 Okay, we're going to get started. Good morning, good morning, and good afternoon, and good evening, and good late night wherever you might be. It's great to have you guys here. Welcome to Digital Pedagogy Lab 2020, our very first online event. I have to say this is just a little bit strange for me. I'm normally at this point, standing in front of an auditorium full of people and the energy is fantastic. But I know out there beyond the screen where all of you are, the energy is great. So it's so good to have you here. We're going to start off today with our keynote, our opening keynote from Jesse Stommel. And before we get going though, I just wanted to say a couple of words about sort of what's available here in the webinar. We will be, this is essentially a Q&A session. So Jesse's going to talk for a little while, but then we're going to really get right down to questions and answers. So we're really here to hear from you as much as to hear from Jesse. So if you look down at the bottom of your screen, you'll see there's a little Q&A, with two little thought bubbles or two little talking bubbles. And you can just jump right into the Q&A and pose questions there. Behind the scenes, I've got some folks helping out. We've got Naomi De La Tour here, who's one of the faculty teaching Education Agency and Change. And I've got Stephanie Che, who's the event manager for Digital Pedagogy Lab. And she's going to be helping me with the Q&A side of things. You're also welcome to use the chat to introduce yourself to everybody here and to talk to other participants. That's all good. If you pose questions in the chat, I'm not sure they'll get seen. So it's a really good idea to use the Q&A. If you want to be, if you want to actually raise your hand and speak to Jesse, at some point, your mics are automatically muted and only I can unmute you. So if you have a question, you want to actually speak to Jesse, go ahead and just raise your hand and I'll unmute you and you can just talk. So we're not real formal here. So yeah, so the Q&A piece, raise your hand if you want to and then you can use the chat to talk to each other. Right now we've got about 175 people here. And I think we're expecting a few more. So but people will sort of trickle in as they can. So I hope that everything's going well for you all. I do want to just remind you if you have any questions, if anything's going on that doesn't seem quite right, just let me know, reach out to me and we'll do our best to help. I will address really quickly that there's a lot of folks who are having a hard time getting into their courses in discourse. So those discourse spaces are not locked. There's nothing wrong. What's going on is that until you accept an invitation to discourse, I can't add you to your course in discourse. So what happens is you accept it, then I can add you, but I can't add you constantly throughout the day. So every now and then I'm going in and I'm adding people. So you will get in. If you haven't been able to get in, just we'll take a little bit of time. Okay, so without further ado, I will introduce, I want to introduce Jesse Stommel. Jesse is, for me, Jesse goes without introduction. I mean, he's been my colleague for almost 20 years now. We've been working together in a variety of capacities across academia, in digital learning and in instruction design and critical digital pedagogy. We both worked, both managed the hyper pedagogy journal. We founded digital pedagogy lab together. We've been working together for a very long time. Jesse is one of those people though that I owe so much inspiration to in my own work. And I know that there's, one of the things that Jesse is really good at is offering help to other people, offering inspiration to other people, offering support to other people. And he's one of those folks who sort of stands out there and puts himself out there in front so that we can all sort of see what might be possible. Jesse is known for sort of generating the whole idea around critical digital pedagogy. He does a lot of work currently in ungrading. We've both been very active in the work around the pivot to online. And it's just been a really wonderful time working with him for this long. So currently, Jesse has actually just recently moved from the East Coast to Colorado. And I think he doesn't even have all his boxes unpacked. So it's kind of amazing that he's able to offer a keynote today with all of that, with all those circumstances. So without further ado, I'm gonna go ahead and put Jesse on the screen and I will be quiet. Here he comes. Hi everyone. It's good to see you. I am indeed living inside a giant, giant pile of cardboard boxes. And my three-year-old daughter is wreaking havoc, which means she loves to help, unpack boxes. She has recently found a large, large box of Legos and the Legos are now strewn about her room. It is actually a really wonderful thing to try and unpack boxes and have a three-year-old, basically always keeping you sort of two steps forward, two steps back. It helps you realize how important it is to just pause and think about your space and think about the joy you can have in your space and not the getting things done. And I actually think there's a metaphor in there about designing online courses or preparing for the fall. I've been really vocal about the fact that I don't feel like our institutions have given us the space or time that we need to really plan for fall. So many institutions have left their faculty and their students up in the air about what fall is going to look like. And I feel like that has created a space where we don't necessarily know how to move forward. And we're trying as best as we can to build, design, plan, emotionally prepare for the fall and feeling like the world is constantly moving beneath our feet. That we talk about the idea of the pivot. The one thing I can't stand about this word, pivots, is it suggests a sort of neat and easy turn, one direction. I'm actually in a desk chair, desk chair's pivot. I don't really think teaching and learning pivots in the same way because desk chair pivots and then it immediately can pivot back. That's not the kind of situation that we're in. The situation we're in is feeling like we have unsteady ground beneath our feet. And I actually think that what we need to do at a moment like this one is pause and think about, just sort of look at the ground beneath our feet. Look at the Legos that are strewn about. Don't try and immediately pick up