Tracy Irish
That's correct.

01;18;25;22 - 01;18;35;17
Scott Riley, II
So looking back, did you achieve all of the goals that you set out for yourself when you began this program? And did any of them change while you were building the program?

01;18;35;27 - 01;19;02;16
Dr. Tracy Irish
Okay. So the first part you and B joined started in 2016 and I believe and Spence was named the inaugural director in 2017. And then I joined in the fall of 2018. I did a lot of what I wanted to do. I got students excited about it. I got students involved, and I did get some students that went through all the different levels and completed a teaching as research project.

01;19;02;16 - 01;19;27;07
Dr. Tracy Irish
One of them was even able to travel with me to a forum in 2019 to present her work, as was pretty much the sort of national conventions called a Circle Forum. So that was very exciting. At that forum, I was also on a committee to help establish and organize the forum and come up with the schedule and certainly with Dr. Janet Rutledge, the dean of the graduate schools assistants.

01;19;27;07 - 01;19;56;27
Dr. Tracy Irish
We got Dr. Hrabowski to be a keynote speaker at the 2019 Forum, which I really felt like showed that UMBC was truly invested in the teaching and learning development of our graduate students. So that was very important to me. And I was certainly, you know, in the in the workshops that I gave, in the course that I taught I could, I could see the students growing and I could see them starting to think about things.

01;19;56;27 - 01;20;27;10
Dr. Tracy Irish
And the one online workshop I did at the beginning of COVID was on inclusive teaching and STEM. And I, I got just such great feedback from that that, you know, students really thought about, you know, the, the small comments you can make that make a big difference where one of their students in the classroom feels like they're a part of the a part of the group, or they feel isolated from the group.

01;20;27;10 - 01;20;58;24
Dr. Tracy Irish
And it's not that we mean to say things, but it's just those, you know, really thinking about those ahead of time and really making sure what we what we say is not alienating anyone or making anyone feel like they don't belong. And I think that happens a lot and people don't realize it. So that was one of my, I think biggest successes was having that workshop, being able to do it online at the last minute and getting really just such good feedback from the graduate students about it.

01;20;58;24 - 01;21;19;09
Dr. Tracy Irish
I didn't really accomplish all that I wanted to do. I loved being the civil director, but my department chair didn't really feel like it was working out. He felt like there wasn't enough time devoted to my my faculty position. And I do think a certain position needs to be a full time position to really do everything you need out there.

01;21;19;09 - 01;21;45;18
Dr. Tracy Irish
I don't think it can just be a percentage of your work day or a percentage of your workload that, you know, most of the universities and the network have a certain director that's full time and sometimes they even have an office around it to support it sort of was a part of the the graduate school graduate student and postdoctoral development sort of umbrella.

01;21;46;08 - 01;22;10;20
Dr. Tracy Irish
But since we did different things, you know, I was I had sort of staff support and a grad student support, but I was the only one developing the workshops and and trying to also do things for the Circle Network. And it was a lot, but it was so rewarding and so a part of who I am and what I want to accomplish.

01;22;10;22 - 01;22;12;19
Dr. Tracy Irish
So it was very important to me to be the director.

01;22;13;00 - 01;22;38;00
Scott Riley, II
Yeah. And it sounds like it was really rewarding on multiple levels for you and the school that you became the director. So talking about your successes, I'm curious. I think I know the answer, but I want to ask it anyways. Do you think the Circle program at UMBC, especially for graduate students, was successful, and how do you think you can measure that success or how would you measure that success?

01;22;38;25 - 01;22;42;18
Dr. Tracy Irish
I think it was very successful. I think it probably still is.

01;22;44;18 - 01;23;05;01
Dr. Tracy Irish
I think by the number of students that started participating in events was a good sign of the success. I think the feedback that I would get, I would always have some sort of an evaluation to get feedback from the students as to how relevant it was. You know, what more they would have liked to have had what they thought wasn't necessary.

01;23;05;13 - 01;23;32;20
Dr. Tracy Irish
I always tried to get feedback from them and it was always positive feedback that it did make a difference, that they've learned a lot and it was something that, you know, they're not getting from anywhere else, which was important. If I were still Circle Director, I would want to go and talk to people who have graduated UMBC and are in academic slash faculty positions and find out, you know, what are they using that they've learned?

01;23;32;20 - 01;23;52;09
Dr. Tracy Irish
I would love to love to have been able to do sort of that kind of study once people were out of you. NBC. I think that's a true measure of whether new faculty are able to utilize the the information and the strategies that they gain through, certainly in their own classrooms.

01;23;52;18 - 01;24;18;17
Scott Riley, II
And student engagement. I agree. I think that's the number one metric about whether or not a program is successful. With that, we've kind of gone through your story about what it takes to be a director of Circle, and you gave some great advice. It really does need to be its own position. I'm curious if there if there's anybody listening to this that's thinking about bringing circle to their school, could you give them any more advice?

01;24;18;17 - 01;24;21;02
Scott Riley, II
Besides, you know, it definitely needs to be its own position.

01;24;22;28 - 01;24;47;25
Dr. Tracy Irish
I think that it can seem overwhelming when you get started and you think of all these things that you need to do. You know, you want to offer your students as much as you can. And my biggest is thisis to talk to people at the Circle Network and make sure they've done over the last five years, they've really done a great job of organizing and categorizing all of their resources.

01;24;47;25 - 01;25;10;00
Dr. Tracy Irish
So if there's a specific topic that you want to cover at your school, you as a member of Circle, you know, as one of the leaders of a circle, you can go in there and you can access all of the resources and now you can search it by topic area and you can really see all the different things that all these other universities have done within that area.

01;25;10;04 - 01;25;42;28
Dr. Tracy Irish
And what's nice about it is they're not proprietary at all. So you can download a couple of them and you can modify and mesh them together and really make it what you want. So I think the biggest thing is just you don't have to start from scratch. You have all of these resources and even if you think, okay, I don't even know where to begin, just go through all the different topics within the resources and think about, okay, I could do something on inclusive teaching, I could do evidence based teaching and learning, I could do something about bullying, I could do something about anti-racist teaching.

01;25;42;28 - 01;25;57;04
Dr. Tracy Irish
There's all these different topics so that if you don't even know where to begin, you can start looking at some of these other topics and get an idea and then have the resources there to help you develop, you know, one that works at your own campus.

01;25;57;29 - 01;26;21;15
Scott Riley, II
I like that. I like that. As if you're deciding to bring in circle to your campus. You have a lot of the agency about the theme and how it starts at your campus. And it sounds like there's almost an infinite well of resources to pull from way, which could be daunting. But, you know, someone who wants to bring a whole teaching and learning program to university is already ambitious, right?

01;26;21;15 - 01;26;38;20
Scott Riley, II
So absolutely. Last question. What do you think is moving the needle in education? Is it programs like Circle? I mean, we're both probably pretty big advocates for circle, but what do you think is moving things forward or pushing things forward in education right now? What should we be looking for?

01;26;39;04 - 01;27;06;19
Dr. Tracy Irish
I think programs like Circle, anytime we talk about improving the teaching and learning is going to move the needle in education. But I also think we need to think about equality and equity. Are students really getting everything that they need? To me, education is, you know, a quality. Education is something that all students at any grade level should be able to get all the time.

01;27;06;19 - 01;27;32;29
Dr. Tracy Irish
And that's something that, you know, we have these pockets of great, great programs. But then there are some areas that have nothing. So we really need to you know, I think having programs like you guys have with moving the needle where people can listen to different things that people are doing helps because I think everybody's intentions are good, but they don't know how to get started.

01;27;32;29 - 01;27;47;00
Dr. Tracy Irish
They don't have the resources to get started. And the more we can share and collaborate and, you know, get it into more places, no matter how large or small the population, the bigger difference that's going to make.

01;27;48;03 - 01;28;03;06
Scott Riley, II
I agree 100%. And so with that, Dr. Irish, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing not only your experience, but your story as someone who pioneered graduate education at UMBC. Thank you.

01;28;03;17 - 01;28;04;03
Dr. Tracy Irish
Thank you.

01;28;04;26 - 01;28;32;03
Scott Riley, II
Now I'd like to shift the conversation closer to home by bringing on a second guest, talk about what opportunities are available for students on our campus here at UMD. To do that, I will be speaking to our resident expert, Jennifer Miller. Jennifer holds a master's degree in education and is pursuing a Ph.D. in health professions. Education. She's also the director of the Career and Professional Development Office of Postdoctoral Scholars in the School of Medicine.

01;28;33;01 - 01;28;45;21
Scott Riley, II
In addition to spearheading comprehensive career development for students leading skills seminars and grant writing workshops, she also utilizes certain resources in her work. Jennifer, thank you for being here today.

01;28;46;00 - 01;28;47;16
Jennifer Aumiller
Thank you so much for having me.

01;28;47;21 - 01;29;12;16
Scott Riley, II
I'd like to start with the first question and the topic of this episode is that a lot goes into training grad students for the outside world. And one thing that's gotten a lot of attention recently is training them to become educators. And so we've talked about sort of a little bit with Dr. Irish at the UMBC campus. But, um, be is not an official cert on campus yet.

01;29;12;16 - 01;29;31;09
Scott Riley, II
You've been able to utilize some of its resources to help students with education training specifically. I think it's certainly massive open online courses. Would you tell us a little bit more about them and kind of how you discovered these courses and why you thought they'd be useful for grad students? I know there's a lot of questions. Sorry.

01;29;31;20 - 01;29;54;20
Jennifer Aumiller
Now I can do all of those. That's fine. So actually I found out about the massive online open courses are MOOCs from CERT all in 2016. So I was working. We have a program that we started in 2014, which is a collaborative Teaching Fellows program. And that's an opportunity for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to get teaching experience.

01;29;54;20 - 01;30;26;19
Jennifer Aumiller
But my collaborator at Hopkins, they were a several institution, and so they're students were getting trained in subtle techniques. And I wanted our students to have a similar opportunity. So I had reached out to the CERT all team to find out about applying as a campus. And at that time, they weren't taking any new applications, but they did have a new thing that they were starting to do, which were these massive online open courses that were facilitated by someone on a campus.

01;30;26;20 - 01;30;52;12
Jennifer Aumiller
And so I was really interested in doing that for our graduates students. So I signed up and became a facilitator. They sent me like a facilitation packet and they had two MOOCs that they had at the time. One was called an introduction to evidence based undergraduate STEM teaching, and the other one was more advanced, and it was called Advancing Learning through evidence based undergraduate teaching.

01;30;52;24 - 01;31;17;26
Jennifer Aumiller
So these are really focused on undergraduate teaching. But what was really wonderful about them as a kind of as a flipped classroom format, so the students would watch and they had they have them broken down really nicely into certain segments that you're not sitting down and watching like an hour and a half of like lectures. But there's a lot of really great conversations about different active learning techniques.

01;31;18;05 - 01;31;39;22
Jennifer Aumiller
They'd go into some pedagogical skills, like learning about Bloom's taxonomy and those types of things. But then every after, every section you get together as a group and have a facilitated conversation, diving deeper into the topics and actually applying some of the active learning strategies so that they can actually be part of it and see what that looks like.

01;31;39;28 - 01;31;45;06
Jennifer Aumiller
Like think pair shares and jigsaws and those types of things. So it's a really great program.

01;31;45;22 - 01;31;56;25
Scott Riley, II
Yeah, that sounds amazing and it sounds like there's a lot of benefit to the grad students. I'm curious you. I forgot. When did you try your first MOOCs in you?

01;31;56;25 - 01;32;17;10
Jennifer Aumiller
And I did it in 2016. And I've offered I've offered both of them. So I've done both the introduction and the advancing learning, I think, for our students and for what they needed. The first one really was more what they were interested in. The other one had a kind of a research component to it, and I think that was diving a little too deeply into it.

01;32;17;10 - 01;32;23;20
Jennifer Aumiller
So since I've done both, I've then offered the introduction every year.

01;32;24;01 - 01;32;43;10
Scott Riley, II
So I'm curious. That's since you have these years of experience with the introductory MOOC, how is it has it changed any for you? Have you seen a large increase in participation in what are some of the things that have changed since the first year that you taught this MOOC?

01;32;43;23 - 01;33;06;15
Jennifer Aumiller
Absolutely. So I I've kind of added some more pieces to it as we've done, like as I've seen like some of the as it was done in 2016. Some areas seem to be a little dated, so kind of interjecting some more current things into it. Obviously, when we went into COVID and some of our students were starting to teach in a virtual format, like we started talking about with how to apply these in a virtual format.

01;33;06;27 - 01;33;35;01
Jennifer Aumiller
So kind of tailoring as we go. And then also like students are really interested in learning about, you know, how to teach because we know if, if our PhD students are interested in becoming faculty at a primarily undergraduate institution or apply, having teaching experience is really important and having some of this foundational knowledge is really important. So we have a pretty steady interest in these types of programs.

01;33;36;02 - 01;33;52;11
Scott Riley, II
So yeah. So even though it is primarily geared towards teaching undergraduates, you're saying there's still a lot of merit in teaching our graduate students to, you know, learn how to teach, even though most of the students here are graduate level or above.

01;33;53;02 - 01;34;18;27
Jennifer Aumiller
Correct. I think active learning techniques can be applied in any educational setting. I think there's been a lot more movement in the undergraduate setting for active learning techniques, but in recent years you see more and more of these entering into the graduate student space. So just thinking about how to have an interactive classroom I think is good for anybody at any stage of whoever they're teaching.

01;34;19;27 - 01;34;27;18
Scott Riley, II
Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly, and it's definitely the way that I prefer to learn and the way that I prefer to teach. So I'm right there with you.

01;34;28;02 - 01;34;28;11
Jennifer Aumiller
Yeah.

01;34;29;04 - 01;34;45;09
Scott Riley, II
So it seemed really important that you received feedback from the students about How to change workshop shapes or how to incorporate new and relevant material. Can you discuss some of the methods that you employed or how you created that feedback structure, a feedback loop for these workshops?

01;34;45;27 - 01;35;13;05
Jennifer Aumiller
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's mostly done in the conversations where we would talk about the way that the facilitated conversations are done is asking them to kind of reflect on their own experiences or if they're currently teaching what their current experiences are, or if their current student what their current experiences are. So By hearing some of those things and some of their concerns, we could actually start to tailor that program as well.

01;35;13;05 - 01;35;15;25
Jennifer Aumiller
So we were able to kind of respond to that.

01;35;16;06 - 01;35;37;13
Scott Riley, II
Yeah, I like that. It sounds like you give students the agency to almost mold some of this program to fit their needs. It creates that buy in that you want from the students. That's awesome. So I could sit here and talk about sort of all day. But the truth is, there are a lot of different ways that we as faculty can help students learn how to become educators.

01;35;37;13 - 01;35;59;23
Scott Riley, II
And I know that you are involved in several other things. Are several other initiatives on campus. You mentioned earlier the collaborative teaching Fellows program, and I read that you also lead discussion groups where student education on mentorship is one of the primary topics. Can you talk? Let's let's start with the the discussion groups. Can you give us a little insight into what those discussion groups are like?

01;36;00;09 - 01;36;31;27
Jennifer Aumiller
So as far as mentoring is concerned, I'm actually trained as a facilitator for entering mentoring, which is a program that's out of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. And in that we actually talk about and offer the workshops for faculty, but we also offer these workshops for students and postdoctoral fellows because not only are they themselves being mentored, but we're also, you know, they could be mentoring, you know, undergraduates or other people in the lab as well.

01;36;32;04 - 01;37;05;28
Jennifer Aumiller
And as future mentors now know, no matter what type of position they're going to go on, they are going to serve in a mentorship role. And so we actually these are facilitated conversations so they can talk about like things that are actually going on for them right now and kind of get kind of group, think about them. But what's really powerful about these two is a kind of the program follows really important steps in the mentoring process like communication and you know, setting expectations.

01;37;05;28 - 01;37;30;10
Jennifer Aumiller
And, you know, when is somebody independent? You know, how independent? How do you promote professional development, diversity, equity and inclusion, all of these things? We talk about them in a facilitated way and also give them some resources, but also they get to share their experiences and kind of use it as a place to learn from others as well and hopefully create a mentoring community.

01;37;30;28 - 01;37;55;09
Scott Riley, II
So yeah, this sounds like a great program. I'm, I think, I need to join to get some of this mentorship myself. On that note, I'm curious, we talked about some of the benefits and the activities that go on during these disco, these group discussions for mentorship. But the relationship between a mentor and a mentee is a very difficult one to get right.

01;37;55;09 - 01;38;07;00
Scott Riley, II
And so I'm curious, is there a selection process that you use to pair mentors and mentees together, or is it more of a first come, first serve basis? We have a mentor. We have a mentee.

01;38;08;12 - 01;38;44;21
Jennifer Aumiller
So actually what our program is mostly doing is already addressing established mentorship. So when we're talking about mentors in the biomedical sciences, we're talking about the primary investigators that are their supervisors, but also their mentors in their academic research. So it's actually a big part of education for our scientists because they do classes for about two years on average, and then the rest of their time, about three years or more, is spent in the lab learning from their peer, their mentor, about how to be a good scientist and do that project.

01;38;44;21 - 01;39;10;12
Jennifer Aumiller
So we're not actively matching, we're actually more helping mentors, be good mentors for their students and postdocs, and then also students and postdocs when they get into that role, which isn't typically assigned, it's just more either natural. Like the person comes in the lab and they start working with them, or later on if they become faculty, that they will be mentors like that, that they can be effective in those roles.

01;39;11;06 - 01;39;28;26
Scott Riley, II
Oh, that's that's perfect, right? You don't have to do the what I would think is the hardest part. It's done for you. And then you can just foster and cultivate those relationships, helping them become better mentors and helping future mentors with the tools that they are giving them, the tools that they need to succeed when they leave for their careers.

01;39;28;26 - 01;39;29;12
Scott Riley, II
That's awesome.

01;39;29;22 - 01;39;43;23
Jennifer Aumiller
Yeah. So yeah, we're not doing mentoring matching. There's a lot of really great programs I know on campus that kind of do that, like the umbrella program and those types of programs. But we're really more dealing with the functionality of the mentorship relationship.

01;39;44;11 - 01;40;05;13
Scott Riley, II
So thank you so much for that comprehensive overview of how these mentorship discussions go. These work groups go. I'm a little curious. We briefly mentioned it before and I'd like to touch base on it now. Could you go into the Collaborative Teaching Fellows program? I know that that's a cross campus program between you, UNB and Hopkins, right?

01;40;06;02 - 01;40;37;24
Jennifer Aumiller
Right, exactly. And actually, the National Institute of Aging just recently joined. So it's a really great program that was started in 2014 and it was just myself, I or my office and another office that was my counterpart at Hopkins. We joined forces because we realized that our graduate students and postdoctoral fellows needed a teaching experience if they wanted to be competitive in the primarily undergraduate institution faculty market.

01;40;38;16 - 01;40;56;08
Jennifer Aumiller
And we were both approaching different undergraduate campuses separately, and that wasn't the most effective way because we'd both approached, you know, say like Goucher and say we would like to have this. And then they were like, Well, why aren't you guys working together? So we ended up having a meeting and decided that that really made a whole lot of sense.

01;40;56;08 - 01;41;38;15
Jennifer Aumiller
And so we started partnering with different regional institutions Stevenson University, Gautier, Loyola University of Notre Dame of Maryland, and also Baltimore Underground Science Space as well as Baltimore City Community College. So we have a bunch of partners and we're always adding more and they have different types of experiences that our graduate students and postdoctoral fellows can have to have, like active learning and active teaching experiences so they can actually get some hands on training in that.

01;41;38;15 - 01;41;46;15
Jennifer Aumiller
And they also have a mentor that works with them in each of those institutions. So that's another program that we have been running since about 2014.

01;41;46;25 - 01;42;00;25
Scott Riley, II
Are you looking for members from other schools from you? Because the School of Pharmacy happens to have some deans teaching fellows that would greatly benefit from that. That might be something that I try to collaborate with you on later, if that's okay. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

01;42;00;25 - 01;42;20;21
Jennifer Aumiller
We actually allow anybody can apply for the collaborative Teaching Fellows program. In fact, our applications are open now, so I'll definitely send that over to you so you can send it out to your fellows because we'd be more than happy and we have had some school of pharmacy postdocs for sure be part of the program.

01;42;21;14 - 01;42;39;25
Scott Riley, II
Well, that's awesome. It sounds like a really great program. I love this idea of collaborating with a network of undergrad universities that provide unique experiential learning for anybody who's part of this program. That sounds like invaluable. That's an invaluable resource for us to have for our teaching fellows.

01;42;40;04 - 01;42;41;00
Jennifer Aumiller
Absolutely.

01;42;42;05 - 01;43;03;04
Scott Riley, II
All right. Well, with that, I'm curious, one of the things that always runs through my mind when I think about programs like these is how do you measure their success? So from your perspective, because you seem to be the spearhead or the point person for a lot of these programs. How do you measure the success of these programs that you're a part of?

01;43;03;10 - 01;43;07;24
Scott Riley, II
And do you feel like but do you feel these programs are successful?

01;43;08;08 - 01;43;32;13
Jennifer Aumiller
Yeah, so I mean, we do surveys. I always survey to see, you know, what worked, what could we do better, those kinds of things. That's always a really helpful thing. We do that for the societal MUC and you know, obviously it's open discussion. So we make it like, you know, an open place where people can share, you know, what's working, what's not working, but also with a formal survey and the same with the collaborative teaching fellows.

01;43;32;22 - 01;43;56;25
Jennifer Aumiller
We it with the mentorship as well and with the Collaborative Teaching Fellows program. That program we actually survey a number of times. We survey the primarily undergraduate institution mentors as well as the fellows that are part of the program. And we also have periodic meetings with the fellows so that they can kind of also learn from each other, like kind of having a peer, you know, place to come in.

01;43;56;25 - 01;44;19;26
Jennifer Aumiller
Like, Oh, I'm having a problem with this in my teaching, you know, what are your experiences? And then some of us who are also involved in the teaching space can also be there to help them. So we use that. And then we also look at for the collaborative teaching fellows to see if anybody was successful that wanted to be placed in a primarily undergraduate institution as a teaching faculty.

01;44;20;17 - 01;44;26;16
Jennifer Aumiller
And we have had people placed. So we feel like that's also an instrument to kind of show like success of the program.

01;44;27;00 - 01;44;55;05
Scott Riley, II
Sounds really thorough, like you get a lot of information from a lot of different sources to determine whether or not your programs are beneficial. Yeah, that's great. So the next question that I'd like to ask you is we've gone over the circle. We've gone over mentorship, the mentorship programs, the Collaborative Teaching Fellows program. I'm curious, do you think that there are any gaps because this sounds pretty comprehend sieve so when I ask this, it might be a loaded question.

01;44;55;05 - 01;45;04;18
Scott Riley, II
Do you think there are any gaps in education or mentorship for graduate students at U and B? Any other initiatives you'd like to see brought to the campus to maybe fill in those gaps?

01;45;04;24 - 01;45;27;14
Jennifer Aumiller
I think it would be really great if we could be an official circle institution because I think that would kind of create more programming. Like so I'm, I'm offering like one eight week program, but that's just like one part of a life cycle of all the learning that could be happening for students and postdocs about teaching. So I think the circle programming actually is really fantastic.

01;45;27;14 - 01;45;53;19
Jennifer Aumiller
So that would be something that I think moving towards it would be great just to give more resources and you know, even just, you know, if someone's teaching, having kind of a place that they can go and maybe even mentorship around teaching for those types of students and post-docs that are interested in that would be great. So I think there's still always room for enhancing and creating more space for things.

01;45;54;17 - 01;46;01;22
Jennifer Aumiller
Yeah. And I think even more collaborations around campus on a lot of these different things would be really great too.

01;46;02;11 - 01;46;24;02
Scott Riley, II
Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly. I'm a firm believer that a subtle initiative that you can be would be a great benefit to the grad students. And if you need somebody to help you out with writing the application, let me know. I also think that we could do a lot with collaboration because until I did a little bit of investigating and I'd like to thank Erin Hager for introducing me to you.

01;46;24;02 - 01;46;34;07
Scott Riley, II
I didn't even know that circle was on you and be in campus in any way, shape or form. So I think it'd be great if the schools could do a little bit more collaboration from these workshops.

01;46;34;23 - 01;46;35;17
Jennifer Aumiller
Absolutely.

01;46;35;23 - 01;46;59;18
Scott Riley, II
All right. So with that, I like to wrap up with two fun questions. I mean, these are all fun questions, but these are more personal perspective questions. And so I'd like to start with my second the last question, which is each one of us, an educator, brings something unique to the table. And my perspective and I'm curious from your experience, what do you think your teaching superpower is?

01;46;59;18 - 01;47;29;10
Jennifer Aumiller
I'm going to say, I think seeking out collaborations for our students and postdocs, because I feel like you can't do everything by yourself and you can't be everything for everybody. So I think having collaborations creates a much richer, much more dynamic and adds so many things for our graduate students and postdoctoral fellow. So I think I would say seeking out collaborations and being open to those collaborations would be what I would consider.

01;47;29;22 - 01;47;32;05
Jennifer Aumiller
If I had to call it a superpower, that would be it.

01;47;32;19 - 01;47;48;18
Scott Riley, II
Yeah, I think that's a great superpower and I definitely think you should call it a superpower because not everybody utilizes that ability, right? Yeah. So the the last question that I'd like to ask is, what do you think is moving the needle in education?

01;47;48;18 - 01;48;10;12
Jennifer Aumiller
I'm going to come back to collaborations, honestly, because I think the more we are learning about education, the more we can learn from different spaces. So like I'm in the Health Professions Education Program and I'm learning how those things really can apply to like a more basic science, biomedical space and kind of thinking about how that can maybe move the needle there.

01;48;10;12 - 01;48;33;09
Jennifer Aumiller
And I think also looking talking to other people in other fields and looking around campus and seeing other people we can collaborate with, I think can just create more opportunities and just a richer and more robust environment for education and teaching. So that's really where I think really could help move the needle.

01;48;33;24 - 01;48;44;12
Scott Riley, II
And you've made a really strong case for it with this interview. So I want to thank you again, Jennifer Miller, for being a guest on the show for moving the needle.

01;48;45;06 - 01;48;49;25
Jennifer Aumiller
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.

01;48;49;25 - 01;49;06;15
Erin Hagar
Thank you for joining us today on moving the needle visit us at U. Maryland dot edu slash FC TRL to hear additional episodes, leave us feedback or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

 

01;00;00;17 - 01;00;31;07
Martha Ertman
Welcome to Moving the Needle. Casual conversations about ways big and small to impact student learning. Brought to you by the faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Erin Hager. Let's move the needle. Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Moving the Needle. I'm excited to introduce you to our guest, Martha Ertman, the Carolyn Hanan Siebel Research professor at the University of Maryland, Carey Law School.

01;00;32;00 - 01;01;02;05
Erin Hagar
Martha teaches contracts, commercial law and foundational transaction skills courses. And she's written one of the textbooks used in her courses. Before joining the Maryland Carey Law faculty in 2007, she taught at the University of Utah and the University of Denver Law Schools, and she's also been a visiting faculty member at the University of Michigan, Connecticut and Oregon. In today's conversation, we'll talk about the roots of law, education, how it's different from other disciplines and how it's evolving.

01;01;02;18 - 01;01;25;18
Erin Hagar
We'll also talk about the changes she's made to her teaching, specifically through the creation of short instructional videos based on new understandings and epiphanies she's had about today's generation of learners. Professor Ertman shares how creating these videos has allowed her to reconceptualize her class time in completely new ways. And she's honest about how not everyone in her field agrees with these approaches.

01;01;25;29 - 01;01;37;12
Erin Hagar
Finally, we'll talk about easy, simple strategies you can implement to help students see themselves as professionals in their chosen discipline. Thanks for joining us. Professor Erdman, welcome to Moving the Needle.

01;01;37;24 - 01;01;39;09
Martha Ertman
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

01;01;40;06 - 01;02;07;20
Erin Hagar
I appreciate that. And one of the many reasons we're so excited to have you here today is that this is our first interview with a member of the legal profession. And I am really excited to talk today about legal education. We are a as everyone knows, we are a health and human services professions campus. And so I am very excited to talk about legal education and, and, and its approach and its history.

01;02;07;20 - 01;02;13;23
Erin Hagar
And so I was wondering if maybe we could just start there. Can you can you talk to us a little bit about legal education and its roots?

01;02;14;15 - 01;02;48;20
Martha Ertman
Absolutely. And thank you for being excited. Very few people use the word excited and lawyer in the same sense. I've been teaching for almost 30 years and when I began teaching in the nineties, we taught very much in a way that I was taught, which was how my teachers were taught, going all the way back to the late 19th century, to a guy named Christopher Columbus Lang Dell, and he was at Harvard, and lawyers were just moving from an apprenticeship model to university education.

01;02;48;20 - 01;03;29;23
Martha Ertman
And so to legitimize university education. Christopher Columbus Lang Dow appropriately named, discovered the case method and so he handpicked famous cases made them even more famous use them as examples for students to learn how law operates. So it looks at appellate decisions, not trial court. It looks at the law and much less to contextual factors. And so basically enter millennials and Gen Z students and the Internet and things have really changed.

01;03;29;23 - 01;04;07;28
Martha Ertman
So a lot is changing to keep what's good about the most traditional legal pedagogy, but updated to recognize that the challenge for millennials and Gen Z is not to access information. They have it all on their phones, their challenges, to chunk it, to organize it. And so the most basic things like start at the top of a document to read instead of doing a word search to find what you're looking for is something that has become an essential piece of our classes.

01;04;08;11 - 01;04;08;23
Martha Ertman
Huh?

01;04;09;07 - 01;04;24;23
Erin Hagar
That's so interesting. So just going back a little bit to that case approach in its roots and during that time and even into today, what are some benefits for students to learn about the law through cases?

01;04;24;23 - 01;04;56;29
Martha Ertman
So you'd get different answers depending on who you ask. Traditional faculty members still use the Socratic method, so in a traditional law school first year class, there are maybe 70 students in the classroom. Students get called on by the professor and they have to recite a case. And in reciting the case, the professor will ask questions, but in the most pure form will never utter a declarative sentence.

01;04;57;10 - 01;05;28;04
Martha Ertman
And the idea is students learn by questioning and and discerning the rationale and patterns in the law themselves. So that is a very, very traditional model. Modified Socratic is more common now where there's a lot of back and forth. A lot of our students come to law school and they've never talked in front of a big group in class.

01;05;28;04 - 01;06;00;20
Martha Ertman
This is really I. The way I teach probably half the time should be me talking and half the time I'm talking in part because one of the best ways to learn is to actually use multiple cognitive channels. So you're hearing you're speaking, you're writing it down. And also any professor who's paying attention knows that the students care way more about each other than they do about us, even though supposedly we're the stars of the show.

01;06;01;01 - 01;06;07;19
Martha Ertman
So when other students are talking, students have lots of reason to deeply engage.

01;06;08;10 - 01;06;20;23
Erin Hagar
Yeah, that's great. It's it's interesting to hear, you know, how that approach has evolved over time while still keeping the essence of using those cases and seeing the parallels among the cases and learning that thought process.

01;06;21;05 - 01;06;55;06
Martha Ertman
Yeah, there are big patterns. We've often taken a cue from medical classrooms. I heard sometime years ago that the time is long past where medical school can hope to convey all the things that students need to know. The best thing they can hope to do is convey patterns so that when the students graduate and become practitioners, they can teach themselves and also intuit from larger patterns how to find the materials they need to know.

01;06;55;06 - 01;07;35;02
Martha Ertman
So at least the way I run my classroom is very much on the on the pattern of teaching them how to teach themselves. But the most traditional Socratic path would say, Oh, well, you can't spoon feed them, you can't tell them what the big patterns are. You have to let them discover it themselves. And my experience has been that students who have come of age in the last ten years simply don't read as much, and they are not engaged with written materials in the same way.

01;07;35;02 - 01;07;49;04
Martha Ertman
And so oral materials and visual materials are absolutely essential to convey the basic legal doctrines that that the students are there to master.

01;07;49;23 - 01;08;07;04
Erin Hagar
Yeah. And you have really developed some tools and approaches once you recognize that, that change in the, this generation of students. Do you want to talk a little bit about some of the things you've done to to meet your learners where they are?

01;08;07;15 - 01;08;34;09
Martha Ertman
Absolutely. As I say, I've been teaching since the nineties and I was really ripening into one of those crabby middle aged women who was talking about kids these days. They're not reading enough. They're asking questions that are too basic. What's wrong? And what I realized then, this really took full flower during the pandemic. But I had been working on videos and quizzes for quite a while before that.

01;08;34;21 - 01;09;01;13
Martha Ertman
But full flower in the pandemic where I realized every single student has in her pocket the computing power that could have gotten you to the moon. And so at any given moment, they can pull up anything very different from what prior generations had to do with how in themselves the library, finding the book, finding the page and write it down so you don't have to go back again.

01;09;01;26 - 01;09;46;08
Martha Ertman
And so it seems to me the primary challenge for them is sorting material. And so I have big old headlines in a million different ways in my classes to say, these are the patterns, this is what to look for. These are the key concepts, these are the terms, these are seeming synonyms that in fact have different meanings. And so I basically, over a period of time, developed a series of online videos that are part of a contracts casebook that I teach with and then did ones on my own, just recorded in my kitchen during the pandemic.

01;09;46;17 - 01;10;10;07
Martha Ertman
And then there are quizzes that go along with them because I think both Millennial and Gen Z students are so used to interaction that the old pattern of law school where you're in tie or grade is based on a final exam and there's no practice and no feedback before that just simply doesn't work. Yeah. Yeah.

01;10;10;19 - 01;10;33;26
Erin Hagar
And the creation of these videos has afforded you the opportunity to rethink your class time a little bit. So do you want to talk a bit about how you see that relationship between information of the the providing of information and then the application of information with respect to what students are doing before, during and after class?

01;10;34;08 - 01;11;00;02
Martha Ertman
Absolutely. If we're I think your listeners are probably familiar with Bloom's taxonomy, where you start with knowledge transfer and only gradually do understand about how concepts actually work in the world and how they interact with each other. So that knowledge transfer, that 10 minutes I would have spent at the beginning of any given class lecturing through the materials I now have in a lecture video.

01;11;00;03 - 01;11;23;05
Martha Ertman
And the lecture video is counts as class time and students take a quiz that is essentially did you watch it and pay attention or not a hard quiz at all. And then they can watch it over and over again. And the idea is that in cognitive science, one of the least effective ways to master material is to read your notes.

01;11;23;16 - 01;11;47;17
Martha Ertman
But one of the most effective ways is to exercise your recall by trying to go into your long term memory and bring it back up. And in doing that, each time it gets a little more settled, a little more rich. And so these videos are made to be watched over and over. Some students watch them at three quarter time, some students watch them at time and a quarter.

01;11;47;28 - 01;12;17;07
Martha Ertman
And what so great is the thing that you think is impersonal. I've learned to not have my camera on. It turns out pedagogically it works better for them to not see me, which is great because then I don't have to repeat the the recording so many times. And it also means that the students have told me it's like they get a private tutorial and they can engage with the professor and it helps that I wrote the book as well.

01;12;17;07 - 01;12;37;25
Martha Ertman
But anybody could do this for their classes, so I get really positive feedback on the ability to cover the material when they're walking the dog, when they're doing the dishes, when they are watching it, as well as listening.

01;12;37;25 - 01;12;51;15
Erin Hagar
Yeah. And then so they do that before class and then when they come to class, you can be reasonably assured that the students have gone through this material. And how does that change the classroom experience for you?

01;12;52;03 - 01;13;22;15
Martha Ertman
Oh my goodness. Their questions are so much better. I really was just calcifying into some crabby old lady and it's and it's just brought my teaching to life in a way that I'm just embarrassed was necessary. So now I have a much better sense of making the best use of the time where we're live. I think post-pandemic, we probably all feel that.

01;13;23;01 - 01;13;49;05
Martha Ertman
But the the precious time where you can actually be in the classroom and do a back and forth and we refer to hypotheticals. There's a simple situation where there's a dispute between two people. And I could say, okay, let's say last night in class, it was Hannah in Madison. Let's say Hannah says to Madison, if you give, you climb the flagpole, I'll give you a hundred bucks.

01;13;49;05 - 01;14;17;15
Martha Ertman
If and if and if the person climbing the flagpole stops midway. Is there a contract? Is there a breach? All those things. And you just can't do that online in the same way. And I think that the techniques like that make use of a live classroom and the relationships between the students, which are so important. Yeah.

01;14;17;25 - 01;14;30;17
Erin Hagar
And when and when you can be assured of that baseline understanding of the core concepts, you know, it seems like you could also more easily put them in groups to figure some things out and to solidify those personal connections even more.

01;14;31;03 - 01;14;55;02
Martha Ertman
Absolutely. There's been a lot of criticism about the traditional law school classroom that ignores the fact that any like any professional, a huge part of your job is in collaboration and so I call on students in law firms. It might be three students, and of course they're named for their last name. So it's visualizing themselves in a law firm and a few years time.

01;14;55;17 - 01;15;24;12
Martha Ertman
And then if they don't know the answer, they can raise the single finger of consultation, which let the record reflect is the index finger. Yeah. And when a law firm raises the finger of consultation, then all the law firms talk about the particular question and then the whole energy of the class goes up. And then after 30 seconds a minute, whatever it takes, and I can see it's getting quiet.

01;15;24;22 - 01;15;54;12
Martha Ertman
I come in and ask and everybody is present. So I'm really aware of the research from the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Utah, where my coauthor on my Casebook, Deborah 3D, was deeply engaged as she created a first set of videos. One of the things that came out in her engagement there is that the attention span of students is so much shorter than we.

01;15;54;12 - 01;16;24;02
Martha Ertman
Professors think. That data where students are watching a video say and there's a camera tracking their eye movements indicator and this is across a big n big group that students have about a seven minute attention span. They will continue listening for about 7 minutes. After 7 minutes, it starts going down at 12 minutes. It is nothing. It is radio silence.

01;16;24;02 - 01;16;57;21
Martha Ertman
And so it is crucial for us to recognize that the world has changed. And so you need to if you want to keep your students present and engaged and making use of the live class time as well as the video class time in recorded videos, you have to reboot and just and apparently the attention play apparently the attention span reboots and that seven minute period starts again if you could interrupt.

01;16;57;27 - 01;17;22;13
Erin Hagar
Right, just some kind of change of activity, some kind of some kind of difference introducing some kind of of shift there. Yeah, absolutely. That's that's research that we've we've come across as well and we recommend for for videos and and also classroom, classroom activities. Could I go back to your to the law firms, the students comprising these law firms?

01;17;22;13 - 01;17;59;08
Erin Hagar
And I just I want to point out something that I think is so amazing about that. I've been doing a lot of of reading about this, the idea of inclusivity in education is particularly important in light of all the the very important work around diversity, equity and inclusion that that all universities are striving toward down. And one of the ways that inclusivity has been defined in a in a professional setting is to introduce experiences, to have students feel as though they are part of that profession.

01;17;59;16 - 01;18;24;25
Erin Hagar
And and this idea of identifying with a role or identifying with a particular career. So the the act of you naming them, you know, Peterson Jones and and Hernandez and and and letting them feel as though that, you know, I can hear my name in that they that sounds pretty good. And that is just you know, it may not even be something you consciously did.

01;18;24;25 - 01;18;44;23
Erin Hagar
Perhaps it is. But I just want to call it out because it is it is just grounded in the literature as one of these practices that that really goes a long way to to helping students see themselves in these roles that, you know, for some students, the idea of them becoming a lawyer may have seemed a pipe dream just ten or 15 or 20 years ago.

01;18;44;23 - 01;18;55;08
Erin Hagar
And now here they are in your classroom, and I'm sure that it can be a little bit overwhelming. So I just I want to call that out because that is a really cool technique that you're doing.

01;18;55;20 - 01;19;37;01
Martha Ertman
Well, thank you for saying so. And I'm so glad you raise the DEA question, Anne, because while I didn't think of DEA in relation to the questions of inclusivity, I stole it from my colleague Michael Van Alston, who is an immensely gifted teacher. But I have since heard from my also immensely talented colleague, Russell McClain that and he does do work on DIY and belonging and cognitive science research and, and, and specifically it does not at all surprised me to hear the data.

01;19;37;02 - 01;20;16;26
Martha Ertman
You say that visualization matters. I teach a course on contract drafting the basic skills like in the case method. There is no room for learning a basic skill that for example, a well-written contract has component parts and they have names like you have head, shoulders and knees and toes. Any well-written contract is going to have a title, a preamble, a recitals, words of agreement, covenants, reps and warranties and until five years ago, I'm embarrassed to say most law schools didn't cover that basic stuff.

01;20;16;26 - 01;20;59;27
Martha Ertman
They thought that the firms would would train students and that now the bar exam is requiring just starting in 2026, the bar exam is going to start testing skills and requiring less memorization, which also is a reflection that students and practitioners can look anything up. Also, our accreditation body, the American Bar Association, requires students to have a certain number of transition to practice credits, which involve things like basic skills, like reading a contract or arguing in front of a judge.

01;20;59;27 - 01;21;36;18
Martha Ertman
So those are really important and changing. And so thinking of yourself in a firm is a really big part of that. But the other thing I would really love to make sure I get to say is that creating these visuals presented opportunities for DTI interventions in the classroom that I little guessed were possible until I did it. So when you're creating visuals, you get to pick images and in the drop down slide and PowerPoint, there are public domain pictures.

01;21;36;18 - 01;21;57;26
Martha Ertman
And so, for example, I try to have metaphors. There are big breaches of an agreement that have big consequences. There are little breaches of agreement that have more modest consequences. So I have a picture of a pair of legs with a big rip in the jeans and a little rip in the jeans. And then I use those images throughout.

01;21;57;26 - 01;22;36;23
Martha Ertman
Sue kind of have that that tactile piece and we all have had ripped clothes to to ground that abstract idea in something really concrete. But then I can also take a look at the skin underneath the jeans. And so I have delivered or at least created all kinds of inclusivity in those kinds of images. It took some doing, it took some digging because the patterns of exclusion are such that the default is still embarrassingly presumed to be white and male.

01;22;36;23 - 01;23;12;16
Martha Ertman
So the great thing about doing this in conjunction also with my book is that we made avatars in these very fancy animated videos that the publisher created that are gender and race inclusive, so their skin is blue and the other ones orange and their names change. Through the course of these 30 videos, the examples in the middle chapters of the book are are gender inclusive names of Adam and excuse me, Adam and Bianca Begin.

01;23;12;22 - 01;23;42;21
Martha Ertman
There are our traditional characters. There's examples in LA, always A and B, and then for the gender inclusive chapters, it's Alex and Blake. So the videos refer to Alex and Blake. Almost always Alex is on the left side of the screen. Blake is on the right. So you have these kinds of unconscious tools that come in to convey information that I think we have left on the table before.

01;23;42;21 - 01;23;43;01
Martha Ertman
Now.

01;23;44;03 - 01;24;09;14
Erin Hagar
This is so great. I, I just am loving this conversation so much. I want to pivot a little bit to these videos because you've had an interesting experience or an interesting dichotomy of experience where you have been able to participate in the creation of videos that are have been made by your publisher with I'm assuming a bigger production team and access to some, maybe some fancier tools.

01;24;09;26 - 01;24;10;13
Erin Hagar
And then you.

01;24;10;13 - 01;24;34;24
Martha Ertman
Have only because we demanded it. It's very low tech. It's PowerPoints, slides and voiceovers. But the educational designer was willing to find some characters that didn't look like Archie and Veronica. But we really we had to push to do it. But one state. But they do. I mean, they do the music. They they have some really fancy embedded quizzes.

01;24;34;24 - 01;24;35;05
Martha Ertman
Yeah.

01;24;35;15 - 01;24;57;00
Erin Hagar
That's great. But then you've also is particularly as a result of the pandemic started creating videos on your own just using tools that you had available and thinking about, you know, we were talking about ID in a profession. And so for faculty who are listening, who are like, I'm not Steven Spielberg, right? I, I can't produce movies like this.

01;24;57;00 - 01;25;11;28
Erin Hagar
I don't know how to, how to create videos like this. I don't have, you know, a team like that through a publisher. But you found some ways to make this very accessible. Do you want to talk a little bit about about how you approach those videos and what you learn through the process?

01;25;12;10 - 01;25;35;17
Martha Ertman
Absolutely. I am so glad you mention that, because one of the really big takeaways I want listeners to just pop in their pockets is that this is easier than you think. First of all, we all lived on Zoom for a year or more, so we're very familiar with getting on a screen, having a bunch of PowerPoints pressing record and then letting things play out.

01;25;35;28 - 01;26;13;23
Martha Ertman
It's very similar. Making a lecture video. You create the slide deck, you could prop bubbly, create the slide deck from the slides you may already have. You just do things to make sure that the slide deck has, you know, is consistent throughout with the color and the font and those sorts of things. And and I think it's really important to have images that let everybody in your classroom see that they belong in this professional world.

01;26;14;28 - 01;26;44;00
Martha Ertman
One of the biggest compliments I got about this lecture videos with I've done it for a couple of different courses, and with each one I pick a song that has a little bit of a riff that has to do with either contracts for this course or debtor creditor relations for the other one. And I take that little snippet and I have it at the beginning of every video and at the end of every video because I kind of want them to queue up, okay, this is we're in contract land now.

01;26;44;09 - 01;27;14;08
Martha Ertman
And one of the wonderful compliments I got from a student last year was that during finals period, he dreamt about this the that that little snippet of music. So that means and, you know, the cognitive science of this, if you practice the video game before you go to bed and then do it in the morning, you're going to do better than if you practice it at noon and at six and then go to bed.

01;27;14;08 - 01;27;55;03
Martha Ertman
So it's it's I thought this is exactly what we wish for, is that we convey things to them in a format that can't be as exciting as what they're seeing on YouTube or TikTok or anything else, but at least it's not scratching with sticks in the dark. And I think that the tech and the DTI are absolutely closely aligned so that if you have if you're interested in doing new technology, you've got to be inclusive or you're just hopelessly retro.

01;27;55;04 - 01;28;03;12
Martha Ertman
And I think if you're inclusive, you've got to get beyond sticks in the dirt or you're hopelessly retro. That way too.

01;28;03;24 - 01;28;49;12
Erin Hagar
Yeah. All that's so what, what a great compliment because it's, it's a seemingly little thing, but it was done intentionally with thought behind the impact. And I think what it invites us to talk about also is the the balance between these audio or visual cues and how they should always be chosen in support of the content and not just as an extra kind of cute add on because there is a lot of research that shows that, you know, if you if you're doing a PowerPoint and you, for example, your wonderful image of the torn jeans to represent that breach of breach of contract or the rift and that I can't remember the language you use

01;28;49;12 - 01;29;26;08
Erin Hagar
but but that becomes, like you said, a visual metaphor that you reinforce throughout. And we're talking, is this a big hole in the jeans or a small hole in the jeans? And that becomes part of the language of the class. Right. And it supports the learning. But if if you as an educator just for for kind of cute and fun effect through and just pictures of your kittens into that PowerPoint, then that becomes a distraction because there unless you are making a link to the content that you're that you're doing, then it becomes distracting and not just an it can actually impede learning.

01;29;26;18 - 01;29;46;03
Erin Hagar
So it shows that intentionality the music that you're picking the little snippet is thematically related to the course or the lesson that you're doing. And it's it's done at the beginning and the end. It's probably not played over what you're saying. So that students aren't trying to to listen to two tracks at the same time are getting distracted by the music.

01;29;46;03 - 01;29;52;21
Erin Hagar
So the the natural instincts that you have in the creation of this is just is really wonderful.

01;29;53;05 - 01;30;20;15
Martha Ertman
Well, I'd love to hear that from from an expert on this. When I started, I had the way too much excitement, way too much going on in my slides. So the background, I chose a really bright color because I was excited about it and I wanted to bring the classroom alive. But it turns out visually that just doesn't work, that there's a reason our elementary school classrooms were painted pale green, pale yellow, pale blue.

01;30;20;15 - 01;30;53;23
Martha Ertman
It's a great background. And similarly, I learned to have fewer images where passive babble. I obviously we have to use a lot of words, but speech bubbles can do a lot of conveying of the information and having that the consistency of the same checkmark for something going right and the same X for it being worn is really helpful.

01;30;53;23 - 01;31;20;14
Martha Ertman
It's not professional. It's absolutely not professional. There there's the I should also really add that not everybody in legal education is sold on this. There's a lot of folks who still think that we should not spoon feed our students and they and they use the phrase spoon feeding. Every time I give a talk on these videos and quizzes and they said, we're just spoon feeding them.

01;31;20;14 - 01;31;52;26
Martha Ertman
And they I have a I've written a lot about feminist theory. So of course I'm a feminist with a chip on her shoulder when they're said as that talking about care work, I wonder why it is we associate helping people learn the material that they are paying $100,000 in order to master that somehow it's not doing our job to tell them what it's about.

01;31;52;26 - 01;32;07;13
Martha Ertman
It just there's something really I think we just need to be cautious when we dismissively refer to these supports and scaffolding as spoon feeding.

01;32;08;05 - 01;32;25;14
Erin Hagar
I think that's so important. Yeah. What an interesting insight. Our last question is one that we like to ask all of our guests, and it's this Do you see something in higher education? Right now that you feel is really moving the needle?

01;32;25;14 - 01;33;25;10
Martha Ertman
Oh, that's such a great question. I, of course, wish I could speak about higher education across the disciplines, but everything I know about medical school is totally out of date and all the more so with nursing and pharmacy and everything else. I think that at least in law, we are up dating to focus on skills more than memorization and that the rec, it just turns on what I said earlier, which is it's so easy to find materials with just a couple of keystroke books and so hard to separate the good stuff from the trash because there's just fewer gatekeepers.

01;33;25;10 - 01;34;05;21
Martha Ertman
And I think students really are in need. And it's got to be true across the schools that students are really in need of guidance about what is adequate professional information and what is something else and to to separate those. So before this podcast I got on Google, I was looking for medical, the monarch said and what people would use and you know they're just people who create videos all over the place and I don't know if they're students.

01;34;05;21 - 01;34;42;29
Martha Ertman
I don't know if they're part of a for profit test prep. I think it's probably a little bit of everything and it seems to be immensely important across the disciplines that we do what we've always done, which is convey enough information and skills that our students graduate and are able to practice the profession in a competent way and a huge piece of that is to assess information and evaluate it and understand something new quickly.

01;34;42;29 - 01;35;08;26
Martha Ertman
So really it's almost like we're teaching them to fish, but we have no idea whether they're going to be fishing in an ocean or fishing in a puddle, or maybe they're going to be fishing for compliments. They'll be doing something totally than we could imagine. And so in many ways, our task is really different than it used to be.

01;35;08;26 - 01;35;40;24
Martha Ertman
So I think our media must also be different. And and I guess I would also just encourage professors. I have to before we finish, I have to put a plug in for a guy named James Lang who wrote a book called Small Teaching. And he really encourages you to make small changes that you hear about something new and you think, I really want to totally redo my course, but you're not going to unless there's a pandemic and you have to, which hopefully we won't have that happen again soon.

01;35;41;19 - 01;36;10;22
Martha Ertman
So you just do a little bit and you do a little more. And the great news is, is that in ways you little guessed, it brings the material to life for you again. It makes your understanding of this incredibly familiar material actually come to life in new ways. And in doing that, you're kind of understanding what it's like to be your students to learn something new.

01;36;10;24 - 01;36;26;11
Martha Ertman
So, you know, you're you're as you say, all of us who are professors have done pretty well to get here. We could take a little a little bruising to the ego while we learn to do this. And I think it's an ethical imperative that we do.

01;36;27;20 - 01;36;38;23
Erin Hagar
And I love how you how you wrap that up with the rejuvenation that can come with that. We know it's good for the students, but it works out great when it's also good for ourselves too.

01;36;39;18 - 01;37;12;24
Martha Ertman
I guess the last thing, there are so many things I want to say. I'm so glad you had me on your show that I also want to say that your existence as the Center for Teaching and Learning the LEAPS efforts to elevate the seriousness of pedagogical theory is huge. Really important, because too often at a major research university we act as if teaching is the frosting, research is the cake.

01;37;13;04 - 01;38;06;05
Martha Ertman
And the fact is, I probably thought that when I was an early academic and maybe you kind of have to to get your footing. And now I really feel like teaching is the thing that is most intellectually engaging of almost anything I do. And it is really the ways that the future world will change. And by updating how you do it and caring about how we update and sharing information and giving it the respect it deserves is crucial because at least in law, and I'm betting elsewhere on campus, there's still kind of an old fashioned tendency to say only research matters.

01;38;06;05 - 01;38;10;25
Martha Ertman
And teaching you can just do in your sleep most. Yeah.

01;38;11;11 - 01;38;37;15
Erin Hagar
Well, we are so lucky to have you as a messenger in these spaces and to bring what you've learned and your passion for education, which just comes through in every every sentence you say. And we are we are so lucky to have you on the show. Your students are so lucky to have you in their classes. And we cannot thank you enough for being willing to come and open this world of legal education to all of us today.

01;38;37;15 - 01;38;39;02
Erin Hagar
Thank you so much for joining us.

01;38;39;14 - 01;38;43;19
Martha Ertman
My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

01;38;44;15 - 01;39;01;03
Erin Hagar
Thank you for joining us today on moving the needle. Visit us at U. Maryland dot edu slash fc l. To hear additional episodes, leave us feedback or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

 

01;00;00;01 - 01;00;29;14

Erin Hagar
Welcome to Moving the Needle. Casual conversations about ways big and small to impact student learning. Brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Erin Hager. Let's move the needle. Hi there. And welcome back to Moving the Needle. On today's episode, we're going to ask ourselves this question How can expert clinicians, doctors, nurses, Dennis Pitts?

01;00;30;21 - 01;01;00;26
Erin Hagar
How can they also become expert educators using the best evidence and teaching and learning to prepare the next generation of health care providers? Many of us teach the way we were taught, or we intuitively try out new approaches, hoping they'll be successful. But how can we know what research based education practices are proven to impact student learning? Well, one way faculty members or future faculty members can enhance their skills and knowledge is to take coursework in education.

01;01;01;14 - 01;01;30;14
Erin Hagar
Deepening one's knowledge about learning theory. Teaching Strategies, research based practices in assessment, program evaluation. All that good stuff. The Health Professions Education Program at UMD launched in fall 2020. This program provides faculty in all health care fields opportunities to dip their toes into the educational waters by earning a post baccalaureate certificate. Or they can dove in and work toward a master's or Ph.D..

01;01;30;28 - 01;01;53;16
Erin Hagar
Today, we'll hear from some of the faculty members and program directors about how this program came to be and the flexibility it provides its learners. We'll also hear about some of the exciting projects current students are undertaking and where this degree is headed. Let's welcome Dr. Christina Stone, Dr. Violet Khulu and Dr. Karen Gorgeous to the show. Cristina, let's start with you.

01;01;53;27 - 01;02;07;22
Erin Hagar
So the University of Maryland, Baltimore, recently launched a new program in health professions, education. Can you talk to us a little bit about why a program like this is important and why UMBC was the right home for it?

01;02;08;08 - 01;02;37;24
Dr. Christina Cestone
Thanks, Erin. That's a really great question. Yeah, AHP launched in 2020 and it's new to the campus, but it is a field of study that's been around for quite some time. Many listeners might know it under the auspices of medical education. And over the last 50 to 70 years, it's really kind of become its own field of study and brought in to be named health, professions, education.

01;02;37;25 - 01;03;17;18
Dr. Christina Cestone
And along with that has been a proliferation of programs. And I think UM B is a great place for an HPE degree because of the numerous health professions and human services field that exist on our campus. So specifically, health professions. Education is really an applied area of education where learners study the foundations of the learning sciences and they engage in this practical application of knowledge to research, advancing their teaching academic leadership posts and program evaluation to improve programs, learner experiences and outcomes.

01;03;18;18 - 01;03;30;24
Erin Hagar
That's great. So, Karen, you have a health professions background yourself as a as a physical therapist. Can you talk to us about what a degree in health professions education can provide clinicians?

01;03;30;26 - 01;03;56;02
Dr. Karen Gordes
Sure. Great question, Erin. Thank you. Many clinicians, they really they arrived to academia directly from the clinic. They're often driven by a passion for teaching, but routinely they have no formal background in education. So enrolling in an HB program or provide these faculty formal introduction to pedagogy, the underlying foundations and principles of teaching all within an evidence based context.

01;03;56;17 - 01;04;19;02
Dr. Karen Gordes
For me, it will give them the why of their teaching and the how of teaching, but grounded in educational research. I think in this way, clinical faculty will be able to then critically analyze their teaching methodologies for continuous improvement and perhaps through their own education research, evaluate their impact to contribute to the body of knowledge within health prevention and education.

01;04;19;22 - 01;04;35;03
Erin Hagar
Well, so how do we get there, Violet? Tell us a little bit about this curriculum. Like how how do we prepare these clinicians to go through that range of analysis and experience that? Karen, just Karen just described, how how do they move through this coursework to do that?

01;04;35;20 - 01;04;55;24
Dr. Violet Kulo
We have a range of programs, so we have the PhD program. We have the master's program that started in the fall of 2022. And we have two certificates that will start in the fall of 2023, one in teaching and another one in educational leadership. So all the four degree programs have a fall start and the courses build on each other.

01;04;55;24 - 01;05;21;01
Dr. Violet Kulo
So they must be taken sequentially. And we begin with the foundational courses such as the theoretical Foundations of Learning and the foundations in statistics. The students take one course at a time in the fall and the spring semesters in two courses concurrently in the summer of year. Each one of the courses is eight weeks long and they lay the foundation for conduct conducting research for the students in year three.

01;05;21;12 - 01;05;32;25
Dr. Violet Kulo
So there’s a focus on foundational knowledge and then the year three, the students try and transition into that doing dissertation and they have a mentor to help them through that process.

01;05;33;11 - 01;05;49;14
Erin Hagar
It's great that there's so many entry points to this degree so that people can can start and decide if they want the certificate level or the master's level. And then if they decide they want to keep going to the Ph.D., they can they can just keep doing all those courses transfer into that higher level. Is that right?

01;05;49;21 - 01;06;04;28
Dr. Violet Kulo
That is correct. So they they such certificates at an onramp to the master's and the master's is an onramp to the page. So you don't lose credit for you're given credit for all the work you've done for the next degree should you choose to continue to the next level.

01;06;05;04 - 01;06;29;02
Erin Hagar
It's a wonderful way for people to get their feet wet in this discipline and see to what extent they they want to keep going. So, Kristina, there are a lot of higher education, Ph.D. and programs in education. So can you talk to us a little bit about how in each health professions, education, Ph.D., is different from those?

01;06;29;10 - 01;07;02;11
Dr. Christina Cestone
I think health professions, education, coursework and our curriculum and the field of at large differs because health professions is a unique work environment and a learning and teaching environment. And so the coursework is very multidisciplinary, it's interprofessional. And even though folks are coming from different training pipelines, they're all looking at education of those learners through their own disciplinary eyes.

01;07;02;11 - 01;07;41;13
Dr. Christina Cestone
So they're taking core educational knowledge, foundational research, and then they're applying it to what the pipeline is like for training in their own discipline. And so I think that they bring a nuanced understanding to education that if you are in a educational psychology program, for example, or just in a a core college of education that you might not be exposed to because those programs, for example, could be very focused on K-through-12 education and what it's like to be in a classroom with reading and writing and all those things are foundational and important.

01;07;41;13 - 01;08;12;25
Dr. Christina Cestone
But the health professions and graduate education in the health professions is a unique animal, if you will, in terms of how education is used, how learners are assessed, how competency is measured, and the impact of learners coming out of those professions is also much different than someone who's graduating with a specific College of Education degree because they're not going out to practice health care on the public.

01;08;13;04 - 01;08;27;02
Dr. Christina Cestone
They may not have patients, and there's a very significant health impact to their. And I think that's the difference. And I don't know if my colleagues want to add anything to to this sort of a nuance to HPV.

01;08;27;02 - 01;08;51;02
Dr. Karen Gordes
I did have something to add to like how the cohort moves through together. I was going to say that, you know, Violet mentioned that the cohort moved through the program together. I really feel like this adds a richness to the experience for each learner within the program because they're having this great opportunity to talk with other faculty or other individuals interested in being in faculty from different medical professions.

01;08;51;14 - 01;09;17;22
Dr. Karen Gordes
And so this there's this sharing of knowledge from your own unique discipline, but then being able to compare and contrast it to other disciplines in the health professions, education world are experiencing the same content or design or delivery. So I think that that interprofessional collaboration in this program really adds a robustness to the degree that you might not find if everyone was coming from an education background.

01;09;18;02 - 01;09;40;20
Erin Hagar
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I also think to the trend in health care is much is is really leaning toward this interprofessional practice in health care. And so to be trained as an educator in an interprofessional setting also models the way that that we want our health care providers to ultimately practice. So I think that's a great opportunity for everybody.

01;09;41;12 - 01;10;16;13
Dr. Christina Cestone
And I think it's important to say that a lot of what health professionals do educationally is done intuitively. It's done based on what they've seen their instructors, preceptors and educators do that may or may not be intuitive. It may not be accurate in terms of what we know works for learning effectively in academic environments. And so I think there's that intuitive piece that may be right, but it could also be wrong because sometimes learning is not what we think it is.

01;10;16;13 - 01;10;41;20
Dr. Christina Cestone
So this whole idea of rereading, rereading and rote memorization is often believed to be an effective form of studying, for example. And we know from the literature that there's other strategies and techniques like self quizzing and self explanation and questioning that are highly effective. And we don't see, you know, some educators don't know that. And so that's not being taught or shared with the learners in their curriculum.

01;10;42;03 - 01;11;03;00
Erin Hagar
Gass said. This whole process of teaching, the way that we've been taught is so common, I think, in all forms of higher education and health professions as well. And it sounds like this program is really an opportunity to question the ways that we have been taught and those practices that are effective keep them and those practices that may have better alternatives.

01;11;03;08 - 01;11;06;08
Erin Hagar
This is an opportunity to to learn in practice, those.

01;11;06;14 - 01;11;30;19
Dr. Karen Gordes
Just to follow. But both you said, Erin and Christina said one of the aha moments that students have that's really such a pleasure to see is that many of them go, wow, I've been doing that. Say, for instance, reflective journaling as an assignment for their students and they did have this intuitive instinct about that. That would be a great structure for evaluating an experience in the clinic by a student.

01;11;31;00 - 01;11;56;10
Dr. Karen Gordes
And what's nice to see is now that they're actually reading the learning theories and the literature in the educational world, they now have the kind of the background for why they are doing what they're doing, so they better understand their selves in their teaching roles and through that then have the ability to further refine or iterate an assignment because they now have the foundational principles of what they were doing.

01;11;56;11 - 01;12;03;09
Dr. Karen Gordes
They had this intuitive instinct, but now they actually have the literature and the understanding to support what they were doing and how to make it better.

01;12;03;15 - 01;12;26;18
Erin Hagar
Yeah, that must be so validating when they, when they come across something and say, hey, I've been trying that and I do think it works well and now I know why that's so great. So the courses in the program are fully online and they're asynchronous, which means that these students are not meeting at a scheduled class time the same day of the week, all getting together Wednesdays at seven.

01;12;27;14 - 01;12;36;21
Erin Hagar
Can you tell us, Violet, a little bit about how this works? How do students engage and interact with each other if if they're not on the same schedule?

01;12;37;01 - 01;13;09;13
Dr. Violet Kulo
So we use the Blackboard Learning Management system, so students log into Blackboard at their own time to access the course materials such as recorded lectures and readings, but they interact through Blackboard Discussion Board. Mostly they have discussions that might maybe do on Thursday or Wednesday. Then they then they interact with their peers responding back and forth and from the readings and any material they've been given from the activities, they also engage with their peers giving feedback.

01;13;09;27 - 01;13;34;10
Dr. Violet Kulo
And some courses also have projects that students work on collaboratively and they engage with that, giving feedback on those projects to help their peers to improve their they are their projects. The output opportunity that students have to engage and collaborate with each other is during the we have an in-person impact institute where they come on campus for four days.

01;13;34;10 - 01;13;59;28
Dr. Violet Kulo
And this is an intensive institute that is designed around the primary objectives of the program, such as interprofessional and cross-cultural education, teaching and research students, and give them give a presentation of their research projects. And they also give feedback, give, give chance, get a chance to give feedback or constructive feedback and receive feedback from their peers and the instructors.

01;14;00;08 - 01;14;05;06
Dr. Violet Kulo
So we've built in quite a few areas where they interact and collaborate with each other.

