 Hello and welcome. I'm Tracy Shailen, Distance to Education Coordinator at Southwestern College. And for today's webinar, we're talking about culturally responsive teaching online. We will be focusing quite a bit on this amazing book by Zareta Hammond and investigating how we can apply this to an online college environment. So first, I want to start with a definition of culturally responsive teaching. The quote that you see here on the slide comes from Zareta Hammond. And her book, Culture Responsive Teaching and the Brain, has really opened my eyes to lots of ways that we can apply some very important ideas about how the brain works and how students learn to our online environment. So we will be focusing on her for much of what we do during our time together today. But I wanted to start with this quote and talk about some ideas around it before we jump into some of the material in her book. The first quote is the process of using familiar cultural information and processes to scaffold learning. So a couple of important things in there. Cultural information, certainly so that students can connect to things they're already familiar with, but also cultural processes. In other words, thinking about how students are used to learning, how prior learning has taken place. Because a lot of times that does not match up with how traditional higher education expects students to learn. Scaffolding is also really important so that students can build on top of previous learning as they go through your course. And maybe your course can even build on previous learning outside of the course. The second part of this definition is that culturally responsive teaching focuses on relationships, cognitive scaffolding, and critical social awareness. So we already see scaffolding has come in again. Clearly, that's very important. I also want to spend some time today really focusing on that first part, relationships, because more and more research is showing that relationships are absolutely crucial to priming the brain for learning. And we'll be looking at a little bit of that research today, and I'll be providing you with some resources so that you can take a deeper dive after our short time together today. So culturally responsive teaching does not mean that you have to be an expert in all cultures. It doesn't mean that you have to have information about every possible cultural background of the students that may be in your class. It means that you acknowledge a variety of cultures and ways of learning. So you're tapping into the prior experiences of your students, even if you don't necessarily know exactly what those experiences are. One of the things that we can think about in terms of this is the way that different cultures approach learning. So in American higher education, actually just in general in educational institutions, we tend to approach education through individualism. So we look at things like individual merit and accomplishments, whereas a lot of the learning that has taken place prior to coming into our educational system is based in collectivism. It is community oriented. And so recognizing that and tapping into that is one of the ways that culture responsive teaching can really help our students learn. So it's meeting our students where they are. It is looking for ways that we can connect to what they already know, how they're already learning. Essentially, it's just customizing our teaching to our students. One of the key things in Zoretta Hammond's book is the ready for rigor framework. If you haven't seen this before, it is in her book, but it also is available online as a standalone document on her website. Her ready for rigor framework is broken up into four quadrants. And each one of these is a way that educators can think about about education in a way that can get students ready for the kind of rigorous critical thinking that they'll need to do to be successful in the class. So we're going to break this down and briefly just talk about each one of the four and then talk about how we could think about these concepts in an online environment. First one is awareness. And this is actually focusing a lot on the individual educators experience. Also, there will be some questions for you to consider if you look at this in her book, ways to identify what your cultural lens might be, ways to think about the different general types of culture. So this is where individualism and collectivism is discussed. There's some information in here about recognizing how the brain learns and how your particular brain learns and how your particular brain is interpreting things based on its experience. Due to the individual nature of this, I'm not going to delve into it too much, but this is a really important starting place when you're thinking about how to implement the strategies in cultural responsive teaching. The second one I'm going to dive a little bit more deeply into and this is learning partnerships. So one part of this is to reimagine the student-teacher relationship. We're used to that phrase, the sage on the stage, which is the way that traditional education has been offered for decades, maybe even centuries. And that is where the instructor's role is to present the knowledge and the student's role is to take it in. And we have been reimagining this for quite some time now because students can go to the internet to find that content. And so sage on the stage is not necessarily even needed anymore, but all the research suggests that it is not effective because students need to learn actively, not passively. And that sage on the stage is very passive. So in reimagining the student-teacher relationship as a partnership, in terms of culturally responsive teaching, it's also thinking about how the teacher can work with the student to make the learning effective. So it's getting to know who your students are so you can form an effective partnership. It also leads to the student taking increased responsibility for that learning because they are in that partnership. Another