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 Josh.
Josh Friedman: Hi there, Gina. It’s so nice to meet you.
Gina: This is like the first time I’m meeting you in person.
Josh: That’s true. Many times online, the first in person. I’m very happy to be here. I’m so happy, thank you so much for having me.
Gina: So, tell us about yourself and what you do at Hunter.
Josh: I am currently a sixth-year PhD student over at Teachers College, Columbia and studying how teacher-student relationships impact student learning, specifically how non-verbal communication between teachers and students helps students engage in thinking processes. So, here at Hunter, I teach psychology; I’m incredibly passionate about the sort of really rigorous quantitative complex methods that are coming out of computer tech in all sorts of ways for the study of psychology and how people think. The two classes that I teach here at Hunter are “Experimental General Psychology,” where, it’s a giant double course, they write four papers in a semester, and really dig deep into the questions of what is science, what is knowledge, what is the ability to learn about learning, learn about how people learn and think and do, and how to do experiments or correlational studies to gather data and information relevant to those questions.
The other class that I teach is called “Memory and Attention,” and it focuses on what memory and attention are from the perspective of how we can learn about that, how we can study them scientifically from a bit of a socio-cultural cognitive lens which essentially means how can we break down the things that people say or do, their reaction times, things like that, to experimentally be able to understand how they remember what they remember, what they attend to and how they attend, and the kind of deep intertwining of what we remember and what we attend to and what we remember.
So that’s what I do at Hunter. And it’s an incredible opportunity to not just do that for myself and my own learning, but to really work with the students and to learn from their perspective, daily life totally coming into this upper-level psychology study for the first time and thinking, how does this actually apply to my life? How does this help me remember how to get to the subway, or help my grandmother with her groceries or whatever it may be, it’s an incredible opportunity to sort of like, let the rubber of “research and thinking and philosophy” meet the road of “these are real people doing real things.”
Gina: That sounds so cool. I want to take all your classes. So we were so happy to have you participate in the Podcast Club.
Josh: I was happy to participate as well.
Gina: And at the end of the Club, we asked about a teaching transformation that you may have gotten through listening to the podcasts in the Club. So can you tell us about your teaching innovation?
Josh: For sure, I would love to. To go back to this experimental psychology course, they’re writing a lot of papers, and in this process of writing papers, especially at the level of, maybe I want to do this for a living, maybe I don’t want to do this for a living, but I just want to write a sort of argument or make a point in an email and have it come across clearly and be convincing. And so that the people that I’m working with, they sort of see that as a good idea and move forward with it. The idea of critique, the idea of review, the idea of seeing your writing from somebody else’s perspective is something that I got really deeply interested in this semester. And the kind of classic way of doing it is, OK, everybody bring in your paper, everybody sit down and trade, you know, slide your paper to the right and read the paper and tell the author what you think about it. So I’m familiar with some feedback strategies and giving structure to the environment, norms of feedback values, doing a little bit of pre-briefing, etc., this is how to be a good peer reviewer and giving examples of that kind of thing. And so we did that and I gave them this structure, this format that started out as their author statements that began [with] “I like, I wish, I wonder.”
And that was just from my own work and actually informal education backgrounds and giving critiques to peers of mine as we designed experiential education programs. And so I brought that into the classroom, and it seemed to have some kind of effect that was positive. But I wanted to use this opportunity in the Podcast Club to drive that idea further, but to do it in a way that also made it feel less pressurizing for the students. That environment of social judgment is huge, and it can be really demotivating to students and to a lot of people if they don’t feel like they’re actually gaining something from the experience and it’s only an opportunity to be added in the world today. And so, to build on this idea, I basically took a lot of inspiration from this one podcast I listen to about “Feed Forward” statements. I don’t remember exactly the name of the two people that were mentioned in the podcast. But it was actually close to, “I like, I wish, I wonder,” but it was actually something more along, “I notice,” or “I appreciate,” “what if…” or “how might you…” were the other two.
