Gina Riley: Welcome to Faculty Innovations in Teaching, a podcast by ACERT, the Academic Center for Excellence in Research and Teaching at Hunter College. I’m Gina Riley, ACERT senior faculty fellow, and this season’s host of Faculty Innovations in Teaching!
During this first season, we’ll hear from full and part time Hunter College faculty who during the Spring 2023 semester participated in our ACERT podcast club. Members of the Transformative Listening Podcast Club, created thanks to the support of the CUNY Transformative Learning in the Humanities initiative and the Provost’s Office at Hunter, listened to podcast episodes spanning the areas of engagement, classroom culture, and assessment. Based on their listening, they created innovative teaching practices which were utilized in their actual classrooms. In this podcast, members of the Club will share their learnings and their insights on transformative teaching! We hope you enjoy!
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Gina: Hi Chris, how are you? Tell us about yourself and your role at Hunter. And when you’re not teaching, what’s your favorite thing to do?
Christine Willard: My role at Hunter has been wonderful. I’ve been teaching in the online program in [coughs], excuse me, in the School of, you know, Special Education, and I’ve been working with students with literacy and also their practicum of student teaching. And the really neat thing about it is that a lot of folks say you can’t really develop relationships online while you’re teaching, and I have found that to be 100% not true. I have been able to get to know students, they linger, they want to talk. I think there’s almost more relational space when you teach online. You’re very aware of that. You know what you’re really aware of is the dynamics, the interpersonal and the intrapersonal, the students engaging one another, and the banter and the delight they have in that. And I sometimes sit back and just watch them. I have really been enjoying my online classes, both hybrid and fully online at Hunter because of that, because I’m learning, I’m learning about the socialization and the needs of the students, so that’s been absolutely great.
What do I love to do when I’m not teaching? When I’m not teaching, I love to kayak. I really enjoy getting out on the water and kayaking. I enjoy cycling. Right now I’m in the midst of weeding and working with my garden, my unruly garden. I enjoy that. And for the first time, well, I guess last year I did as well, but I have chickens now. I know you have chickens also, and I’m exploring the delights of being a chicken owner, and going on the egg hunt in the morning, and having a chicken in my lap while I’m reading, so all good things. I guess our next project is being beekeepers. So, all new things, that, you know, later in life trying out, it’s been great.
Gina: That’s so fun. Tell me how the beekeeping goes, because I’m tempted. I’m a little scared, but I’m tempted.
Christine: Yeah, it is tempting. The end result is so nice, to have the honey, but I think you have to deal with a few stings before you get to that point. I will definitely let you know about that.
Gina: Awesome. We were so excited to have you participate in our Podcast Club. And at the end of the Club, we asked everyone to create a lightning talk on the teaching transformation they created inspired by their listening in the Club. Can you tell us about your teaching innovation?
Christine: Sure, my teaching innovation is actually a work in progress, and I’m having a good time with this, and it will have to be ongoing only because it’s related to student teacher observation, which is something that comes at specific points in my teaching. But the innovation I’m really looking at is looking at a “feed-forward” model versus a feed-back model. And my inspiration came from Joe Hirsch, who wrote the book The Feedback Fix. But actually, the paradigm I valued most was Marshall Goldsmith, in his book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. And I thought that was really profound before I even opened up the cover of the book, realizing what a truism that indeed was – it’s kind of like if you ever read the book The Chronicles of Narnia, the children, I think they ask Aslan, “Can we get back here again through the wardrobe or this way?” And he says, “You’ll be back but not the same way.” And it’s kind of just such an interesting notion of time, and it’s a no brainer when you start to think about the significance of being in the moment and being future-oriented versus being past-oriented – the past is gone but yet we don’t put it to bed. We kind of tend to harp on the past and there’s all sorts of implications for that.
Gina: Yeah, I love that. I also think it’s so good in terms of general teacher reflection. That feed forward model, we always think of reflection is looking back. But I think reflection can be both. Reflection can be like “I have done this” and “this is what I can do in the future.”
Christine: Yeah, Marshall Goldsmith made a point of saying that successful people, they’re not against feedback, but they like it in the form of ideas for the future, because they tend to be very self determined in nature and autonomous, and anything that doesn’t give a hint of, well, I can now do this or do this for the future, is really not very useful. And a psychologist at Columbia University did a study with feedback, and he said we really only can contain about 30% of the feedback that is given to us. It tends to be a dumping ground and too much comes at us, and there’s all sorts of negative implications for that.
Gina: So interesting. Summer I hope lasts for a really long time, it’s the first day of summer today when we’re recording. But what are your hopes for the fall semester for yourself, for your students?