01;14;05;22 - 01;14;32;18
Erin Hagar
Well, you mentioned their research, Violet, which is a perfect Segway. You're your first cohort in the PhD program is is just beginning their research phase. So they've gone through their their coursework over the last two years and now they're entering the phase where their focus is is on their independent research projects. So can you tell us a little bit about some of the things that your students are investigating and looking to explore?

01;14;32;24 - 01;15;00;29
Dr. Violet Kulo
Absolutely. And this is very exciting to see that the first cohort is year three and they're doing the independent research and some of them are already at or progressed onto like a candidacy. So just to share a few projects that our students are working on, one of them is the House Students Achievement Goal Orientation in a team based learning classroom differs with great that's great advisors and graded individual readiness assurance tests.

01;15;00;29 - 01;15;29;04
Dr. Violet Kulo
And then the other research project is barriers impacting interprofessional collaboration between physical therapists and dentists who treat patients with orofacial pain. And this project is also looking at those students who have had AP training, who had AP training in their in their graduate training. Then the other project is exploring the landscape of design and delivery of sexual health education in the doctor physical therapy curriculum.

01;15;29;13 - 01;15;42;03
Dr. Violet Kulo
So these are these are just a few examples, but they can see a wide range of projects ranging from curricular design to pedagogy to interprofessional education and how it translates to practice.

01;15;42;19 - 01;16;02;06
Erin Hagar
That's so interesting. It's going to be fun to see the ways that these students make an impact in in what we know about HPV and if in in a few years time when their research is completed. So, Cristina, going forward, how do you see this program evolving and how do you see your graduates making an impact on these professions?

01;16;02;24 - 01;16;31;25
Dr. Christina Cestone
Yeah, Erin, you know, that's an interesting question because it is so early in the program and so I can only look to other HP programs nationally and internationally and see where those learners have made an impact in their field and so as Violet describes the number of different research projects, it's really also representing the number of professions that are represented in this program.

01;16;31;25 - 01;17;00;19
Dr. Christina Cestone
So we currently have eight professions represented from the Allied Health Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy pay fields, and we think that's only going to grow in terms of numbers and diversity of professions. So I would say first, that's where I see it going. I think we're we're at about 30 students right now at the third year of the curriculum. I think we see enrollment expanding well beyond this.

01;17;00;19 - 01;17;32;07
Dr. Christina Cestone
Once we have these other degree offerings in play in terms of the certificate and the we move into the second year of the master's program, I also feel like we will grow our faculty. They'll be increased opportunities for research. And as we build our research portfolio, it's sort of like research begets research and projects. We get projects and students, we get students because there's just more known about our program over time.

01;17;32;21 - 01;17;50;11
Dr. Christina Cestone
And we really feel that that's the growth areas, is the research impact that you and be will have on the health professions, education, landscape and then the growth of the program overall, both in terms of representation and profession and numbers of learners.

01;17;50;22 - 01;18;17;13
Dr. Karen Gordes
Kind of in response to what Cristina was saying, another impact that I see is that these graduates can be change agents in their own educational program. Many of them are faculty currently in their discipline, and they are now expert educator. So they have the capacity to change or evolve the educational program in which they are delivering their clinical content.

01;18;17;13 - 01;18;49;25
Dr. Karen Gordes
And so they came as clinical experts, but now they also are education experts. And that infusion of those two genres and one faculty member is really such an enhancement to the educational program that those individuals are now serving as faculty. And I think the other benefit is, is that they have the capacity to increase the amount of literature that's being produced under the umbrella of education with their within their specific discipline.

01;18;50;08 - 01;19;18;01
Dr. Karen Gordes
So I think there's a lot of clinical research that's being generated in these various disciplines and a lot of times the education research is on the side and now they can be individuals that are are kind of pushing the envelope that we need to have that same amount of dedication in time and distribution of literature that's in the educational side of health professions, education.

01;19;18;12 - 01;19;34;07
Dr. Karen Gordes
So I see kind of two impacts of these graduates change agents in the delivery of the educational curriculum within their discipline, but also primary conscious contributors to the literature within their field, but under the umbrella of education. Yeah.

01;19;34;23 - 01;20;01;25
Erin Hagar
And I could see where that would be so important because the volume of clinical information that is being produced is, I think, rapidly outpacing the the ability to teach it. All right. So educators really need to know what kind of skills can we impart in our students so that the students themselves can can make sense of this clinical literature and all of these new treatments and things like that.

01;20;01;25 - 01;20;24;08
Erin Hagar
So it I could see how teaching is very much going to be impacted by the sheer volume of of clinical information that we have now and change a lot because of that. So what would you say to a clinician who's listening, who is debating whether or not this this is the right path for them. They're maybe thinking about becoming an educator.

01;20;24;08 - 01;20;34;06
Erin Hagar
Maybe they're a preceptor, right now. How would you how would you encourage them to think about a decision like this to to get a new new training in health professions, education.

01;20;34;24 - 01;21;01;21
Dr. Karen Gordes
For those that are interested in pursuing a career, in teaching, in health professions, education. This provides the missing link. Again, you are an expert clinician and you know how to engage in evidence based practice under the umbrella of health professions. But you also or should be engaging in evidence based education if you're going to pursue teaching within health professions.

01;21;01;21 - 01;21;07;26
Dr. Karen Gordes
And so this is that missing link that you don't have from your educational background that got you to where you are.

01;21;08;05 - 01;21;16;16
Erin Hagar
That's great. Is there anything else about this program or about the field of health, professions, education that anyone would like to share?

01;21;17;00 - 01;21;48;22
Dr. Violet Kulo
Yes. One of the things that we've we've had we hear time and time again in the program is their immediate application that the students are doing. They learn something and they immediately applied in in their classrooms. So it's really gratifying to know that they're there. They there's an impact right away. And then we also have projects with which we try our best to make projects that for them to do projects or to applicable to whatever they're doing in their programs.

01;21;48;29 - 01;22;12;21
Dr. Violet Kulo
So if they're doing like a program evaluation project, they might do a project that is that will help them to evaluate their program. Then when they're doing like a literature review, they also can present that at a conference. So we up a project that will they can use them in not only as an assignment, but also they can get scholarship out of it.

01;22;13;12 - 01;22;20;10
Erin Hagar
That's great. So it's very practical and very applied in addition to the depth that they're getting and the exposure to the literature.

01;22;20;21 - 01;22;53;04
Dr. Christina Cestone
And also to add, you know, it's important to emphasize and a lot of the learners we interview and who apply and expressed an interest in the program, ask this question. You're can I do it? Can I do it? Well, I'm a practicing health professional, and I am here to say absolutely it is a manageable program for all of our students are currently full time employed in their health profession and or as faculty in addition to clinical practice.

01;22;53;04 - 01;23;19;05
Dr. Christina Cestone
And so it's a very different kind of program than their primary training. Yet at the same time it's manageable while working full time. And that is the beauty of the curricular design, the mentorship that they receive as well as the asynchronous nature of coursework. And so it is designed for flexibility and it's not, you know, a piece of cake.

01;23;19;15 - 01;23;27;13
Dr. Christina Cestone
It's obviously a lot of work. But what we're hearing from our learners is that it is manageable and doable while maintaining full employment.

01;23;28;02 - 01;23;49;13
Erin Hagar
Well, I can't wait to have the three of you on maybe in a couple of years. And we can hear about all of the exciting projects that have crossed the finish line from your PhD students. We can hear more about students who have started at the certificate level, in the master's level, and hear how how those curricula have affected them and their professional development.

01;23;49;22 - 01;24;09;14
Erin Hagar
So thank you for sharing this. I hope folks listening who are interested will consider this program. It's a wonderful opportunity to merge the fields of health care and education and really just advance our understand ing and training the next generation of of health professionals. So thank you all for the work you do and thanks for the time you spent today.

01;24;09;29 - 01;24;10;10
Dr. Violet Kulo
Thank you.

01;24;10;18 - 01;24;13;25
Dr. Karen Gordes
Thank you, Aaron.

01;24;13;25 - 01;24;30;13
Erin Hagar
Thank you for joining us today on moving the needle visit us at U. Maryland dot edu slash FC tell all to hear additional episodes. Leave us feedback or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

 

01;00;00;01 - 01;00;30;27
Erin Hager
Welcome to Moving the Needle. Casual conversations about ways big and small to impact student learning. Brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Erin Hager. Let's move the needle. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Moving the Needle. Today, we're talking about the culture of academic departments. Every institution is different, of course, in the culture, in one department may be very different from another.

01;00;31;08 - 01;00;56;12
Erin Hager
But how did these cultures come to be? How are they formed and fostered and maintained over time? What impact does a culture have on individual faculty members and how does that culture trickle down and impact the student experience? Finally, what happens when a department is intentional about creating a culture of kindness? Let me introduce you to our guest.

01;00;56;24 - 01;01;22;24
Erin Hager
Dr. Glen Canares has dental degrees from New York University and the University of Washington Seattle Children's Hospital. He serves as clinical director for the Division of Pediatric Dentistry and the Assistant Program Director of the Pediatric Dental Residency. He is also the president of the Maryland Academy of Pediatric Dentistry. I think the way that Glen structures his own bio gives a great sense of how he lives out his personal values.

01;01;23;05 - 01;01;47;23
Erin Hager
In addition to listing the impressive credentials that I just shared, his bio also says this Dr. Glen Canares is a pediatric dentist, an educator and a professional speaker. His personal mission, as you and the faculty, is to inspire students, patients and colleagues to become the best versions of themselves. He is intentional about creating a supportive environment of trust and leads with kindness.

01;01;48;14 - 01;02;13;16
Erin Hager
Dr. Canares is an American born child of Filipino immigrants and was raised in a blue collar community. Through his upbringing, he learned that no dream is too big to go after, but also that no work is ever beneath him. He values authenticity and empowerment. Viewing the world through a lens of realistic optimism. I think you'll hear Glenn's core values and this sense of realistic optimism.

01;02;13;20 - 01;02;17;29
Erin Hager
Loud and clear in this conversation. Glenn, welcome to Moving the Needle.

01;02;18;13 - 01;02;21;06
Glenn Canares
My pleasure to be here. Yeah, let's do it.

01;02;21;18 - 01;02;33;06
Erin Hager
Let's do it. Okay, let's start by talking about academic culture broadly. Let's talk about your experience with academic cultures, maybe before you got to UMD. How would you describe them?

01;02;33;17 - 01;02;56;10
Glenn Canares
So I feel like an academic culture is like any other place. I know it is academics, but it could be let me say it like this is that I think if you're an office or community health center or wherever might be. Every area has its own set of like culture where one place you could work in a hospital, but it might be completely different than another one.

01;02;56;22 - 01;03;25;19
Glenn Canares
So I say it like that because generally my my experiences and I don't know if it's built in to how we develop as academics, but I'll say this, it it feels like there's, there's a level of performance, right? So there's a high performance kind of feel or a low performance or anywhere in between. And I feel like that tends to be the, the dimension that a lot of cultures look at in academia.

01;03;25;19 - 01;03;47;25
Glenn Canares
Is this someone publishing their they on their way to get promoted so hyper who are they doing well with this so high performance low performance. But I'm going to add in this other thing that I've I've observed for myself is this idea of what is the trust level at? Is it a low or moderate? A high and I, I share this is that I've worked at other places.

01;03;47;25 - 01;04;17;13
Glenn Canares
I've been other places. And maybe it isn't necessarily just academia, but the idea that I don't know if I've always felt that level of trust and that tend to be the has a huge influence in terms of what it means, its effect on performance. So I would say in general, it's kind of like this high moderate performing depending on where you are in terms of performance and then this level of trust that hasn't been the highest.

01;04;17;14 - 01;04;18;24
Glenn Canares
I'm just going to call it like that.

01;04;19;07 - 01;04;43;05
Erin Hager
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and since since on this podcast, we focus so much on teaching and learning. How would you say that that level of trust, whether it's high or low, how does that trickle down to the students of a faculty member feels within their department, within their division, varying levels of of trust and safety within that, how do you think that ultimately trickles down to the students?

01;04;43;17 - 01;05;10;23
Glenn Canares
So I'll share my thoughts, and I think it's also grounded in some of my experiences. I think there's something really nice about being in in postgraduate education, right? So beyond the undergraduate level, because you ultimately work with a lot of really successful students, these are students that have made it to that almost next level. You know, I when I first started and I'm kind of I'll get to your questioner.

01;05;10;23 - 01;05;29;28
Glenn Canares
And so I just want to just share a little background. When I first started, I was I was really into the idea, like, I'm really excited. I get to work with the top one, two or 3% of students because they're they're at this next level going beyond their undergraduate education. And that was my understanding, right, that that is my baseline expectation.

01;05;29;28 - 01;05;58;25
Glenn Canares
And what I've noticed is how I think it trickles down when you have a lower trust environment is that gets muted. You know, when you have a low trust environment, I don't care how it's something, I don't care. It's just what I've noticed is that as high performing as someone could potentially be or already is, that can be muted because you're worried about making a mistake and making sure no one finds out or I've seen it where I call it the blame game.

01;05;58;25 - 01;06;25;00
Glenn Canares
It's never anyone's fault, but it might be something that could be external factors. It could be something else, it could be how things were communicated. But there's the blame game type of thing. And we have brilliant students here. I mean, there's this look at this is our future. And when there's a low trust environment, the other thing is, I think any sort of creativity and innovation tends to get more stifled.

01;06;25;22 - 01;06;28;06
Erin Hager
Yeah, for fear of making mistakes. Do you think.

01;06;28;25 - 01;06;52;26
Glenn Canares
That's that would be my thoughts is that, you know, because I felt it myself, I'm kind of sharing my experiences, but also what I've observed as well. I think it it's that thing. Well, I got to be perfect and correct. And since there's low trust, there's there's not the trust is that this could potentially be a teaching moment for me, whether it's internal or external or likely it should we should be both the faculty as well as the student.

01;06;54;01 - 01;07;13;29
Erin Hager
It's so interesting. You know, my I'm thinking about a personal example. My family were were a big sports family. My son plays sports at a pretty elite level. And it makes me think of the impact of a coach because you can have the most talented players, the most elite of elite, the all stars, the selected from the best teams across the country.

01;07;13;29 - 01;07;34;03
Erin Hager
And if you put them in an environment with a coach, that that scares them, then you can see it. You can see that on the field. You can see that kind of stifled, tense performance level. And I think you're circling this back and bringing this back to that feeling of trust really resonates, I think, in that environment, too.

01;07;34;14 - 01;08;07;28
Glenn Canares
Thank you for that an example, because I do see the parallels in the sense that if someone is learning something new, I would almost argue that the trust level needs to be much higher because there's a higher probability of things breaking down. So the difference between a bunch of little kids running around to learn to play soccer versus that at the professional level, the trust, the way trust is in let me put this the way trust becomes can can become a higher level, maybe a different method depending on the level.

01;08;08;10 - 01;08;18;23
Glenn Canares
But ultimately, I agree with you. I think that when you have less of that, it results in, you know, going on autopilot or more stifled play. Right. And it affects performance.

01;08;18;23 - 01;08;41;13
Erin Hager
So yeah, it's so interesting. And it's, it's it's interesting to think about that in the context of, like you said, these graduate students who have really are the cream of the crop in terms of the, the, you know, moving along the their educational journeys. So talk to us a little bit now about the the culture you're a part of now, the department you're in.

01;08;42;23 - 01;08;53;26
Erin Hager
Tell us about it. When we talked earlier, you mentioned some core values inside that division. And could you tell us a bit about those and and how those are communicated?

01;08;54;11 - 01;09;20;07
Glenn Canares
Yes, very gladly. So I okay, let me put it like this. You know how when you I'm not one that really likes talking about myself that much, but when you really love something and you're just like, Oh my God, I could go on and on and that's how I feel about my division. So I'm in the Division of Pediatric Dentistry here at the School of Dentistry and I just I'm trying to find the right words.

01;09;21;03 - 01;09;57;03
Glenn Canares
It is without hyperbole, Erin. I truly mean it. This is the best environment I've ever worked in for what I need to do. And like I'm talking from my first job in McDonald's when I was 15 years old, all the way to my current position now as as a faculty member here. And so to answer your first part of that question, I think what the really interesting thing is and and it what I I'm sure I can talk about this more but really led from my my chairman is that there's this idea of leading with kindness here.

01;09;57;24 - 01;10;27;10
Glenn Canares
And I want to be very specific about kindness. Kindness is not being nice. Being nice to me is what I also want to be nice. So let me set that aside. But being nice is, is people pleasing is trying to, you know, what's the word, just people pleasing. Like I want to just make you not feel uncomfortable, that sort of thing that, that, that's being nice to somebody and I think that's still good.

01;10;28;06 - 01;10;49;11
Glenn Canares
But truly leaning into the idea of leading with kindness and setting is that as the first and foremost in our division, which is when you lead with kindness, we lead with what can I do to be helpful, right? Whether it's to the division, whether it's to one of my co faculty, whether it's to our students or residents, what can I do to be helpful?

01;10;49;18 - 01;11;14;27
Glenn Canares
And that, I think, has set the tone for how we interact with each other because being helpful. May how do I put this? There's, there's nuance to it, right? So as a as a general broad stroke, it's it's trying to help elevate somebody else's career or just help them out on a project or even help cover clinic for a short that's that's helpful.

01;11;14;27 - 01;11;37;07
Glenn Canares
But it doesn't mean that it can't be uncomfortable or that you have hard you can't have hard conversations or have to, if especially from a leadership standpoint when we're working or a teaching standpoint, that sometimes we need to guide our students or each other really in a way that says, hey, I think this will be helpful, and maybe they don't see it, maybe they don't agree.

01;11;38;04 - 01;11;43;01
Glenn Canares
So I'm hoping that makes sense that the difference between kindness and being nice.

01;11;43;10 - 01;12;06;06
Erin Hager
Absolutely. I it makes me think of the work of Brené Brown and one of her lines is clear is kind of right. And so sometimes giving that, that direct feedback that, you know, seeing what needs to be said, that clarity, you know, that is kindness rather than pretending like there's no problems and pretending like everything is okay and just kind of hoping nobody notices.

01;12;07;06 - 01;12;36;14
Erin Hager
So I think that makes absolute sense. But I'd like to dig in a little bit on this idea about helpfulness because when you've got a big department and you've got multiple people with different personalities, what's helpful to one is, is, you know, helpful, looks different, right? And so what interests me about this is that this idea of helpfulness, does it does it come from a set of share, like a shared vision for where the department is going?

01;12;36;15 - 01;12;45;15
Erin Hager
Like we're all we're all different. We've all got different careers. But our our ship is sailing in this direction. And so I understand helpfulness in light of that.

01;12;45;27 - 01;13;08;03
Glenn Canares
I agree. I think that it does need to be paired up. Right, because you can be super helpful. But if it's just a if it's if it's not in in alignment, it's just really helpful people to work with. I agree with you. There's a way that it needs to follow something that shared vision the way we kind of you know, I'm sharing this because this is a conversation.

01;13;08;03 - 01;13;30;15
Glenn Canares
This is kind of the daily. Daily, it's embedded in how we perceive things and where we want to go. And to our chairman through the other faculty here, it's it's kind of rooted in values and core values and the way we approach this, you know, I've been here for five years full time. I actually just had my last month was my five year work anniversary, very exciting.

01;13;30;26 - 01;13;50;21
Glenn Canares
And with the values you and B already had values. You know, we I know we've changed. I think within the last year they were modified. But before that, we had another set of six values, a five or six, I believe. And we we looked at them and yes, of course, we want to live all the values and do all those things.

01;13;50;21 - 01;14;11;02
Glenn Canares
But we looked at and which ones resonate most for what we need to do for our division, because where we were five years ago is different than where we are now versus even the beginning of the pandemic. And at the time we said, hey, you know, the three of the values that you and B says was accountability, excellence and collaboration.

01;14;11;02 - 01;14;35;11
Glenn Canares
And we're going to lean into that. So how can I be helpful? How can I be kind when it comes to being accountable to to promote excellence and to collaborate? And that's where we focus. And, you know, at the time and I'm sharing my own personal experience from five years ago, we are we are a leaner division. We we in the past few years, a couple of years, we've actually hired a couple more full time faculty.

01;14;35;11 - 01;14;55;26
Glenn Canares
But we were a leaner division and we still have the stress of the like, oh, my gosh, we've got to get all the stuff that we have to run courses we have to cover clinic, we have to do all these things. And we still had all those pressures. But by leaning to that, it gave us the focus on how to be helpful to our division, to each other, to ourselves.

01;14;56;18 - 01;15;24;29
Glenn Canares
And what's really kind of cool is that throughout this journey, and this is my observation that we've been very clear about those three values to lean into from you and be that for the next over the years, what I've noticed is that there is now curiosity, harmony and service. These are values that I almost would feel are an extension once you've leaned into those, and this is for our division when we leaned into those three, now we're kind of expanding it.

01;15;24;29 - 01;15;30;24
Glenn Canares
And now, now these are things that I hope among us are also being transferred down to our students and our residents.

01;15;31;03 - 01;15;44;22
Erin Hager
Yeah, that's so interesting. It's almost like once once that foundation of those first three values had been laid, it it provides good, solid footing for some of these other benefits to open up.

01;15;45;10 - 01;16;07;25
Glenn Canares
Right. Right. And, you know, I will add this, Erin, what's really cool about it is that I don't want anyone to think it's been a perfect smooth ride, right? It hasn't. But what's cool about it is that, you know, when something feels off, right, whether it's it's just something it has it feels off today. And I mean that in a bigger so that we we can understand that personally.

01;16;07;25 - 01;16;28;26
Glenn Canares
But when I say that in a bigger sense, if something's off about where things are going right and just like something's off me are just our students aren't responding as well. Or there's tension here that I'm trying to figure out between faculty members or whatever it might be. It's nice to go back. It's a nice place to go back and say, okay, accountability, excellence, collaboration.

01;16;29;21 - 01;16;36;28
Glenn Canares
How can I be helpful? How can I be kind, right? And then that can inform our next decisions and how to bring it back.

01;16;37;06 - 01;16;56;29
Erin Hager
Yeah. And it also just the, the vulnerability to articulate that you notice something's off, right? There must be a culture of trust to go back to to the first thing you mentioned, to be able to say something feels a little wonky here, like what's what's going on rather than just again, brushing it under the rug, hoping, knowing it picks up on the same vibe.

01;16;57;25 - 01;17;03;22
Glenn Canares
Yeah. Yeah. Like rather than be nice about and saying, oh, everything's good. Yeah, exactly. I 1% agree.

01;17;04;01 - 01;17;27;08
Erin Hager
Oh, so interesting. So talk to us a little bit about how you got to this place. Did did this emphasis on core values and and kindness and helpfulness, did that happen organically? Was it a top down be nice mandate or through some kind of experience? Like how did your division get here?

01;17;27;08 - 01;18;08;25
Glenn Canares
So it's because we're not perfect. That's that's my overall answer. And I have some there are a couple key things, but it's because we we know we're not perfect and probably never will be and we're people and things are going to there's always going to be something that makes it hard. So the first this is my first one of the first experiences I it almost made it forced it to happen was there was an accreditation visit and this was, I guess 2018 and this would be there's a creditors for our school, there's a creditors for medicine, you know, for the whole campus hospitals, etc., etc..

01;18;08;25 - 01;18;19;18
Glenn Canares
But it's a stressful situation. So for anyone who's listening, who has ever had to be part of that, it is stressful. It's literally palpable tension. People are walking around. It's it's stressful.

01;18;20;01 - 01;18;30;12
Erin Hager
Yeah. I almost think that we should cut in like the Jaws music when you say that there was an accreditation visit bump, bump, bump, right. So that the.

01;18;30;22 - 01;18;57;26
Glenn Canares
The yeah, yeah, yeah. It was stressful. So but you got to remember, I'm a new academic, right? I'm fresh to this. And there have been people in the part of the division and how do I put this so with our division. So the creditors go through, they evaluate our programs, all these different things. And for anybody who's been involved, I think you have to have a framework for that.

01;18;59;14 - 01;19;27;00
Glenn Canares
And then another accreditation. There were a couple of questions by the visitors about part of one of our programs are programs for the for the division without going into too much detail. And there were some things they were concerned about. And the thing was, is this is how do I put this? We could have been like, well, it's it's on the chairman or the director of that program.

01;19;27;00 - 01;19;49;09
Glenn Canares
Like whatever we're we're going to I don't know, we'll just leave it to them. And, you know, if if the something hits the fan, then we're like, okay, it's on them because they're they're in charge. But we got this notification about there being possibly an issue right in one of our programs. And how are we going to address that and how are we going to respond to that?

01;19;50;03 - 01;20;05;10
Glenn Canares
Was it 4:00, 430 in the afternoon? I mean, it's a that's what I mean. It's not like this was like, oh, it is top of the morning on the second day and we have all day to work on this. We are fresh. We've been covering clinic or we've been you know, you have to teach some classes, that sort of thing.

01;20;05;10 - 01;20;24;14
Glenn Canares
So all that stuff doesn't stop when accreditors come as the end of the day and we find out about this. And what happened is that rather than leave our chairman or program high and dry, we said, okay, what do we need to do? And I remember and this is academics, by the way. This is not like we're not going to residencies.

01;20;24;20 - 01;20;54;13
Glenn Canares
I remember for two nights we stayed till like eight or 9 p.m. and I am not advocating staying late and crunching it and but the idea is that we came together and using what we could have and getting the information we need to respond appropriately. And I'm not trying to be vague, but I because I don't want to go into the details of it since it was part of accreditation, but we were able to properly respond to the accreditors in a way that made sense that there's like, Oh, that is why the program does it like this is the information they were going to get.

01;20;54;13 - 01;21;18;07
Glenn Canares
So therefore it is not an issue when it comes to accreditation. So we went from the potential of being I'm just going to put out there in serious trouble, not trouble, but something we're going to have to mitigate and respond to, to something that they understood because we came together in that moment and that for the first and in and there was this sense of, my goodness, when it really mattered, we came together.

01;21;18;21 - 01;21;47;24
Glenn Canares
Yeah. So there was this level of trust and it enhanced and I will say that in, in fact, in this really high performance for this quote unquote crisis situation. Yeah. And I as I talk about that now, that was really special to me because like I had said from my first job to, you know, all the different jobs in between in other places in dentistry, whether in practice or in academics, that was that that it was different.

01;21;48;12 - 01;22;10;18
Glenn Canares
I palpably felt something was different. And from what I understand and there's something in a shared struggle. But like I said, depending on your environment, sometimes it's like, all right, well, you know, it's not my responsibility. You know, it's tough everywhere versus, okay, let's make this make this work. And for that, that in my core said, okay, this place is special.

01;22;11;00 - 01;22;13;14
Glenn Canares
There's something going on here and how do we make it better?

01;22;14;05 - 01;22;33;20
Erin Hager
It's such a great story because, I mean, it truly is a crisis moment. Right. And it could have gone 17 different, worse ways. But but what I think is so powerful, too, is that that sense of collaboration and that sense of we're not leaving anyone in the lurch, no program directors left behind, like we're just going to figure this all out.

01;22;33;29 - 01;22;54;18
Erin Hager
But you you also had that immediate positive feedback in the sense that you that you were able to cut that problem off at the pass. You know, you were really able to resolve it. And so I wonder if just kind of that, you know, I'm just speculating here, but just that that energy, that adrenaline and and then to have it be like, yes, that worked.

01;22;54;29 - 01;22;58;08
Erin Hager
You know, this this approach really can work.

01;22;58;15 - 01;22;59;28
Glenn Canares
Yeah, I agree. I agree. Yeah.

01;23;00;10 - 01;23;24;15
Erin Hager
Yeah, that's such a good story. So, you know, you kind of had this crisis moment. Everyone, you know, there's this epiphany of of this sense of collaboration and that really seems like it. It took hold and stuck around right after that. What do you think are some of the day to day impacts of this culture that it has for you personally?

01;23;24;29 - 01;23;31;12
Erin Hager
What what benefits do you think it brings you as a as a professional and as a human loaded question?

01;23;31;12 - 01;23;57;11
Glenn Canares
I love it. Loaded question. To answer that, let me give a little bit of context, Arun. My answer is that so right. Crisis happened, crisis averted. We came together Kumbaya. We're we're this wonderful group, right. The thing is, what was what's been interesting about the last five years in this division is for me, is that it keeps getting tested.

01;23;58;11 - 01;24;20;11
Glenn Canares
Right. This idea that core crises there then, I mean, COVID was worldwide crises, but it affected us individually. You know, we had we're in division that we're both clinically and also died tactically when the students so had all sorts of different effects. So it kept getting tested. And that idea of like, are we really that much together? Right?

01;24;20;11 - 01;24;53;19
Glenn Canares
So because that kept getting tested, it kept reinforcing it. Does that make sense here because of that being tested and crises continue to happen? By the way, I don't want to I'm not naive. And we're dealing with something now, but because it became tested and it became just more embodied, what it's actually created and I'm going to use this word my term used all the time, is this creative space for our division and that, Oh man, I like it.

01;24;54;15 - 01;25;19;14
Glenn Canares
And it's more recent, but has this beautiful creative space because yes, we're still doing on the day to day. Yes, we still do the crisis. But there's this sense of like, well, we're going to figure it out, work together and do it and see how we can be most helpful. Right? So we've got that there and that allows the space for creative and that that is amazing because that is the thing I was talking about earlier with the students, right?

01;25;19;14 - 01;25;56;21
Glenn Canares
This idea of like you've got these really high performing students. I would say, you know, I, I believe are pretty good, fairly accomplished faculty. Right. And it's this idea that now you're allowing for this creative space, this innovation, and that's come about for us in curriculum design that's come about in the way we as best we can in terms of clinical teaching on the floor, on the ability to to free up more time in thinking, regarding even administration like administration, not just the, not the fun stuff of teaching and and and clinical work, but truly the even the administration, right?

01;25;56;21 - 01;26;21;00
Glenn Canares
The, the idea of like, oh, we can actually get efficient at consensus and move forward. Yeah. And because it doesn't stop, it isn't that the problems will never stop. Issues will never stop, but it's really kind of nice. And then you get and here's what's cool. I think that the chairman, the deans, the assistant, you know, all everyone there, they're oh, these are our strategy people.

01;26;21;00 - 01;26;41;17
Glenn Canares
But what this is allowed is this creative space to say, Oh, there can be strategy and vision and leading into the future and aligning at the level of a non dean or non chairman at that faculty level. Right. You know, we're the ones that are curriculum design in teaching and you know, and in the clinics and all that stuff.

01;26;41;17 - 01;27;07;23
Glenn Canares
So it's it's really course, it's it's really nice to see how people come and look and then go after what they truly care about. I mean, I mean, we're a university if you can do research in areas you actually are passionate about, but you're allowed that space and actually encouraged to be in that space and or whether it's teaching or just whatever, I don't know, exciting.

01;27;08;07 - 01;27;32;00
Erin Hager
I just as you talk, I just keep picturing this this net under trapeze artists, right. That that the culture in my head, the culture that your division has built, really serves as the safety net so that the people in the division can do the flips and make the leaps and and try these things and know that, you know, when crisis comes, if we fall, you know, that net's going to be there.

01;27;32;00 - 01;27;59;26
Erin Hager
Or if we have to pivot for a moment and deal with COVID, deal with accreditation, whatever it is that you'll still have that freedom to eventually go back and keep trying those new things. It's it's interesting. I think I think it's easy to think of culture and mission and creativity as kind of moving in parallel. But the way you describe it, it's really the culture really fostered that they're they're interwoven in a way that it seems like could be hard to untangle at this point.

01;28;00;09 - 01;28;23;05
Glenn Canares
Yes, I'm just processing that analogy because it's beautiful and I'm not considered in that way. And I love it because that's exactly how it feels. That's right. That a trans trapeze artist job is to not fall off the handle that they're holding on. I don't know, trust trapeze artist terms, but for any trapeze artist listening like sorry and butchering it.

01;28;23;23 - 01;28;25;09
Erin Hager
My back to the bar thinking that's what.

01;28;25;09 - 01;28;46;18
Glenn Canares
It's yeah this is the part you hold on to the bar, right? Yeah. Good. So really the job of a trapeze are is not to fall off the bar, but what makes a trapeze artist beautiful? Their work amazing is the flips is approaching danger and catching the other one, you know, and doing all these different things. So that's.

01;28;46;18 - 01;29;03;15
Glenn Canares
That's how I love your analogy. I'm sorry. I'm like kind of like love of this is that we get to do the flips and yes, sometimes we fall, right. It's not perfect. But there is that net and I know long and it's almost like that's exactly said, we're always going to hold on to the bar when we need to.

01;29;03;15 - 01;29;14;21
Glenn Canares
That's our job, right? Not to follow and we'll continue to do that. But now we can start to start playing and then make I love it. Yeah. What we what we already do. Even more beautiful, almost even artistic.

01;29;14;22 - 01;29;23;15
Erin Hager
Yeah. We're just. We're just going to, like, turn into circus performers. Yes. And a health profession setting. And it's a good thing we have lots of doctors around. So when we fall down, you know, that's true.

01;29;24;01 - 01;29;27;15
Glenn Canares
I'm in pediatric dentistry, so we got to play, you know, we've got to be interesting for these kids.

01;29;27;25 - 01;29;35;19
Erin Hager
So. Exactly right. But do it for the kids. How about the students? Do you have a story about how that this culture impacts them?

01;29;36;14 - 01;30;09;25
Glenn Canares
So I've seen it extend out to our students as well. This this idea of leading when kindness and again, like how I had said, it's the idea that kindness is being helpful. Right? Not just being nice to protect the students, you know, ego or whatever, but more that it's truly to be helpful. So I was actually working with one of our residents, my resident had gone through a particularly difficult clinical case where she had to do some extractions on a kid that had infections and just poor behavior is really challenging.

01;30;09;25 - 01;30;30;14
Glenn Canares
And when she was done, you know, wasn't perfect. She was newer. But I had asked her, I go, So are you ready to hear feedback? What was really kind of cool is that there was another resident from another division that walked by and stopped to talk to me later in the day and says, I heard something that I've never heard before.

01;30;30;27 - 01;30;56;14
Glenn Canares
You asked. I won't say the resident's name, but you asked her if she was ready to hear feedback in the entire time she had this other resident in another division had been a dental student, had been a resident, had never heard a faculty member ask anyone that. So I think it all gets extend from that idea of starting with from a place of kindness and to be helpful and when you really lean into that.

01;30;56;14 - 01;31;13;25
Glenn Canares
And so that idea is that while I can be most helpful when assuming it's not one of those immediate things where you have to be like This was an urgent situation, this was a critical thing that we need to address it right now. But in most other situations is something we can do when there's when they're ready to receive in here.

01;31;14;10 - 01;31;38;27
Erin Hager
So I'm thinking about the faculty and academic leaders who are listening to this and thinking about their own cultures. And maybe maybe they're thinking there's some room for improvement in their own in their own culture. What would you recommend to them? How would you suggest they start start thinking about it, start start building this? I mean, we can't all have, you know, like a orchestrate a crisis moment to get us there.

01;31;38;27 - 01;31;47;19
Erin Hager
But are there things that you've learned, you know, in your five years about culture that that you think could could help a department or a division?

01;31;47;19 - 01;32;07;04
Glenn Canares
So I do have a couple of thoughts on it and something as I've learned as a educator, as an even and not even as and also as a clinician, is that, for instance, with our patients, when we we tell them, you got to brush your teeth, you got to fly, you got to do this, you got to do this, you know, eat less sugary foods.

01;32;07;19 - 01;32;29;07
Glenn Canares
You got to get it right. We can give them ten different things. And you know what? It's actually more likely that our patients or the parents of our patients are going to do none of it because it's overwhelming versus saying, hey, your job is to instead of. So even if they're not brushing or they're only brushing your job, brush one tonight.

01;32;29;18 - 01;32;46;04
Glenn Canares
That's it. And the next time I see you will see how well you're doing that. And if you're able to do that, then we'll work on how you do it or adding it to the second time and that we found to be more effective. So in that same way, that's how I answer your question, is that I think there are two components.

01;32;46;04 - 01;33;06;19
Glenn Canares
And the first one I think is actually for anyone that isn't in a position to or or anyone that just wants things to change in a way like this is it all starts with ourselves, right? We can tell other people we can do better, but a true such setting ourselves and that's what I love with the idea of leading with the kindness and kindness.

01;33;06;19 - 01;33;24;20
Glenn Canares
Again, all we say is that it's not about being nice or easy to work with or whatever. It's about doing something helpful for somebody else. And the other part will be about the values to help align it, kind of what we talked about. But I would encourage that, you know, habits, right habits happen when you do more of it.

01;33;24;20 - 01;33;50;25
Glenn Canares
So if you are in a position and I, you know, I can imagine if you're close, you're like, oh, we only need a little bit. I also have been in areas where it's like the it feels like the opposite, but it all starts with us. So I would encourage is that find something you can be helpful with and I'll share these examples of how I've received them or I have done for others is that share an opportunity to join in on a research project, right.

01;33;50;25 - 01;34;28;02
Glenn Canares
So especially if a if for those of us on the more clinical side, that's a harder thing to to jump on to to get research going while we're also covering clinics or teaching or grading, creating and grading exams. So that's kindness. Can I you know, my chairman did connect some with the mentor or if you see a project that maybe, you know, it's too much for your plate, you know, this is I think this is a really nice example of kindness because even in my time and I expect I suspect some listeners are out there, too, is that sometimes it's hard to say no when you have got like, Oh, can you do this?

01;34;28;02 - 01;34;47;01
Glenn Canares
He's like, Oh, great, I can do it, I can do it. But truly, it's one of those where you can say, you know, I don't know if I have enough time for that or it maybe not in your area of strength, but I think one of my colleagues would be a great fit. That is, number one, being kind to yourself because you're you're not overwhelming yourself, but also being kind of to your colleagues.

01;34;47;19 - 01;35;11;16
Glenn Canares
Right. If there isn't. So here's another thing is that I you had mentioned earlier, Erin, that idea of vulnerability, right. So, too, if we're I love the trapezoid, so see where trapeze artist or just continue just to hold on to the bar. And we I want to try a flip for the first time and that might be a curriculum innovation or a way that you might want to do teaching clinics a little different.

01;35;12;22 - 01;35;46;24
Glenn Canares
Is that I think you can be very kind by not, you know, scientific method and us in, you know, research there's there's a natural and it's part of the process of skepticism or criticism because we want to make sure the data that the science is good. But I would I this is what I would say this is a really kind way to do something is that if someone is trying something different, experimenting, if you will, rather than criticize right away or say that won't work, we've tried that before, being kind to me, say, hey, try it out.

01;35;46;24 - 01;36;12;08
Glenn Canares
If you need some feedback, let me know or why something didn't work or why it did work. But I think that's incredibly kind thing and it's a very simple thing, right? The other ones are maybe a bigger ask. That's a very simple one, is that if someone is trying to be a little bit creative or innovative to become better at something that matters, like teaching or research or or being a better provider, anything, you know, be kind in that sense.

01;36;12;16 - 01;36;13;23
Glenn Canares
Support them, encourage them.

01;36;13;25 - 01;36;33;01
Erin Hager
Yeah, almost like sit on your hands a little bit and just let the process unfold, let the flips happen and then and then see what's needed. I love that. And I love the way that you focus that answer on what anybody can do individually. This isn't waiting for a new strategic plan. This isn't waiting for revised core values.

01;36;33;01 - 01;36;56;25
Erin Hager
This is nothing that is passive, and it's nothing that requires anyone to be in a formal leadership role. But it truly is taking leadership initiative to to allow your colleagues the grace of maybe some quiet when they're trying something new or the, you know, some space or to pass along those opportunities to them. I just this is really wonderful.

01;36;57;11 - 01;37;20;22
Glenn Canares
Yeah. Thank you. Or may I add something else? Of course. Thinking, too, is the the other thing that is, again, this is from my observation of things is that we talked about values earlier and like I said, you can be provides literally provides them for us, you know. But again, it's that same idea of focusing on something that we can focus on and maybe do in small steps.

01;37;20;22 - 01;37;43;23
Glenn Canares
And is that, you know, versus like do all six core values or do all eight? It's this idea of find one that especially if you are in a position of leadership formally, you know, pick a core value but not not the three, not just really pick one core value that you think that resonates most, what your division or department needs to achieve and focus on that.

01;37;43;23 - 01;38;03;24
Glenn Canares
And what I mean by that is like, for instance, the the idea of accountability, right? We talked about that earlier. That's really taking responsibility, saying, okay, if this was my issue, I, I got to lean into that. I it's a if it's on me, I got to get it done. Or if something doesn't happen, I'm not going to play the blame game.

01;38;03;24 - 01;38;24;01
Glenn Canares
I'm going to say, okay, this, this is my responsibility, but how can we make it better? So really leaning into whatever that that responsibility is. And here's the second part, especially related. So this is something my chairman did. We when we really just the conversation wasn't he I think we knew it and felt it when I talked about the accreditation story.

01;38;24;19 - 01;38;42;24
Glenn Canares
But over the years we've made it very clear this is what we're focusing on. It wasn't just like, wow, that was we can come together. We're good people. It's like, no, we're really focusing on accountability here. And how is that showing up in how we teach our residents? How is that showing up in what we're doing for getting our our curriculum together?

01;38;43;04 - 01;39;00;05
Glenn Canares
Right. Are we making sure that everything is on time when people ask so that our exams have no problems, that little things like that? Right. That it it plays out in different ways. But focusing on one and the other part of that is that he kept talking about it. I keep talking about other people keep talking about it.

01;39;00;05 - 01;39;12;20
Glenn Canares
And it's this idea that you can have lunch and say, okay, like, I'm not saying let's talk about accountability at today's division meeting. It's Hey, this, this is an experience that I've had and it comes through our time so that it's part of the conversation.

01;39;12;23 - 01;39;13;02
Erin Hager
Yeah.

01;39;13;12 - 01;39;32;05
Glenn Canares
Because I guess I'll be very honest, I know those values because we talk about them, but we can have core values up on a website. We can do all these things, but isn't part of normal conversation and it doesn't have to be. So, Erin, I was accountable today. And, you know, it's just like, hey, I did this. I met my deadlines.

01;39;32;05 - 01;39;53;23
Glenn Canares
Wow. That is, you know, as a leader, reflect that back. Yes. Say that that's a great example of being accountable. Awesome. It's not a simple because you have to listen. You have to be observant. But that's what I might suggest for anyone in a leader position that's really trying to reflect back what you're focusing on so that people see it and that they know you see it.

01;39;53;26 - 01;40;11;05
Erin Hager
Yes. You know. And you notice it more once you're looking for it. You know, that phenomenon where if you're looking, you know, when you're shopping for a new car and you see all the ones that you're you know, that you're considering buying, like, oh, there's like 4 million of these cars out on the street. It's because you've primed your brain to look for them.

01;40;11;05 - 01;40;34;22
Erin Hager
And I feel that that works with with behaviors as well. Right. Like, you know, we're talking about accountability and you're seeing this and then suddenly you have that wonderful positive kick butt feedback loop of, well, now I'm seeing it everywhere I look. And it could be something as simple as the, you know, a message gets passed along in a timely way or, you know, the the big accreditation report is due is turned in a week early, whatever it is.

01;40;34;22 - 01;40;36;25
Erin Hager
And so you notice it in ways big and small.

01;40;38;05 - 01;40;55;26
Glenn Canares
Yes. And, Erin, you are I don't know if this has been reflected back to you, if we're going to talk about this, the you are talented and skilled at analogies. I know because I, I know I drive a Honda pilot and I notice those Honda pilots on the. So you are skilled at analogies.

01;40;56;00 - 01;41;14;27
Erin Hager
Oh, you know, when you have an arts degree in a health professions institution, you got to weave it in wherever you can there. But thank you. I appreciate that so we ask all of our guests this question and it can be related to what we're talking about or something completely different. Is there something now that you think is moving the needle in higher education?

01;41;15;17 - 01;41;42;23
Glenn Canares
Yes. Uh, and in my in my view. So I think professional identity formation is something that's really important. And and I'm sharing this in a way that I think it's it's one of those things that actually if you look at it there, there is a there's some research. I think when we were looking at it's I think nursing has some medicine has some dentistry, not a whole lot.

01;41;42;23 - 01;41;51;25
Glenn Canares
There is a little bit, but and I'm going to I'm going to pull it back. 10,000, what is it, 10,000. You're the analogy, master. Was it.

01;41;52;03 - 01;41;53;07
Erin Hager
10,000 foot view.

01;41;53;14 - 01;42;20;28
Glenn Canares
You. Thank you. Thanks very much. Now I know who to go like. I need an analogy. Let me talk down the 10,000 foot view. So we we have a world where we have so many different opinions. And I get the sense, you know, even with our younger generations, there's this lack of a sense of identity. Right. And and asset the, you know, in human be, like I said, it's just this next level.

01;42;20;29 - 01;42;46;09
Glenn Canares
We're professional schools, you know. And I think that something that maybe was just assumed before, if you are a physician, if you are a lawyer, a social worker, whatever it might be an educator, there is a certain that there was an identity associated with that. And and again, I'm not saying all dentists are the same or whatever, but it's this idea of this professional identity.

01;42;46;22 - 01;43;10;23
Glenn Canares
And I think when we look at the research, it's actually going to be working with some people at my school to to do a scoping working now and doing a scoping review regarding that in dentistry is this idea that we can build that into curricula, right? So we can build that idea of saying, hey, new learners when they're they're more open.

01;43;10;23 - 01;43;29;27
Glenn Canares
And, you know, I don't know what admissions criteria use, but something we use in our residency when we're looking for evidence is how teachable or are these potential residents of ours? And when you have that and you can integrate what it truly means from University of Maryland's idea of professional identity for a dentist or a physician. Let's listen.

01;43;29;27 - 01;43;48;22
Glenn Canares
Corporate and but it's one thing is like, well, we you may say we do that, but I mean, really being intentional about that. Yeah. And then the second part is that I think it's exactly this conversations we've been talking about is this idea that if we teach it, we, you know, what is it again, analogy or sayings? I'm sorry.

01;43;48;22 - 01;44;06;17
Glenn Canares
It's like you got to practice that. You got to practice what you preach, right? So we can teach it. But if we don't do it, but if we are set into our culture and whatever it is, whatever that is, and saying this is what it means to be a general dentist professionally, this is what it means to be a pediatric nurse.

01;44;06;17 - 01;44;36;02
Glenn Canares
This means to be whatever, embodying that and doing that. How do I put students, especially the younger junior? They are smart, they're quick. They're as I don't know if I can say in this podcast, but I can say they they can I think they can spot B.S.. Yeah, you know, you know, and and when we do that, so if we embody that truly what we believe our profession needs to be incorporated as curriculum.

01;44;36;02 - 01;45;01;19
Glenn Canares
So and there's this, there's this field of about professional identity formation. So I your question was about moving the needle, right? It's the name of the podcast. What can move it. Yeah, let's invest in right and and here's okay this is this is the I think why this is so powerful to me is because when we do that, it's professional identity formation.

01;45;01;19 - 01;45;20;11
Glenn Canares
But what we do here, especially when you're in an environment where you actually want to be part of something, you're you want to do the flips here. You want to be not just hold on to the bar to pay the bills. Right? When you're in an environment like that, it starts flowing out to your other parts of your life.

01;45;20;11 - 01;45;48;27
Glenn Canares
How how I work here is affecting, I think, in a positive way how intentional I am with parenting my children, being being a husband to my wife, you know, my friends, the colleagues that aren't in the dental school. Right. Like Erin, you and me talking like it's it starts to flow out in other areas that it's because you're you're it's this practice of like practice.

01;45;49;05 - 01;45;57;00
Glenn Canares
It's doing what you truly believe and then teaching it down. And it just it has this ability to spread everywhere in other parts of your life for the better.

01;45;57;18 - 01;46;16;29
Erin Hager
In one of our interviews earlier, we interviewed Martha Erdman, who is also on leap. She's in the law school and she was describing a strategy she uses when she puts her students in groups that she's asking them to work on a problem or think about a case. She calls the groups the way you would name a law firm.

01;46;17;05 - 01;46;35;28
Erin Hager
So would be like Haggar class and Jones. What do you think about about this? So just that little act of them feeling like they're partners in a law firm and their name is on the door, you know, just adds to that sense of professional identity. And she she described it almost as an aside, you know, she just and I said, whoa, whoa, whoa.

01;46;36;07 - 01;46;56;06
Erin Hager
That is so amazing because it's coming up more and more, especially in the in the realm of inclusive teaching. Right. This idea of helping students see themselves, imagine themselves in the field, you know, that they're that they're even if they're not going to be in that field, if it's an undergraduate. Right. Like just just imagine you could see yourself here because I can see you there.

01;46;56;16 - 01;47;02;03
Erin Hager
And so who knows what that could open up for? For a for a student. Oh, I love that so much.

01;47;02;17 - 01;47;04;08
Glenn Canares
That gave me goosebumps when you just said that.

01;47;04;08 - 01;47;19;24
Erin Hager
Actually, isn't that a cool idea? I mean, I just I was just like, what could I I'm so glad you said. That is very great. So just Glenn, thank you so much for your time today. This has been the most enjoyable conversation and I am so excited to share it with our listeners. Thank you.

01;47;20;05 - 01;47;27;02
Glenn Canares
You're very welcome, Aaron. This has been a joy for me to I hope I hope your listeners get something out of this. I have.

01;47;29;13 - 01;47;46;01
Erin Hager
Thank you for joining us today on moving the needle. Visit us at u. Maryland. That edu slash f seitel. To hear additional episodes, leave us feedback or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

 

01;00;00;13 - 01;00;30;05
Scott J Riley II
Welcome to Moving the Needle. Casual conversations about ways big and small to impact student learning. Brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Scott Reilly, too. Let's move the needle. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Moving the Needle. Many of us in our academic career have likely had some experience using labs as a method for experiential learning, depending on the course.

01;00;30;14 - 01;00;52;18
Scott J Riley II
Labs can be straightforward, where students follow a protocol for a well-established experiment, and other times they can be more of a labyrinth where students need to properly navigate through obstacles and challenges to reach the end. Labs are a versatile tool for teaching because there are many ways to approach building them. I'm excited to discuss a novel approach to teaching labs with our guest, Dr. Stephen Ming.

01;00;53;07 - 01;01;17;10
Scott J Riley II
Dr. Ming serves as an Associate Professor of teaching at the University of California, Irvine. In 2021, he was awarded the Distinguished Early Career Faculty Award for teaching from the Irvine Division of the U.S. Academic Senate. Since he joined the UCI team in 2016, he's been working hard to develop curricula that focus on teaching students skills that they can use in whatever career path they choose.

01;01;17;29 - 01;01;19;29
Scott J Riley II
Welcome, Dr. Mang. We're excited to have you here.

01;01;20;10 - 01;01;21;12
Steve Mang
Thanks. Yeah, it's good to be here.

01;01;22;00 - 01;01;32;19
Scott J Riley II
Well, let's get right into it. I'd like to start this conversation by asking you to tell us about your background in science education and some of the classes that you teach at UCI.

01;01;33;15 - 01;01;56;13
Steve Mang
Sure. So in when I was a grad student, I was a grad student also at UCI, and I figured out pretty quickly that research was not my favorite part of the graduate student experience. It was the teaching and teaching part. And so I tried to seek out as many of those opportunities as could, you know, teaching for more quarters than were required in different classes and this kind of thing.

01;01;58;10 - 01;02;19;19
Steve Mang
And I asked for and got the opportunity to write a couple of journal of chemical education papers while I was a graduate student. And so that kind of got me on the track of teaching, more so than research after grad school. So after grad school, I applied to a bunch of lecturer positions teaching only and got one at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

01;02;20;12 - 01;02;44;21
Steve Mang
And so that's where I really learned to teach college. I would say mostly by trial and error, really figuring out, you know, I got kind of thrown in the deep end. They give me a couple of lab classes and say, it's up to you, which is nerve wracking. And so I just started putting labs together, seeing what students liked, what they didn't like, what they struggled with, and what was too easy for them.

01;02;45;18 - 01;03;07;09
Steve Mang
And so that's sort of I worked on that for a few years, and then I got the opportunity to move to UC Irvine, where I'm now a professor of teaching track. So this is something that's kind of unique to the U.S. system, where it's it's a tenure like track for people that focus on teaching, and then they'll do research that's related to their teaching.

01;03;07;09 - 01;03;17;25
Steve Mang
So chemistry, education, research or laboratory development or this kind of stuff. So I've been here six years now and currently an associate professor of teaching.

01;03;19;04 - 01;03;41;01
Scott J Riley II
So that right there, I think, is another conversation that I want to have with you. As far as the tenure or teaching track for faculty or teaching focused faculty. But it sounds like you've had a lot of time to practice your craft and almost in a lot of ways do it through a baptism of fire. So I'm curious, our our discussion today is on inquiry based labs.

01;03;41;01 - 01;03;44;28
Scott J Riley II
Can you talk about what an inquiry based lab is and how it works?

01;03;45;14 - 01;04;15;06
Steve Mang
Sure. Yeah. So you're right about the trial by fire thing. You know, like most Ph.D., chemists don't have any formal pedagogical training. So it's been learned by doing sort of experience. And so my version of inquiry, what I would call an inquiry based lab, might be different than what other people would call inquiry based labs. My approach to including in opportunities for inquiry in my labs is to try to make them authentic as authentic to the research experience as possible.

01;04;15;06 - 01;04;37;20
Steve Mang
So I teach senior level labs. And when you're doing undergraduate research, when you're a senior or when you move on to graduate school, the problems are typically not very well defined. They may not even have a correct answer. You're going to have to figure out how to collect the data that might answer the question. It's not going to be very good data sometimes, but you still need to extract meaning from it.

01;04;38;08 - 01;05;01;03
Steve Mang
So my approach is to write lab manuals that tell the students, here's what the problem is and here's background on that problem. Here are some measurements and some instruments that you may be able to bring to bear on this research. QUESTION And here's your goal. At the end of it, you want to be able to say these things and answer these questions and then just let them go and not quite see what happens.

01;05;01;03 - 01;05;29;02
Steve Mang
You know, I and it's in the lab, so we we do guide them through the process, but we leave a lot of it up to them. We let them struggle. We let them argue among themselves. We let them talk to other groups who already did the experiment, see what they did. So the process of having inquiry in that kind of curriculum is more leaving the direction, the specific steps up to the students, giving them a guiding question and a framework to answer it.

01;05;29;02 - 01;05;33;21
Steve Mang
Like you're going to use a flow emitter for this one, and then letting them go and seeing what they do.

01;05;34;02 - 01;05;59;22
Scott J Riley II
Wow, that sounds awesome. On multiple levels. It's really testing students on their ability to do independent research, do critical thinking, and collaborate with people to solve a problem that, like you said, may not have a cookie cutter answer. Right. And on that note, I'm curious, you mentioned data collection. Do you find that in these labs, data analytics skills are important?

01;06;00;26 - 01;06;22;25
Steve Mang
Yes, I do. And I wish I could. I wish it was easier to convince my students of that fact. So we do we do a couple of experiments where the students can't open the data file in Google sheets because it's too big, too many data points. So one, for example, is an article in J Canard that I pretty much just took wholesale, which is using FTI AR to analyze food oils.

01;06;22;26 - 01;06;46;04
Steve Mang
So like olive oil, sesame oil, you know, bunch of different all these are basically just all mixtures of fatty acids. And so the FDR spectra, all of them is really, really similar with these very subtle differences. So if I ask them to take the spectra of some known oils and then here's an unknown figure out what it is that's basically impossible to do by just looking at the FDR spectrum.

01;06;47;03 - 01;07;09;29
Steve Mang
So what we do is we use MATLAB, which they they fight me on a little bit, and we apply a technique called principal component analysis, which is sort of like a quote unquote big data, you know, chemo metrics thing. And using the principal component analysis, you can figure out which oils are which based on the positions of the vibrational transitions.

01;07;10;00 - 01;07;27;14
Steve Mang
They move around just a little bit based on the chemical environment. And if you get a whole bunch of data and you run it through this principal component analysis in MATLAB, you can almost always do the oil identification, even when it's not obvious from the raw data, but that. So the problem is to do this, you have to collect this huge amount of data.

01;07;27;14 - 01;07;45;28
Steve Mang
And so the techniques that the students are familiar with, like opening up in Google sheets and plotting everything, that doesn't work anymore. But, you know, it's this authentic problem. Is this oil adulterated or not? You go to the grocery store, you buy olive oil. Is this actually olive oil? You know, no, probably not. Right. So how do you know what it's adulterated with?

01;07;45;28 - 01;07;49;29
Steve Mang
While you you can do this experiment and you can actually address that problem.

01;07;50;06 - 01;08;09;26
Scott J Riley II
Would you say there's a large gap in students skills as far as being able to independently use MATLAB to do these principal component analyzes? Do you feel like there's they come in and they pick it up really quickly? Or is this something that is lacking in their educational background?

01;08;10;09 - 01;08;32;15
Steve Mang
So in our curriculum, we have a class called I think it's called computers in chemistry. Anyway, it's chem five is what I refer to it as. And it they learn computational skills in this the freshman year course and then it sort of depends on what they do in the interim before they get to me as seniors, whether they keep reinforcing that or whether they just forget about it.

01;08;32;15 - 01;08;49;19
Steve Mang
But I don't count and then transfer. Students are a whole different problem. They wouldn't have taken that class, so I don't count on them being able to pick it up right away. We do a lot of scaffolding. We start with MATLAB in week one doing very simple problems, extend it to slightly more complicated problems in the second and third week.

01;08;50;04 - 01;09;11;24
Steve Mang
And then once they get into the, you know, lab rotations where they they run into the FTI them, eventually they've at least seen MATLAB. They've used it to do a few things. There are a bunch of tutorials posted all over the course website. And so yeah, there's, there's an element of handholding in the MATLAB because the backgrounds are going to be so varied.

01;09;11;24 - 01;09;25;19
Steve Mang
But the important, the learning objective that I care about is that they know that MATLAB is a tool that they can use in this way to handle a lot more data than spreadsheet software can, and it can do more advanced calculations than spreadsheet software can. And so I do think that they learned that.

01;09;26;16 - 01;09;52;28
Scott J Riley II
Speaking of learning objectives, one of the things that I'm interested in with these inquiry based labs is this idea, like you said, there's a there's a professor and a T.A. in the lab to kind of guide the students. But you always want to make sure that you hit your student learning outcomes or your objectives for the course. Is that more difficult with these inquiry based labs where you have to add some kind of additional component to make sure that they get all of those student learning outcomes?

01;09;52;28 - 01;10;00;01
Scott J Riley II
Or when you go to assess them, you find that these inquiry based labs meet that that goal or that expectation every time.

01;10;00;23 - 01;10;22;17
Steve Mang
It's a little of both. There are some learning objectives that I'm not confident that they'll they'll bother to address in the inquiry based labs, because they would skip over the step because it's sort of obvious to them or whatever. Or on the other end, it would be too hard. They wouldn't think to make a given measurement or they wouldn't think to check a certain thing or whatever.

01;10;23;00 - 01;10;43;22
Steve Mang
But I do care about them learning, you know, that fact. And so some, you know, I'll cheat a little bit. I'll say, okay, this is an inquiry based lab, but in the Prolog you got to make these three measurements, right? So there's a method for inquiry based labs that I taught with last summer in a colleague's general chemistry lab class called argument driven inquiry.

01;10;44;09 - 01;11;05;10
Steve Mang
And I really like it for this kind of thing. So this was pioneered in chemistry by Joi Walker at East Carolina University. And the idea is the way that my colleague does it anyway is that each lab experiment, there are these four experiments that they do and each of them is two weeks long. And then so in the first week they call them fundamental skills.

01;11;05;10 - 01;11;24;02
Steve Mang
So they there's an overall problem that they're trying to solve. But these are freshmen in their first chemistry lab ever. And so the first time they come in, they're going to learn how to make a melting point measurement, or they're going to learn how to do, you know, use a little ovens or something like this. Right. Just skills that they don't have yet.

01;11;24;02 - 01;11;46;21
Steve Mang
They're going to learn the skills and then they're going to make a prediction about what's going to happen the next week when they come in and use those skills to address some sort of authentic problem, you know, determining the composition of a mixture or making a beer's law, a plot to do quantification or whatever it is. And so then the next time they come in, they do what's called the original investigation.

01;11;46;21 - 01;12;07;15
Steve Mang
And in this part, this is the inquiry part, it's less well defined and they have to like build an argument. So this is argument driven inquiry part. We have these tables, they can write on it with chalkboard markers and so they'll make a little poster on the right on their table and say, here, you know, here's our plan, here's our justification for the measurements that we're going to make.

01;12;07;25 - 01;12;30;11
Steve Mang
Here's the kind of data we expect to collect, etc.. Right. And then students will go around, visit each other's tables and look at their posters and say, Oh, that's a good idea. I never thought of that. Or they'll argue with them and say, Oh, don't do that. Do this other thing. You know, it's fun to watch. And then they so they do a little report for the fundamental skills, a little report for the original investigation and a big report for the overall lab.

01;12;30;23 - 01;12;49;10
Steve Mang
And so you can really make sure that you hit a lot of different kinds of learning outcomes with the combination of those three assignments. So you can one learning outcome can be, you know, do they know how to make a calibration curve, right? And so because you walk them through, you make sure that they collect the correct data and then another learning outcome can be less well-defined.

01;12;49;10 - 01;13;09;04
Steve Mang
Can they, you know, make an argument based on incomplete data, or can they predict the results of an experiment in advance or whatever? Right. And so there's opportunities to get all these different kinds of learning outcomes in there. It's also really cool because they look like they're doing science. You know, you go into the lab and they're they're like excited and talking about, No, let's do it this way, let's do it this way.

01;13;09;26 - 01;13;23;06
Steve Mang
They're not just have their head in the lab manual and, you know, okay, what's step three? Okay, let's do step three. What's that for? Okay, let's do step four. It's a lot more fun to be in the lab and watch people do experiments as well.

01;13;23;10 - 01;13;54;07
Scott J Riley II
That sounds great having them engaged because I was a TA for many years and I've heard exactly what you just said. You know, let's do step three, step four. And they're not even thinking about why they're doing the steps. So if you've been able to overcome that hurdle, that in and of itself is an amazing achievement. I want to segway from that and discuss your creation process behind these inquiry based labs and kind of when and where did you first discover or create these ideas and what did the process look like?

01;13;54;07 - 01;14;04;10
Scott J Riley II
Did you have pilot classes? Were there rounds of student faculty input? And how well accepted were these changes? Because you are kind of reinventing the lab in a way.

01;14;04;19 - 01;14;27;20
Steve Mang
So yeah, so pilot classes would have been a great idea, but that's no typically by my invention process, I guess has been driven by dissatisfaction. So I get a new job or take over a new lab and I see the way that people have been doing it in the past. And I say, Well, you know, that's dumb, or I do it their way once and I watch the students and I say, Well, they're not getting anything out of that.

01;14;27;29 - 01;15;03;09
Steve Mang
Or they could be thinking about this in so much more detail or et cetera. Right. And so then I just I make changes that make sense to me. And part of this process is you have to be willing to have a class go really badly, which has happened, although not, you know, luckily, not super often more usually it's like one experiment was like, well, I asked them to do way too much and nobody learned anything because they were they got stuck on the first step of the inquiry process and they never got past it and or they got past it because the to help them.

01;15;03;09 - 01;15;27;26
Steve Mang
But then they didn't really understand why they got past it, you know. But you know, in terms of the development of the experiments, I've taken a couple of different approaches to this, one that I've actually really had fun with. Right now I teach instrumental analysis, so I go to like the Journal of Food Chemistry is a good one and find experiments that people are doing, really doing out there in the world of food analysis.

01;15;27;26 - 01;15;49;19
Steve Mang
So finding an authentic problem. And then I'll either spend a lot of time myself or what I much prefer is to get an undergraduate research student to come in for a quarter and turn this really complicated research experiment into something that students can do in a I have a seven hour lab period, so in a seven hour lab period.

01;15;50;02 - 01;16;09;10
Steve Mang
And so like the these experiments I do right now is like that. The HPLC lab experiments I do now is like that. The other thing that I try to ask myself, I'm not, I don't can't always answer this. So I sometimes have to go out and get the answer is if my students get hired to be an analytical chemist, how are they going to be using this instrument?

01;16;09;20 - 01;16;28;04
Steve Mang
So my chromatography labs, we don't just make a calibration curve and use it to identify an unknown. We do complicated sample preps, we do method development and then we do the calibration curve stuff. So, you know, one thing that's nice that I have this seven hour lab, so we could do a little bit of method development in the lab.

01;16;28;29 - 01;16;52;02
Steve Mang
The other one is that I've developed a little homebrew simulation software so that they can do some of the method development before they come in as a pre lab and then confirm what the simulation told them. And then, you know, continue with the the stuff that has to be in person once they get there. But you know, in both cases, my idea is that I want authenticity.

