Intentional Teaching

Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.Traditionally, college students who don’t have ACT or math placement exam scores high enough to place into college algebra are placed into intermediate algebra, a developmental math course that serves as a perquisite to college algebra for those students. However, this prerequisite approach has chronically low student success rates at many institutions.Enter the corequisite approach, in which these students take college algebra along with a second, support course concurrently. The idea is that students who aren’t quite ready for college algebra will get the just-in-time support they need in their support course. The coreq approach is so successful that an increasing number of states are mandating that colleges and university at least offer the option and in some cases, do away with the prereq approach altogether.What does it take to make a successful corequisite college algebra course? I wanted to find out, so I reached out to a few colleagues who have been doing this for a while. On this episode, you’ll hear from Tina Ragsdale, teaching enhancement coordinator at West Kentucky Community and Technical College; James Kimball, master instructor and assistant department head in mathematics at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette; and Kathy Almy, longtime math educator and currently CEO of Almy Education. We have a fantastic conversation about the coreq approach to college algebra, and I think that anyone with an interest in college students success will find it enlightening.Episode Resources:·       “Co-requisite Redesign Leads to Increased College Algebra Success and College Completion,” Tina Ragsdale, Renea Akin, and Geelyn Warren, https://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/jarihe/vol4/iss1/5/ ·       Almy Education, https://www.almyeducation.com/ ·       James Kimball’s faculty website, https://math.louisiana.edu/node/122 ·       College Algebra with Corequisite Support, an OpenStax textbook by Jay Abramson and Sharon North, https://openstax.org/details/books/college-algebra-corequisite-support-2e?Book%20details Support the showPodcast Links: Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe Subscribe to Intentional Teaching bonus episodes:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2069949/supporters/new Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteachingFind me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.

Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.I recently saw that Brielle Harbin received the 2023 Distinguished Teaching Award from the American Political Science Association. Brielle was a graduate teaching fellow at the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching from 2014 to 2016, which is how I know her. She was actively involved in our learning communities on the theme of teaching, difference, and power, work which resulted in two co-authored publications, including the award-winning article “Teaching Race and Racial Justice: Developing Students’ Cognitive and Affective Understanding of Race” in the journal Teaching & Learning Inquiry.Brielle is now an assistant professor of political science at the United States Naval Academy, where she has taught courses on politics, race, and media, and has led workshops for her peers on inclusive and anti-racist teaching. Thanks to this and other work, Brielle is now the first pre-tenure faculty member to win the Distinguished Teaching Award from the APSA! I reached out to Brielle to invite her on the podcast, and we had a wonderful conversation about her teaching philosophy and practices and how she continues to develop herself as a teacher over time. Episode ResourcesBrielle Harbin’s website, https://www.mbharbin.com/APSA Distinguish Teaching Award announcement, https://politicalsciencenow.com/brielle-harbin-receives-the-2023-apsa-distinguished-teaching-award/ Brielle's teaching publications, https://www.mbharbin.com/teaching.html State of Nature game, https://sites.google.com/site/howtodosimulationgames/examples-of-simulations/political-studies/state-of-nature Please note that in this interview, Brielle Harbin speaks as an individual and not on behalf of her organization.Support the showPodcast Links: Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe Subscribe to Intentional Teaching bonus episodes:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2069949/supporters/new Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteachingFind me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.

Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about “assignment makeovers” in this new age of AI, and a key part of rethinking assignments is exploring what we and our students can do with AI technologies in our fields.To help in those explorations, I reached out to Garret Westlake. He is the associate vice provost for innovation and executive director of the da Vinci Center for Innovation at Virginia Commonwealth University. I know Garret because I helped the da Vinci Center build and launch an online short course on design thinking and human-centered design. I learned that Garret has been actively exploring the use of AI technologies in design thinking, and I was really interested in hearing from Garret how AI might serve as a catalyst for creative thinking and a supportive tool for entrepreneurship.If you’re interested in teaching creativity or critical thinking or having students tackle open-ended problems, I think you’ll get some great ideas for integrating AI into your courses from my conversation with Garret. Episode Resources:·       Garret Westlake on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/garretwestlake/ ·       Garret’s TEDx talk, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxXuhHB093I ·       da Vinci Center for Innovation at VCU, https://davincicenter.vcu.edu/ ·       Introduction to Design Thinking, a free short course from the VCU da Vinci Center, https://davincicenter.catalog.vcu.edu/courses/introduction-to-design-thinking  ·       Assignment Makeovers in the AI Age: Essay Edition, https://derekbruff.org/?p=4105 Support the showPodcast Links: Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe Subscribe to Intentional Teaching bonus episodes:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2069949/supporters/new Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteachingFind me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.

Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.On today’s episode, I talk with Eden Tanner about her experiment with mastery assessment. Eden is an assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Mississippi. Eden had been changing up her grading practices for a few semesters, and this spring she leaned into mastery assessment. The students in her 170-seat general chemistry course could retake a new version of each of the four exams in her course basically as many times as they wanted. In the interview, Eden shares her motivations for moving away from traditional grading practices, as well as lots of nuts and bolts about her mastery assessment practices this spring. Episode Resources:·       Eden Tanner’s faculty page, https://chemistry.olemiss.edu/eden-tanner/ ·       Episode 19: Talking about Inclusive Teaching with Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan, https://intentionalteaching.buzzsprout.com/2069949/13445883 ·       Episode 15: Grading for Growth with Robert Talbert and David Clark, https://intentionalteaching.buzzsprout.com/2069949/13041036 Support the showPodcast Links: Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe Subscribe to Intentional Teaching bonus episodes:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2069949/supporters/new Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteachingFind me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.

Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.In March 2023, educators Kelly A. Hogan and Viji Sathy wrote a piece for the Chronicle titled “How Can ‘Inclusion’ Be a Bad Word?” At the time, they both worked at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and they had been asked by North Carolina state lawmakers to provide data about DEI programming at their institution. In their op-ed, they wrote:“How does it feel to have your work in this kind of political spotlight? Frustrating. In large part because of the disconnect between how these topics are discussed on social media and on the news versus what we know to be true about them based on evidence, research, and practice.”I reached out to Viji and Kelly to ask them about that disconnect and about how they communicate with a variety of audiences, including with their own students and with faculty colleagues, about inclusive teaching. Kelly Hogan is a professor of the practice of biology at Duke University, having recently moved there from UNC-Chapel Hill, and Viji Sathy is the associate dean for evaluation and assessment at the Office of Undergraduate Education at UNC-Chapel Hill as well as professor of psychology and neuroscience. The two are authors of the 2022 book Inclusive Teaching: Strategies for Promoting Equity in the College Classroom and speak frequently at colleges and universities about inclusive teaching and student success. The three of us had a wide-ranging conversation about inclusive teaching and what it looks like in practice in higher education. I hope you’ll listen to it and share it with friends and colleagues who are interested in a practical understanding of this work.Episode Resources“How Can ‘Inclusion’ Be a Bad Word?” by Kelly Hogan and Viji Sathy, https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-can-inclusion-be-a-bad-word Inclusive Teaching: Strategies for Promoting Equity in the College Classroom by Kelly Hogan and Viji Sathy, West Virginia University Press, https://wvupressonline.com/inclusive-teaching Viji Sathy’s website, https://sites.google.com/view/vijisathy Kelly Hogan’s faculty page, https://scholars.duke.edu/person/kelly.hogan inclusifiED, Kelly and Viji’s joint website, https://sites.google.com/view/inclusified DEI Legislation Tracker, Chronicle of Higher Education, Support the showPodcast Links: Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe Subscribe to Intentional Teaching bonus episodes:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2069949/supporters/new Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteachingFind me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.

Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.Earlier this year, I had the good fortune to speak at a teaching conference hosted by Hofstra University in Long Island, New York. My favorite presenter at that conference was a sociology professor named Rosemary McGunnigle-Gonzales. Not only did she go on a beautiful rant about the deficiencies of our traditional classroom spaces, she also shared a fantastic story about taking her students outside to draw chalk timelines on the sidewalks around her classroom building. Rosemary is an adjunct assistant professor in sociology at both Hofstra University and Columbia University, and I am very excited to have her on the podcast today.We talk about embodied learning, classroom design, teaching hard topics like human rights, getting students to do the reading, and, yes, sidewalk chalk as an educational technology.Episode Resources:·       “Getting students to do the reading.. and to talk about it!” Derek Bruff, November 2022, https://derekbruff.org/?p=3934. ·       “Transparent Teaching with Mary-Ann Winkelmes,” Intentional Teaching podcast, https://intentionalteaching.buzzsprout.com/2069949/11997464-transparent-teaching-with-mary-ann-winkelmes. ·       “Embodied Learning with Susan Hrach,” Intentional Teaching podcast, https://intentionalteaching.buzzsprout.com/2069949/11558821-embodied-learning-with-susan-hrach. ·       “Episode 96: Jenae Cohn,” Leading Lines podcast, https://leadinglinespod.com/uncategorized/episode-96jenae-cohn/.  Support the showPodcast Links: Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe Subscribe to Intentional Teaching bonus episodes:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2069949/supporters/new Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteachingFind me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.

Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.In the summer of 2020, the Oregon State University Ecampus launched a research seminar that gathered educational researchers from around the world who were curious about the role of synchronous instructor presence in online courses. After all, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, most online education was asynchronous. How important were all those Zoom meetings for student learning, really?  Today on the podcast, I welcome three members of that research group who are presenting their findings at the Distance Teaching & Learning Conference hosted by UPCEA, the University Professional and Continuing Education Association, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My guests are Mary Ellen Dello Stritto, director of the Ecampus research unit at Oregon State; Enoch Park, senior instructional designer and online learning specialist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte; and Lidija Krebs-Lazendic, lecturer in psychology at the University of New South Wales in Australia.These three represent a group that conducted an extensive meta-analysis of the existing literature about online learning, looking for studies that examined the role of synchronous instructor presence in online courses. Spoiler alert: They didn’t find much! So if you’re looking for an answer to this big question about synchronous instructor presence, you won’t hear it. But we do have a great conversation about the question itself, their research methods, and what advice they have for others engaged in educational research. Episode Resources:Mary Ellen Dello Stritto, https://ecampus.oregonstate.edu/staff/bio/dellostm.htmEnoch Park, https://professional.charlotte.edu/directory/enoch-parkLidija Krebs-Lazendic, https://www.linkedin.com/in/lidija-krebs-lazendic-3a4a8323/?originalSubdomain=au Distance Teaching & Learning (DT&L) and Summit for Online Leadership and Administration + Roundtable (SOLA+R), https://conferences.upcea.edu/DTL-SOLAR2023/ Support the showPodcast Links: Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe Subscribe to Intentional Teaching bonus episodes:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2069949/supporters/new Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteachingFind me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.

Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.If you’ve taught in higher education for any length of time, you’ve probably had one or more students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, better known as ADHD, in your courses. You might not have known it, however, since some students with ADHD haven’t been diagnosed yet and some choose not to disclose it to their instructors. This type of neurodivergence can be a little invisible to instructors, which is why it’s important we learn more about it and how we can design and teach courses that support these students.Cathryn Friel knows a lot about teaching students with ADHD. Catt is a senior instructional designer at Missouri Online, and she completed her PhD last year with a qualitative study examining the experiences of students with ADHD in online courses. I reached out to Catt to learn more about her study and her own experiences as a student with ADHD. I learned a lot from our conversation about how students with ADHD experience and cope with college courses and about how instructors can make their courses, especially their online courses, more welcoming to neurodiverse students.Episode Resources:·       “Experiences of students with ADHD in online learning environments: A multi-case study,” Cathryn Friel, https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/91567 ·       “What I wish my instructor knew: How active learning influences the classroom experiences and self-advocacy of STEM majors with ADHD and specific learning disabilities,” Mariel Pfeifer, Julio Cordero, and Julie Dangremond Stanton, https://www.lifescied.org/doi/full/10.1187/cbe.21-12-0329 ·       “Supporting ADHD Learners with Karen Costa,” Teaching in Higher Ed podcast ep. 384, https://teachinginhighered.com/podcast/supporting-adhd-learners/ ·       Distance Teaching & Learning (DT&L) and Summit for Online Leadership and Administration + Roundtable (SOLA+R), https://conferences.upcea.edu/DTL-SOLAR2023/  Support the showPodcast Links: Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe Subscribe to Intentional Teaching bonus episodes:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2069949/supporters/new Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteachingFind me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.

Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.Robert Talbert and David Clark are both mathematics faculty members at Grand Valley State University and authors of the forthcoming book Grading for Growth. They are both incredibly thoughtful and effective teachers who share their experiences, insights, and advice widely. Their new book based on dozens of case studies from instructors across the disciplines who are questioning some of the assumptions baked into higher education and finding better ways to assess students—and to help them grow.In our conversation, we discuss some of the problems with traditional grading systems, the ways that teaching college students is not like competitive gymnastics, the four pillars of alternative grading that Robert and David inferred from their case studies, and strategies for putting those pillars into practice. I also ask them if maybe it’s possible to not hate grading so much? Episode ResourcesGrading for Growth (Routledge, 2023), https://www.routledge.com/Grading-for-Growth-A-Guide-to-Alternative-Grading-Practices-that-Promote/Clark-Talbert/p/book/9781642673814Grading for Growth blog, https://gradingforgrowth.com/Robert Talbert's website, https://rtalbert.org/David Clark's website, https://sites.google.com/mail.gvsu.edu/clarkdav/ Support the showPodcast Links: Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe Subscribe to Intentional Teaching bonus episodes:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2069949/supporters/new Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteachingFind me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.

Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.Correspondence courses. Night classes. Extension schools. Distance education. Continuing education. Professional education. There’s always been a lot happening in higher education for working adults outside the traditional residential undergraduate experience. And for the last couple of decades, those areas of higher education have increasingly moved online. Three years ago, the COVID-19 pandemic greatly accelerated the growth of online education, both for working adults and for traditionally aged college students.To get a better handle on the changes in online education caused by the pandemic, I reached out to a couple folks who know online education well. Robert Hansen is the chief executive officer of the University Professional and Continuing Education Association, better known as UPCEA, and Julie Uranis is the senior vice president for online and strategic initiatives at UPCEA. UPCEA is a professional association for higher education faculty and staff who are involved in professional, continuing, and online education, and Bob and Julie been busy the last few years helping their members adapt to higher education’s new landscape.During our conversation, we talk about UPCEA's mission and how its work has changed over time, the state of online education as we leave the COVID-19 pandemic, the changing role of online program managers (OPMs) in higher ed, and UPCEA's summer conference, which is actually two conferences combined.Episode Resources:·       UPCEA, https://upcea.edu/ ·       Distance Teaching & Learning (DT&L) and Summit for Online Leadership and Administration + Roundtable (SOLA+R), https://conferences.upcea.edu/DTL-SOLAR2023/ ·       “Guidance on outsourcing spurs anxiety about ‘collateral damage,’” in which Inside Higher Ed covers the Dear Colleague Letter about online program managers (OPMs), https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2023/02/28/amid-pushback-us-delays-guidance-outsourcing Support the showPodcast Links: Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe Subscribe to Intentional Teaching bonus episodes:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2069949/supporters/new Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteachingFind me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.