the Legos and put them back into a box because they're probably gonna come right back out again. And so rather than thinking about how we can just build this perfect thing for fall that is going to be absolutely marvelous and it's gonna withstand every test or turn or trauma honestly that we experience as we move into teaching in the fall, I think better to sort of assess where we are and to make sure that we're being patient and honest and careful with ourselves as much as with our students and our three year olds and our friends and colleagues. So I am a little bit bewildered because I just moved, I traveled 1,800 miles with a three year old, a dog and a cat, but I am here with you now and I'm really, really glad to spend this time with you. I'm gonna be kind of watching the chat as I'm talking a second, I'm gonna pull up some slides. I will kind of be keeping my eye over on the chat. It's not really possible to both talk to all of you and keep myself inside of that conversation, but I love watching what's happening over there. I love seeing it out of the corner of my eyes. It's so bizarre to speak to a room full of people and not to be able to see any of those people. Honestly, that movement that I'm seeing over on the right hand side of my screen is the people that are still there. I will let you know that the text that I wrote for this keynote is available on my blog at jessestommel.com. I also tweeted it earlier today and it's also cut and pasted into the description of this keynote. These slides are there as well. So there's a set of slides. There is what I'm gonna be saying to you right now, which is also being recorded and then will be added to those various places. And then there's that text. I'll let you know that those three are all going to be different from one another. The slides tell one story. My post, my article I wrote tells another story and what I'm gonna be doing with you is gonna be yet another story. It can't be the same story and the reason it can't be the same story is because you're all here with me. So this is really gonna be guided and shaped by the things I see out of the corner of my eye and also based on the questions. So I'm gonna pull up some of my slides, which sort of, and I'm just gonna talk through some of the points from the posts that I wrote and use this as a jumping point, jumping off point to our discussion. I'll probably only talk here for about 15 minutes and then open it up to Q&A. I may skip some of the slides on the fly because really it'll be driven by the moment and what I'm seeing out of the corner of my eye, where it seems like, where it seems that you need us to have time to talk through together. And with no further ado, let me share my screen there. I think you are now seeing me and also seeing my slides. The interesting thing that happened is it's always fascinating to watch the architecture of these different platforms because the interesting thing that happened when I pulled up my slides is that immediately the chat went away. I'm gonna see if I can get the chat back as I'm working here, but I may just not have a chat so that I am just gonna imagine that that wonderful word is happening over on the right hand of my screen even if I can't see it. But I mean, the thing is that I think that we really do this work together. And so when I titled this talk and I titled this article that I wrote, I don't wanna suggest that we shouldn't have conversations about teaching and learning and that we shouldn't learn from one another and we shouldn't be inspired by one another and we shouldn't share our best ideas and we shouldn't take those ideas and modify and adapt them for our own classroom. I think what I'm pushing back on in this talk is I'm pushing back on our individual and our institution's desire to create models, templates that can easily be copied and adopted institution-wide. So the issue for me is not necessarily the models themselves, but it's the way that we interact with models, the way that we imagine there can be a one-stop fix, the way that we imagine there can be an easy, again, an easy pivot, an easy way to shift your course from face to face online that someone out there has already figured out the 10 steps that you need to take. And if you follow those 10 steps, you will end up with the perfect online course. The reason I wanna push back on that is because teaching is hard. Teaching is emotional labor. Teaching is work that we do from our hearts as much as from our head and work that we do from our bodies as well. It's not work that can be easily digested into 10 neat and tidy points. I've never created a model for online digital or hybrid pedagogies. As long as I've been teaching and as long as I've been teaching teachers, I've encountered, been flummoxed by and have cast off models. I have yet to see a single pedagogical model worth its salt. Learning styles, blooms, taxonomy, addy, scaffolding, design thinking, quality matters, androgogy, high flex, lists, then diagrams, rubrics, templates, six principles of androgogy, five stages of addy development process, six levels of blooms taxonomy, 42 review standards of the quality matters rubric. I'm actually getting breathless for two reasons. One is because that is a litany of words that feel heavy, that weigh me down as I read them. I'm also getting breathless because I just moved from sea level to 5,200 feet. And so I have not quite caught up with being able to breathe and speak. Josh said that the reason, because Josh, my husband, Josh, he said, I'm not having that much of a problem breathing. And then he realized, oh, that's because you are doing this teachery voice thing. And using that teachery voice requires a little bit more air than my other registers. So one of the issues with these models is that they get adopted and then they get used and spread without much interrogation. And I actually think there's something really great to be gained from looking at these models. So it's not necessarily that we throw them away altogether, but I think inspecting them and investigating them and asking critical questions of them. So even if we do decide to cast them off, as I said in one of my early slides, I think it's still useful for us to look at them and look closely at them and ask us why they exist and what function that they're serving. Why were they invented? Whose interests do they serve? Learning styles is a good example of a model that has been pretty widely debunked. No less than, and yet, no less