Faculty are central to implementing ELOs, HIPs, and VALUE rubrics. What roles, supports, incentives, and change processes are necessary to ensure that faculty can create the learning conditions, with fidelity and at scale, for all of our students to succeed?

At AAC&U’s Annual Meeting last week, Natasha Jankowski, director of the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA), Rebecca Karoff, associate vice chancellor for academic affairs of The University of Texas System, and Penny MacCormack, chief academic officer of the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE), explored this question.

In case you were unable to attend the session or want to revisit some of the key points, excerpts are shared below.

Rebecca Karoff: Knowing Who Our Students Are

One of the things we’ve been working hard to do is knowing who our students are, on our campuses and in our classrooms. I want to just think about The University of Texas System as an example. Of course, it’s both typical and exceptional in different ways, but we’re working really hard to shift some of our thinking around, who our students are, what our approaches to student learning are, our organizational structures and the teams, the barriers we may unintentionally put in front of students. And that we really want to make sure we all recognize who we’re teaching so that we teach and serve the students we have now in our classrooms—not the ones we had 10 or 20 years ago, and not the ones we wish we had. We have a very diverse group of students in the UT system.

Many of our students, because they come from low-income and first-generation backgrounds, are going to have some particular challenges that we need to be really cognizant of as we structure and prepare and support our educational environments, and our faculty teaching. For Texas, and I think this is probably true for many of you, the nontraditional student is the new traditional student. There’s no such thing anymore as nontraditional in Texas. Everyone, essentially, is nontraditional. As I said, I think this will be a reality for many across the country if you’re not there already, where you’re just educating some more diverse students and that brings with it a tremendous responsibility and also privilege, to get some things really right for our students. 

We’re really trying to focus on finances, advising, and belonging—making sure our students have financial well-being, making sure that they’re getting effective advising, and making sure that they have that sense of belonging, academic and social. We also are trying to support faculty in taking responsibility for student success in key ways at this point: through professional development and through timely and actionable data. Some of the data I just shared are a kind of broad overview of the Texas system. We’re trying to get data in the hands of faculty that they can use and make actionable. We’re also doing a wonderful pilot project with ACUE that you’re going to hear a little bit more about from Penny, so that we can help faculty just feel much more comfortable with their pedagogy. We know that some faculty will come in really well trained to be teachers, but we also know some don’t get that training in graduate school. 

We also know we have a lot more to do. We have to do more to support faculty to be more equity minded and take that assets-based approach towards their students.

Penny MacCormack: Putting Faculty at the Heart of Student Success

Faculty are key. Faculty are central without any question. They are the folks who interact with the most students. Compared to anyone else on campus and online courses, faculty have the most interactions with the most students and the most time with students. On average, a student will spend 1 hour with their advisor and 200 hours with faculty in a given semester. What we’re focused on is making sure that that understanding gets operationalized—that faculty are not left out of the student success agenda. 

Most of us, not all, most of us had little or no training in teaching. Being clear about the outcomes, making sure students are connected with the instructor, motivated, experience a sense of belonging—you are not born to do those things. You can have a rough idea, but ultimately we patchwork together what we do. We get practice in a workshop, a session that we attended, and we patchwork something together. So for us, what we wanted to do was to develop courses in effective teaching practices. We wanted to make sure that when faculty took those courses, they were a comprehensive foundation of the concept knowledge that faculty need to be effective in a college classroom, and that our certificate would be meaningful. We wanted a meaningful certificate, and we wanted to make sure that all faculty would continue to be supported after they finish the course, to continue learning, continue practicing, continue thinking about instruction, because it’s not one thing and now I’m done, I’m all set.

Faculty are required to implement a new practice to complete every single one of 25 modules. That doesn’t happen at the end of the workshops. I’ve designed a lot of workshops. You hope and then pray they will do something, but you don’t know. Our faculty are required to implement and to write a reflection of that experience. I used to talk about all these things in the same excited way I am now, and people were like “That’s really lovely, but will faculty do it?”

