It is easy to want to cover up in some way as professors…

In today’s episode, President Jose Antonio Bowen encourages us to become good at “Teaching Naked.”

Podcast notes

Guest: Dr. Jose Antonio Bowen, President, Goucher College

Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning

Recommendations (part 1)

This episode, we start with Bonni’s recommendation and ask Dr. Bowen questions from Storycorps.

• Storycorps
• About Storycorps
• Storycorps’s Great questions
• Danny and Annie’s animated story
• Ask your colleagues the questions related to working from Storycorps

Teaching Naked

The thing that teachers do best in the classroom is to be human beings, and to get to know their students as human beings, and to make that connection between what matters to their students and what matters to them. (Jose Bowen)

• Start with what matters to your students
• Used to have the advantage, based on knowledge
• Use class time to make genuine connections and not simply for providing information
• Technology works great outside the classroom for quizzing, communication, etc.
• We know more about teaching than we did when we were in school
• Pedagogy needs to be our central focus, and most of us weren’t trained in it

A teaching failure

Bonni admits to one of her bigger failures in teaching in the past few years

Driving the stick shift car and not always having it turn out the way we want it to

Overcoming the failures – Jose gives advice

We are opaque as to our own intellectual accent. Everybody has an accent in the way they speak, but they also have an accent in the way they think.

Academics, in particular, are bad examples of learning, because we learned in spite of the system. We’re the odd balls. We’re the weirdos. We’re the people who liked school so much that we’re still here.

Most students don’t learn that way.

Failure is simply part of the game. Disconnect is just part of what happens. (Dr. Jose Bowen)

• Embrace mistakes
• Admit when things go wrong
• Describe why you tried what you did
• Model change (“I changed my mind.”)

The end of the story

The Naked Classroom

• Furniture moves around; no rows
• No technology / screen
• Index cards
• Noisy
• Laptops aren’t typically necessary

Nobody uses a laptop while doing yoga or playing tennis (Jose Bowen)

I believe in noisy and messy classrooms. Complexity. Lots of failures. People having to confront real problems. Confront each other. Confront me… (Jose Bowen)

For beginners… need to set the stage and expectations… after that, they know how the game works.

Twitter

• Jose on Twitter
• Bonni on Twitter 
• Michael Hyatt’s beginners’ guide to Twitter
• Bonni’s resources to help you learn Twitter

Recommendations (part 2)

Jose closes the podcast episode with his recommendations.

• Merlot II: Multimedia educational resource for learning and online teaching
• SmashFact: Create custom study apps for your students’ devices

Change is hard. It’s hard for you and it’s hard for your students… Keep asking your students what’s working. Expect some failure. It’s not a linear process.

That’s the process of learning and we’re all learning how to do something new: And that’s how to be better, more engaged teachers.  (Jose Bowen)

Closing credits

• Subscribe to the weekly update and receive the Educational Technology Essentials Guide
• Give feedback on the podcast or ideas for future topics/guests