From the Top

A couple years ago, I wrote a post about joining a local community band. After taking 35 years off of playing the trumpet, I decided to dust it off and join a band. At the time, I wrote about being terrified for the first practice. I literally had nightmares about being shunned from the group. Of course, that didn’t happen. I was welcomed by the group and have enjoyed being part of a band again.

Now it’s two years later and I’m still plugging away. I do my best to practice regularly and have even taken some lessons to work on my playing. I’d like to say that my playing has vastly improved, but learning (and relearning) things after three decades away hasn’t been easy. But the nightmares have (mostly) subsided.

Our community band is only active for about eight months of the year. To prepare for summer concerts, we start practicing in mid-April and meet weekly through the end of August. We take a few months off and then convene again in mid-October to start preparing for Christmas concerts. The band convened a few weeks ago to start preparing for this summer and we’re working through a host of new music. I’ve never been very good at sight reading. It usually takes me a few takes (or more) to get the hang of a song so these first few practices are always the most challenging for me. If you’ve never played a musical instrument, the best way I can describe the feeling of sight-reading new music is that it’s sort of like being on a fast-moving bus in a foreign country. I’m barely holding on and I don’t always what stop we’ve reached. I could ask someone nearby but I don’t want to feel foolish for not knowing the language. Thankfully, the feelings of sheer terror start to quell after a few practices.

I’ve been thinking a lot about last week’s practice. We’re working through the movements of Gustav Holst’s Second Suite in F. It’s a challenging piece, and we’ve been spending a few weeks working on it. In the first few practices, we focused on the first and second movements and we’re starting to get the hang of it. This past week, we started working on the third movement which has some tricky notation and timing. It’s also an upbeat movement, which adds another degree of difficulty to the music. Our first time through the movement was a mess. Returning to the bus metaphor, it’s like the members of the band were on different buses in different countries and we were all moving at different speeds. Midway through our first effort, the director stopped the band and chuckled. He suggested we try it again from the top.

And this is the part that I’ve been thinking about. Our second try was better, but not by much. We made it a little further in the song, but it was obvious that we weren’t all on the same bus yet. During our third try, we got a little more coordinated. By our fifth or sixth effort, it sounded cohesive. We were playing together and the music was starting to sound the way it was supposed to sound. I was really impressed.

Certainly, we still have a lot of work to do, but our development so far has been dramatic. And that’s the part that I’ve been reflecting on. As a teacher educator, I spend a lot of time talking with my students about different learning theories. I’m a big believer in social constructivism, which views learning as a process that occurs through social interaction and through the help of others. One key element of social constructivism is the zone of proximal development (ZPD). ZPD can be defined as the space between what a learner can do without assistance and what a learner can do with guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers. While I teach my students about ZPD and we talk about the power of learning in groups, it’s another thing to experience it firsthand.

A Beacon of Hope

Like many colleges across the country, my university held commencement ceremonies recently. This is a time for celebration and reflection. It’s a time for looking back at the journey taken and a time for looking forward and envisioning the road ahead. As an educator, I’ve always enjoyed attending graduation ceremonies. I enjoy rites of passage that mark endings and new beginnings. I enjoy the pomp and circumstance, the regalia, the procession. It’s a moment of tradition that honors academic transitions.

The speakers at this year’s commencement ceremony included several individuals with diverse and challenging backgrounds. For instance, the moment of reflection was given by Roberto Jose Lopez Adrian, a graduating student who was earning a master’s degree in social work. The commencement speaker was Dr. Tamara Willis, an alumna of our university, who serves as the superintendent of a local school district. In his speech, Mr. Adrian talked about arriving in America as a teenager. He had left his home country of Venezuela to escape political instability and economic hardship. Through his hard work, resilience, and determination, Mr. Adrian became an American citizen and earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees. He credited education as being “a beacon of hope illuminating the path to a brighter tomorrow.”