They will. Ninety-six percent of our course-takers say the course is relevant. Eighty-seven percent would recommend it to a colleague. Ninety-four percent say it helps fine-tune and helps them get better at teaching. Okay, so they liked it. Are they doing anything? A typical faculty graduate who has the certificate has reported to us, on average, they learn 55 new practices, they learn more about 71 practices. They implement 28 practices, 28 evidence-based practices. Faculty changed what they’re doing in their classroom. They report wanting to implement 28 more, and we make sure they’ve got the course available to them so they can. Everyone likes that. But people were like, “Wait a minute. What about the students?” I’m so psyched to share that we do an efficacy study with every single partner that we partner with, and we have evidence of student impact.

To read our efficacy studies, visit https://acue.org/impact/efficacy-studies-reports/

Natasha Jankowski: Making Our Work Intentional and Transparent

It can’t be by happenstance that our students get to have these experiences. It needs to be intentional. It needs to be written large and that’s really hard. Not all institutions have an office of assessment to help or set up a future of learning to engage in these conversations, and so we really need some sort of wide, sustainable approach to get into these parts. Five takeaways for faculty align really nicely with the points Penny had up on the elements in the curriculum, and one of them is transparency. We spend so much time on intentional design, and then we tell no one, right? Or it’s in a report that’s archived somewhere [until someone asks] “Why are you asking me to take this class? What am I supposed to get out of it?” So thinking about transparency in terms of knowing why I’m asking you to do this, and where you’re going to go with this, and how it’s going to be applied—then this is a team sport, right? We’re running a marathon here or a relay, so I’m passing students to you. You’re picking them up. You need to know what I’m doing so you’re prepared for them when you’re coming in, so this is the staff developmental process. It can’t just be me on my own because I’m interested and I find it great. If we want to see that impact at scale, we have to be doing this collaboratively.

Another one is thinking about those pedagogical approaches, those evidence-based practices that we know really make a difference, and thinking about how to invite them in the spaces within. The self-regulation in alignment is another one, which is if we can’t also involve our students in this to help teach them how to learn, to think, to be able to go forward and do this. There’s a lot of times when we hear institutions or faculty within say things like, “I wish I could, but our students just can’t do that.” And I’m like, “Tell me why. Did you try?” And they just say something like, “No, I just don’t think they can.” And I say, “Well, if you don’t think they can, now that’s different, right?” Thinking about and having to apply and try things out really helps with that self-regulation piece and alignment—putting this all together so that it’s not just that one experience that was really great, but it’s a consistent amount of experiences over time.

How do we get there, to this integrated supportive space? On the one hand, we need everyone to be on board and part of this conversation. We need everyone to be enabled to help our learners. I use that in a very intentional way because we have a lot of blocks that we put up for well-intentioned folks that want to help our students and engage in that. I love this concept that Tom Angelo talks about, about learning traps. It is this idea that we created this environment and that there is no way we can get through it without running into it because it’s intentional. You cannot escape from it without having learned the things that you want. It’s not just by happenstance that you get such an engaged faculty member who’s being innovative in their practice; it’s by design that you will have these. It’s equity of learning experience. It’s not just the select few who get it; it’s for everyone who comes through our doors, which requires actions for broad-scale faculty professional development ideally driven by evidence-based practice.

How is your institution working to involve faculty in creating the learning conditions, with fidelity and at scale, for all students to succeed? Leave a comment below.

As you may have seen in Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, we recently launched a major collaboration with The Career Leadership Collective to further advance high-quality instruction and career preparation at colleges and universities nationwide.

“The Collective is committed to helping higher education and career leaders systemically weave

career education into the fabric of the campus and throughout the full student life cycle,”

said Jeremy Podany, Founder and CEO of The Collective. “Our collaboration with ACUE encourages our members to view the faculty-student relationship as central to this effort.”