01;16;53;19 - 01;17;13;28
Steve Mang
It provides for much more interesting problems. The real world has a lot of inquiry in it, and so it provides for a lot of opportunities for inquiry. And then the students are more interested. You know, I give them they're unknown and it's a can of tuna fish or salsa or something. And here, deal with it. Right. That's a that's an interesting, authentic problem that they're presented with.

01;17;14;15 - 01;17;36;15
Scott J Riley II
I really like this word of authenticity because as you keep explaining these labs to me, I think of labs as the quintessential experiential learning model. Right, the hands on application. But the more you talk about it, the more I realize there's so much more room for growth in making it more experiential, if that's the way to say it or more authentic, like you said.

01;17;37;03 - 01;17;58;02
Scott J Riley II
So thank you so much for kind of giving us some insight into your process. The next thing that I want to ask is what are some of the challenges with using this approach? We talked about some of the challenges developing, and I think we touched on it earlier. Participation doesn't seem to be a problem. Like you said, your students are more engaged.

01;17;58;02 - 01;18;23;26
Scott J Riley II
But I'm interested with things like students level of communication skills. When you're talking about them talking to each other in groups, do you see students giving other students, you know, bad advice and how is that handled? And then it's unique in your situation, you mentioned that you have a seven hour lab. So do you have trouble filling the time for that whole 7 hours to make sure the students are continuously doing something towards their education?

01;18;24;23 - 01;18;42;20
Steve Mang
I actually try to design experiments that most students can do in like five of those 7 hours or maybe six. And then this gives people an opportunity if they go down the wrong path for an hour to make up for it, but 7 hours a long time. And it's a long time as they focus in on task and learning.

01;18;43;00 - 01;19;03;11
Steve Mang
So I actually tend not to use the entire thing, but in terms of talking to each other, in terms of continuously solving the problems, no, there are certainly some groups who will get frustrated and sort of shut down. And, you know, it's it's hard. I can design an experiment where nobody gets frustrated, but then the stronger groups aren't going to learn anything.

01;19;03;29 - 01;19;21;16
Steve Mang
And I can design an experiment where everybody gets frustrated. That's easy. I've done that before. But trying to hit the sweet spot in the middle where the strongest groups are working hard and learning things, and then the groups who have, you know, they're missing a piece of background or whatever or they didn't do their pre-planned. They can still actually get something out of the experiment.

01;19;22;27 - 01;19;45;18
Steve Mang
That's the tough part. And then it goes to training as well. So you need to prepare your Tas for the idea that here are some points that that every group is going to get stuck. You need to identify when a group is going to get stuck and be able to work their way through it or they're going to get stuck and then they'll just sit there and stare at their desks for half an hour and wait for somebody to give them the answer.

01;19;45;18 - 01;19;59;23
Steve Mang
So helping to identify that point and then knowing when to give the groups that need a nudge nudge is a big part of this, really, because. Yeah, people people certainly get frustrated.

01;20;00;09 - 01;20;05;20
Scott J Riley II
Yeah. And I just thought of something that made me frustrated. You mentioned students not doing their pre labs sends a chill down my spine.

01;20;06;02 - 01;20;25;08
Steve Mang
Yeah, well, people are people and they got a lot of stuff going on. They did. So, you know, you're everything you design needs to be flexible. You know, that's my students. The jobs take care of family. They have a two hour commute because they can't afford to live near the school. You know, there's a lot going on out there.

01;20;25;08 - 01;20;28;19
Steve Mang
And so everything needs to be a little bit flexible to account for that.

01;20;29;24 - 01;20;55;19
Scott J Riley II
Agreed. And on the topic of flexibility, kind of segueing into our next question, how do you measure success for these strategies because of how open and complex this approach is to labs, to lab reports still work the same way? Are there lab is there a lab final that you use to assess the students ability because you're now giving them these very open problems that don't have exact answers?

01;20;55;19 - 01;20;59;09
Scott J Riley II
How do you measure stronger students and students who need to improve?

01;20;59;19 - 01;21;25;06
Steve Mang
So okay, for the freshman class that I mentioned earlier, the argument driven inquiry, when we do a lab final in that class and mostly it's focused on the technique, they demonstrate a couple of techniques, they demonstrate that they can do data analysis, and then they'll also do a little bit of interpreting portion. Like one of the things they do is try to identify which mixture would make the best sunscreen based on the wavelengths it absorbs and its melting point and etc..

01;21;25;06 - 01;21;51;23
Steve Mang
And so they get all this data and then they need to to do a little bit of interpretation. What does it mean to be a good sunscreen? Well, it means that it has this wavelength absorption and this melting point, etc.. And so they do a little bit of drawing conclusions from the data in my instrumental analysis class and my my pecan lab class, I don't do a lab final because these classes are like way too much work already for the students, not me.

01;21;52;13 - 01;22;21;09
Steve Mang
So they're it's a they have a seven hour lab a week. They also have two lectures a week. It's a combined lecture lab class, which are rare in our department. And so I have way more opportunities than I need, honestly, to assess my learning outcomes, giving them an extra lab final unnecessary. But lab reports certainly do work and I certainly do get an opportunity to assess all of the learning objectives that I have for each each lab.

01;22;21;24 - 01;22;26;21
Steve Mang
So I use it's what's called specification lens grading. Have you heard of this thing?

01;22;26;21 - 01;22;27;23
Scott J Riley II
I've read the paper on it.

01;22;27;25 - 01;22;45;22
Steve Mang
Oh, you all. You read my paper. Okay. Yeah. So that one's about a writing class, which is not really applicable to the lab stuff. So for the lab, the idea of specifications grading is that you set out the list of your learning objectives for the experiment or whatever it is, the assignment. And then students get credit for either meeting them or not.

01;22;46;11 - 01;23;05;08
Steve Mang
So students initially don't like it because they may have a lab report where they need to make four figures. Let's say. And there is just one rubric item for making figures correctly. And if they miss one, if they mess up one of those four figures, they don't get that rubric right. They got to do it either all correctly or they have to try again.

01;23;05;08 - 01;23;23;13
Steve Mang
And they part of the deal is resubmission. And so it's not an all or nothing kind of thing. It's less harsh than they initially perceived to be, but it does require them to demonstrate mastery of the learning outcomes. To get credit, there's no partial credit. So on all of my rubrics, I have a couple of different kinds of learning objectives for each lab.

01;23;23;13 - 01;23;50;22
Steve Mang
I have some that are common to all experiments, which are mostly the scientific communication stuff making figures, making tables, supporting conclusions with evidence, this kind of stuff, right? And then there are some that are unique to the content of each experiment. So for the HPLC lab, they need to be able to to determine a calibration sensitivity and they need to be able to identify the best mobile phase composition from a vending plot and you know, things that you only do in HPLC.

01;23;50;22 - 01;24;07;09
Steve Mang
You don't do it for imagery, but, you know, so over the course of the quarter, they turn in these eight lab reports and on those eight lab reports, they demonstrate mastery of the course content and then also repeatedly demonstrate mastery of scientific communication.

01;24;07;28 - 01;24;32;27
Scott J Riley II
Great. It sounds like you've really thought out how to measure the students progress in a fair but strict way. If that seems reasonable, they do need to meet these requirements. But the re-assessment. I think the reassessment is something that we as educators don't use often enough to allow students to make mistakes on graded material and then have it come back for reassessment.

01;24;32;27 - 01;24;54;23
Steve Mang
Yeah, and especially for inquiry labs. Even if you're not using specifications grading, that's a vital part of it. I think having some opportunities for students to mess up go down the wrong path, get feedback and then identify the correct path. And that can be real time to doing it in real time, or it can be turning in a preliminary lab report saying, Oh, no, you didn't really interpret that correctly.

01;24;54;23 - 01;25;21;07
Steve Mang
Let's try it again. But authentic inquiry means not getting it right the first time, sometimes even the second time, right? If it's really an authentic problem, that means it's hard. And that means that the answer may be a little messy or ill defined or hard to extract from incomplete data. And it's unrealistic to expect even most students to nail that on the first try.

01;25;21;07 - 01;25;30;24
Steve Mang
So the giving giving them more opportunities, building that into the class as you design the class, even if it means you cover less content, even if it means you do fewer experiments, I think it's worth.

01;25;31;01 - 01;25;38;14
Scott J Riley II
I agree, quality over quantity. If you get the students to learn a few things, well, that's better than them not knowing many things, right?

01;25;39;06 - 01;25;59;01
Steve Mang
Yeah. And the, you know, the process of switching to specifications grading really makes you think about what are what do I care about when I teach this class? Because you're making these big lists of learning objectives, right? And then you make this big list and then you look at the experiments you did last time and the assignments you gave last time, and you're like, Well, I didn't assess half of this stuff, right?

01;25;59;01 - 01;26;20;24
Steve Mang
Do I really care about it? And so, no, maybe you don't care about it, or maybe you do and you change your assessments. But either way, it helps you zero in on what you actually think is important for students to get out of the class. And then always, I reckon I talked to a lot of people about how to do specifications grading and I always recommend Get rid of stuff.

01;26;21;07 - 01;26;41;03
Steve Mang
You're doing too much, you're assessing too much, you're signing too much. Get rid of it. So like you read my paper about my writing class with specifications grading, there's like, I don't know, 30% fewer assignments in my class that I'm teaching right now than the class. And I wrote that paper about three years ago. I just keep getting rid of stuff.

01;26;41;03 - 01;26;45;27
Steve Mang
Get rid of it, get rid of it. More scaffolding opportunities, more resubmission opportunities. You know, that's better.

01;26;46;16 - 01;27;07;24
Scott J Riley II
That's something that I've been curious about with the idea of how many reassessment opportunities you provide. And it sounds like, like you said, the mantra is get rid of stuff, really hammer home key points for students. And once they've got that down, that's better than giving them a bunch of assignments where you might not necessarily care about certain things that you put in there.

01;27;07;24 - 01;27;11;05
Scott J Riley II
You just did it to to give them stuff to do busy work as it was.

01;27;12;00 - 01;27;36;29
Steve Mang
Yeah. I mean, or, you know, something that people do with good intentions is they try to assess the same learning outcome multiple times throughout the semester. And, you know, that's fine. But if you have a student, and especially if it's in slightly different context each time, if you have a student who's struggling a little bit with that learning objective, but they're almost getting it, having them fail in three different context doesn't help them and it doesn't tell you anything, right?

01;27;37;21 - 01;28;02;23
Steve Mang
Having them try it multiple times and zero in on a better understanding in the same context, I think. Well, it's certainly counter. Right and I think it helps them really understand what's going on. You know, it is, of course, important to be able to apply understanding in multiple contexts, but you've got to get it first and giving people the opportunity to get it first and then apply it, I think is the better way to go.

01;28;02;27 - 01;28;28;17
Scott J Riley II
I agree wholeheartedly. I'm interested. Can you see this being used in other lab settings like psych or social work where the level of instrumentation may not be or the presence of instrumentation may not be there? And if so, if someone wanted to utilize this inquiry based strategy, what advice would you give them as they start their their journey of empirical study with trying these classes out in their setting?

01;28;29;05 - 01;28;45;15
Steve Mang
People who are designing the experiments are the experts, right? So when I when I look at a problem that I'm trying to adapt for an inquiry based experiment, I try to think about my own thinking. So we tell students to do metacognition all the time. But, you know, we got to do it too and try to plan out.

01;28;46;03 - 01;29;01;26
Steve Mang
How does an expert think through this kind of problem? And then if you think students could get there on their own, you just give them the problem and say, go ahead and see if they can work it out on their own. But often that's not the case. Often you need to give them sort of signposts along the way.

01;29;02;17 - 01;29;27;22
Steve Mang
And so if you identify as an expert that you look at a problem and you identify aspect A, an aspect B, an aspect C, and then you synthesize those into a solution or an analysis of the problem. You can guide students to each of those. You can have a three part lab right where they first inquiry their way to aspect A and then inquiry their way to aspect B and then, you know, put everything together.

01;29;27;22 - 01;29;42;18
Steve Mang
You're not going to like trick students into it. They they're going to need a little bit of help because they're not experts. They're not maybe not familiar with the content. They're trying to you know, they have a lot of stresses. They want to get the right answer. They want to write a good lab report, getting a grade, etc..

01;29;42;26 - 01;30;03;17
Steve Mang
And so giving them a little bit of a map for here are the things an expert would use to make their conclusion. Let's try to figure out the answers to those things and then let's draw a conclusion, I think is the advice that I would give. And so for instruments, this is what I do like, okay, we're doing an HPLC lab, so identify the best mobile phase composition for the separation.

01;30;03;17 - 01;30;26;22
Steve Mang
Identify the best flow rate for the separation, figure out what range of calibration standards you need, right? And then put it all together. Do the analyzes, give me an answer. How much bisphenol A is in the hot sauce? You know, and the reason that I tell students to do those individual things is because I know that those are the things that I would need to do if I came to this problem and had no idea where to start.

01;30;26;22 - 01;30;49;24
Steve Mang
Well, let's let's figure out the parameters that we need for the solution. Let's figure out the instrument conditions in this case. So don't assume that students are going to know that's what I need to do right away. Give them a little bit of a roadmap. But then within that, there are plenty of places where you could take away details, make them answer questions, make them get a little lost and confused and work their way through things, right.

01;30;49;24 - 01;30;52;14
Steve Mang
I have a lot of lab procedures where I make students lost and confused.

01;30;53;05 - 01;31;17;03
Scott J Riley II
I know that feeling. I feel like sometimes that's more on the student than not of the procedure, but I can commiserate there. Thank you for the advice, Steve. I'd like to kind of round out the conversation by talking to you about what you think is moving the needle. So the my one of my favorite questions is, what do you think is changing the landscape of teaching?

01;31;17;17 - 01;31;47;18
Steve Mang
So I already I mentioned, you know, Joy Walker at Eastern Carolina and my colleague and actually at UMBC. See, a friend of mine, Marie Van Susteren, is doing this same thing with this idea of argument driven inquiry of good giving students these authentic or semi authentic problems, but then just giving them time to work it out, to argue about problems, to draw their own conclusions, to give other people advice.

01;31;47;18 - 01;32;14;21
Steve Mang
Right? Making the lab a more authentic place than just following a recipe and, you know, learning how to to use a graduated cylinder or whatever. I think these these techniques that people are using to turn the lab into a place that's not for that's not just for hands on skills, but is also for critical thinking and learning the practice of being a scientist.

01;32;15;12 - 01;32;54;07
Steve Mang
I think that's the most important thing that we can do with lab instruction. And I mentioned it before, sometimes it means taking content out and I'm totally okay with that. I actually advocate for that doing less stuff, but asking the students to do it better, more authentically, more like a scientist would do it. Getting them into these habits of mind for thinking through a problem, thinking about how to design a solution or how to even approach the problem in the first place, I think is a much more use, much more effective use of our lab time than just, you know, here's how to do serial solutions.

01;32;54;07 - 01;33;04;25
Scott J Riley II
Yeah, I agree. We really want to train the next generation of scientists to be independent thinkers, not follow the recipe. So this this technique really does sound like it's trying to do that.

01;33;05;14 - 01;33;23;24
Steve Mang
And giving them experiences that are going to show up in their job or if they go to grad school, like being frustrated, like being completely lost and not knowing what you're doing and having to go back three steps and say, okay, when was the last time I knew what I was doing? Right, let's go back to that point and then let's start again.

01;33;23;29 - 01;33;57;19
Steve Mang
You know, it sounds borderline cruel, but I really enjoy watching students go through that process, not because I like seeing them be frustrated, but because I remember me in in graduate school being on my own scientifically for the first time and having no idea what was going on right. We can recreate that in a much more friendly setting, in a setting where there's there's trust between the student and the instructor and they know that there is a ladder there that they can grab on to if they need it, but that we expect them to try and figure it out on their own.

01;33;57;19 - 01;34;24;10
Steve Mang
Right. And I really would hate the idea of any of my students going into either graduate school or their first job and being expected to solve a problem and just not even knowing how to approach it. That's a very lonely feeling and scary feeling. And I think labs can introduce students to that feeling in a much lower stakes environment, teach them how to work their way through it, teach them how to think like scientists.

01;34;24;28 - 01;34;30;26
Steve Mang
Anybody who's doing that, I would say, would be would be moving the needle would be improving lab education.

01;34;30;26 - 01;34;38;23
Scott J Riley II
Agreed. Steve, thank you so much for coming on the show today and talking to us about these inquiry based labs. We really appreciate it.

01;34;39;00 - 01;34;42;13
Steve Mang
Yeah, no problem. It's good to talk to you.

01;34;42;13 - 01;34;58;00
Scott J Riley II
Thank you for joining us today on moving the needle visit us at U. Maryland dot edu slash FCTL to hear additional episodes, leave us feedback or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

01;00;00;01 - 01;00;27;17
Erin Hagar
Welcome to Moving the Needle. Casual conversations about ways big and small to impact student learning. Brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Erin Hagar. Let's move the needle. Hi there, everyone. Welcome back to Moving the Needle. Have you ever looked at a roster of students at the beginning of a semester and thought, how in the heck is this going to work?

01;00;27;29 - 01;00;50;20
Erin Hagar
How are all of these students with wildly different backgrounds and experiences, career pathways and prior coursework? How are they ever going to cross the same finish line at the end of the semester? Well, that's one of the challenges faced by the Medical Cannabis Science and Therapeutics program here at UMB This Master's program is the first in the country dedicated to the study of medical cannabis.

01;00;51;11 - 01;01;13;25
Erin Hagar
Students in this program are health providers, for sure, but they're also policymakers and regulators. Dispensary staff and businesspeople, each of whom need to have a shared understanding of the research and science around the medical uses of this plant. Our guest today is a faculty member in this mostly online program, and she'll share how she accounts for this incredible diversity of learners in her course.

01;01;14;11 - 01;01;36;07
Erin Hagar
She'll also describe strategies to create boundaries so that students can get the support they need without requiring the instructor to be responding to emails at all hours of the day and night. Let me introduce you now, Dr. Tiffany. Berkeley earned her doctor a pharmacy degree from the University of California, San Francisco. She completed her acute care pharmacy residency at Yale New Haven Health.

01;01;36;18 - 01;01;57;22
Erin Hagar
Then completed a specialized residency in psychiatric pharmacy here at UMB. She's a board certified pharmacotherapy specialist and a board certified psychiatric pharmacist. She develops innovative courses and interventions to educate students, health care practitioners and the public about medical cannabis. Tiffany, welcome to Moving the Needle.

01;01;58;04 - 01;02;01;27
Tiffany Buckley
I am so excited to be here. It's going to be a great conversation.

01;02;02;08 - 01;02;18;07
Erin Hagar
I'm excited, too. Well, let's let's jump in. So by way of context, you are one of the inaugural faculty members in a unique graduate program here at UMB. Can you tell us a little bit about the master's of science in Medical cannabis science and Therapeutics?

01;02;18;07 - 01;02;55;09
Tiffany Buckley
Yes. So I am really proud of this program. It's all because of the vision of our dean at the School of Pharmacy, Dean, Natalie Eddington. She saw that there was a need to train people about medical cannabis. So the National Academies of Science in 2017, they actually released a report about cannabis and its therapeutic potential and what that report showed is that there was there was some therapeutic potential for cannabis in different areas, like chronic pain, for instance.

01;02;55;20 - 01;03;23;14
Tiffany Buckley
But interestingly, most health schools don't health professional schools don't teach about cannabis or the system in the body that cannabis works in. So through Dean Eddington's vision, this program was born. And what I think is a real strength of the program is that it really takes in a whole bunch of diverse students because medical cannabis can touch so many different people.

01;03;23;23 - 01;03;39;24
Tiffany Buckley
So we don't just have health care practitioners, but we also have people who are in business, people in law, people in marketing. Because all of these fields can still have an impact in the medical cannabis industry.

01;03;40;09 - 01;03;53;09
Erin Hagar
Yes. And we're going to talk about that very diverse student body as we get into our conversation today. But just to frame for our listeners, can you talk about the specific course that will be exploring today?

01;03;53;24 - 01;04;30;14
Tiffany Buckley
So because I am a psychiatric pharmacist, I teach a course on cannabis and mental illness. Well, mental health. So the name of the course is Advanced Cannabis Therapeutics for Neuropsychiatric Conditions. And in that course, we examine where does cannabis really fit in for the treatment of numerous psychiatric and neurological disorders? So we talk about cannabis and psychosis, anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, insomnia and autism.

01;04;30;25 - 01;04;57;05
Tiffany Buckley
And through that course, I've really worked hard with the instructional design team, starting with you, to make sure that I infused the concept of evidence based medicine into that course so that students really get the opportunity to dig through the literature and figure out how is cannabis being used for treatment and what does the evidence even say.

01;04;57;29 - 01;05;14;02
Erin Hagar
So one of the first things that you recognized when you were designing this course is that there were going to be students taking this course from a diverse array of backgrounds. Can you talk a little bit about that and what implications it had on how you designed it?

01;05;14;17 - 01;05;42;05
Tiffany Buckley
Yeah, so diversity is definitely one of the strengths of the program and I really wanted to make sure that I could meet learners where they were. So I started off with just a survey to figure out what people's backgrounds were. So the survey results were very illuminating. I had nurse practitioners, pharmacists, nurse managers, veterinarians on the health care practitioner side.

01;05;42;15 - 01;06;15;29
Tiffany Buckley
But I also had CEOs of medical cannabis industries, a filmmaker, as well as bartenders who are responsible for selecting different strains of cannabis that people will be utilizing within the dispensaries. So it was a vast array of people. So I started off knowing that each of those learners were going to need different types of things. However, I could still structure my class in a way where I could kind of catch everybody.

01;06;16;12 - 01;06;42;03
Tiffany Buckley
So what I did is I started off setting expectations. So because this is an advance Cannabis Therapeutics course, I knew that I was going to be teaching people about how to utilize cannabis for treatment, but I wanted to be mindful that not everyone has a medical background. And it's important to emphasize that people should not be practicing outside their scope of practice.

01;06;42;19 - 01;07;37;15
Tiffany Buckley
So for the health care practitioners, yes, we're going to talk about treatment. We're going to talk about more about how to appropriately dose to avoid harm. But for my other people, I wanted to focus more on making sure that they were really educated about the disease states that we were talking about. So I had to utilize plain language terms to explain that to them and also explain how cannabis is going to affect these different disease states as well as have everybody go through the literature and really figure out, okay, what are the the benefits of cannabis and the limitation of cannabis that we see from the literature, understanding that there is a lot of bias

01;07;37;15 - 01;08;13;12
Tiffany Buckley
around the literature. So basically within my course we had we ended up having I ended up creating different questions for people who had different backgrounds. So I would have a very similar assignment. They would all get a very similar patient case. We would go through the pathophysiology, go through the literature. But for the healthcare practitioners, we take it to the next level where they're talking about treatment considerations.

01;08;13;12 - 01;08;53;16
Tiffany Buckley
Whereas for my people and what I now call the patient educator or patient advocate section, they are more responsible for really helping go over the evidence with patients. So patients can make an informed decision about whether or not that they would like to utilize cannabis, but it's important that they have all the information and then how to connect patients with their health care providers and have patients advocate for medical cannabis use with their health care providers.

01;08;53;24 - 01;08;59;10
Tiffany Buckley
So now how do we navigate the whole medical system, which is already vastly confusing?

01;08;59;26 - 01;09;25;26
Erin Hagar
Yeah, that's great. So it really sounds like you went from that analysis phase with the with the survey and the survey results and getting a sense of who who is in here and then making significant but not duplicate modifications to the assignments. And by that I mean you're not creating completely different assignments for everyone, but you are modifying them based on their level of experience and knowledge and role.

01;09;26;18 - 01;09;53;29
Tiffany Buckley
Exactly. Yes. And I feel like that allows me to tailor the learning experience to who is in the class, provide that personalized touch that people need, meeting people where they are and really maximizing their skill sets so that they can go out into their different professions and still have all the information that they need to provide information about cannabis.

01;09;53;29 - 01;10;22;06
Tiffany Buckley
Because especially with cannabis and this happens a lot with many things in medicine, but people's health literacy is, is very low in general, which that means people's ability to find health information, understand it, and use it. And with cannabis, it's so much more confusing because when you go online, you either see cannabis is good or cannabis is bad.

01;10;22;11 - 01;10;39;06
Tiffany Buckley
But what's the truth? That's really hard to kind of tease out and deduce. So with this class, I teach everybody skills to be able to, to, to do that, to find that information, but also communicate it with others regardless of what your background is.

01;10;39;19 - 01;11;03;09
Erin Hagar
Yeah. And that's going to lead us to the next challenge we'll talk about, which is that reviewing the evidence. But before we go there, I just wanted to ask a question about how the relationships among these very different groups of students played out, because it could run the it could run the risk or have the potential of sort of creating a tiered system within your class.

01;11;03;09 - 01;11;14;14
Erin Hagar
We've got the health care providers over here and we've got kind of everybody else, just your kind of layman folks over here. How did that play out in terms of their relationships? Did it create a hierarchy? Were they collaborative?

01;11;14;24 - 01;11;52;22
Tiffany Buckley
So I think it's all about I think that framing is very important. So I try to frame everything in the way that we all have a very specific role to play, and we all are very important in that role about medical cannabis and making sure that we get that information out. But all of us have different skills. So for instance, my fiance is an engineer, even though I'm great at reading and dissecting pharmacy in medical knowledge when he talks, I don't understand what he's saying half of the time.

01;11;53;02 - 01;12;15;29
Tiffany Buckley
So I can kind of know something about engineering, but my that's not my background. So we want to make sure that we utilize people's backgrounds because those are their strengths, where they're going to shine and teach them the skills that they need to really kind of bolster what they already know. So I think setting the stage makes a big difference.

01;12;16;12 - 01;12;55;28
Tiffany Buckley
I think it's also important for them to be able to work in some sort of collaboration with each other, because I hear your students say it was nice to see the excellent student work from someone who is a clinician, because I can see different ways of thinking and someone who's on the clinician side would say, Oh, well, it was really nice to hear from that person in marketing when they created this infographic about medical cannabis to give to a patient, because it was really understandable and they understand how to utilize space and how to get people's attention and print out materials.

01;12;56;10 - 01;13;29;21
Tiffany Buckley
So just emphasizing that the diversity is a strength, just like diversity is a strength in all capacities and having a way for people to work together in certain capacities but understand that people's jobs are different and that that's a strength too. So I want to make sure that I'm tailoring to everyone's strength. I have gotten some pushback where people will try to to switch into other pathways or sections or they want to work on something else.

01;13;29;21 - 01;13;52;29
Tiffany Buckley
And I just let them know how I really design this with you in mind. So please, please give it a chance. And see, I made sure that the information is rich and is going to be beneficial. And if you don't think it is, please tell me what you think that I could add to this pathway to further enrich your experience in my class.

01;13;52;29 - 01;14;05;03
Tiffany Buckley
So I'm constantly getting feedback, collecting feedback. I am known. I know I'm not supposed to do it, but sometimes I will do a little change in my class even while it's writing based on student feedback.

01;14;05;17 - 01;14;44;19
Erin Hagar
Yeah. Yeah, I know. I remember how responsive you were and that that responsiveness really kind of leads us to the next challenge that that popped up as we got under the hood of designing this course together and that had to do with the students ability and the accessibility of evidence in this field, in the medical cannabis arena. So can you talk a little bit about that, how how you noticed this coming up as an issue and how you responded in real time to provide the support students needed to to practice this skill?

01;14;45;00 - 01;15;17;07
Tiffany Buckley
I feel like there is a real problem with people being able to interpret evidence in general. We have a lot of scientific studies that are constantly coming out, but I feel like a lot of people, and myself included, which is why I spent a lot of time coming, bringing myself up to speed on these things. They have a difficult time understanding the nuances of the evidence, and a lot of that has to do with different factors.

01;15;17;07 - 01;15;48;13
Tiffany Buckley
But it could even be something like the media reporting study results that says that cannabis helps with, well, cannabis cures anxiety or these really sensationalized kind of bits of information that we get pulled from studies and working in some other courses that were really rich. I realized when I was grading and instructing in those, the students really struggle with being able to dissect evidence.

01;15;48;25 - 01;16;16;19
Tiffany Buckley
So I was lucky enough to meet you, Erin, and tell you and talk to you a little bit about how I wanted to incorporate this into my class. So what I started out just evidence based practice in general. I did a lot of research on the back end to figure out what would be kind of the content that I would want students to know Duke has done.

01;16;17;00 - 01;16;53;16
Tiffany Buckley
They have a lot of great modules about evidence based medicine, and I worked with our school pharmacy librarian, Emily Gorman, to also pull resources on evidence based medicine and how to teach that. And I was lucky enough to find kind of a framework for teaching evidence based medicine, which is the five A's. So that starts with really assessing all evidence based medicine starts with the patient.

01;16;54;01 - 01;17;38;24
Tiffany Buckley
So that starts with assessing the patient carefully and figuring out what kind of factors are going to come into play when we eventually recommend therapy. Then you ask a question, so you ask a Pico question, which stands for person, population intervention, comparison and out outcome. Asking that question allows you to find a study that is going to appropriately answer that question after you ask that question, you go on to analyzing the well, excuse me acquire so you go to acquire the data.

01;17;39;02 - 01;18;14;18
Tiffany Buckley
So I actually teach students specifically how to locate data from PubMed and Embase and I worked with Emily Gorman again because the library has so many great resources about how to acquire scientific data. Then after that they appraise a clinical study. So Duke has these really great worksheets that go through that talk about different biases and studies and bias is what can really shift error that's introduced into the study.

01;18;14;18 - 01;18;49;26
Tiffany Buckley
They can shift the results so students go through and they dig, dig and dig into the nitty gritty to find the bias in the studies and to have an opinion on that. And then finally, they are going to provide their overall full analysis and assessment of that patient. So they take the initial assessment of the patient, their assessment of the literature, and then they put it all together and they utilize that to make recommendations for the patient that are based in evidence.

01;18;49;26 - 01;19;19;17
Tiffany Buckley
And so I when I was a little I was trying to figure out how to incorporate this into my class talking with you, we decided that we were going to incorporate different objectives of this process throughout the modules, because evidence has shown that students actually learn better when things are spaced out instead of just kind of the whole fire hydrant.

01;19;19;17 - 01;19;43;04
Tiffany Buckley
This is everything about evidence based medicine, so they had an opportunity to really practice every step. And then at the end of by the end of my course, they can do all five steps seamlessly without as much instruction. So I start with more worksheets to guide them in the beginning, and then those kind of fall away too when we just have some questions.

01;19;43;04 - 01;19;53;01
Tiffany Buckley
And I asked basically, is this patient a candidate for medical cannabis? Use evidence to back this up. And so it really is a fun, beautiful thing.

01;19;54;06 - 01;20;18;20
Erin Hagar
I really appreciated how you did that and just to make it maybe a little more concrete because it's hard to to talk about worksheets without seeing them. But one of the things I think that you did so effectively was to scaffold those worksheets as the semester unfolded. So in the beginning, you know, students are going through this whole process, but instead of acquiring the evidence, you're providing the articles.

01;20;18;20 - 01;20;35;24
Erin Hagar
So you're you're putting in those pieces that they're not quite ready to do yet. So they can focus on those first two steps. And then and then you find an article so that they can go through it and you know what's in that article. And so, you know what they should be seeing and finding in that. And I just thought that was so great.

01;20;35;24 - 01;21;02;05
Erin Hagar
There were so many examples of ways that you would gradually take things out that you were providing for them initially. Just the way a scaffolding supports a building until it's sturdy enough to stand on its own. And then really by the end of the semester, it's like, okay, here's your patient case. Go to it. I mean, basically and I just I think that was just so intentionally done and it was it was just really a pleasure to watch that unfold.

01;21;02;10 - 01;21;27;15
Erin Hagar
I think the other thing that I just want to highlight to from what you were saying is that you didn't have to necessarily recreate the wheel as you were making these instructional choices. And I think that's so important sometimes when we realize our students have a gap or there's this there's this big skill set that we want to develop, but you think, oh my gosh, that would involve basically building a whole new course within the course that I'm already building.

01;21;28;16 - 01;21;55;15
Erin Hagar
But you found some outside support. You found that tutorial from Duke, and you use the the skills and materials from a librarian. So it's just it's just important to realize that for some of these things that are common, I mean, searching, searching, the literature is a common skill across all disciplines, but especially in the health professions. So taking advantage of what's out there and seeing what's there that that you might not have to create on your own, it's really important.

01;21;55;15 - 01;22;25;12
Tiffany Buckley
Definitely. I am so happy for all the and just working at U and B, there are so many people who are willing to help. If I ever have a question or want to incorporate something into my class, someone can always point me in the right direction. So that's a great thing about working here. One thing I did want to highlight though about the course is part of the scaffold team though, was also providing a lot of feedback.

01;22;25;24 - 01;23;12;15
Tiffany Buckley
And so the way that I did that for each step was in my class when students complete a everything kind of starts with a quiz based on some reading instantly. As soon as they submit that and receive a hundred on it, that drops down feedback that provides explanations for why the answers are the way they are. When we get to more comp flex parts like asking a Pico question where that has to have four components or so they ask their Pico question, they submit that and then instantly boom, they get feedback on what should be in the what is expected to be in the Pico question.

01;23;12;24 - 01;23;44;24
Tiffany Buckley
So students have told me that that's really helpful because these classes, it's only one week to learn all these content, all this content, and now I have content, plus I do this reinforcement of evidence based medicine in my class. So my class is is a lot and students say help. They're thankful for it and it's rich, but I've gotten feedback that because that stuff shows so quickly, it really helps them figure out how to take the information and put it together for more complex steps.

01;23;45;13 - 01;24;07;01
Erin Hagar
Just so that it's clear for the listeners, this feedback has been pre-populated. So you're not individually grading each quiz and going in student by student and providing that based on their scores. They're comparing what they've submitted to a kind of version that you've put up there so they can make that comparison on their own. Is that right?

01;24;07;07 - 01;24;36;13
Tiffany Buckley
So more I call it a detailed answer, key. And then the throughout the module, there might be various assignments. These detailed answer answer keys are going to pop out. I might have two or three assignments for their last assignment. That's always a little bit more comprehensive, but I still have an excellent student work pop up at the end.

01;24;36;20 - 01;25;17;23
Tiffany Buckley
But then we still go through me and all the lovely teachings and instructors and we provide them meaningful, personalized feedback. But a lot of that feedback too, we work on in advance so that we can structure like this type of assignments, missing these components. So we already have built out responses for things that could happen. So that makes grading easier because what I ask students to do is a lot of work, but I also don't want to make my Tas and instructors have to go through all this labor of figuring out what to say.

01;25;17;23 - 01;25;20;05
Tiffany Buckley
So I just figure that out in advance for them.

01;25;21;05 - 01;25;50;03
Erin Hagar
Well, it's such a nice balance. So students get that immediate feedback. So as soon as they submit, they have something to compare it to. But you're really saving your time and energy and your tas time and energy on that more comprehensive assignment at the end. But even that it sounds like you've got like a repository of of kind of maybe common strengths and weaknesses that you might see across these assignments that you can then tailor just so that you're efficient, but it's still personalized.

01;25;50;05 - 01;26;01;02
Erin Hagar
Exactly. And I think it's important for the listeners to know that this the numbers of students in this program are huge. I mean, it's there can be. How many people are in the program now?

01;26;01;14 - 01;26;42;12
Tiffany Buckley
Oh, wow. So I think we have about and I'm off a little bit, but maybe around 250 or so. So I have taught classes where I have 60, 70 students. I've also been in other classes where I where I'm helping to where there's 200 students. So I'm asking students to do a lot. I'm asking them to review the literature, go through bias, all these complex steps when there's that many students, there has to be something set up to be able to provide that meaningful feedback but still be structured in some capacity.

01;26;42;12 - 01;26;48;20
Tiffany Buckley
Or it could take forever to grade and we've gone through that before. So that's why I now have the more structured feedback.

01;26;49;09 - 01;27;17;07
Erin Hagar
Exactly. And this happens after iterations, right? So this isn't something, you know, that people figure out before the first launch of the course. I'm sure these are systems and things that have developed over time. But speaking of all those students, another opportunity or challenge that presented itself as this course unfolded really had to do with the the volume of requests and the volume of communication that you were trying to manage.

01;27;17;29 - 01;27;26;05
Erin Hagar
Can you talk a little bit about about how that unfolded and and what strategies and boundaries you put in place to to help you manage that?

01;27;26;19 - 01;27;56;18
Tiffany Buckley
Yes. So this was my first experience teaching in an online environment, and it's vastly different than when you are in person. Also, I had students, like I said, it's diversity is a strength. We have students from all over the world, so people are in different time zones. So I had to figure out what to do because the emails, there were so many emails about so many things coming in at all different times.

01;27;57;03 - 01;28;31;18
Tiffany Buckley
So I actually, I work really closely with the instructional designers in the school of Pharmacy. I talk to them probably weekly or more while my course is running. So I brought it up to the instructional design team and they were able to really help me kind of set some boundaries. So what was suggested it was that I make specific hours within my course where I respond to things so and don't respond to anything outside of those hours, as tempting as it might be.

01;28;32;15 - 01;29;02;22
Tiffany Buckley
So I set those from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. I let students know that any requests received outside of this window. I will answer those the following day. In addition, I decided to utilize for Cyber Cafe more. So the Cyber Cafe is a place and blackboard where it's just basically kind of a discussion board and students can post questions there.

01;29;03;02 - 01;29;28;04
Tiffany Buckley
So I was getting a lot of content related questions as well as technology related questions. So I told students, Hey guys, all your questions are important, but I want to make sure if you have a question, other students probably have it as well. So can you just post that in the Cyber Cafe? Any content related questions so we can generate a rich discussion?

01;29;28;14 - 01;29;49;00
Tiffany Buckley
And then I'll address that every week and office hours. So that really started something. Students got way more comfortable. They might email me a content related question. I would say, can you please post this on the Cyber Cafe? Or, you know, I'll just go on ahead and posted on the cyber cafe because it's content related and I'll answer there.

01;29;49;16 - 01;30;22;25
Tiffany Buckley
So that started it clearing up my emails so that the only emails I would get it I was getting were for request for recommendations or requests for extensions and other things that I wanted to be able to attend to. I also worked with an instructional design department because in the school of Pharmacy they told me that they could help me with all these technology related concerns because even though I can design, I can design courses to an extent.

01;30;22;25 - 01;30;48;09
Tiffany Buckley
I still always love their help. They are amazing. I don't have those skills of physically building everything in Blackboard. So I was instructed if something breaks, let them know and they can assist me a little bit better. So I started doing that. I started telling students, Hey, contact the pharmacy helpdesk if it's a technology related issue and CC me on it.

01;30;48;16 - 01;31;19;04
Tiffany Buckley
And that allowed me to have more people looking at it. So if something goes wrong, we can fix a broken link or something. So all those things they, they started in some they started working pretty well. And then I tacked on an office hour where I have I look at the cyber cafe, I pull any questions off there for the week.

01;31;19;20 - 01;31;50;19
Tiffany Buckley
I also have another place on the Cyber Cafe where they can submit questions and I would have this in-person office hour will not in-person online office hour where students vote on the time and we would talk about the questions we would talk about any feedback students have because I love feedback and we would talk about any anything that they wanted to talk about about medical cannabis within that hour.

01;31;51;00 - 01;32;16;16
Tiffany Buckley
So that allowed me now they have a place to express themselves, they have a place to meet me. We can talk and to get their questions answered. So all that stuff ended up working really well. I also changed the due dates in my class because every class is a week and they start on Sunday and typically they end on Sunday.

01;32;16;28 - 01;32;51;11
Tiffany Buckley
I changed them all till Tuesday for the next week and I told students, Hey, it's the weekend, please don't contact me over the weekend. We can talk about it on Monday or Tuesday. You need to enjoy the weekend as well so I don't answer anything on the weekends anymore and all those together. I only get a few emails now and all the emails I get are very rich and students have said I've seen some of the reviews where students say, Oh, Dr. Berkeley has these strict hours for when she can't communicate.

01;32;51;18 - 01;33;15;06
Tiffany Buckley
But then I've also seen others that say Dr. de Berkeley just set a boundary. She said, boundaries, just clean, clear communication. You know, she's going to respond when she said she is going to respond if she's not there. There's these other mechanisms to help us. So I feel like that's how the world works with boundaries. So I like having those in my class and I'm happier now.

01;33;15;06 - 01;33;18;01
Tiffany Buckley
So that's great.

01;33;18;01 - 01;33;44;04
Erin Hagar
That's, that's so great. And I think those are such concrete, tangible techniques that folks can do to help reduce that feeling of overwhelm, which I know can happen when we're in this space time continuum. That's so odd in online courses. So thank you so much for sharing those. We have talked about so many different strategies not just to online instruction, but really instruction in general.

01;33;44;12 - 01;33;58;15
Erin Hagar
I guess of of all of the things that you've learned through this experience of of developing this course in this unique program, what advice would you give a faculty member who's just starting a course design process?

01;33;59;06 - 01;34;25;07
Tiffany Buckley
Yeah, I would say that it's I see that working with the instructional design team is one of the best things that you can do. You're not alone. And with instructional design team, I feel like all the instructional designers I've had the opportunity to work with at the university, they really help me figure out, okay, what are the objectives?

01;34;25;17 - 01;34;56;27
Tiffany Buckley
And then are going to be learning activities that can really support these objectives. So it's been so fun to just have that support, be able to bounce ideas off of people, be able to talk about different technology that can come into my class to talk about just concern that I'm seeing in real time and have an opportunity to really get evidence based feedback because our instructional designers are just so trained.

01;34;57;09 - 01;35;05;27
Tiffany Buckley
So I would encourage everyone to to talk with the instructional design team and don't be a stranger at all.

01;35;05;27 - 01;35;31;18
Erin Hagar
Yeah. So often we, we think of teaching in silos and I think that's so important, just, just bouncing these ideas off of anybody. But one thing, you know, as someone who's done instructional design, one thing that I really love about it is the way that like I get ideas from what you have designed, Tiffany and the way that you've structured these assignments and I can pass those along to people in completely different disciplines.

01;35;32;16 - 01;35;56;23
Erin Hagar
That idea of scaffolded worksheets and, you know, providing more at the beginning than at the end and the, the structures you set around your communication policy, that kind of thing, those are transferable. And so we have the luxury and the really exciting benefit of being a repository for so many of these ideas at them. We can kick back and say, Hey, this worked over for my my friend Tiffany and Pharmacy found this effective.

01;35;56;23 - 01;36;09;19
Erin Hagar
What do you think? Could this work in your class? So. So that's fun for us, too. It has been a joy to collaborate with you over these past couple of years, and I am so glad that we had the opportunity to have this conversation. So thank you for joining us.

01;36;09;21 - 01;36;16;29
Tiffany Buckley
Thank you for having me. And thanks for all the work that you've done on my courses over time.

01;36;17;26 - 01;36;34;10
Erin Hagar
Thank you for joining us today on moving the needle. Visit us at u. Maryland that edu slash f seitel. To hear additional episodes, leave us feedback or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

 

01;00;00;14 - 01;00;26;21
Scott Riley
Welcome to Moving the Needle. Casual conversations about ways big and small to impact student learning. Brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Scott Riley, too. Let's move the needle. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Moving the Needle. As educators, when we think about creating content for our students, we have a lot to consider.

01;00;27;00 - 01;00;52;20
Scott Riley
We want to ensure we communicate, are learning objectives, utilizing different strategies to connect ideas and engage the students. To do this, we often employ different pedagogical approaches to convey the content we created. Each strategy we use acts like a unique tool that can come with several pros and cons. This can lead us down a rabbit hole trying to find the perfect pedagogical strategy to use and even inspire us to create new ones.

01;00;53;12 - 01;01;21;01
Scott Riley
I'm excited to discuss a hybrid approach using experience, learning and social innovation with our guest. Jim Kutcher. Jim Kutcher serves as the program director of the and Health and Social Innovation at UMD. He's an award winning teacher and internationally recognized as a leader in social entrepreneurship. He cultivates strong entrepreneurial skill development for his students. Research and professionals through experiential learning courses and workshops.

01;01;21;23 - 01;01;36;17
Scott Riley
He's the lead author of Social Entrepreneurship, a practice based approach to social innovation. And he's also the host of Profiles and Social Innovation, the podcast. It's my great pleasure to welcome Jim to the show. Jim welcome.

01;01;37;05 - 01;01;38;25
Jim Kucher
Scott Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.

01;01;38;26 - 01;01;58;18
Scott Riley
Yeah, no problem. I like to start the interview with kind of a setting the groundwork, setting the baseline for everyone listening. I want to talk about what experiential learning is and what social innovation are, because that's the those are the topics of the show. Can you tell me what you what your definition of those two things are?

01;01;58;24 - 01;02;20;25
Jim Kucher
Absolutely. The first one is really as experiential learning is just a fancy academic term for learning by doing. Right. I mean, you know, we all took experiential classes in high school, right? We took shop or we took Home EC and we took something like that. And you you built something. You made something in the class. And by doing that, you learn how to do it.

01;02;20;25 - 01;02;37;05
Jim Kucher
So, you know, the high school shop class is notorious for being littered with boards that weren't quite the right length. So you learn how to measure, you learn how to cut exactly. And eventually you produce something. I actually still have it. It's called a pilgrim footstool and it still sits in my living room to this day. I made it in shop class.

01;02;37;05 - 01;03;02;26
Jim Kucher
I think I was. I don't know, sophomore in high school. So that's the easy one. Social innovation is both very simple and quite frankly, maddeningly complex. And I think the differences between sort of the theory and the execution. So the theory is simply that you're trying to take an entrepot nurse mentality and apply it to a deeply entrenched social problem.

01;03;03;14 - 01;03;24;02
Jim Kucher
So fundamentally, an entrepreneur looks at a problem and says, What's wrong with this? What could I do better? What isn't working? How is the problem not being solved? And we're all familiar with that from the commercial world. You know, famous examples like the iPhone and those kinds of things. You know, the technology we're using today was invented by somebody who said, hey, you know, we could do this thing.

01;03;24;02 - 01;04;02;01
Jim Kucher
And podcasts have taken off. So that's sort of the entrepreneur perspective. But then you apply it to deeply entrenched social problems like diabetes and hunger, poverty, homelessness, those kinds of things. So it gets very, very complicated very quickly in practice. But what we do at the University of Maryland, Baltimore Graduate School and the program that I run in social innovation is we help folks figure out step by step and move by move how to try to identify those problems and come up with solutions for them.

01;04;02;01 - 01;04;10;24
Jim Kucher
So it's a long journey. It's an arduous journey, but we happily have a few folks, a few folks who have come out the other side and are doing some really interesting work.

01;04;11;19 - 01;04;32;22
Scott Riley
Yeah, I believe it. And it really sounds like this is kind of a double edged sword in the fact that social innovation is a great space for using experiential learning. There's a lot of hands on stuff you can do, but like you mentioned, it can catch you just as quick because it's really complicated to get into these ideas and do something practical like in person, right?

01;04;32;25 - 01;04;59;00
Jim Kucher
Yeah, Yeah. I mean, it's not quite like, you know, woodshop. We don't need to keep a lot of Band-Aids around in the physical sense, but but I do spend a lot of time with my students talking them through things where there's frustration and there's ambiguity and all that sort of stuff. So, yeah, it's it's an interesting journey. But, you know, the experiential learning piece, the way I sort of help people get their heads around that is to think of art class, right?

01;04;59;00 - 01;05;31;15
Jim Kucher
So most of us have taken a class somewhere along the line in painting or pottery or even a writing class, you know, poetry or whatever. And in all of those experiences, what happens at some point in time is you get to what they call studio, which is where let's take painting for example. You bring in a painting and it's half finished and you put it up on an easel and all of your classmates look at it and they say, Scott, you know, I really love what you did with the way that you pictured that flower.

01;05;31;15 - 01;05;50;27
Jim Kucher
I can really see the flower. I can almost smell it. But the dog sitting next to the flower looks kind of funny. You know, dogs don't usually have three ears. And what happened to the tail? And gosh, the fur looks like it's kind of matted or something. Did you really mean that? So you have that sort of feedback as you're creating the work, right?

01;05;50;27 - 01;06;18;02
Jim Kucher
So that happens. That's very, very common in art. And it's also very, very common in entrepreneurship education, which is essentially what we do. We're training social entrepreneurs to try to attack deeply entrenched social problems, and they're building what we hope will be sustainable business models that can generate revenue while creating this social change. That takes a lot of work.

01;06;18;02 - 01;06;40;24
Jim Kucher
It takes a lot of what we call iteration, which is trial and error. So you present the business model in a class one day and the instructor and the students all sort of look at it together and say, Scott, you know, I really like how you're addressing the problem of chronic homelessness in terms of how you're going to help people recover from that.

01;06;41;17 - 01;06;56;02
Jim Kucher
But gosh, you know, the way you're paying for it doesn't quite make sense to me. So then you go, Ah, okay, thank you. And we even work on it together to say, How can we do that better? And then you go back and do another week's homework and come back and sort of lather, rinse, repeat at that point.

01;06;56;16 - 01;07;12;24
Scott Riley
So then when you're in the classroom, is your role more of like a facilitator? So you kind of just ask, okay, that's my curiosity because because it sounds like you can just let your students go, and if they have a little bit of drive in them, they'll just take the class and run with it.

01;07;12;24 - 01;07;39;07
Jim Kucher
Absolutely. And actually, it's funny, the hardest part, I think, for folks who teach in this kind of environment is learning that many times the best thing that the faculty member can do is be quiet. And because we've got a lot of folks that teach in this program who've got a lot of great expertise and and want to impart that expertise, it's very hard.

01;07;39;12 - 01;08;03;24
Jim Kucher
And I'm basically talking to myself when I say this and then even, you know, the other folks that teach in our program are much better at it than I am, quite frankly. But, you know, it's very hard to say, okay, they're going to figure this out in another ten, 15 seconds. And you just kind of got to give them that space to get there as opposed to the sort of faculty slash parental reflex that wants to jump in.

01;08;03;24 - 01;08;25;16
Jim Kucher
You know, if you've raised kids, you know, you want to jump in and give them the answer. And that's not always what's best. It's often better to let them figure out the answer. So, yes, absolutely. The faculty member is very much a facilitator, and often the quieter, the better, which is totally opposite from what most people who have been teaching for a living are used to doing.

01;08;26;02 - 01;08;43;05
Scott Riley
I can 100% commiserate with you there. I have that reflex is strong in me and when my students are close, I just want to help them get there. But you're right, it's so much more enriching for them if they come to it by themselves and they can turn around and look at you and be like, Hey, we did it.

01;08;43;15 - 01;08;51;28
Scott Riley
You know that. I guess that sense of accomplishment is almost as important as the content that they learn, too, because it encourages them to keep doing the process.

01;08;51;28 - 01;09;20;23
Jim Kucher
Absolutely. And the other really tricky point is when they get to an answer and the reality is that their answer is accurate but not complete. So there's that kind of yes and moment. And it's very challenging there because you have to be careful to deliver that. Yes. And so it doesn't come across as a yes, but. Right. Because.

01;09;20;24 - 01;09;44;20
Jim Kucher
Yes. But will will discourage further participation. Yes. And will encourage them to continue to move forward. And it's it's language. It's very challenging. And then we teach in what we call a high flex mode. So we've got classes that are held live on a video conferencing platform. We have classes that are held asynchronously on Blackboard. We've got classes and recorded.

01;09;44;20 - 01;10;01;18
Jim Kucher
So you're communicating across multiple modes. So you also have to be, you know, really conscious of how is this coming across when I'm typing it into Blackboard as feedback versus how this is coming across. When I'm speaking to a student live on a video conference, it's it's, it's a lot of fun.

01;10;02;00 - 01;10;17;06
Scott Riley
And it sounds like communication is one of the the challenges are being intentional with your communication, knowing what you're trying to say and the tone and everything. Are there other challenges that you you have found that make this particular approach difficult to implement?

01;10;17;20 - 01;10;43;06
Jim Kucher
Oh, gosh, yeah. One that comes to mind, which is more relative to the sort of entrepreneurial aspect of it than it is necessarily directly to the experiential learning, although I do think that you kind of can't have one without the other is is what we call a pivot. So a student is working on a particular concept, a particular idea for a way to solve a problem.

01;10;44;00 - 01;11;15;01
Jim Kucher
And they realize that for various reasons, usually environmental, there's some sort of circumstance in the community, for example, that prevents them from executing on the idea that they had, and they have to go back and rethink it and sometimes even come up with a totally different idea or even a totally different community to help. Right. And that can be very frustrating because they've spent weeks, months, in some cases years working on this.

01;11;15;01 - 01;11;44;27
Jim Kucher
It's very analogous to, you know, our colleagues in the medical school where they're doing substantial scientific experiments, right. Where you could try five, eight, six, 20, 100 ways to try and solve a scientific problem. And in that world, that experimental mindset is a little more established, a little more accepted. It's sometimes a little more challenging when you're in the social sciences world that I said to sort of get your head around that.

01;11;44;27 - 01;12;11;04
Jim Kucher
But it's a very present reality. And for the student it can be very frustrating because they're like, Darn it, I was working on this thing. The other thing is they get very passionate about their solution, right? Because this is my idea. And to have to set that passion down or set it aside when they realize that this isn't going to work the way I thought it was going to work is it's an interesting moment.

01;12;11;04 - 01;12;20;26
Jim Kucher
So you're you're you're part facilitator, you're part mentor, you're part psychotherapist. You know, you're a lot of different things. But again, it makes it a lot of fun.

01;12;21;06 - 01;12;45;25
Scott Riley
And they never said it would be easy being a teacher, right on this topic of challenges. And I love that you made the analogy between this iterative, you know, experimentation in your projects versus science. As a scientist, I am sadly like anchored to the idea of quantitative metrics, and I'm so curious for this experience of learning and social innovation.

01;12;46;10 - 01;12;55;22
Scott Riley
You know, you talk about the setbacks that the students have in their project. How do you how do you measure success in the class? How do you say the students on track do you have tests.

01;12;56;03 - 01;13;18;00
Jim Kucher
Projects? They have projects that they have to do all the time. But it's very interesting because at the end of the day, what you're talking about is strategic decisions, right? You're talking about a strategy for developing an organization that's going to try to tackle a problem. Right. So in the science world, you know, and I'm speaking way out of my element here, so you had to forgive me.

01;13;18;00 - 01;13;37;12
Jim Kucher
But basically, you know, the science world, the question is, did we kill the virus or didn't we? You know, in my world, the solutions are much more nuanced. And quite frankly, you can't really tell if it was the right strategy until you implement it, because quite frankly, if it worked, it was the right strategy. And if it didn't work, it was the wrong strategy.

01;13;37;25 - 01;14;02;11
Jim Kucher
So the only thing we can do as educators is evaluate the thought process. So we look at it and we say, okay, does this make sense? Does it seem like they've addressed it from all the appropriate perspectives when it gets to the sort of financial modeling and building the, quote unquote, business side? You know, do the numbers add up to do the financial projections make sense?

01;14;02;11 - 01;14;25;12
Jim Kucher
Right. So it's really evaluating the the logic patterns and the thought process that went into the work more than it is, is this going to work or not? There is some is this going to work or not in there? Because, you know, I just graded some work for a student who defined their market is the United States of America.

01;14;25;12 - 01;14;43;28
Jim Kucher
And I said, well, you know, that's a little broad, especially for a startup, right? I mean, you're not going to start Countrywide. Maybe you get the Countrywide in 20 years, but you know, as a startup, you're not going to get there. So, you know, there are some things where you go and not exactly, but most of the time it's the thought pattern.

01;14;43;28 - 01;15;10;26
Scott Riley
So talking about your approach to to assessing these students, it sounds like there's a it sounds to me a little bit holistic, like you approach it and you have your method of doing it. But I'm curious when it comes to consistency between multiple faculty assessing the student's work, what's what's the plan or their rubrics? Is there a set of rigid guidelines or is it individual faculty based, like how they approach assessment?

01;15;11;11 - 01;15;34;01
Jim Kucher
That's a great question. There's there's a couple of factors there. One is that those assessments are made within a context of a particular subject matter. Okay. So one of the classes that I teach is the finance class, which is the penultimate class that comes in right before they hit their capstone experience. And in that class, it's all about how are you going to pay for this?

01;15;34;20 - 01;16;06;04
Jim Kucher
Right? So those strategies are around funding strategies for social purpose organizations. We have a colleague that teaches the marketing class, so his perspective is around marketing. Another colleague of mine teaches a class on community engagement, right? So it's all about, okay, so what are your strategies for community engagement? So so some of that comes within context of the course material for the material, for the specific course.

01;16;06;24 - 01;16;26;27
Jim Kucher
We also are blessed with a wonderful group of folks that help us with the learning design and or the course management, and they do a great job of sort of keeping us honest about, okay, well, that's nice, but what is the rubric look like and how do you know? So there are you know, there are assessments of learning that happen in the background.

01;16;27;22 - 01;16;59;28
Jim Kucher
And then the last thing and this is really interesting for the students is kind of right up there with the the pivot thing we were talking about a minute ago. One of things that happens as the students get to their capstone is they've had multiple experiences with multiple instructors, and sometimes they've gotten conflicting information. Right. Because, you know, I mean, if you play a sport and one coach, you know, you play baseball and one coach says to choke up on the bat and the other coach says to hold the bat all the way down to the bottom, you're going to go, what do I do now?

01;16;59;28 - 01;17;25;08
Jim Kucher
Right. So so part of it is also that experience of of of them resolving the ambiguity. I'll give you a great example. I had a student the other day who was considering changing their concept completely, going to a whole different idea of working with a whole different community and there were pluses and minuses to sticking with what the student was working on versus changing to this other concept.

01;17;26;08 - 01;17;42;26
Jim Kucher
And we talked through the pluses and minuses. Okay? If you do this one, you got to think about this, this and that. If you do the other, you got to think about the other, you know, the other. And the student says, Well, what do you think I should do? And I said, I'm sorry, but that's like asking, what kind of mustard do you want on your sandwich?

01;17;43;14 - 01;18;05;24
Jim Kucher
You know, Do you like spicy? Then go here, Do you, like not spicy, you know? And so one of the things I think that we try to teach above everything else, and this is not intentional. I don't mean that the faculty do this on purpose, but there is a certain level of any entrepreneurial experience where you have to understand dealing with ambiguity.

01;18;06;12 - 01;18;40;09
Jim Kucher
You have to understand dealing with conflicting information, dealing with incomplete information, dealing with lack of information. There's a great, great rule, seem a great, great definition of what it means to be an entrepreneur. I was involved by a guy named Howard Stevens at Harvard years ago, and he said that an entrepreneur is someone who undertakes an attempt to build an organization without complete knowledge of all the materials necessary to complete the task.

01;18;41;11 - 01;18;58;01
Jim Kucher
Right. So if you think about somebody who builds a house, they've got blueprints, they've got the boards, they've got the shingles, they've got the pipe. Bah bah bah bah bah bah. And they build a house, which is great because you've got a house. Right? But all of that is known ahead of time now. Yeah, sure. You might hit a rock when you're digging the foundation, but you know that that's a that's a minor issue.

01;18;58;16 - 01;19;19;08
Jim Kucher
You know, an entrepreneur looks at looks at a field on a hill and says, I'm going to put a house here. And you say, how? Well I don't know. Well, you do realize there's no road. Yeah, there's no road. Okay. Do you realize that's all right? Yeah. You know, and so that's it's a very different mindset. So that part of that kind of sneaks in through having multiple faculty, if that makes any sense at all.

01;19;19;26 - 01;19;45;21
Scott Riley
Oh, it does. And for me, it also makes a lot of sense too, that I think the the conflicting information is good in a way, because if you're going to be an entrepreneur, like you said, you're going to get incomplete information, conflicting information. How good are you at self-direction? Can you make these choices, these independent choices, when people who have more experience than you are telling you different things, how do you decide what is right?

01;19;45;21 - 01;19;53;11
Scott Riley
And I would assume that's a natural part of their projects that they eventually have to decide, Do I choke up on the bad or do I do?

01;19;53;11 - 01;20;18;26
Jim Kucher
I mean, they've got to make they've got to make the call that we can't make. And even if we could make the call, it's not the right thing for us to do as facilitators, because, again, the learning is is the piece. Now, I there's one of the thing I have to say about this whole experience that I'm extremely proud of that you and be does that is different from most entrepreneurship educations whether it's social entrepreneurship or commercial entrepreneurship?

01;20;20;06 - 01;20;51;11
Jim Kucher
Just about every program has a culminating experience that involves in a presentation of some sort, an entrepreneurship language. We call it the pitch. And just about every campus that has these kinds of programs has their pitches in a competition. And there's actually really good research that says that pitch competitions are not particularly good as a learning experience, because what happens is the student that comes in first is just the only thing they learn is they're pretty, you know, the only thing they learn is just, Oh man, I nailed it.

01;20;51;11 - 01;21;08;29
Jim Kucher
Right? And the one that comes in last is like and, you know, I was kind of faking my way through it anyway. But the ones who come in second and third, it's really damaging because we all know at any given day you're a better presenter, you're not as good a presenter or you connect with one particular judge or you don't connect with one particular judge.

01;21;09;07 - 01;21;31;04
Jim Kucher
You're wearing the wrong colored tie or the right color shirt. You know, you're the right pair of glasses. I mean, there's so many variables. And when you ask people about judging those kind of competitions and you say, what separated the first and second, you often get a very intense, tangible answer. I don't know. Scott just had something about him that I just you know, Scott just really grabbed me.

01;21;32;04 - 01;21;54;15
Jim Kucher
So we intentionally have our pitch as a showcase, not a competition. So everybody's on an even playing field. And the other thing is, if one of our students stands up in that activity and says, Look, I've been working this on this idea for three years, here's why it won't work. And here's all the things that I tried to do to make it work.

01;21;54;15 - 01;22;20;25
Jim Kucher
And here's why. None of them work either. So at the end of the day, I'm going to go get a job somewhere. I tell all of our students that that's the fastest way to get an A, if you're honest about it, and you show all your research and you say, Here's all the things I tried to do, this is a problem that I can't solve for these reasons, you'll get an A quicker than the student that stands up and says, Here's my really cool idea.

01;22;20;25 - 01;22;38;05
Jim Kucher
Here's how I'm really going to make it happen, and here's how I'm going to pay for it. And, you know, it just has the slickest presentation in the world. So we're we're real proud of the fact that failure is just failure will get you as good a grade as success, maybe better.

01;22;39;12 - 01;22;59;00
Scott Riley
Well, that's the real world, right? If you if you go through the process and you explain it. Yeah, I, I wholeheartedly agree with that. If, if you've been working on it and you show the work, that's it doesn't always work out in the real world. And that's okay. As long as you can show that what you did had a logical train of thought behind it and you gave it a good try.

01;22;59;01 - 01;23;21;06
Jim Kucher
I'm about and again, in the science world that's much more except it and understood right. This is this is something that I just could fix in the world of entrepreneurship, even in social entrepreneurship, you know, it's a little bit it takes a little more time to get folks comfortable with that. I think some of that, quite frankly, is just the, you know, the culture in the United States and, you know, the sort of go, go, go.

01;23;21;22 - 01;23;31;17
Jim Kucher
And even what it means, what the phrase entrepreneur means and in the US context, I think has something to do with that. But we're we're fighting that battle the best we can.

01;23;31;29 - 01;23;39;21
Scott Riley
Yeah, because yeah, because you're right. In the science world, you know, the experiment can fail 600 times and that that happens.

01;23;39;21 - 01;23;40;07
Jim Kucher
Is everybody.

01;23;40;09 - 01;24;02;10
Scott Riley
Saying it? Yeah. Because you showed that it doesn't work. And I always love talking to people from different fields of specialty outside of like, quantitative, you know, metric based hard core, not hard core science, but, you know, science because we're all doing hard core science. But it's always interesting to hear the difference of culture, the difference of perspective from other fields like that.

01;24;02;20 - 01;24;20;18
Scott Riley
And so on that note, I'm curious, I think I know the answer now since we've been talking about it for 27 minutes. But why choose this experience learning approach over something more traditional like vertical, top down lecturing? I feel like it has to be done experientially. That does. You've convinced me.

01;24;21;01 - 01;24;53;29
Jim Kucher
Well, how are you? How do they put your hand on the microphone and say, Hey, man, I'm now it absolutely has to be this way. And it's it's fascinating to me because, you know, social entrepreneurship is in many ways a subset of entrepreneurship in the larger context, Certainly from an educational standpoint, social entrepreneurship is a subset of entrepreneurship, education, and and there are folks that are a lot smarter than me that have been at it a lot longer than I have that have done a lot of research around this.

