 So the chapter today deals with a critically important aspect, which is essentially community building. And Jeff, you're going to take us through our few-minute synopsis here of the chapter. I see that we already have a slide ready to go. So Flora is yours, Jeff, hit it. Tell us about this chapter. Alrighty. So I took this chapter because I've realized for a long time that community building in classes is crucial. And I've done a lot over the years to try and do it. And I remain terrible at it. So just sort of backing up years, there was this book called I think it's called What Matters at College, which was this giant longitudinal study done in the US of university students. It was basically a correlation fishing expedition where they did this big longitudinal study looking at many, many different things and just tried to look for correlations with everything. And sort of surprising to the people doing the study, just about the only thing that seemed to matter was the degree to which students form functional peer groups during their degrees. And so I read this years and years ago, and ever since I've been saying, well, OK, so why don't we do more in our classes to deliberately foster a formation of peer groups? And like I say, despite trying a lot to do it, I think I'm still pretty awful at it. Anyway, so the sort of underlying theory here is Vygotsky, good old stuff, zone of proximal development. And in this sort of newer framework for thinking about it in terms of a community of inquiry, there are sort of these three prongs, cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence. And I've tried to sort of put that, hang on, why is this not going? There we go. In more plain language, right? Give students stuff to talk about, give them opportunities to do that in real human interactions, but structure it all in a way that still leads to your course objectives. So the chapter is full of various recommendations for how to go about this, and in particular, how to go about it in an online course. So they talk about introductory posts, which I tried last term and got zero buy-in from my students, but that's probably because I made it optional. And as we all know, anything you make optional, no students will do. I did a Meet Your Instructor video discussion prompts, having online discussions going and not just sort of tossing it out and saying, OK, well, here's a place for you to post, but actually having prompts and that you have to participate in the discussions so that there's an instructor presence in it and so on. And again, if it's optional, no one will do it. So presumably you need to have some sort of incentive, being aware of diversity, so monitoring and looking for various signs of students marginalizing other students. I liked this suggestion of name stories, and in particular, part of what I liked about it, and my phone is just reminding me of my next thing, part of what I liked about it is getting every student in the class to tell their name story, because I find, of course, a lot of the time, we're teaching students and we have the students with names that we know how to pronounce, Mike, Sarah, and so on. And then we have our international students and we fumble with their names and eventually sheepishly ask, can you help me pronounce your name? And it draws attention to those specific students' names, whereas if you just start out with name stories for everyone, then you can get that pronunciation guide, but not single out particular students. And then the overall advice that's always good advice in any teaching, I think, be kind. So they talk a lot about deadline extension policies and actually use exactly the same words for it that I do in my own courses, where I have what I call get out of jail free cards. I like the term they use, oops, certificates or oops, tokens or whatever. I might actually switch to that. It's less of a mouthful than get out of jail free card. All right, there's my five minute. I don't know whether I went over five minutes, but five minute summary of the chapter. Perfect. Does anyone want to add some things to that? Floor is open for anyone who wants to add some summary. Yeah, no. I think Jeff has an uncanny ability to touch on the main points there, because the last part is around that idea of some compassion and conveying support. The really interesting point is that those three presences are great. If you think about balancing those out in some way, I think you're getting to the heart of how to create this community in a asynchronous environment. Asynchronous, well, you're there. You're present, but it's easy for the instructor to disappear. Social presence can be bolstered by teacher presence. So those two can kind of meld together really nicely. So I thought that was really important. And they also mentioned a couple of other books like that are very specific to creating strategies for creating that that I kind of highlighted. So I wouldn't mind taking a peek at those just to see if you can write a whole book on creating community. Actually, I have exactly the same thing. I've got a highlighted thing that says creating engaging discussions. I'm reading through, I have a physical copy of the book, but I've actually, you can't see it because it's being eaten by Microsoft, but I have a physical