And I really loved the framing of these questions especially, “I wonder,” sort of says, I, as a reviewer, wonder, if you should feel guilty about not wondering as the author, right? But I loved this change in the formulation to say “what if,” because that’s something I’m wondering, but it’s automatically a question I’m now putting to you and I’m sort of being upfront and sort of authentically honest about that wondering and saying, what if you added periods to the end of your sentences, whatever it might have been. What if you considered how gender or ethnicity or socioeconomic status would have played a role in how people remember to put their keys in the key spot when they got home? This semester we had students studying what is the effect of social media on student anxiety – so interesting, such an incredible opportunity for students, especially at this age to study about brain development; adolescence is this huge period of social anxiety and social development.
And so, they’re wondering, OK, I think it’s about the type of social media people use, Instagram versus Tiktok; I think it’s the hours that people are on social media, 1 [hour] a day versus 10 a day; and they’re doing all of these kinds of studies in parallel with each other. So there are five or six people asking the same question but from different angles and in different ways. So then they get to this point where they’re giving the feedback. And instead of saying, I wonder “if the amount of hours had an effect” and this person then responds, “well, that’s your study and that’s how you ask the question and I’m asking about type. Instead I can say what if the number of hours changes, how the type of social media affects somebody…” and it puts it on the authors themselves to ask this question and then they might be looking at an interaction effect and it kind of deepens the layer of scientific investigation they’re doing; I think because it’s now an opportunity for them to ask or participate in that question rather than them sort of feeling guilty for not asking or thinking of the idea themselves.
So that was really cool and we did it basically in these five-minute lightning presentations for their final paper where every student filled out one of these forms that had the four “Feed Forward” statements on it for every other student. And the really cool innovation about it was just the fact that it was a Google form, it spit out a spreadsheet. I could sort it by student name, copy and paste and send in an email and they had it the day of. So it wasn’t this sort of like, my name is Josh and your name is Gina, and I am, Josh, giving you, Gina, this feedback, looking you in the eye and saying you do this… that it put a little bit more distance there where it was a little bit more anonymous, but I could kind of scan it and we went through the values. And so a student’s just seeing these things without thinking, oh, it was because they’re this or they’re that person, and they were kind of just getting this list of questions: “What if, how am I, I noticed,” that kind of stuff that I think was really beneficial in the end. So, that was a lot but that was the teaching innovation and the reasons that I sort of implemented it in the way that I did.
Gina: That’s so cool. A lot of people found that “Feed Forward” really interesting. And I’m also thinking of ways to integrate it into my classroom, so I love that. What are your hopes for the fall semester for yourself and for your students?
Josh: It’s a great question. I think that there’s a classic one and then there’s a sort of let’s innovate kind of thing. The classic one is, I’m really looking forward to now having a couple of semesters under my belt of doing this, revisiting these syllabi and these reading lists that I come up with. At first it was this sort of shotgun of “I think this is all going to work” because these are the papers that I loved and had an effect on me, and what we love and what works for us is not going to work for everyone. I’ve gotten a lot of feedback on what if it was a paper that was more like this, I’ve spent some time looking into what are those papers that fit those criteria and let’s change those out, let’s change sort of how we interact with that sort of literature, which I think is a really core component of engaging with academia, but also, which is the idea of knowledge these days, generally, where do we get our knowledge from?
And knowing how and what knowledge, or claims to knowledge we digest is a crucial component of this activity that I think we’re doing in a bachelor’s degree. So I’m excited about that and sort of renovating that first run a little bit. The sort of innovative pieces, I really loved these lightning presentations. I really love this idea of people being given five minutes on a paper before they actually write the paper down. The other thing with the peer review piece was you show up with this completed paper and then somebody gives you thoughts on it, and you’re like, oh now I gotta rewrite this whole paper and this is terrible and everything. And it’s just like, what if you had a really clear idea and you could get a lot of feedback on that idea before you wrote out this whole paper. So, the idea that I really want to carry forward there is what if instead of spending the time to do this giant peer review with the whole paper, a few days before that paper is due, you’re going to do some minor edits. And some students are frantically rewriting the whole thing with the 48 hours notice kind of thing. Which is not cool, right?