Christine: I’d like to probe this whole area a bit more. I actually have a number of students I’ll be working with in the fall in a clinical type of setting. I want to prepare myself to follow through with this model, and I started to think about the problem that I initially had in working with my students in a clinical setting, and that post-observation after a student has taught. They’re sitting there with you looking at you and what are they really saying? They’re kind of saying: tell me what I did wrong, what didn’t you like? And I’ve never been pleased with that posture, but didn’t quite know how to address that. But I knew that the student was saying: you need to critique me, and you need to show me how to get on top of my game, and you need to give me feedback. And what they really want to say, what they’re trying to say to you is: I want to have some autonomy, I want to show myself my ability, I want to be able to move forward with this, I want to be able to feel that I am part of something larger than myself, I’m in this academy, I matter. And I realized by some of the social and facial gestures that I get, and some of those non-spoken kind of cues that the students were not comfortable with the sessions, because there were preconceived notions of what was going to happen in that session, and they were not looking forward to it.
And so this is causing me to re-examine the role of both students and myself in this whole process. And I know one of the things I need to do is take myself off that throne, because I did a meta-analysis of the term feedback, how it’s used in the academy, or how it’s used in a school setting. And it typically has to do with the fact that somebody else is the agent of your destiny, so to speak, feedback typically puts the onus and the ownership on the person who is requesting, or asking you, or telling you what you did wrong. I realized that my whole paradigm is me in the driver’s seat. I have to think through this summer ways to remove myself from the driver’s seat and put the student in the driver’s seat. So I’m contemplating working on some process forms that will give me open-ended prompts whereby I can challenge my student to have a feed-forward attitude about their own teaching.
And that would just be clarifying statements, like, for me to say, in what way…Let’s say if I’m working on, the student is looking at modeling, the student wants maybe more information about how to be explicit in the classroom and model some of the behaviors they would like the students to emulate. So I might say: In what way would you like to work on modeling? The student might then come up with: Wwell, what if I did this? And then my role would be: Well, how about maybe this? And the student: Well, I could also do this. And then my ultimate goal would be to give it feet or to give it wings, and to have this student give a time and an allocation for that, and specificity for that, and actually come up with a plan.
I’ve now become a guide, a mentor, a coach. I’m not the person who is in charge, the taskmaster, the deliverer of bad news, the critique, the critic, I am not these things. I am now a partner with that student. Because I do believe that students need to develop, as you said, they need to become reflective practitioners. And I’m not helping them, I’m not helping them at all, if I am generating all of the steps along the way, or if I am critiquing them. The very process inherent in reflection requires that you learn how to do that, you use your executive function ability to critique yourself. So I’ve not been the most helpful to my students, when I walk in with my agenda. And the neat thing, Gina, is this is also associated with what we were talking about with the whole ungrading movement, because this works in nicely. It doesn’t smack of assessment and grading, it’s more of a self-improvement plan, a growth-oriented plan, which is much more student-oriented versus assessment-driven, so I like that piece too. [laughs] Sorry, that was a long answer.
Gina: No, that was so good, so good. And again, I keep reminding myself that self-assessment is authentic assessment: when the student is in the driver’s seat, when the student is self-assessing, that is as rich of an assessment as any other assessment that they will ever do. So thinking about that too, I love that Chris.
Christine: Yeah, I think for student teachers, or new teachers, or teacher practitioners, self-reflection is, I might even say, even more vital than any kind of assessment that I would do for that student, because they’re going to be extremely autonomous in that classroom, and the decisions they make and their ability to stop in their tracks and say: How can I move forward here? How can I better this situation or this behavior? I won’t be there to help them do that, but giving them the tools of reflection is something they can take with them on their journey, much more significant than my in that point in time going, “You did this wrong,” and dwelling on that.
Gina: I love that. That’s so beautiful, and there’s so much to think about in there and so brilliant. So do you have a teaching wish list? If you wanted to provide the most innovative pedagogy for your students, if budget was unlimited – which it’s not, right? – but if you had the ultimate wish list, what would you like to provide for your students? What tools would you need?
Christine: That’s a really powerful question. If I had my wish list, I think one of the things I would continue is using a feedback mechanism for my students whereby they can self-monitor and self-assess. I have had good results with that. We use right now something called “Go React” – and I know there’s other platforms out there – but I’m really a proponent for a student looking at their own teaching before I even look at it. Anything that the student can utilize for self-reflection, I’m all about that, so any type of tool that they can stop, time stamp, look at things, describe their own teaching moments, is very helpful. So I would always have that on my wish list that I gave my students the capability to see themselves, to hold up the mirror, as Joe Hirsch would say, would be a very important thing.