01;24;53;29 - 01;25;16;07
Jim Kucher
But yeah, it's it's just it's just not something you can do in theory. It's just not, you know, you can't you can't write an essay about baking a pie. Well, I mean you could and I'm sure somebody has and probably some of these are maybe thinking of one of the great literary books about pie baking of my mind immediately went to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for some weird reason.

01;25;16;07 - 01;25;26;21
Jim Kucher
But, you know, it's just you can't I guess you can't eat it, is what I would say. You can't eat the pie. There's only an essay.

01;25;26;21 - 01;25;52;24
Scott Riley
Gotcha. Gotcha. So so on that note, because this, you know, it feels like this has to be an experiential learning approach. Has that strategy that you mentioned before, kind of the students get together and critically assess and provide iterative, constructive feedback on each other's project? Has that strategy evolved since you first started to utilize? Actually, I guess I should ask, how long have you been using that strategy?

01;25;53;02 - 01;26;00;03
Scott Riley
And then has it changed over time, or is the formula perfect and doesn't need to change the formulas?

01;26;00;03 - 01;26;27;02
Jim Kucher
Never perfect. It always seems to change, you know, I mean, that's that's that's the fun of teaching, right? You're always you know, the reality of teaching is you learn more than the students do. Right. But so I've been doing this for, gosh, 16 years now. And yes, it changes. I would say the biggest change, quite frankly, has been since I've come to UMBC is working with graduate students where it's in a different context.

01;26;27;18 - 01;26;46;12
Jim Kucher
Whereas when I've done this with undergraduate students, it's a little bit different. The other thing, and this is just kind of human nature, I think, is it's often hard early on to get the students past the point of simply patting each other on the back. Mm hmm.

01;26;46;13 - 01;26;47;27
Scott Riley
Yeah, I agree with some.

01;26;47;27 - 01;27;04;29
Jim Kucher
So the students give the feedback and say, Scott, this is really great that I did. I love what you're doing here. And I'm like, okay, that's nice. But you know, be constructive. And one of the things I think that we do in in our program in the Masters of Science and Health social innovation is to say, look, you're a cohort.

01;27;04;29 - 01;27;29;29
Jim Kucher
So they work together for a time, typically at least a year. And then the cohorts kind of mix and merge over the summer each year. So there's an amount of time where they can develop a relationship with each other, where there's a level of trust. And then the other thing is because they're all adult learners, there's a little bit more willingness to to be a little bit more candid with each other.

01;27;29;29 - 01;27;48;16
Jim Kucher
But even there, you still often see, you know, that first sort of gentle, pacifying phase of this is a really good idea. I'm just wondering if you had thought about this. The da da da. It's very, very rare. Happily. And I do pull students back. If this happens, it's very, very rare where you see students trash each other.

01;27;48;20 - 01;28;03;03
Jim Kucher
I in 15, 16 years of doing this, I can't think of two or three times where I've had to pull somebody back and say, Hey, wait a minute, you know, you really just flamed at that person. So, you know, you need to apologize. It doesn't happen very often. So they're generally very positive.

01;28;03;08 - 01;28;07;15
Scott Riley
Yeah. Having students be more cautious with their feedback is definitely better than the other end.

01;28;07;24 - 01;28;30;07
Jim Kucher
Oh yeah. Oh, yeah. And they get too generous. No, it happens. It happens that way very, very consistently. So it's and it's good and it's healthy. And again, you know, I mean, if you go out into the world and try to launch an enterprise, you know, the world is going to be far less generous in how they give you feedback.

01;28;30;19 - 01;28;55;05
Scott Riley
So true, so true. But speaking of feedback, I'm curious, do you do you get feedback from the students on this approach? Because I'm I don't know about their program is in its entirety, but I would consider this a unique class if I were taking it as part of a curriculum. So do you get feedback on this unique approach or is this common like in every class for this degree?

01;28;55;05 - 01;28;56;06
Scott Riley
This is how it's done.

01;28;57;00 - 01;29;28;07
Jim Kucher
It is consistent throughout the courses that we teach. They also have specialization courses that they take that are taught in other parts of the institution. But yeah, it's it's consistent in the courses that we teach. Interestingly enough, we also have a couple of agreements on campus with other schools at UMD where some of their students can come in and take one or two classes with us, and that's actually where the adjustment is more severe to get to what I think your question was where students are like, Hey, wait a minute, what's going on here?

01;29;28;07 - 01;29;47;10
Jim Kucher
Right where they've been sitting in a more lecture oriented mode and all of the sudden they're they're brought into this crazy world where they got to start thinking about stuff and putting stuff up on on the easel, so to speak, into that Ira. And there we get a lot of positive feedback that they find it very freeing and very open and very refreshing.

01;29;47;10 - 01;29;58;04
Jim Kucher
So it's you know, and I mean, people like to show off their work, right? I mean, that's a fundamental trait of human nature. You know, I spend the last half hour showing off my work with you and I'm having a ball, right.

01;29;58;14 - 01;30;02;22
Scott Riley
Saying this is I love this conversation. I'm learning so much.

01;30;04;03 - 01;30;04;26
Jim Kucher
And I'm not.

01;30;05;20 - 01;30;38;14
Scott Riley
Things I want to switch or kind of move the conversation over to. Since we've now that we've talked about experiential learning, apply to a social innovation setting, what how would you advise somebody who wants to take this strategy and apply it to their class? Like so I'm I'm thinking about teaching a data analytics course, and I really like this approach of including experiential learning, this conversation based or this feedback based experience learning strategy.

01;30;38;18 - 01;30;42;08
Scott Riley
What's advice that you could give to somebody who wants to implement this in their class?

01;30;42;21 - 01;30;44;04
Jim Kucher
Fasten your seatbelt.

01;30;47;13 - 01;31;06;27
Jim Kucher
Happily, I do what I do because I'm not sure I could do this any other way. I mean, you know, I've taught in more lecture based situations. I often say, you know, when I when I do speaking in seminars outside of the classroom with with various groups that I'll talk with, you know, they don't know me, they don't remember before.

01;31;06;27 - 01;31;25;01
Jim Kucher
And I stand up. And one of things I say is they say, I really want this to be conversational because unlike most faculty, I actually get tired of hearing myself talk. And and so when that first question comes out of the room, I profusely thank that individual, and that tends to break the ice. So I think it's getting comfortable with that.

01;31;25;01 - 01;31;45;02
Jim Kucher
I also think it's getting comfortable with knowing what you don't know and being okay with that, right. Because you know, students are going to point things out. You're going to have to say, you know, I'm not really sure. Mm hmm. You know, let's talk that through together or. Yeah, I know. Let me get back to you on that.

01;31;45;02 - 01;31;54;05
Jim Kucher
Right. And that's that's not easy for those of us that have been trained in, you know, pedagogical standards and all of that sort of thing.

01;31;54;23 - 01;32;12;25
Scott Riley
Yeah, I agree. Do you have expectations when you come into the class that as long as they hit these points, I'm satisfied or is it much more free rein is like, you know, as long as they have a good conversation and they touch on some of the things that are important.

01;32;12;25 - 01;32;14;18
Jim Kucher
You know, we've got learning objectives.

01;32;14;19 - 01;32;15;09
Scott Riley
Okay. So that's.

01;32;15;09 - 01;32;41;14
Jim Kucher
Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. Oh, no, no. We've got we've got very, very strong learning objectives. And again and the folks that, that help us too with the courses I work with, they've done a fantastic job of keeping us honest in that regard. So there are very definitely things that we want them to learn. And I think the difference, Scott, is that it's not that you don't have objectives, it's that you're flexible in the path to those objectives.

01;32;41;24 - 01;32;59;16
Jim Kucher
I think that's the big difference. The big difference is we want you to get somewhere, but if you go, you know, south and then west and then north or you go north and then east and then south, you know, if you get there, we're fine.

01;32;59;20 - 01;33;12;06
Scott Riley
And then that's where being the facilitator of the conversation really comes into play, right? When you see them just continuously going south and they eventually need to go north, maybe like tip their ship 45 degrees and say, well, what about this? Let's go look over here.

01;33;12;08 - 01;33;30;09
Jim Kucher
Right, Exactly. Okay. Right. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, well said. Very well said. Thank you. Yeah, that's exactly. It's. It's okay. You know, and it's also and this is something that only comes with time, quite frankly, is being instructive in how you help them turn direction.

01;33;30;20 - 01;33;51;03
Scott Riley
Right. Because like you said, you don't want to go back to just giving them the answer. You want them to come to it naturally. So it's a it's a gentle hand that has to turn the direction of the conversation. And that, like you said, I think the advice for people who want to implement this in their classes experience is the best teacher you're going to experience to learn to write.

01;33;51;18 - 01;34;10;29
Jim Kucher
You're going to want to. I have to say there's also there's a lot of good material. This is this is a technique has been around long enough that there's a lot of good material. I had the benefit of going through a week long experiential education workshop when I was very, very first in academia and geared specifically towards entrepreneurship education.

01;34;11;10 - 01;34;31;11
Jim Kucher
And this is a trite phrase, but it really did change my life. It really just changed how I looked at the whole thing. And so and there's there's, there's lots of good material out there now in that. So, you know, physician heal myself I think would be the other advice there and study up a little bit on the technique and the tools before you start to dive into to make it happen.

01;34;31;23 - 01;34;50;05
Scott Riley
Great. That sounds like really strong advice. I want to finish off the interview with one last question. It's one of my favorite questions to ask all of our guests, and it's what do you think is moving the needle in education? What is changing the landscape of teaching as we come out post-COVID?

01;34;50;07 - 01;34;51;10
Jim Kucher
We've got another half an hour.

01;34;51;17 - 01;34;59;22
Scott Riley
That's what I guess. Yeah, we could start a whole nother discussion, man.

01;35;00;10 - 01;35;23;15
Jim Kucher
You know, the one thing that I think is working for us, and when I say us, I mean very specifically my program and my division of the institution and sort of how we approach this whole thing is this notion of what they're labeling as Hi flex. So when we have a class, we have multiple ways that a student can access the content.

01;35;23;23 - 01;35;45;08
Jim Kucher
They can come to it live every live session we have, we record so they can go back and listen to the recording later. We have asynchronous modes. You know, there's a lot of different ways for the student to come into that. And the other thing I think is we need to have a greater recognition of the humanity of the students.

01;35;45;15 - 01;36;06;14
Jim Kucher
I remember when was teaching undergrads awhile back, you know, it was sort of like you're late for class and I hope that those days are ending, You know, I hope we're like, okay, good to see you. You know, and if you've got somebody that's got a chronic attendance problem, you take them aside and just have a conversation and you say, okay, now, so how's things?

01;36;06;14 - 01;36;15;15
Jim Kucher
You know, is everything okay? And, you know, I think the humanity of the student is the other place where we're doing good work, but we've got room to grow the formula.

01;36;15;15 - 01;36;25;02
Scott Riley
Never perfect. We got to keep advancing it right now. Well, Jim, I really appreciate you coming on the show today. Thank you so much for being a guest. On moving the needle.

01;36;25;02 - 01;36;29;01
Jim Kucher
Thank you. Out of all.

01;36;29;01 - 01;36;50;16
Scott Riley
Thank you for joining us today on moving the needle. Visit us at U Maryland dot edu slash fc t l to hear additional episodes, leave us feedback or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

 

01:00:00:13 - 01:00:30:12 Scott

Welcome to Moving the Needle. Casual conversations about ways big and small to impact student learning. Brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Scott Reilly II. Let's move the needle.

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Moving the Needle. Have you ever been curious about how teaching evolves over time? How and why has lecturing changed since the times of Plato and Florence Nightingale? Is it simply responses to outward pressures like COVID or the advancement of technology? Are new pedagogies and teaching ideas ever tested in a rigorous process? If so, what does that process look like? How do educators experiment with education? And just as important, how do they verify if it's worth implementing?

I'm thrilled to discuss these ideas with two returning guests, Dr. Violet Kulo and Dr. Eric Belt.

Dr. Kulo is an associate professor and program director for the M.S. in Health Professions Education program in UMB's graduate school. She was responsible for overseeing curriculum mapping, medical student assessment, and program evaluation in the preclinical curriculum. Dr. Kulo’s research interests include instructional design, learner engagement, student assessment, and evaluation of innovative educational programs. She is passionate about preparing competent, effective, and exemplary interprofessional health professions educators, leaders, and researchers.

Dr. Belt is a senior academic innovation specialist at UMB and has served as an instructional designer virtually and on campus for various community colleges across the United States. In these analogous roles, he has taught courses and workshops centered on instructional design, interaction, engagement and communication with technology. Dr. Belt has a passion for advancing the scholarship of teaching and learning through course design, instructional communication, and faculty professional development.

Welcome,  Dr. Kulo, and welcome, Dr. Belt, thank you so much for joining me today.

Violet

Thank you for having us.

Eric

Excited to be here.

01:02:25:26 - 01:02:53:08 Scott

Wonderful. I’m really thrilled to get into this topic so I want to start from the base of what I think is this grand mountain when we think about education research. And, I’m going to ask in broad terms, what is education research? Violet, can you start?

01:03:50:02 - 01:04:18:11 Violet

Thank you for that question. So education research is the scientific field of study that examines education and learning processes, and it seeks to describe, understand, and explain how learning takes place. So it develops new knowledge about teaching and learning, which eventually leads to the improvement in educational practice. And just to add, to elaborate on that some more, there are four types of knowledge that education research contributes to. The first one is like description. So, for instance, describing a natural or social phenomenon in education. Then the second one is improvement, which are looking at how effectiveness of interventions in the classroom. The third is prediction, which is the ability to predict, predict to phenomenon. For instance, you can do a prediction of how one exam scores will predict maybe the student's performance on a licensure exam. And the fourth one is explanation. So this one seeks to explain an educational phenomenon. And here it entails testing at formulating a hypothesis, testing the hypothesis in a real or simulated situation. Then collecting data to determine whether they correspond to the hypothesis. So the fourth one entails our testing a theory.

01:04:21:19 - 01:04:47:08 Scott

Wonderful thank you so much. And to build off of that a little bit, you mentioned testing a theory since this idea of education research revolves around how to better educate individuals or to test and understand models of education. Are there any core theories as to how individuals learn or are there any learning theories that may help in constructing these models or these hypotheses? Eric, can you speak to that at all?

01:07:08:14 - 01:07:34:12 Eric

Sure. Yeah. That's a great question. You know, there's I think learning theories have been around for a while, centuries even Aristotle, Plato. Right? You know, even in modern day we talk about the Socratic method. So Socrates is learning theory might have been that we that humans learn best through dialog and that reflecting on, you know, conversation or asking questions and debating with the answers is how people learn best.

But, you know, you fast forward through time up until modern day and we might have I'd say in the last hundred years or so, it's probably more common for people to refer to the educational research space to names such as Dewey, Piaget, Pavlov, Vygotsky, Skinner, Watson, Montessori, you know, philosophers and researchers like that. And, you know, when it comes to what they sort of contributed, they each had different views that enough people could get behind and support and keep publishing on it.

And, you know, some of the things that they talk about or probably how we refer to them now or know them now is behaviorism. Right. That's a learning theory. Stimulus response, essentially. That's Pavlov's dog. Right. Behaviorism. Constructivism, which is, you know, that learning is constructed, it's social well you can have social constructivism, but it's that it's a negotiated process. Cognitivism, that's a learning theory that just talks about how the human brain is a computer and that we just are sort of like accessing different files, recalling those things as we learn.

And there's all sorts of other ones, you know, humanism, human is at the center, learner-centered instruction, things like that. More recently, connectivism. That's a new one. It's probably some academic debate going on there with that one. But the idea is, is that learning happens in the sort of networked nodes of our technologies. Right. So kind of abstract thought there. But yeah, so, you know, all of these I think are just influential to educational research and kind of how we sometimes base our studies.

01:07:34:25 - 01:08:02:17 Scott

Excellent. Yeah. So I want to connect those two ideas, starting with education research and learning theory and come to this focused point of what components of education are commonly examined since we talked about this core idea behind learning theory. I'm wondering, Violet, can you tell me, you know, what is commonly examined in educational research and what unique aspects of education can be researched?

01:08:53:10 - 01:09:15:12 Violet

So just a few that I could mention as that, like, for instance, student motivation. So we want to see what things motivate students to excel in the classroom. Then another thing is maybe student engagement. So, for instance, if you have an instructor who has primarily been using lecture and maybe they changed their instructional strategy, they use maybe team-based learning, problem-based learning.

Then you may want to measure how whether that instructional strategy is engaging students. And look at maybe, for instance, students. Cause with the lecture-based instruction or the active learning strategy. Then another aspect is also like technology. So if you use technology in your classroom, implement technology for the first time, you want to see whether that has made a difference, has facilitated the instruction.

So also, I know it's not only like classroom research, but it can also be about leadership. So you want to see like, like education leaders, whether they impact like instructor self-efficacy. So there are different things that you can research in the classroom and outside of the classroom that advance the knowledge in education.

01:09:15:28 - 01:09:47:19 Scott

Yeah. So I think there's a really important point there that I just want to highlight again, that it's not just education. Research is not just about what happens in the classroom. We learn in a lot of different ways from different environments and through different mediums. So it's cool to hear about how what we're talking about today can be applied to pretty much anything that involves education and learning, right?

01:09:54:19 - 01:10:22:06 Violet

That's correct. And one of the things also I would like to add also, it's not you can also like Eric talks about the learning theories. You could also use those in practice. For instance, like, oh, we've seen these articles that have come out like in clinical practice instructors using something like cognitive load during procedural skills to see whether it affects like trainees in, in, in the in the hospital, whether you know, when they're doing like colonoscopies, they measure the cognitive load when they're doing the procedure. So it can also apply outside of the classroom in the clinic when students are out there on their rotations.

01:10:35:24 - 01:11:01:25 Scott

Yeah, I think that's a wonderful example. And this brings up a really important question that we've kind of been touching on bit by bit, building up, climbing further up this mountain. Eric, I wanted to ask you about how building a study would look. We're talking about researching education, researching methods, researching technologies, learning theories. That's a lot of different things to consider. And I know this is a question in and of itself that could last a whole episode, but what would you say are the basic building blocks of constructing a study? Are there tools that we can use? Is there a framework?

01:13:36:05 - 01:14:00:06 Eric

Yeah. Oh, that's a great question. You know, all of the above, I would say. But, you know, it sort of starts with, I would say, an interest, a curiosity. We want to know more. Right. And once we have that in our mind, we're curious about something. I think the first step is always got to be, go to the literature, what has already been studied about this, what's already been written about it, What do we already know?

You know, and I tend to use, I'll use different databases and search tools with the library. But, you know, most often it's like Google Scholar, just to get a sense of what's been written about this, what's out there, how what's the most cited resource about this. And then I might take the resources section from that page and find other sources where they were coming from.

So I got to go to the literature and see what's already been done. And, you know, when it comes to educational research, it could be like, your idea doesn't have to be complicated. You know, it could be that you're just curious about, I don't know, wearable technology, Fitbits, smart glasses, you know, what's been going on with those in online courses and in higher ed.

So I got my three key search terms. Right. So Fitbit's online course, higher ed or post-secondary education or something like that. And you just kind of see what's out there, you know? And then I think what happens is there's an opportunity there once you start researching the literature to see what other researchers have called for in terms of further research.

So they're basically they have your idea might not be exact. Right. But it's similar. And, you know, someone once said there's no such thing as an original idea. So the idea is, this idea has been out there, people have approached studying in different ways and they're giving you suggestions like, we need to look at it this way.

Sometimes it's a mixed methods approach, a more qualitative approach, but there's just a call to action to sort of keep the line of inquiry going. And I think far too often that sort of drops off where people would be like, you know, my idea is more unique. I'm doing something that's, you know, out of the box.

So I want to study it from scratch. And it just kind of forgoes a lot of work that's already been done. So, you know, go to the literature, construct a study, and it's taught as tools. I mean, there's you know, I tend to go to books for these sorts of things. I really like Creswell and Creswell’s research design, qualitative, quantitative and mixed method approaches.

I also frequently go to Creswell and Poth Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design because I'm a qualitative researcher, and with those, you know, there's other sources that are very qualitative in nature. You know, Lincoln in Guba. Saldana, Miles, Huberman, Saldana. There are just big names in qualitative research that all of which sort of ride different roadmaps for the type of inquiry that you might want to or use or follow.

01:14:01:03 - 01:14:25:13 Scott

Wonderful. I would pick out a couple of terms there. So I'm a scientist by training, and so I heard mixed methods, qualitative and quantitative. Can either of you just elaborate a little bit on what like a qualitative method for education research would look like in a quantitative method? Because I'm thinking to myself, well, how do I run an experiment where my students are the sample?

01:15:57:19 - 01:16:21:27 Eric

Well, you know, I think that what you're describing there would be quantitative, you know, in terms of a quantitative approach. We might have an experiment or a hypothesis and a null hypothesis, and we might, you know, have a control group, group of 50 students here in this classroom, group of 50 students online. And then we you know, how the question and we answer the question, we run some stats on it and do an analysis.

In terms of qualitative, there's typically around five probably generally accepted qualitative research approaches, and they are grounded theory, phenomenology, case study, ethnography, and probably a narrative, something that's more like literary or, you know, writing a story of sorts. So and with all of those, you know, qualitative approaches, there are certain things that are required of them to be considered, you know, a grounded theory study and things like that.

And then mixed methods. You know, it can happen in a couple of different ways, you know, And I think there is if you think about it in the sequence, you can have an exploratory sequential mixed method study or an explanatory sequential mixed method study. So an exploratory is I'm going to start with the qualitative first, and I want to get a general sense of what's going on, and then with that information, I want to develop my study, my quantitative study and go from there and then vice versa. You know, maybe I do a survey first, I collect a bunch of quantitative data, and then I want to take a deeper dive by interviewing some participants about their experiences and having them talk about their lived experiences or observe them in some way. So that's probably more common to go from quantitative and qualitative. But that's, that's what I got.

01:16:22:12 - 01:16:42:08 Scott

Awesome. Awesome. So again, as a scientist, I'm hearing a lot of familiar words, which makes me very comfortable, like null hypothesis case study. But again, it sounds like there's a lot to consider here. So, Violet, I'm wondering, can you expand on any of that a little bit? Are there other things that we could or should consider when constructing a study, either before or after, you know, data collection?

01:19:01:26 - 01:19:20:23 Violet

Yes, and Eric covered a lot in the previous question. So, for instance, he said, you know, like starting with a significant research problem, which you get from the literature, and you could also be testing a theory because maybe like you want to add, theory has been tested maybe in medicine and you want to test it in a different field.

And then you could also extend previous research. So you want to build onto what other people have done. So you're looking at what you want to adopt, that you want to try to fill in your specific area. Then you specify this, you know, the purpose of the study. Then just to add on to Eric covered it well, you know, the different research methods.

And also some of the considerations are doing an IRB, so it doesn't mean that if it's education research, you're not you know, you're not dealing with patients or something, you still need to apply for IRB and get approved even if you're not, you know, working with participants directly. Maybe you need and you need an exemption from the IRB, okay, then the sample to use.

You have to consider that, well, how many people will you include in your sample? So if you're doing like a quantitative study, you need to have a specific number of people to meet, you know, for power analysis. So if you're doing like maybe a T-test, you might need like 100 participants for your study to have enough power.

Then also that you okay, so consider your sampling strategy. If you're doing qualitative research, how are you going to sample your participants? Is it purposive sampling or are you using snowball sampling? Then also a big thing is instruments for the that you're using for the quantitative research. You have to you need to use reliable and valid instruments like we covered in the in a previous question.

The main things that are question research measures are latent constructs. For instance, you cannot measure motivation directly, so you need to use a validated instrument that has been validated to measure, to measure motivation, something like self-efficacy. It's not something that is tangible. So it's really important to use instruments that have been validated in the literature. Then some other things like after the post consideration is, you know, like report how you report your data and then dissemination for publication.

Then after that you also think about how are you going maybe to extend this data in other settings or in other populations to build on the knowledge that you've, you've created.

01:19:21:03 - 01:19:45:27 Scott

So Violet, you mentioned an interesting term, and because I'm a novice in the education research space, I was wondering if I'd ask you to maybe describe what an instrument is. I think you gave a good explanation of how to use it and some of them that exist. But for someone who's not familiar with the education research space, what is an instrument in particular.

01:20:19:21 - 01:20:41:05 Violet

For qualitative research, an instrument is a set of questions that has been validated in the literature to measure a certain construct. For instance, like motivation. So if you want to measure motivation in your class, you can find an instrument that has been validated, maybe has like 30 questions that are measuring student motivation in the in the classroom.

So it's important that you find an instrument that has been validated and validation involves measuring that it has construct validity where it's measuring what it's supposed to measure. It has content validity, and then it also has to be reliable. Reliability means you get similar results if you use it in different settings. So that instrument has to have been used constantly and you have like maybe a good, validated instrument can have like an alpha, like a Cronbach’s alpha of above 0.8.

01:20:41:05 - 01:20:57:04 Scott

Awesome. Yeah, I think that's really cool that I think the term instrument really hits it right on the head about what it's used for and how it works. It's an instrument that we can use in education research based off of everything that you said that's already been vetted. So we don't have to come up with valid forms of questionnaires every time we want to do educational research.

01:20:57:16 - 01:21:29:07 Violet

Yes. And let me just also add to that. So other people also do a study to create an instrument and to validate the instrument. So that's also another research study that you can do, creating an instrument and testing it out to validate. So that's a valid study.

01:21:33:28 - 01:21:58:28 Scott

That I feel like we could get into a whole another conversation going down that path. So I want to talk about something else kind of shifting gears from the quantitative side, moving maybe a bit more to the qualitative side or just more broad in general. How critical is perspective when we're talking about doing these studies, like, for example, having global perspective or how individuals interpret questions and data? Eric, can you speak to the power of perspective in education research?

01:24:28:28 - 01:24:46:15 Eric

Yeah, it's highly influential. You know, just real quick, I wanted to touch on some of the points about the qualitative research and inquiry. You know, some of the times we as a qualitative researcher, I might sort of cringe at terms like reliability or validity things like that. We tend to focus more on credibility, trustworthiness, things like that.

So, you know, there's you know, I completely agree with Violet, you know, in terms of using valid instruments to test studies, it saves a lot of time, effort and work. But, you know, I think what's, and sort of springboarding into this question, is what's most important in a quality study is really the researcher reflecting on themselves in the process.

You know a qualitative researcher is a part of the study and there are different worldviews that really influence some of the decisions that you're going to make along the way. So some might say, you know, that the goal of this process is to eliminate me. I'm the researcher. I just want to observe, you know, I have bias, I need to get it out.

But then some people say there's just no way that you can actually do that, right? So there's different worldviews that influence how we approach something. So, you know, there might be interpretive frameworks. So you might say that somebody might have a post-positivist perspective or a post-positivism, you know, sort of that they had prior quantitative research training, right?

They're really interested in cause and effect, right? And if they see the world in that way, then they might construct a study to try to find cause and effect. If you're a social constructivist, you know, you might have recognition that you're at least involved in the study some way because you're a person, you're part of it, and that, you know, participation and constructs meaning right in your account of the process.

And, you know, there's different things, there's transformative frameworks, there's postmodern perspectives, pragmatism, you know, feminist, there's critical theory, critical race theory, queer theory. I mean, these are just interpretive frameworks that really influence a lot of the decisions that we're going to make along the way, including how we discuss our findings with others. And, you know, there's for instance, you know, phenomenology can be very heavy in terms of a read can be very heavy lift, and some people just don't have the time for it.

They you know, I want to know the intro methods, results, analysis, discussion give it to me in one sentence blurb at the top of the manuscript because I'm not going to read all ten pages. Right. And keep it moving. Right? Or a phenomenologist just might write a book. You have to kind of read through it and go through their journey with them.

So, you know, different strokes for different folks, I guess. But I think that all of that really influences how, how and what we study and why.

01:24:47:24 - 01:25:10:15 Scott

Agreed. I think it's important to kind of go back to that previous question. Again, it sounds like perspective needs to be a preconceived duration, impose consideration while you're constructing the study and interpreting the data for all the points that you mentioned. So perspective is powerful when it comes to educational research.

Eric

Absolutely.

01:25:10:16 - 01:25:36:03 Scott

So with that, I know we've covered some of these things, but I want to explicitly focus on the challenges that education-based research faces. So, Violet, outside of what we've discussed already, are there any other challenges that someone coming into this field would want to know about before they start constructing a study? Where are some challenges behind education-based research?

01:26:32:29 - 01:27:00:18 Violet

So one of the things I could I can add is that like making sure the study procedures are consistent. So like when the procedures are very you need to introduce bias, just like Erica's explained in the other question for qualitative research, you, the researcher, is the instrument because you're the one reading out. You know, if you're doing interviews, you're the one reading out the page.

You know, the interview questions to the participants. It's important that you're consistently reading the questions and asking the same questions for everyone. Otherwise, you learn to introduce bias and then you may not be able to compare data for analysis. Then the other thing is also like we discussed before, you're measuring latent variables and at times you may not find an instrument that is valid for the construct that you want to measure.

So that means you maybe you need to start from scratch too to develop an instrument. So and then another one is like, for instance, if you're doing like a like you're doing a study with your students, like maybe a simulation and you're using like standardized patients, but you know, like if they're acting, they're doing, it's hard for them to be consistent for like maybe 10 students because, you know, they're human.

So just making I think consistency of procedures is a big challenge.

01:27:06:21 - 01:27:33:21 Scott

Wonderful. Yeah, I completely agree with that. I was just thinking about the human factor in education research and how it's probably one of the hardest fields to study because of that. Our sample variability is the most variable in my opinion. Thank you so much. Now I want to kind of zoom out from the topic that we've been discussing and focus on what outcomes we expect from educational research. How does it benefit the field of education? Eric, can you give your thoughts on that?

01:30:52:19 - 01:31:12:16 Eric

Yeah, yeah. The first thing that comes to mind is that education research is messy, right? It's not as clean cut as some people would like, and it's because of what we're, you know, just talking about the human factor. And because of that, it's kind of, you know, it's just hard to control. So, you know, how does this research benefit the field? I think it's just like any other field of study, right? The more that we learn, the more we know, you know, and it's the more we can try different things. Some things might help us develop more efficiencies.

Some things might influence different experiences in different ways, you know, in terms of like paradigm shifts and stuff like that. If enough people can get behind it, the idea, they agree, then it seems to, you know, sort of move it, get things moving in a certain direction when it comes to educational research, you know, but the biggest breakthroughs when it comes to educational research is, is that for me is when educational myths are debunked.

Right. That's the big breakthrough because what'll happen is somebody will get an idea. And enough people say, you know, that makes sense. I get that. You know, maybe like the idea, the concept of digital natives versus digital immigrants, right? Anybody born before 1985 cannot handle a computer as well as somebody born after it. Right? And you look at that and on the surface, you're like, I kind of make sense.

You know, the younger kids in the generation can handle the newfangled gadgets quicker than we can, right? But then you debunk it with educational research, and you say that's just not true. Right? It's like anything that we learn that anybody can do it and that, you know, age might not influence or, you know, stuff like learning styles, things like that. When those myths are debunked, that is a breakthrough in educational research, in my opinion.

01:31:12:19 - 01:31:38:23 Scott

Awesome. So with that being said, now that we've kind of covered, I won't say we've climbed the whole mountain, but we've definitely started getting up there. Violet, if someone wanted to start research in this area, where should they start reading? What? What are some good resources for them?

01:31:53:24 - 01:32:07:00 Violet

And Eric mentioned quite a few earlier on and the books by John Creswell. I think he's like the maybe is it grandfather or father of educational research. He has like over 40, I think over 40 books. So he has a book on just like planning, conducting and evaluating quantitative, quantitative and qualitative research. Then there's a book about research designs, like Eric mentioned, the different research designs.

So he has a book on all the research designs that he has. He has books on just qualitative designs, books on mixed methods, designs and books on quantitative so that John Creswell is where, where to start.

01:32:07:00 - 01:32:33:19 Scott

Great, wonderful. So the last question that I always like to pose to my guests is what do you think is moving the needle? What is changing the landscape of teaching? So this is for both of you.

01:32:33:20 - 01:32:34:00 Violet

Okay, let me go first. Maybe this is not moving the needle in a big way right now, but in the future, I see how artificial intelligence will impact of teaching and learning. So quite a few questions were raised recently about how educators will embrace or not embrace Chad. GP So which has been like a topic of discussion and I see a lot of research coming out of this topic.

01:32:34:00 - 01:32:57:14 Eric

And you know, just to build off of what Violet said, you know, what's changing the landscape of teaching is what's ever changing in the landscape of students in some ways. It's so, you know, you talk about the hyflex stuff, but really, you know, I'd say since kind of 2020, you're right, it's probably going to be a big turning point for a lot of different reasons.

And the history books of, you know, the three thousands or whatever, because, you know, this sort of changing nature of work, school study, like work life balance, things like that, those are really influencing you know, the everyday and, you know, it's influencing, you know, how we come to work, you know, maybe talk about flexible and remote schedules and work from home and telecommuting and whatever you want to call it.

The same goes for the students that are studying. You know, and typically, you know, we always hope that the students drive what we're delivering for them. The students are the ultimate customers of ours, right? So we want to give them we want to meet them where they are. We want to give them what they need in the moment.

So, you know, this idea of hyflex or whatever, be more flexible with our instruction is interesting, you know, and how we approach all these different variations. Right? So to me, I think where this where it's kind of moving the needle a little bit because I'm a diehard asynchronous distance education online learner, right. I can do it on my own time. You know, I don't need the classroom and, you know, and that might be different than some.

But for me, what's moving the needle a little bit there is this blend of asynchronous and synchronous online learning. So traditionally asynchronous online course, right? You don't have any real time connection for the most part. You know, I'd say historically speaking, it's always been instructor will just post a message right, and you never really online at the same time I remember back in the day they used to have a chat forum for like AIM-style chat and nobody would ever be online at the same time.

So it's kind of a pointless thing. But now I think because of what's happened in the, you know, outside world that say where people are using technologies like Zoom more frequently and regularly, it's more comfortable. It's more commonplace to say, Hey, let's just have a Zoom meeting on Wednesday from seven and nine or whatever it is, or 6 to 7 to really sort of touch base with the online student.

And I think that's cool. And I think that however we kind of find those blends is going to be interesting to say the least, because all we know in terms of the research space is very much dedicated to this distinction between asynchronous and synchronous. And when you start mixing those two, it's going to mix the results and I think that'll be very interesting moving forward.

01:35:28:04 - 01:35:54:00 Scott

Agreed. But I think you really hit the nail on the head there with it's about the students and as the students change that's really going to affect how education changes. And so this was a really exciting topic. Thank you, Dr. Kulo and Dr. Belt, for sharing your expertise today. We still have some mountain to climb, but for now, I just want to say thank you so much for being part of the episode today.

Violet

Thank you. Dr. Riley.

Eric

Yeah, thanks for having me.

01:35:59:04 - 01:36:14:17 Scott

Thank you for joining us today on moving the needle, visit us at umaryland.edu/fctl to hear additional episodes, leave us feedback, or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

01;00;00;01 - 01;00;33;08
Erin Hagar
Welcome to Moving the Needle. Casual conversations about ways big and small to impact student learning. Brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Erin Hager. Let's move the needle. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Moving the needle. I don't know about you, but some of my most formative educational experiences, both as an educator and a student, happened outside of the traditional classroom, often outside of the country.

01;00;34;06 - 01;01;04;10
Erin Hagar
How can we, as educators, thoughtfully and ethically design global learning experiences for our students? And if traveling with our students isn't possible, how can we bring global ideas into our classrooms? Fostering a positive classroom environment for diversity and incorporating community engaged learning. Our guest today developed and participated in the UMC, Costa Rica Faculty Development Institute, an immersive faculty development program designed to explore these very questions.

01;01;05;00 - 01;01;30;11
Erin Hagar
Let's start by meeting the leaders who envisioned and developed this program. Amy Ramirez is the executive director of Global Learning and International Services at UMBC Center for Global Engagement. She has been involved in international education for her entire career. Carlos Firestone Guzman is an associate professor of global health at UMD and the director of the Inter-American Center for Global Health in Costa Rica.

01;01;31;01 - 01;01;32;13
Erin Hagar
Carlos and Amy, welcome.

01;01;32;28 - 01;01;34;10
Amy Ramirez
Thank you for having us.

01;01;34;20 - 01;01;35;16
Carlos Faerron Guzman
Pleasure to be here.

01;01;36;03 - 01;01;40;29
Erin Hagar
So why don't we start by having you tell us how this development institute came to be.

01;01;41;14 - 01;02;06;29
Amy Ramirez
So during the pandemic, the Center for Global Engagement, where I work, we had put in place a program called the Globe Baltimore Teaching Fellows Program, and that was designed for faculty members that wanted to think about how to globalize courses that they were already teaching or maybe develop out a new course that was going to have some global concepts or ideas integrated.

01;02;06;29 - 01;02;37;20
Amy Ramirez
We were doing it over Zoom and we had some really wonderful, very engaged faculty members and just really novel and creative efforts that came out of that. But that institute, I guess, or that program, but we really recognize that it was really difficult for faculty members to give creative teaching effort the attention that I think they might have wanted to give it because of all of the other pressures of the pandemic.

01;02;39;07 - 01;03;11;01
Amy Ramirez
And then the other thing that I really want to point to was Carlos's leadership in particular of the Decolonizing Global Health Education Summit that took place in May of 2021. And we had so many faculty and students and colleagues from around the world that were able to participate and Emeritus faculty member who has supported global efforts on our campus was able to participate as an observer of that of that summit.

01;03;11;05 - 01;03;37;06
Amy Ramirez
And afterwards, she remarked that the way that we really move global into the institution is we actually have to think about faculty development. So when we were really thinking about, well, how do we get faculty members excited about giving, you know, giving fresh energy to some of their teaching efforts in particular, and particularly get them excited about Global?

01;03;37;06 - 01;03;59;14
Amy Ramirez
We were like, well, what could be better than to bring them into a new context where they are a learner in that setting and also to have some dedicated time away from the busyness of the office to really think deeply about how they would want to move the ideas that we introduced them to into their own teaching practice.

01;04;00;04 - 01;04;43;24
Carlos Faerron Guzman
And the summit that Amy was describing was a global health summit that was hosted at University of Maryland, Baltimore, that was focused on the theme of decolonizing global health. Now, of course, within the field of global health, there has been a historical trend to develop global health programs, both in research, education, implementation and policy that really create an overt omission of diversity of perspectives in which different groups might overlook or exclude the different perspectives or knowledge bases.

01;04;44;03 - 01;05;14;24
Carlos Faerron Guzman
And it really happens that global health is there's an overrepresentation of certain ways of doing things in certain ways of knowledge. So we wanted to focus on on what is the emerging narrative coming in mostly from the Global South, regarding how do we understand in global health, how do we stop the stereotyping in our textbooks? How do we address kind of the neglect that still exists of of lived experiences?

01;05;15;04 - 01;05;59;26
Carlos Faerron Guzman
How do we address the fact that a lot of communities are still excluded, communities of practice, communities of knowledge, communities themselves? Right? So we wanted to focus on an addressing some of those, let's call them epistemic injustices. And we were speaking with Amy yesterday about this, that that still exists within the global global health sphere. So from that STEM that this was one of the to say that the seeds for the Faculty institute in Costa Rica stemmed from from this summit, I do want to say as well that an essential part of running the faculty Institute in Costa Rica is part of the long standing relationships that we've been able to develop with the with

01;06;00;12 - 01;06;33;24
Carlos Faerron Guzman
this particular community of San Vito, those where it was the geographic context that hosted the Faculty Institute, and without that historical, let's say, legacy of relationships that have been built throughout the years, in part by myself and part by my colleague and by my one of my mentors, it would not have been possible to develop this, let's say, meta level learning experience where we are trying to embed educators in the behind the scenes of what does global health or global learning look like?

01;06;34;18 - 01;06;37;02
Erin Hagar
Tell us a little bit more about how this program was structured.

01;06;37;12 - 01;07;12;12
Carlos Faerron Guzman
Sure. So we structured this as a week long experience where the different so the different participants would get kind of a core, let's call it a core experience that included sessions on things like ethical engagement or ethical issues in global engagement, things like how do we think about equity when setting up international partnerships. We would also set up part times for sharing case studies about global learning, both from the positive and the challenging aspects.

01;07;12;22 - 01;07;44;14
Carlos Faerron Guzman
And then we set up the week as well to include it community visits, right, and visits and site visits, so to speak, or field experiences for faculty that where representative or of some of the elements that we wanted faculty to be learning from this experience. Right? So we set it up in a way that it is it was similar experiences that we would provide students, but they were looking at it from, let's say, the back and that design and.

01;07;44;14 - 01;08;08;18
Carlos Faerron Guzman
Right. What kind of questions should you ask your students when you are engaging with a certain group of stakeholders? What kind of learning objectives should you prompt your students to think about before the site visit? What kind of things could you do post site visit? So it was this middle level experience that included both the Workshop B style stuff and the site visits as well.

01;08;08;18 - 01;08;35;10
Carlos Faerron Guzman
And there was another component of the week that included faculty that the faculty members, the participants of the workshop being able to share back and do more of the community in the sense of the community of the participants. Right. That that say we actually did forge a community between the 11 participants that we brought and they shared amongst each other their lessons learned, their challenges, as well as the projects that they were trying to move forward in global learning.

01;08;35;10 - 01;09;01;26
Carlos Faerron Guzman
So the week was very diverse, it was very active and included what you would think about when you're thinking about a global learning, including time for reflection as well downtime and time for team building, which for us is as important as we think of the next steps of and how do we expand global learning at UNB as a team as this seven schools that are trying to reach similar goals.

01;09;02;17 - 01;09;22;27
Erin Hagar
Yeah, I really appreciate that you know, the word Metta was coming to my mind as you were speaking in the sense that the the faculty are participating in this experience in a way that resembles what the students are going through. And also the faculty are being invited to think about all the behind the scenes, right? The design, the logistics, the framing of the experience, that kind of thing.

01;09;23;16 - 01;10;07;28
Carlos Faerron Guzman
Yes, that is correct. That is exactly how we designed the experience. And we did that at the levels of think like a what are risk management, even issues about this. What are the design elements of the experience? What are the certain prompts you want to be able to capture and not necessary. Only that was discipline specific, right? We try to make it, let's say, quote unquote, generic enough that it could speak to the to the faculty members that were at the School of Pharmacy, but also people that were teaching things at the Graduate School Board School of Nursing or PaaS, you know, So it was diverse enough or a it was they had that component

01;10;07;28 - 01;10;13;06
Carlos Faerron Guzman
that each people could see it through their own lenses. So it would be a meaningful learning for them.

01;10;14;01 - 01;10;22;09
Erin Hagar
So can you tell us a little bit about the faculty response? What kinds of experiences or aha moments that the faculty had while they were in Costa Rica?

01;10;22;18 - 01;10;43;22
Carlos Faerron Guzman
Maybe I'll let Amy respond to the aha moments if she if she can think of some just. But I think from from your question, I just want to say that the experiences, of course, were diverse. And one of the things that surprised me was how the different faculty members from the different schools were obtaining different lessons from the different things that we were doing.

01;10;43;22 - 01;11;01;29
Carlos Faerron Guzman
Of course, they were adapting the lessons to whatever they were working on. So for me that was kind of a checkmark that we were achieving that. But that diversity there was, was quite nice to hear about. And and I would also say the framing was super important because we were and just how we should be with our students.

01;11;02;08 - 01;11;24;07
Carlos Faerron Guzman
We were extremely explicit on what we wanted to achieve, right? We were extremely explicit like, we're going to do this site visit to this community. Right here is what I would expect this student to learn during the site visit or what I would expect how the site visit would be framed. But this is how I want you to see this as faculty members, this experience, and think about that.

01;11;24;14 - 01;11;43;24
Carlos Faerron Guzman
So that explicit ness, so to speak, allowed them to connect the dots, connect the dots, or my understanding of that being super explicit about that allowed them to connect the dots on how that would relate to whatever they were working on. Because it's important to say that when we talk about global learning, we're not talking about just quote unquote, going abroad, right.

01;11;43;24 - 01;12;09;12
Carlos Faerron Guzman
Or crossing the border, going to wherever. Right. Global learning can happen in your local classroom. So and because faculty members were coming in with different projects and approaches, some of them were trying to globalize their curriculum through the incorporation of literature that includes other perspectives. Right. And they were trying to embed case studies that were maybe not US based, but globally based.

01;12;09;12 - 01;12;20;12
Carlos Faerron Guzman
And so global learning includes all that. So the different participants were obtaining those lessons depending on where we were at. But let Amy add to some of the things I just said.

01;12;21;06 - 01;13;02;06
Amy Ramirez
Yeah, I mean, there were so many aha moments that it's hard to really zero in on just a few, but maybe I'll, I'll, I'll pick a few one related to a site visit and one related to a conversation that we had during one of the one of the sessions that we had inside the classroom. So people kept talking about the site visits in so many ways and honestly, like I could pick so many examples from the site visits which Carlos, as you as we were exploring a little earlier, like they were operating on multiple levels at the same time, it's like a fabulous example of like what good like experiential learning design should actually look

01;13;02;06 - 01;13;53;02
Amy Ramirez
like a really wonderful example of that. So but people like the faculty members, one of the site visits was to the local hospital in San Beat Dakota, but it was where we were and the the fellows, they were able to visit a visit this hospital where they were really discussing some of the some of the reforms that this hospital has put into place to really encourage to really connect with the indigenous community in this region of of Costa Rica, for example, They train the health professionals to be able to deliver babies in a way that in the way that the women in this indigenous community actually deliver children.

01;13;53;03 - 01;14;18;22
Amy Ramirez
They give the way they give birth to children. Right? So or like they had the indigenous women in the Indigenous community helped to design the hospital gowns that mirror their cultural, their traditional cultural dress, for example. So immediately faculty members were just connecting like, Wow, this is just a really beautiful example of what culturally competent care actually is.

01;14;18;22 - 01;14;40;27
Amy Ramirez
And this is what we're actually talking about when we talk about what culturally competent care could look like. So lots of faculty members were thinking about how do I bring this example into some teaching where we're actually talking about culturally competent health care? Like this is a really good example of that. And so faculty members were definitely speaking a lot about that.

01;14;41;21 - 01;15;24;14
Amy Ramirez
Another discussion that maybe another example maybe that I could point to is I had a chance to facilitated a discussion around creating a positive classroom environment for diversity and one of the models that I introduced in that talk was a model about cognitive development, which sort of lays out how students move along different level, a continuum of cognitive complexity from a very dualistic understanding of right answers and wrong answers to a more relative understanding of complex issues and really internalize what their commitment and their values are as professionals.

01;15;24;29 - 01;15;50;23
Amy Ramirez
And we just had this really robust discussion about how to move students along this continuum of complexity and getting students accustomed to the notion of ambiguity, especially because I feel like in the professions or the disciplines we're talking about, there are a lot of clear right and wrong answers, right? There's a right way and a wrong way to calculate the dosage of a medication to a patient.

01;15;50;23 - 01;16;34;10
Amy Ramirez
Right? But in the global arena, a lot of what we're talking about is ambiguous and it's open to interpretation. But it's also really important to have there's also really important and high standards for what ethical conduct could look like in different places in the world. Right. And I think that this model really helped faculty members maybe put a finger on some of the tensions that they were coming up against in their own work with students and really how opening up a space for complex and ambiguous topics to be explored can actually be a real challenge for both students and faculty when so much of the curriculum is teaching knowledge and skills where there aren't as

01;16;34;10 - 01;16;57;13
Amy Ramirez
many shades of gray. So that was a just a super rich discussion, honestly, that we were definitely debating a lot about. How is it that we put some of some of these issues that we really care about in global learning alongside some of these hard knowledge and skills that we acknowledge are really important for students to master and they need to be taught and taught well.

01;16;57;25 - 01;17;06;14
Amy Ramirez
But there's all of this ambiguity out there that we also need to figure out how to introduce professionals and scholars to.

01;17;07;09 - 01;17;10;20
Erin Hagar
Looking ahead, what are your plans and your dreams for this program?

01;17;11;07 - 01;17;38;07
Carlos Faerron Guzman
Well, we would definitely want to be able to sustain this through time. It doesn't mean that this would happen in Costa Rica every year. We would really want faculty to be able to access these opportunities more broadly. At the university level, we would like these to be incorporated into a more of the streamlined opportunities that are provided to faculty members around the university.

01;17;38;07 - 01;18;01;12
Carlos Faerron Guzman
So for us, the future of the actual workshop, right, which is we want it to live on and to be able to be offered. Now there is the other question and and you may not be asking, but what is the future of global learning at UNB? And as a as a university that has as one of their goals to really grow internationally.

01;18;01;12 - 01;18;26;07
Carlos Faerron Guzman
Right. And I would say that we really want faculty members to be equipped to do this and do this global work much more efficiently and much more ethically, much more in in a way that the impact then can be multiplied. So there's two layers to your question. One is the actual institute, which you want to grow and can carry on and sustain.

01;18;26;07 - 01;18;57;25
Carlos Faerron Guzman
And then there is the impact that we want to create in our faculty members that will then have a global impact, right? And without wanting it right, maybe as a as a byproduct of of what happened in the Institute, I think a nice cohort of like minded, very convergent thinking group of faculty members has emerged. And now there is some something emerging from that, let's call it cross-pollination is the word that we use sometimes in environmental sciences.

01;18;58;16 - 01;19;11;21
Carlos Faerron Guzman
That is really exciting. And some of the new ways that university can find ways to impact not just faculty but students. And our global endeavors is emerging from that cross-fertilization. A cross-pollination that I was just speaking.

01;19;12;18 - 01;19;43;06
Amy Ramirez
Yes. And you touched on so many of the things that I was already thinking about. We hope we really hope to make this an annual program. Honestly, there's something incredibly special about taking faculty members into the into an environment where they themselves, first and foremost, get to really be learners in that space. I feel like there isn't enough attention to faculty members as learners themselves and the importance of continued faculty learning.

01;19;43;18 - 01;20;15;26
Amy Ramirez
And certainly faculty members can learn individually through their own research or their own reading. But there is something very special to collective learning. I am one of those people that will say that learning learning is a very social act and the best learning comes from being in community with others. So we really hope that we can make this an annual program and we love how interdisciplinary this cohort is and how diverse it was across a range of social and professional identities.

01;20;16;07 - 01;20;45;09
Amy Ramirez
And so much of what we're describing was because of the ways in which each of these fellows were interacting with what we were introducing them to from their own unique professional disciplinary social experiences. Right? And we had faculty from five UMP schools. And we really hope going forward to get representation from the schools that we did not have on this and this version of the institute, I guess this this past year.

01;20;46;29 - 01;21;22;29
Amy Ramirez
And like we did realize halfway through this institute that we really were laying the foundation for very strong interdisciplinary collaboration around global health and education at UAB. And so we are beginning to think about what a community of practice might look like around global health and global education for interested faculty, staff and students. I just think that it's so important that we keep the conversation going and really bring more people from across the institution into the fold of this work.

01;21;23;16 - 01;21;31;09
Amy Ramirez
So we really want to think about how we provide the space for those networks and those collaborations to really take root and flourish.

01;21;32;03 - 01;21;56;27
Erin Hagar
Well, that all just sounds wonderful. What I kept hearing through our conversation today was the sense of community that you very intentionally built, and I think that's going to be the root of so many positive developments with this program going forward. We're really grateful to you both for for your leadership in this initiative. And I'm very excited to follow up this conversation by speaking to two participants in the Costa Rica Faculty Development Institute.

01;21;57;07 - 01;22;19;19
Erin Hagar
Let's meet them now. Elliot Snider is a clinical instructor and director of the Office of Global Health at the University of Maryland School of Nursing. Elias is a nurse practitioner who spent years living in East Africa, working on projects related to health, nutrition, agriculture and health equity. Eleanor Fleming is the assistant dean of Equity Diversity Inclusion at UAB School of Dentistry.

01;22;20;06 - 01;22;31;16
Erin Hagar
She is a CDC trained dental epidemiologist and a board certified public health dentist with both domestic and global experience in public health. Elias and Eleanor, welcome.

01;22;32;01 - 01;22;32;29
Eleanor Fleming
Thanks for having us.

01;22;33;12 - 01;22;44;20
Erin Hagar
I'd like to start by asking you both about what attracted you to this fellowship in Costa Rica. Why did you apply and what were you hoping to get out of the experience? Eli I do want to start.

01;22;45;14 - 01;23;15;23
Elias Snyder
So I am new to the University of Maryland as faculty, and I'm in my role as director of Global health at the School of Nursing. I was I was really excited to kind of learn about the global experiences that are happening at other schools, connect with other folks interested in global health and and kind of have to find time to to work on different projects that we were interested in in the School of Nursing.

01;23;16;03 - 01;23;17;18
Elias Snyder
So that's kind of what drew me.

01;23;17;23 - 01;23;20;06
Erin Hagar
That's wonderful. Eleanor, what about you? What caught your eye?

01;23;20;21 - 01;23;46;08
Eleanor Fleming
So I approached this from a different perspective. So I served as the Assistant Dean for Equity, diversity and Inclusion at the school of Dentistry. And in this work, I think a lot about, you know, health equity and what does that look like for our learners and our faculty and staff to really be engaged in elevating health equity wherever we happen to be?

01;23;47;05 - 01;24;27;00
Eleanor Fleming
I had traveled with the school to Rwanda in March of 2022, and so I had this idea that the dental school was very engaged in global oral health and wanted to, you know, be more intentional and partnerships to make sure that our, again, learners and clinicians and researchers are better connected to global opportunities. And when I saw the the call, I was like, well, this feels like something that, you know, could add value to the work and interest that I personally have.

01;24;27;00 - 01;24;53;03
Eleanor Fleming
But also could be a nice fact finding mission, if you will, to make sure that, you know, I'm able to support colleagues and learners in doing this work. So I really applied to learn more and I was also hoping to get out of it resources that I could bring back. And I was very open to what those resources could be.

01;24;53;24 - 01;25;13;12
Eleanor Fleming
But as I said, to also be able to connect with others who, you know, this is their primary focus, which again, I'm the equity diversity and inclusion person who is interested in global health but does not have like a true global health act or hat for the work that I do.

01;25;13;12 - 01;25;25;08
Erin Hagar
So right. Well, it sounds like you both went into this experience with with a sense of what you wanted, but also an openness and a curiosity to how the experience was going to unfold.

01;25;25;17 - 01;25;26;00
Elias Snyder
Definitely.

01;25;26;01 - 01;25;26;18
Eleanor Fleming
Absolutely.

01;25;27;23 - 01;25;48;26
Erin Hagar
One of the components of this experience was for the participants to to bring or to conceive of an individual project that they wanted to explore during the time there. And then and then beyond using the resources and the the experience as a as a learning event. So could you tell us a little bit about about your individual projects, Eleanor, What did you bring?

01;25;49;19 - 01;25;50;01
Erin Hagar
So as I.

01;25;50;01 - 01;26;22;23
Eleanor Fleming
Said, I came to this theory curious to learn more in order to bring back to I'm colleagues at the School of Dentistry. So my project was very general in assessing the the landscape, you know, what, where does global health fit into the current pre doctoral curriculum for our students who will become dentists and also our hygiene program for students who will become hygienist?

01;26;22;23 - 01;27;00;02
Eleanor Fleming
And I had a very basic project, if you will, I mean, essentially reviewing curriculum. But what happened because of my experience, is that the project has kind of morphed into me applying what I learned and supporting our student learners and having this broader understanding of what health is and using a lot of the global how pedagogies, for lack of a better word, but applying them to work that we're doing local.

01;27;00;02 - 01;27;25;27
Eleanor Fleming
So I think the the term is like local, global or global, local or something like that. I'm not into the jargon, so I never get those things right. But that has been what my work has transformed into is is really having this practical focus of, you know, resourcing our learners to have this broadened perspective about what they're doing, how they're practicing.

01;27;25;27 - 01;27;38;22
Eleanor Fleming
And it may be that they're practicing in Baltimore or over in Shady Grove and not in Costa Rica or, you know, Rwanda. But I think the principles are still the same.

01;27;39;11 - 01;27;43;15
Erin Hagar
Well, thank you for sharing that, Eleanor. Eli, how about you tell us about your project.

01;27;44;21 - 01;28;04;21
Elias Snyder
So our situation at the School of Nursing is a little different. It's actually pretty unique out of all of UMD. So we're the only school on the campus that has an office of Global Health, and we've had the office for over a decade now. And it's something that, you know, we're really proud of as a school of nursing.

01;28;05;04 - 01;28;33;00
Elias Snyder
And because we have this office, we have full time faculty and staff that are devoted to global health projects, and we have a global health certificate program, a post bachelor's certificate program. And we also have didactic courses and field experiences for all the students. What I wanted to do during this experience was sort of zoom out and look at sort of the state of our global health program.

01;28;33;05 - 01;29;03;23
Elias Snyder
The Office What is the office of Global Health doing? What are the courses that we're offering and just sort of get a lay of the land? Because as I mentioned, as a new faculty member, I wanted to really get a handle on what we were offering to our students and then subsequently how that translates into what we stand for as a school of nursing in the global health landscape and what we can then offer our global partners and the communities that we work with.

01;29;03;24 - 01;29;38;11
Elias Snyder
So I was really hoping to get more insights from different folks that were attending, as Eleanor said, really thinking about global health pedagogy. So my background is as a as a practitioner of global health. So I'm a nurse practitioner and I've done a lot of global health work, mostly in East Africa, with different in different capacities. But this is my first time being full time like academic or sorry, as a full time instructor in an academic setting.

01;29;39;09 - 01;30;01;23
Elias Snyder
So it's kind of new for me to think about what does it mean to teach global health, What does it mean to evaluate global health programs? And that's really what I was hoping to get out of this experience. How to strengthen what we're what we're doing. Something that was really exciting was the interdisciplinary aspect of it. Many, if not all, schools were present.

01;30;01;26 - 01;30;07;22
Erin Hagar
What do you think that interdisciplinary approach brought to your experience there?

01;30;08;10 - 01;30;37;18
Elias Snyder
It was really nice to be around people that weren't just like, quote, global health people. It was really nice to have DTI experts. It was nice to have kind of more bench science minded folks and to have medicine and dentistry and nursing and everybody really coming together because, you know, any time that happens, I think your perspective, your perspective expands, you expand your consciousness, your awareness of what's going on.

01;30;38;08 - 01;30;46;20
Elias Snyder
And I was I was very pleased by that interprofessional aspect of the of the trip.

01;30;47;14 - 01;31;02;00
Erin Hagar
So let's talk a little bit about the your concrete experience in Costa Rica. How was this experience structured and what kinds of activities did you undertake that informed your approach to your individual projects? Eleanor, Do you want to start?

01;31;02;18 - 01;31;38;29
Eleanor Fleming
So, you know, I have to give kudos to Amy and Carlos and Virginia. Don, our kind of facilitator for pedagogy. I mean, they did an expert job at curating an experience. And I think for me, like that's really what I took away is, you know, when you have students either doing, you know, a an externship or rotation global health experience, whatever you want to call it, there is a lot of curating that goes into it.

01;31;38;29 - 01;32;05;14
Eleanor Fleming
It's not just you're going to go here and provide, you know, dental care to this community on this day at this time. But there's a lot that you have to build on the back end for resourcing and then work that you have to do at the end for the reflection. So our days typically started with, you know, some some session of information.

01;32;05;14 - 01;32;45;13
Eleanor Fleming
So, you know, lectures, the content was set up for, you know, adult learning. So it was very interactive. There were small groups time for us to kind of pause and reflect and then we would have a field trip, for lack of a better term. But we actually got to go and, you know, visit a hospital, go and see where, you know, migrant workers are, you know, laboring and coffee places and you know, what that looks like from like a migrant health perspective.

01;32;45;13 - 01;33;19;01
Eleanor Fleming
We went to an indigenous community and kind of saw their community health center again, for lack of a better word, and had some interactions there and met with someone who I think would be considered the pioneer, the the leader, the person who really has advocated for health in Costa Rica in a very real way and have kind of some some time in conversation with him.

01;33;19;11 - 01;33;55;05
Eleanor Fleming
But everything ended with like the the reflection and the debrief. And so we I left at least with a model for this is how you structure learning. And I don't think that in my personal learning there has been a lot of opportunities for me to have curated experiences with the debrief and the reflection and the reporting back. So that was kind of a transformative experience for me as a learner.

01;33;55;13 - 01;34;41;19
Eleanor Fleming
And also, you know, to make sure as an educator that I bring that into my practice of how I communicate education. So I think in many respects what I observed has transformed my approach to how do I support learners and how do I curate experience centers where the outcome should be clear, not just on learning objectives. Of course you're going to do that, but also to the experience that people have while learning and being attentive to what that feedback could be for the individual learner.

01;34;41;19 - 01;34;54;14
Eleanor Fleming
So it made me very introspective and even more curious about pedagogy and how we do this thing that we call teaching and education.

01;34;54;28 - 01;35;04;07
Erin Hagar
Eli I saw you nodding your head when Eleanor was talking about the debriefing and reflection. Is there anything you wanted to share about, about your experience with that?

01;35;04;21 - 01;35;33;15
Elias Snyder
Well, I think Eleanor summarized very well kind of the flow of the whole experience. And what I would add is there's something really transformative or magical that happens when you step outside of the classroom. And I think people at you would be in these clinical these professional schools probably have some sense of that when you go into a clinical setting or into a community, it's much different than the classroom.

01;35;34;09 - 01;36;05;19
Elias Snyder
But I felt like Costa Rica almost took it to a new level because we were in this incredible it was a forest. It was we were in this botanical garden and this forest and this learning center. So we were surrounded by nature. And then we would go out, as Eleanor said, to visit these different sites. And I think getting out of the walls, moving beyond Baltimore, it really facilitated an openness between the participants.

01;36;05;19 - 01;36;31;08
Elias Snyder
I think a lot of what happened in the curated time was really beneficial. The debriefs were very impactful and then it also happened on the bus. And what happened when we were taking breaks and walking through the trails or going to have dinner at the end of the day together, I think that's it really facilitated more connection building between these people that I hadn't met before.

01;36;32;00 - 01;36;57;25
Elias Snyder
And it's nice to feel, I think when we're thinking about pedagogy, when we're thinking about how we want to teach students or each other, those connections are maybe they're overlooked, but they're critically important because that's how we're going to collaborate more and build partnerships and do more work together is through those kind of off off the table conversations, the things that happened not in the official sessions.

01;36;58;08 - 01;37;09;06
Elias Snyder
So overall, I think, again, giving really incredible kudos and gratitude to the organizers for designing it and very intentionally designing this in this way.

01;37;09;29 - 01;37;41;05
Erin Hagar
Yeah, Yeah, that's that's so interesting, that idea of, you know, when you when you're outside of your typical environment in the way that you're kind of awake and alert and alive to things that that maybe you are taking for granted while you're in your normal environment. And I guess I wonder what advice you might give to faculty too, to build those connections, to create those connections when they are teaching in a more traditional in inside a UNB classroom or inside a, you know, their traditional day to day.

01;37;42;07 - 01;37;52;22
Erin Hagar
Is there anything you think that that you could transfer from that experience? You know, for folks who may not have the experience of of being overseas with a group of students?

01;37;53;29 - 01;38;26;06
Eleanor Fleming
For me, I think it's how do you show up? And I see how you show up because I watched Don and Carlos and other facilitators like show up fully present, you know, really engaged and bringing their own curiosity to how we were learning. And this is not to say that our colleagues aren't, you know, masterful and how they teach whatever their specialty is.

01;38;26;06 - 01;38;59;03
Eleanor Fleming
But I think sometimes as like the subject matter expert, you've given the lecture umpteen million times and it just becomes empty. 1,000,001. So is it possible for us to bring that like beginners mentality and to think about how we can effectively we know, deconstruct that typical classroom where I am the expert, transmitting information to you, the learner, to create the space where we are all learners and sharing.

01;38;59;12 - 01;39;41;00
Eleanor Fleming
I just happen to be the person who maybe did a little bit more of the beforehand reading to inform and guide the conversation. But we really are in this together to learn concepts to, you know, in the case of dentistry, you know, practice our develop our hand skills for, you know, restorative procedures or whatever. But the degree to which we can remove as many barriers between learners and facilitators and to be open the richness of sharing and to creating those moments again for pause and reflection.

01;39;41;14 - 01;40;06;10
Eleanor Fleming
And it can be, you know, as little as, you know, inviting people before you start to just like, take a breath and ground and then you go into your content, or it can be, you know, as big as having assignments where maybe you ask the student to, you know, reflect and judge their own crown preparation on a tooth.

01;40;06;10 - 01;40;33;29
Eleanor Fleming
So what is it that they see and how does that compare to what you taught them or, you know, something related to a up to a experience with a patient. But the degree to which we we show up with openness and invite that same openness to the learner, I think that's applicable in any context, in-person virtual professional conference, whatever you like.