So figuring out a way to say, OK, we’re going to generate this idea, I’m going to get all of the bullet points, we write scientific studies. So we’re thinking in the ideas of the structure of introduction methods, results, discussion, and how do I format that? I think instead of what I’ve been doing is recommending you have your introduction done by this day, you have your methods done by this day, and you have your results done by this day, and your discussion done by that day, and on then on that day is the peer review. And so then your whole paper is written, you do the peer review, you tweak it and then you turn it in, and I think it was so much too late. I think the idea now is to say have two sentences, three sentences, maybe of what each of those four sections are on this date that used to be the recommended [date] your introduction is due, let’s do lightning talks on that.
And then once we have that lightning talk on the board, maybe we do it in class, maybe we record them and do this asynchronously and make it a thing. I haven’t totally decided yet. But we do this kind of, “I’m going to give a five-minute lightning talk.” I’m going to let you know what my idea is before I’m fully invested in it, get a ton of feedback on it that’s totally light touch. “I notice, I like, what if, how might,” and I use that to build out the rest of what my paper is going to be… I think that might be a lot more helpful to students and sort of thinking through that process and thinking a little bit more big picture, it seems to kind of parallel this idea of I wander down the hall and I pitch to my co-worker, hey, I’ve got this half-baked idea. What do you think of it? And sort of normalizing that informal soft peer review, doing that a bunch of times. And now I’ve got my idea coming in conversation with everybody else’s ideas, so now I can sit down and write it in my head.
Gina: I love that. I’m in a research group where we do that. It’s like our research is not fully thought out, but we’re sitting there and we’re just talking to each other and getting that, like you said, soft touch feedback. It is so helpful to the process, and I can see it being so helpful to the students.
Do you have a teaching wish list? Something that you have in your head that would allow you to provide the most innovative pedagogy to your students? And so, if we had an unlimited budget – which we do not, right? – what would you provide?
Josh: Yeah, so when we have an unlimited budget….
Gina: I love that kind of thinking.
Josh: I did a little bit of this starting last semester actually. So again, I mentioned briefly, my background is all in sort of informal education spaces; experiential ed, working with summer camp, after-school programs, that’s what I did before I came to this PhD program; studying how people learn. And so I’m really incredibly passionate and interested in, how do informal activities, and informal interactions between students, but also between students and their instructor change the nature of that instruction, change the nature of those moments of “I have this idea, I have this information, I think I have a really great way of presenting it and I think it would be beneficial for you to listen.” That’s the pitch of me standing at the front of the room, right? But what’s the meaning of that, if a student can’t connect to that? And if we don’t know the reason that students can’t connect to that, what are we doing anyway? How are we going to improve this thing?
A lot of my research and a lot of what I do is sort of tweaking things that we do within the classroom to try to optimize our activities is literally to bring them out of the classroom. I teach this Memory and Attention course, and we’re talking about attention, we’re talking about split attention, and I played improv games with them. We went outside where everybody’s standing in a circle and somebody’s got the rabbit to pass around in the circle and there are different activities that you have to do and pay attention to. And it’s this opportunity that does many things, this is the whole pitch of experience of let’s do something that’s an activity that’s active, that gets people engaged in doing stuff together about the topic that is sort of infused and integrated with the topic in a way that’s inseparable. So we act, we’re not just talking about how our attention is divided, we’re actively experiencing that divided attention and how we navigate it. That gives an opportunity to reflect later on what all this research-finding shenanigans is. So that we can conceptualize it, we can put a space to it in our minds and our experience.
So when we have unlimited budgets, I would say that, you know, we would have, I don’t know exactly what it is, but bigger spaces, or somewhat equivalently, smaller class sizes so that there is the opportunity and materials to engage in much more informal play, much more informal activities that allow you to engage the concepts that you’re talking about. Whether it’s memory or attention or how people do business or what child care requires of us because every single topic is about something that humans do in the world. Every single topic is doable. So the budget would be for putting those “doings” in the classroom rather than sticking to “tellings.”