aspect of this is taking responsibility to reduce the social emotional stress that our students can sometimes experience, whether it's in a face-to-face class or an online class. And a lot of this comes from things like stereotype threat or microaggressions where the student feels targeted for some aspect, usually a physical aspect of their outer self and feels that they are going to be judged or stereotyped based on that. And that's very stressful and it can trigger that kind of fight-or-flight mechanism. It's not an ideal situation for learning. And so to really help our students focus on the learning, we need to make sure that we are reducing that stress and we're making it a safe space for learning and not a space where they're expecting to experience this stress. And then the last thing I wanted to spotlight here is the balance between care and push. So many of us have already discovered this is kind of that sweet spot for learning when we have students who really are feeling supported and are inspired to push a little bit harder in their learning. We know the importance of pushing our students to achieve, but a lot of times that push is not going to be received well if there isn't some trust and care along with it. The balance between showing students we're committed to them and we care about their success and then pushing them to reach higher levels. Really go hand in hand and I think a lot of us are very familiar with how to balance those two, but how do we develop that care and that trust in an online environment? Sometimes that's a little bit more challenging. And so when we move on to the third quadrant of the Ready for Rigor framework, we can really think about how we might want to approach that in an online environment. One key thing is to make sure that it is a socially safe place for learning. As we talked about before, reducing the sense of stress and a perceived threat in an environment is absolutely crucial. And making it a safe space for learning. And this can happen in things like setting up Medicaid rules so that your students have a clear understanding of what behavior is encouraged in an online environment like a discussion and what behavior won't be tolerated. When there are guidelines that say things like personal attacks are not allowed, that can create that sense of safety. And then, of course, modeling that and responding if the Medicaid rules are broken, those are all important. You also could consider a syllabus statement about your commitment to a safe online learning environment or how in this course you and the whole course will be respecting diverse experiences and diverse voices. So something where you're explicitly stating that this is an intellectual environment that's going to be valuing these types of interactions and also valuing diverse experiences. That can go a long way. And a related idea is after it's a safe space for students to contribute their ideas to make sure that you have room for them to use their voice in that online environment. So giving some of the control of the class to the students, creating assignments that ask students to actively participate in their own learning. That can be built right into assignments. We commonly do this with discussions where everybody's expected to contribute an idea. You also can do it with assignments that are project based where students share their project with the class. So the more space we have for student voices, the more comfortable they get contributing. But again, it has to feel like a safe space in order for them to really freely do that. And then the last area in our overview here is information processing. So a few things to spotlight in this part of the framework, providing an appropriate challenge in order to stimulate brain growth. There is a lot of research, which Zoretta Hammond actually cites in her book about how you can grow a brain's capacity to learn. And one of the ways is through productive struggle, through challenging assignments that are within the students reach, but push them a little bit to get there. And that is a really excellent brain workout. In fact, that's the kind of thing that we do when we're doing a body workout as well, right? We don't expect somebody to run a marathon their first time out running, but we may have them push themselves to run a little further each time. So providing challenges is really important to stimulate that brain growth. And then also providing authentic opportunities in those assignments. So when we talk about authentic, we're talking about real world opportunities, creating assignments that are mimicking what students would do in the real world for this kind of topic. In other words, not a multiple choice exam. They will not take a multiple choice exam in the real world. That can be part of your class certainly, but it's not going to do much for brain growth and helping students process that information and really learn it deeply. So providing a balance, maybe that could just check their comprehension, but then you also provide activities that let them try out these skills. So maybe it would be something like writing a report for a fake company and that would let them demonstrate that they've learned it by doing something that's a realistic assignment. Or maybe it is writing a letter to the editor or doing the accounting books for a fake organization using some fake numbers. So it's giving them opportunities to do field work within the class. And right in between those two on the framework is connecting new content to culturally relevant examples and metaphors from students, community and everyday lives. In other words, when you're teaching the content, find a way to make it relevant to your students. And this is specifically in terms of cultural relevance. So a lot of times the academic world can feel like a completely foreign environment for many of our students. Finding a way to connect what they're learning to something they're already familiar with is really effective. Brain research into how we learn talks