01;40;33;29 - 01;40;35;03
Erin Hagar
Any thoughts to add on that?

01;40;36;03 - 01;41;19;20
Elias Snyder
I resonate with all of that for sure. What's difficult is the way that higher is structured is that it does not lend itself to that sort of learning. It really is structured in such a way in this traditional hierarchy where you have the professor, you have the students. I think for us in the UNB schools, it's also a different level of complexity because we have the didactic along with these clinical skills, we have packed curricula, we have so much to teach in such a short time, and I hear resounding again and again from faculty how how they want to be creative and they want to be innovative.

01;41;19;20 - 01;41;46;12
Elias Snyder
But the way that it's all structured doesn't really facilitate that. What I found at the Costa Rica experience was it was just a breath of fresh air. In many ways. It was very open, it was very collaborative. If you're trying to do that in this sort of academic setting, I think it can be done. But we really need to think outside the box.

01;41;46;23 - 01;42;27;11
Elias Snyder
We need to almost be radical to say, I know that this is how it's been done, but it doesn't mean that we can't shake things up a little bit and to kind of to elevate what Eleanor was saying, this idea of showing really authentically as as maybe, dare I say, removing the title of professor or faculty or doctor or whatever it is, and just coming as a mentor and a guide and saying, I have these skills that I learned through my mentors and guides and I'm going to pass these along to you and facilitating conversation in that space.

01;42;28;02 - 01;42;54;27
Elias Snyder
I think it could really shift the way that people are learning the way that we are seeing education in higher education. Yeah, I didn't to be honest, I didn't think about that as part of this experience. But as we're reflecting again, emphasizing the importance of reflection, it really felt like that it was sitting amongst friends, amongst peers with mentors guiding and imparting their knowledge to us.

01;42;56;14 - 01;43;19;08
Eleanor Fleming
It's interesting that you bring that point up, Eli, because that was actually one of the points that Dawn made. You know, as we sync about what global health experiences look like, you know, sometimes you get that like parachuting model of like, we're going to come in, we're going to do our thing and we're going to parachute out. We've got all the power, you got nothing, and we're here to help.

01;43;20;05 - 01;43;48;14
Eleanor Fleming
But what she asked us to do and one of the models which I interpret is kind of community engaged work is going into global health opportunities to find out, you know, what is it that the community wants and needs, How can the community be at the table? And effectively, where can those power dynamics essentially ease away to where we're all just doing the work or having the experience?

01;43;48;14 - 01;44;36;03
Eleanor Fleming
And so I think what you're calling for in terms of how we might reimagine higher education is very much alive as evidence based practice in the global health space. And so it just becomes the question of in how we show up, are we willing to go in and say that we are all learners? I realize that we have some core competencies, some professional things that we must do as But in doing that, where can there be these opportunities for the openness, for the sharing, for the accommodations of things, and not just we're getting you ready for this board exam because we want you to get the license to go and do this thing.

01;44;36;03 - 01;44;45;25
Eleanor Fleming
Like, I feel like global health gives us the model to do both. And and I just wanted to elevate that because that's what Don taught me. Shout out to Don.

01;44;46;04 - 01;45;13;12
Elias Snyder
Shout out to Don. Yeah. If I can add to that part, kind of going to a meta level here, we're in a learning environment. You know, the idea of this academic institution is a safe place for us to learn and grow and make mistakes before we go out into the real world. It's also a place for faculty and for instructors to also learn how they teach, learn how they view things.

01;45;13;12 - 01;45;41;17
Elias Snyder
So I would almost encourage folks to to push their comfort boundaries a little bit. And what that can do is not only reimagining how we're teaching, but it starts to shift something in our minds. And when you then enter a community, maybe you would be more open to saying, Oh, I have something I can learn from this person, or I'm not just the one like you were saying, parachuting in.

01;45;41;17 - 01;46;02;19
Elias Snyder
I call it pop n pop out global health, where you just pop into your thing, you pop out, you keep it moving. But maybe you actually become a part of the community. Maybe you find that you're growing, you're changing as well. So maybe for us as as faculty unlearning, what we've been taught is is a take away from this as well.

01;46;03;12 - 01;46;32;15
Erin Hagar
So fascinating. It's I love what I'm gleaning from this is that the structure of this experience and the the the framework of global health really provides this fertile soil to to grow and expand the way you approach any community, including the higher ed community that we're all part of. And it just seems like the ripple effect of this experience is is really powerful.

01;46;33;04 - 01;46;52;12
Erin Hagar
I am so just thrilled to to hear here about this. I wonder what advice you might give for faculty, because I know this is a program that we're hoping to grow and continue. What advice would you give to faculty considering this experience or a similar experience going forward?

01;46;52;28 - 01;47;22;17
Eleanor Fleming
So for the faculty member who is like me, who does not have a clear, you know, background in global health but is curious, I say apply, you know, talk with colleagues, you know, figure out where the greatest needs are in your department, in your program, in your school, and just, you know, write up that awesome proposal and just do it.

01;47;23;09 - 01;48;05;27
Eleanor Fleming
And also, you know, to realize that and this is one of the things that I tried to offer with my colleague Shani Fleming, no relation in the graduate school. We're both kind of the equity, diversity and inclusion people at the schools is that this work is equity, diversity and inclusion work too. So whether you come to this as I'm interested in global health or I'm interested in us from some aspect of equity, diversity and inclusion, know that this is a very big tent and wide space where I would hope everyone would see.

01;48;06;14 - 01;48;10;26
Eleanor Fleming
And so I encourage everyone to to just take the chance and apply.

01;48;11;24 - 01;48;34;24
Elias Snyder
I think a lot of folks might might not realize they're doing global health work because they're not leaving the United States and going into X country. In reality, the way that we see global health at the school of nursing, the way that I think we're moving towards this or we need to be moving towards this, is that global health is really a philosophy.

01;48;35;16 - 01;49;05;02
Elias Snyder
We have traditionally used this model of going to other countries to like, quote, help people or to, quote, bring a project or intervention. And we need to again, unlearn that. What global health really needs to be is recognizing that we are we're all a part of this global community and we have just as much to learn from folks in Rwanda or Costa Rica or another country as they have to learn from us.

01;49;05;20 - 01;49;38;24
Elias Snyder
So when you can really shift your mentality to thinking about global health as global learning, I think then it becomes more expansive, more inclusive. People can find their place within this kind of global health landscape. Additionally, we also have what I'm calling global communities here at home. So we have so many people from so many different countries and backgrounds, walks of life that are here in our community and our city that we're caring for, that we're neighbors with.

01;49;39;21 - 01;50;09;16
Elias Snyder
When you learn these global health philosophies of cultural humility, you're infusing principles into the work. You're again seeing people on a more humanistic level. I think those philosophies of global health can be infused into everything that we do. And to give a shout out to the previous director of the Office of Global Health, Dr. Yolanda Omalu, she really took this idea to the next level, and she developed the Global Learning for Health Equity Network.

01;50;09;20 - 01;50;31;25
Elias Snyder
So this is an idea that's come from the School of Nursing, where people can apply for grants and do projects where it's multidirectional. So you would go into Brazil to help support whatever projects they were wanting support With that we have expertise in and then in exchange we would learn from them and implement there things that we need help with here at home.

01;50;32;10 - 01;50;48;15
Elias Snyder
So if you can think about global learning in that way, then I really think most people could find themselves in this space and therefore they should maybe not. Should is the correct way, but I would encourage you to apply for this experience and see what comes of it.

01;50;49;01 - 01;51;11;03
Erin Hagar
I am so glad both of you applied and had the experiences that you did and that you could share them with us and with our community here today. I am so thrilled to have had the chance to talk with you and to hear the ways that this experience is rippling out and impacting the way that that we can think about education more broadly.

01;51;11;13 - 01;51;13;13
Erin Hagar
So thank you both so much for your time.

01;51;13;25 - 01;51;15;21
Elias Snyder
Thank you so much. It was great.

01;51;15;22 - 01;51;33;20
Erin Hagar
Thank you. Thank you for joining us today. On moving the needle, visit us at u. Maryland dot edu slash fctl to hear additional episodes, leave us feedback or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

 

01;00;00;15 - 01;00;29;19
Scott Riley
Welcome to Moving the Needle. Casual conversations about ways big and small to impact student learning. Brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Scott Riley, too. Let's move the needle. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Moving the Needle. A core pillar of teaching is innovation. As the world advances, so too do the tools educators have at their disposal.

01;00;29;21 - 01;00;58;21
Scott Riley
The use of these tools in new and interesting ways can lead to revolutions in teaching. Virtual reality is a technology that has recently gained a lot of attention as a new platform that can empower educators. If you do a search for VR in education, you'll come across magnificent concepts like VR classrooms and hands on training through simulation. Combine these concepts with increasing affordability and improved user friendly software and you have a potential recipe for something special.

01;00;58;24 - 01;01;20;20
Scott Riley
Many universities and companies have started to explore its potential, and we will too, with the help of an expert in the field. I'm ecstatic to introduce my guest today, Dr. Jack Pottle. Dr. Pottle is the founder and chief medical officer of Oxford Medical Simulation. In his early career, he studied psychology and worked in nursing before studying at Oxford to become a doctor.

01;01;20;23 - 01;01;47;20
Scott Riley
After practicing for several years, he got into education, initially founding an open access medical education company, as well as teaching doctors in physical simulation labs. Then in 2017, he left clinical practice to found Oxford Medical Simulation, which focuses on VR education and training in health care. His work in the space has led to many publications in multiple journals and an interview on the being virtual show.

01;01;47;23 - 01;01;50;09
Scott Riley
Dr. Pottle, welcome to Moving the Needle.

01;01;50;11 - 01;01;52;27
Jack Pottle
Absolute pleasure to be here, Scott. Look forward to talking.

01;01;52;29 - 01;02;11;15
Scott Riley
Me too. So I kind of want to kick things off by asking you to give us a detailed overview of your company, Oxford Medical Simulations. I know we talked about it in the introduction, but if you could talk about it with respect to what it does for VR education, we'd love to know more.

01;02;11;18 - 01;02;39;05
Jack Pottle
Absolutely happy to see what our core we are a health care training company, so we use VR, virtual reality. We use A.I.. We use performance analytics to be able to improve clinician performance and ultimately improve patient care. And everything we do is driven by that vision of how we allow clinicians to take better care of their patients. What does that mean in practice?

01;02;39;08 - 01;03;02;08
Jack Pottle
In some ways you can think about it like a flight simulation for healthcare professionals, for nurses, for physicians, for Allied Healthcare. It is about providing them with environments where they can practice safely to be able to learn from their mistakes and improve care. And we offer these VR simulations. So these are virtual simulations through which we do this in headsets or on screen.

01;03;02;13 - 01;03;34;02
Jack Pottle
So a doctor or nurse anywhere in the world can put on a virtual reality headset and essentially play the role of a doctor or nurse. This is virtual reality video gaming, and the point being, they can then interact with any patient in any setting as they would do normally. By that I mean a full history from a patient, full AI driven conversation assessing that patient, doing investigations, the management working with that team all in this virtual scenario.

01;03;34;04 - 01;04;08;05
Jack Pottle
Meanwhile, the patient's physiology and wellness is changing. The clinician can interact exactly as they would do in real life in a way that feels real. And that's what and what's important about what we're doing. It is creating environments that just feel like people are doing what they would do in real life. But we can scale that training and alongside that, be able to look at everything that veterans are doing in that scenario and being able to immediately after this scenario provide incredibly detailed feedback on their performance.

01;04;08;08 - 01;04;27;16
Jack Pottle
Show them instantly how they can improve and allow them to go back in and repeat that scenario and provide all that information to the learner at the institution as well. And so that is the deep dive into what we do practically in terms of the products that we offer. We now work in the predominantly between the UK and the US.

01;04;27;17 - 01;04;48;27
Jack Pottle
As you can tell from my accent, I am originally from the UK, now based in Boston. There are 80 or so of us in the company and we were really across education and healthcare. By that I mean predominantly nursing schools, medical schools and health systems with a particular focus on nursing and health systems currently.

01;04;48;29 - 01;05;14;17
Scott Riley
Wow, that sounds amazing. And I like that It's it's international at this point. It's not just something in the UK, but it's made its way to the US. I'm curious, why did you start this company? Was there a need in the space? Because when I think about the kind of things you're talking about, I assumed because I'm not educated on the matter, that there were physical labs that nurses and doctors could go to to practice these things.

01;05;14;17 - 01;05;17;04
Scott Riley
So why bring VR into the mix?

01;05;17;07 - 01;05;40;08
Jack Pottle
Yes, a good question, and I think I'd answer that in two parts. And the first one comes from why we realized the broader need in this space. So I started before being founder and chief medical officer of medical simulation. I started in educational psychology, worked in junior nursing for a couple of years in the UK, and then was a practicing physician for seven years, predominantly in the NHS.

01;05;40;13 - 01;05;59;28
Jack Pottle
But I worked abroad in Belize and Thailand, in South Africa and saw in all of these different areas the gap between how we train people at National Medical School and practice this huge gap between how you allow people to perform, to be able to take care of patients is very different from how we teach people to pass exams.

01;06;00;03 - 01;06;27;06
Jack Pottle
And so throughout that time I originally built a free open access medical education platform called Oxford Medical Education. That was when I was at Oxford Medical School originally. And we get up to 2 million or so people a year worldwide really, to teach them what they need to know, when they need to know it. And that was the realization to me of the value of delivering training at scale of being able to see this huge global need and being able to get scalable training to them.

01;06;27;06 - 01;06;54;29
Jack Pottle
That was practical. And over that time, I was also involved in physical simulation, as you said, that got the idea of these labs exist, these waves of training with mannequins and with actors, these high tech, expensive physical labs. And I realized that you could take some of the best components to that and be able to scale it in a much faster, more efficient, more realistic way to be able to deliver that impact scale.

01;06;55;01 - 01;07;17;13
Jack Pottle
And the impact at scale is really the rationale behind something like our mass. It's being able to say physical simulation with mannequins and actors is wonderful. I'm a huge proponent of it, but it is not scalable, it's not flexible. Whereas with virtual reality, you can do it 24 hours a day, seven days a week, anywhere in the world you can put on a headset or be on screen.

01;07;17;16 - 01;07;45;06
Jack Pottle
It's also time saving. You don't need faculty to be able to run it necessary, and so all scenarios can run without faculty. That frees up faculty and educator time to be doing other things. It's a massive reduction in cost. It's about a 10% the cost of physical simulation training to run something like ops, medical simulation, and the quality and breadth of scenarios that you can offer in VR, things that we could never do in a certain physical simulation.

01;07;45;06 - 01;08;04;14
Jack Pottle
So there's a big breadth benefit to it as well. And ultimately the ability to train at scale is limited by physical simulation. No matter how good it is, you cannot build physical simulation centers all over the world where you need to and VR can get to anyone anywhere.

01;08;04;16 - 01;08;24;09
Scott Riley
Yeah, this sounds great for what I'm hearing. I can think of three. These all fall into like three big pillars in advantage. You're talking about the scalability really does seem like a powerful advantage. And then the thing that I'm hearing that I really like is accessibility. You're bringing these labs to facilities that otherwise might not be able to do it because of cost, faculty time.

01;08;24;09 - 01;08;48;08
Scott Riley
There's a number of things. And then the last one is versatility. I'm sure that there are simulations that are much easier to enact in a virtual scenario than they are in the physical world. So I'm really happy to hear that there are a lot of benefits to using virtual reality to teach medical professionals. So I want to play the bad guy a little bit here and say the can't all be good, right?

01;08;48;08 - 01;08;59;13
Scott Riley
What are some of the challenges, especially in the health education field, that revolve around using VR? I can think of a couple off the top of my head, but I want to hear from the expert.

01;08;59;16 - 01;09;20;20
Jack Pottle
First of all, like absolutely appreciate you playing the bad guy. Every every story needs a bad guy. And honestly, I am very open about the negative elements of what we do or potentially negative elements. It is my job to help our clients and partners find ways around these elements, so I am incredibly upfront with it. I would divide.

01;09;20;21 - 01;09;48;20
Jack Pottle
Might be very interested to hear your opinion on it as well, but I would divide it into I think one is that you need to be able to cover all of the different needs of people coming to you with scenarios. You need to be able to cover things like individual training, team training, communication skills training, physical skills training and to be able to do that is very difficult to build a platform to be able to cover all of those different elements.

01;09;48;22 - 01;10;18;27
Jack Pottle
The other challenge in this space is being able to say, how do you create a system which is adaptable to different environments? Every health care system is different. Everyone does things in slightly different ways. So a massive challenge in any kind of virtual simulation is building scenarios that can be flexed by the institution to meet specific needs. And some of those we've worked our way around in how we designed the platform to be able to train in the different ways of building, authoring platform to allow claims to be able to adapt scenarios.

01;10;19;00 - 01;10;55;19
Jack Pottle
But I think there are some inherent limitations and part of it is internal, part of it is external. The internal one, I would say is technology. VR is wonderful for scaling simulation. It is not the best way for training someone how to do suturing, for example, how to stitch someone on the haptics. And that's the touch and sense of touch and feel that you can get from virtual reality tools no matter what linked in may tell you is not good enough yet to replicate anything close to what we can do in real life.

01;10;55;22 - 01;11;15;15
Jack Pottle
And I think being aware of that and upfront to that and saying to people we can do a lot of things better than physical simulation, there are a lot of things that we can't do as well, and there's a big overlap between them allows people to see where VR can fit in a whole simulation or whole educational curriculum to be able to find the best, the best fit for it.

01;11;15;17 - 01;11;44;06
Jack Pottle
It is a tool to use in a simulation toolset. So I think the the answer to limitations, I'd say one is the inherent element of the technology too, is how you build a platform to make it scalable and to make it flexible to different needs. I would say the final challenge is more an external one and it is more this is a new technology and a lot of people in healthcare education are deliberately risk averse in many cases.

01;11;44;09 - 01;12;02;11
Jack Pottle
So being able to take people on that journey, this isn't a scary technology is something that you can use and something that you can build upon is a lot of the emphasis behind our work. And that is a a genuine challenge that every health system will have. You'll get people that understand it and want to drive it forward and people that don't.

01;12;02;15 - 01;12;06;09
Jack Pottle
Being able to navigate that is always an interesting experience.

01;12;06;11 - 01;12;28;21
Scott Riley
Yeah, I agree. I think the the external limitation is the one that I think about the most is convincing individuals or creating buy in that this new technology is useful because you can show a bunch of videos of simulations, but until you're able to convince people that it's worth implementing that, that's to me the real challenge, because like you said, it's a tool.

01;12;28;23 - 01;12;52;26
Scott Riley
If you design the simulation correctly, then it's a useful tool. But convincing people that it's worth approaching and where it's trying, especially in a risk averse field like medicine, I agree. I think those are some challenges, but I am glad that you're in this space to kind of overcome those challenges. You pioneer the way so that VR can become more ubiquitous in these kind of environments, because I very much think it's a great tool to have.

01;12;53;01 - 01;13;11;10
Jack Pottle
And that is, I think, one of the big roles that we have as as a company leading the way in this. It is not just to produce technology that works, it is to be able to encourage people and support them in its use. If people have bought homes and are not using it, we as a company have failed.

01;13;11;13 - 01;13;29;21
Jack Pottle
It is our role to make sure people can use it effectively to improve care. And I think that concept of how to use a tool like this to democratize the way we love our education is our role as a company. We need to support people on that, on that journey, and we do that as much as we as much as we possibly can.

01;13;29;23 - 01;13;50;10
Scott Riley
Kind of picking something out of that. You you talk about helping the individuals become, what I'll say, proficient with the technology, because first you have to know how to use the technology before you can even get into the simulation. And you mentioned that your background was very much your original background was in physical simulations. How did you yourself become proficient in this technology?

01;13;50;10 - 01;13;55;21
Scott Riley
Was it a natural pathway or did you have to kind of take the road less traveled to become proficient in it?

01;13;55;23 - 01;14;21;07
Jack Pottle
I think the first thing to say is I would never argue I am proficient in the technology. I think the honest answer is what we've built and what is possible in VR and AI is so big that no one can be proficient in all of it. And I've acknowledged that very early on, and I think a lot of it focuses on what are our strengths as an individual and how are people stronger as teams.

01;14;21;07 - 01;14;45;13
Jack Pottle
So I founded UX Medical Simulation with my co-founder and CEO Michael Wallace, whose background was in technology complex health care application development. And so the combination of my clinical and educational expertise with his technical and business expertise is what got me off the ground. But nowadays, a lot of it is that we have a fantastic team doing this.

01;14;45;17 - 01;15;10;22
Jack Pottle
We have people better than I am at building all of these different elements. These are world leading VR developers, artists, animators who are incredibly proficient in the tech, and I learn from them, they learn from us. So we are growing together and it's one of the most exciting things about doing this work is, yes, seeing the impact it can create, but also being able to work with these individuals to build something which is totally new.

01;15;10;27 - 01;15;28;21
Jack Pottle
There is no blueprint for this. There's nothing to follow to say this is how you should design it. And that makes it a really exciting place to be, to be able to learn and grow and adapt together in collaboration with our clients. It's a fantastic job. So I can't say enough about how lucky I feel to be in a position where.

01;15;28;24 - 01;15;49;26
Scott Riley
Yeah, I imagine it's an exciting adventure every day when you're working with these kind of projects. And so I know you mentioned there's no blueprint, but it piqued my curiosity. When you talk about the development of these simulations, can you give us a basic overview or some best practices for how do you develop simulations like this?

01;15;49;28 - 01;16;12;17
Jack Pottle
So so yes, the best way of describing this is probably to relate it to how we think of physical simulation. And we always start with the learning objectives. What is it that you're trying to teach? Because really everything in terms of the design comes off those different elements. And by that I mean what is the interaction type that you need to have?

01;16;12;22 - 01;16;32;07
Jack Pottle
Do you want to have hand control in that? Do you want to have voice controlled? Should it be a multi patient or a multi player scenario to be able to meet those learning objectives? And from there you begin to think about the components that go into it. So the environments, the characters, the equipment that you might need to be able to hit those learning objectives.

01;16;32;09 - 01;16;55;29
Jack Pottle
And from there we layer on the patient characteristics, the non-player character characteristics that may come on, elements of the physiology, the emotion that goes into it, and then what the players are going to say to you and the flow of that scenario coming together. And what we then do in physics, in physical simulation is you might talk about the debrief, the process of how you're going to debrief someone once they've been through that scenario.

01;16;56;01 - 01;17;19;17
Jack Pottle
We think about, yes, the debrief, but we also think about how are we going to provide feedback, how are we going to be scoring the the individual on that, on that progress through that scenario? So there are huge numbers of things to think about as we are building these simulations. An awful lot for authors to keep in their heads and all of it needs to be related back to the evidence base.

01;17;19;20 - 01;17;41;22
Jack Pottle
So we build scenarios with a multi-stage peer review process. They are all related back to the evidence base. We made that very transparent, swallowed it as well, and we go through regular reviews. So I don't know if that answers the whole of your question in terms of what goes into it, but I think it is a the best way to think is start with a learning objectives.

01;17;41;22 - 01;17;51;15
Jack Pottle
Think of the components of the scenario that you're trying to build and the feedback and the scoring that comes from it and continually relate to back to out in space and best practice.

01;17;51;17 - 01;18;18;16
Scott Riley
Wonderful. So it does answer my question, but it also whets my appetite to know more. I feel like that in and of itself as a whole conversation. One thing that I do want to ask just to help set a sense of I don't want to say scale, but put a put a frame around it is how long do you think if someone were if someone from a university here was going to approach Oxford simulations and ask for one of these to be developed, what do you think the time in general it takes?

01;18;18;18 - 01;18;27;15
Scott Riley
What is the time in general it takes to develop one of these simulations? Is it a year long project? Yeah, I'm sure it varies, but what would you say the median is for the average?

01;18;27;17 - 01;18;51;04
Jack Pottle
Yes, so I think so. I frame that in two ways. One is the amount of time it takes to build a platform in which to build these scenarios. And that's what we spent the last five, six years doing, is building a platform whereby you can build new scenarios quickly to help to be able to meet these different needs, building up the machine learning models, the engines to be able to run the scenarios.

01;18;51;06 - 01;19;12;21
Jack Pottle
So that process is long. The process then of building scenarios on top of the platform to answer your question, as you hinted, is very much how long is a piece of string? What scenario is it that you want to build? If you're building something relatively close to what we've already built, we can do that in a matter of weeks with mass create our authoring platform.

01;19;12;23 - 01;19;48;19
Jack Pottle
People don't need to go through us to do that. They can literally build those scenarios themselves using our authoring platform so that massively reduces the time. To how much time do you want to invest in this? And you can be able to produce anything off the back of it. I would I would copy out what I said and again, stop being the bad guy before you have to saying that actually if you came to me and said, Jack, I want to build a scenario on the back of a helicopter with 40 people and a promo machine, I would say that is not a matter of a few weeks.

01;19;48;22 - 01;20;08;03
Jack Pottle
That is a multi, multi month project that will take a great deal of time and thought and backwards and forwards. So I think I would say anything from a few weeks to six months from a really complex project like that would probably be a reasonable estimate. But it very, very much depends on what the ask is understood.

01;20;08;03 - 01;20;34;05
Scott Riley
I mean I think that's great that there is a lot of there are a lot of options to go with. If you want to create something entirely unique, that's an opportunity that you can have at Oxford Medical Simulation. But also if it's something that maybe is more commonplace in medical labs that might already be developed and then you could have it, you know, you could ask for it in June and have it ready for the fall semester.

01;20;34;05 - 01;20;36;13
Scott Riley
If it's something that you've already kind of built.

01;20;36;16 - 01;20;56;02
Jack Pottle
100%. I think our role as a company and what we've increasingly done over the last two years is being able to make our tools available to people to build what they want. We don't want people to have to come through us to be able to build what they want. We want to make the tools so that they can just adapt scenarios on the fly.

01;20;56;04 - 01;21;12;15
Jack Pottle
And that's what we've got to now with our mass create is people don't need to have the blocker of asking us for things and building. They have all the tools available to them to say if they want to spin off a new scenario to something new and exciting that we haven't thought of as our mass, they can.

01;21;12;17 - 01;21;32;01
Scott Riley
Awesome. Awesome. With that in mind, we've we've discussed the the partners, the users, people who help validate the simulations. But there's one group of people we haven't talked about yet and the people that I like to think are the most important in this whole process. The the students or the potential trainees that are going to be taking these simulations.

01;21;32;01 - 01;21;49;14
Scott Riley
So I'd like to switch gears a little bit and talk to you about some of the outcomes with the students. I'd like to start by asking what's the general perspective from? Have you heard the general perspective from a lot of students about their feelings on VR for training simulations?

01;21;49;16 - 01;22;13;14
Jack Pottle
Yes. So we have a we have a whole and successful support team to help people with this. So we listen very closely to learners going through it. I think increasingly for the younger learners in particular, there's an expectation of this now at nursing and medical school. They are very aware of VR. They know what is going, what they know what it's about, and a lot of them have done it before.

01;22;13;16 - 01;22;30;28
Jack Pottle
So some of them are not at all surprised by it. And VR for education seems a natural fit. I would say that is a majority, but not everyone. Some people are still surprised by VR, some people don't want to put on a headset and they need to be encouraged to do that to get a sense of how it feels.

01;22;31;01 - 01;22;51;03
Jack Pottle
So the technology wise is less of a barrier, but for a few people there's always that technological barrier to get into it. When people put on a headset, that feeling dramatically changes because they don't realize what it can do. And we always encourage people to dive into any headset and try any kind of VR before to go and ask if they can do.

01;22;51;06 - 01;23;14;08
Jack Pottle
Because playing beat Saber really gives you a sense of how much reality works. You don't need to do IMAX necessarily. I think it then comes down to once that part of the technological barriers, how people enjoy using the platform itself, whether they're using it for education, training or assessment. I am constantly enthused by learners response to our message.

01;23;14;10 - 01;23;36;24
Jack Pottle
They get it. They get it for their own benefit to be able to see their improvement over time. And what they particularly value is that ability to be able to have agency to practice in ways that they are never able to do at National Medical School, they can go and have that psychological safety to be able to mess around, make mistakes, and it's okay.

01;23;36;26 - 01;23;55;12
Jack Pottle
No one's watching them, no one dies, no one's going to shout to them It is okay to fail on that way of thinking. I refer to it as aerosol learning is what we're trying to build of trying to be able to say Medical, medical mistakes are a part of life. We want you to make them in a safe space and therefore learn from them.

01;23;55;14 - 01;24;17;06
Jack Pottle
And that particularly resonates with the learners as well as don't get me wrong, as well as the wow factor. People love putting on VR and we try to remove that as much as possible, but it is a nice side effect of what we do. But I'm more interested in the in the educational outcomes that comes from it. The satisfaction scores from us as well as the usability scores are very high.

01;24;17;08 - 01;24;31;28
Jack Pottle
And that's not just coming from internally. We have lots of people that do studies on our tests now, so we have plenty of research from lots of people at Johns Hopkins have done a number of papers on Olmsted nursing that show some of these outcomes in the learners responses to our mass, which is always confusing to see.

01;24;32;01 - 01;24;56;02
Scott Riley
Yeah, and I want to highlight again some of the powerful concepts that you've discussed, the the idea of being able to make mistakes in what could be very high pressure situations in the future really I think is important in the learning process for students because I can't imagine how many students just choose to leave because of those stressful situations that you were discussing with you.

01;24;56;03 - 01;25;32;21
Scott Riley
They don't want to be yelled at. They don't want to accidentally kill somebody. And this gives them a slight step up before those more stressful situations to really feel it out and practice air for learning, like you said, which is I, I cannot under I can't overstate how powerful that is as an educator personally. The other thing that I want to talk about, you know, we've talked about usability satisfaction and you mentioned that you go through a rigorous validation process, but can you talk about the outcomes of these trainings with regards to transfer of skills to the real world?

01;25;32;26 - 01;25;44;13
Scott Riley
Does from your studies and from independent studies from Johns Hopkins, do you see that this training is effective and can be useful for students as they make their way through their academic career?

01;25;44;16 - 01;26;15;25
Jack Pottle
Absolutely. So the says a lot of the studies that have come out, including the ones from Hopkins and the NHS and other institutions around the world, have shown that in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, VR simulation is more effective than any kind of didactic training or e-learning because it makes you feel like you are there and it is equal, if not more effective, to what we do in physical simulation and again, I would caveat that to be able to say there are things physical simulation does that we don't do.

01;26;15;25 - 01;26;37;06
Jack Pottle
There are things we don't do that physical simulation doesn't do. But that's the level that we are looking at. It is just as effective, if not more effective, than what we're already doing. We see by making people, by allowing people to go through a mass that their scores in VR improve over time, you could see that performance improving in virtual reality scenarios over time.

01;26;37;08 - 01;26;59;15
Jack Pottle
What we and we also have evidence to your point previously of that confidence improving on that perceived competence improving. So people think that going through a mass, they will change that practice in real life and improve what we have not yet goals and interestingly, what physical simulation has never got over the 40 or so years that it's been out.

01;26;59;15 - 01;27;24;08
Jack Pottle
There is evidence of practically how that relates to changes in patient care down the line. That is the Holy Grail that we are trying to get from all of this. We did not hear about evidence, but we have preliminary evidence of it in sepsis in a hospital system in Illinois. But it is definitely something that we have not yet got fully researched or mapped out.

01;27;24;10 - 01;27;46;18
Jack Pottle
If people are interested in doing research on it without a mask, we'll be delighted to hear from you. It is absolutely where we're going with this. And in many ways I talked about impact of scale. That is, the outcome of impact at scale is the ability to change patient outcomes and having evidence to be able to prove those outcomes is where we're going with it as well as in health systems, the evidence of return on investment.

01;27;46;23 - 01;28;03;00
Jack Pottle
And that is what we do have a lot of is being able to say if it's of equal efficacy, efficacy as physical simulation, but is available, scalable, repeatable and reduced cost, that return on investment in health systems is very much evidence that we do have.

01;28;03;02 - 01;28;31;02
Scott Riley
Yeah, and those are those are very important aspects. And going back to what you mentioned before and quantifying educational outcomes is the Holy Grail for a lot of education research, right? Because we we study what I would argue is one of the most complex scientific systems in the world, the human learning process. And so I'm really excited to look back at your company in five years and see what other cool things you've been able to measure based off of more data coming in.

01;28;31;02 - 01;28;45;19
Scott Riley
And so with that, I'm I've been holding this question back and I want to ask it now. I feel like this is the right time to ask what's next for Oxford Medical Simulation in terms of education? What's your newest in course project that you can tell us about? You know.

01;28;45;21 - 01;29;17;04
Jack Pottle
I always I love this question. I never quite know where to start with it, but I'll pick a pick on a number of elements that we're doing. So one is and I'll talk about this broadly, is the the integration of AI and VR is huge. The ability to use it to make the scenarios more realistic, to produce more scenarios, and to produce patients with whom you can have a totally realistic human interaction.

01;29;17;04 - 01;29;49;01
Jack Pottle
Because that's what I is doing is phenomenal. So A.I., in terms of the scenarios, is one of the things I'm most excited about, and it plays into a lot of what we do now, our internal processes, some of the new products that we're bringing out in the ice space and in the analytics space as well. So if I can have AI as a bucket that I'm excited about, I would I think some of the projects that we're doing in AI, particularly around the AI controlled patients in communication skills, is some of the most interesting.

01;29;49;03 - 01;30;20;00
Jack Pottle
So de-escalation scenarios, training doctors and nurses, how to de-escalate angry patients, teaching them how to empathetically discuss difficult decisions, how to break bad news with patients, how to communicate in an educational way using motivational interviewing, all of these scenarios that we're building, using AI. And that's a fascinating element that we're driving. And so the other one that I tend to talk about other more hardware and technological buckets.

01;30;20;02 - 01;30;50;21
Jack Pottle
So it is we've built in virtual reality because it's a really good way of scaling training, increasingly virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality are becoming a continuum, a rightly becoming a continuum. And by that I mean that's reality. You put on a headset, your whole world is virtual augmented reality. You have something overlaid on your real world, and mixed reality is the whole spectrum between that and these headsets you may have seen the Apollo bringing out.

01;30;50;21 - 01;31;08;10
Jack Pottle
For example, you can literally move between virtual and augmented reality quite smoothly. And I think that technologically is going to be very interesting for the space of education and training is using those different modalities of immersion in different ways to meet different objectives.

01;31;08;12 - 01;31;21;05
Scott Riley
One thing I like to ask during these conversations is what do you think is currently moving the needle? Education or what is changing the landscape of teaching? And it's totally okay to say Oxford Medical Simulation.

01;31;21;07 - 01;31;56;16
Jack Pottle
I think you put me on the spot there. I, I wouldn't just say Oxford Medical Simulation. We are a company at the leading edge of this, I think VR and A.I. in health care education as a whole is is moving the needle. Yes, I think we're the leader in it. I would say that I'm the founder and chief medical officer, but this whole space is going to continue to dramatically change over time and the upswing in people using this kind of technology over the last two years has been phenomenal.

01;31;56;18 - 01;32;19;28
Jack Pottle
And that will continue to grow, not just in the US and the UK, but globally, and not just in medical education and nursing education, but across the whole of healthcare. So I think the technological innovations that we and other people are using in this space has the ability to fundamentally change how we think about healthcare education over the next ten years.

01;32;20;02 - 01;32;24;27
Jack Pottle
And that's the thing I'm excited to be part of and for us to be spearheading is on as agreed.

01;32;24;27 - 01;32;46;07
Scott Riley
I think it's a really good time to be an educator who is enthusiastic about technology. Just based on what you said, there's a bright future for anybody who wants to incorporate VR and other kinds of augmented reality into education. So, Dr. Powell, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today. Really appreciate you being a guest on the show.

01;32;46;08 - 01;32;56;12
Jack Pottle
Not at all. It has been an absolute pleasure. I'm happy to come back on any time and pontificate about the world of VR. And I great speak to you.

01;32;56;15 - 01;33;10;08
Scott Riley
Thank you for joining us today. On moving the needle. Visit us at U. Maryland edu slash fc t l to your additional episodes. Leave us feedback or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

 

01;00;00;02 - 01;00;30;20
Erin
Welcome to Moving the Needle. Casual conversations about ways big and small to impact student learning brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Erin Hagar Let's move the needle. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Moving the Needle. I'm Erin Hagar and we're recording this today on what is the university Maryland, Baltimore start of term for most of our classes.

01;00;30;20 - 01;00;40;03
Erin
And we are going to change things up a little bit today. And rather than having kind of a formal interview, our co-host tonight, Scott Riley. Hi, Scott.

01;00;40;05 - 01;00;40;28
Scott
Hi Erin

01;00;41;00 - 01;01;02;27
Erin
We are going to do a little bit of a back and forth about strategies for starting the semester. All of the energy that comes at the beginning of the semester, kind of keeping that energy going as the stressors pile up. Why we do what we do and what's fun about this episode is that we sent out a call to our faculty across campus to to hear from them, to hear from you.

01;01;03;00 - 01;01;19;04
Erin
What strategies do you have to kind of start the semester on the right foot? Keep things going, keep your energy up, take care of yourself when the stressors pile up. And so we're going to be talking about that today and sharing the wisdom of our colleagues today. So thank you all for joining us. Scott, how have you been?

01;01;19;04 - 01;01;20;07
Erin
How is your summer?

01;01;20;10 - 01;01;39;04
Scott
Aaron My summer was great always to short. I you know, I always start the end of the spring semester saying, yes, I've got 12 weeks. I have all the time in the world. And then I closed my eyes after, you know, one or two night's sleep. And I'm already preparing for courses. But it was a great summer. How was your summer?

01;01;39;07 - 01;01;55;11
Erin
Yeah, it was good. It was good. A little bit of, you know, all the things that sort of make it a summer. But I hear you. I feel like the the idea of summer as a true break is something that maybe isn't as common anymore in the higher ed as it used to be, at least from the folks I'm talking to.

01;01;55;11 - 01;01;56;23
Erin
Are you noticing that also?

01;01;56;25 - 01;02;10;28
Scott
Yeah, I definitely am noticing that there seems to be more and more time dedicated to preparation in the summer for the upcoming semester than when I started my teaching career some of some years ago. And so I definitely see that.

01;02;11;04 - 01;02;26;18
Erin
Yeah, well, I hope you had some moments over the summer to rest and recharge, but now that we're approaching or here at the start of the semester, I'm wondering what strategies do you have to make sure the semester gets off on the right foot?

01;02;26;20 - 01;02;49;05
Scott
That's a great question. For me. It's and I'm kind of embarrassed to admit this. I use lists, I do checklists, and as simple as that sounds, when it comes to prepping for the upcoming semester, I always find that I forget so much over the summer about what things need to be ready to go. So I create a checklist and I go through, Do I have my materials prepped?

01;02;49;07 - 01;03;12;16
Scott
Have I gotten everything I need from any academic resources or any of the library resources that I need to grab? And the one thing that I really like to do probably the week before the semester is update content. So once I've reviewed everything and make sure that the bones of the course are still relevant or still useful, I then go in and see is there anything that needs to change?

01;03;12;16 - 01;03;27;06
Scott
Should I switch something? I also look at notes from the previous time I taught the course to say, Oh, that topic didn't work at all. So let me just shift or, you know, move lanes a little bit to help me prepare for the upcoming semester.

01;03;27;08 - 01;03;48;21
Erin
Yeah, that's so important. I really appreciate that. I think especially in health professions, you know, where are, where your fields are changing so rapidly and the research is coming out at such a fast pace. Keeping on top of all of that must be a challenge. One of our respondents, a faculty member in the School of Nursing, has a really great strategy for this.

01;03;48;24 - 01;04;10;29
Erin
She says that she belongs to a few listservs that help her identify updated articles and maybe different clinical guidelines, that kind of thing. And she just forge them to it to a special email folder as she gets them. And so she has all of that information in one place and she's getting ready to update her content, update her syllabi as the semester starts.

01;04;10;29 - 01;04;11;25
Erin
I thought that was really great.

01;04;11;25 - 01;04;32;17
Scott
Tip Yeah, that definitely falls back on the plan ahead mentality. Don't let the semester surprise you and get this updated content in an organized spot where you then don't have to search through your 300 emails over the summer. I think. Yeah, that was a great response. One thing that really resonated with me was from Roderick Rose from the School of Social Work.

01;04;32;21 - 01;04;51;07
Scott
One line in particular maybe don't work quite as hard on non teaching activities for just a couple of weeks. And this is a trap that I find myself falling into every semester. You know, we're back. A lot of people have motivation. They've got new project ideas, Committees are starting up again and they've got a bunch of agenda items.

01;04;51;12 - 01;05;11;07
Scott
And so my calendar almost every semester just gets slammed in the first couple of weeks with things that are important, but they're not teaching focused. And so I think that was a really great piece of vice. We also saw a similar response from Samantha Fold in the School of Social work. You know, avoid scheduling or agreeing to too many meetings for the first couple of weeks.

01;05;11;07 - 01;05;15;07
Scott
And I, I need to write that somewhere on my desk, you know.

01;05;15;09 - 01;05;37;19
Erin
Yeah, I noticed a lot about calendar management, time management, you know, really one thing that I noticed come through in a lot of these comments was this idea of protected time. It's one thing to say, you know, try not to do so many non teaching activities. I think it's a another thing to really block that time off in your calendar and make sure no one can schedule you.

01;05;37;22 - 01;06;03;25
Erin
MJ Bondy from the from the graduate school says she likes it carve out time in her schedule when she's at her best for grading and student engagement. So not just fitting and teaching into the cracks and crevices where meetings are not happening, but really carving out that protected time and saying, This is what I'm going to work on my course prep, this is when I'm going to do my grading, that kind of thing, and and really blocking it in there like it is a meeting.

01;06;03;28 - 01;06;21;14
Scott
I fall into that trap again in the fact that I don't consider how much time it's going to take to grade the assignments or how much time I need for lesson planning. And then often I find myself doing it quickly and not giving it the time it deserves because my calendar was open. So I put other meetings in there.

01;06;21;16 - 01;06;31;05
Scott
But blocking off intentional time for the other responsibilities, almost the invisible responsibilities that people don't think about when teaching. I think that's great advice for anybody starting the semester.

01;06;31;12 - 01;06;38;09
Erin
Yeah, that's great. Do you find you have a better time of day or a better time of week to tackle those kind of thought teaching tasks?

01;06;38;14 - 01;06;55;28
Scott
100% I do. So I am very much a morning person. I would say that 90%. I hate to say that 90% of my productivity happens before noon, but in your experience as someone who's worked closely with a lot of educators, what do you think the best time for these kind of things is?

01;06;56;00 - 01;07;18;29
Erin
You know, I think it's really a question of just knowing yourself and knowing being mindful of your own energy levels. And and I work a lot with faculty who teach online. And so in those courses, there isn't necessarily a dedicated class meeting time. So the I always call it like the space time continuum of those classes is a little different than what it is when you're meeting Tuesdays and Thursdays from 5 to 8 or something like that.

01;07;18;29 - 01;07;44;12
Erin
So I think just knowing yourself and knowing when there's those energy levels are at their peak and also really coming up with a reasonable rate of responsiveness, like a timing of of how soon it is you're going to be able to respond to students. I mean, I think there's a lot of thinking that goes around you know, you don't want to reply to every email the second it comes in because that might be all you do all day.

01;07;44;14 - 01;08;14;26
Erin
But at the same time, particularly in an online environment and especially at the beginning of the year, students need to know that there's a another person at the end of this communication exchange, right. That they're they're being supported, that there's someone there they aren't just in this vacuum. And so maybe thinking about your your rate of response, the the quickness with which you respond to students is maybe a little higher in those first couple of weeks, particularly in an online course, so that they do know you're there, you're available.

01;08;14;29 - 01;08;26;23
Erin
But being really clear about expectations that, you know, you may not be able to reply to every single email immediately after it's received, just kind of setting those boundaries, but also making sure students know you're there.

01;08;26;25 - 01;08;47;15
Scott
Yeah. And I think this is really a good time since we're on the topic of students anyways, to kind of discuss our second question and when we reached out to everybody the second question was how do you connect with students at the start of the semester? And so I know, Aaron, you do a teaching in that teaching fellowship.

01;08;47;15 - 01;08;48;00
Scott
Can you remind.

01;08;48;00 - 01;09;10;19
Erin
Me? Yes. So we have a it's called our Future Educators Academy, and it's for graduate students who are interested in pursuing careers in academia. And so we kind of expose them to, you know, what is life like as a faculty member? How do you balance teaching and research? What are some of the core principles of effective instruction, that kind of thing.

01;09;10;21 - 01;09;46;20
Erin
But we do spend a lot of time at the beginning of our of our time together, getting to know each other. These are graduate students from different disciplines, different schools within UMD, so they probably haven't met each other before. And yeah, it's just taking that time, being really intentional about that time at the beginning and not thinking of it as just something you have to push through in order to get to the content and realizing that the the, what we're able to do as a group is going to be improved by that sense of community that we try to build, build in those first couple of first couple of meetings.

01;09;46;22 - 01;10;06;19
Scott
Okay, So you you intentionally set a set aside time in those first couple of meetings to allow the students to build community and connection. And I think that's a really powerful strategy. One of the things that we saw quite frequently in our responses was creating that intentional time for students to get to know each other and to to not rush.

01;10;06;21 - 01;10;27;23
Scott
You know, if a little bit of content gets pushed back, that's fine. For me, one of the biggest ways that I try to connect with students at the beginning of the semester is I pose a very what I think is simple question, but it always gets crickets inside of the classroom. I go, Why take this class? And many, you know, sometimes I'll get a nice student who would be like, Well, I have to.

01;10;27;26 - 01;10;50;26
Scott
And I'll be like, okay, okay, that's good, that's good. You have to take it. But then tell me why. Why would you want to take this course? And the purpose of that question is to get students to talk about their goals. What's their next step goal? What's their career? What are their career goals? And then I try to massage the learning outcomes of the class to be relevant to their goals.

01;10;50;26 - 01;11;17;14
Scott
And what it does is it creates connections between students who are going into a similar career field or students who know that they're going to struggle with particular content. And they mentioned like, my goal is to get better at Blink somebody else's. Oh, I want to get better at that too. And it creates these unintended connections in the first discussion of class to really help build, like you said, community and kind of break down some some barriers.

01;11;17;17 - 01;11;46;05
Erin
I love that so much because I bet you get a little bit of a deer in the headlights look from some of your students. But what I what I appreciate about that is it reminds students that there even if this is a required course, they're sitting in the seat as a choice, even if this is a required course in a in a set curriculum, they are sitting there in order to meet the requirements to advance their skills toward their desired career.

01;11;46;07 - 01;11;57;17
Erin
And I think that coming into the semester realizing like, yes, this is these are stepping stones to get me where I want to go. And just being reminded of that at the start of the semester must be really motivating.

01;11;57;20 - 01;12;24;07
Scott
I hope so. So far I haven't had any complaints, but I do want to also discuss Tanya Thomas from the School of Law mentioned the common or a popular way to introduce students in class by doing icebreakers, but one I hadn't thought about in a long time was the two truths and a lie. Normally I hear, you know, what's your name, where you're from, and students kind of give this, you know, like a passive answer.

01;12;24;07 - 01;12;35;10
Scott
They're just answering to to move forward. But I like these more interactive games that require them to think a bit about themselves and reveal something to the class to help create bonds.

01;12;35;10 - 01;12;56;22
Erin
I noticed that, too. She also mentioned asking students to identify song lyrics or songs that really resonate with them or make them feel motivated. And then she goes an extra step and creates playlists for those songs. And so when the students are maybe working in groups or doing independent work during the class time, active learning, she will play those songs.

01;12;56;28 - 01;13;12;29
Erin
And I think what a wonderful way for students to know that you have been heard literally, you have been heard because now you are hearing the music that I know motivate you or inspires you as you're working on this class together. I think what a wonderful, wonderful way to show that engagement.

01;13;13;01 - 01;13;17;18
Scott
Yeah, I'm probably going to steal that one. Sorry. Ahead of time, Tonya.

01;13;17;21 - 01;13;18;21
Erin
That's the whole point.

01;13;18;21 - 01;13;19;14
Scott
That's a really good one.

01;13;19;14 - 01;13;40;09
Erin
That's the whole point. I know. It's so great. Samantha Ford in the School of Social Work also talked about going deeper in those icebreakers, not just that superficial. Where are you from? And she connected it to the students value system, which I think is important in any field. But I can imagine, especially in social work, that constant reminder of why, why we do what we do, why are we here?

01;13;40;09 - 01;13;56;29
Erin
Not just my personal goals, but my my values, what I'm hoping to create and put out into the world. It, I think, would lend itself toward a very rich discussion and students feeling connected to her and to each other very quickly in the semester.

01;13;57;01 - 01;14;15;24
Scott
And this also really reinforces the idea of putting the agency on the students to let the professor know what's important to them so that moving forward in the class, those things can be incorporated if they, you know, parallel with the material and things like that. So that's really that's a good idea. These are all great ideas.

01;14;15;26 - 01;14;22;24
Erin
Scott What do you do at the start of the semester so that students get to know you on a little bit deeper level?

01;14;22;26 - 01;14;57;25
Scott
Oh, I'm sure many of my students will say, we wish Scott did less of this, but I generally tend to incorporate parts of myself into my lectures. We actually had a discussion. I'd made a summer bridge program called Sage so that our incoming students could refresh on material before they actually got into class. And I'm a huge Dungeons and Dragons fan, and the way that I kind of put myself in there is the logo for Sage is the letters Sage, but there's a little red wizard's hat on the S because Sage, you know, they're wise people.

01;14;57;25 - 01;15;22;28
Scott
They, they give advice and things like that. And so I, I try to incorporate my personality into my lectures. And I, I very much believe in making or having the students shouldn't say making having the students interact. And sometimes that requires organic conversation that's not related to the material. Going back to favorite songs, things like what movies did you see over the weekend?

01;15;23;00 - 01;15;44;01
Scott
I try to be intentional about including small things like that throughout the entire semester. And the key thing, at least the key to my success, what I believe is remembering those things. It's not it's not just enough to know the student's name, but when you go in and say, Hey, I remembered that movie you recommended to me and I watched it and these were my thoughts.

01;15;44;01 - 01;15;57;16
Scott
And that really creates that connection, that rapport between the student and the professor, because they say, Oh, the professor is the professor cares about what I say. You know, they're not just trying to teach me and leave. I think that's important.

01;15;57;19 - 01;16;35;04
Erin
Yeah, I think that too. Two way vulnerability obviously within reason and respecting boundaries and that kind of thing. But creating that vulnerability with your students, sharing a little bit of your of your life, your your personality, your interests, that kind of thing, it humanizes you. And I believe that it creates an atmosphere where students might be more likely to ask questions or might be more likely to come up to you after class and say, hey, I'm kind of struggling with this particular topic or, you know, whatever it might be, just it just lowers those defenses a little bit when they can see you as as a human instead of just, you know, this person who

01;16;35;04 - 01;16;39;01
Erin
evaluated grade to my work and tells me what I need to know.

01;16;39;03 - 01;17;03;22
Scott
I, I agree. And I keep forgetting because I'm still relatively new to the faculty environment that there is this intimidating barrier for many students to see. You stand up at the other end of the classroom as an expert in your content and they do forget sometimes that we are very human and that we can be approached and we will not breathe fire or, you know, terror terrorized the students.

01;17;03;22 - 01;17;15;19
Scott
And so, yeah, creating those humanizing moments I think is very critical. But like you said, there, there is a balance. You know, we do have to maintain a professional relationship and that's that's difficult. You really got to work at that.

01;17;15;25 - 01;17;35;28
Erin
Yeah, I like what Susan, Ben, Ben did in the School of Nursing said she talks about the beginning of the semester as an opportunity to convey excitement on the part of the faculty. So excitement that, you know, you're teaching this class, excitement for this discipline, excite, excitement for this field. How would you say you you approach that?

01;17;36;01 - 01;18;07;11
Scott
So it does depend on the content that I'm teaching. So, for example, I my background is in batteries, and so I'm very passionate about talking about three dimensional lithium ion diffusion patterns, but that's a little bit harder to get my students into. So it comes back to making things relevant. We talk about how batteries are in cell phones and in cars, and so I get the students to be passionate about the content and about learning by creating, by and creating relevance to their lives that isn't necessarily part of their career.

01;18;07;13 - 01;18;28;20
Scott
It's a little bit harder. For example, with technical writing, I also teach technical writing, and there it's very much we start with assignments that are fun for them, them telling me about their hobbies, them telling me about their their passions, their dreams. And then we get into, okay, let's create a method section for PCR or a fluorescent assay.

01;18;28;24 - 01;18;34;06
Scott
But we start we try to start the semester off with fun and relevant content. But it's it's tricky sometimes.

01;18;34;09 - 01;18;54;08
Erin
I remember faculty that I experienced in college and graduate school and like, whenever they geeked out about something, like, I just kind of appreciated that light. Like they may not win me over into the glory of a lithium ion battery or whatever. But it it does make me realize, like, this person is here because they really love this information.

01;18;54;08 - 01;19;07;21
Erin
And I think that goes a long way into bringing your students along, even even if it might not be there. Their passion for the rest of their life, you know, it just kind of creates some energy, I think, that they can ride that wave.

01;19;07;28 - 01;19;09;01
Scott
Agreed. Agreed.

01;19;09;06 - 01;19;31;17
Erin
Well, the next question that we asked in our call for responses was about self-care and how faculty can take care of themselves as the stressors of the semester pile up, which they always do. And we know it's coming. So, Scott, what's your what's your self-care strategy? Where do you go when you can feel yourself getting a little stressed in the semester?

01;19;31;19 - 01;19;55;02
Scott
So for me, it's all about creative outlets. I really do my best to make sure that I have an identity outside of my job, and I know that's not for everybody. Some people are very passionate about their profession and their career, and for me it's very much about finding things that I like doing outside of work and making an intentional time to do them.

01;19;55;05 - 01;20;13;26
Scott
It's a I guess I'll say I make myself a little too available to answering, like you said, student emails, making sure I get back to them in time. So I have to pick my times very carefully and most of the time I don't get to pick. I just say, Oh, I've got an hour here. Let me sit down and start being creative.

01;20;13;26 - 01;20;19;15
Scott
And that goes a very long way to helping me stay sane during the semester.

01;20;19;22 - 01;20;42;18
Erin
I love that. I love that so much of what we got in response to this was kind of your your physical self-care routine. So exercise and nutrition and and drinking water, all those things are so important. But I love how you expanded that to include kind of honoring your creative self, honoring a part of you that, you know, is is not in service of your students or in service of your field.

01;20;42;18 - 01;20;46;29
Erin
It's just something that fills you up and brings you joy. No pun intended. Charges your battery.

01;20;47;05 - 01;21;14;20
Scott
Yeah. So speaking of charges, your battery and great poet Nisha Ganesh from the School of Dentistry kind of discusses the fact that as a person who has to be extroverted constantly in their profession, sometimes that drains their social battery and they do a lot to protect intentional time, either in the morning, in their evening, you know, not normal working hours, but giving themselves dedicated time to do activities that rejuvenate them.

01;21;14;20 - 01;21;31;23
Scott
And I think that's something that we can all practice a little bit more, is saying, hey, I need to make time for self-care just for me, not as an obligation to anybody else or doing anything but say what makes me rejuvenated and what times can I do that?

01;21;31;25 - 01;21;54;03
Erin
Yeah, and it's interesting because other people sort of had the an opposite approach with respect to that introversion extroversion dynamic again. And some people find it rejuvenating and recharging to just make time to to spend time with their colleagues, to connect over coffee or a lunch, talk about what they're facing. I think, you know, we work in a very vibrant institution.

01;21;54;03 - 01;22;19;24
Erin
There's a lot of people, a lot of stuff going on, but so much of our work could be seen as individual, right? We teach individually typically, you know, maybe our research is with some colleagues, but but the things that we're doing are kind of on our own. So Samantha Fold in the School of Social Work talked about taking time to scheduled check ins with with colleagues, coffees or lunch, catching up that that really can be a stress reliever and and create community.

01;22;19;24 - 01;22;22;15
Erin
You know among the faculty which is so important.

01;22;22;17 - 01;22;43;21
Scott
Yeah I agree and I wonder if there's a way to kind of intentionally incorporate that into the semester before it starts going back to, you know, you were talking about how do we start the semester off? Right. I know one of the responses was plan ahead, make meetings that, you know, you're going to need to make. But what about meetings that you you need for yourself?

01;22;43;21 - 01;23;06;22
Scott
And so I wonder if that's something that we can intentionally do as well as say, hey, I know I'm going to need to meet with some faculty to recharge my batteries. Let me get it on their schedule in September, because come October everybody's going to conferences, people are going away for vacations in November. So getting a jumpstart on the semester may also be about, Hey, let me schedule those rejuvenation meetings.

01;23;06;23 - 01;23;22;15
Erin
I think that's so smart and recognizing that they don't all I feel like we just have this default where meetings have to be an hour, like 20 minutes, like let's just do a 20 minute coffee and disconnect and just nice to see your face and and hear how things are going. I think that can go a long way.

01;23;22;15 - 01;23;46;16
Erin
So I love that idea. I think that's great. I also heard a lot in our in our mailbag responses to this is just kind of recognizing the rhythm of a semester and preparing for it. Right. A lot of people seem to think that it was important for them to recognize that, you know, the first couple of weeks of the semester have this high energy, this get to know you.

01;23;46;18 - 01;24;04;15
Erin
And then there's a different energy. Maybe over the next month, this kind of we get into a routine of content and assignments and things like that. Then comes a slam, right? The slam is going to come at a particular point and you know it's coming and you know, you're going to have all your papers to grade and the dog's going to have an emergency surgery in your office.

01;24;04;15 - 01;24;19;02
Erin
Internet is going to go out like you just know a week like that is going to happen. So just kind of bracing yourself for it, I guess. How do you do you have any tips for just knowing something like that is coming and and dealing with it when it does?

01;24;19;05 - 01;24;44;24
Scott
So I think we may have discussed it before, but I think one of the responses said it best. The semester is only 16 weeks. So when I personally think about the rhythm of the semester, I see no matter what's going on in X number of weeks, it will be over. And so all things are temporary. Whatever stressors are coming your way, it's a hill, you know you're going to get over it and then it's going to be downhill from there.

01;24;44;24 - 01;25;04;15
Scott
And so I wish I wish I did have some tangible tips most of the time. Once those hard weeks in the semester come, I really just kind of put my head down and get through it. You know, I pushed through it knowing that once I'm on the other side, I'll feel much better. What about you, Aaron? Do you have any tips for that?

01;25;04;17 - 01;25;24;16
Erin
Well, a couple of things. Come to mind. One is, so I've been getting trained in coaching and one of the things that coaches will often ask their clients is how are you going to celebrate? Right? Because so often we just we reach a hurdle and then we're like, okay, reach that hurdle. What's the next one? Or I, I met this accomplishment and now what?

01;25;24;23 - 01;25;48;14
Erin
And we never really take a moment to intentionally celebrate those kinds of things. So maybe when you get to a certain point in the semester or you've gotten you've gotten your students through this, particularly challenging assignment or activity, just maybe just take a moment and say like, Wow, that's really meaningful to me. This happens every semester. It's always hard, but maybe I'm going to give myself a little reward.

01;25;48;14 - 01;26;06;01
Erin
Maybe I'm going to go out for an ice cream cone or I'm going to invite a friend to coffee or do something that fills me up. But just making it a conscious connection to that hurdle that you've just overcome. So that's one thing that comes to mind. But I love something that Dr. Mary Jo Bandy in The Graduate School wrote.

01;26;06;01 - 01;26;34;26
Erin
She has a tool that she uses and she calls it the ten, ten, ten Challenge. And so what that is, is just when something difficult is happening or something stressful, asking yourself, is this going to matter in 10 minutes, ten days or ten years from now? And the response to that really can influence how you feel, right? Like if you realized, like, okay, this this is a pain right now, but in 10 minutes this is going to go away.

01;26;34;26 - 01;26;50;20
Erin
Ten days from now, this will seem like a completely different situation. And when I think about ten years, you know, that seems to me like something coming up that's like really questioning my values are really creating some kind of why do I do what I do type question Like, is that going to matter in ten years from now?

01;26;50;20 - 01;27;05;01
Erin
And I'd be willing to bet very few of the things that come up that that create stress in the moment meet that ten years from now challenge. I just I thought that was just such a healthy, healthy way to think about things on our plate that might be unpleasant.

01;27;05;04 - 01;27;25;21
Scott
Oh, I agree. And I'll be honest with you, I had to write down your first suggestion because I constantly forget that we're not just doing things to get to the next thing. We do need to celebrate our achievements, even if it's small. The beauty of the U. And B campus is you can go get an ice cream and it's a five minute walk from campus and you know, it's a 20 minute meeting.

01;27;25;21 - 01;27;33;02
Scott
You can go grab an ice cream, come back and you won't miss a beat in your day. And so that one really resonated with me. Thanks for that, Erin.

01;27;33;04 - 01;27;56;11
Erin
All right. Well, now we have a plan. We're going to do an ice cream. Yeah, well, I think this kind of lends us into the last question we ask because it really gets into that idea of making meaning around what we do. Our question that we threw out to our colleagues was, was what keeps you going as an educator and what helps keep things in perspective when teaching and other demands feel difficult?

01;27;56;13 - 01;28;18;16
Erin
And Scott, I don't know about you, but these responses really knocked me over because the depth of meaning that our faculty place into their teaching, the sense of purpose that came through in these responses as as a source of strength and energy. Like why do we do what we do? I just thought they were beautifully expressed.

01;28;18;19 - 01;28;44;24
Scott
Agreed. And for me personally, my my response is very similar to many of the people who many of the faculty who responded to us. I really do get fulfillment. I know I talked about having things outside of work, but I really do get fulfillment when the student has a light bulb moment or when the student comes to me and says, Hey, I'm really struggling and I trust you to help me overcome this barrier, this hurdle that I'm facing.

01;28;45;01 - 01;29;00;21
Scott
And so for me, the reason that I keep doing what I'm doing, no matter how hard it gets, is always going to be very student focused. I want to see the next generation of young individuals go on and succeed and do things even better than I could have ever done that. And that's we saw a lot of that in our responses.

01;29;00;23 - 01;29;26;06
Erin
Absolutely. And I think being in the Health and human services professions here, it makes that meaning takes that meaning even one step further afield, like like Samantha Ford in the School of Social Work says, reminding myself that the work we do will help to prepare hundreds of future social workers who work alongside communities in which we live and work and hopefully help to make the world a more inclusive, equitable place makes this work meaningful.

01;29;26;06 - 01;29;27;27
Erin
It's worth the demands.

01;29;27;29 - 01;29;53;23
Scott
Yeah, I wish. I wish I could add to that, but I think that was said perfectly. I also think it's important. Nisha Ganesh from the school dentistry brings this up as well, is that we're constantly looking at the assessment of students, you know, the outcomes of students. And one of the things that can really help frame things for you as an individual or a faculty teacher is to come up with outcome assessments for yourself.

01;29;53;23 - 01;30;12;27
Scott
Going back to that idea of celebration, something that can keep you going throughout the short term, the 10 minutes, the 10 hours, the ten months, ten years is to come up with assessments are outcomes at the end of every semester to say, Hey, look at all the great things that I've accomplished. Wonder what I can do next semester.

01;30;12;27 - 01;30;29;04
Scott
Can I outdo myself or do I need to take it a step back and do a little bit of self-care? But I think that's another thing that was mentioned that keeps people going is knowing what you're doing has an impact and then looking back and reflecting on all the things you've accomplished. It's not just the day to day grind.

01;30;29;04 - 01;30;31;02
Scott
You're doing things that matter, you know?

01;30;31;05 - 01;30;47;19
Erin
Yeah, yeah, almost like a life review, like kind of as your life review as an educator, like thinking about how you taught when you first started out, what you've learned since then, the kind of interactions that you've had with your students really taking the long view that can be incredibly powerful and motivating.

01;30;47;22 - 01;30;48;06
Scott
Agreed.

01;30;48;09 - 01;30;53;09
Erin
This has been such a wonderful discussion. I am just wishing you the absolute best start to your semester.

01;30;53;12 - 01;31;01;25
Scott
Oh, thanks so much and I always appreciate being on the show with you and I can't wait to see all the cool things that we both do in the upcoming semester.

01;31;01;27 - 01;31;23;19
Erin
Yes. And for the rest of you, we are wishing you a great fall semester and we hope that some of these tips and strategies and perspectives help us as you get ready to connect with your students in this profession and think about that broader purpose, about why we do what we do. Thanks so much for your time today.