Through this collaboration, The Collective’s members will have the opportunity to earn credit toward ACUE’s Certificate in Effective College Instruction with a concentration in Career

Guidance and Readiness through new online and face-to-face “seminars.” Podany was integral to the development of ACUE’s new career course, and we’re excited to deepen our work together, to advance our common goal to see all students receive a high-quality education and graduate with the skills necessary for successful careers.

“We formed this collaboration based on our shared commitment to student success through

teaching excellence and career preparation,” said Dr. Penny MacCormack, ACUE’s chief

academic officer. “Together, we recognize that every aspect of a student’s experience must have intrinsic value and propel them toward their futures.”

In a new study published in PLOS ONE, a team of biology professors set out to evaluate and share what they learned about their process of curricular transformation for an introductory biology course. A key takeaway? “Curricular transformation takes time. A long time.” In this interview, Suann Yang and Tarren Shaw, two of the study’s coauthors, share their personal experiences as novice teachers that shaped their research interests and key recommendations about how to build buy-in among students and faculty.

How did you become interested in the process of curricular transformation and the impact it has on student perceptions and performance?  

TS: When I first started teaching, I wanted to make sure students had a good time in my class, so I worked jokes into my lectures and included interesting stories. If students were enjoying the lecture then they must also be learning, right? Students did have a good time—they even said so on my end-of-course evaluations—but not one student left a comment about how they learned more as a result of my teaching. This got me thinking, how should I teach so that students leave my class as critical thinkers able to see how the subject matter applies to their lives? Instead of spending my time finding a memorable anecdote or crafting a punchline, I began to spend time crafting classroom experiences that put student learning and experience at the center. My mantra became “The person who is talking is the one who is learning.” I started building more and more opportunities into my class for students to talk with each other about what they were learning. I started working with Suann about this time and discovered that she had a similar experience to mine and wanted to find new ways to engage students in meaningful learning.

SY: I had come to my role as a professor with the assumption that learning is supposed to happen in a class, so therefore it will occur. So, the first time I taught a course, I packed it full of the important information that I thought students should know, just like I had experienced as an undergraduate student. Unlike Tarren, I didn’t necessarily strive for students to have a good time. Instead, I naively assumed that the quality of the information that I presented would be the determining factor in student learning. Boy, was I surprised when my first exam proved that assumption to be incorrect! From then on, I totally changed my perspective on teaching and learning. I decided then that I needed to learn everything I could about teaching effectiveness. This eventually led to leading the Integrating Biology and Inquiry Skills (IBIS) curriculum project with Tarren. Funnily enough, I had a similar wake-up call during the transformation process, like I experienced with teaching. We thought our curriculum was great—it aligned to many of the recommendations from Vision and Change—but after our first semester, we didn’t get 100% of students thinking the same thing. Of course not.

TS: We forgot about buy-in! We assumed that if students had a choice between sitting in a class and listening to some old dude read bullet points or go to a class where they were able to work with their friends to apply knowledge to solve interesting problems, it would be obvious which was better. But we were surprised that some students were discontented with the changes we had made and would have preferred the old dude!

SY: Being improvement oriented, we then began to focus on this group of discontented students and wonder, why are they unhappy? Are they learning anything? How about the students who were satisfied with their experience? This meant that we needed to begin measuring not only student perception but also their performance.

What’s a key finding from your research? What surprised or challenged your thinking on efforts to create, adapt to, or teach a new curriculum? What implications does this have for college educators?

SY: Curricular transformation takes time. A long time. Longer than the length of the [National Science Foundation] grant that funded the work!

TS: While we were implementing the course, we kept thinking, “This is the year when students will finally accept it!” But, looking back, it seems we needed the institutional memory to forget the old version of the course and allow our transformed curriculum to become the norm among the student body. This took about four years.

SY: So, this means that when an institution wants to implement curricular change, everyone who is involved or supporting the work should be aware of this lengthy timeline.

TS: This can be frustrating for faculty involved in developing the course or involved in instructing early iterations of the curriculum.

SY: Yeah, you’re already working really hard to make changes, so it can be demoralizing to receive any negative student comments on your work. But, stick with it, because we found that the negative responses decrease, and there’s an increase in the quality of the positive responses.