about that quite a bit. We hook new information onto existing information to convert it to long term learning. So if you can think about culturally relevant examples that's showing students how to connect to things we're already familiar with. These could be examples from pop culture, from family situations, and it could also be wide open to let the students make those connections. So maybe we provide an example and then we let the students connect it to experiences in their lives. And then going back to the idea of giving students the voice to share what they've learned. This would be a great opportunity to do that. So they connect it to something that's relevant to them and then they share it with others. And so then students have all kinds of examples. And then the last thing I wanted to spotlight here is the importance of formative assessments and feedback. Formative assessments are ones that students can learn from as opposed to a summative assessment, which is often an end of the semester high stakes sort of assessment where we determine what grade they get or how well they've understood the information. Those can be very stressful and a lot of times students don't really accurately show how much they know in a summative assessment that's very high stakes. But formative assessments are usually pretty low stakes. They're not worth a lot of points. The goal is to see where students are in their learning, give them some feedback, help them correct their course that they need to and push them to learn a little bit more. So that is found to be very effective in getting students ready for more rigorous learning and reaching students from a variety of backgrounds. And then of course feedback is a major part of that. That's how the formative assessments become useful. They're getting some guidance to help them take control of their own learning. And it's also a safe place for them to take some risks too, because they know that if they mess up here, they're just going to be guided. They're not going to fail the course. Backing out from that framework, I wanted to share with you a couple of general culture responsive teaching strategies that Zoretta Hammond shares. And these cross over several of the different topics we've talked about so far. One of them is building authentic relationships. You don't have solid relationships with your students. If they don't feel like they know you and trust you, then a lot of what we just talked about won't happen. So if they don't feel like this is a safe place to learn and they can trust you to give them constructive feedback, they will not put themselves out there and take that risk. So that's why it's described here as the on ramp to engagement and to learning. So it all starts with building solid relationships with our students and we will talk about how to do that in an online environment. Acknowledging students diverse responses, diverse stress responses. So we talked before about how those stress situations can make it difficult for students to learn. It can also make them react in ways that we don't expect. I think we've probably all had the experience of a student responding really negatively to something we said and we're kind of surprised. It's really important to find out why, to talk about it with a student, try to get to the heart of what it is so that you both can learn from that. Because if you are unintentionally triggering a stress response in them because it's something you said, you really want to know that so that you can be aware of that for the next time, right? For the student, for another student. And the student needs to be reassured that you are in their camp and that you are supporting them. So talking through those kind of situations is really important and it primes the brain to be ready to learn. The third one is creating a community of learners and that's building on values of collaboration, connection, that collectivism we were talking about before. So creating a community of learners helps students work together, learn with each other, not feel quite so isolated. And then the last one is using brain research to increase the learning that happens in an environment. And this is especially nice to think about for online. Connecting new content to existing content as we talked about before. But one way that's really powerful to make that connection is using audio and visual. Those are ways that the brain is really primed to take in new information. It's not by reading. We were using our eyes and ears as human beings long before we had writing. And so using audio and video is a really powerful way to help students learn. So that could be an image that's anchoring some text on a page. It could be a video where you're talking to your students. And music is specifically mentioned here too. So maybe a video you're creating for students where you're talking about a new assignment. Maybe you have a soothing audio track behind it that's low but is influencing how students are hearing this discussion. Because a major assignment can be stressful and music could certainly increase that stress or hopefully decrease it. So you wouldn't want to play like the Jaws theme as you were talking about the new assignment. But something that's classical or inspirational certainly could help. OK, one area that I wanted to talk about a little bit going back to the importance of authentic relationships and community building is I wanted to bring in a little bit of research that's actually outside of this book on the importance of interaction in learning. So this was a study of community college courses as you can see here. They were looking at four elements of these community college online courses and the impact they had on student grades. So the fourth they looked at were organization and presentation of the material in the online class. Learning objectives and the connection of those objectives to assessments. Interpersonal interaction within the class and use of technology. So they wanted to see how these four impacted