01;31;23;21 - 01;31;38;06
Erin
Thank you for joining us today. On moving the needle, visit us at U. Maryland. That edu slash fc tel. To hear additional episodes, leave us feedback or suggest future topics, we'd love to hear from.

 

01;00;00;15 - 01;00;27;21
Scott Riley
Welcome to Moving the Needle. Casual conversations about ways big and small to impact student learning. Brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Scott Riley, too. Let's move the needle. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Moving the Needle. A little over a year ago, we explored the idea of how to train graduate students in education.

01;00;27;23 - 01;00;52;19
Scott Riley
During our conversation with Dr. Tracy and Jennifer Aumiller we learned about the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning across campus, teaching fellowships and workshops as platforms designed to help grad students teaching and mentorship skills. Now, UMB is an official CIRTL partner, which means we get to start a new conversation about what this means for our students, faculty and schools.

01;00;52;21 - 01;01;14;17
Scott Riley
It's my great pleasure to introduce Jennifer Miller. Jen is the director of the Career and Professional Development Office of Postdoctoral Scholars in the School of Medicine at UMB. In addition to that role, she contributes to numerous professional development workshops and seminars to help train the next generation of graduate students. Now, she isn't alone in being a CIRTL expert.

01;01;14;19 - 01;01;28;20
Scott Riley
The CIRTLCommittee at UMB includes Jen, Dr. Christina Cestone, Erin Hager and Dr. Eric Belt, who are working diligently to ensure the success of certain here on campus. Welcome, Jen. Thanks for being on the show today.

01;01;28;22 - 01;01;30;06
Jenn Aumiller
Thanks for having me.

01;01;30;09 - 01;01;53;10
Scott Riley
So it's been a little over a year since we last discussed some of the opportunities available to students on campus here at UNB. And we're now talking about certainly coming to you and being served or being are you and being a Seattle campus. But because it's been a year. I'd like to just do a quick review. What does CIRTL stand for and what is its mission?

01;01;53;13 - 01;02;30;13
Jenn Aumiller
So CIRTL stands for the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning. And it comes out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And the mission for this program really sees undergraduate education as a strategic leverage point in preparing future STEM faculty and then advancing STEM undergraduate education in the U.S. and Canada. So it's a national and slightly international program and really seeks to prepare future STEM faculty who excel both as researchers in education and also as teachers.

01;02;30;15 - 01;02;42;21
Scott Riley
Wow. That's a that's a goal I can get behind. I'm kind of curious, how do they achieve that? That seems like a very big goal. How do you how do you do all those things at the University of Maryland, Baltimore?

01;02;42;24 - 01;03;27;24
Jenn Aumiller
Well, what was really cool about joining this program is we got to be part of a national network. So we got to tap into all of the really wonderful resources that are offered nationally and these are largely done in like workshops and trainings. Many of them are virtual because they're national. But we also already had a lot of really great programing happening at UMD And kind of what was really great about putting this program together here might be application for Shuttle was we got to kind of tap into and investigate all the really great programs that are already happening at UMD and creating more a more cohesive program for students and postdoctoral fellow to tap

01;03;27;24 - 01;03;44;09
Jenn Aumiller
into. So they also offer a certificate ing program through cert, all so our students and postdocs will have access to that at three different levels. So that's really how this program is achieved.

01;03;44;12 - 01;04;03;09
Scott Riley
Wow. So it sounds like this benefits a lot of different populations at you. And B, you mentioned the students and you mentioned postdocs, which I really like to hear, because when we first started this conversation, you were mentioning this is kind of undergrad focused and UNB is has some like one or two undergrad programs from my understanding, but it's mostly a graduate university.

01;04;03;09 - 01;04;26;21
Scott Riley
So the fact that what we're kind of hearing is that graduate students can participate and even postdocs can participate. Sounds really awesome. And I'd like to dig a bit deeper. You mentioned that there are three levels of certification. Can you talk a little bit more about that? What's the difference? If I receive a level one style certification versus a level three?

01;04;26;23 - 01;04;58;13
Jenn Aumiller
Sure. So, like, associates are starting to kind of tap into some of the core ideas that are foundational. First hurdle, which are learning through diversity. Teaching is research and learning. Community issues are some of the foundational concepts within the circle. So you take some workshops and courses and trainings. And then we've also the group of people that I'm working with, Karen Hager and Dr. Eric Belt, we've created like a Blackboard site to track all of this.

01;04;58;15 - 01;05;35;23
Jenn Aumiller
And then you also have to submit a written statement of what you've learned during that time period. We move into the practitioner level. We start thinking more about that research component as part of it, and then also getting some teaching experience, which our students and postdocs have a lot of different opportunities to get those teaching experiences. And then at the third and final level is scholar, you're really thinking more about the research part of teaching and learning and maybe producing a product that you can present at a conference or something like that.

01;05;35;24 - 01;05;39;09
Jenn Aumiller
We could even do it here at the LEAP Conference at UNB.

01;05;39;11 - 01;06;03;11
Scott Riley
That sounds wonderful. And as a former student, I really like the idea that doing this provides me something tangible. You know, there are a lot of workshops that are available that are good for skill development and other things, but having that certification, that credential to move forward with in your career sounds like a really positive, really powerful benefit for someone who's considering participating in sort of at the student level.

01;06;03;12 - 01;06;19;00
Scott Riley
So with that, I'd like to know, like the benefits seem clear to me for the participants, but I'm curious, you know, what, what benefits do individuals schools at the University of Baltimore get from this? What what does the university get out of being a servile partner?

01;06;19;03 - 01;06;55;14
Jenn Aumiller
Yeah, so I really thought a lot about that when we were putting this application together. And it really can start cheating these best practices. And it's evidence based teaching methods methodology within classrooms because we have students and postdocs that can be teaching in some of our classes here at the campus. So kind of bringing these best practices into our classrooms kind of and creating a learning community where there's I mean, there's a lot happening on the faculty side.

01;06;55;17 - 01;07;05;21
Jenn Aumiller
So this is kind of creating the space also with the students and postdocs to create more of a universal understanding of best evidence based practices.

01;07;05;24 - 01;07;37;28
Scott Riley
That sounds solid to me. I like the idea of bringing in whatever is considered the best practice is for our school to continue to move forward in the education field. And so I'd like to switch gears a little bit. You mentioned this before. I remember that when we interviewed or when I interviewed you that you actually have designed and led many in-house development programs and you even utilized one of Circle's resources, the massively open online courses for your students.

01;07;38;00 - 01;07;50;10
Scott Riley
So you talked about some of the reasons why you chose to switch over to certain. But I'm curious, were there other platforms like Circle to consider, And if so, why did you choose Circle as the platform?

01;07;50;16 - 01;08;22;27
Jenn Aumiller
Yeah, so actually I Dr. Seth Stone was approached about applying for this platform and was aware that I had been doing some work in this area. So we actually put the application in together with Erin Hager and Dr. Eric Belt and I think which is the nationally recognized program. And so by tapping into this program and it's been around for a while, I think it really afforded our students and postdocs a nationally recognized credential.

01;08;22;29 - 01;08;33;05
Jenn Aumiller
It's been really studied heavily. It's written into a lot of grants. So it really seemed like the right program for our students and postdocs to pursue.

01;08;33;07 - 01;08;56;13
Scott Riley
Yeah, that makes complete sense, right? You have this program that you mentioned is nationally recognized and it's already been proven to work. There are multiple cohorts that have come through certainly and have received real benefits from the program. And I was watching something on YouTube before our discussion. They actually do alumni interviews, panels and some of the alumni.

01;08;56;13 - 01;09;12;06
Scott Riley
What they've been able to achieve in part because of what they went through. It certainly is impressive. So makes a lot of sense to bring several to UMD. I was kind of hoping that it was because of the interview a year ago that we had you like, Oh, we got to get settled in, but that's fine. No, no, no worries.

01;09;12;06 - 01;09;30;13
Scott Riley
No worries. It could have been. Oh, that's what I think. That's what I'll think for now. So now I want to talk about circle is here. We are going to have circle at UNB. Can you tell me what the initial rollout is going to look like? What are we going to see in the first year of sort of being here?

01;09;30;13 - 01;09;32;05
Scott Riley
What should we be excited for?

01;09;32;08 - 01;10;00;20
Jenn Aumiller
So it's already started. So that's really exciting. So our students and post-docs have already been able to tap into these national trainings and workshops on lots of different topics. So we're already starting with that. And we have a Blackboard site where students and postdocs can go in and let us know what they've completed. So people can already start moving towards receiving one of the certificates.

01;10;00;22 - 01;10;34;25
Jenn Aumiller
Also, we're having a information session for anybody interested in learning more about this the next week. So that'll be October 9th at noon. And then also we're just looking at what we can harness within our institution with the DTA program, the graduate teaching assistant program that Aaron and Eric both ran. They already had some really great pedagogical workshops that they were running for those fellows.

01;10;34;25 - 01;11;04;02
Jenn Aumiller
And so now because of START all ours, general students and postdocs throughout campus can go and attend those as well if they're interested. And those are also counted for credential and addition to some of the programs that I've been running, those also are counted for credentialing. So it's kind of creating a warehouse and a space for all of our students and postdocs to participate in both the national and then some of our programs that are already existing at you and be.

01;11;04;05 - 01;11;30;28
Scott Riley
Yeah, this sounds like a very strong way to start off, and you're already integrating and collaborating with mechanisms and programs that already exist at UNB. So this sounds like we're off to a really strong start. And I wanted to zoom in on one of the things that you mentioned that students have already started. What are the are there any prerequisites to joining Circle or how if I was a student and I was interested, how do I get on this train?

01;11;31;00 - 01;11;54;15
Jenn Aumiller
Well, we have an email list that you can join so you get information, but we're kind of blasting out the information through the elm and letting everybody know. All students, all graduate students and postdoctoral fellows at the University of Maryland, Baltimore can participate. You don't need to have previous teaching experience or anything. You can have previous teaching experience, but you certainly don't need to.

01;11;54;18 - 01;12;17;03
Jenn Aumiller
So this program really can meet wherever students and postdocs are so that they can access what they need. And there's just lots of different levels of programing. So if you've already or if you have you have some teaching experience, maybe some of these other workshops that are offered, like writing a teaching statement and those kinds of things will be very helpful for you.

01;12;17;05 - 01;12;35;25
Jenn Aumiller
Or maybe if you're just like, I'm not really sure what is evidence based teaching practices or learning theories. There's classes for that as well, or how to design a syllabus or, you know, backwards design and things like that. So there's lots of different programs for every level so anyone can join.

01;12;35;28 - 01;12;46;14
Scott Riley
Well, I'm going to hang on that because now I'm going to sound a little selfish and I'm happy for the students. But what if I'm a faculty that wants to join? If anyone can join? How do how do I as a faculty get involved in this?

01;12;46;16 - 01;13;10;07
Jenn Aumiller
I would recommend reaching out to the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning because they're a fantastic resource. So that would be my first stop. I don't know that they're like checking faculty registration. So I'm not I have have faculty come to a lot of our workshops already, so but they probably wouldn't be able to receive certification as part of this program.

01;13;10;09 - 01;13;32;00
Scott Riley
Still a great benefit, even if you can't receive a certificate, you know, you've already made it to the faculty position. So really any benefit that you can gain from going to the workshops is worthy in and of itself. That sounds awesome. So the next thing that I want to talk about is that's what the first year is going or the first year has already started and it looks like a lot of great things are happening.

01;13;32;00 - 01;13;39;27
Scott Riley
But what's the long term plan for Circle? What's the, you know, if we call it the five year strategic plan, what does that look like for Circle?

01;13;40;00 - 01;14;14;28
Jenn Aumiller
Yeah, So what we're going to start doing is also creating our own national program that UNB will offer. So that's going to be that's not the first year that be starting in the second year. So please stay tuned for that. So that will be really exciting. So that we're also going to be contributing to the national level. In addition, we're also going to be evaluating all of these programs and getting lots of evaluation data from the students in the post actually participate as well as from the institution as a whole.

01;14;15;03 - 01;14;26;15
Jenn Aumiller
So we can see what the impact of this program is in addition to seeing if any changes need to be made. So that's kind of where we are with this right now.

01;14;26;17 - 01;14;54;12
Scott Riley
Okay, awesome. I really like the idea of you and B contributing at the national level, creating our own national programs. So with that, I'm interested in one thing that you mentioned evaluation. This is a big program. There going to be a lot of participants and the content is quite diverse with three levels of certification. How is the committee that you've mentioned several times going to evaluate the success of this program?

01;14;54;14 - 01;15;21;05
Jenn Aumiller
Yeah, So we're going to be looking at it from multiple stakeholders, you know, the students and the post-docs obviously, that are participating in the program. Also looking at we have the GTA program. So is does this have an impact on the Graduate teaching assistance program? Does this have an impact? We also have the Collaborative Teaching Fellows program, which is a partnership with UAB, Hopkins and NAIA with regional, primarily undergraduate institutions.

01;15;21;07 - 01;15;47;06
Jenn Aumiller
Is there an impact there in addition to, you know, the students and postdocs that are teaching within campus, is there an impact there that we're seeing as well? So we're going to be evaluating this from multiple standpoints. In addition, there's national evaluation of all the programs that they offer as well. So there's going to be a real 360 evaluation of the entire program, asking many stakeholders.

01;15;47;08 - 01;16;15;24
Scott Riley
That sounds intense. I'm interested will participants get to see the information that you collect or see the results where you post some kind of I don't want to call it a pamphlet, but some kind of announcement saying, hey, these were kind of the goals that we wanted to reach with Circle, and this is what we were able to achieve at year one and year two, because I think it's important to to let people know, you know, what you're doing is that something that is potentially on the agenda for the Circle committee?

01;16;15;26 - 01;16;30;11
Jenn Aumiller
Yeah, absolutely. I think transparency is really important so that people know if they're going to invest time in this, that there is, you know, a positive outcome to this time investment. So, yes, absolutely wonderful.

01;16;30;12 - 01;16;56;07
Scott Riley
I have one more question that I'm just really interested in because the process seems so intricate and complicated. But if somebody else was thinking about trying to bring circle to their university, their campus, what advice would you give them? Having just recently gone through the application process, having just recently started it up, what are the tips and tricks people should know for bringing Circle to their campus?

01;16;56;09 - 01;17;29;13
Jenn Aumiller
I think you really need to get a team of people. It's definitely not an individual application and you need to get university commitment of resources to the program. But I think it's a really wonderful opportunity to take a bird's eye view and really start to collect all of the things that may be happening on your campus already in teaching research and learning and creating a place where there's like kind of a one stop shop for students and postdocs that are interested in accessing that curriculum.

01;17;29;16 - 01;17;50;27
Jenn Aumiller
So I would definitely say to start early and be thinking about, you know, all the different so you have the time to kind of align what you're already doing and programing, really looking at the circle mission, seeing what you have and what is aligned and how your institution can benefit from this program.

01;17;50;29 - 01;17;58;12
Scott Riley
Wonderful. Thanks so much and really appreciate you taking the time to come speak with us about circle being on you and be.

01;17;58;14 - 01;18;02;29
Jenn Aumiller
Absolutely. Thanks so much.

01;18;03;01 - 01;18;16;21
Scott Riley
Thank you for joining us today on moving the needle. Visit us at U Maryland dot edu slash FCTL to hear additional episodes, leave us feedback or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

 

01;00;00;01 - 01;00;24;20
Erin Hagar
Welcome to Moving the Needle. Casual conversations about ways big and small to impact student learning. Brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Erin Hager. Let's move the needle. Welcome back to Moving the Needle. You are in for a treat today. We have the honor of speaking with UMB’s

01;00;24;20 - 01;00;53;14
Erin Hagar
2023 Educator of the Year, Dr. Christy Chang. If you're like me, you're going to come away from this conversation impressed, inspired, and just delighted by Dr. Chang and her commitment to her students and faculty on this campus. Dr. Chang teaches genetics in three departments in the School of Medicine here at UMB. In addition to her own research and publications, she also mentors junior faculty and postdocs developing their grant writing skills and confidence.

01;00;53;16 - 01;01;18;10
Erin Hagar
In today's conversation, Dr. Chang describes what she hopes her students get from her courses well beyond their time in school. She also talks about her engaging approach to teaching through storytelling and analogies. And she tells us a story about how her students gifted her with one of her most prized possessions. We'll also hear her deep concern about her students mental health and how she normalizes the topic of mental health in her classroom.

01;01;18;13 - 01;01;22;14
Erin Hagar
Dr. Chang, welcome to Moving the needle and congratulations on this award.

01;01;22;17 - 01;01;33;05
Dr. Christy Chang
Thank you. I'm really honored to be invited. I have listened to other podcasts and I really enjoyed the other offering, so thank you for including me.

01;01;33;06 - 01;01;46;25
Erin Hagar
It is our pleasure. I wonder if we could start by having you tell us a bit about your journey as an educator. Was there a moment when you realized that that teaching was something that you really enjoyed? Yeah.

01;01;46;28 - 01;02;19;15
Dr. Christy Chang
while in Graduate school, getting my Ph.D., we were required to teach for one year at the Hopkins Homewood campus. We were asked to give one lecture and supervise weekly labs, and for some reason we were taught extensively how to prevent cheating. But we were not at all prepared on how to be a good teacher. So after that experience, I really enjoyed interacting with students and had a great time.

01;02;19;16 - 01;02;44;03
Dr. Christy Chang
And and the student body voted me TA of the year. At that point I thought, Well, if I enjoy teaching Hopkins pre-med, I will probably enjoy teaching everyone anyway. So. So I seek out opportunity to do more teaching and to design curriculum once I became a faculty. And here I am.

01;02;44;05 - 01;03;03;00
Erin Hagar
That's so wonderful. I think the the culture now is is really changing toward providing graduate students more opportunity to teach and more preparation to teach. And it sounds like that's something that that you appreciated as well as just having the opportunity to do that.

01;03;03;05 - 01;03;36;04
Dr. Christy Chang
Yes. And I wish more graduate school tutors like you were doing for our students. Most well funded programs have their students research assistants by teaching you. Oh, I would say joyful part of our work. And then I wish more students are introduced to it and that they don't see it as like, if research doesn't work out, I go teach at a small college.

01;03;36;06 - 01;03;52;23
Dr. Christy Chang
That career track is very rewarding and highly competitive, and then it's now really the backup plan at all. And I really work very hard to make sure our students know that. So thank you for doing what you do.

01;03;52;26 - 01;04;13;06
Erin Hagar
Oh, well, thank you. Yes, it's it is such a valuable profession and an art and a science unto itself. And and it's so wonderful to be able to to talk to like minded educators like you about it. So speaking of your teaching, how would you describe your unique teaching style or approach?

01;04;13;09 - 01;04;53;23
Dr. Christy Chang
Oh, I would say I go for a very organized structure lecture. People like all information presented to them and specific ways that I help bring some highly structure information more satisfying anything so that at a standstill. So I tend to do that. And then I use like, wow, where how many and why approach to organize my material. So I can example would be when I teach about mutations and what it does to our body and diseases and so forth.

01;04;53;25 - 01;05;28;07
Dr. Christy Chang
I start with we the mutation is in the protein coding region, the non protein coding region. How big is the mutation one nucleotide? Thousands and thousands of nucleotides. And then how many? There's only one out of the 5000 people have been or why the other three people have it. And then so I go through this and and see if there's anything against expectation or is consistent with students expectation.

01;05;28;09 - 01;05;57;29
Dr. Christy Chang
And of course, I pick example to make it a mixture of both I know went against the expectation. I teach them, Oh, what's a likely explanation mechanism behind that. And often they lead to some new and cool biology. They were not expecting to learn that day, but the techniques out, the ideas that they have at the lectures under one umbrella or through the lens of one single disease.

01;05;58;01 - 01;06;03;11
Dr. Christy Chang
And then that makes the learning more enrich experience.

01;06;03;18 - 01;06;31;02
Erin Hagar
That's so interesting. So it sounds like what I'm hearing is there's a framework for the way that the information is presented. But because of that framework, students have the ability to be surprised or amazed by what they're about to hear because it's they've got that structure to support them and then they can be curious and excited about some of the things that might not be expected.

01;06;31;05 - 01;07;05;16
Dr. Christy Chang
Yes. And for instance, when I teach, they say environmental nutritional factor, and I give them a very elegant experiment done in mice. And they were say, there's no way we can ethically do such experiment in human. But they are historical examples when that actually happened. So you set out into a diabetic condition in mice. I showed you how doing World War Two, the Dutch famine actually caused massive starvation.

01;07;05;18 - 01;07;41;16
Dr. Christy Chang
And we can see the epigenetic signature generations later. So and also severely obese individual are going and they are undergoing bariatric surgery and that dramatic weight loss, it's also another natural experiment that we can it's not experiment with that intentionally, but it's a totally ethical way to get to the kind of data that we got in mice. So I think there are a lot of parallels in what I do.

01;07;41;19 - 01;07;52;28
Dr. Christy Chang
I give them to a scenario that looks very different on the outside and they are wet and then these will surprise them and they learn to be more interesting that way.

01;07;53;01 - 01;08;14;28
Erin Hagar
That's so interesting. And I think that framework is so important because when everything feels new and everything feels like they don't. Students may not necessarily know how to structure so much information that's new all at once, but you're providing them that which lets them make meaning out of these examples that you're sharing with them.

01;08;15;05 - 01;08;39;23
Dr. Christy Chang
Yeah. And they also are tied to things they can relate to. Like they have grandparents who may be great, great parents. I forgot how many time has passed. They have some of the historical events. They were part of their family history and then that in some way we are all living some kind of experiment.

01;08;39;26 - 01;08;42;26
Erin Hagar
Yeah. And so it makes that personal connection to them.

01;08;42;29 - 01;08;43;24
Dr. Christy Chang
Well, that's.

01;08;43;24 - 01;08;59;09
Erin Hagar
Wonderful. Well, what would you say are your teaching values? What do you things? You know, we can think about so many things as teachers. You know, so much feels important. But how do you focus on the things that matter to you?

01;08;59;12 - 01;09;27;21
Dr. Christy Chang
And so they are two things that I try very hard to do. One is that I want to teach in genetics. I want to teach them about personalized medicine and all this. The what's even more important as an educator is I teach them how to think scientifically, so how to set up experiments to know what's good they have bad data and no data, right?

01;09;27;23 - 01;09;55;10
Dr. Christy Chang
How to have good controls in the experiments. And I think some of the things that are happening in class, it's not just helping them to be successful graduate students and go get good experimental theory that publish and graduate. It's also a teacher of how to live a good life and have good interpersonal relationships. And so that's the hidden oh tease.

01;09;55;12 - 01;10;25;23
Dr. Christy Chang
So I would use it so very often because this has students in their twenties. I use dating relationship romantic relationship a lot when I make the analogy. So I would say, Oh, what would be a day that I support your hypothesis, review your hypothesis or offer the information. So let's say the hypothesis is you have a good marriage, a good relationship.

01;10;25;25 - 01;10;53;01
Dr. Christy Chang
So supportive evidence would be your partner. Check out your mother and bring you a cup of tea every day. Right. Something that received that hypothesis would be these are bank account you know about, right? No data at all will be your partner. You had a really long day doing a very complicated, demanding experiment. And then I'll text you and I'll.

01;10;53;04 - 01;11;26;28
Dr. Christy Chang
Or a vicious neighbor of me some credit unions. So those have no information versus information that actually refuse support your hypothesis. And it's very important that students know that when they look at the data every day. And the second thing I care about a lot of is I want students to know how deeply scientific discoveries and technological innovations actually impact real life and how society is evolving.

01;11;27;01 - 01;12;06;17
Dr. Christy Chang
So some example would be nuclear weapon or A.I. or genomic editing invention of insulin and things that really percolate and change how people live and then they can have them, which in one lifetime in one's career or so I have one lecture where I tell them how for hundreds of years nothing absolutely was dead besides giving a new name to a particular central and have a better clinical description and and then at the outset of the Human Genome Project, how discovery is celebrated.

01;12;06;23 - 01;12;35;08
Dr. Christy Chang
So which in my lifetime we went from classification and no nothing at all to gene based therapy and babies who used to die very early on, almost all of them before age one and cannot ever hold their head up. And they are riding horses. And so those stories are some of them you could say deception, but and not always that case.

01;12;35;09 - 01;13;00;04
Dr. Christy Chang
You know, one you I can give them many, many examples. And I want them to know they are doing their work. You know, I'm going to a darkroom like a film and go off and not the cell experiment. Actually add up to incredible changes in how we do, how we carry out medical care and the quality of life that we changed.

01;13;00;05 - 01;13;14;29
Erin Hagar
Wow, that sounds so inspiring. Like, what I'm hearing is reminding your students sort of where they are in this moment in time and the impact that that this work, even when it's frustrating, can have on future generations.

01;13;15;01 - 01;13;34;06
Dr. Christy Chang
Yeah, I so we start with clinical descriptions of molecular mechanisms to the latest gene based therapy and then they show then the timeline of all that progress and from the late nineties to now.

01;13;34;09 - 01;13;58;01
Erin Hagar
That's amazing. So you mentioned in that description of your values, your use of storytelling and in the write up after you won Educator of the Year at UMD, one of the things that came through from your students is how much they love your use of storytelling. Why do you think that telling stories is an effective teaching approach?

01;13;58;03 - 01;14;36;11
Dr. Christy Chang
Storytelling is such an ancient and powerful craft, right? So yeah, it's what we use before the invention of written language. Like, this is storytelling. It's how family laws and information are passed either vertically or horizontally based throughout the community and close down generations. And it's a very emotional component. And we know from the kinda time studies that we remember things, if we assign meaning, we're emotionally moved by it.

01;14;36;14 - 01;15;06;25
Dr. Christy Chang
So it doesn't have to be that much famine and something that inspires empathy and compassion. It could be even just humor. It could be curiosity. Right. And so I try to work in as many of those elements. And I say I always say I do. And I do not do it intentionally. Every time I just come across an example that I thought, Oh, this will be a really good way to explain a particular concept.

01;15;06;27 - 01;15;43;00
Dr. Christy Chang
Many hindsight, I would go, Oh, this is a great story. Oh, even if I'm not teaching genetics and preparing them for an exam. So and you can see this demonstrated so often by politicians, right? They will spend 1 minutes talking about numbers and facts about inflation. And now Simon is talking about a particular family business. So that raises the oh, this lady named Mary who made the best cookie in the world and how inflation impacted her.

01;15;43;04 - 01;15;59;14
Dr. Christy Chang
Right. So because that's how politicians and I think if effective speakers know those stories well, I'll have a much more impact than just giving them compelling numbers.

01;15;59;16 - 01;16;20;18
Erin Hagar
Yes, that's absolutely true. And the the the data supporting that that that learning connection between when we feel something and and retaining that information is is such an important tool that an educator can use in their in their collection of things that they do to share information.

01;16;20;20 - 01;16;24;08
Dr. Christy Chang
And they need so much more for me. Yes.

01;16;24;11 - 01;16;28;25
Erin Hagar
And I think students respond when they know that their instructors are having fun as well.

01;16;28;26 - 01;16;30;08
Dr. Christy Chang
I think so, yes.

01;16;30;11 - 01;16;33;07
Erin Hagar
And that's another emotional connection that they're making, right?

01;16;33;14 - 01;17;01;19
Dr. Christy Chang
Yes. I'm so easily amused. And so the classroom into action is something I particularly enjoy. And I think that a back and forth, whenever someone asks a question, it's another opportunity for me to go off script and be a three dimensional person and then time by students also to engage with me more authentically.

01;17;01;20 - 01;17;27;12
Erin Hagar
Yeah, I love how you frame that because I think sometimes when we come to a class and we we've prepared and we have a plan and those questions can sometimes be seen as a deviation or taking time away from completing this plan. But the way you're framing it is this question is really an opportunity to, to invite that connection and to create a deeper connection with that student and then ultimately the whole class.

01;17;27;15 - 01;18;02;11
Dr. Christy Chang
And then I also make my success every semester differently. It's not that everybody score above a certain number that makes me believe I had a great semester. I want that. But also the students were required to ask questions, and so I've made the connection that I did not make yet and that I got to engage them not just individually performing a community.

01;18;02;13 - 01;18;05;06
Dr. Christy Chang
And that's also something wonderful I enjoy.

01;18;05;09 - 01;18;21;11
Erin Hagar
Oh, that's wonderful. Well, to go back to that idea of storytelling as a way of creating connection, I wonder if you might tell our listeners a story, maybe something about a memorable teaching experience that you had class.

01;18;21;13 - 01;18;59;26
Dr. Christy Chang
So when you hear I was teaching the difference between genetics and epigenetics, and I use in the example that have not just genetics, epigenetics also made preference in sexual selection. Anytime you can bring those in students, yes, pick up a little. So. So the story is that some species of fish females will select male partners based on the yellow pigment in their father.

01;18;59;28 - 01;19;32;26
Dr. Christy Chang
So the darker the yellow is, they have a lot of carotene. So the idea is that they die male, represent someone with good nutritional status who's genetically more said and a more ideal partner to reproduce with. And it turns out that female finches are so intelligent they could tell the difference between current nutritional status versus nutritional status from previous season.

01;19;32;29 - 01;20;03;23
Dr. Christy Chang
So I remind the students this is because if you're going to see like a male, purely because if they are wearing a Rolex watch, then you should know how to tell a fake one from the real one. And the second day a student presented me with a drawing of a pair wearing a Rolex watch. And then what was absolutely lovely was that not only he drew, he did a drawing, but he had texts.

01;20;03;26 - 01;20;17;14
Dr. Christy Chang
The whole class, at least many of them, were texting each other the whole evening to get all the details right and to provide him with information to the little things to include his drawings.

01;20;17;15 - 01;20;18;28
Erin Hagar
Oh, my gosh.

01;20;19;00 - 01;20;24;18
Dr. Christy Chang
So needless to say, the drawing is among my most precious possession.

01;20;24;18 - 01;20;32;07
Erin Hagar
Yes. And they use that as an opportunity to deepen their own community within the class setting themselves.

01;20;32;10 - 01;20;51;21
Dr. Christy Chang
Yes, they are first year students and into some programs. The fact that they can together, it's their scientific interests, their sense of humor and their artistic abilities all coming together. I in creating this gift for me.

01;20;51;21 - 01;21;08;01
Erin Hagar
Oh, that's amazing. And I love to the way that a story like that or as an experience like that becomes part of the shared vocabulary of a particular group of students or a particular community. You can go back to it always and say it's like the bird with the Rolex, or it's.

01;21;08;03 - 01;21;19;26
Dr. Christy Chang
You know, yes, I imagine, you know, they telling their story to their family and friends and for them endlessly entertain them. Yes. Since that's really so.

01;21;19;27 - 01;21;39;07
Erin Hagar
Yes. The ripple effect of that. Oh, that's a wonderful story. Thank you so much for sharing that. I'm wondering, as you think about your career as a as an educator, how would you say that you're still growing? What topics are on your mind as you think about our students today in this generation?

01;21;39;09 - 01;22;23;12
Dr. Christy Chang
So I think, yes, I am mature as an educator. I am more aware and more committed to frame the material I want to teach. So a historical societal lens, so instead of teaching just about a genetic disease at, I will point out, giving this the same mutation or a similar mutation that cause very similar disease, but one university and the other one I say in Sardinia, Italy.

01;22;23;14 - 01;23;21;12
Dr. Christy Chang
So where there is universal public health care system and the population is homogeneous versus heterogeneous, and these are men, they they legalized reproductive rights. What happened to the patients actual quality of life and the population's awareness and prejudice or lack of against people who have the disease. So I try to bring those elements and then also I am more aware that students, I should have seen them not as cross-national interaction, but a longitudinal interaction, that it's a very competitive process to get ones to you or M.D. or some other graduate training.

01;23;21;14 - 01;24;06;19
Dr. Christy Chang
They're all students currently and historically students have graduate students are more likely to have severe mental illness than their counterparts outside of graduate school, and this generation is hyper aware of their mental illness. So you are here now a conversation highly goes by with tell somebody, say boundary or gaslighting. Also, they are hyper aware, but they don't necessarily have the tools to really prevent mental illness and then to take care of themselves and to the fact that we are taught very early to brush our teeth.

01;24;06;22 - 01;24;55;11
Dr. Christy Chang
But we don't always teach students or young people how to do the same for their mental health as they do for their physical well-being. So this is becoming something I care deeply about. So I just develop a lecture by now, prevention for residents and sell out. And then I have been doing things with the graduate students that I want to do more with, because when those issues go unaddressed and students either have a horrible time struggling also graduate school or they dropped out, and then when they do, the one who dropped out are disproportionately women or people of color.

01;24;55;12 - 01;25;13;22
Dr. Christy Chang
And we know what that does to the diversity of our workforce and representation. So this is becoming something really near and dear to my heart. And I want to do much more with this issue in this part of my career.

01;25;13;24 - 01;25;35;14
Erin Hagar
Oh, wow. Yes, I think that's absolutely spot on. Just as kind of taking the pulse of of where we are as a society with increased awareness and and evidence of of this mental health crisis that that we're in right now. And it sounds like you're really weaving that into your values as an educator.

01;25;35;16 - 01;26;07;28
Dr. Christy Chang
Yes, Actually, few years ago, I went back to graduate school to get my masters in professional counseling. So now I actually see how some students in my when I practice, it's a therapist. And then I want to have individual clinical experience. And then I want to take what I learned watching literature to provide something for our group tested.

01;26;08;04 - 01;26;08;20
Dr. Christy Chang
Oh, that's.

01;26;08;20 - 01;26;16;22
Erin Hagar
Wonderful. And what a commitment to your students that you went and got additional education to be able to better serve them.

01;26;16;25 - 01;26;47;02
Dr. Christy Chang
I think it's good that everyone get used to the idea. We're a lifelong learners, right? I actually saw it as a gift to myself to being in my fifties and to learn something in a structure were thinking to have someone say, This is why you need to learn. And so I really appreciate that having that experience. And then how he add another piece to all my everyday life.

01;26;47;04 - 01;26;52;08
Erin Hagar
That's wonderful. What what advice would you give to other faculty members.

01;26;52;08 - 01;26;52;27
Dr. Christy Chang
Who.

01;26;52;29 - 01;27;15;15
Erin Hagar
See this mental health crisis that we're in? They're concerned about their students mental health, but they might not be able to get a degree in clinical professional counseling. What advice would you have for faculty who are who are aware of these issues but not quite sure how how best to support students?

01;27;15;18 - 01;27;57;09
Dr. Christy Chang
The best place to start it is to normalize it, right? That it's not a taboo. It's something people should feel open that they can speak about openly and honestly. So and they each offer actually some training for mentors and advisors how to do this just practice awarding for, they say, suicide assessment to assess students who are clinically depressed and to see if they have suicidal ideation and which is something that's really, really difficult to talk about.

01;27;57;13 - 01;28;22;13
Dr. Christy Chang
Right. I it's it's like any exposure therapy you will we can build that tolerance. And so I have gone oh no, I could never, ever do that. It has to be really in a matter of fact and just ask people about suicide ideation, if that's an element we should be concerned about and then to post support around it.

01;28;22;15 - 01;28;52;12
Dr. Christy Chang
And so I think we can all be more open with challenges that we face. And so a lot of times mental illness, they don't start in a vacuum right? Some people have some genetically had this susceptibility and then they they are aware that they grew up in a family where they they have as much support or have as much a healthy environment as others.

01;28;52;15 - 01;29;30;23
Dr. Christy Chang
And it's usually some other stressful events or multiple stressful years. And then you see the onset of their symptoms and often that if we believe those external challenges will paralyze us, then we become discouraged and and we start to lose hope. Real confidence goes down, our self image and all that become all too. But if we realize that everybody are walking around with some combination of strength and weakness.

01;29;30;23 - 01;30;06;18
Dr. Christy Chang
Right. And then and it also more support, more compassion, more flexibility in the system that even when really challenging event or a struggle with any kind of physical mental illness happen, it also means we are off our track permanently. I might be a little detour and if you interview venture successful scientists, almost no one's career. It's linear. And then now having and then your career passes actually done one.

01;30;06;20 - 01;30;38;25
Dr. Christy Chang
So I would actually just share what happened in my life. I would tell no national or home regional studies about how often a young scientists expected to have a very stressful event dynamic and reconsider their career choices, and then that they are not things that will push us off our path. You just need a path to get to where we want to go.

01;30;38;25 - 01;30;39;21
Dr. Christy Chang
More interesting.

01;30;39;22 - 01;31;07;13
Erin Hagar
Oh, I love that framing of that. It's just it's such a wonderful perspective. Thank you for sharing that. I've I've in my work like you, I'm I'm starting to think a lot about about mental health and stress, particularly from the faculty lens, because I'm seeing a lot of signs of of burnout, of exhaustion, of overwhelm, you know, in the university community on the faculty side.

01;31;07;13 - 01;31;29;27
Erin Hagar
And, you know, I think about all the competing pressures that faculty have with with research, securing grants, you know, teaching expectations, service commitments, their own personal lives and families and things going on. How would you say that your perspective that you just shared with us as you thinking about the student population, you know, what supports might we put in place for faculty as well?

01;31;30;00 - 01;31;59;03
Dr. Christy Chang
So that's the other high I where on campus is that our track to career development program for junior faculties and I work very hard to change that idea. Like I'm good at this. I'm not at a time when it's this is a skill I need to acquire and this is the skill I need to improve or I'm actually competent already with this skill set.

01;31;59;05 - 01;32;33;12
Dr. Christy Chang
And what we are giving responsibility to teach, to do research, to secure external funding. And some of this metrics are much easier to measure. So you can definitely have a very secure path to a promotion and all that. If you have a solid funding history. So I make it my mission to unpack how to write a grant to people who have not had that funded mentors.

01;32;33;14 - 01;33;06;16
Dr. Christy Chang
And this is by no means a criticism of our mentors and all the things we do instinctively. Well, that doesn't mean we know how to unpack it, to teach it to someone else. So it's few years ago. MH has started for Paraguayan writing coaches to support a smaller university. Unlike University of Maryland Baltimore, that does not have a significant career development office.

01;33;06;18 - 01;33;37;01
Dr. Christy Chang
So I did that for minority faculties elsewhere. And now I brought that skill back to Maryland and let the faculty know this very stressful, daunting thing they expected to do on top of their clinical skills and research skill. Taking writing skills can be impact, and it's absolutely possible to learn it systematically, and then I will help them do that.

01;33;37;03 - 01;33;58;16
Erin Hagar
Wow. So you really take this commitment to to education with such a broad lens with you. You know, faculty are part of that community. Your students are part of that community. And I think our entire community is just so lucky that we have you as one of us, so that you can share these really important perspectives with all of us.

01;33;58;22 - 01;34;23;24
Dr. Christy Chang
Thank so much. I feel very fortunate that University of Maryland, Baltimore, allow me to have all this platforms that when I decided to step away from research, I found ways to have a really, really enjoyable, impactful chapter that I had no way I expected in the beginning.

01;34;23;25 - 01;34;33;19
Erin Hagar
Yeah, yeah. Your own journey, you know, just all of the different twists and turns in your own career path and it sounds like it has been such a rewarding one.

01;34;33;22 - 01;34;44;19
Dr. Christy Chang
You and I think if this is true for many, many of us, right? Oh, some people are too busy to share their stories. I don't mind at all. So here we are.

01;34;44;22 - 01;34;56;06
Erin Hagar
Well, we are the better for it. And I cannot thank you enough for taking the time to talk with us today, Kristie. And congratulations again on this wonderful, well-deserved award.

01;34;56;09 - 01;35;04;00
Dr. Christy Chang
Thank you so much. And thank you for doing what you do for our community.

01;35;04;03 - 01;35;18;19
Erin Hagar
Thank you for joining us today on Moving the Needle. Visit us at U Maryland dot edu slash FCTL  to hear additional episodes, leave us feedback or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

 

01;00;00;02 - 01;00;29;21
Erin Hagar
Welcome to Moving the Needle. Casual conversations about ways big and small to impact student learning brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Erin Hager. Let's move the needle. Welcome back to Moving the Needle. We're closing out 2023 with an introduction to UMB's new director for the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning, Dr. Saul Roberts-Lieb..

01;00;29;23 - 01;00;55;25
Erin Hagar
Sol joined the FCTL in September, and now that he's had a couple of months to get his feet under him in this new role, we wanted to bring him on to talk about his career journey, his thoughts about the role CTLs play in higher education, and specifically what CTLs look like in specialized universities like UMB. Dr. Sol Roberts lead most recently served as the director of faculty development at the Carle, Illinois College of Medicine.

01;00;55;27 - 01;01;32;27
Erin Hagar
Before that, he was the associate director for Pedagogy Strategy at the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning at the University of Illinois. In these roles, Sol was at the forefront of faculty development and evidence based teaching practices, collaborating closely with faculty and staff to devise innovative strategies for student engagement and enhancement in educational learning environments. Sol’s educational background includes a doctorate in educational policy and organizational leadership from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a specialization in differentiated instruction and organizational change.

01;01;33;00 - 01;01;44;08
Erin Hagar
He currently lives in Bloomington, Illinois, with his wife and two daughters, and they will be making a permanent move to Baltimore later this summer. Sol, welcome to Moving the Needle and welcome to UMB. How are you today?

01;01;44;10 - 01;01;48;23
Sol Roberts-Lieb
I am doing well. Thank you for having me, and I'm glad to be here at UMB.

01;01;48;25 - 01;01;59;09
Erin Hagar
wow. We're excited to talk to you today. And I thought we would just start by having you tell us a little bit about your professional path and how that path brought you here.

01;01;59;12 - 01;02;19;12
Sol Roberts-Lieb
Absolutely. It's one of those things that people don't see When I grow up. I want to be a faculty developer. It's not one of those things for me. I wanted to be a high school chemistry teacher and I went from being wanting to be a high school chemistry teacher to being involved in technology and just working through what is technology, where are the people.

01;02;19;12 - 01;02;41;26
Sol Roberts-Lieb
But this thing in my heart kept saying, I want to teach, I want to teach. And then just going through, working in the public sector, then working at the University of Illinois, and I didn't realize what that was. And while it was I wanted to teach, it was more I wanted to help other people to teach better because I realized the great teachers I had in my life and that's what I wanted to do, was help them to be good teachers.

01;02;41;29 - 01;02;56;26
Sol Roberts-Lieb
And through just experiences working at a med school and then having that and looking for what was next for me and where could I help others in Grow led me to this opportunity and just excited to be here.

01;02;57;08 - 01;03;02;04
Erin Hagar
that's great. Well, what is it about Centers for teaching and Learning that excites you?

01;03;02;11 - 01;03;27;13
Sol Roberts-Lieb
I think Centers for Teaching and Learning have a very unique role and a very unique responsibility and an opportunity because it's not about teaching subject matter in a in a school or a program. It's really having a relational impact. And that excites me that we're talking about relations and how to help faculty, staff, students to get where they want to be.

01;03;27;14 - 01;03;51;04
Sol Roberts-Lieb
It's a lot of listening and that's a lot of just figuring it out and being in the center. We have great leadership here at UMD that empowers us to try new things and with having the different schools that we have, our center can do many different things and we can reach out and find out what are the needs of each of our schools, how can we help them, and what are those commonalities.

01;03;51;07 - 01;04;05;00
Sol Roberts-Lieb
And I think for me, it's really exciting because nothing is set in stone right now and we're kind of in, you know, liquid jello. It's not in the fridge yet. So lots of different ways that we can do it. So it just excites me for possibilities.

01;04;05;02 - 01;04;12;16
Erin Hagar
Yeah. Just getting a little more specific, what are some of those possibilities right now that that have caught your eye?

01;04;12;19 - 01;04;37;06
Sol Roberts-Lieb
I'll start in the scholarship aspect with UMD being a very professional and technical and science driven campus. It is well known for its science research and its clinical research, and one of the areas of growth is educational research, and a center for teaching and learning has an expertise that can help our schools. What are the things we're doing in the classroom?

01;04;37;06 - 01;04;59;27
Sol Roberts-Lieb
However you define the classroom? Is it brick and mortar? Is it bedside? Is it chair side? Is it in the community? And I think that's a great way to show the work that our faculty are doing in many different fields and how they're improving teaching and what teaching was ten years ago isn't what it is now. And so what is that scholarship say that's out there?

01;04;59;27 - 01;05;19;05
Sol Roberts-Lieb
But also how can we contribute to the scholarship of teaching and learning? So that's one piece that's excited for me. The other part that's really exciting to me is with our seven schools and different programs, that's how do we share resources, How can we get the expertise that are in each of the schools to other schools or programs?

01;05;19;11 - 01;05;40;26
Sol Roberts-Lieb
And I think the CTL can be a great conduit for that. And we don't have to be the subject matter experts in everything. Maybe there is someone in the School of Pharmacy who is doing this new technique that would work in social work and we can be that conduit. So that that's exciting. And then just growing together and growing through this teaching.

01;05;40;26 - 01;06;02;08
Sol Roberts-Lieb
How do students play into this as a center? Are we more focused on faculty development or are we fact focused on students output is and how the students meet their goals? And I think I think that's ways just to think and collaborate. And I've been talking about the schools but also talking about leaps and the leaps program is great.

01;06;02;13 - 01;06;10;23
Sol Roberts-Lieb
And how can our faculty work with LEAPS to put into practice some of their ideas and goals?

01;06;10;25 - 01;06;44;00
Erin Hagar
Yeah, well, you you mentioned a little bit about our unique context here at UMB being a health and human service focused university for graduate students. You come from your most recent experiences at a medical school, and I'm wondering how do you think the role of a CTL is different in a health and human services professions institution? How are the faculty needs different at a place like you UMB compared to, say, your traditional four year undergraduate institution?

01;06;44;02 - 01;07;04;28
Sol Roberts-Lieb
I think there's lots of differences. So when I was at the University of Illinois, we had our Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning that was across campus. And then some of the schools also did their own thing. So in the College of Medicine, I was mostly responsible for all the faculty development in that in that school, and I didn't have a lot of other resources.

01;07;04;28 - 01;07;28;00
Sol Roberts-Lieb
I could reach out to campus, but it wasn't specific to the needs of the med school. There was the basic, which I think is great, And there's also this thing that's very different called undergrads. At UMD, we have very few. Only in our one program, and it's very different when you're looking at what is the time available for professional students and graduate students.

01;07;28;05 - 01;07;53;04
Sol Roberts-Lieb
What does that look like? How does accreditation come into play? One of the uniqueness is that we have at human beings. Each of our schools are very focused on their mission, their vision and their goals, and they're great in those areas. And for a traditional FTL, it's not like that. It's how do you have that overall experience for the students who are in very different colleges and programs speaking courses?

01;07;53;07 - 01;08;21;29
Sol Roberts-Lieb
We're here. Part of the goal of the job of the FTL is to see what is going on in each of the schools. How can we help and how can we take that expertise and leverage it for other schools and other programs. So I think it gives us unique opportunities in the world to do this, but also some very, very smart people who are doing great things already and having an FCTL to help use their skills for everyone I think is great.

01;08;22;01 - 01;08;43;12
Erin Hagar
So you've been here now for about three months, so you're still, I know, navigating your way and meeting lots of people and getting accustomed to the nooks and crannies of our institution. But at this point, how would you describe U-m's strengths and opportunities specifically as they relate to faculty development?

01;08;43;15 - 01;09;09;25
Sol Roberts-Lieb
I think one of the biggest strengths, and I saw it almost on day one, is this university UMD lives its mission. It lives its values, and it lives at statements. Unlike what I've seen in other places, They're not just words on a wall. This is who we are. This is what we do, and this is how we're going to help our students, our faculty, our greater area, but also the West Baltimore area.

01;09;09;27 - 01;09;33;20
Sol Roberts-Lieb
And it's great to see that kind of reinforcement in every single thing that we do. So that is wonderful. And that really leads into faculty development and it gives us opportunities to say, how does this support our strategic plan? How does this help our students? And our communities in the West, Baltimore and greater area? And I haven't seen that in as many places.

01;09;33;23 - 01;09;56;24
Sol Roberts-Lieb
So for me, it's everybody is around that same mindset. So it's open to see, you know, what I've done for all these years may not necessarily be the best way. And I want to learn, I want to improve my teaching. And there's been an emphasis lately that I've seen and how do we get teaching to be as recognized and as valuable as the other jobs and responsibilities of faculty?

01;09;56;26 - 01;10;09;18
Sol Roberts-Lieb
And seeing that strength and support from the leadership is wonderful to me. I think it's going to be great for us on moving forward and working with everybody and how do we do the best faculty development we can.

01;10;09;21 - 01;10;19;05
Erin Hagar
So in your vision, what does it look like to have a thriving faculty center for teaching and learning that's truly responsive to faculty needs?

01;10;19;08 - 01;10;48;20
Sol Roberts-Lieb
I think that's a great question. And I was once asked, Saul, can you tell me the ideal organizational chart for an I.T center where I used to work and i said I can't because I don't think there's a such thing as a perfect org chart or a perfect way of doing things for me, it's about the relationships. Do we have people coming and saying, Hey, Saul, hey interim hey to anyone in our unit, we're thinking about doing this and we want your help.

01;10;48;22 - 01;11;24;27
Sol Roberts-Lieb
And to me, that's what a thriving CTL is. It's not. we're in trouble. Can you help us now? Or can you just do this in Blackboard For us? It's this partnership and it's really growing this thing holistically beyond what is considered traditional faculty development. And it's thinking about collaboration. It's thinking about scholarship with partnership. And that's what I'm really excited for, is to see this growth from day one, say, how can we help, you know, SETI, We want your expertise in this.

01;11;25;04 - 01;11;29;12
Sol Roberts-Lieb
And that's what I think is our best opportunity and what I want to see in the future.

01;11;29;14 - 01;11;39;05
Erin Hagar
And in your experience, you know, since the FTL is new on campus, how would you describe kind of the traditional CTO historically?

01;11;39;10 - 01;12;00;09
Sol Roberts-Lieb
So there's basically two models of a traditional CTO. There is one that is more in your instructional design. It's how do I help you build your course? And that's from uploading it into a learning management system such as Blackboard. It could be some of the more traditional as well as how do your assignments look, how do things like that.

01;12;00;12 - 01;12;25;07
Sol Roberts-Lieb
And that's what they do. Maybe they're monitoring online class chats, maybe they're taking support calls from students and helping when things aren't working right. The other is the more faculty development side where it's we're going to do traditional workshops, we're going to offer them certain times of the month. People are going to come and learn how to do this is how do you write good learning objectives?

01;12;25;07 - 01;12;48;19
Sol Roberts-Lieb
This is how you write good multiple choice questions, and those are valuable skills and I think that is the traditional model. Whereas for us we are looking at beyond that, how can we in the activities that we're doing, put faculty development in there and kind of to use your word here and stealth faculty development, you know, how do we make it real?

01;12;48;22 - 01;13;08;28
Sol Roberts-Lieb
So if somebody is creating a course and we're working with them, we can talk about learning objective, but also what makes a good learning objective at the time that they need it. And that's really what we're trying to do, is infuse this wherever we can. Instead of saying they will come to us, it's we are coming to you and bringing those skills to you.

01;13;09;01 - 01;13;18;04
Erin Hagar
And it sounds like your vision includes working in partnership with Dean Provost office leaders within the schools themselves.

01;13;18;07 - 01;13;43;14
Sol Roberts-Lieb
Absolutely. We can't come to a school and say, this is what you need to be better. That makes no sense. We have to see what is the context that they're working in, what is their framework, and how can we take our knowledge of current practices and of literature and education and infuse that with them? So we're growing together, not just putting down this is the way you have to do it.

01;13;43;17 - 01;13;57;00
Erin Hagar
Yeah. As you've been doing your listening tour with the different schools, what kinds of topics and questions are coming up? What are you, what kinds of themes are you noticing in these conversations about how the FTL might plug in?

01;13;57;07 - 01;14;19;05
Sol Roberts-Lieb
It's interesting. I've been talking maybe 50 people at this point. It's been growing and one of the things is there's an F echo. What does that do? Is that just part of the grad school? And what I say is, no, this is some of the services that we provide. And also we're not part just the grad school or part of UMD, and we're a service for everybody.

01;14;19;08 - 01;14;56;29
Sol Roberts-Lieb
So that's one of the things that trying to bring out that all the schools grants, you know, contracts. So those type of things, we can help with that. So I think the communication of who we are and what we are is big. The other that I'm hearing is I want to collaborate more with other people, either interdisciplinary research, interdisciplinary teaching, interprofessional education, how do we come across from each of the schools and leverage what we have and that goes not only for teaching skills, but also technologies that we use, approaches that we use.

01;14;57;01 - 01;15;22;17
Sol Roberts-Lieb
Can we streamline some of the tools and have one or two in certain cases instead of everyone doing what they thought was best in their environments and coming up with things that may work even better. So one of the things that is just really, really made me excited is every single person I've talked to said, We want to work with you, we want to collaborate, we want to grow.

01;15;22;17 - 01;15;24;15
Sol Roberts-Lieb
And that's just been exciting to me.

01;15;24;18 - 01;15;39;10
Erin Hagar
Well, as you think about Centers for Teaching and Learning in the future and here at UMB what do you think is is moving the needle? What's on the cutting edge of faculty centers for teaching and learning right now? What should we have our eyes on?

01;15;39;13 - 01;16;12;00
Sol Roberts-Lieb
There's so many things that are going on. I think one is what is the value of education? If we think really outside the box, it is coming up more and more with the increasing price of tuition, with political rhetoric, with just the sentiment, why is higher ed valuable and what factors or CTLs can do is work and show that education is a science, it is an art, and the skills that you're learning is more than just the content that's being provided.

01;16;12;02 - 01;16;37;04
Sol Roberts-Lieb
It's how do you interact with people, What is leadership, what is scholarship and how are you helped throughout that? So we have our coaching program that Aaron, you're part of and Dr. Michelle Pearce is leading and that's wonderful. That's a skill. And this is what we're trying to get to, is how do these apply to outside of education when somebody graduates?

01;16;37;04 - 01;17;04;05
Sol Roberts-Lieb
Yes, they may have a degree in medicine. What are the other skills that they got along the way? And I think that's where centers really need to focus. And also, one of the big issues is faculty well-being, staff well-being, student well-being. A good friend of mine once said that we're at a stage where no amount of yoga or essential oils is going to fix this, and schools can help and say, what are we doing?

01;17;04;05 - 01;17;25;18
Sol Roberts-Lieb
What are the things that can make things make teaching easier? What can reduce some of your administrative overhead? And how can we help you to feel better about your teaching experience, about your scholarship? Yep. How can we in scholarship, how can we break things into smaller chunks and show you how to do that to help with your goals?

01;17;25;21 - 01;17;56;11
Sol Roberts-Lieb
So I think there's lots of ways and it's just so much more beyond just saying we're going to do a workshop or we're going to help build a course. And it's really getting into relational aspects and helping to find out how we can help all the schools, all the faculty flourish. I like to use that word because flourishing means different things to different people, and that's really what we want to do, is help everybody to flourish in their teaching, in their service, in their clinical practice, their scholarly activity and where can we fit in.

01;17;56;13 - 01;17;59;17
Sol Roberts-Lieb
So that's that's really where I'm excited about as well.

01;17;59;19 - 01;18;21;13
Erin Hagar
Yeah, that is exciting. It's exciting to be at this moment in the trajectory of our Center for Teaching and Learning here at UMD and to invite everyone to to be a part of what we're doing and and help inform where we're going. So is there anything else you'd like to leave our listeners with before we wrap up? And thank you for your time today.

01;18;21;16 - 01;18;37;14
Sol Roberts-Lieb
I would just do a quick shameless plug that says the actor is here to help everyone here at UMD, reach out to us, go to our Web site. We'd love to partner with you and see how we can help advance your goals of the university's goals in the future.

01;18;37;16 - 01;18;54;18
Erin Hagar
That's great. Well, again, welcome to UMB we are so excited that you're here. It's going to be so exciting to see how the FCTL evolves over the next year or so, and we hope you'll come back and and give us a look at things in the future so we can see how things have grown.

01;18;54;20 - 01;18;57;16
Sol Roberts-Lieb
I look forward to it and thank you for having me on today.

01;18;57;19 - 01;19;16;01
Erin Hagar
It was my pleasure. Thank you for joining us today. On moving the needle, visit us at U. Maryland. That edu slash FCTL to hear additional episodes, leave us feedback or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from.

 

01;00;00;02 - 01;00;33;07
Erin Hagar
Welcome to Moving the Needle. Casual conversations about ways big and small to impact student learning. Brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Erin Hager. Let's move the needle. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Moving the Needle. I'd like to invite you to think back to that transitional time when you were just on the cusp of finishing your dissertation and starting to think about that next step in your career, your first faculty role.

01;00;33;09 - 01;00;56;06
Erin Hagar
How did you see yourself as a scholar and an educator? How were you shaped by the influential faculty members on your path? How did you want to carry those lessons and experiences forward to the students you would later teach, mentor and advise? Today, we're joined by Vashti Adams, a PhD student in the School of Social Work who is at exactly that point in her academic career.

01;00;56;08 - 01;01;21;00
Erin Hagar
Vashti received her master's of social work degree from Columbia University, and she is now in her fourth year at UMD, already an accomplished scholar. Vashti recently defended her dissertation proposal, a study that looks at how black women perceive nonwhite approaches to health promotion. She has served as a graduate teaching assistant, supporting a course in the new online master's of social work program.

01;01;21;03 - 01;01;35;21
Erin Hagar
In this conversation, Vashti reflects on her academic journey. The influential faculty members she's encountered along the way, the difference between a teacher and a mentor, and what she's looking for next in her career. Vashti Hi. Welcome to Moving the Needle.

01;01;35;25 - 01;01;37;07
Vashti Adams
Thanks. I'm happy to be here.

01;01;37;09 - 01;01;45;22
Erin Hagar
Well, why don't we dive in just by having you tell us a bit about your academic journey. Where are you right now? And and tell us about your path.

01;01;45;24 - 01;02;06;11
Vashti Adams
I am a fourth year doctoral student in the school social work, and I've been in social work for all of my time in higher education. But I've done a lot of different things in that time. So I started out actually wanting to study journalism as an undergraduate, and I picked a school that didn't have a journalism major, so I found myself in need of actually finding a major to do it.

01;02;06;11 - 01;02;28;12
Vashti Adams
My time there and my father suggested social welfare because it matched with some of the classes that I had taken and some things that I was interested in. But at the time I didn't realize that social welfare was social work. I thought it was just caring for society, and that's something that interested me. But when I became an upper division student, I realized that social welfare did me in social work, but I already was hooked.

01;02;28;12 - 01;02;45;17
Vashti Adams
Like I was interested in social work as a profession. So I decided to stick it out. At the end of my undergraduate years, I decided to apply for graduate school in social work because I wanted to do work on the school to prison pipeline and racial disparities in school discipline. And I thought that social work would be a good discipline for that.

01;02;45;19 - 01;03;05;22
Vashti Adams
So I go to a social work graduate program and there I think, well, actually I might really like counseling because my internship was a clinical position. So I'm getting that experience and I think that counseling might be it for me. And later I realized that counseling is not it for me, and I didn't really love actually providing therapy, but I really did like being in social work.

01;03;05;25 - 01;03;24;00
Vashti Adams
At the same time, I was starting to learn more about what social science and social work research looks like. I had personal interests in diet, culture and weight, stigma and disordered eating and things around that nature. So I decided that my next move would be to stay in social work, but to pursue a Ph.D. so I could do more of that research side of things.

01;03;24;00 - 01;03;30;00
Vashti Adams
I could stay in the field that I love, but do something that was a little bit more appealing to me, which is kind of this more academic kind of work.

01;03;30;03 - 01;03;39;16
Erin Hagar
Yeah. And now that you are in the spotlight that you're in now, you know, kind of in the dissertation stage, where do you see yourself taking that social work career next?

01;03;39;19 - 01;03;58;26
Vashti Adams
I am interested in a tenure track position, a place where I really can pursue my research interests, get more experience in teaching and shaping this next generation of social workers, and also teaching outside of social work to. I'm really interested in seeing how my work can influence other health care related disciplines like nursing medicine and things like that.

01;03;58;29 - 01;04;39;07
Erin Hagar
So right now you really have your foot kind of straddling the border between being a student yourself, more on the independent side of your research and preparing to enter academia as a faculty member. And so I'm wondering if maybe we we could talk a little bit about your experience as a student, sort of thinking now with all the experience you have under your belt about the types of faculty members, the types of teaching styles that you noticed across your your academic career out resonating with you, What what do you remember about your undergraduate and your early graduate school days, about the faculty members you had in the approaches they took?

01;04;39;09 - 01;05;00;03
Vashti Adams
When I think about kind of impactful experiences and things that stood out to me, I think about really faculty who put the principles that they're teaching us into action and are really examples of the types of social workers that they're teaching us to be. And so one particular example, I was in a graduate class on social work advocacy, and we were talking about like, what is social workers role?

01;05;00;09 - 01;05;20;21
Vashti Adams
What's our role as a discipline and as individual social workers and disrupting health care disparities based on race. And in this conversation, some of the students were really struggling to grasp this idea that some of the impacts we see are because of racism and because of these racial disparities in health care access, the types of treatment that people get, etc..

01;05;20;24 - 01;05;42;04
Vashti Adams
And so because some students were struggling, a lot of the students of color started to speak up and share their personal experiences with having gone through the health care system with the disparities and the different access that their family members have had and the disparate treatment that they'd experienced. And still some of the students were really not grasping that this was as big as a problem as it was.

01;05;42;06 - 01;06;02;27
Vashti Adams
And so it just became a situation where students were sharing very personal experiences that meant a lot to them, and other students were just really pushing back kind of in a detached way from this personal conversation. And so what the professor had did was he stepped in and actually put a pause on the conversation and redirected us back to what the topic was.

01;06;02;27 - 01;06;32;14
Vashti Adams
We went back out of the personal back into the readings, back into the selection material to kind of take a break from what we were talking about and that to me represented the principle of advocacy because there was this dynamic that was happening in the classroom where students were not feeling heard. They were sharing their personal experiences, not something that unfortunately does happen to students of color is having to educate and not kind of receive the benefit of that education, having to teach people what racism is and how it shows up.

01;06;32;16 - 01;06;48;28
Vashti Adams
And that can really take a toll on you. And so this professor stepped in to say, you know, this wasn't something he was witnessing. He disrupted that system and the dynamics that he wrote that he witnessed and we reset back on the class. Then after the class, he sent us all an email saying that this was kind of a heavy class.

01;06;48;28 - 01;07;06;13
Vashti Adams
He saw that it was getting personal. If anybody needed to utilize the office, our space to process what was going on, he would be happy to do so. And so that really just showed me an example of what it can look like to advocate. Even when no one was really asking you to. It was in the moment. It wasn't that somebody had reached out after class to say, you know, this was having for me.

01;07;06;13 - 01;07;24;00
Vashti Adams
He was witnessing something that could have been problematic and stepped in to take care of it right away. So that really stuck with me. Have really this professor taking the responsibility to kind of manage what was happening in the classroom. And even though he wasn't participating in the discussion, he wasn't just letting it happen. He was there being an active participant.

01;07;24;02 - 01;07;49;11
Erin Hagar
I really appreciate that story so much because I think a less experienced faculty member might say, we're really having a good back and forth here, right? Like this. This conversation is is very dynamic. But but to take that one step removed, that as you said, and really see the conversation, not just for the the content that it was covering, but also for the underlying dynamics among the students in the room.

01;07;49;14 - 01;07;53;04
Erin Hagar
And to step in that, that's really some skillful facilitation.

01;07;53;07 - 01;08;08;08
Vashti Adams
Yeah, I definitely think it's kind of like he was witnessing it happening on two levels, like what we were saying. But then who is saying that? What are their identities? What's being challenged here beyond just is this the idea that we're talking about, but really like taking a deeper look.

01;08;08;10 - 01;08;28;00
Erin Hagar
Right. And it sounds like the the adjustment that he made was to go back to that the objectives of the class. Right. And to say like let's let's re ground ourselves in the objectives for today, the materials that we've been looking at, that kind of thing. So it's not just putting a kibosh on it, but redirecting back to the materials that were presented.

01;08;28;07 - 01;08;44;01
Vashti Adams
Right. Exactly. So we were able to go back to talking about how might social workers intervene instead of talking necessarily about people's experiences, whether or not racism showed up in health care. That wasn't the topic. We were able to get back to what is our role as social workers when we see these types of things happening?

01;08;44;04 - 01;09;12;28
Erin Hagar
Yeah, yeah, that's a that's a really insightful lesson to be to be taken from there. So I'm thinking about the stage that you're in now as writing your dissertation, entering that independent phase of your academic journey and your faculty now are really serving the role as mentors. And I'm wondering if you could talk a bit about how you see the difference between a teacher and a mentor or an advisor.