than 71 different models of learning styles have been proposed over the years. But psychological research has not found that people learn differently, at least not in the way as learning styles proponents claim. One of the issues with learning styles models and really any of these models is they try and take something like a human being learning and put it in an eating time box and try and describe it and break it down into four categories or five categories or even 12 categories. And that doesn't really align with how human beings actually engage with their worlds in sort of complex ways. And ultimately, don't we want our students to engage the world complexly? Don't we want to engage our students complexly? Isn't that what's sort of at the heart of the work that we're doing? Nevertheless, in two online experiments with 668 participants, more than 99, 90, not 99, 90% of them believed people learn better if they are taught in their predominant learning style. So even though a theory has been widely debunked, there are nevertheless 71 different models for learning styles being spread and shared. And 90% of people surveyed in this particular study believed that learning styles were valid. I will be honest with you and I've done the cold learning inventory and I used to do it with new teachers when I led a faculty development seminar. I actually liked doing it and the reason I liked doing it and I liked having us talk about it was because it opened a set of conversations that we might not have had otherwise. What I don't appreciate is the way that these are shared and used without an eyebrow raised at them and the way that we just drop off of our tongue, oh, I'm a visual learner, oh, I'm a kinetic learner. When if we actually sat with that idea, we would realize how much more complicated our learning is which is, well, I seem to learn kinetically sometimes and I seem to learn visually some other times. There are certain things I like to learn in one way and certain other things I like to learn in another way. When I'm learning with a teacher, I like to learn this way. When I'm learning by myself, I like to learn another way. So the idea being that these neat and tidy boxes that we put it in don't allow for that kind of introspection and that kind of observation that we can make. This is Bloom's Taxonomy. So Bloom's Taxonomy is actually the first model that I encountered. I encountered it when I took my first faculty development seminar, which then a few years later, I ended up leaving that same seminar. Bloom's Taxonomy from the first second that I saw, I was suspicious of it and I think the reason I was suspicious of it is maybe because it looks too cute, maybe because it looks too easy, maybe because it's breaking things again into such neat and tidy categories. I'll tell you, I love rainbows. My husband loves rainbows, my daughter loves rainbows. I don't necessarily know what the rainbows are doing in this particular case. I don't think that they're doing the work that I want them to be doing. You Google image search for Bloom's Taxonomy and you see what kind of shapes that these take and you see how a simple idea, which actually, I mean, if you go read some of Bloom's early work, there's some interesting kernels there and some interesting kernels that I think have been lost over the years, but you can see how easy and how watered down this gets from one iteration to another, how easy it is to move this from one shape to another and that somehow that change in shape is meant to change the way that we think about it. One of my issues with Bloom's Taxonomy is that it's hierarchical. Each level of the pyramid is supposedly built upon the level below. So you can't create or evaluate until you first remember and understand. I'm certain my three-year-old would take issue with that. And in fact, I think it's really interesting to think about the way that she moves to create before she gets to those other stages and that actually the creation is the thing that helps her get to the lower levels. So I've always wondered about turning Bloom's on its head. Interestingly, the metaphor, the visual metaphor, doesn't really work that way because literally as a pyramid, the lower levels support and hold up the higher levels. And also the lower levels are huge whereas the top level is really tiny. So as a visual metaphor, it actually takes creation at the top and makes it the smallest thing that necessarily depends upon everything else below it. And so I think that we need to inspect not only our use of these, but also how we depict them and think about what story that we're telling when we spread these different models. Ultimately, models like Bloom's, I believe are a distraction from the hard conversations we should be having about teaching and learning. And I don't think that's an accident. I think one of the reasons that, again, teaching is hard, the work is hard. Coming together socially for social learning with our colleagues, with our students, those interpersonal relationships are hard. And when you think about a moment like this, a moment where we're in the midst of a quote unquote pivot, a moment when people around us are suffering, a moment when we or people close to us, our students are experiencing acute trauma. It's, I don't know how else to say it, except that it's hard for things to be hard and that we look for answers that might make it easier for us. We don't necessarily, our institutions don't want us to, and sometimes we don't wanna have the hard conversations because, frankly, we're tired and we're experiencing trauma in many cases. While there is more direct attention to design within online learning circles, there's also even more reliance on models and packaging of best practices. Best practices which aim to standardize teaching and flatten the differences between students are anathema to pedagogy. The most egregious example is the quality matters rubric. I think one of the reasons when we turn to online learning, we are in many cases moving into a kind of teaching that we're unfamiliar with, our institutions have concerns about the shape of online learning and how online learning will change the nature of their institution. So to some degree, we take on a defensive posture and that defensive posture causes us to look for armor and these models serve as a really effective armor. The other thing that they do is they serve as a kind of, a kind of performance, a kind of performance of rigor, a kind of performance