Gina: And I have so much to talk to you about after this. Oh god, I love informal learning spaces. Those make me so happy, I love it. So do you listen to podcasts outside the Podcast Club?
Josh: I really don’t. I really appreciate it when people say, hey, listen to this podcast and I listen to it and it’s great. I don’t have the sort of thought in my mind yet of “let me go explore and see what’s out there” and that kind of thing.
Gina: So, what are you reading?
Josh: Right now, admittedly, I’m reading much more of an interest piece, less about teaching, but it’s called Indigenous Continent. And it is history on this continent, America, from a sort of indigenous centric perspective and what that looked like. And so that was just really informative for me. I’ve been deeply interested in native peoples and sort of our relationships – I don’t even want to say with them, like they’re them and there’s an us – like our relationships to nativity and to indigenousness, and to the land. We were talking about before we came in, I love gardening, I love getting into where we come from and what we’re fed by, and history is a huge component of that. So getting a broad and a deep perspective on that piece of my own existence is really valuable to me. The last few books also, one was called Seeds. The other was about fungi.
Gina: I just finished reading Braiding Sweetgrass.
Josh: I’m so glad you mentioned this because especially on a podcast moment, I can’t help myself. I read a ton and if there’s one book at this point in my life that I recommend absolutely everybody in the world should read and that would better the world, it’s Braiding Sweetgrass without a doubt. Thank you Robin Wall Kimmerer for your contribution to the world.
Gina: I just finished it and I’m so excited. It’s so good.
Josh: It’s so good. Her ability to weave together science. I mean, we’re talking real science that tries to investigate knowledge we can rely on in the world, her weaving of that perspective with the wisdom of indigenous storytelling and the relationship with the land and how this is tied together through what we get from the land to live and survive and continue all of that knowledge gathering and scientific process is just unbeatable. It’s a joy for the spirit, the soul, and the mind. She’s written another book [Gathering Moss]. It’s not quite the same flavor, but it’s a gift to the world, and others no doubt will attempt to emulate the craft, because it’s what the world needs right now. It’s so good.
Gina: I love that, I can’t wait to get into mosses. [laughter] I just said just so she hears. [laughter]
Josh: Great idea, let me know if she replies. [laughter]
Gina: Is there one piece of advice that you would give to a new professor at Hunter?
Josh: Yeah, you know, I didn’t grow up in New York City. I grew up in the burbs of Houston, which is a very different place. It’s not an entirely different place. It’s just a very different place. And I think again, my own biases from the question I want to ask about the world, sort of prompts me to say in this moment it’s absolutely invaluable to listen to your students, and it’s really important to recognize that you can’t listen to your students if you don’t ask them to say anything.
I think this sort of intimidation that a lot of people feel, a lot of new faculty, myself included, that I’ve talked to, that you’re now responsible, you’re now like this authority for knowledge and for bringing something to these students that they’ve never had before, and, you know, to some degree, that’s true. But if the focus and the entire direction of activity gets harnessed by that focus, we end up just standing up there, soliloquizing for hours and hours and hours on end, without really knowing whether or not that’s what our students, forget about want, but need in order to actually engage and get what we want them to get.
And so I would just say, and encourage, and suggest that, especially up front and in the beginning (beginnings are so important), that from the very beginning, we offer ourselves as an opportunity to engage. If we only offer ourselves as an opportunity to be listened to, and that’s like the mode of engagement, we really lose a lot of things from the get go. I think doing everything we can, whether it’s a welcome survey or an opportunity for students to introduce themselves, no matter how long that may take, even in a 400-person lecture, giving students opportunities to know, and through action, know that their voice is being heard in that room and that it’s being listened to by you as an instructor. And that you are listening to it and what it’s telling you, in my mind, the absolute core of teaching. It seems too receptive for this idea that we’re authoritative and responsible for, but it has to start there, there’s no other place, if we’re going to be successful.
Gina: I can’t think of a more beautiful place to end a podcast. Thank you, it’s been so wonderful, and I really loved meeting with you.
Josh: Right back at you.
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