student success as measured by grades. And what they found was the interpersonal interaction was by far the most significant factor on student grades. So students who were in low interaction courses earned nearly a letter grade lower than those who are in high interaction courses. It made the difference of a full letter grade and here's the breakdown that you can see. So the ones that had little interpersonal interaction. This was the average GPA and strong interpersonal interaction. You can see it's nearly a letter grade higher. And this is just looking at grades. This is not looking at the student perspective, how they perceived their learning. There also is research suggesting that they feel like they learned more in an interactive class too. And so it's really important for students to feel like their instructor cared about their learning and was there with them on that learning journey. And in a face to face class, it's really easy to do this, right? Your facial expressions, your enthusiasm, your little side conversations with students to show them that you see them, you remember them, you're connected to them. That all just happens easily in a face to face class. So if someone walks in the door, you greet them by name. You ask them some detail that you know about their lives. And it's nothing you even think too much about, right? In an online environment, it really needs to be consciously developed and consistently developed. So when we're teaching online, we really need to build that instructor presence in a variety of ways. We're not really there at the door to greet them individually, but maybe we create an icebreaker discussion where we do have a chance to greet them individually. And then maybe we remember some details about them and we bring those into side conversations we have via email or in feedback on assignments. Those sorts of things are really powerful. All right, so I want to go back to Zoretta Hammond's book for a minute and talk about another concept that she has. This is actually a term that was coined by an educator in the 70s by the name of Judith Kleinfeld. And she looked at different educator personalities. And she divided the book into four different types based on a spectrum. And you can see the areas of active demandingness, meaning you're actively pushing students to achieve higher levels versus passive leniency. So their achievement is not a priority. And then the other spectrum here is personal warmth versus professional distance. And so using this as a framework here, we've got these four different types of educators. The warm-demander, the technocrat, the sentimentalist, and the elitist. So these are kind of fun to read through and think about characteristics of maybe yourself, maybe other educators that you know. But the one that I really want to focus on now is the warm-demander because that has been found to be the most effective type of instruction. So I wanted to go over a couple of details here and then talk about how we could think about being warm-demanders in an online environment. So we're going to come back and kind of break this down in a second. But I wanted to bring in a quote about warm-demanders, because again, remember this is a term that's been used in a variety of publications. Warm-demanders expect a great deal of their students, convince them of their own brilliance, and help them reach their potential in a disciplined and structured environment. There's a lot to unpack there, expecting a lot from students, but also convincing them that they can get there, that we completely believe in their ability to achieve those expectations. I think that's really critical because a lot of our students come in from a deficit mindset, not expecting to be able to do well, hoping to just survive. And if we can convince them that we believe they can do it, I think we've all seen the impact that can have on students. And then also having a structured environment to help them get there. So that leniency is really deadly, especially online, because it enables procrastination. It doesn't encourage students to prioritize the assignments that they need to work on in order to achieve those expectations. So I think that's just a beautiful quote. It really encapsulates a lot. Going back to Zoretta Hammond, I wanted to break this down a little bit with some color coding in terms of an online environment and how we might do some of this. The first on the bulleted list here describing a warm-demander is explicit focus on building rapport and trust. In other words, making it really overt, that one of your priorities is building rapport with your students, and you do that in a visible way in the class. And so some ways that Zoretta Hammond describes here expresses warmth through nonverbal ways. Okay, well already there's a challenge in an online environment, right? How do we express warmth in an online environment? So some of the examples here are tone of voice, good nature teasing. Those things are tricky in a text-only environment, right? Sometimes what we think is funny, students might not interpret as funny if it's text-only. Teasing could be interpreted as very negative and critical by a student. So one obvious solution is to incorporate some more audio and video to make that easier. But there are ways that you can convey a warm tone in writing, too. And there are some very important places to do that. So one really important place to pay attention to tone is the syllabus. Because for many students, that's the first document for the course that they have. That's their introduction to the course. And I think a lot of us traditionally have looked at a syllabus as a place to put all the rules. But if you think about it as a student's introduction to the course, is that really what you want them focusing on are all the rules? And oftentimes those rules are written in really negative ways, right? They've been necessarily written by us. They're just policies. And policies are not warm by nature. So one thing that we can do when we're looking