So I would also like my students if I had a wish list to have more time to … I think the term was abrasive, something abrasive conversation, but in a good kind of way. And I think Joe Hirsch talked about Pixar folks, when they’re making a Pixar film, how they all get together, those who are participating in that film, and they can each give a critique of each other’s work, but they also have to then give a strong suggestion about what that looks like in the future and to immediately move from dwelling on that “But this…” to “I recommend,” or “Why don’t you try this or do that?” And I, one of my wish lists would be that we had stronger collegial groupings for our students who are out in the field, so that they can “iron sharpens iron” type of thing, and they could really feed off of each other’s good ideas. Because I’m a little bit old school frankly, I’ve been teaching for a long time. And I think the idea of the innovations come when a student is steeped in the culture and the context of that school, and they really understand that. And I’d like to see students in similar contexts come together and have working groups, so that would be significant. So two things: the student be able to really see themselves as teachers, and also for a collegial presence to be there, so that students can really work together on those pieces. And somehow maybe we can build that into the curriculum, so that they have time together to be reflective practitioners together in a similar context.
Gina: I love that. I also like the idea, because so many of our students are in similar schools and so adding alumni to that reflective circle …
Christine: … that’s a great idea. Because I tell my students that the ethos at their school is unique, and when you think about it, it would be difficult for me to critique that student, not really understanding that culture of that school, and each is incredibly unique. And when I stop and I listen and I hear what’s going on at their schools, and I take the time to do that, it’s rather remarkable how all of sudden the formula things don’t really work, and you just have to really be steeped and understand what is happening uniquely in that charter school or in that regional school, and that’s a fascinating study in and of itself. So I think that would be helpful for students in similar settings to have opportunity to banter and work with some of these questions that they’re grappling with, that I myself could set up the process, be a process designer, but certainly not be the final say in informing how they behave in that setting. They need to almost create that, they need some mutual creating going on there.
Gina: Love that. That’s really beautiful, that’s fantastic. Do you listen to podcasts outside of the Podcast Club? And if so, what’s your favorite?
Christine: I’ve been enjoying, I’ve been listening to some podcasts from the International Literacy Association. And I’ve been doing so because I am trying to really become an expert, which I don’t think will be possible, but really interested in the science of reading, because again, from my background, supposedly we kind of did it all wrong, and the ethical stance would be to really understand some of the brain studies and the science studies behind the neurology of how we learn how to read. So I will be spending some time this summer on podcasts, unfortunately, probably not ones for how to kayak, probably more so on how to better understand the science of reading for myself and for my students.
Gina: That’s so good. I’m teaching a class right now on the science of reading, and I always forget and I reminded my students that the science of reading is definitely not just education-based. There are articles about science of reading and podcasts from psychology, anthropology, and from everywhere, from medicine, from everywhere, and to just think about that like a cross-discipline field …
Christine: … that’s great.
Gina: You’ve been teaching at Hunter now for a little bit of time, and so what advice would you give to a new professor at Hunter?
Christine: It’s funny because I’ve been there a while, but there’s newness really around every corner. And I think for a new person, I would want them to first do some listening, listen to your students. I hang out after my online sessions and I just listen to my students and what they’re talking about, and I learn a lot about what they would like to know more about. So I would be open, you know; now I will frame this in the context of teacher ed. So for teacher ed certainly would be: listen to what they’re interested in and what they want to learn. Because, again, these are people who want to be successful, they want autonomy. So listen to the themes that emerge, that they’re dealing with, and go toward that, to whatever degree possible. And if you are in a grad program, allow your students to express some of their expertise, have them do some talking about what they’ve done, what they’ve tried – that really perks the attendance when students feel that they’re a vital contributor to that community, they then want to want to come, it’s value added for them, and, again, they feel autonomous and successful, which is what everybody wants to do in that setting.
So listening, employing your students’ gifts and talents in that class, be humble – and I think humility is important, and students pick up on that right away. If you have a humility in how you handle the curriculum and the information, and you are not there to just dispense with all of this information, because information is out there, anybody could get anything – I mean, the students could do what I do to prepare for class, but it’s the delivery. So be careful with your delivery, be careful to make it useful for your students and not just useful for you, but use the material in a way that challenges and ignites their interests. So it’s not all about being well prepared with stuff. It’s really the delivery of that information in a way that is helpful for the students at that time. So I think those are the pieces I’m learning now. This is mostly online for me, but it is interesting because you orchestrate that online environment a bit differently than you do the classroom. The timing, the pacing, the engagements … it’s all a learning curve when you switch to that paradigm, but it’s been incredibly enjoyable.
Gina: Well, Chris, this has been amazing and so brilliant and fun. Thank you so much.
Christine: You’re very welcome.
Gina: You’ve been such a great member of the Podcast Club.
Christine: I enjoyed that tremendously, that was a highlight for me.
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