of knowing what we're doing. Shawn Michael Morris has famously said many, many times that the key to thinking about online learning is to recognize that we don't yet know what we're doing. I actually think that that's the key with all teaching and all pedagogy because every teaching situation is different and so recognizing that we don't yet know what we're doing and that we constantly are in a place of not yet knowing what we're doing is important and these models I think frustrate our ability to sit in that place of not knowing. The quality matters rubric. I've seen the quality matters rubric. I've been familiar with it for years. I've pushed back on it and critiqued it in various ways for years. The reason that I'm pointing to it right now is I've seen the quality matters rubric being used to, being used as a sort of answer, a solution to the problem of the pivot to online. And I think it's a very odd solution. I think it's an odd solution because it is an extraordinarily complex model, 42 or 43 points on the quality matters rubric, which I'll show in a second. The other reason that I have concerns about quality matters as an answer in this particular moment is evident right here on the page in some of the marketing copy from their website. The quality matters is grounded in research driven by best practices, a community that puts learners first. And as you continue to read the quality matters quality assurance system. Immediately I take issue with this word quality assurance. I think I take issue with it because teaching is a place of constant iteration, constant change and constant risk taking and failure and constantly looking at your philosophy and re-imagining your approach on the fly. I also just some of this language that quality matters delivers the promise of online learning. One of the things that I think is important for us to do is to investigate what these tools whether it's quality matters, whether it's Zoom, whether it's the learning management system to look at these tools and look at what they say that they're doing and to find the places where what they say that they're doing veers away from what they actually are doing. And I think that there's some of that going on in this quality matters marketing copy. It's promising something that I can't imagine it actually delivering. My biggest concern right now is the way I've seen quality matters and it's rubric being presented as a solution to emergency remote teaching. If a teacher with no experience working fully online has been asked to shift all their teaching into an online or hybrid format, dumping a 42 or 43 item rubric in their lab really isn't going to help and it will likely do harm. When we look at this, the rubric itself, I honestly, I pulled this up on the screen and I immediately, I sort of brace for a sort of impact. I step back a little bit. I'm overwhelmed by it. It even just looking at it visually, the rubric suggests that online teaching is something that is impenetrable. It suggests that online teaching is something that some expert in some other room has some amazing understanding of and that if you work through these 42 or 43 points, it's 42 points for the higher education one, 43 points for the K through 12. If you work through these steps and collect your points over on the right, what you're seeing on the right is the point value of each of these items on the rubric. So you collect points for each point value and then your course is certified and you are voila, after working through these 43 points, an excellent, amazing online teacher. To me, this frustrates teachers' entrance into the work of online learning. And then when I drill in and I look a little bit more carefully at some of the points on the quality matters rubric and I wonder what I'm looking for, what kinds of phrases and what kind of words that I'm looking for. I wanna just point out the accessibility and usability section. 8.1, the course navigation facilitates ease of use. Immediately I think ease of use. Ease of use, is that a phrase that I would connect with the sort of visceral emotional embodied learning that I was describing? Ease of use is not necessarily a phrase that I would valorize in my pedagogy. The course design facilitates readability. The course provides accessible text and images in files, documents, LMS pages and web pages to meet the needs of diverse learners. I think it's extraordinarily important that when we're putting stuff online, we're thinking about accessibility issues. We're thinking about whether or not disabled students or students with learning differences are going to be able to access that material. I don't wanna undercut that, that's very important. And yet I don't see how this by itself meets the needs of diverse learners. This is also the only place in 8.3 and 8.4 where that word diversity is used and accessibility is only used in connection with these very mechanical system based aspects of course design. And then if I go up a little bit and I look at number 6.4, number 6.4 says the course provides learners with information on protecting their data and privacy. There's a couple of issues that I have with this. One, the course provides learner with information. So the onus is on the students to look at that information and then to make decisions about how to protect their data and privacy. I think it's important that as teachers, as institutions, we're doing the work of helping protect students' data and privacy, that we're not shifting the onus on the students to do that work themselves. Yes, we should be sharing this information to students but we also need to be doing that work as teachers designing courses. QM promises efficiency and objectivity but actually creates more work and merely provides cover for all the biases and subjectivity that continue to exist and are left unchecked in spite of the rubric. None of this is to say Bloom's taxonomy or the quality matters rubric have never ever been used to support good pedagogy. My point is that these are not the first places we should be turning as we begin to imagine what online and hybrid learning could be, especially in a moment like this one. There's another place that I think that we should turn. This is a really wonderful resource and there's lots of different examples of things like this. Things that actually ask us to consider hard questions about what it is to be a student in a moment like this one. This is a trauma-informed approach to teaching through coronavirus