While her circumstances were different, Dr. Willis shared a similar message in her speech. Dr. Willis talked about navigating various forms of trauma in her home life to become the first member of her family to obtain a college degree. Dr. Willis credited her first-grade teacher, Mrs. Jennings, who recognized her potential and had her tested. Mrs. Jennings “saw promise where others might have seen only barriers.” Through Mrs. Jennings’ work, Dr. Willis gained access to accelerated learning opportunities that would have otherwise remained unavailable to her. Dr. Willis highlighted the “transformative power of education” and how teachers can be “beacons of hope and agents of change in the lives of students.”

These were important messages to hear.

At first glance, it may not seem like I’d have much in common with these individuals and their inspiring stories. Both speakers were people of color who overcame great personal challenges to achieve academic success. Unlike Dr. Willis and Mr. Adrian, I grew up in a middle-class suburban environment where higher education was always assumed to be part of my future. But their experiences still connected with me, not only because of their powerful stories of triumph but because they reflect my family’s past. Let me explain.

My father was the first member of his family to graduate from college. Unlike me, his pathway to higher education was never assured. He arrived in America when he was five years old. Because he had spent his early years in Italy, my father couldn’t speak, read, or write English and was held back in elementary school. Despite coming to this country for a better life, my father’s family lived in extreme poverty. My grandfather worked in a coal mine and my father told stories of his family needing to trap animals for food.  Despite these challenges, my father was able to graduate from high school. Because his family couldn’t afford to send him to college, he enlisted in the Air Force where he taught Morse Code. After leaving the military, he went to college on the GI Bill and worked nights at a glass factory to pay for his expenses. After years of hard work, my father earned a degree in electrical engineering and worked for decades in the field.

My father’s experiences and achievements aren’t dissimilar from those that Dr. Willis and Mr. Adrian shared. Each overcame unimaginable challenges and persevered. Education was a beacon of hope to them. And while I didn’t experience the hardships that Dr. Willis, Mr. Adrian, or my father did, my life and the opportunities available to me are largely the result of the benefits that education offered to my dad. When people say that education is a beacon of hope that can transform lives, they’re not just talking about transforming a single person’s life. That beacon of hope, when answered, can reverberate through the lives of one’s sons and daughters. It has the power to resonate for generations.

To read the full transcripts of the commencement speeches from Dr. Willis and Mr. Adrian, go to: https://www.millersville.edu/commprogram/9am-ceremony/index.php

The Smartest Person in the Room

There are a lot of times that I’m in meetings where I think someone is clearly dismissing the perspectives of the other participants in the group. A person will share some great idea and somebody will quickly spout out a bunch of reasons why the group shouldn’t consider it. Even worse, there are times when someone won’t even acknowledge any other ideas or perspectives being shared and just steamrolls their positions onto the group. In those moments I think, “This person clearly thinks they’re the smartest person in the room.” It may not be a fair assessment or observation, but a person’s actions can telegraph how they view others. And themselves.

This post isn’t about those people. It’s actually about people who aren’t like that at all. A few months ago, I was invited to join a group that was considering how generative artificial intelligence (genAI) could be used in doctoral programs. The group included a handful of people who already knew each other, and I was the newcomer. I won’t name-drop the group members here or go through their resumes or anything, but these are smart folk. Book authors. Academic leaders. Recognized scholars.  Any one of them could easily have qualified as the “smartest person in the room.” But none of them acted like it. They were warm, welcoming, and collaborative. They provided space for each other (and me) to share ideas. We respectfully challenged each other and contributed alternate points of view to make our work stronger. Ultimately, the group came up with something novel and we collaboratively wrote a manuscript that should be published in the next few months. We’re also meeting again next week to discuss other work we could do together.

Groups like this don’t form often, and I’ve been marveling about it (and our work) for the last few days. Recently, I came across a quote that best captures my thoughts.

“The smartest person in the room is the room itself.”

When I first encountered this quote, I did some googling to find its source. The quote is credited to David Weinberger who shared the sentiment in his book, Too Big To Know. After reading some posts on the quotes, I now know that Weinberger was referring to how technology can be used to networks of people to share ideas, but I think it also captures something bigger. There’s a power in smart people getting together and putting aside their egos and accomplishments. The sum can be greater than the parts. The room can be smarter than the smartest of us.