TS: Finally, I had students telling me they saw how our course material applied to their lives, and that the way they were being taught was the reason.

Based on your work in this area, what practical advice do you have for faculty who are interested in curricular transformation at their institution?

SY: In addition to being ready for a lengthy timeline, multiple assessments are a really good idea. Measuring not only learning gains, but also student perceptions of them, allowed us to identify those discontented students, and the nature of their discontent.

TS: Our student learning gains remained relatively consistent throughout the life of the program, so if we had only used student test scores or the college end-of-course survey to measure the effectiveness of our transformation efforts, we would never have realized how much student buy-in was shifting in favor of the new course.

SY: Remember that buy-in from both students and faculty is important—especially for active learning, because both groups need to be committed to participation for this type of classroom environment to be effective.

TS: Get as many people on board as possible, students included. At the conclusion of each term, we identified enthusiastic students who were able to be successful in the course and created positions for them as peer mentors to guide the next cohort of students to success. This let the new students see that success is possible and provided evidence that active learning works.

SY: Our team of faculty made this transformation possible. I think it’s clear how dedicated everyone—not only our coauthors but also the others listed in our acknowledgements—was in this undertaking, which reflects their deep level of commitment to its success.

Tarren Shaw is a lecturer in the Department of Biology at the University of Oklahoma. As a fellow at OU’s Center for Teaching Excellence, he leads faculty development workshops to encourage active learning and assessment strategies across the university. His research interests include undergraduate biology instruction, curricular development, and the impact of technology and peer-led instruction on student learning gains.

Suann Yang is an assistant professor of biology at SUNY Geneseo. As a trained community ecologist, Suann’s scholarly interests are focused on how the context of student-to-student interactions influences their attitudes toward learning. Her projects include improving student retention with peer-led workshops, teaching quantitative skills while reducing math anxiety, and developing multidisciplinary open educational resources for sustainable education.

By Julie L. Pentz

I teach dance for a living. I am a university professor, and I am a tap dancer who speaks through the sounds I make with my feet. I am an ACUE Fellow and now an ACUE Facilitator, guiding a new cohort of my university peers though ACUE’s Course in Effective Teaching Practices. Most importantly, I use my ACUE training on a daily basis, and it continues to enhance the experience that my students have in the classroom. Here, I offer practical advice, encouragement, and strategies to adapt ACUE’s principles to any course, regardless of the discipline that is being taught.

Building Community in the Classroom

Name Tents 

In my courses, we don’t have desks, or tables, or chairs. With that challenge, I adapted the concept of using name tents to get to know students’ names to note cards. Through this exercise, I’m connecting with my students and building community in the classroom.

On the first day of class, I recommend giving your students note cards and asking them to respond to these questions:

• What is your name (or preferred nickname)?

• Where are you from?

• What is your major (and minor or certificate, if applicable)?

• What do you like to do for fun?

• What’s a fun fact about you?

Next, have your students share this information in class. It’s an immediate way to learn about your students while connecting them to each other. I then collect these note cards for a goal-setting activity later in the semester.

10-Minute Meetings

In the first 2 to 3 weeks of class, I require 10-minute meetings for all students and attach points to this assignment. It communicates to students that I want to get to know them. You may think that time is short and an activity like this will eliminate hours from your academic life, especially at the start of a semester, but this exercise allows you to learn more about your students and spend less time, in the next few weeks, getting to know them and building community.

When I meet with my students, I set a timer for 10 minutes and allow them to talk about any topic that interests them. Many times, students will ask follow-up questions about the course. Often, I’ve found myself listening to wedding plans and stories of running 5Ks to marathons, and from time to time I even get to talk about my favorite topic, RHINOS!

I will acknowledge that I do not teach large classes of 100, 200, or 300 students. With larger class sizes, 10-minute meetings may be tough. But I’d encourage you to find ways to adapt this idea to fit your classroom setting. If you have teaching assistants, students can be broken into smaller groups and have 10-minute meetings with the TAs.