01;09;13;01 - 01;09;18;16
Erin Hagar
What are you looking for in that role and how are you seeing it show up in your work now?

01;09;18;19 - 01;09;43;27
Vashti Adams
I think definitely what I'm looking for like dissertation committee members or chair mentors, all those things. I'm looking for someone who could be more of an intellectual partner, someone who is definitely way more experienced there in this field, who's more experienced in research and teaching everything than I am, but still sees me as someone who isn't mentee. I'm not just a student in the sense of I don't have as much experience, but the experience that I do have is valuable.

01;09;44;02 - 01;10;03;07
Vashti Adams
Like a junior, junior colleague in the sense of what I have to say and the opinions where I want to direct my study. Those are all a value. Another thing that I'm really interested in looking at is faculty members who are excited about what I have to do and what I want to look at and just my interests.

01;10;03;09 - 01;10;22;14
Vashti Adams
I think one thing about a teacher or when you're a student, your faculty, you want them to be excited about what they're teaching you. So if they're talking about research methods, you want them to be excited that they do qualitative work, or if it's more of a like topic area class, you want them to be your teacher because they know a lot about this area and they're excited to help you.

01;10;22;17 - 01;10;46;13
Vashti Adams
Whereas when I'm looking for a mentor, I want someone who's excited about my work, especially because in the program there's not a faculty member here that does exactly kind of what I'm looking at. But there are plenty of faculty members who are interested in what I have to say and who are eager to kind of see what do I have to bring to the field of social work and how I'm going to enrich like the research landscape at, you know, wherever institution I end up next and during my time here at Maryland.

01;10;46;16 - 01;11;06;15
Vashti Adams
So I think that's a big difference is like either way, you want excited and energetic faculty. But I think as a student, I want them to to be excited and I expect them to know like what they're teaching me as a mentor. I don't expect them to know everything about my topic area, but I do still expect them to be excited to help me and like eager to see where I'm going to go next.

01;11;06;18 - 01;11;17;07
Erin Hagar
Yeah, and bringing that relationship full circle. Like you said, we're showing that continuous learning that we want our faculty members to demonstrate.

01;11;17;09 - 01;11;33;11
Vashti Adams
yeah, definitely. I think that's one big thing too, is having faculty who are willing to say, I don't know a lot about that topic. And that's okay because, you know, that's the model that we have here. We don't as in the school of social work, you don't come in to maybe study with one particular faculty who has the same interests as you.

01;11;33;12 - 01;11;46;09
Vashti Adams
You're able to learn from all the different faculty and what their their interests are. And so having someone who's able to say, yeah, you know what, I don't know a lot about that. This is what I do know. And I'm so excited to help bridge this gap and get you on your next step.

01;11;46;12 - 01;11;49;14
Erin Hagar
Yeah, Do you want to tell us a little bit about what you're studying?

01;11;49;17 - 01;12;26;02
Vashti Adams
Yeah. So broadly, my research looks at issues around weight, stigma, disordered eating and just health promotion. Specifically what I'm going to be looking at in my dissertation is black women's perceptions of specific weight, inclusive approaches to health. And specifically, what do black women in the area think about the principles of weight inclusivity, which involves rejecting like a hierarchy of sizes with some sizes being indicative of good health right off the bat and some sizes being indicative of poor health eating for wellbeing, which is the idea that the way we eat is that eating enriches us in a lot of different ways and it contributes to our health and wholeness beyond just the calories in the

01;12;26;02 - 01;12;48;16
Vashti Adams
macronutrient, but also, you know, spiritually, mentally, physically, that that all is a part of healthy eating. And then the last principle is life enhancing movement, which is similarly the idea that the way we move our bodies should not just be about restriction and burning calories, that there are a lot of ways that being active and moving in ways that we're able to that that can enrich our wellbeing.

01;12;48;16 - 01;13;07;04
Vashti Adams
So things like mental health, physical health, all that good stuff. So I'm looking at how do black women perceive these principles and what are their thoughts about these principles being used as a foundation for health promotion in chronic disease prevention efforts? And I'm really hoping that this work will help to inform weight inclusive approaches to chronic disease prevention for specifically black women.

01;13;07;10 - 01;13;25;24
Vashti Adams
So we can get away from this idea that the only way to be healthy is to be a certain size and to eat as many calories and to be on the treadmill, you know, hours and hours a day towards a vision of health that really is aligned with what black women in the community are thinking about health. And that is just respectful and inclusive to people of all sizes.

01;13;25;26 - 01;13;54;10
Erin Hagar
Yeah, it's such an important conversation and I'm so excited about the way that you're going to to inform the future not just of social work, but of of the provision of health care going forward. So again, kind of going back to this idea of of being at this intersection, right, Like here you are on the cutting edge of the cutting edge of this really exciting research, finishing that up, thinking about the next steps.

01;13;54;13 - 01;14;18;13
Erin Hagar
I wonder if you might tell us a little bit about a role you're playing right now on campus, which is a graduate teaching assistant. What are you learning from that experience about your future roles as a faculty member? The responsibilities you might have as a faculty member, and thinking about how you might bring that research to the next generation of of social worker or other kinds of students.

01;14;18;15 - 01;14;48;23
Vashti Adams
Yeah, I think one thing that I've really learned is that faculty members have a responsibility to kind of think about all the things students need to learn outside of just the course material and doing their part to get them to that place. And so one specific example is about deadlines. So as a student, I tended to think that deadlines are kind of a social construct, that they're just a way for faculty to kind of have like a holdover from from this idea of that like faculty have power and students like our support underneath them.

01;14;48;29 - 01;15;12;29
Vashti Adams
So not that individual faculty feel that way, but that, you know, our academic system is oriented towards, you know, it's a power system and that deadlines are just a result of that. That's just they've ended up this way. So I was thinking that, well, maybe students don't really need that, but maybe it would be better to just say these are all the activities you have to do in a semester and, you know, giving people the responsibility to do it on their own.

01;15;13;02 - 01;15;33;15
Vashti Adams
And so that was my student perspective coming in as a DTA. However, I realized that a lot of students really struggled with the time management of being able to get their assignments in on time, and what they actually needed was experience having to stick to a deadline because especially in a social work program, being able to stick to deadlines is crucial for your career success.

01;15;33;15 - 01;15;53;04
Vashti Adams
Like if your clients need you to file a paperwork for their housing or for their court case by a certain date, you have to get that in on time. And so it's a service to make sure that students are used to deadlines and kind of feel the importance of that. Like that's the part of your career preparedness. So maybe as my experience, as I'm just in this one particular class.

01;15;53;06 - 01;16;14;25
Vashti Adams
Sure, it didn't. It maybe contribue it was a passing of past class. Whether or not you turned it in on this deadline or that deadline, if I was just focusing on what students needed to learn in the course in this class, maybe I would have tended to go towards the well, maybe we don't need a deadline. But the faculty member I was with really showed me is that we are we have a responsibility to students as future social workers.

01;16;14;29 - 01;16;31;08
Vashti Adams
And so beyond this, our beyond this one class, like what are we doing to prepare this next generation? Part of that is the content that's definitely important. But also part of it is like this professional development kind of thing. And then this really made me see just the role of like a social work faculty in the faculty in general, just in a different lens.

01;16;31;08 - 01;16;56;19
Vashti Adams
Because before I really was thinking more about, Well, what do you need to know about this content? And even how is this content going to relate to your practice? But really, how can we develop you as a social worker and really to make sure that when you graduate with your MSW and you have your stamp from this university that we're stamping on, that you're, you know, like competent and qualified and all these ways beyond just social work practice, but, you know, just professional things that you need to, to do your job.

01;16;56;19 - 01;16;57;06
Vashti Adams
Well.

01;16;57;08 - 01;17;26;03
Erin Hagar
Yeah, Yeah. It's so interesting because I think that questioning mindset that you brought to that deadline debate that you were having with yourself can be really useful for a faculty member. Kind of what what is the underlying construct of this system or this rule or this structure that we have? And I think questioning that can be really healthy because it may cause some faculty members to say, you know what, maybe this is more about me than them or more about me than the profession or my ego or whatever it is.

01;17;26;05 - 01;17;42;09
Erin Hagar
But when you can when you think about that question and you can say, actually to be a competent professional, or they do need this particular skill, they do need this particular mindset, and but just going through that questioning process can bring a lot of value to that instructional role.

01;17;42;11 - 01;18;04;16
Vashti Adams
Yeah, I definitely think so. I think it also pertains to writing like kind of clear communication. I know we all can write in different ways, but kind of being so lenient on letting go of things like, you know, can I understand what you're saying? Is there organization? Are your ideas, you know, presented if we let go of that, to kind of just say, you know, I want to respect all students writing and not really kind of teach those those kind of communication skills.

01;18;04;20 - 01;18;20;01
Vashti Adams
I think that's another example of what we do want to make sure that we are holding space for people to write and communicate in different ways and understanding that in the profession there are some kind of basic things that you'll have to communicate in writing, and so you've got to get to practice in doing that. Now.

01;18;20;08 - 01;18;30;12
Erin Hagar
Yeah, yeah. That intentionality seems like it comes back to that. Is there anything else about your experience that you think you might carry forward into your future career?

01;18;30;15 - 01;18;51;00
Vashti Adams
I think something in particular with this DTA is I was in I was helping with the class that was all in a virtual program. It was in the evening. Most of the students had a full time job outside of class, and that really helped me to also see the the student teacher dynamic a little bit differently. I already had this idea like I'd been through a lot of education classes.

01;18;51;00 - 01;19;14;26
Vashti Adams
I think it fits like with my philosophy to reject this kind of thinking model where students are just these empty receptacles and teachers teach them everything and teachers have all the power and didn't have that thing. I already don't really endorse that perspective, but being in the GTA in this class has really helped reshape my ideas even further because I was just seeing that kind of the time that we have with our students is a privilege.

01;19;14;26 - 01;19;36;12
Vashti Adams
They're carving out times out of their really full lives with families, with school, with, you know, people were having personal issues and they're still making the time to come to hours at night, like 6 to 8 during the weekday to spend time in our class. And it really just helped me to see, like the responsibility of faculty to make sure that that time is worth it.

01;19;36;18 - 01;19;53;05
Vashti Adams
That's worth it for you, having sacrificed, you know, that evening with your family to be in this class and making sure that, like, we're not wasting time, that we're using the time that we have to the best of our ability in that I'm like bringing my best, even as a DTA. Like, have I prepared for the class? Have I done the reading?

01;19;53;05 - 01;20;11;09
Vashti Adams
So whatever questions you have in this town can be answered. It's really just kind of honoring and kind of flipping on its head that like the students need to be appreciative for us, Like we need to be appreciative for them. They came to my class and, you know, like they did what they could to be prepared. So it helped me to see that just the student teacher dynamic in another light.

01;20;11;16 - 01;20;35;26
Erin Hagar
Yeah, yeah. That's such a great perspective to to carry with you as you go forward. So speaking of that, as you are in the final stages of of doing your research and finishing your dissertation and thinking about the job market, why don't you tell us a little bit about what you're hoping for in that next phase of your journey and and how you might think of yourself as an educator going forward?

01;20;35;28 - 01;21;02;17
Vashti Adams
I think what I'm really looking for is an academic position. I really like research. I did a whole Ph.D. for that, and so I want a position where I am able to further my work. But I also still am interested in teaching, especially bridging in my topic to teaching and social work education. We don't talk a lot about weight stigma, even though we do talk about like structural oppression and different forms of power and oppression and that hierarchy, all that good stuff.

01;21;02;18 - 01;21;20;02
Vashti Adams
So we're not all talking about weight. And I would really look for a position where there is some freedom to bring in those discussions, either as a whole class or even like some flexibility in existing classes. So I know in some programs, you know, everybody has to teach. Whoever is teaching, maybe 1 to 1 has to teach it the same way.

01;21;20;09 - 01;21;36;21
Vashti Adams
But I'm really looking for a position where I could bring in some readings or, you know, a module about this topic or that topic. So just kind of some intellectual freedom within the classes that I'll be teaching to kind of put my spin on things. And then of course, the time to do my research, to put my spin on that as well.

01;21;36;23 - 01;21;56;14
Erin Hagar
So I am really excited to think about you. Varshini The faculty role with this perspective that you're bringing, and I am cheering for you as you enter the job market. And I know that something wonderful is going to work out and what a lucky institution is going to it's going to be that that lands you as their faculty member.

01;21;56;16 - 01;22;15;28
Erin Hagar
I wonder, just closing us out, if you might have any final reflections on how you are seeing yourself as an educator, as you think about your own academic journey from student to GTA and now entering the job market as a future faculty member?

01;22;16;00 - 01;22;50;03
Vashti Adams
Yeah, I think something that has really stuck with me that I kind of talked about earlier is just having a responsibility to your students and really even thinking about my experience and like really admiring that faculty who took that active role in our classroom. He was active participant to seeing how the faculty that I work with now, like, takes responsibility to the students for getting them to where they need to go in certain areas like professionalism and really just using that as like a guiding principle of what responsibilities do I have to my future students, how I end up might hold up my end of the bargain, not just how students will hold up their

01;22;50;03 - 01;23;05;09
Vashti Adams
end by turning in their assignments and etc., but what do I owe the students that are, you know, in my academic care for this semester, quarter, whatever? And how can I make sure that I'm not just doing what I can to fulfill my my responsibilities as the educator?

01;23;05;11 - 01;23;28;19
Erin Hagar
Yeah, it's such a wonderful perspective and I cannot thank you enough for taking the time out of your busy, busy schedule to come talk with us and share with us your experience in this interesting intersection that you find yourself in now. And we are just cheering for you as you enter the next phase. Well, thank you. Thank you for joining us today.

01;23;28;19 - 01;23;41;21
Erin Hagar
On moving the needle, visit us at u. Maryland. That edu slash f seitel to hear additional episodes, leave us feedback or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from.

 

01;00;00;01 - 01;00;26;25
Erin Hagar
Welcome to Moving the Needle. Casual conversations about ways big and small to impact student learning. Brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Erin Hager. Let's move the needle. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Moving the needle. Maybe it's just me, but I don't think there's any puzzle more fun to solve than curriculum.

01;00;26;28 - 01;00;55;19
Erin Hagar
Getting a group of people with their different backgrounds and abilities across the same finish line, grounding them in what's currently known while recognizing that knowledge is going to change and preparing these students for fields that might not even exist yet. I mean, come on. It's incredible when you think about it. And of all the curricular puzzles out there, the one we're going to talk about today is a 5000 piece, double sided single color kind of puzzle, just so complex and interesting.

01;00;55;22 - 01;01;17;22
Erin Hagar
It's the first in the nation medical, cannabis Science and therapeutics degree out of the School of Pharmacy and its curriculum design was led by our guest today. Dr. Leah Sara is the CO program director for the nation's first graduate studies and Medical cannabis Program at the School of Pharmacy. Dr. Sara graduated with her PharmD from the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy in 2010.

01;01;17;25 - 01;01;44;18
Erin Hagar
She is a board certified pharmacotherapy specialist who is often invited to speak on her areas of focus pain management, palliative medicine and cannabis therapeutics. She received a leader and health care award in the category of medical cannabis from the Baltimore Business Journal in 2020. Leah Also, and this comes into play in our conversation today, earned a master's in instructional systems development at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

01;01;44;20 - 01;01;46;14
Erin Hagar
Leah, welcome to Moving the Needle.

01;01;46;16 - 01;01;49;02
Leah Sera
Thank you for inviting me. I'm excited to be here.

01;01;49;09 - 01;02;02;12
Erin Hagar
Well, I can't wait to dive into this conversation. Why don't we start way back at the beginning and you orient us a little bit into how the medical cannabis Science and Therapeutics degree came to be. What drove its development?

01;02;02;15 - 01;02;39;20
Leah Sera
The program initially was conceived by our previous dean, Dr. Natalie Arrington, and it came into being because in Maryland, the medical cannabis program was really taking off. It was rapidly evolving and at the same time there have been a number of of articles, published surveys of health care professionals is indicating that this topic, medical cannabis, wasn't taught in health professionals curricula, but that clinicians wanted to know more about it because patients are asking them about it.

01;02;39;20 - 01;03;09;19
Leah Sera
And so that was really the impetus for us to start thinking about this program. I became involved because as I, I wanted to I asked my department chair to, you know, to put in a good word for me with the dean that maybe I could teach a class in the program. And then after speaking to the dean about some of my ideas, I was luckily given the opportunity to lead the development and implementation of the program as program director.

01;03;09;21 - 01;03;21;13
Erin Hagar
Wow. It's really interesting that it could really be considered a patient driven program that the patients were asking the health providers. And the health providers said, we need this.

01;03;21;16 - 01;03;41;17
Leah Sera
Absolutely. And that's reflective, I think, of medical cannabis as a whole and how it's evolved in this country. And it certainly has it evolved because of the medical field as we traditionally think of how how medicine evolves. It's really been very much a patient driven or a people driven.

01;03;41;24 - 01;03;57;09
Erin Hagar
Yeah. So interesting. So when you thought about kind of the landscape that you were given, when when this program was being conceptualized, what what kinds of puzzle pieces were you trying to fit together as you thought about this curriculum?

01;03;57;12 - 01;04;23;02
Leah Sera
Starting from the very beginning. You know, I have a background in instructional design, so it was, you know, a very good opportunity for me to kind of put my education into practice. It really was about what's the what's the gap? You know, what should we teach, what's missing? And this, you know, was a little bit more challenging for us because there was a template for us for this program.

01;04;23;07 - 01;04;47;25
Leah Sera
There was no other program like this that we could say, well, what is it another university doing or what's another program doing? So we had to really start from the beginning and think about, you know, things like who is our who's our target audience, what is our teaching philosophy, What's what's our why? Why are we doing this? What is our teaching teaching methodology?

01;04;47;27 - 01;05;17;10
Leah Sera
How are we going to implement this? What are our kind of external constraints? You know, what are the administrative constraints that we have? What are the curricular constraints that we have because of the, you know, our topic is not a traditional topic and a lot of nontraditional things about teaching cannabis. So really was starting from, you know, literally the ground up and figuring out all of those things.

01;05;17;12 - 01;05;26;08
Erin Hagar
Yeah, that's a that's a lot to put together. Maybe we can break some of those out. Piece by piece. So who did you see as your target learners?

01;05;26;11 - 01;06;11;28
Leah Sera
So it really evolved. And I would say that this was one of the things that we decided on very early and really drove, I think, the development and continues to drive the evolution of our program. And that even though this program kind of came into being based on, you know, what we thought the needs of clinicians or health care professionals might be, we quickly realized after, you know, talking to some, you know, some other stakeholders and trying to get just some thoughts and opinions from people in the field that the education really was needed in a much broader audience and just health care professionals because, you know, this field isn't just made up of health

01;06;11;28 - 01;06;45;15
Leah Sera
care professionals. It's made up of people with a lot of different academic and professional backgrounds, and none of them have this training in their, you know, college curricula either. So we decided pretty early on in the development to make this accessible to as broad an audience as possible. And that had, as you could probably imagine, major implications for how we teach some very challenging concepts in in the medical field.

01;06;45;17 - 01;06;50;05
Erin Hagar
Yeah. So how did you how did you approach that? We approached it.

01;06;50;08 - 01;07;18;04
Leah Sera
You know, from a two pronged standpoint. We needed to, you know, make challenging scientific concepts accessible to people who may not have a science background. You know, if we were going to accept people into the program who hadn't taken, you know, chemistry course since high school and teach them medicinal chemistry and pharmacology, we had to teach those concepts from the ground up.

01;07;18;04 - 01;07;47;18
Leah Sera
And similarly, if we were going to take non clinicians and teach them how to evaluate the medical literature, we had to include the basic building blocks in our curriculum and not make any assumptions about what people came into the program with because we didn't require any specific prerequisite courses or courses of study. Someone could, you know, can be accepted into the program if as long as they have a bachelor's degree in any field.

01;07;47;18 - 01;08;10;10
Leah Sera
So, you know, if they have a bachelor's degree from 1992 and Russian literature, then they can still be accepted into this program, you know, assuming they're otherwise, you know, good candidates. So we had to figure out how to teach that. And luckily, we have very you know, our science faculty are incredibly talented in that department at making that very accessible.

01;08;10;13 - 01;08;46;11
Leah Sera
The other side of this is we also want clinicians and health care professionals. You know, in our in our program. And so we needed to make sure that the content was also challenging so that they wouldn't be be bored. And so we did that by, you know, creating different levels of assignments, providing different opportunities for more experienced students or those who wanted, you know, maybe more of a challenge to dig deeper into the topic.

01;08;46;14 - 01;09;12;14
Leah Sera
And and although our approach has, you know, evolved, you know, a little bit in some of the some of the details of the coursework, I think overall it's been very successful. And what we found is that the students really benefit from that diversity in in the classroom because they are working with students who may have had very different professional, all academic or life experiences from them.

01;09;12;14 - 01;09;17;26
Leah Sera
And that just makes the learning experience much richer for everybody involved.

01;09;18;03 - 01;09;48;07
Erin Hagar
One of these puzzle pieces sounds like a very diverse group of learners with a wide variety of background and background knowledge coming into the program, but also the topic itself is very new, and the the levels of evidence around the field of medical cannabis have obviously been restricted. Can you can you talk a little bit about sort of where the state of the the medical cannabis literature was as this program was getting off the ground and how that impacted its design?

01;09;48;10 - 01;10;17;21
Leah Sera
We knew that because the medical evidence that surrounds cannabis is, you know, it continues to evolve rapidly, you know, and there there there is a fair amount of clinical evidence. There's also been a lot of, you know, preclinical studies that have been done on cannabis and related topics. And also, you know, there has been a lot of clinical evidence and not necessarily here in the United States, but outside the United States.

01;10;17;24 - 01;10;46;04
Leah Sera
And one of the things that, you know, I think was that drove the timing of developing this program was the publication of a systematic review by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine in 2017. That was an extremely comprehensive, systematic review and and ultimately concluded that there was evidence for the medical use of cannabis in several medical conditions.

01;10;46;06 - 01;11;15;26
Leah Sera
But we can't just teach our students what we already know. We have to prepare them to be able to interpret the evidence as it comes along. And that's why teaching them the process of evidence based medicine became a really critical concepts, you know, underpinning a lot of what we do in the program, teaching them, you know, how to appraise different types of articles in the medical literature.

01;11;15;26 - 01;12;06;16
Leah Sera
Those are, you know, how to and how to identify reliable resources online, how to communicate what you know, to different audiences, to to legislators, to health care professionals and to patients. And those are skills that, you know, will transcend, You know, what the state of the evidence is. Now, when you're in the program now and allow you to, you know, continue to learn and and explore the evidence as it evolves, which it will continue to do because this field is maybe more than some other fields, you know, as I said, really rapidly evolving in terms of what we know about cannabis and medicine.

01;12;06;19 - 01;12;36;28
Erin Hagar
Yeah, I think that's such an important lesson for anybody. Thinking about curriculum to take away is what are the skills that are going to be evergreen no matter the the changes or the evolutions in the content itself and the evidence for what you're teaching. How can you prepare your students to to evaluate information and to assess it, to find it, to communicate it well beyond, you know, the lifespan of whatever specific content might be in your coursework?

01;12;37;00 - 01;12;59;24
Leah Sera
Absolutely. I love that term. Evergreen. I think that's is just it gives the students, you know, something beyond, you know, something to carry with them beyond what they have learned. And it allows this degree to kind of keep on giving even as their own professional career. You know, takes them in, you know, one place or another.

01;12;59;26 - 01;13;22;12
Erin Hagar
So we've got the diversity of learners. We've got the ever changing landscape of the evidence itself. And and you just mentioned briefly this idea of speaking with legislators, right? We've got this legislative context around there. How did how did that impact the design of the curriculum, the legal landscape, the legislative part of this?

01;13;22;14 - 01;13;49;28
Leah Sera
Well, it it impacted the curriculum in a number of ways and continues to impact the curriculum. This is a topic which especially considering we're a public university and we receive, you know, federal funding and our students are eligible for federal financial aid that we need to be careful about how we present the topics and how we teach about what is still a Schedule one substance.

01;13;49;28 - 01;14;15;04
Leah Sera
It's a it's a federally illegal substance. You know, for however long it remains. We shall see. But at the moment, that's still the case. And so we don't do any hands on. We don't have any cannabis in the program there, no hands on experiences. We don't have some topics in our curriculum like how to run a cannabis business.

01;14;15;06 - 01;14;45;17
Leah Sera
And so it has impacted our ability to to teach some topics. But you know, it's given us also an opportunity to focus on what is important in our wheelhouse as a school of pharmacy and that is the patient as as you said, you know, this is a patient driven idea and patients remain at the center of of everything that we teach in the program.

01;14;45;20 - 01;15;09;21
Leah Sera
So things like, you know, obviously the clinical topics, you can kind of draw a direct line to patient care and impacting patients, but also the science, you know, understanding the science, understanding the different policies and how they are made and how you might influence the development of policy in the future. Those are all things that come back to improving the lives of patients.

01;15;09;24 - 01;15;16;14
Leah Sera
And so those are the things that we've focused on cultivating, so to speak, in our curriculum.

01;15;16;17 - 01;15;19;22
Erin Hagar
Yeah, So there's an advocacy component, it sounds like as well.

01;15;19;25 - 01;15;54;23
Leah Sera
Absolutely. We we started off in the original curriculum. We had an elective and still have an elective that focuses on, you know, federal and state laws and policies. But a couple of years ago, we added a new elective on medical cannabis advocacy was developed by Debbie Cheer Guy who's who was at the time the executive director of Americans for Safe Access, which is, you know, one of the biggest, if not the biggest patient advocacy nonprofit related to medical cannabis in the United States.

01;15;54;25 - 01;16;09;27
Leah Sera
And that, you know, takes just knowing about the laws and policies one step further to teach students how to translate that knowledge into, you know, you know, action at the, you know, federal, state, local level.

01;16;09;29 - 01;16;16;29
Erin Hagar
Another one of those evergreen skills that no matter how the landscape changes, there will always be a need for advocacy in one form or another.

01;16;17;00 - 01;16;18;04
Leah Sera
Absolutely.

01;16;18;06 - 01;16;25;12
Erin Hagar
Yeah. That's so great. What were some of the surprises that you dealt with as you were designing this curriculum?

01;16;25;14 - 01;16;56;06
Leah Sera
For me, I think that the biggest surprise really occurred kind of during the first couple of years of of implementing the program, and that was the importance of kind of the co-curricular aspects of program development, things like creating the culture of the program, things like setting, you know, expectations and professionalism and how to engage students with faculty and engage them with each other.

01;16;56;08 - 01;17;42;07
Leah Sera
The importance of activities that bind students together like, you know, like student organizations and things like that. You know, the curriculum itself, of course, is central to our program. But those co-curricular things, I think, are what give, you know, a program, its sort of staying power and helps it evolve and helps it improve over time. And so that was then and has been an incredible learning experience for me and and helps, I think, us as faculty and program directors really feel like we're in partnership with, you know, with our students because, you know, just a couple short years I'll go from students to being colleagues and, you know, one of the things that I think

01;17;42;07 - 01;18;03;00
Leah Sera
exemplifies that more than anything else is that we've been happy to bring back alumni to help teach in our program and to create this kind of network of students and alumni that are all working toward this common goal of, you know, helping patients through learning about medical cannabis.

01;18;03;02 - 01;18;24;05
Erin Hagar
That idea of co-curricular is so interesting, and I don't think we mentioned earlier that that this is an online program. And so that idea of student student connections with each other, student connections with the faculty takes on a different dimension when they are working primarily asynchronously. So how did you what did you implement to create that culture?

01;18;24;08 - 01;18;53;03
Leah Sera
Some of those things were were built a little bit into the curriculum for the beginning of it have evolved things like our symposium where even though we are an online primarily online program, we do require that students come to campus once a semester for, you know, for a symposium that includes workshops and seminars and opportunities to network with each other, with the faculty, with professionals in the field, with alumni.

01;18;53;05 - 01;19;29;24
Leah Sera
And so that's that's evolved and in different ways. As you know, our different cohorts kind of tell us what they want out of that activity, but also smaller things like adding office hours, you know, live online office hours, you know, into our courses so that it's not everything's not asynchronous. They're they're optional, they're recorded. But it's an opportunity for students who want to engage with the faculty to to do so where it's not just an email where you can see someone, you know, on a computer screen, at least.

01;19;29;26 - 01;19;57;09
Leah Sera
And so that's been, I think, a big thing that we've gotten very good feedback from from the students about our student organization has been a huge one and that's been very successful. And they work with alumni. They have networking events on their own. They have they invite professionals to give, you know, workshops and seminars to the students. They have study study hours.

01;19;57;09 - 01;20;12;01
Leah Sera
So those things have been really big in helping to, you know, as I said, build the kind of the culture of our of our program and what it means to be a student in, you know, our medical cannabis Science and Therapeutics program.

01;20;12;03 - 01;20;28;28
Erin Hagar
How are you evaluating and adapting the program going forward? What kind of inputs are you getting? How are you putting that all together in the stew and and making, you know, changes in and modifications as things go forward?

01;20;29;01 - 01;21;01;16
Leah Sera
Since we launched the program in 2019, there have been a number of changes to the curriculum. Some of them are you know, more administrative, like we broke up a three credit longitudinal course into three one credit courses. But most of the changes that we've made to the curriculum have been about personalizing the student experience, you know, I guess individualizing the student academic experience in the student curriculum and responding to what the students say they want to learn.

01;21;01;16 - 01;21;36;21
Leah Sera
And for us, that has meant adding, you know, different elective opportunities to to the program. Things like like the advocacy course that I mentioned, things like an integrative health and wellness elective where we've added medical psychedelics elective that's going to run for the first time in just a couple of weeks this spring. So it's been great for us to take feedback from the students and incorporate it in into the curriculum.

01;21;36;21 - 01;21;58;03
Leah Sera
And because, you know, the students are the ones who are telling us, you know, here's what I here's what I want to learn, here's what's going to be helpful to me as I navigate, you know, my way through this industry after graduation. Here's what I want to know. And so that's been how we evolved the program over the last few years.

01;21;58;06 - 01;22;16;19
Erin Hagar
Yeah, it's almost taking that patient centered approach and kind of bringing it full circle. The patients kind of drove the development of this by asking for it, and then you're continuing that that loop by taking the input of the students who are hearing presumably from patients and colleagues about what's going to propel them forward.

01;22;16;22 - 01;22;17;25
Leah Sera
Absolutely.

01;22;17;28 - 01;22;36;10
Erin Hagar
So, Leah, if you were going to talk to someone in academia, program director, program chair who is thinking about pioneering a new program that was really on the cutting edge the way yours was back in 2019, what what advice would you give them?

01;22;36;12 - 01;23;06;17
Leah Sera
Yeah, first, I think it's, you know, the most important thing is to have the support of your administration. And we were really lucky because as many potential roadblocks as there could have been for a program like ours, you know, we really had very consistent support, not only from our, you know, school of pharmacy administration, of course, but also from the university, you know, and Maryland High and Higher Education Commission.

01;23;06;17 - 01;23;31;03
Leah Sera
And so that's important. And the way that you do that, I think, is that you, as you know, the the potential program director or leader of the program need to kind of do your homework in your research, find out, you know, what is the need for the program, who is the target audience, what else is out there in terms of potential competition and how are you different?

01;23;31;05 - 01;23;50;15
Leah Sera
And then once you have an idea of of all of that and maybe a general idea for your curricular structure, get people excited about it, you know, be passionate. Understand your why once you get people excited about it, then, you know, hopefully all of the the pieces will start to fall into place.

01;23;50;18 - 01;23;54;10
Erin Hagar
Yeah. Well, what is exciting to you going forward?

01;23;54;12 - 01;24;19;11
Leah Sera
Some small things and some potential larger things, you know, as an instructional designer by training the the iterative, iterative changes that you make to a curriculum are, are very satisfying to me. Things like, you know, taking that student feedback and adding a new elective or making changes to improve specific courses within the existing curriculum. Those are all things that I enjoy.

01;24;19;11 - 01;24;50;07
Leah Sera
But from a, you know, a more, you know, kind of a larger, you know, more 30,000 foot view. I think that it's seems likely now that there are some changes coming to this field and the way that cannabis is regulated that may, you know, open up some more doors for us in terms of topics that we're able to to teach in our curriculum, things that we're able to do, perhaps adding things like externship or internship experiences.

01;24;50;09 - 01;24;57;11
Leah Sera
So the future is bright. I'm really excited about what we're going to be doing in the next you know, 3 to 5 years.

01;24;57;13 - 01;25;17;29
Erin Hagar
Well, I'm excited for you. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to be here with us today. This is a fascinating curriculum on so many different levels. And it's, you know, to kind of see it being built literally from the ground up has just been an exciting part of of my work here at U and B, So thank you for taking the time to share it with all of us.

01;25;18;01 - 01;25;33;05
Leah Sera
Well, thank you for inviting me. And Aaron, thank you for all your help, because, you know, because you were there from the beginning, you know that I couldn't have done it without you. So I'm forever grateful to you for all of your help getting this program up and running. Back in 2019.

01;25;33;08 - 01;25;47;23
Erin Hagar
Thank you for joining us today. On moving the needle, visit us at U. Maryland. That edu slash f seitel. To hear additional episodes, leave us feedback or suggest future topics, we'd love to hear from.

 

01;00;00;15 - 01;00;26;21

Scott Riley

Welcome to Moving the Needle. Casual conversations about ways big and small to impact student learning. Brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Scott Riley, 2. Let's move the needle.

 

Welcome back to Moving the needle, research or teaching. It's a question that many of us have heard more than once in our careers.

 

01;00;26;23 - 01;00;54;27

Scott Riley

Faculty are often categorized based on their primary focus. But as the landscape of education continues to develop, so too do the roles and dynamics within universities. Traditionally, research focus faculty members have borne the brunt of teaching responsibilities. However, there has been a notable shift towards incorporating more teaching focused faculty into the academic mix. This shift in faculty composition has inevitably led to distinct sets of expectations and standards for each category.

 

01;00;54;29 - 01;01;18;16

Scott Riley

Today, our discussion delves into the realm of teaching focused faculty and explores the pathways and prospects for those interested in this trajectory. We aim to unravel the intricacies of what it truly means to be a teaching focused faculty in the modern academic landscape and shed light on the future trajectory of this vital academic cohort. It is my pleasure to introduce our guest today, Dr. Samantha Fold.

 

01;01;18;18 - 01;01;43;22

Scott Riley

Dr. Fold is a clinical assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Social Work. She's also a member of the leaders and Education Academy, or Presidential Scholars Educator Development Subcommittee. During her tenure on the committee, she's collaborated with others to explore the role teaching focused faculty play at UAB and other universities, as well as the importance of mentorship and teaching focused faculty career pathways.

 

01;01;43;24 - 01;01;45;12

Scott Riley

Thank you for being here today, Samantha.

 

01;01;45;19 - 01;01;48;02

Samantha Fuld

Yeah, I'm excited to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

 

01;01;48;05 - 01;02;18;28

Scott Riley

Of course. So some of the charges of the Educator Development Committee were to work on promotion guidance tools, peer observation protocols, and mentorship programs for faculty at UMB. And from my understanding, this led you all to investigate. Faculty Composition promotion pathways and professional development opportunities, not just here, but across universities throughout the U.S.. And so my first question is, what have you learned about the types of faculty here at UMB and at other schools?

 

01;02;19;03 - 01;03;16;23

Samantha Fuld

So I think one of the biggest learnings has been Kinect add to the diversity of faculty roles and how those roles are interpreted, what workloads look like, what requirements look like, what mentorship and promotion looks like, what structures are formalized and what are not. In general, it seems from our investigation, and I know you've been a huge part in driving that forward, it seems that most universities, most colleges we've explored graduate schools a great deal have the what might be considered the traditional tenure track faculty role that includes significant attention to research, balanced with attention to teaching and attention to scholarship.

 

01;03;16;25 - 01;03;52;26

Samantha Fuld

And then many, many universities also have teaching focused roles and some research specific roles. I know here at the School of Social Work at UMB where I am, we have a non tenure track contract, full faculty lines for teaching focused faculty, and then also for research focused faculty who do not engage in teaching. And it seemed as though those roles are present, though, to different extent within different university systems.

 

01;03;52;28 - 01;04;11;00

Scott Riley

Wonderful. So if we think about it, we can kind of I know it's a simplification, but we can say that there are two big categories of faculty that split out into a lot of more complicated one, but we can basically put them in the the research faculty category or the teaching faculty category for simplicity's sake. Would you say that's reasonable?

 

01;04;11;01 - 01;04;16;06

Samantha Fuld

Yeah, I think that's true, particularly in non tenure track roles.

 

01;04;16;09 - 01;04;28;15

Scott Riley

And so now I'm kind of curious throughout your research, what impact do those positions have at their universities? Do you see them having a lot of overlap or are they pretty separate?

 

01;04;28;17 - 01;05;14;04

Samantha Fuld

I do think when we're talking about teaching versus research focused faculty, what someone's job looks like and what they're doing on a day to day basis is really different. It doesn't seem to me, based on what we've explored, that there's a great deal of overlap. Though certainly many teaching focused faculty are engaged in research projects and typically it seems as though their research areas of research focus is often in service of their teaching, in service of curriculum development and in service of promoting student development, as opposed to sort of going deep into their area of knowledge or expertise, developing.

 

01;05;14;05 - 01;05;27;04

Samantha Fuld

You know, we're on a health care campus. They're developing new treatments, things like that. It seems as though teaching faculty when they are researching are more student and curriculum focused.

 

01;05;27;06 - 01;05;52;27

Scott Riley

So it sounds like we've discussed what separate about them. Right. And so the question now becomes, what's similar about the roles? And I think one thing that's important to highlight here is the the expectations of the role, right? Because like you mentioned, it's one thing for teaching focused faculty to jump into research, but it's very much focused on the service aspect of their their workload.

 

01;05;52;27 - 01;06;27;23

Scott Riley

Right. They're not necessarily expected to provide the same level of content towards the scholarship role, which, by the way, we we can define the faculty role in general as having three major components, right? Scholarship, teaching and service. And so if we think of the scholarship as very much the research aspect and teaching is as teaching, like you mentioned, there's definitely a lot of teaching focused faculty that I've met that are very passionate about research, but it's geared towards, like you said, curriculum design, you know, coursework, things like that.

 

01;06;27;25 - 01;06;35;06

Scott Riley

Whereas a traditional research faculty would be doing research to advance things in their specific field of expertise.

 

01;06;35;13 - 01;06;35;24

Samantha Fuld

Yes.

 

01;06;35;24 - 01;06;43;18

Scott Riley

And so my question now is, you know, what trends have you seen or what patterns have you seen for any overlap between the positions?

 

01;06;43;21 - 01;07;17;03

Samantha Fuld

You know, I think that there is overlap in the positions in that we're all working within educational institutions is where the education of students is and should be central to the mission of the organization in addition to the research component. I think these three areas that you've identified teaching service research, obviously, you know, at the School of Social Work at U and B, our workloads are very explicitly defined.

 

01;07;17;05 - 01;07;49;00

Samantha Fuld

So my workload as teaching focused clinical faculty is 80% teaching, 20% service. And if in the research realm, it would be the opposite, the focus would be on research. Now, in my contract, and I think that this is true for at least speaking to many colleagues and exploring what we can of many teaching roles. We've looked at many different promotion and tenure documents and different guidance, at least from our state system.

 

01;07;49;03 - 01;08;25;14

Samantha Fuld

It seems as though teaching roles typically are defined by requirements for teaching and service, but the expectation for scholarship, the expectation for what's often more informally and in in our setting called dissemination, continues to is certainly there for us as well. And I think that's something that becomes a little bit of a challenge in the role. Is that your time and the time that is allotted for you is not the right word, but your time is really focused on teaching.

 

01;08;25;14 - 01;08;56;20

Samantha Fuld

Your time is really focused on curriculum development, on service to the school, on service to depending on your depending on your field service to the community, service to your professional organizations. And in order to progress in your career scholarship, whether it is specifically to find as part of your promotion requirements or not is important in academia. That's how we sort of develop and prove our expertise.

 

01;08;56;22 - 01;09;47;12

Samantha Fuld

And it's, you know, an ingrained part of how we move the work forward in our field. And so I would say there is that overlap in the scholarship expectations. Implicitly, though it's not necessarily explicitly outlined in our contracts and our requirements in the same way, at least depending on the school. And that's also what I think is interesting about the teaching focused faculty role is that as we've investigated what promotion looks like, what mentorship looks like, what roles look like for all of these different types of faculty at colleges and universities, both here in Maryland and around the country?

 

01;09;47;15 - 01;10;34;00

Samantha Fuld

It seems as though the expectations of tenured track faculty tend to be fairly similar across institutions, across fields, and the document that explore requirements, expectations, and even just in speaking with colleagues about what's expected, how things are framed, what promotion paths are available do seem a little bit more varied. It seems as though standards and expectation in this role haven't been maybe codified in the same way, which is also part of the reason that it's challenging to find research specifically about teaching faculty and the experiences of teaching focused faculty as well.

 

01;10;34;03 - 01;11;04;01

Scott Riley

100%. I agree. And this kind of brings up an interesting topic that I'd like to explore a little bit more with the with regards to promotion practices for, you know, we're talking about tenured versus contingent faculty. So we've kind of switched from talking about maybe teaching focused faculty because contingent faculty can be both research or teaching. Right? But what I'm interested here, at least from my perspective, is that many teaching focused faculty are in the contingent category, right?

 

01;11;04;01 - 01;11;19;19

Scott Riley

They're a non tenure track. And so with that, I'm curious, what have you discovered? What have you learned as part of the committee with regards to career pathways for teaching focused faculty and contingent faculty?

 

01;11;19;21 - 01;11;50;26

Samantha Fuld

I think one of the things we've learned, again, both connected to exploring the research and also connected to, I think just more qualitatively, our discussions between colleagues is that I know that when I was going into academia, I was essentially told if you want to focus on teaching, you could maybe pursue a tenure track at a small teaching college, but you're never going to.

 

01;11;51;03 - 01;12;21;00

Samantha Fuld

Teaching isn't going to be the emphasis of tenured work at most larger colleges or universities. Is that that is you're looking at a contingent or contractual faculty position, and that is it's on the minds of teaching faculty it quite a bit. Right? It drives what you do. It drives the decisions that you make. It influences how you can interact with your colleagues in a system where lots of folks are focused on tenure or have tenure.

 

01;12;21;03 - 01;12;49;29

Samantha Fuld

And so that is something that's come up in our research, is that teaching focused faculty, particular early and larger university systems like you and be where we work, those teaching roles are contingent faculty roles and what that means, at least implicitly, is often that teaching folks can feel less valued, more insecure in their jobs. Certainly that impacts our teaching.

 

01;12;49;29 - 01;13;29;25

Samantha Fuld

It impacts our work. One of the reasons I was so glad to be invited to participate on this subcommittee and to be invited to be part of this Leap's initiative at U. And B was that President Geral in particular was really stating that there needed to be a greater emphasis and a greater value on teaching. And I think we've all felt as part of the subcommittee that one of the ways you demonstrate that value, demonstrate that emphasis and demonstrate that importance in academia is creating pathways for better promotion pathways for tenure status or permanent status.

 

01;13;30;00 - 01;13;36;25

Samantha Fuld

And that does exist. There's precedent for it existing both within the university system and more nationally.

 

01;13;36;27 - 01;13;47;28

Scott Riley

Yeah. Wonderful. What has your committee seen from other universities with respect to evaluation metrics for promotion in those teaching focused roles and those contingent roles?

 

01;13;48;04 - 01;14;29;06

Samantha Fuld

I think one of the things that's really stood out in the research is the reliance on teaching evaluations as a primary metric for assessment of teaching focused faculty, which makes sense. There is also and there's a recognition that teaching evaluations, you know, a strong, strong foundation in the research demonstrating that teaching evaluation ones are subject to a great deal of bias, that needing to sort of keep teaching evaluations top of mind for for faculty can lead to pretty significant great grade inflation.

 

01;14;29;09 - 01;15;12;09

Samantha Fuld

There's issues with teaching evaluations. It's a primary mechanism for evaluating teaching. The other thing that we've seen a lot in the research is an emphasis on teaching observations, pure observations and observations from more senior teaching faculty and senior mentors. There are some great frameworks for that, something that's come out as particularly important, I think in a lot of that literature actually is the attention to the relationship and how teaching observations are used in the evaluation and professional development for teaching faculty.

 

01;15;12;11 - 01;15;58;10

Samantha Fuld

Because when there is concern that they may be, there might be an overreliance on the teaching and the teaching observation, or there's concern that it could be used in a pejorative way, I think the literature shows that potentially they're not as helpful, that really teaching observations are most helpful as a supportive professional development tool where you have the opportunity to get feedback from a mentor or from, you know, a peer, someone who sits in on your classes and doesn't often have the opportunity to see what you're doing, give you feedback, even just to reflect your strengths as well as to brainstorm some new ideas for teaching development.

 

01;15;58;12 - 01;16;23;17

Samantha Fuld

So I think from our exploration of the research that teaching evaluations and teaching observations have been primary ways of evaluating the teaching. Now then when it when we look at promotion pathways, I know something that's come up as a focus of our conversation and has also been what does it look like if we are being promoted? Typically there's an emphasis on teaching.

 

01;16;23;24 - 01;16;54;12

Samantha Fuld

There's been an emphasis on service. So what does that service look like? Is it committee participation? Is it student advising? Is it service to the community? Is it service to our professional organizations? And then there's that missing piece that is not often clearly defined as part of our roles, which is scholarship or dissemination, but is very important implicitly and implicitly in the academic system.

 

01;16;54;19 - 01;17;27;15

Samantha Fuld

So here at the School of Social Work, at least we do have a clear promotion pathway for teaching focused faculty. You can be an assistant clinical assistant professor, clinical associate professor of clinical, full professor, and that pathway and the promotion track looks very similar to promotion review for tenure track faculty. It it involves external reviews, It involves sort of a full demonstration of what your portfolio is.

 

01;17;27;15 - 01;17;54;26

Samantha Fuld

And something that comes up is, you know, it's scholarship is important in that dissemination is important in that in some way, but it isn't built into our requirement, sort of our guiding documents in the same way. It's just something that we all know and that we're mentored to to know is important. And that's something that came up a lot in our research, in our discussions and our exploration of these documents as well.

 

01;17;54;28 - 01;18;23;16

Samantha Fuld

Is that what started as necessary, what started as our job description, what stated as the pathway to promotion isn't always exactly doesn't tell you everything that you need to do to really advance, to grow your career, to get promoted. And obviously our focus is teaching faculty isn't just on promotion, it's about growth and development as educators. And the promotion piece is certainly important to professional fulfillment.

 

01;18;23;21 - 01;18;37;05

Samantha Fuld

Different roles that we can take on within our schools, within the universities. And so it's a key piece of, I think, what's needed to support and also to retain excellent teaching faculty.

 

01;18;37;08 - 01;19;02;02

Scott Riley

Yeah, I agree. And I want to I was interested when you were talking about dissemination as part of the scholarship, because I know in your research you have come across some what I would call unique methods of dissemination. One of the things that I thought was really interesting was when you were thinking about teaching focused faculty, one thing that was brought up is opportunities like this, you know, a podcast.

 

01;19;02;09 - 01;19;30;03

Scott Riley

What value, what impact does this have from a scholarly perspective for teaching focused faculty? And so as someone who's dug into these things, what are some other components that or other mediums that you see being valuable for teaching focused faculty to grow their career? Yeah, if podcasts are a potential avenue, what's what are some other things you've come across that some teaching focused faculty may not know to consider?

 

01;19;30;06 - 01;20;09;01

Samantha Fuld

Sure. Things like podcasts, things like media interviews, things like social media campaigns, even websites, apps, interactive media platforms, community work, community events, workshops, trainings. Most of those things have not traditionally been considered scholarly dissemination in academia. Typically, scholarly dissemination has focused on academic writing and peer reviewed journals, presentations at peer reviewed conferences, you know, research consortiums, things like that.

 

01;20;09;04 - 01;20;44;11

Samantha Fuld

But I do think when a university values teaching and values the work of educators, there's also great value in building the field. And there are so many ways you can do that. The reality is a lot of folks, unless you're publishing open access, which let's be honest, teaching faculty don't typically have large grants that will fund open access publications unless you're publishing open access when you contribute to the work, to the field.

 

01;20;44;11 - 01;21;08;10

Samantha Fuld

In that way, people the community more broadly isn't necessarily seeing it. A lot of folks can't pay 30 to $50 to look at an article you've written, but they could watch a YouTube video, they could listen to a podcast. And so when you're teaching and when you're working in an area that's impactful to the community and people have access to those resources, that is meaningful dissemination.

 

01;21;08;16 - 01;21;39;14

Samantha Fuld

And I think the thing that's key is that as teaching focused faculty, when we are going up for promotion, when we're looking towards advancing in our careers, the onus really is on us in many ways to demonstrate to our colleagues and to our deans who are making these decisions that this is impactful, this is important, and to frame it in terms of scholarship and dissemination because it is yeah.

 

01;21;39;17 - 01;22;11;21

Scott Riley

And this makes me really happy because I have a new phrase based off of what you just mentioned, I'm going to latch onto this. Access contributes to meaningful dissemination and through these accessible forms of dissemination, we're impacting the communities around us and people at large in a scholarly way. I think that's a really cool concept. And so this this brings up another point that I wanted to discuss with you and what you found in the committee is these these barriers that teaching focused faculty face.

 

01;22;11;21 - 01;22;36;01

Scott Riley

You mentioned not having access to large grants to create open access journal articles, but with barriers in mind. What are some of the support systems or resources that you've become aware of for teaching focused faculty so that they can enhance their career, They can develop their teaching effectiveness for promotion, whether it's on the horizon or, you know, being developed.

 

01;22;36;03 - 01;23;25;28

Samantha Fuld

Yeah, that's a great point. You know, there are many phenomenal teaching focused education, development focused organizations and resources that exist. Obviously, the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning that you're involved in here at your Emby yet is one of is one of those is is one of those things. I think the key thing that we've landed on as important in our research and in our exploration as a subcommittee has been mentorship, Mentorship and guidance is a huge resource for teaching focused faculty, particularly because it seems that the landscape shape of academia and university systems has shifted back and forth a little bit.

 

01;23;25;28 - 01;23;53;00

Samantha Fuld

And I think throughout, you know, the past several decades, there has been more or less focus on teaching and teaching focused faculty at different points. We we seem to be in a moment where it's becoming increasingly recognized that teaching focused faculty are particularly important and particularly important for the student experience. You know, there's greater knowledge and connection within the university.

 

01;23;53;00 - 01;24;21;00

Samantha Fuld

There's consistency there. Teaching focused faculty tend to be, I think, most visible to and available to students. And so that really helps to enhance the student experience and mentorship and understanding how to navigate this university system. That to your point in asking about, well, what are other ways that we can define and think about scholarship in the context of teaching faculty?

 

01;24;21;02 - 01;24;47;20

Samantha Fuld

These aren't necessarily the traditional ways that have been set forth in academia, and so support to kind of guide us through that are important. It's a challenge sometimes because there aren't as many of those people who have been through the process already and so I know at least here at our school, we have some amazing mentors and I just want to really name that they are that mentorship.

 

01;24;47;21 - 01;25;07;11

Samantha Fuld

There's a lot of mentorship that's falling on them because there there aren't so many people who have sort of taken that path ahead of them. But mentorship stands out, has stood out to us, I think is as one of the biggest areas of support and support needs and resources for teaching focused faculty.

 

01;25;07;14 - 01;25;35;11

Scott Riley

Yeah, I 100% agree there. I'm thinking about my own personal experience as a new instructor of only two years that you would be. I would not have made it nearly as far or been as successful as I am without individuals mentoring me, which wasn't necessarily part of their job description as a teaching focused faculty. I don't think it's written anywhere that anyone needs to mentor me, so I really appreciate the outstanding mentors we have here.

 

01;25;35;11 - 01;26;00;25

Scott Riley

I also want to highlight another key aspect of mentorship that really supports teaching focused faculty, and that's the the aspect of advocacy. And on top of that, visibility, because if you don't have anybody who's gone through this process before advocating for you at the higher levels, it's going to be really hard for you as an individual to get that same level of impact when you're trying to advocate for yourself.

 

01;26;00;25 - 01;26;40;14

Samantha Fuld

Absolutely. And I'll say to that that advocacy doesn't have to fall just on more senior and more experienced teaching focused faculty. That advocacy ideally happens amongst all of our colleagues, all of our senior leaders in their recognition of the importance of teaching focused faculty. And it does again, I think it does fall on us in some ways to explain our importance and to be really open and proud about the work that we're doing so that folks know and they see it.

 

01;26;40;14 - 01;27;02;28

Samantha Fuld

Because especially if you're doing amazing things in the classroom, the reality is that with the exception of, you know, for us, we get a teaching observation when we start and then when we go up for promotion, which could be three, five years more, more than that, depending on the choices that you make. And when you feel like you're ready.

 

01;27;03;00 - 01;27;32;16

Samantha Fuld

But we're not getting teaching observations very regularly. And so that means folks don't know what's happening in our classrooms. Folks don't know necessarily about the innovative or transformative work. We need to share that and we need to share that through dissemination. We also need to share that as we are connecting with mentors and and with folks who, to your point, can advocate with us and for us.

 

01;27;32;18 - 01;27;41;00

Scott Riley

And I think with all those combined efforts, there can really be a positive effect on organizational culture for teaching focused faculty.

 

01;27;41;04 - 01;28;19;08

Samantha Fuld

Absolutely. And it's really important because it's a it's such an important job. It's a meaningful job. I love this job and it's important to name you know, it's it's it's taxing, Right. Especially, I think, in the I won't even say post-pandemic world because I don't know that we could really define what that means. But there has been an unprecedented maybe that sounds cliche, but there has been there's been an unprecedented rise in mental health struggles amongst everyone, particularly amongst students.

 

01;28;19;10 - 01;28;57;08

Samantha Fuld

I was looking at the statistics the other day, since we're in a grad school setting and the current statistics are that up to 50% of graduate students are experiencing struggles like depression and anxiety and often the role of teaching focused faculty isn't just education, it is also mentorship. It's also advising. We take on a huge role, both formally and informally, doing that for students, and that is that's tough work right now.

 

01;28;57;08 - 01;29;00;12

Samantha Fuld

It's important work, but it it can be tough work.

 

01;29;00;14 - 01;29;28;20

Scott Riley

And I'll support you on that claim of unprecedented because in my own personal experience, I've been teaching for ten years now and the rise in student mental health issues over the past couple of years, at least from my own perspective, has skyrocketed. And like you said, one of our roles informally as teaching focused faculty is to help support students through those struggles as best we can so that they can succeed academically while they're here at UAB.

 

01;29;28;23 - 01;29;46;07

Scott Riley

And that's that's another thing that we we won't have time to discuss. But the kind of the invisible work or the unaccounted for work that teaching focused faculty do with students that isn't necessarily directly academic, but is a support based work that helps them succeed academically.

 

01;29;46;10 - 01;30;15;08

Samantha Fuld

Yeah, it's something that's really implicit in our role, and I think there's a parallel between the mentorship that we do of students or that we offer to students and the mentorship that hopefully is offered to us. Because again, going back to some of that research that we've determined as a subcommittee is one of the things that is key and central in a mentorship, in a mentorship relationship is not just expertise, but it is that relationship.

 

01;30;15;08 - 01;30;41;21

Samantha Fuld

It's the development of a connection, it's approachability, it's warmth. And so that's something that we need to offer for students. It's something that we also need, I think, to be successful and to succeed and to, you know, feel as though we're working within a supportive organizational culture, which ultimately helps us to thrive and continue to develop as educators.

 

01;30;41;24 - 01;31;01;23

Scott Riley

I can't think of anything else to add to that. This is wonderful. Samantha, I've got one more question that we kind of like to end the episodes on. It's going to be a pivot from what we've talked about before, but I always like to include it. What do you think is moving the needle? What is currently changing the landscape of teaching?

 

01;31;01;23 - 01;31;11;23

Scott Riley

I know we've talked a lot about, you know, teacher teaching, focused faculty promotion, support for them. But in general, what do you think is changing the landscape of teaching?

 

01;31;11;25 - 01;31;41;29

Samantha Fuld

I think that students are and I think that students are in a really good way where as previously, I think there was sort of this expectation that when you come to a university, you sit and you listen to a lecture from an expert and then maybe you try it out and you learn how to do it. Students are really demanding in the most positive sense, innovation in teaching in communication.

 

01;31;42;05 - 01;32;24;05

Samantha Fuld

They're really demanding innovation in a lot of the ways that we go about education. They're looking for a lot more experiential work. They're looking for a lot more flexibility and choice in their ability to specialize and to elevate their own niche and their own interests. And I think that's really good. I think that pushes us as educators and also gives us the space to be more innovative, which then ties back into what we've been talking about in terms of a much broader view of what scholarship is and what scholarship means.

 

01;32;24;07 - 01;32;52;11

Samantha Fuld

So many of the I actually had students last semester ask if they could take some of the resources that I had developed for us to use in class and build out a website so that those resources were more accessible to the community. And that was a great idea. It was a great example of dissemination and of sort of sharing the knowledge, sharing the resources, sharing the work and it really was student led and student guided.

 

01;32;52;11 - 01;33;15;26

Samantha Fuld

And so I think the students continue to, as they innovate, push us to innovate, which has been really great for teaching. And then I think ultimately, hopefully it will lead to maybe us pushing universities to innovate and sort of recognizing that the value in the work that we do is teaching focused faculty even more than they do at this point as well.

 

01;33;15;28 - 01;33;34;11

Scott Riley

Yeah, this makes me think I need to thank my students. The next time I see them. Because you're right, I haven't thought about it in a long time, but many of the times I've changed as a teacher are when the students have said explicitly This needs to change. This is not working for us. And so I've had to adapt and get better and develop myself.

 

01;33;34;11 - 01;33;37;12

Scott Riley

So that's that's a really great answer. Thank you, Samantha.

 

01;33;37;14 - 01;34;19;02

Samantha Fuld

Absolutely. And you know, I want to be clear that I do think we're valued. I think our roles exist because the university recognizes that they need great, committed, dedicated, full time teachers and in academia to, you know, the truest, the biggest, the greatest recognition of that value is creating pathways for promotion and pathways for permanent status tenure. And so I'm hoping that in the future, the landscape, not just at our university but at universities across the country, really shifts a little bit to creating some of these tenure aligned pathways for teaching faculty.

 

01;34;19;04 - 01;34;29;05

Scott Riley

Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how things develop because it definitely seems like that's some universities are definitely taking that position. Yeah. Thank you again, Samantha, for joining us today.

 

01;34;29;10 - 01;34;35;15

Samantha Fuld

Absolutely. Thanks for thanks for the conversation. This has been great.

 

01;34;35;18 - 01;34;49;08

Scott Riley

Thank you for joining us today. On moving the needle. Visit us at U. Maryland edu slash FC team L to your additional episodes leave us feedback or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

 

01;00;00;16 - 01;00;19;07
Scott Riley
Welcome to Moving the Needle. Casual conversations about ways big and small to impact student learning. Brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Scott Riley, too. Let's move the needle.

01;00;19;09 - 01;00;47;13
Scott Riley
Welcome back to Moving the Needle. Developing skills is vital for any successful career. Credentials are a powerful means to identify an individual's skill. From diplomas to licenses to certificates. There are a lot of ways to show when is able to take on new projects and jobs. While many credentials have significant benefits, they also come with challenges such as rigid time commitments, financial barriers, and limited access.

01;00;47;15 - 01;01;12;17
Scott Riley
These challenges have led some to think creatively about how to create credentials that let people showcase their skills, while also providing flexibility. I'm excited to introduce our guest today, Doctor Gregory Bright Bill. Doctor bright Bill is the Associate director for student leadership and involvement in intercultural Leadership and engagement at Umbc. Doctor bright Bill oversees campus wide student leadership and development.

01;01;12;19 - 01;01;40;04
Scott Riley
In the spring of 2023. Doctor bright Bill also started Umbc, his first digital badging initiative called the Learning Institute, which provides students, staff, and faculty access to free micro courses and micro-credentials. Since its inception, the Learning Institute has taken an innovative approach to co-curricular engagement and learning. Recently celebrating its 25th Micro course and awarding of its 2000 micro credential.

01;01;40;06 - 01;01;48;13
Scott Riley
With all of that said Doctor Bright, Bill sees micro credentialing as a cornerstone of higher education's future. Doctor bright Bill, welcome to the show.

01;01;48;15 - 01;01;57;28
Greg Brightbill
Thanks for having. And please call me Greg. I'm excited to be here and to share a little bit about what we're doing with micro credentialing at UMD, but also micro credentialing at large.

01;01;58;00 - 01;02;14;06
Scott Riley
Well, thank you, Greg, and let's just jump right into it. One of the ways I like to start these conversations is with an overview question. So can you provide an overview of what micro credentialing or badging is and why it's becoming increasingly popular in the education sector?

01;02;14;09 - 01;02;33;11
Greg Brightbill
Well, I think the first thing and the most important is that micro credentialing in its genesis is not something new. So think about trainings that you've been to where you walked away with a certificate. It was an unaccredited certificate, and it was just signed by the person that was training it. And you walked away and you probably put it in a binder.

01;02;33;11 - 01;03;02;22
Greg Brightbill
Then maybe at a job interview, you opened up your binder and if they said, hey, do you have any experience in conflict mediation? You said, yes, I do. I have this micro credential on conflict mediation. Really the big difference that we're doing now when we talk about micro credentialing is making it a more digital credential, where we are digitizing that little paper certificate and making it something so that it's easier for employers or, organizations or even earners to verify.

01;03;02;25 - 01;03;09;28
Scott Riley
Who is pursuing these micro-credentials, who's earning them? You know, in general, and particularly at UNB.

01;03;10;00 - 01;03;31;15
Greg Brightbill
When we think about micro credentialing, it actually goes along really well with a, the movement of skills based hiring. So when we think about what employers are looking for, they're not just looking for a degree, let's say for example, if you are a student, you're graduating into your master's of social work. So you go and apply for a job as a school social worker.

01;03;31;18 - 01;03;59;06
Greg Brightbill
They know you have your degree in social work, but let's say, for example, they're also looking for somebody who knows how to handle crisis. So crisis management or let's say they're looking for somebody that also knows CPR or how to even deliver an EpiPen. So what we are doing is we are adding on to the education that somebody may earn with micro-credentials based around specific, desirable skills that employers want.

01;03;59;06 - 01;04;29;00
Greg Brightbill
And so when we think about, you know, skills based hiring, the majority of employers are going in that direction. in fact, 87% of employers actually find that skills are crucial when they're hiring. And this is all data pulled from the LinkedIn. What we're also finding is that employers want verifiable skills. And so they don't want to just hear an employee or a potential employee say, well, you know, I, you know, went to a workshop one time on CPR.

01;04;29;02 - 01;05;08;20
Greg Brightbill
They want to know, okay, well, how do I know this is legit? And that is where Micro-credentials come in. And when we talk about Micro-credentials, we're often talking about an open batch or an open mic or credential, which is one that is verifiable through a link. A URL and it is individually assigned to that person. And so what we've also found is that research and micro credentialing done by, you know, this article by Collegiate Education found that 76% of employers identify Micro-credentials as something that is important because what it tells them, it's that person has skills that they can showcase.

01;05;08;25 - 01;05;35;26
Greg Brightbill
But also here's the big thing. Micro-credentials also showcase that, an employee or a potential employee is open to expanding their knowledge. They're open to learning, they're open to growing. They're open to adding to their knowledge portfolio. That same study found that 60% of the people that responded to it said that micro-credentials convey an employees competencies and skills that they find desirable, and that they find valuable when interviewing somebody.

01;05;36;02 - 01;05;47;08
Greg Brightbill
So it goes back to really what micro-credentials are, which is just showcasing earned skills. knowledge that a student or a learner may acquire anytime.

01;05;47;10 - 01;06;11;12
Scott Riley
Based on what you said about the diversity of individuals completing your micro-credentials and the expectation of employers for different skills. I think you use the example of, social worker and, you know, CPR and administering an EpiPen. How do you how do you determine what are the correct micro credential opportunities or offerings to give to people?

01;06;11;17 - 01;06;37;11
Scott Riley
So if they are more employable, they are more valuable because you're talking about, you know, you've talked about individuals at different levels of their career with different goals and aspirations, and then employers have different expectations depending on the role that they're hiring for. And I think you mentioned that, you know, part of it's data pooled from LinkedIn. But is that the only metric that's used or how do you as a long way of saying, how do you determine what content to provide?