copy of the book, but I actually reading the online one because it's so easy to cut and paste. And so I just keep a running text document here. And yeah, there's a lot of, in theory, summer reading that's going to happen. Good, good, good, yeah. One thing I wanted to add is just to emphasize maybe a different dimension of something that Jeff had pointed out. So the idea that the chapters started with of these three kind of components of building that zone of proximal development with the teaching presence. The way it was framed, I think, was a little bit more active and I think should be a little bit more active in the sense that the actual, the titles, and I think the titles are important here, were reveal your personality and convey caring and support. And that's the, I mean, those are, they should be part of the teaching, obviously, but that active effort to do that, to actively project yourself in and to not just be caring, but to convey caring. So there is an active performance involved in that, right from the very beginning, where you let your students know that you are the kind of person they can. So it's one thing to respond with empathy, but a student isn't even going to ask for understanding unless you have actively conveyed that you are that type of person. In the same way as injecting as much as possible into your course, who you are as a human being. And part of that for me is that I'm a first gen student. And as a result, I'm a lot more, not just tolerant, but directly understanding, because I was a terrible student. I had a lot of stuff going on when I was in undergrad and I messed up a lot. And so it would be unfair of me to require a different standard than I did. On the other hand, there were times when I could have had a sterner hand and I did sometimes from professors and that combination of stern support and understanding is really what got me A's in a lot of classes as opposed to the grades I don't wanna talk about, A's classes. But that active effort to project yourself into the course as a human being, right? Who is fun and has a personality. And it doesn't have to be, I'm the hilarious guy. It can be whatever your personality is. Like don't try to be someone you're not. But whoever that person is, but that person is a person who cares and he was listening and is actively there to help. I think that active engagement is a really important part of it that I took out. Anyways, it was one of those actually affirming things where you're reading through and you're like, oh man, I'm doing this already, right? This is great. Show that, go for it. I was just gonna say like building on that. I had a similar reaction in the sense of doing it. One of the things that I've not really struggled with for a long time, I definitely struggled with it early on in my teaching career. But I teach performance studies, I teach communication. So it's sort of built into the content in some ways that you kind of from day one try to build community, at least if these are the kinds of classes in a certain kind of community you're trying to foster. What I noticed is I think I'm pretty good at building community. I don't know if it's always as connected to the goals of the course, it's connected for me, I don't know if it's a parent that it's connected to the goals of the course for the students. And so I think that that point about not just conveying empathy or even caring or conveying your cultural responsive teaching, but also being more transparent about that, I mean, not explaining every single element of everything, right? But making sure that your students understand like, so I have, I don't call it an oops token, but I'm definitely gonna think about that as a way to process what I already do, which is I read something in the Chronicle a couple of years ago that was basically about ditching deadlines. And I was like, well, that's a little much, I don't know if I need to ditch them entirely. But one of the suggestions was to have for one written or turned in kind of assignment per term, your students get a three-day no questions asked grace period. And what they have to do at the end of that three days is contact you and say like, hey, you know, it's almost done, I'm gonna have it to you tomorrow or I'm really, really still struggling with this for X, Y or Z reason and they don't have to go into great detail, but you try to help them through it and students have responded so positively to that even when they don't use it, right? They've said things like that's so, you know, it's a relief to know that that's there in a moment when life happens and, you know, I don't have to kind of ask or, you know, what they probably perceive as big for an extension, I just have to let you know what's going on, you know, or let you know that I'm struggling. And, but the oops token adds the layer of like an action that they have to do as opposed to just sort of automatically not turning the thing in. So I'm really, I'm really interested in how I might use that. That's right, it was a long winding road sometimes. I don't know, that's good. Yeah, I don't know. I had some reservations about the oops token, but I'm open to it. I am maybe too accommodating. I try to start the class by projecting sternness because you can only, you can't, you can't, you know, get