from the Teaching Tolerance website. There is a link to this in my post that I shared. The items on this, and when you go look at this, in some ways it's a rubric. It's a series of lists separated into categories but it never feels easy. It never feels pat. It never feels like a neat and tidy solution. Instead, it is a bunch of very practical suggestions but that are oriented towards getting us as teachers, as administrators, as instructional designers, to be thinking about who our students are and to be adapting our courses on the fly to meet the needs of our specific students, not the hypothetical students that a lot of pedagogical models are trying to build for. Establish a routine and maintain clear communication. There's actually some words and phrases on this guide that are very similar to some of the words and phrases that I see on the Quality Matters Rubric but their term, they have a different focus. This is maintaining clear communication and it's aimed at building community. It's aimed at helping students feel safe and helping students feel a sense of psychological safety. Relationships and well-being should take priority over compliance. If you look at Quality Matters Rubric, if you look at the way Blooms is often administered, compliance ends up being a very important key feature of those models. It actively encourages and supports a sense of safety, connectedness and hope. Hope is a word that appears, I think, 11 times in the trauma-informed approach to teaching through coronavirus. It's not a word that appears even a single time on the Quality Matters Rubric. Last, acknowledge that trauma is not distributed equally. Our students are not carbon copies of one another. We can't create one pedagogical approach that will meet the needs of all of our students and right now we need to be doing that work as Borcosky and Ross write the new instability and isolation within our current environments contribute to an evolving and unstable sense of belonging for students, teachers, leaders, and parents. And that sense of belonging is utterly important to the work that we do inside of a social learning environment. For me, flexibility and trust are key principles of any pedagogy, but they are particularly important when we're in crisis. We don't need models that are predetermined. We need instead to think about how we can develop approaches that can adapt on the fly to the specific students that we're working with. And we have to design for the least privileged, most marginalized students, the ones more likely to have felt isolated even before the pandemic. Disabled students, chronically ill students, black students, queer students, and those facing housing and food insecurity. We need to write policies and imagine new ways forward for these students, the ones already struggling, already facing inclusion. As Kathy Davidson writes from everything we know about learning, if the trauma is not addressed, accounted for, and built into the course design, we fail, our students fail. And as Sarah Goldberg-Rabb and I have written, we need to design our pedagogical approach for the students we have, not the students we wish we had. This requires approaches that are responsive, inclusive, adaptive, challenging, and compassionate. And it requires institutions find more creative ways to support teachers and prepare them for the work of teaching. This is not a theoretical exercise, it is a practical one. So my pedagogical model, it's simple. Single sentence, how many words? I'm gonna count them, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 words, a single sentence, 10 words, pedagogical model, stop looking for models and begin by talking to students. Thank you. Great, thank you so much, Jesse. There's all applause in the chat, that's so adorable, I love that. Yay, so much applause. I think that counts as a standing ovation, there you go. This is great, so thank you so much. We do have some questions in the Q&A. I know there were some questions too that came up in the chat, so hopefully we can get to those as well. I noticed that in the Q&A folks are voting up questions, which is great, that's one of the ways that we make sure that the questions that need to get addressed get addressed. I'm just gonna start actually from the top here with Faye's question for Jesse. How can we change our institutions that expect teachers to adopt and reproduce established pedagogical models versus developing emergent pedagogical practices? I think I actually talk about this a little bit in the piece that I wrote and didn't talk about it just now, but there's a way in which one of these, one of the things that these models do, and this is one of the issues that I have with the way that I see quality matters being used at specific institutions, is that idea of quality assurance. What it is, is it's a way for the administration to measure the performance of the teachers that work within that system. And I think what it does is it creates an environment. It creates an environment where teachers feel like they have no productive ways forward. They have no way to push back without serious risk to their own livelihood on the approach that they're being asked to follow. There is not wiggle room or space for improvisation, play, creativity for a teacher to design a course that doesn't look like any other course. And I think that we need to, whether we're using quality matters or not, if your institution has adopted it, I understand that when these models get adopted, that it's hard to feel like you have any way to resist. And that especially if you're a contingent faculty member or an adjunct or precarious in some other way or a marginalized teacher who's having your teacher inspected or evaluated more carefully, more, I'm trying to think of the word for surveillance, but it's hard to know how to push back. And so I think what we need to do is be asking institutions to make sure and asking the designers of these models to make sure that that wiggle room is built into the models themselves. Great, cool. Next question. Actually, we have a hand up. So I'm gonna let Xan actually ask their own question if that will work. Hey, this is Xan. And I had no idea I raised my hand. But, I said. But I really wanna know, I often, I teach undergraduates at a small rural, predominantly white institution with a lot of first gen students. And they, and sometimes their parents really want something that is pretty, looks like pretty much everything else that they've ever