at our syllabus before each semester starts is think about how we can revise it to make it match more with how we actually feel about teaching the course. So to try to warm the tone up a little bit, maybe create a welcoming statement at the very beginning of the syllabus. In the policy areas, see if we can build in a little bit of that confidence we have in our students, our excitement about the subject matter, that sort of thing. And then all the week one communications are really important as well. So think about the welcome letter you send out to your students before the class starts. What kinds of things can you put in that welcome letter to really convey to students how great this class is going to be, how excited you are to work with them. Think about the words you can use that will convey that warmth and that enthusiasm. And you also could make a video too, and you could include a link to it in that welcome letter. So a lot of us send our welcome letters out as email to students because our Canvas course isn't open yet, or we open the course a few days early and we send it out as an announcement. In both of the situations, you could send a link to a website that you have for students or a video that you've made for students. So there are lots of possibilities there. The second bullet talks about how you can show personal regard for students inquiring about events and people in their lives. In other words, showing that you see them as individuals. You know, a lot of students assume that their online instructors are basically just computers, their classes on autopilot. It's not really taught by anybody. Maybe it was built by somebody, but it isn't really actively being taught. Somebody isn't there to answer their questions and respond to their emails. I hear that with surprising regularity, not necessarily on our campus, but about online learning in general. So getting to know our students early on can really help show them that we have a real instructor here, not just a computer. Icebreaker activities are a really common way to do that. One thing I like to do with icebreakers is take notes on each student as the icebreaker unfolds. So if it's a discussion in Canvas and students are sharing some information about their experiences or their interests, I'll jot that down. There's even a place in Canvas to do that. In the gradebook, you can activate the notes field. It lines up right next to their information on the left-hand side of the gradebook, and you can make that column as big or small as you want, and you can type information in there. The students can't see it. It's only visible in the gradebook view. But it's a really great way to put down some notes about your students so that when you are working with them, you can remember those things about them and bring those into the conversation. Another way to show students that we really see them as individuals is to use their individual names. Use their names in discussions, use their names in messages and emails. In discussions, their name is right there, right? So you might think, well, I don't need to refer to them by name. I'm replying to them. Obviously they knew who I'm replying to. But sometimes students can think that those are just cookie-cutter responses. If you use a person's name, it really says that you see them. And so look for opportunities to use a person's name. Something I picked up from Michelle Pekansky-Brock from Out One is putting a student's name in the subject line of an email. So if you're reaching out to a student who hasn't been responsive in your course, you want to contact them by their college email, put their name in there. Say, so-and-so, please respond, or so-and-so, just checking in and seeing their name in the subject line can really grab their attention and make them think that it's not just a form letter you're sending out to 20 students, it's actually for them. Holding high standards is another key because so far we've talked about the warm part of a warm demander, but there's also the demander part, right? So holding high standards, sharing your confidence that students can reach those standards is really essential. And it's essential to do it early and often. And it also is really essential to help them get there that you scaffold those assignments. So you build parts of the assignments on previous parts versus just saying, you have a major term paper to do at the end of the semester. It's worth half your grade. Be sure to turn it in by the last week of the semester and then never talk about it again. That's just setting students up for failure and really stressing them out. But if you scaffold an assignment where they do small step after small step and they experience victories along the way with each small step, then you're really helping them be successful. And they're still getting to that impressive final product at the end, but they got there step by step. Scaffolding is more important in an online class than a lot of people might realize because in face to face class, we're doing a little bit of scaffolding just in how we talk about things with students, right? We introduce something by reviewing what we did at the last class meeting in an online environment that might not happen as often. And so scaffolding deliberately building the assignment into parts is a really good way to do that. And then the last thing on this list for a warm demandor is being viewed by students as caring because of personal regard and the tough love stance. Thinking about how you can show students that you think they can do it, but also give them some challenge, make it something that they can really feel proud of when they're done. So building that productive struggle into the assignments, pushing them to go a little bit beyond what they feel are their abilities, what is in their comfort zone. Pushing them to go just a little bit further, but expressing confidence that you're sure that they can do that. That's where the learning really starts to take off. So that warm demandor is