that back, you know, you can only move down from whatever your point is. It's impossible to get harder as you go along in the class. So I give them a talk about, you know, how I'm going to have deadlines and stuff, but I never actually enforce them except for like, you know, a final exam or something. But even then, if someone comes along and they have a legitimate excuse and that legitimate excuse can even be, you know what, honestly, I just lost control of the class for a while. It doesn't have to be my dad got cancer, which I've had a number of students legitimately like that. I had to fly back to India because somebody got, you know, somebody has a brain tumor. I mean, I've had those actual excuses, but I've also had the excuses that are, you know, not technically acceptable, but are 100% understandable. You know, I just, I don't know what happened. I just kind of lost control of the course for a bit. And if any student ever comes forwards and projects an interest in succeeding, I always give them the opportunity and usually without significant penalty. And I don't know, I mean, I guess that most of my classes are small enough. If I had a 300 person class, that would probably be total chaos. And you'd have to just be a hard ass on it. Otherwise everyone would take advantage. Maybe it's the combination of the fact that I start every class by doing the things that we have in here and saying, look, I'm a real human being, et cetera. But I haven't felt like deadline extension-y stuff has been exploited. In fact, to the opposite, I feel like more often at the end of the class will come along and I'll be like, why didn't you just reach out? You know, we could have fixed this. But I mean, I do definitely have students who come along and, you know, they haven't done things for half a class and then they show up and they say, look, I just want to do goodness. I admit, you know, I don't know, I got bummed out, you know, I just have been having a rough semester. It doesn't have to be something. It could just be, I mean, that's not delegitimized. That is legitimate. I was depressed is a legitimate excuse, even if it's not clinical. It's just, I was in a bad place. So I don't know, I haven't had to invoke any kind of token kind of thing. And I worry about students, I worry about that kind of creating a stigma in that you have to, I don't know, and maybe this is a made up worry, but the idea that you still have to acknowledge wrongness kind of, you know, there's an additional barrier where you have to go and walk in with a, you know, with a red scarlet letter on you or something, which is the uke's token. Maybe that's not the case, but I just, I worry that that might be the case, rather than just, it's an additional thing where you have to have a badge, like a literal thing that you bring in, rather than just being like, hey, can I have some help? So here's how, and, you know, this depends on, this can depend on how you sell it. So the way I put it is, yeah, no, if you've been ill or you've got a death in the family or any excuse like that, no, you don't need to use an uke's token or I call them get out of jail free cards, but I think I'll call them uke's tokens from now on. No, those are legitimate reasons for missing a deadline or whatever and just tell me, and I'm gonna give you an extension, right? And I record an extension and discuss the extension with the student and say, you know, if you're still not gonna be able to make that date, then keep me posted and, you know, we'll further extend it to the extent that that's possible. But the get out of jail free cards are the no questions asked. You just have, you know, for any reason, you know, basically, I give them two, right? That you have two times during the course when you can just miss a deadline with no excuse and have no penalty for it. And, you know, there are certain, I put certain restrictions on what they can use that on. So, because, you know, there are certain things that I really want them to get done on time because, you know, physics is one of these disciplines where everything builds on the thing before it, right? And so, if they get behind on certain things, it just becomes irrecoverable, right? So I put some restrictions on what they're allowed to use their get out of jail free cards on as opposed to just, you know, with a legitimate excuse getting an extension. But I tell them, you know, this is partly because you need, well, I tell them partly, it's because I'm kind of crazy and you're, I'm giving you way more deadlines than you probably have in any of your other courses and it's hard to manage and you're gonna miss some. So here, you can miss a couple and have no consequence to help you balance things, right? So that's how I sell it. And I think the students appreciate it and seem willing to use it. And yeah, so I do get students still coming and saying, well, you know, they tend to come and say, well, you know, this happened, I wanna use a get out of jail free card and I'll come back and say, no, that's a legitimate excuse, no card required. I've recorded an extension, right? Right, but it also is like sort of teaching them in a way not that they don't necessarily know, but like that in the work world and in sort of culture generally, like if you, like we're asking you to be