01;06;37;16 - 01;07;00;02
Greg Brightbill
And this is actually a huge question within the credential world, because while we know that, you know, 69% of employers state that they know about Micro-credentials, there's actually still a little bit of confusion. In fact, there was an article from Inside Higher Ed that came out last year, which was that micro-credentials are still confusing. Employers don't know what to do with them.

01;07;00;05 - 01;07;28;07
Greg Brightbill
And so what we're seeing is actually this partnership building where higher education organizations and higher education institutions are actually partnering with private companies. So let's say, for example, if Google says we want people that have knowledge and A, B and C, and the University of Blank says what we want our students to be employed by you. So we're going to develop Micro-credentials on A, B and C, and our students are going to earn that.

01;07;28;07 - 01;07;56;07
Greg Brightbill
So that way when they have Micro-credentials micro credential be Micro-credentials C and they go to that, you know, I think Google is one. I said an interview, Google says great, that's exactly what we were looking for. And so it really does require, a substantial amount of research in topics and trends. Now, one of the benefits of micro-credentials that we actually a tie it often to what's called micro courses and a micro course is pretty much what you hear.

01;07;56;07 - 01;08;23;27
Greg Brightbill
It is a small course. It's not something that is a full semester. Usually it's, much more simplified. And the benefit of micro credentialing alongside micro courses is that you can actually stay much more current and emerging trends, emerging industry standards, emerging knowledge, so that you don't have to spend years preparing a course. let's say you want to have a course on AI learning and health care.

01;08;23;29 - 01;08;40;16
Greg Brightbill
So let's say we want to develop one. Well, historically you'd have to create a curriculum. You'd have to propose it. You'd have to go, you know, in the state of Maryland through Mehak, then you'd have to get it. Then you have to recruit for it years. By the time that you actually have your course implemented, especially when it pertains to technology.

01;08;40;16 - 01;09;04;06
Greg Brightbill
Is it still relevant now with micro credentialing alongside micro courses? you're able to go a much quicker route because it is not an accredited, you know, credential, but it still is backed by that organization. And so it allows a lot more flexibility in staying current with industry, things that are desirable by employers or what employers are asking for right then and there.

01;09;04;13 - 01;09;39;09
Scott Riley
Yeah, it sounds like a lot goes into it. And I like the idea of partnerships because this kind of cuts out the mystery, right? If Google tells you exactly what they want their employees to have coming in, you can create those micro-credentials and move forward. And that saves everybody a lot of time and effort. One of the many benefits and I, I really want to highlight what you mentioned before, that there I don't want to call them barriers, but there are a lot fewer obstacles to making these micro credential courses, the micro courses, which allows them to stay relevant and on top of the skills that students and staff and faculty need.

01;09;39;09 - 01;09;59;21
Scott Riley
So that's wonderful with the the university in mind. And we're talking about, you know, some of the connections between the university and these micro courses. I'm curious, when you're designing these Micro-credentials, do you take into account the mission of the university and its goals? How do they align with, the mission and goals of the university?

01;09;59;23 - 01;10;23;03
Greg Brightbill
Well, you know, to start at UMD, we are, I think, doing okay when it comes to micro credentialing, but we are far behind some of the bigger institutions. I mean, I think it was, University of Texas System just partnered with Coursera, and they're aiming to, connect with 30,000 students to get micro-credentials. And, you know, that's huge.

01;10;23;03 - 01;10;47;10
Greg Brightbill
And they have hundreds of micro courses and hundreds of micro-credentials at UNB, we've got a much smaller, you know, list of micro-credentials. We're about at 25 Micro-credentials. And, you know, we've engaged with, I think, 1400 individual learners. So here at UMD, when we are thinking about micro credentialing and digital badging, often it starts with what benefits everyone.

01;10;47;13 - 01;11;12;19
Greg Brightbill
We're still looking at, okay, what is, something that anybody can gain knowledge from. So for example, we talk about public speaking. We have our public speaking micro credential. We have one that we just started on resume writing and cover letter writing and interviewing and psychological safety. So we are developing micro courses and micro-credentials that anybody at the University of Maryland, Baltimore can benefit from.

01;11;12;22 - 01;11;34;27
Greg Brightbill
We also open the door for more specific micro-credentials. And so if, for example, if one of the schools or our department or anybody at UMD wants to award a micro credential to a specific population, we are more than happy to help facilitate that and to work with them in implementing and delivering that digital badge. Micro credential. If you had to ask me, well, Greg, what where do you want to take this?

01;11;34;27 - 01;12;00;22
Greg Brightbill
What do you want in the next 5 to 10 years? Where's the learning as to going? It is really one where I want the Learning Institute to capitalize upon the expertise here at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and the people that we have here, and to be able to utilize the staff and the faculty who have knowledge that is desirable, and then turning that into a micro course.

01;12;00;22 - 01;12;23;04
Greg Brightbill
So, for example, I was just reading an article the other day, Doctor Allen, doctor from our school of medicine. Doctor, doctor, I love his name, is developing a powder based blood substitute. Phenomenal. I mean, absolutely brilliant. And so if you said, well, Greg, what do you want to do for micro courses? Well, I want to probably start with that.

01;12;23;07 - 01;12;51;07
Greg Brightbill
And so I would probably want to invite Doctor Alan doctor to come in and talk about innovation and health care or pioneering synthetic blood. And just to give a short overview, an introduction into the topic for faculty, staff or students or anybody else external to be able to have an opportunity to just sit in, listen, learn, prove their knowledge and gain a micro credential.

01;12;51;09 - 01;13;13;13
Greg Brightbill
And really, when we think about the learning issue, that's what we've been built upon, which is, recognizing that you may not like this, but faculty aren't the only people here at you and be that can teach. We have a fire marshal who is awarding micro-credentials in fire safety and fire extinguisher use. We have staff in our, fitness center that are doing CPR trainings.

01;13;13;16 - 01;13;36;22
Greg Brightbill
We have staff within Student affairs that are teaching how to do a job interview. And my hope is to not only, capitalize upon the faculty knowledge here at UMD, but also every employees, any employees knowledge. So that way we can together share that knowledge amongst the Umbc community or the greater community. And that way everybody can benefit from it.

01;13;36;24 - 01;14;02;05
Scott Riley
Which very much aligns with the goals of the university community outreach, community service. Where is the line begin to get blurry between a micro credential and a, you know, an actual credential? And the reason that I ask this is because once you have completed four courses that we're all micro, it becomes somewhat summative to a master credential. And that has more weight, that has more impact.

01;14;02;12 - 01;14;14;07
Scott Riley
I guess the it is called a master credential, not a micro credential. Right. And so are we really witnessing a new tier that is the interim between a standard credential and a micro credential here at you. And B.

01;14;14;09 - 01;14;34;19
Greg Brightbill
One of the things that we've been talking about is exactly that. What is the connection between these micro credentials and a degree. And that's actually one of the wonderful opportunities that we see within micro credentialing. And so for example, let's say you could take a course and get a micro credential in a class. Well, you really enjoyed it.

01;14;34;21 - 01;14;59;13
Greg Brightbill
You want to keep going. You want to get another one. Well now you're at two micro-credentials. We'll keep going. What? Hey, how about you just wrap it up and get the whole degree? And that actually is something that is being utilized widely across academia in micro credentialing, where we are using Micro-credentials kind of as that gateway and getting people to learn and getting people into a classroom setting.

01;14;59;15 - 01;15;25;06
Greg Brightbill
You know, one of the things that we've learned in the Learning Institute and things that I've found is that often, our learners are people who are not ready or don't have the ability to take on a full academic degree program, but they want to just learn because they're curious and they want to benefit their career. And so they'll start by after a certain point, they realize, okay, I can do this, I can learn.

01;15;25;08 - 01;15;48;23
Greg Brightbill
I'm excited by knowledge. I want to keep going. And that's what we've seen, you know, in academia. And that's what we're probably going to start seeing at Umbc. But another thing, you know, one thing that you haven't asked me, which I think is really important, which is equity, be equity and knowledge. And one of the benefits of Micro-credentials and micro course is that often we apply a very equitable lands on learning and engagement.

01;15;48;25 - 01;16;16;06
Greg Brightbill
So for example, somebody may not have the time to enroll in a full program. Well, but they may have a little bit of time to complete a micro credential. Or let's say, for example, somebody wants to well said. Let's say, for example, somebody is at a setting where they can't be in class. So let's say one of the one of the biggest populations actually, that's been taking our Micro-credentials are the front desk security assistance at the university.

01;16;16;08 - 01;16;34;13
Greg Brightbill
One of the reasons that they love it is that they can do it on their phone. They can do it at their own time. They can do it on a mobile device, they can do it on a computer, and they can gain those skills while they're working. You know, you can sit down and listen to a micro course video while you're actually working.

01;16;34;16 - 01;16;53;24
Greg Brightbill
Take the assessment. And then now you have a digital micro credential, and we find that this is important because what we're doing is we're making it easier for people to access knowledge. You don't have to submit your your grade or your grades. You don't have to submit your grades. You don't have to apply to an academic program. You don't have to interview for one of our micro courses.

01;16;54;01 - 01;17;17;08
Greg Brightbill
You can go to the website you maryland.edu backslash. The Learning Institute. You can scroll through our portfolio of micro courses. About two thirds of them are all online asynchronous self enroll self-paced. You click one of them, you enroll, you do the course. Then you get contacted with your micro credential. You could do this in one evening your Saturday night.

01;17;17;11 - 01;17;42;25
Greg Brightbill
You can earn a micro credential that's so much more equitable and educational access than having to submit an application with an essay about why you deserve to be in the program and that's something that's really important for us when we're talking about micro credentialing, is recognizing that knowledge is something that shouldn't be placed behind a wall. Now, another approach that some micro-credentials are doing is making it so that the knowledge is free.

01;17;42;25 - 01;17;58;20
Greg Brightbill
So you can enroll in a free micro course, learn and potentially, if you want to earn that micro credential, you could possibly pay for it at the. And now that is not the model that we do here, but the value of it is that it is still allowing that knowledge to be something that is free.

01;17;58;22 - 01;18;31;05
Scott Riley
And for me, this really hits home because I'm a huge advocate for accessibility. And this platform like you're mentioning, does just that. You are you are removing the restriction of access to education and making it open to multiple populations within the Umbc community. And I think that's really powerful and that's great. What other support systems, does Umbc have to assist students in, you know, getting micro-credentials navigating the micro credentialing process?

01;18;31;07 - 01;18;35;02
Scott Riley
I know you're a great resource, but is there anything else that we should highlight?

01;18;35;05 - 01;19;02;04
Greg Brightbill
Yeah. Also, over on the Academy of Lifelong Learning, Nick Cohen Hoven is doing some amazing work. He has, I can't remember how many. 4 or 5. micro-credentials that he's offering that have been co-developed by the graduate school. these are being implemented through at and they are completely free. We have a lot of partners that are coming to also do micro-credentials and such as the patients program in the School of Pharmacy.

01;19;02;06 - 01;19;24;25
Greg Brightbill
you know, these are all groups that are coming around campus to ask for an opportunity to develop a micro credential and digital badge. I think the next step for us is looking at that externally focused micro credential. So, you know, we've talked a lot about how the Learning Institute serves, faculty, staff and students. The population we don't serve is people that are not currently in the Umbc system.

01;19;24;25 - 01;19;48;03
Greg Brightbill
If you don't have a UB ID, you can access one of my micro courses. But what one thing that we're looking at is, okay, so how do we then take this the next step? So for example, we just implemented a service learning and volunteering orientation micro credential. And the hope is that, this will be something that is widely utilized for people who want to volunteer, whether it is here at the community engagement center or abroad or anywhere.

01;19;48;03 - 01;20;04;18
Greg Brightbill
So we value volunteering and service, and it's very much connected to the university's mission. So how do we create this micro credential and what do we need to do within the Learning Institute and at Umbc to make it so that this micro credential or that knowledge is widely available to anyone?

01;20;04;23 - 01;20;06;01
Scott Riley
That's a big question.

01;20;06;03 - 01;20;26;13
Greg Brightbill
It is. I mean, you know, one of the things we do, all of our videos that we develop for the Learning Institute are on YouTube, so anybody can watch them. So when somebody that is external wants to learn about interviewing, I just say, here you go. We create a playlist to go through it. The only thing I'm unable to do is let you in blackboard or to award you the micro credential.

01;20;26;15 - 01;20;45;18
Greg Brightbill
Our hope in the future. My hope is that the Learning Institute will be able to grow so that, be, you know, in our mission, we say we serve Maryland. Well, yeah, let's do it. Let's serve Maryland in the knowledge that we have and sharing that knowledge with anybody here in the state or anybody anywhere.

01;20;45;21 - 01;21;01;05
Scott Riley
And kind of on that note, I'm really interested. You know, you've mentioned how many different populations, how many different people the Learning Institute has impacted. Do you have any success stories that you might want to share, or any testimonial that has maybe stuck out to you?

01;21;01;08 - 01;21;23;27
Greg Brightbill
I mean, we've got many success stories, but one of my favorites, and it's not a really success story, but one of my favorite things is when I'm on LinkedIn and somebody that I might not even know at the university, shares, hey, I just earned this micro credential, and you know how LinkedIn's algorithm goes. You may not know the person, but it shares it widely.

01;21;24;04 - 01;21;45;14
Greg Brightbill
And several times I've been like, that's one of ours. That's one of the learning institutes. And that's really exciting for me because I am able to see the impact and to see the joy and to see the excitement. Now, if you probably said, okay, well, Greg, what's our most popular micro courses? The Office of Emergency Management. I mean, I think they're they're actually leading and micro credentialing.

01;21;45;16 - 01;22;09;08
Greg Brightbill
I mean, they're really they're really doing amazing and awarding digital badges. but I would say probably the one of the most popular ones is, is our salary negotiation. And the reason we created that was because students want to know, you know, I had a dental student several years ago that, came back for an interview panel where students that were current students were asking her questions.

01;22;09;10 - 01;22;30;16
Greg Brightbill
And she said her biggest mistake as a new professional, and she had her degree in dentistry was undervaluing her worth. She said that she went out there and she had a number in her head. She said, this is what I want. And the employer, the dental office, said, sure, great, I love it. Yeah, well, she didn't realize was how underpaid she was.

01;22;30;18 - 01;22;51;28
Greg Brightbill
And so, you know, over the years, what I've realized is that this is something that students want to know about. They want to know, how do I get my worth when it comes to my job? And so we created this, this, this micro course. But here's the funny, wonderful, interesting thing. Again, the majority of people that have taken this micro course are actually staff.

01;22;52;01 - 01;23;16;10
Greg Brightbill
I find it hysterical because and this is not showing throwing shade at H.R., probably H.R. is not going to teach employees salary negotiation, but the learning Institute can do this because our goal is students. Our goal is learning. And if staff and faculty also want to join in and gain a micro credential and learn about salary negotiation, come on board.

01;23;16;13 - 01;23;18;21
Greg Brightbill
And that's been really wonderful and exciting for us.

01;23;18;23 - 01;23;42;19
Scott Riley
Well, thank you so much for this really well-rounded and comprehensive look at not just micro credentialing and badging, but what the Learning Institute is doing to kind of be at the forefront of innovation with micro credentialing. I do have one more question for you that I like to ask all of our guests, and it's the question of what do you think is moving the needle in education?

01;23;42;21 - 01;24;21;22
Greg Brightbill
I think one thing that's moving the needle forward in education is really the hybridization of technology and knowledge and technology and classroom engagement and technology, and how teachers, how educators can effectively build that bridge with learners. And I'm excited to see where that goes forward and how we're able to use technology and possibly VR and different ways that we can give our students, our learners, our community, a better opportunity to expand their career, their knowledge and move forward in their their lives in a positive direction.

01;24;21;24 - 01;24;27;05
Scott Riley
Agreed 100%. Thank you so much, Greg, for being on moving the needle.

01;24;27;08 - 01;24;31;04
Greg Brightbill
And thank you for having me.

01;24;31;06 - 01;24;44;26
Scott Riley
Thank you for joining us today on Moving the Needle. Visit us at U Maryland Edu MFC, CTL. To hear additional episodes, leave us feedback or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

 

01;00;00;16 - 01;00;19;03

Scott Riley

Welcome to Moving the Needle. Casual conversations about ways big and small to impact student learning. Brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Scott Reilly, II. Let's move the needle.

 

01;00;19;06 - 01;00;43;24

Scott Riley

Welcome back to Moving the Needle. Teaching is a multifaceted profession that involves much more than meets the eye. From course designed to assessment, faculty put an immense amount of thought and effort into their work. Whether they are crafting unique learning experiences or pioneering innovations in their field, educators need a strong support system. This is where the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning comes in.

 

01;00;43;27 - 01;01;05;05

Scott Riley

It's an invaluable resource for faculty and staff, providing opportunities to explore the world of teaching and develop their skills. With its fifth year anniversary on the horizon, we're going to explore how it came to be, what it is now, and where it's going over the next five years. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Doctor Christina Cestone.

 

01;01;05;07 - 01;01;29;20

Scott Riley

Doctor Cestone is the assistant vice provost of faculty affairs. Before accepting her new position in 2023, she served as the Executive Director of the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. With a distinguished career dedicated to advancing educational practices and fostering a culture of excellence in teaching. Doctor system brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to our conversation.

 

01;01;29;23 - 01;01;32;02

Scott Riley

Doctor Cestone, welcome to Moving the Needle.

 

01;01;32;04 - 01;01;36;08

Christina Cestone

Thank you for having me. Doctor Riley, it's good to be here.

 

01;01;36;10 - 01;01;50;03

Scott Riley

Well, I'm really excited to talk about today's topic. The Faculty Center for Teaching Learning is very near and dear to my heart, so I want to open up the conversation by asking for those who don't know what is the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning?

 

01;01;50;06 - 01;02;19;27

Christina Cestone

That's a really great question, which has often been confused on the campus. so the center was an idea, a strategic idea that came out of a strategic planning process in 2014. And it's really, it was just an idea that was about supporting faculty as instructors, teachers, evaluators, assessors to have a resource on campus, like many campuses do.

 

01;02;19;27 - 01;02;57;20

Christina Cestone

And I and I can actually say almost 1300 campuses across the United States, at large research institutions have centers for teaching and learning. So after the sort of strategic idea of the center, there was the establishment of this group called the Academic Innovation and Design for education Group. The aid group, which Kevin Engler, Sharon Gillooly, and Erin Hagar were originally part of, and that group was there to support the new, and improved version of the graduate school, which was going to have this new online suite of programs.

 

01;02;57;20 - 01;03;24;23

Christina Cestone

And they needed instructional designers and educators to support the development of those programs, like Cannabis, like our master's of science and health science, health sciences. and so that funding really started the infrastructure for the center. And then in 2019, when I came and joined UNB, it became officially known as a central resource under the provost as the FCTL

 

01;03;24;25 - 01;03;54;15

Christina Cestone

And so at that point, it was, you know, our mission was very broad and it became to advance evidence based teaching and learning and assessment evaluation practices throughout the campus community, partnering with staff, faculty, and educational leaders in the curation, collaboration and co-creation of teaching and learning resources. and the whole goal really was educational enhancement and to impact student success.

 

01;03;54;20 - 01;04;27;09

Christina Cestone

So we did that through a variety of services and programs, which I can get into a little bit more. but really, how I conceived the center was sort of this hub and spoke model, which is a common center model where, we would offer some services and services would be branched out to the schools, and then there would be communities of faculty who might take advantage of different services or come together, like in our online teaching community and share best practices.

 

01;04;27;09 - 01;04;38;03

Christina Cestone

And so it was really meant to be this is hub and spoke and community oriented. entity or initiative, if you will.

 

01;04;38;06 - 01;05;00;21

Scott Riley

As I'm hearing you discuss different aspects of the center, it makes me really think about who the center serves. It's called the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning. And you mentioned, you know, faculty and staff play a critical role in a lot of the processes there. But does it serve anybody else with either the things that it puts out or the services that it provides?

 

01;05;00;23 - 01;05;30;01

Christina Cestone

Yeah, absolutely. It serves students primarily because if our instructors have enhanced skills or they're trying new things that have been known to to increase learning outcomes, that's going to affect student learning. And students access. we also have the GTA program. So that graduate teaching assistant program will help people like postdocs or future faculty, learn to become part of academia and the academy.

 

01;05;30;01 - 01;05;57;27

Christina Cestone

So I think it it serves future faculty. It serves faculty. but we also have a lot of clinical instructors and people who are considered, quote, staff educators, but they're educators nonetheless, and they haven't really had opportunities to kind of dig deep in some cases into educational practice. And I think the center provides a space and, expertise for them to do so.

 

01;05;57;29 - 01;06;15;22

Scott Riley

Wonderful. It sounds like from what you've said, it really does serve a lot of individuals. And then there are groups and communities that benefit from the output of the center, like you mentioned, students. Right? A lot of this, we're doing this so that the students who come to UNB get a top notch education. And so I'm glad to hear that.

 

01;06;15;22 - 01;06;34;16

Scott Riley

That's kind of one of the indirect effects of the faculty center for teaching Learning. I do want to circle back a little bit to how the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning got started, because I'm really interested in its history. you mentioned it a little bit. but I'm curious about the you mentioned the process a little bit.

 

01;06;34;16 - 01;06;48;02

Scott Riley

And so I'm curious, how long did the process take from, hey, this sounds like a good idea to, like you said, Opening Day, where it was officially called the Faculty Center for Teaching Learning. It sounded like a year, but I'm curious, was it a longer process?

 

01;06;48;02 - 01;07;14;17

Christina Cestone

So I think it was actually less. Maybe people didn't know of us. so you know, initially I've said this before, we were really seen by people because of our origination in the graduate school as this instructional design team. and that's understandable because that was our initial focus, and we had strong expertise in that space. And this was April of 2019 when I joined.

 

01;07;14;17 - 01;07;42;23

Christina Cestone

And, we were, you know, we worked on a strategic plan because we didn't have one. We didn't know, you know, really what we were going to be doing. and so about February of 2020, we launched our initial website. We were in a temporary space, so we didn't really even have this space where we were a center where you could go at that point when we were more on campus and in person.

 

01;07;42;26 - 01;08;10;25

Christina Cestone

but then we launched this website, which had lots of resources. and we were starting to build out the content in February, and Covid happened. And so I would say from between April and February was really when we got started. And then, Covid accelerated that because everybody was moving to this thing called emergency remote teaching. I don't always call it online teaching, because it was really a response.

 

01;08;10;25 - 01;08;35;29

Christina Cestone

And the reaction to we can't be up front and personal with our students, and we have to do something. So, I think about that time. Then we started to expand, and we really started working on our goals. So Eric Bell, doctor Eric Belt joined, Becky Menendez joined, and so our ability to reach people remotely during Covid increased.

 

01;08;36;01 - 01;09;00;16

Christina Cestone

so did our creative ideas establishing our website, as I mentioned, using more technology tools, like Voicethread and others to, doing a lot of video and media production to add to the website content, and to achieve the objectives that we had developed as a team, as a small team. and those are on our website, probably for time.

 

01;09;00;16 - 01;09;22;02

Christina Cestone

I won't go through them, but we had set up sort of five core objectives. and, you know, we had to kind of work on those even though we were completely remote. So I would say we had just learned to use teams when the pandemic happened. and so that was a really big tool for us and trying to reach people.

 

01;09;22;04 - 01;09;26;02

Christina Cestone

you know, what? What was it 6 or 8 months after we launched?

 

01;09;26;04 - 01;09;53;23

Scott Riley

Yeah. It's really interesting to think about how Covid changed the the way the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning did things since it was so early on, and it's I'm really excited because now that we're, you know, knock on wood, we're on the other end of Covid. This is really where the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning can take some of those initiatives and strategies that may have had to have been altered because of Covid, and really try them out the way they were originally intended to be.

 

01;09;53;27 - 01;10;21;04

Christina Cestone

I was going to say, if I can give you an example of exactly what he's about, which is, you know, the online teaching community that we have, in fall of 2019, that was Doctor Michelle Pierce with this idea. And there were seven of us in a conference room and pharmacy in the pharmacy building. And by the time Covid happened, we were doing that online teaching community.

 

01;10;21;04 - 01;10;52;07

Christina Cestone

We said, well, it's an online teach community. It should be online. just by pivoting to online, we started to grow our numbers. And by the end, today we have over 200 members to the online teaching community. but, you know, we saw during Covid that number just spiked, you know, went to 79, 89, 150. because people had heard we had this group where you could get ideas, you could talk about challenges you were facing online, and you were with your peers.

 

01;10;52;07 - 01;11;17;07

Christina Cestone

You were with other faculty members and experts from the center who could give you ideas and generate ideas to solve those challenges. And so I think that's a really, to me, solid example of both something we started that we thought was going to be really good for, you know, sort of a hallmark program of the center. Then we had Covid and it became so critical.

 

01;11;17;07 - 01;11;41;09

Christina Cestone

It was like so many people said to doctor Pierce, this helps me feel connected. I don't know where I would have done had I not join this community. I felt so isolated. And so it provided not only social connection, but expertise and sharing, in education, in practice. And so I think that's what made it sort of the perfect storm of impact in terms of programing.

 

01;11;41;11 - 01;12;00;22

Scott Riley

Yeah. And we can finally say that something good came from Covid. It sounds like there was a real benefit to to switching to this online platform. And I, I spend every Friday, I get a chance to be part of that online teach community. I do it, it's one of my favorite ways to spend lunch. So I can also, advocate for it or support it.

 

01;12;00;24 - 01;12;22;11

Scott Riley

so moving to the next topic, I'm interested. You know, we've kind of talked about the history of the faculty Center for Teaching and Learning, what its mission is, how it achieves that mission. But you mentioned there are other centers for teaching, learning, you know, across universities throughout the United States. And so what I'm interested in is how is ours similar to those other entities?

 

01;12;22;11 - 01;12;26;27

Scott Riley

But then how are we also unique as the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning?

 

01;12;26;29 - 01;12;59;09

Christina Cestone

Yeah, that's a great question. faculty development as a an area of research and area on campus is really, started in the 70s and it goes back primarily in higher education, not necessarily professional schools, if you will. And so I think that's what makes, the fact that we just have a faculty center for teaching and learning established in the last five years, not unusual because we are we don't have an undergraduate campus.

 

01;12;59;11 - 01;13;35;12

Christina Cestone

We are a professional schools. professional education has a body of research in and of two. It's unto itself because of the specific nature of it, and training people. It's kind of that workplace academic hybrid training people for careers and very specific careers that affect the public and, and the public good. so I think that's what really makes us different is the professional education and the multidisciplinary nature of professional education at UNB.

 

01;13;35;15 - 01;14;00;10

Christina Cestone

I don't know any other campus, maybe a campus in California that is similar, that has as many professional schools as UNB does. So that really makes it different because we have faculty from so many backgrounds that we work with. but, you know, I hopefully I'm answering the question. I mean, what we focus on is the education piece.

 

01;14;00;12 - 01;14;36;10

Christina Cestone

And so there are some things called pedagogy of the professions. And an example of that would be, you know, in law, in law, the Socratic method and case based teaching and moot court are very signature to teaching law. and, you know, so we're working with faculty who are engaged in those kinds of educational activities. And I don't think in a higher ed campus without a law school, that this center would be getting into, trying to know and understand those educational practices because they don't have that population of faculty.

 

01;14;36;13 - 01;15;13;24

Christina Cestone

so that's just kind of a single example. But obviously our medical school is one of our is our largest school on campus. and many, several of us who are educators, like Doctor Cuello and myself, worked in medical schools for a long time. And so I think bringing in knowledge about medical education and how it works, how it's accredited, I think what that faculty, what they do, I think is also very important for our center to be to differentiate itself from other centers that are just general higher ed type centers for teaching and learning.

 

01;15;13;27 - 01;15;45;03

Scott Riley

I want to highlight the the idea, too, of intersectionality between those professional pedagogies. There's probably a lot of there are probably a lot of unique aspects, like you mentioned when teaching law and teaching medicine, but because we have a centralized faculty center for teaching and learning, I like to imagine or I'm hoping that there are ideas that the individuals in the center take from medicine and help us to indeed enhance law pedagogy, and vice versa.

 

01;15;45;03 - 01;15;59;02

Scott Riley

Law pedagogy can be used and retooled to be used in nursing or social work. and so I think that is a really unique aspect of our faculty center for teaching learning, even if it is one example, it's probably the best example, right?

 

01;15;59;09 - 01;16;21;10

Christina Cestone

Yeah, I definitely hear what you're saying. There are, you know, so case based learning is not unique to law. It is a signature thing that they do, but it is not unique to law because we know there's cases that are used in medicine and nursing all the time. They're probably used in social work as well. so yeah, so there are things.

 

01;16;21;10 - 01;16;26;17

Christina Cestone

And then I think what also cuts across discipline is the practice of assessment.

 

01;16;26;19 - 01;16;27;28

Scott Riley

Yeah.

 

01;16;28;00 - 01;17;00;19

Christina Cestone

assessment is you know there is a discipline around assessment and item writing and quality item writing and assessment. that measures what it is you purport to measure. It's not just, about writing a good test item, but it's also how does that test item, ultimately result in capturing the knowledge that you intend to capture from the learning objectives that your program offer has.

 

01;17;00;26 - 01;17;26;12

Christina Cestone

So I think it's really important to assessment really cuts across all the all the professions, all the disciplines. and each has its own accrediting body. And so, you know, sometimes we can help when it comes to things like curricular mapping. So the center has some expertise in curricular mapping. This is an exercise we just went through with our, middle states accreditation committees.

 

01;17;26;14 - 01;17;56;04

Christina Cestone

And curricular mapping is an educational practice. And so that cuts across disciplines. And we can be helpful in that arena as well. So there's so there are these, areas of education that really they cut across and they might be implemented in different ways with different tools and different content because the disciplines differ, but they have educational evidence behind them that makes them sort of core, regardless of what that is.

 

01;17;56;08 - 01;18;21;26

Scott Riley

And I think what this really highlights about the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning is it's an excellent resource and space for collaboration and the exchange of diverse perspectives for the ultimate goal of education and so on. That thought, I'm really interested in what the plan is now. Now that where COVID's behind us, you're talking about all these services that the center offers.

 

01;18;21;26 - 01;18;35;28

Scott Riley

I really want to know from your, you know, from the leaders perspective, what are the major goals for the center over the next year, over the next five years? What can we expect to see from those? from the center.

 

01;18;36;00 - 01;19;06;06

Christina Cestone

We brought on a new director. I moved into a new role, a little over a year and a half ago, in faculty affairs. And so our new center director, Doctor Saul Roberts lead, has really undertaken this massive self-study of what we're doing and really to be get feedback from the community and the stakeholders and the faculty and those we interface with to understand what we're doing well and what we need to improve and what we're missing.

 

01;19;06;08 - 01;19;45;05

Christina Cestone

So I think you'll see out of that self-study, some changes. But I know right away some priorities that we've had for a long time, and this is probably since Covid, when we really had to pivot to focus on that support. is a fellowship or a longitudinal educational experience for faculty and a scholarly community in education? sort of like our online teaching community, but where faculty can come to actually read and discuss research and education.

 

01;19;45;05 - 01;20;11;09

Christina Cestone

And I believe that, learning communities can be called IC3 and it'll be, kicked off and started with Doctor, Eric Belt and others in the fall. I think you may even be involved with that a little bit as well. so I think between the fellowship, our new online scholarly community, we're looking at an institutional level, faculty orientation, and completing the self-study.

 

01;20;11;09 - 01;20;44;12

Christina Cestone

I think that's a lot for a year for the coming academic year. in addition to maintaining and continuing to provide all the existing services is that we do an instructional design course support. and I have to put in a plug if we don't talk about it specifically for coaching, professional development coaching program. that's also led by Doctor Michelle Pierce, who is, integrative wellness expert and also a certified coach.

 

01;20;44;15 - 01;21;24;17

Christina Cestone

And we're expanding that program because the demand has been so incredible and it's helping so many faculty. we've written a couple papers about it. She's publishing a new one that's coming in, coming up soon about the impact of that program. And so we're expanding that coaching program. We've got, Erin Hager, who's being, certified, I think right about now as a new coach as well, so that we can continue to meet the needs of the faculty who are asking for this, for their well-being and for their continuing professional development.

 

01;21;24;20 - 01;21;51;08

Scott Riley

Wow. That is amazing. And I, I want to get a little greedy here. I apologize, I know there's a paper that's coming out, but as a person who's participated in the coaching program and heard of many of the other, participants, positive, perspectives on it, can you, as you're in your role, discuss what you feel the impact of the coaching program has had on all the stakeholders involved?

 

01;21;51;10 - 01;22;30;01

Christina Cestone

Yeah. So, the key thing here is that it's individualized. And so what we hear from some of our coaches, is really about how it made them feel less overwhelmed and more able to manage their competing responsibilities and have sort of a, strategic way to do that, not just this random random approach to that, but they also set goals and could focus on the achievement of those goals because they had new tools in order to do that.

 

01;22;30;04 - 01;23;02;12

Christina Cestone

So, you know, it's a very confidential program. And so I don't, you know, I don't I'm not sharing that from any specific participant. but more broadly, just in terms of the things that that we heard from the evaluation of the program. And, I think that individualized nature of it as a professional development offering is what makes it, so effective, because it's not just like I'm going to a workshop and I'm, I'm sitting in, I'm listening.

 

01;23;02;12 - 01;23;17;22

Christina Cestone

But now I have to figure out how what it means to me and how to apply it. This is really like these are what the challenge, these are my challenges. How can you help me develop goals to effectively solve the challenges that I'm facing? As a as a member of the Academy?

 

01;23;17;24 - 01;23;39;13

Scott Riley

Yeah. And as a participant, I can second all of those, comments that you've made. I think the individual nature of it is what made it so impactful, because we, like you said, we weren't talking about here, general challenges that faculty face. Here's what you should do to kind of fix it. I had a very strong rapport with my coach because we met.

 

01;23;39;15 - 01;23;58;11

Scott Riley

Yeah, we met as a pair multiple times, and he got to know me as an individual, what my personal goals were. And so it was very tailored to helping me figure out my balance. And it all sounds kind of selfish, me, me, me and whatnot, but that that's what was necessary for it to be meaningful from and a good use of my time.

 

01;23;58;11 - 01;23;59;01

Scott Riley

And so that's.

 

01;23;59;03 - 01;24;03;01

Christina Cestone

I think that's career. Yeah. And it was a good experience for you.

 

01;24;03;03 - 01;24;26;02

Scott Riley

Yeah. So even though we in theory we weren't going to talk about it, I hope this highlights the power of that program. And I do want to ask kind of the same question. I'm really excited for this learning community. Focus on the scholarship of teaching and learning. both the EC3 and the edge fellowship that you mentioned. So what I want to ask you is because these don't have any evidence, no data yet.

 

01;24;26;08 - 01;24;31;01

Scott Riley

What are you hoping the impact of these programs are for the stakeholders?

 

01;24;31;04 - 01;25;05;16

Christina Cestone

I would like to see that there is a greater sense of belonging to an educational community at UNB. there is some research that's old, about it's kind of like this branching effect that faculty development has on its participants. So you had this wonderful experience with coaching, which is a professional development experience. And I use the words faculty development, professional development, educational development, often interchangeably, but they're basically referring to the same thing.

 

01;25;05;20 - 01;25;32;25

Christina Cestone

And you had this experience and you went back and you talked about it with five colleagues. Right? And those colleagues were like, hey, I want to I want to get in on this coaching thing. And I have some challenges and I think it might really be helpful to me. And then it it has branches. And so I think that's the impact is that someone has a good experience with the center, with a service or a program that we provide.

 

01;25;32;28 - 01;26;07;07

Christina Cestone

They go out, they talk to their colleagues and they share that, and then they participate. So we can track participation and understand the impact through surveys that we do, focus groups that we do. and I think it's it's one of the biggest challenges. You asked me, you gave me some questions to think about in advance. And, and when we talk about challenges of centers, the measurement is of the impact is one of the greatest challenges that centers have because of this branching effect.

 

01;26;07;07 - 01;26;37;26

Christina Cestone

So say you took a course where you learned about team based learning, and you went and you taught in your department, and this actually happened in pharmacy. You taught five of your colleagues who were teaching a course about team based learning. Well, the center didn't directly teach those faculty members about team based learning, but now they know about a well written, practiced team sequence of teaching that didn't come directly from the center, but it came from one of their peers.

 

01;26;37;26 - 01;26;59;10

Christina Cestone

And I think that is the best type of educational development. But then it presents a measurement problem for us in understanding how many people we're reaching with our services. And, you know, I'm kind of of this mindset is I don't care if you took advantage of it because someone in your department taught you about it because they came to the center.

 

01;26;59;13 - 01;27;23;11

Christina Cestone

That's awesome. Like and and so I don't have to be the one teaching you about TVO. Someone tell you about TVO, you read five articles from academic medicine about TBL and its effect on omitted. Awesome. But then I can't capture that because I'm not part of that conversation. Perhaps, or I'm not part of that group. And so that's a big challenge that we face.

 

01;27;23;11 - 01;27;46;17

Christina Cestone

But I think it speaks to how educational development works. And what we're seeing is we're we're seeing people call us. I didn't know you had a coaching program. Can I get a coach? I didn't know you had this online teaching community. When can I join? Can you have doctor Pierce send me the link. So I think these are all positive aspects of what's happening with the center.

 

01;27;46;17 - 01;27;53;22

Christina Cestone

And it will only continue to grow. But it does present an impact measurement challenge to those of us who run it.

 

01;27;53;25 - 01;28;13;07

Scott Riley

Yeah. And when I think about it as a person who has participated and watched the effects of the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning, I, I can see your point here that we all know it has a positive impact, you know, on the campus and the university for different stakeholders. And then the question of measuring it, how do you effectively measure the impact?

 

01;28;13;07 - 01;28;34;05

Scott Riley

Because like you said, I've taken stuff that I've learned and immediately gone to my colleagues in the pharmaceutical sciences department, and we've had conversations about topics, but because they weren't directly in attendance, you can't mark them off as attended. But they benefited from services that the faculty said, wow, wow, I gotta I gotta think about that for a while.

 

01;28;34;12 - 01;28;59;24

Christina Cestone

Yeah. So so in my in the ideal world, right. In the ideal world, I thought about taking a list of every faculty member who works here or a graduate student. We know what we can track graduate students, but every faculty member or person and then just go through the list and say they've participated in this program. They parties and that's thousands, couple thousand people.

 

01;28;59;27 - 01;29;23;17

Christina Cestone

But to understand impact, you kind of have to do that. And then I have to sit with you, Scott, and say, okay, how many people in pharmacy did you share coaching with? And then go back to Doctor Pearce and say, how many people from each of the schools have taken advantage of coaching? You know, we generally know because we have to know to sign people up, but it's pretty private and confidential program.

 

01;29;23;19 - 01;29;58;10

Christina Cestone

So I would only know counts. I wouldn't be able to say ten people, you know, this this name person, this name person and this name person, all did coaching. So it becomes like an like my ideal is like, I have this list of names and I can say that we touched 50 to 60% of people on this faculty list with some programing from the center in some way, through online course development, through coaching, through the OTC, through individualized, consultations that maybe I delivered or Sol delivered.

 

01;29;58;16 - 01;30;01;09

Christina Cestone

But it's a really hard thing to do.

 

01;30;01;12 - 01;30;22;16

Scott Riley

Yeah. And and this is one metric of impact. You're talking about participation. And we can talk about perception. You know, I can say that this was very helpful to me because that's my perception of it. But then the thing that I'm really curious about, and is probably the biggest Rubik's Cube ever, is what tangible effect does it have on outcomes?

 

01;30;22;18 - 01;30;25;15

Scott Riley

How do you how do you measure that?

 

01;30;25;17 - 01;30;48;13

Christina Cestone

Right. What change. So then the next, you know, down the line is okay, you had this, this this interface with the center or step out from the center. And then what did you change? Did you implement something new in the classroom? Did you change the way you did? Assessment to more formative assessment instead of just summative assessment.

 

01;30;48;13 - 01;31;21;08

Christina Cestone

Like did you develop quizzes like what did you do? And then really understanding again the impact on student success? Did it change student perceptions of learning in that school? Did it change student grades in that school? And those are the real distal outcomes that are harder to measure. Although there is a really good book and I'm blanking on the title that talks about the impact of faculty development on student grades and success.

 

01;31;21;11 - 01;31;34;29

Christina Cestone

And it's not done in professional schools. And so it doesn't. I'm sure it has transferability, but those studies were not done in a professional campus. So valid. But an open area of research.

 

01;31;34;29 - 01;31;36;00

Scott Riley

Which is exciting.

 

01;31;36;00 - 01;31;36;24

Christina Cestone

Yeah.

 

01;31;36;27 - 01;31;49;14

Scott Riley

All right. Wonderful Doctor Cestone. Thank you so much for your insights into the mechanics behind the faculty center for Teaching and Learning, how all things work inside it, and the future of the faculty center for teaching, Learning.

 

01;31;49;17 - 01;31;55;05

Christina Cestone

Thank you so much, Scott. It was great to talk with you today.

 

01;31;55;08 - 01;32;08;29

Scott Riley

Thank you for joining us today on Moving the Needle. Visit us at U Maryland. Edu slash FCTL to hear additional episodes, leave us feedback or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.

 

01;00;00;03 - 01;00;18;27
Erin Hagar
Welcome to moving the needle. Casual conversations about ways big and small to impact student learning. Brought to you by the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I'm Erin Hager. Let's move the needle.

01;00;19;00 - 01;00;40;09
Erin Hagar
Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Moving the Needle. It is officially the end of the semester. so congratulations to everyone who has turned in all of their grades and has crossed off all of the to do's. Today we are having another mailbag episode, and I am here with my co-host, Doctor Scott Riley. Scott, how are you doing today?

01;00;40;11 - 01;00;41;27
Scott Riley
Good. Thanks for asking.

01;00;41;29 - 01;01;09;06
Erin Hagar
I am so glad to be with you today. And, if you remember, back in September, we asked faculty members to write in with strategies that they used to take care of themselves over the course of the busy semester, and we got some great responses. And so, Scott, I thought it would be a good idea to wrap up the end of the academic year with another mailbag episode where we're going to talk about the successes that faculty have experienced over the course of the semester.

01;01;09;12 - 01;01;30;25
Erin Hagar
And I am very excited to start with one incredible success, which is that my co-host sitting right here with me, Doctor Scott Riley, was awarded the Distinguished Educator Award for Excellence in Teaching by Leaps, which is the Leaders in Education Academy for Presidential Scholars here on campus. So well-deserved. Scott, congratulations.

01;01;30;28 - 01;01;32;01
Scott Riley
Hey, thanks so much.

01;01;32;04 - 01;01;55;08
Erin Hagar
That is really, a wonderful recognition of all of the work that you put into teaching. And I'd like to talk a little bit about some of the specifics that were mentioned in your nomination packet. So one quote is Doctor Scott Riley was chosen for his ability to embrace education with a focus on student engagement and facilitating meaningful student faculty dialog.

01;01;55;15 - 01;02;15;05
Erin Hagar
This was echoed by a quote from one of your students, and I just want to read that as well. Unlike traditional lecturers, Doctor Riley integrates discussions where students engage and inquire actively, significantly enhancing their learning experience. Right from the students mouth. What wonderful words.

01;02;15;08 - 01;02;28;21
Scott Riley
Yeah, it's always great to hear such positive feedback from the students. I really do try to put forth as much effort as I can to give them the opportunity to have significant learning experiences. And so it sounds like I hit the mark with this class.

01;02;28;23 - 01;02;43;02
Erin Hagar
That is so great. So tell me a little bit about your approach to dialog, because the specific course the student was describing was a technical writing class. So what do you do to foster engaging discussion and a course about writing?

01;02;43;05 - 01;03;07;23
Scott Riley
It's an excellent question, and it's not an easy one to answer at least. When I tried to design the course, that was the hardest question for me to answer is how do I get these students engaged in academic, technical writing at the graduate level? Because it can be a little dry. The content can be a little dry. And so I decided to treat the classroom very much like a flipped classroom.

01;03;07;26 - 01;03;29;12
Scott Riley
I assigned a book, Steven B Hurd's Scientists Guide to Writing, which is a really great light read for them. It gives them the basic approach to technical writing at the at this level without being kind of like dry, like reading geometry or something like that. And so the students would read, have some time to read chapters of the book.

01;03;29;15 - 01;03;37;26
Scott Riley
Come in. I'd give maybe a 10 minute or 15 minute lecture, which was really just a review in case they didn't read the material.

01;03;38;01 - 01;03;38;27
Erin Hagar
Cover your bases.

01;03;38;28 - 01;03;59;17
Scott Riley
Got it. Yeah. Cover bases. and then the rest of the class would either be broken up into one of two categories. It would either be complete discussion where we would review Steven's material and say, do we agree with that? Don't we agree with that? What is some evidence that they provided? What are some evidence that we have from our personal experience that would support that?

01;03;59;17 - 01;04;19;09
Scott Riley
This is how we should approach a particular aspect of writing or it would be, the second category, I should say would be an in-class exercise, or I'd say, okay, Steven says we should do X, Y, and Z. Let's read these three articles that have been published in different journals by different authors and see if those things are present.

01;04;19;11 - 01;04;39;27
Scott Riley
And if they aren't present, can we come up with a reason why or do we think that they should be present? and it was really it was tough for the first two classes. I had to throw in some levity in there when I remember one particular moment with the PhD students where I was getting crickets. So I said, hey, can anybody tell me what two plus two is?

01;04;40;00 - 01;04;59;21
Scott Riley
And they all, like, was like oh four. I was like, okay, cool. We can talk. We can answer questions, you know. and then from then on, it was a little bit easier once they realized I wasn't out to get them. And this was really an open and safe space to to make mistakes and to really think about what I was asking them to learn.

01;04;59;23 - 01;05;01;12
Scott Riley
it worked out really well.

01;05;01;15 - 01;05;09;01
Erin Hagar
Oh, that's so great. Creating that culture is so important. And I love that you mentioned that. It does take a little bit of a bit of time.

01;05;09;03 - 01;05;32;03
Scott Riley
Yeah. You can't rush it. I know that, at least from my experience and from many other professors that I've talked to, you want to get as much content in as possible, and you always feel like you're strapped for time. and so with this class especially, you really do have to take kind of a softer or a slower approach to the material with the because the end goal for this course is the same either way.

01;05;32;09 - 01;05;36;11
Scott Riley
And so the students kind of got to choose the pace at which we got to that end goal.

01;05;36;13 - 01;05;53;20
Erin Hagar
Oh that's great. Is there anything that you're taking with you into next academic year based on, the feedback that you got either from this course in particular or in the nomination packet? for the award that that you received?

01;05;53;23 - 01;06;15;27
Scott Riley
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things I like to do after the grades have been finalized is ask the students to come meet me, either in my office or to go get a coffee or something like that and have them give me direct feedback, because course evaluations sometimes are done quickly. The maybe the reflection isn't as deep as I would like.

01;06;16;04 - 01;06;37;01
Scott Riley
And so a couple of students took me up on that offer this semester. And, you know, without any bias or fear of retaliation, they were able to tell me what they really thought about the course. And for the most part, it was positive. But there were some key things that they asked me to change. And one example of that is the review process.

01;06;37;03 - 01;07;00;18
Scott Riley
this is something I should have thought of while designing the course, but the goal of this course was to get students to write a mock journal article, and depending on where they were in their academic career, they had a lot of choices. They could write a review article. They could write a research article about their work. They could write a perspective article, white paper, whatever they had the material to use.

01;07;00;21 - 01;07;32;19
Scott Riley
but then when it came time to review these papers, I realized I had 52 minimum ten page papers to review. and so one of the big pieces of feedback that I got was it would be nice to have checkpoints throughout the semester to see if I'm on the right track. And in hindsight, that would have been much easier for me as well, because by the time I got to the final review of the papers, if I had already kind of checked in with them maybe once or twice, I would have had a lot less work to do at the very end of the semester.

01;07;32;22 - 01;07;56;10
Scott Riley
I thought I had solved that issue by having them pair up and do weekly reviews of each other's work, and they would actually turn in an assignment to demonstrate that they had reviewed the other's work. but there was a bit of, I'll call it, trepidation on the student side about not having the confidence to say, I can review this at the same quality as Doctor Riley.

01;07;56;11 - 01;08;11;21
Scott Riley
And I was like, that's that's something we need to practice, right? but that's definitely something that I'm taking from this semester, is this was a good course. The students liked it, but there's a major improvement that I can make that will save a lot of work on everybody's hand.

01;08;11;24 - 01;08;18;16
Erin Hagar
Yeah. I love how you take that course evaluation process and extend it one step further with a personal meeting.

01;08;18;18 - 01;08;45;09
Scott Riley
Yeah, I've found great success in that throughout my tenure as a professor, not only here at UNB but in other teaching positions, that if you treat feedback as an iterative process rather than just happening at the end of a course, it really allows students the opportunity to think about what they want to say, come back and you continue to say things until they feel like they've said everything they can say.

01;08;45;11 - 01;08;47;14
Scott Riley
And it really it helps me a lot.

01;08;47;16 - 01;09;12;17
Erin Hagar
Yeah. And it brings them into the process. That's so great. Well, congratulations on your award. Congratulations on what sounds like an excellent semester. I thought it might be a good time. If it's okay with you to read some of the success stories that people wrote in, and we can talk about, what stands out to us, as strategies other people might consider based on these successes?

01;09;12;17 - 01;09;13;16
Erin Hagar
How does that sound?

01;09;13;19 - 01;09;15;28
Scott Riley
Absolutely. I'm really excited for this part.

01;09;16;01 - 01;09;37;22
Erin Hagar
Okay, awesome. I'll go first. So our first entry is from Iyabo Obasanjo in the graduate school. And she says, I teach online and it's hard to make personal connections with students. One student wrote me an angry email about the low grades she got on an assessment and I responded, explaining why, and then she sent back a relatively rude email.

01;09;37;24 - 01;09;57;04
Erin Hagar
I was annoyed, but I also knew she must be under some pressure to have responded like that. We made an appointment for a virtual discussion on whatever course materials she wanted to go over. She chose the next assignment and we went through it together and I really enjoyed interacting with her. I could tell exactly what she was struggling with and why, and we were able to resolve it.

01;09;57;06 - 01;10;14;24
Erin Hagar
I believe she also enjoyed the interaction and went on to get very good grades in all her assessments and her final reflection, she discussed everything she liked about the course and how she started out not liking it, and now she was loving it and she will use the knowledge in the future. So thank you Iyabo for sharing that.

01;10;14;25 - 01;10;17;25
Erin Hagar
Scott, what what strikes you about that story?

01;10;17;27 - 01;10;39;25
Scott Riley
I feel very attached or very connected to this story. I teach an online data analytics course, and I just I can commiserate so much with this idea of students struggling with the lack of contact with the professor, and I love that the student started not liking the course and then by the end of it, really enjoyed the course.

01;10;39;25 - 01;10;42;13
Scott Riley
That's as an educator. That's a great feeling.

01;10;42;15 - 01;11;16;09
Erin Hagar
Absolutely, absolutely. I really appreciate your vulnerability here because, you know, that feeling of getting, you know, responding in that emotional way to email when students are upset and then it kind of escalates. But for her to have the presence to say, you know what? Something else is going on here. Let me try another communication mechanism and to have it pay off such dividends, I think is just a tribute to that, that commitment that we have when we're trying to teach, especially when we're teaching online and we don't have that eyeball to eyeball contact.

01;11;16;11 - 01;11;17;29
Scott Riley
Agreed. 100%.

01;11;18;01 - 01;11;20;14
Erin Hagar
Awesome. Thank you for sending that in.

01;11;20;17 - 01;11;43;28
Scott Riley
the next success story is from Karen Gorgeous from the graduate school. I made a conscious effort for my teaching practice to reflect the principles of trauma informed pedagogy. This spring. One way that I did that was to infuse self-care thoughts, resources. Each week as a part of my course announcements for each of my asynchronous online courses in HP, RMS, and PhD programs.

01;11;44;00 - 01;12;14;13
Scott Riley
I wanted to set a tone that self-care is important critical to students well-being and personal professional growth. Each of the specific weekly selected self-care resources were chosen to correlate with the ebbs and flows of the intensity of the various weeks of the course. I used images, affirmations, videos, web links all focused on self-care, wellness, and building resiliency. I was fortunate enough to have this effort acknowledged in a course evaluation.

01;12;14;15 - 01;12;30;18
Scott Riley
One student commented, I also really appreciated the weekly pieces of wellness advice. I've started to make space for exercise in my schedule, even when I feel like I don't have the time. Based on her Wellness Weekly thoughts. So Aaron, what does that evoke for you?

01;12;30;21 - 01;13;02;13
Erin Hagar
I love this success story. I have been thinking a lot, as you know, Scott, because we've been talking about this outside of the podcast. I've been thinking a lot about this idea, and I call it I've made up this term, so I don't this isn't the official term, but I've made up this term called parallel skill. And my idea behind that is there are things that faculty members want to instill, want to share, want to ensure their students walk away with that may not be inter gently connected in the curriculum of the course.

01;13;02;13 - 01;13;24;24
Erin Hagar
It may not be the topic of this course. So in Karen's case, her her course is not about self-care strategies for health professions educators write her. She teaches research courses, she teaches methodology courses, that kind of thing. But she has seen and she's identified that self-care and stress reduction is something that is important for future professionals in this field.

01;13;24;24 - 01;13;46;26
Erin Hagar
And she's made the intention to weave that in, in this kind of parallel way. So they're not getting tested necessarily on their self-care routines. They're not getting evaluated on it. But she is saying, I think this is important, and I'm going to spend time every week in my announcements to share some tips with you. And you can see the impact that it had with when students starting to bring back exercise into their routine.

01;13;46;28 - 01;14;14;26
Scott Riley
Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly. And going back to something that we talked about before, I think another major thing to appreciate here from, Doctor Curtis is we just talked about how professors always wonder if they have enough time to teach what's expected in the course, and sort of take a chunk of that out for a parallel skill. And just the wellness of their students shows a real commitment to the student success on multiple levels, not just the academic level.

01;14;14;28 - 01;14;42;25
Erin Hagar
Absolutely. It's recognizing the student as a whole person. And I think that if there are things of faculty who are listening, there are things that you've noticed that maybe you're you're concerned about or you wish students, you know, had had more skills in or, more facility with, you know, etc. you may not you may be able to weave that in to a course that you're teaching, and it may not come at the cost of removing existing content.

01;14;43;01 - 01;15;05;20
Erin Hagar
Right. You may be able to find a low stakes way to integrate that as a consistent theme throughout the course, but without sacrificing all of the other things that that you need to cover. And, you know, if anyone wants to bounce ideas off about that, brainstorm about that. I know Scott and I would be happy to talk with you about that, because I think it's so empowering for a faculty member to say, I noticed that this is an issue.

01;15;05;21 - 01;15;25;29
Erin Hagar
You know, you hear it all the time critical thinking, evaluation of resources, self-care, stress, study skills, those kinds of things. It's not that it's your responsibility to teach those from the ground up, but but to maybe weave in at an appropriate level given the context of your course, it can be empowering to say, I've noticed this is a challenge and I want to do something about it.

01;15;26;01 - 01;15;57;08
Erin Hagar
All right. So we hear from Leah Sara in the School of Pharmacy. All right. Let's do it in our M.S. in Medical Cannabis Science and Therapeutics program. We continue trailblazing with our elective course, Medical Psychedelic Science and Therapeutics. This course was developed by an interprofessional team of clinicians and scientists from both School of Pharmacy departments. This course successfully blended the teaching styles of several different faculty members, and has been extremely well-received by students in the program.

01;15;57;15 - 01;16;06;22
Erin Hagar
All right, Hunter, to you, Leah, Sara, and the Mass and Medical Cannabis Science and Therapeutics program. Scott, what jumps out at you from this story?

01;16;06;25 - 01;16;27;11
Scott Riley
I feel like this is, a trailer. It's given me all the cool stuff, but I want to know more. You know, I always appreciate when programs innovate and trailblazer. And I know for a fact that, M.S. in cannabis has really been trying to break the mold with a lot of the the stuff, the content that they teach and how they teach it.

01;16;27;12 - 01;16;31;21
Scott Riley
Yeah. and so for me, this is just a really nice success story.

01;16;31;22 - 01;16;38;27
Erin Hagar
Yeah. Yeah. Me too. And one thing that jumps out at me with this story and I'm curious, have you ever been taught a course?

01;16;39;00 - 01;16;47;20
Scott Riley
Yes. I have once, and so I, I'm going to take a leap of faith and say that the blending of teaching styles is what jumps out at you, right?

01;16;47;22 - 01;16;48;19
Erin Hagar
Yes.

01;16;48;22 - 01;17;12;18
Scott Riley
Yeah. And so I found that that was one of the most interesting aspects of co-teaching a course. It's one thing when you're like a course manager and you have 14 faculty doing 2 or 3 lectures a semester, or you're a solo professor teaching the entire course. But when you were co responsible for a course with someone who has a different perspective, different experiences and things like that.

01;17;12;20 - 01;17;36;11
Scott Riley
that last line is, is easier said than done to blend the teaching styles of several different faculty, because your students are going to expect some consistency with grading and teaching approaches and assignments. And you may have two very different faculty, or at least in my experience, we had two very different approaches to teaching. And so blending them together, took a little bit of elbow grease.

01;17;36;13 - 01;17;59;14
Erin Hagar
I bet it did. I wonder if that wouldn't make for a good episode next year, because I bet there's so many interesting approaches to to think about when you're co-teaching. You know, like you said, which is a it could be a blending of teaching styles where each instructor, you know, kind of has a as an equal but different role in the course as opposed to managing the course with multiple lecturers.

01;17;59;17 - 01;18;02;19
Erin Hagar
They just seem like very different skill sets needed there.

01;18;02;21 - 01;18;10;17
Scott Riley
Yeah, and I agree, I think that does sound like a great episode. So, Leah, thank you so much for providing an episode idea for moving the needle.

01;18;10;19 - 01;18;13;02
Erin Hagar
Awesome. Okay. Who's next?

01;18;13;04 - 01;18;37;29
Scott Riley
All right, so next is Audra Cohn from the School of Pharmacy. Audra writes this fall semester and required Pharm D course. And this spring semester in a required pharmaceutical sciences master's and PhD course. I used 5 to 7 minute podcast assignments to replace some writing assignments. One podcast type was informational on a relevant topic, and another type included an interview with an expert.

01;18;38;01 - 01;19;02;27
Scott Riley
Students worked in groups of 2 to 4 and really ended up delving deep into cutting edge drug delivery and pharmacokinetic topics. Many students commented that they enjoyed it and even went all out with graphics, music, smooth scripts with good transitions and even humor. Podcasts were created easily in zoom and turned into blackboard via links, so nobody had to learn new technology.

01;19;02;29 - 01;19;22;04
Scott Riley
Students found experts to interview in pharmacies, pharmaceutical industries, postdocs and fellows. Creating the podcast was much more enjoyable and efficient than creating written assignments. I will do this again next year, and so this hits a lot of boxes for me. But Erin, I'm curious, what do you think about this?

01;19;22;07 - 01;19;49;18
Erin Hagar
well, I love this. I think this is so exciting. One of the reasons that, that I really appreciate this success story is a the creativity of thinking outside of the box. I feel that there are so many other ways to demonstrate understanding and application of a concept or a topic other than writing, and I think so often the the default to writing.

01;19;49;20 - 01;20;24;15
Erin Hagar
obviously we want our students to be good writers. It's an essential life. Skill matters and all the professions. And a lot of these students are going to be writing as part of their career. So I'm not underestimating that. But there are other ways to demonstrate what we know and can do with information. And I think giving students a breather on the writing and giving them a chance to demonstrate that knowledge in another way, really shows a commitment to recognizing the strengths and talents of all different kinds of of learning and demonstrating that learning.

01;20;24;18 - 01;20;45;28
Scott Riley
And on top of that, I really like that the professor did what they could to ensure that the students could focus mostly on completing the assignment and not having to learn new technology and things like, it's very like you mentioned, it's good for students to learn new skills and things like that. And so learning new technologies is an important thing they'll have to do for their whole career.

01;20;46;04 - 01;21;04;20
Scott Riley
But the professor intentionally created the assignment with certain resources to ensure that the students could focus on learning what was expected, and not adding a bunch of extra work on top of it. And it it came out really well in the fact that the students were so engaged in the assignment that they treated it like a real podcast.

01;21;04;21 - 01;21;08;14
Erin Hagar
I know we'll have to find out who these students are. Maybe some of them can help us with ours.

01;21;08;17 - 01;21;10;07
Scott Riley
Yeah, I like that.

01;21;10;09 - 01;21;32;14
Erin Hagar
That's great. Well, well done, doctor Cisco. Okay. Up next, we have, a success story from James Polley in the School of Pharmacy. He writes a nice moment this year was the PhD defense of one of my students. I suppose I took in a little more joy in the moment than in past situations where we all celebrate. But then quickly think about the next thing.

01;21;32;16 - 01;21;53;09
Erin Hagar
I have known this student for nine years, as she previously earned a Pharm.d degree here. So I have observed her long road. Like other students, she did a great job and she starting a research position with a very good pharmaceutical company. and she says, relatively speaking, we have quite a few PharmD PhD students with about one every 2 to 3 years.

01;21;53;11 - 01;22;03;18
Erin Hagar
And this is my third student. And it was so nice to take in the joy of that day. That was nine years in the making. What a great success story. What comes up for you, Scott, when you hear this?

01;22;03;21 - 01;22;31;19
Scott Riley
This just tugs at my heartstrings because whenever I think about you know, the impact we have on students, it's sometimes a good thing to remember that they have a big impact on us. And the fact that this professor knew the student for nine years was almost a decade. That's a non-trivial amount of time in anyone's life. And so the lessons that they both learned in this mutually beneficial teaching experience are going to go with them for the rest of their lives.

01;22;31;19 - 01;22;33;10
Scott Riley
And that's that's powerful.

01;22;33;12 - 01;22;56;22
Erin Hagar
Yes. And something else that I noticed about this too, is that Doctor Polly took a moment to resist the temptation to just smile, applaud, say congratulations, and then move on to the next cohort of students. Move on to the next thing. I really appreciate appreciated the way in this entry you can hear him recognizing the significance of the moment.

01;22;56;25 - 01;23;22;07
Erin Hagar
with this particular student and recognizing, like you said, the impact that we have in the impact that they have on us and not not just rushing to the next, I think it's so important. And I think this actually came up in the self-care strategies that folks wrote in about in September to really be mindful of these moments of the, the, the successes that we have, the celebrations, the impacts, and not just let them slip through as we race to the next thing.

01;23;22;09 - 01;23;27;23
Scott Riley
Agreed. We we do need to celebrate more. I won't argue with that at all.

01;23;27;25 - 01;23;30;09
Erin Hagar
All right. And we've got one more, I think. Yep.

01;23;30;11 - 01;23;46;06
Scott Riley
Doctor Andy Koop from the School of Pharmacy writes, students are our future peers, interacting with graduates of various programs at conferences makes it clear the impact we have on their lives and how thankful they are for the education received at UNB. Erin, what do you think?

01;23;46;12 - 01;24;07;05
Erin Hagar
Yeah, I think this is a perfect follow up to the the entry from Doctor Polly because it it invites us to zoom out and look with a wide lens. So not just the impact that we have on a particular student, but really the impact that we can have on this field by the effort that we're making, preparing students to enter and contribute into that field.

01;24;07;07 - 01;24;08;07
Erin Hagar
How about you?

01;24;08;09 - 01;24;30;11
Scott Riley
Well, so for me, it it very much lends to the idea of the network. We continuously tell our students that you need to network and go out and talk to people. And this is a great example of networks growing and lasting beyond just the education that they receive at UNB. Doctor coop goes out to these conferences and gets to speak with students who've had positive experiences.

01;24;30;13 - 01;24;49;12
Scott Riley
You know, a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago, however long it goes. and so for me, this this really frames the idea or manifests the idea of networking and what a network really is. At the end of the day, it's other people who have gone through the same things as you and want to work towards a future together.

01;24;49;15 - 01;24;52;12
Erin Hagar
That's so great, Scott. I'm so glad you're in my network.

01;24;52;16 - 01;24;54;26
Scott Riley
Same. And I'm glad you're in my network.

01;24;54;28 - 01;25;16;02
Erin Hagar
And for everyone listening, I do hope that you have the opportunity this summer to just pause, reset, reflect, think about the impact that you're having every day, all of the effort that you put into your teaching this semester, how worth it it is. and that you can recharge and get ready for a fall semester, to, to do that even more.

01;25;16;07 - 01;25;19;29
Erin Hagar
So thanks for listening.

01;25;20;01 - 01;25;34;16
Erin Hagar
Thank you for joining us today on Moving the Needle. Visit us at you Maryland. That edu MF ctl. To hear additional episodes leave us feedback or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from.