known. And convincing them that it's worth the risk and experiment to go along with my crazy ideas has been a little bit of a rocky road. I never have gotten like the, like, oh, best teacher of the year, forget about it, you know? But it's not that that's what I'm aiming for, but yeah, learning is hard. And I don't know how that I try to be upfront about that, but it's, yeah. So I don't know. I would love to hear your thoughts about the pushback, not from administration so much as from students. Thank you. Well, if we're talking about giving students voice, when students voice their desires and wants and needs, we need to listen to those. On the other hand, one of the things that I think is important for us to do is to talk to students about the status quo and the effect of the status quo on their lives. For example, I don't grade in my classrooms and I haven't for many, many years. I do have to give a final grade, but I don't put grades on individual assignments. And I know that if I walked into a classroom on the first day of class and said, do you all want to be graded? The answer, I'm guessing that in most cases, more than half of the students would say that they do want to be graded because there's too much uncertainty for them. And so I think that one of the things I try and do in my own teaching is make sure that I'm reassuring students at every step of the way that I'm not gonna pull the rug out from under them, that there may be some uncertainty, but that we're gonna work through it together. And I think reminding students that you're not gonna pull the rug out from under them is super important. The other thing that I do because so much of my teaching is grounded in experiment, play, embodied pedagogies, is sort of bringing our full selves to the work of the classroom. Is I make sure that the course itself, that whatever platform it's in, how it's arranged, how I structure any class period, that there's a lot of care taken to develop routines and develop sort of so that the shape, so that the container of the course, the website I build looks orderly, so that students sort of can look around and say, okay, I see where I am, rather than feeling like they're constantly adrift. And that's something that they talk about on the Trauma-Informed Pedagogy website. They talk about using routines and having a sense of clarity, having a sense of psychological safety. That doesn't mean making things easy and doing exactly what all of our students want to do. Instead, I think what it do is it's about making sure students feel like they know where they are. They feel like they're not on unstable ground. They feel like you're there to essentially keep that ground in place. At this moment, that's super hard. I found that in the spring, probably 60% of my job as a teacher was just constantly, every week, sometimes multiple times per week, reminding students that I see them, I'm there for them, the ground is still beneath their feet as much as it can be in this moment. And I am actually recognizing the need for me to do that even more, even in semesters where there's not a pandemic. Because what I'm seeing more than anything is that the number of students that are feeling that uncertainty, like the rug could get pulled out from under them, is extraordinarily great right now. But I think that this moment is also revealing a lot of uncertainty, trauma, marginalization that was just going unchecked before. And not necessarily in my classroom, but yes, also in my classroom. Great, so we have a couple of pans up, but I'm gonna actually jump over to the Q&A real quickly and ask a question from Susanna, who's over in Finland. She says, I was wondering how the theory in practice meet, for example, an online course that will have about 100 students or more, and let's say I have five such courses running at the same time. How will I ever manage to listen to and hear all of the students? Any ideas, suggestions? What I have done is delegated a lot of the listening to each other, to small groups, and they always have a lot of students working and interacting in small groups, even for online courses. However, some students felt it's not enough, or they want more one-on-one time with me. Yeah. A couple of really good examples that you offered already for how I make that work as well. One of the things that I do when I have five, when I have five sections of the same class, and I have taught five sections of the same class, when I have two sections of the same class, three sections of the same class, when I'm teaching online, I find ways to combine the sections, because when you're teaching face-to-face, combining sections is really complicated. You have to get a new room assignment, you have to figure out the timing, but when you're teaching online, combining sections can be extraordinarily powerful. I actually like, I don't think that anyone should take what I'm about to say and go run and raise the caps on online courses. I think that 25 is a really good cap. Shouldn't be 35, it shouldn't be 70, it shouldn't be 100. But my personal preference is actually to take multiple sections and combine them so that I do end up with 60, 75, 90, 100 students. The reason I like doing that is because there's lots of ways to create interest groups. When you have a critical mass, you can create optional activities and you'll get enough students doing the optional activities to get a critical mass and you can also create, you can more effectively create the kind of groups that you're describing where students are working with and helping one another. But the workload is still high for when you have that number of students for the exact reason that you point out that they still want one-on-one time. The thing that I find is creating optional spaces where students can come one-on-one, but in groups, so having Zoom office hours, for example, where you're not just having one appointment at a time, but where people can drop in, can kind of come and go. So there might be six people and then it might drop down to four and then you might just like in that face-to-face classroom when you have the one student who's hanging out at the end, that might happen in the Zoom room as well and I've seen it happen in really wonderful, wonderful ways. So finding opportunities to create a feeling, I don't do individual meetings. When I first started teaching writing, I would do individual sessions with every single student and I found that that helped some students but it didn't