responsible, we're not asking you to be an automaton, right? And so, you know, we're treating you as the human being that we want you to eventually become, right? And we're remembering that you're a human being, but I think there's lots of different ways to do that. And I think that's sort of the core of this chapter, right? Is like, we're teaching human beings and that can be hard to remember online, but also that's not the orientation that higher ed has always had, right? I mean, it sounds ridiculous to say that, right? We've always been teaching humans, but that's in, you know, at least in my opinion, that's not like we're not often or always treated as humans, right? As faculty, right? We have all these demands and expectations on our time. And so the whole system, like this is this sort of a shift in orientation. Yeah, I'm gonna throw things over to Patrick in a second, but just before I wanted to make a quick comment for directly at faculty, I might be listening to you guys as well, which is that this is all obviously focused on students and, you know, how to create the student experience, but my personal experience is that a lot of these steps in projecting empathy, revealing yourself as a human being, that humanization is actually really good for the faculty member because the more likely they are to recognize, I've actually even had people write this in evaluations that you're the kind of teacher who makes us want to work for you because we don't wanna let you down because they have that relationship with you. And the same way as like, it doesn't matter if you blow off a, you know, an AI program or something, you know, one of these MOOC kind of things, there's no real human beings there, but you don't wanna let your friend down, you know? I might say that you have to be best friends, but you don't wanna let a person down who you have respect for, right? But in addition, I mean, I've messed up seriously in classes, like drop the ball on things, right? And the more people recognize that you're trying your hardest, including even just being straight up and honest and being like, you know what, COVID's rough on us too. I was up till three in the morning last night. This is gonna be a bit of a rough lesson, but we're doing our best. They are so much more understanding of the little blips and, you know, missions and roughness and all of that. And it gives you a context where you can experiment and you can mess up and everything else, where if they view you as a human being who is honestly doing your best, right? I found it like about a selfish level. It helps the valuations and everything as well as just helps them to be more open to things you'd like to try that are experimental, et cetera. I just wanna jump, no comments. I wanna jump into Patrick and give him a chance to speak to this. In particular, Patrick, because you're the one here who actually is not just an educator, but an educator of educators, right? So in terms of building communities of practice and this sort of thing, what advice would you give to your students who are gonna go out and be doing this full-time? You know, they're gonna be people trying to create permanent classrooms. I mean, they're even covered in classrooms as an education professor. No, exactly, exactly what you're saying is that it is a very relational undertaking, right? You have to connect with your students. I'm gonna just give a minute and then I gotta jump to an hour. Yeah, absolutely. We only have three minutes left. We're gonna jump to an hour. But to say that, and oftentimes we can reveal ourselves as we become more confident, right? It's really difficult. All these little authoritarian kind of ticks that we use and being the sage on the stage, it's about being vulnerable. As you said, Jason is about showing yourself. It's about connecting with people one-on-one. But also, you know, if you wanna use your, get out of jail-free cards and your oops cards, you know, that fits with your personality. Jason probably wouldn't do it. Jeff does, it works for him perfectly fine. But yeah, you build confidence, I think, and in the confidence you become more human, more able to connect with students. We often default to those authoritarian stances, right? I have to be rigid. They'll run right over me. It's about control. And we find that, and to your point, Jason, students appear evaluations, self-evaluations. I find students harder on themselves than I would be. Hey, it's not that bad. You did pretty good on this and that. You have to talk them down sometimes. So it's not just every kid's gonna give themselves 100%, and this will just fall apart. You have to take some risks, show who you are, be authentic, and generally, most times kids respond and you can build that relationship. That's what we try to teach teachers in training for sure. Fantastic. All right, well, that's a great spot to stop and we're right at 11.59. So next week we've got Patrick, you're gonna be leading the discussion. And if anyone wants to come into the discussion underneath this where we're posting the video to talk about maybe some things that you've done that have helped build community in your classroom, I'd really love to hear some of those examples. And otherwise, we'll see you guys on Tuesday. Excellent. See you. Bye, Patrick.