something to think about something to inspire to something to try to make more overt in our online classes, even if we might feel like we're already really doing it pretty effectively in our face to face classes. And along with this idea of the warm demandor who is setting up these achievable challenges and supporting students by making sure that they know that we are confident they can do it. That's really building learning capacity in the brain. And one of the ways that we get there is by establishing that warm part really early. In other words, letting them know from the beginning that we're there to support them and that we believe they can do it. Because otherwise the demandor part just kind of falls flat and can even cause students just to drop out. So one of the ways that Zareta Hammond suggests that we do this is trust generators. So this is the last big topic that I want to talk about from her book. Trust generators, she says, are universal in their ability to help us feel an instant sense of connection. These are things that build an instant connection with somebody and we've probably all experienced them before. We just feel like this is a person we can trust. We're not even really sure why it might be one of these things. In fact, it very likely is one of these things. Selective vulnerability, which we're going to talk about. Familiarity, a similarity of interests. So someone who asks questions of you to get a sense of what you're interested in and then connects to those interests. So you feel like you have something in common with them. Concern and competence. So a lot of times in instruction we're obsessed with the last one, right? I need to make sure that my students see me as competent as learned as an expert in the field. But if they don't feel like they can connect to you, then that's just intimidating. So that's the demandor part without the warmth. So the first part of this list is really, really important. And the one that I think we underestimate a lot of the time is selective vulnerability. So I wanted to talk about that one, especially what it is, how it works, how you can build it into an online class. So here's another quote from the book. People respect and connect with others who share their own vulnerable moments. It means showing your human side that is not perfect. Think about how you do that in a face-to-face environment. Are there ways that you show some vulnerable side of yourself and that endears people to you? Are there times where you have acknowledged that you made a mistake with your students or you're sick and you come to class anyway and you hardly have a voice, so you're whispering and your students love you for that. Why? Because you're sharing a vulnerable moment with them. You're not feeling well. You're not looking great either, but you're there because they are important to you. And that really shows through. Or what if you share a story of a difficult, challenging experience with students to show them how you can get through those and get to the other side. They really value that you're sharing that with them and they feel more connected to you. To give you an example, I think that we are all very familiar with. What about the emails that we get from our superintendent president? Usually weekly, sometimes a couple of times a week. How many of Kendra's emails display that selective vulnerability? She talks about the challenges that she has faced, the struggles that she has faced in trying to do some of the things that she's asking us to do. Or she'll talk about what she did over the weekend. For example, recently about the challenges, the personal challenges of moving her father into an assisted living environment. So I've never had that conversation with her, but she shared it with me by email. And I still remember it. It really impacted me. So I feel now that I am more connected to her because of that. And that happened entirely through text sent over email. So if we think about how we can build selective vulnerability into an online environment, Kendra does a great example of that. To dig a little bit deeper into this, people respect and connect with others who share their own vulnerable moments. So if we're asking our students to be vulnerable, it's important that we are willing to be vulnerable too, to kind of model that for them. So one way you can do that is you can use video to let students get to know you, let them see who you actually are. And in that video, be willing to show some imperfection. If you make a mistake, if you trip over a word, don't throw it out and start over. So laugh at yourself and move on. That shows them that you are willing to share yourself with them and that they are important enough to you that you're not going to let a mistake stand in the way of connecting with them. Taking risks and talking through those risks with students is really important. For example, if you are a language instructor, tell your students about experiences you've had in learning a new language. What were some of your struggles? What were some of your failures? How did you work through those? How did you learn from those failures? Those are the kind of lessons that really stick with students, but it also shows them your human side and it models for them what they can do. Along those lines, embracing mistakes is super important because if we want students to make mistakes and take risks as they're learning, we need to do that for them as well. In fact, make a mistake on purpose just so you can admit to it, just so you can talk about it with them. If they see that you are a human being who makes mistakes, they are much more willing to make mistakes of their own and learn from them. So I just cannot emphasize how important that is. Another really valuable one in an online environment is to share stories with students. We do this in the face-to-face classroom all the time. We tell a little story that is relevant to whatever the lesson is for the day or relevant to what the students are working on. We let students