We just have to provide space to let that happen.

Demanding or Officious

I’m still working through my pile of papers and grading. So, please forgive this rerun from June 2022.

As part of my summer reading adventures, I’m rereading The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching (Gooblar, 2019). This is the third time I’m reading the book and I’m noticing that different parts of the book resonate with me each time I read the book. A few colleagues got together last summer to read the book as a group, and I wrote a few posts then about the different things that stood out. It seems different parts are getting lodged in my brain this time through.

Maybe it’s just based on some recent experiences I’ve had, but this particular passage has forced me to reflect on my decisions as an educator. In Chapter 4 of the book, Gooblar writes:

“I think it’s possible to be a demanding professor without being an officious one. You can care about your students and make allowances for them without fear that they’ll walk all over you. It is precisely because our students are not young children that we can be lenient sometimes, allowing extensions and makeups on a case-by-case basis, showing them that we care more about their learning than about whether they checked all the boxes.” (p. 123)

I’ll admit that I had to look “officious” up. Here’s a definition I found online:

officious (adj) – assertive of authority in an annoyingly domineering way, especially with regard to petty or trivial matters.

That definition outlines one of the challenges I wrestle with as an educator. How can I be demanding without being officious? But Gooblar’s quote presents another challenge I often wrestle with. How can I be empathetic and offer grace, without having students walk all over me? I’d like to say I have the answers, but if you’ve been reading my posts for the last ten or so years, you know that I don’t. Take this situation with a graduate student I worked with recently.

This spring, I taught a capstone course in our graduate program which involves students creating and implementing an action research project. The course is a six-credit class that involves a ton of work. The students develop research proposals, complete training in research ethics, write literature reviews, collect and analyze data, and report on findings. It’s a sixteen-week course that I’ve compared to “eating an elephant one bite at a time.” To that end, I’ve attempted to build a comprehensive, scaffolded experience for students that makes the huge task a little more digestible (if you’ll pardon the pun).

The students in this graduate program are all practicing teachers. If you know any teachers, you know how difficult the last year or two have been. Teachers were dealing with increased pressures and stress due to changing schedules, changing modalities, learning loss, COVID outbreaks, administrative changes, and so much more. And those challenges and stresses regularly spilled into my graduate classes. Throughout the semester, I’d offer extensions and grace to students who were having difficult weeks.

One student, Jamie, was having a particularly rough semester. Besides their teaching stresses, Jamie (not their real name) was also dealing with some family issues. I won’t describe the issues here, but they were significant enough that I offered Jamie several consecutive weeks of grace in the capstone course. At one point midway through the course, Jamie emailed to request that they be excused from all remaining deadlines for the semester. They would work on the course and the action research project as they were able, but promised they’d finish by the end of the semester.

Recognizing the monumental task of completing the action research project independently, I explained that their plan would unlikely lead to their success in the course. Instead, I offered Jamie the option of an incomplete. They declined, which is where the real challenges for me began.

How do I be demanding without being officious?

How can I be empathetic and offer grace, without having students walk all over me?

I’d like to think that I navigated these challenges well, but I’m certain Jamie would say otherwise. As I tried to steer Jamie back to “eating the elephant” in a more digestible way, my overall focus was on their success in the class. I’m happy to report that Jamie completed their action research project and got an A in the class. But it certainly wasn’t an easy semester for them or for me.

Later in Chapter 4 of The Missing Course, Gooblar writes:

“The authority to unilaterally decide on how we teach our classes, I would argue, comes with a responsibility to explain and justify those methods to our students. I view it as an ethical necessity—I’m going to take up a substantial amount of their time, ask for a substantial amount of their effort, and assess them on my terms. At the very least, I should have good reasons for doing what I’m doing.”  (p. 127)

Interestingly, this quote shows up in a chapter titled “Teaching the Students in the Room.” I just wish Gooblar had offered more advice for explaining and justifying our practices when the students in the room are dealing with a global pandemic, family issues, health crises, or more. Especially considering that while words like demanding, officious, empathy, and grace may be easy to define, they look differently depending on which side of the teacher/student exchange you’re on.