Using DAPPS for Goal Setting

I would suggest offering the DAPPS goal-setting exercise by week 4. The DAPPS formula notes that, to be most effective, goals should be dated, achievable, personal, positive, and specific. To begin, I pass out the note cards students made on the first day of class at random and have students find the person each card belongs to, in order to ensure they know one another’s names and can continue to build community. Once they have met this challenge, we begin the DAPPS goal-setting activity. I ask students to share a few goals that meet the DAPPs requirements on their note cards. I ask for three goals: one must be attainable within the next 3 or 4 weeks of the semester, the second is a semester goal, and the third is a life goal. As dancers, my students must understand that they will always continue learning and growing in their dance technique. Throughout the remainder of the semester, I randomly redistribute the goal cards and allow the students to check in on goals with each other. I find that peer-to-peer interaction with goals is effective and allows students to continue to build a strong community.

Flowcharts, For Dancers 

ACUE’s module on “Using Concept Maps and Other Visualization Tools” challenged me. I remember asking myself, how on earth can I adapt and implement this idea of visual tools into a dance technique class? After I had earned my ACUE credential and began a new semester, it came to me: a dance technique flowchart. I asked the dancers to create flowcharts of their dance training, beginning with when they were young. The results were diverse, informative, and creative. But what surprised me most was that this exercise continued to build community in the classroom. Hard copies of the flowcharts were provided for the dancers. The students sat in a circle and were given one minute to review each flowchart and provide one positive comment about it. My objective was to help students discover deeper value in their dance training paths and recognize that all of our paths are different and valuable. It was remarkable to watch the students make connections with one another as they learned more about their peers who were dancing beside them. My students suggested that I repeat this exercise in future classes, but at the end of week 2, which is much earlier than when I assigned it.

Professional Development 

The definition of professional development, as stated by The Glossary of Education Reform, is “a wide variety of specialized training, formal education, or advanced professional learning intended to help administrators, teachers, and other educators improve their professional knowledge, competence, skill, and effectiveness.” Professional development for my students includes the following: career fair, résumé workshop, reading a book in the field in which they are studying, auditions, and master classes.

My students submit three professional development assignments during the semester, each having points associated with it. Based on the professional development activity, students may be asked to write a paper or a short statement that describes the activity. Students often surprise me with their activities. I had a theater student who decided to read Steve Jobs’ biography and make connections between Steve Jobs, jazz dancer Bob Fosse, and his own life path, with his ambitions to make it to the Broadway stage.

End Strong to Begin Strong the Next Time

“Dear future student” is a technique I started using at the end of the semester. I simply asked my students to write “Dear Future Tap Dance Student” on a note card and continue the letter, offering advice to ensure a successful semester for future students. I have noticed that my tap dancers don’t seem to be as surprised by the amount of balance work used in our classes and that the jazz dancers expect the amount of core work that is in all of their classes. This task is not only valuable for future students, but it allows me to understand my current students’ perceptions, including what they found to be most important, so I can make any changes, as necessary, for the next semester.

Conclusion

Anyone can apply ACUE’s recommended techniques and principles to their courses, regardless of the discipline or classroom structure. As an ACUE Facilitator, I now find myself telling my cohort of colleagues, “If I can do it, you can do it!”

Julie L. Pentz is an associate professor of dance and associate director of the School of Music, Theatre, and Dance at Kansas State University. She has taught and performed internationally at the Theatro Libero in Rome, Italy, Taiwan, Chinese Cultural University, National Taiwan University, Tsoying Performing Arts, Koahsiung Performing Arts, Banyoles-Girona, Spain, Ghana Africa, and Kuwait. She has performed with The National Tap Ensemble and worked with Gregory Hines and Savion Glover.

By Bridgett McGowen

In late 2011 or early 2012, I convinced my manager to approve my attendance at a training and development conference in Denver to further hone my skills as a faculty development consultant. It was a conference for corporate trainer types, learning and development professionals… those kinds of experts. One session that stood out from the others was focused on meeting facilitation and how to make the most out of executives’ and C-suite employees’ time when you conduct a meeting with or make a presentation before them.