into our lives a little bit so they can learn from that story. Sometimes we don't make space for that in an online environment because things are developed ahead of time and a lot of times those face-to-face classroom stories are spontaneous. So the advice here is to look for places to build those stories in. Maybe you're making a video to welcome students to the class. Can you tell a little story about your experience when you took this class as a student? Or an experience you've had as a teacher of this class so that they get to learn a little bit about you and a little bit about the class through that storytelling. You can do this in an icebreaker discussion as well and if you start sharing stories then students feel comfortable sharing stories and that's how you really get a community going. And then tying into that last part of this quote showing the human side of you that's not perfect, I think it's really important to have a mantra like this. Choose the real over the perfect. You always want to be real with students rather than perfect with them because they don't get anything from perfect. Perfect makes it seem like your class is being taught by a computer or by a newscaster who always looks perfect on video. They'd much rather have a real human being who can help them because they are real human beings as well. A real human being who makes mistakes can help them when they make mistakes. So it'll be much more comfortable learning with us when they see us as humans and that's what selective vulnerability does. It doesn't mean you have to share everything about your personal life. It's selective. It's things that you think would help your students learn. So there is a bit of strategy in there, but it also really creates a lot of community with your students and once they trust you, they're really willing to to work hard. So that was a lot. We threw a lot in here. I have one more thing that I want to share with you just as a something to think about and then we're going to open this up to discussion. And so this is something new that has been developed and is starting to be used in our community college system or at least discussed. This is the Peralta Equity Rubric. Peralta Community College District has developed this rubric called an equity rubric that is designed to help online instructors build equity minded concepts and strategies into their courses. And so it ties in a lot with some of the stuff that we're talking about here. We're not going to go over all of it, but I did want to point out a couple of areas to you. So section two of this rubric, diversity inclusion, course content activities and instructor statements consistently demonstrate that diversity is valued in the course. It goes back to what we were talking about earlier with how our syllabus can be an opportunity to convey our warmth, our enthusiasm and our value placed on the student voice. There it is right here in this rubric. Images and representations in the next one present or reflect diversity. So that's going to counter that sense of stereotype threat and stress that we talked about before. And then the last one in this list here, human interaction bias, student or instructor demonstrates self reflection of their own biases. How powerful is that kind of vulnerability? If you're talking about bias in your class and you share an example of your bias, that's really going to have an impact on students. The second page of this rubric has a focus on content, on personal connections with students as we've been talking about on universal design and lastly on student support. So this is a great way to concretely approach some of the strategies that we have been talking about here. So if you wanted to download, kind of try it out with your course, apply it and see if there are any places where you're finding some ways to improve. This is not an exact overlay with culturally responsive teaching, but this equity minded approach does have several similarities with the cultural responsive teaching. So with that, I wanted to make sure that we have plenty of time to discuss some of your ideas, some of your examples, some of your questions. So let's see here, giving feedback using the audio recorder and speed grader, getting much more response back from students, and it is a rich area for vulnerability since I speak spontaneously. That's right, you can make a mistake, you can say your ums and those become endearing. I saw that Maria in the chat said Zoom, absolutely. Zoom is a really easy way to meet with students, groups of students or individuals, and it lets them see the smile on your face, see the concern if they're telling you about a challenge they're facing. And then they feel like they've really been heard, they've really connected with somebody. We have Viara saying voice thread is really helping to connect. Yeah, voice thread is a really good way to get that tone of voice effortlessly, both for the instructor and the student, because if you have the option to easily communicate in audio or video, students will choose it if it's easy. And so in voice thread, with the click of a button, you choose if you want to type something, if you want to speak it, or if you want to use video. And, you know, an interesting thing that that brings up is we talked about how important it is for students to get to know us as real human beings. Sometimes we need to get to know our students as real human beings too. Right. If we only see them as a name on a page that earns a certain grade and turns into a certain kind of work, then we don't see them as a complete human being. And in a face to face class, we that happens naturally but in an online class sometimes we might not understand everything a student is going through and or really understand who the student is and audio and video can really help us do that so I get how voice thread would have that impact. Well, we are out of time. Thank you so much for joining us today for this really important discussion. I have the feeling this is just the beginning.