help others. Some students need that, some don't. So I find just creating the space where students can come to me when they need to is wonderful. The other thing that I think works well for me is I use Slack or I use Teams and I chat with students. Honestly, if I wasn't using Slack or Teams, I would give all the students my phone number. I know not everyone wants to give students their phone number but I would because that text chat, that banter you can have via text works extraordinarily well for me. It doesn't take a lot of my time, it doesn't take a lot of bandwidth. I can give a quick answer to a student and then 25 minutes later, they can ask me a follow-up question and then I can give another answer and I can sort of be working one-on-one with more students simultaneously. So that ends up working pretty well for me. Those are just some ideas. I'm sure that some other ideas are being shared in the chat. I can see them actually being shared in the chat. Great, so Jessica Chung has had her hand up for quite a while, so I'm gonna go ahead and give her the mic for just a second. Hi, Jessie, thank you so much. There's a couple of us from the University of Minnesota and we're really tuning into all these amazing ideas you're sharing related to some of the initial things that you were saying about clarity and kind of the rigidity of rubrics. The question that I wanna pose is with the ungrading that you do when you write a lot about how do we best create stability with clear expectations for student performance without being held to the rigidity of traditional rubrics as we design our stuff for the fall? I think one of the things that I think works brilliantly if your institution uses a lot of rubrics and that's kind of part of the culture and students have come to expect rubrics and that rubrics are something that gives them a sense of familiarity. I've done something where I have had students write rubrics on the first day. So whatever way that we can have students involved in the process of creating the standards for the course for the rubric or the policies for the course can work extraordinarily well. That doesn't necessarily mean giving everything over to the students. That can be overwhelming to students that can also feel really destabilizing to us as teachers. But whether it's a final project that you have the students write the final project guidelines on the first day of class or it's the rubric for the final project and you have students write that or when you're about to assign your first essay have a conversation with students where you say what is good writing? Those kinds of conversations are what I find alleviates the sense of, oh my gosh, I'm in a C and I have no idea where I am with ungrading. The other thing that I find is that students tend to be this is my experience, it may not be yours but students tend to be more comfortable with ungrading than we are as teachers. And I think that the reason for that is because we as teachers have been in school a lot longer and we've been inculturated into systems of grading even longer than students have. And so I find that students more often than not feel a sense of relief and that ultimately what they need is having that frank conversation where they can feel like they can share and be a part of the construction of the classes approach. Great, okay, so we have a question actually a lot of voting up on this question from Joseph Comer. What advice would you have for those of us who are interested in bringing these discussion points and ideas, et cetera into a department or college, et cetera that is more old fashioned in their overall views? That's a really, really good question. And I think that the best way to approach, so if we want to have our institutions raise their eyebrows at some of the models that they've adopted uncritically I think one of the things that works extraordinarily well is to ask people in the department to close analyze the model with the goal of implementing it more effectively. So it doesn't have to be about asking the institution to completely throw something out. For example, quality matters, learning management systems. A lot of these models are something that the institution has invested a lot of time and resources and money into. And so just casting it off isn't necessarily going to get you very far. But instead bringing it to the table whether it's the table at a department meeting or whether it's a larger table at an institution and asking the people at that table to look carefully at what it is and how it works with the goal of tailoring it more effectively to your specific institution. And that's not something, I mean, most of the people that are working with these models also encourage that. And so ultimately, these models are really designed for that work to be done with them. What's unfortunate is how seldomly that work gets done more often than not the models are adopted uncritically. Another thing I think is creating relationships between folks at an institution so that there can be a thoughtful conversation in exchange of ideas. There is a lot of institution attention created between instructional designers and faculty members. And I've talked about this over my career. I've worked both as an instructional designer and I've worked as a faculty member. And there's all kinds of systemic issues, structural issues that keep these two roles almost at odds with one another. And I think that that can be extraordinarily harmful. For example, a teacher who has a really great idea and then the instructional designer who may have been asked to be the guardian of the quality assurance process. That instructional designer has to say, oh no, we can't do that because we have to meet the requirements of this quality assurance program. And so making sure that there is both honest and also thoughtful dialogue between folks at an institution who are doing this work. And that everyone is bringing their own ideas to the table. Great. I'm gonna go ahead and turn over to Eve here who's had her hand up for quite some time. Eve, do you wanna take the mic? Thank you. Or maybe not. That's fine. Oh, there you are. It was a total accident. I don't know when I raised my hand. Oh, okay. But I have a question. I do have a question. I think it might be pretty simple. But Jesse, you referred to when you were giving your talk the promise of online learning. And I would love to hear you just talk a little bit about what you think that is. Yeah, wow. That's