Mounds of Papers and Feedback

I’m bogged down with lots of grading and stuff, so I’m pulling out this post from the 8 Blog archives. This post was originally written in March 2022 but it still captures a lot of what I’m navigating today. Enjoy!

I’ve been navigating the perfect storm of the semester for the last few weeks. I don’t know how it happened, but my courses aligned perfectly (or not so perfectly) so that the students in all of my classes were submitting major assignments at the same time. I probably should chalk it up to poor planning on my part, but I’ve been spending a lot of time providing feedback on student papers and their revised drafts.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that I’ve written about feedback a bunch over the last eleven or twelve years. Personally, I subscribe to Wiggin’s Seven Keys to Effective Feedback which outlines that for feedback to have an impact on student learning it must: be goal-referenced; be tangible and transparent; be actionable; be timely; be ongoing; be consistent; and progress towards a goal. I know that’s a lot to address, but basically it means doing a whole lot more than writing “Good job!” on a student’s paper. It involves setting a clear target for students and providing clear, actionable feedback to help students work towards the target. Reflecting on the feedback I provide to my students, I feel like I meet this standard pretty consistently.

The frustrating part for me is that sometimes I’ll provide feedback to students and won’t see that feedback addressed in future revisions. For most of the assignments in my classes, I allow my students to revise and resubmit their papers for better grades. And while I’ll provide detailed feedback on ways to improve their work, I won’t always see that feedback appear in students’ revisions. Some colleagues have advised that I shouldn’t grade those papers where students have ignored my feedback. Others have suggested that I have students write a revision audit outlining how they’ve specifically addressed the feedback I’ve given in their revision. If you’ve ever submitted an article for publication, this type of audit is common after receiving feedback from reviewers. Despite my frustrations with some of the revisions my students submit, I’ve avoided incorporating these policies. Honestly, they just sound like additional barriers that students need to circumvent to revise their work. I want my students to revise their work. But I also want them to incorporate the feedback I provide.

This morning, I was scrolling through my Twitter feed and came across an article from ASCD titled Getting GREAT at Feedback. Initially, I didn’t think I’d find anything groundbreaking, but then I read the byline to the article: “The key to feedback is how it is received by the student.” That prompted more reading. In their article, the authors, Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey, offer a unique perspective on feedback. They write:

“However, a common misunderstanding is that it’s all about the amount of feedback given—and the more the better. But the key is actually how the feedback is received by the learner. The relationship between the person giving the feedback and the one receiving it is paramount in terms of how much ‘gets in.'”

To better address how feedback is received by students, Fisher and Frey offer a different feedback model that “forges trust, helps the hearer sense a positive motive, and is clear and informative.”  Drawing on work by LarkApps, they offer the GREAT model for effective feedback. I know, it’s kind of a corny acronym, but the dimensions are pretty thoughtful.

• Growth-oriented: The delivery signals one’s intention as constructive, focused on improvement not criticism.
• Real: Feedback is honest, targeted, and actionable (showing the speaker’s grounding in the area in question), not vague or false praise.
• Empathetic: It combines critique with care and a quest for mutual understanding.
• Asked-for: The speaker encourages the receiver to ask questions and seek more feedback, after offering brief comments.
• Timely: It’s delivered soon after the task or learning is demonstrated. Feedback gets stale fast.

Reading through this list, it may sound similar to Wiggin’s Keys to Effective Feedback. From my point of view, however, the main difference is the intentional focus on care, empathy, trust, and relationship building, which makes a lot of sense. People are more likely to receive advice and feedback from people they trust. Although I’ve never done anything to make my students distrust me, I also haven’t explicitly attended to these areas in my feedback, either. If I believe teaching is about relationship building (which I do!), I have to apply that mindset to all areas of my work, including the feedback I provide.