At the core of the presentation was a nine-step process to follow, and in one of those steps, the presenter made a point that resonated with me. He asserted that if you want your audience to listen, lean in, and give you rapt attention, then in the first few minutes of a meeting, you must do four things: excite, engage, involve, and inform your audience. Instantly, I recalled my days of being in the classroom at Prairie View A&M University and Lone Star College, and I thought, “He’s right! This goes for anyone, especially students.” Over the years and along the way, after teaching countless class sessions and designing hundreds of presentations and delivering them to thousands of professionals and students around the country and the globe, I had figured this out, but I sure wish I’d heard this session back in 2002 when I first stepped into the classroom as an educator!

As educators, we cannot assume we have captive audiences simply because we have sets of eyes in front of us. One of the biggest challenges educators face is getting students’ minds off of everything going on outside the classroom (and on their digital devices) and 100% on the lesson. As such, and with a lot of tweaking, reading, researching, and considering postsecondary teaching methodology best practices coupled with the habits of the very best professional speakers, that conference session led me to explore this topic further. In short, class sessions are not that much different from board meetings, and they should be approached with as much purpose and intention as possible. They should be designed in a way that lets students know this is going to be time well spent… that this is going to be a good one!

First, you paint a picture of the audience’s (students’) current position and where they want/need to be, and then you tell them what they will know or be able to do by the time you finish. That second part is what seals the deal. It’s what will have your students on the edges of their seats. I call this toggling between the awful and the awesome.

Here’s how that works. Let’s say I’m about to teach students about presentation skills. My opener that excites and engages them looks like this:

You’ve seen a number of presentations over the years. Some were awesome, while others were a complete mess. And you wonder: How do you get on the stage and rock it out? How can you go from feeling overwhelmingly anxious to amazingly awesome? By the time we finish with this session, you will know not only why you dread making presentations, but you will know the number one secret every expert presenter uses to be a powerhouse behind the mic, and you will know how to take that secret to completely eliminate the jitters and go from making presentations that are okay to presentations that are o-m-goodness.

When you hear that, you’re excited, and you’re thinking, “I want that! Give it to me! Let’s do this!”

Then, you keep that momentum going by making it a conversation that involves and informs all students. Behind the scenes, confirm what you will cover in class and the three things students will know or be able to do by the time you finish with your class session; create that exciting opener, promising them what they will know or be able to do; and then deliver. But do not put the onus on yourself to do all the talking. That is how you involve and inform the class: lecture for about 10 to 12 minutes at a time, and then have the students process that information. They can process it when you provide them with a formative assessment based on that segment of the lecture. Then you reset your energy level to get excited about the next segment.

Finally, take the spotlight off yourself and put it on the students; make them your priority. Think to yourself: “I am going to make this the most enjoyable, valuable, relevant experience this crowd has ever seen. I’m going to get them talking. I’m going to get them writing. I’m going to get them laughing. I’m going to have them walking away thinking ‘Wow. That was so good. I can’t wait for the next class meeting.'”

For new faculty members, remember that students are not hoping you crash and burn. They do not want to see you fall on your face. Conversely, they are secretly cheering you on, hoping you will give them something helpful, useful, and important.

For the seasoned educator, remember you have mastered the basics. You can teach class in your sleep. You’re a genius! So that means it’s now time to have fun. Let down your hair. Pop your collar. Laugh at yourself. Be a rock star for your students. Simply put, be the educator you wish you’d had when you were a student.

You’ve got this. Be seen. Be heard. Be great!

Bridgett McGowen is the owner of BMcTALKS, LLC, and she is an awarded international professional speaker. Learn more about Bridgett at www.bridgettmcgowen.com and visit www.bmctalks.com to learn about BMcTALKS and the BMcTALKS Academy.

When it comes to producing podcasts, a quick audio cut or fade can help polish over mistakes. When it comes to Dr. Bonni Stachowiak’s popular Teaching in Higher Ed, mistakes are worthy of celebration.

Stachowiak’s willingness to grapple with gaffes was on display a few years ago when she turned an on-air blunder into an opportunity to highlight the importance of embracing failure as part of the learning process. The memory stands out as Stachowiak reflects on more than four years—and 230 episodes—of Teaching in Higher Ed (TiHE), which features weekly expert guests on a range of teaching and learning topics, from instructional practices and digital pedagogy to the faculty profession. A common thread through them all is the sense that each conversation is part of a “learning journey” that she’s on with her listeners and guests.

ACUE is thrilled to be along for the ride. Since 2016, we’ve been connecting TiHE to some of the inspiring experts and educators with whom we’ve partnered, from Saundra McGuire, to Catherine Haras, to Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan. As the TiHE-ACUE partnership kicks off its third year, we sat down with Stachowiak to hear her reflections on podcasting and teaching.

Q: What’s a favorite memory or funny story from the podcast?

A: It was my first interview with Ken Bain, and I was so excited—and nervous—because his book, What the Best College Teachers Do, was the very first book that I read about teaching in higher ed. When we finished, he mentioned off air that there was one more thing he wanted to share, but before I could hit record again, he had already started talking. I didn’t want to be rude and interrupt him, so I started taking notes because he was mentioning some people I was unfamiliar with at the time, including Eric Mazur, who’d just become the first-ever winner of the Minerva Prize, a half-million dollar prize for teaching excellence.

When he was through, I looked back over my notes and said, “Tell me again about the Manure Prize.” I said it three times before he very gently said, “Bonni, it’s actually the Minerva Prize.”

Yes, my autocorrect had changed ‘Minerva’ to ‘manure.’ It was one of those things I initially wanted to edit out of the show, but if this podcast is about going on a learning journey, then how would I have known who Eric Mazur was without these kinds of experiences?

Not only did we keep it in, but we ended up doing an episode that celebrates failure and how we learn from it. Episode 100—The Failure Episode— is one of my favorites because it featured people sharing their failure stories. We gave the ‘Manure Prize’ to the person with the greatest failure. (The winner was Maha Bali, a professor and faculty developer at the American University in Cairo.)

Q: How does the craft of interviewing apply to the craft of teaching?

A: Asking simple questions applies to both worlds of teaching and interviewing. A lot of people ask a question like “How do you approach this?” and then begin to answer it with multiple choices: “Do you do it this way? Do you try it this way?” There’s no need for that. Ask a simple question and then stop talking. It’s in the silence that the richest answers will come.

Also, Alex Blumberg, an amazing podcaster, has a formula for how to think about storytelling: “I’m telling a story about X. It’s interesting because Y.” That could be applied more in our teaching. For so many of my classes now, I think, “What is the story? What is really the overarching question I’m hoping to ignite my students’ curiosity around? What makes it interesting?” To me, you could build your entire teaching philosophy on that.

Q: What advice would you give to yourself in your first year of teaching?

A: I would tell myself to slow down and mellow out, both for the sake of my students and for my own sake. It isn’t about covering all the material, it isn’t about ensuring everything goes according to the plan, it isn’t about trying so hard to make sure everyone is riveted at all times by what’s going on in the classroom. I’d tell myself that part of the process for slowing down is to listen a lot more and ask a lot more questions.

Q: If you could interview anyone, living or dead, who would it be and why?

A: Brené Brown. She is such a wonderful researcher, thinker, writer, and speaker who has written so many compelling things. Her TED Talk on vulnerability is the most powerful TED Talk I’ve ever seen, and I’d just love the opportunity to talk to her about how vulnerability could—and should—inform our work in teaching. I’m curious about how she handles her classes and brings her life’s work into the classroom. She’s written about this somewhat, but it would be wonderful to speak to her and ask what specifically can be integrated into teaching. I also have a sense from watching so many interviews with her that she’d be so warm and engaging, and that would probably shave off at least some of my nervousness.