a huge question. I think we're gonna have a whole hour of long conversation about that one. Let's make sure we talk about that one at the fireside chat. But no, I'm glad you bring that up because it was a curious word when I was looking, when I was doing research for this presentation and article that I wrote. And I was looking really carefully at the quality matters marketing copy. And I saw that word promise, which is it's actually put in several places throughout their marketing copy. And it's an interesting word because I immediately start thinking promise to whom and who's making the promise. And what is the goal of the promise? What are we trying to achieve? And when you look at the quality matters rubric, I mean, it's really designed, it looks like it's designed for relationships between administrations and faculty members. Between honestly, also between instructional designers who are often set up as the gatekeepers and faculty members who are trying to design courses. I feel like students get left out that there isn't really a place for students in the conversation about a lot of these models. The models don't seem to be designed for students. So if I think about the promise of online learning, I mean, one of the things that I think we need to be doing, and I hope this comes through almost everything that I say ever anywhere, is making sure that we're involving students in conversations about their own education. I say that, I say that so often. And yet I think it's especially crucial right now, all of this back and forth about what the fall is going to look like. And yet I see very little conversation with students about not just about what they want, but about how their learning is happening. And not just collecting information via a survey, but really engaging with the messy conversation with students about how, when, where, and whether they're learning in this particular moment. Okay, we have another question in the Q&A from Kate Copy. Your keynote notes that pedagogy is practice is the intersection between philosophy and the practice of teaching. How do we build a philosophy of teaching if we have rejected all the models? Do we reinvent the wheel, or can models be a starting place to build our individual philosophies of teaching? I think one of the things that I'm arguing here is that I don't think models are a very good starting place. And too often that's exactly where I see them implemented. I think that models are excellent for evolving our teaching practice. And they're a great thing to sort of hold up against one another to use to inspire conversation. But honestly, when I use the word philosophy, I think models are sitting too, they're sitting too deeply in on the practice side of it. And they're not encouraging the hard conversations. I think that the place to start is to ask what kind of relationship do I wanna develop with my students? It's to ask what kind of experiences do I have to want to have with students in a classroom? It's to ask who are my students? What's motivating them? Those are the places, those are sort of the foundation that I see of a teaching philosophy. And I don't think models tend to get it those kinds of questions. Those questions don't fit and eat entirely into boxes. They don't fit and eat entirely into pyramids or inverted pyramids. And instead what it is is starting with questioning, starting with asking questions about ourselves, our relationship to education. Sean and I often do a writing exercise with teachers where we ask them to imagine the, or where we start by asking them to think back to their first day of college. And then we ask them to think about their students and to sort of see their educational experience from their students perspective. And then we ask them to write a letter to those students, write a letter to themselves, their first semester of college. I think those kind of activities are the things that unearthed. The reason why we got into this profession as educators. And when I say educators, I mean instructional designers. I mean teachers. I mean all of us engaged in the practice of education. I mean student affairs people. We're all educators working through this together. So I actually don't like that divide between instructional designers and teachers or faculty members. I hope that kind of answers that question. It's a, I think it's a hard question and a long question. There's lots of different places to start. But I think ultimately reading, asking hard questions is a better place to start than models. Okay, this is actually a question that came up in chat. And it's one that you've worked with before, Jesse. So I think that this would be a good question to bring up now. It revolved around the idea of sort of, I would love to ungrade, I can't. My institution won't let me. So if there's, and I think this applies to a lot of sort of more radical pedagogies anyway. Sort of, I can't do this within the confines of my institution. So can you address that a little bit? One thing that I often talk about when I hear, when I hear I can't do this in the context of my institution. One of the activities that I do with teachers. And I don't mean this activity to be flipped in any way. I just feel like starting from a place of knowing what the restrictions actually are is absolutely crucial. So when someone says, I can't ungrade at my institution, my institution doesn't allow it. What I tend to do is I say, well, let's pull up the, let's pull up the guidelines that your institution for grading and assessment. And let's put it on the screen and let's look at it together and talk about where you have leeway and where you don't have leeway. So it's about figuring out what the rules are and then adapting our pedagogies so that we are still meeting, so that we still are meeting the requirements in a way that doesn't put us at too much professional risk. And honestly, we also need to be thinking about professional risk and who is at greater professional risk. Those of us with privilege with that are taking less professional risk need to make sure that we're advocating for our colleagues who don't have as much leeway, who don't have as much ability to take professional risk. And there's another aspect of this, which is figuring out what of your teaching is yours and what of your teaching belongs to your institution. And that means we don't necessarily have to ask permission for everything that we do in our classroom. It means figuring out what part of this is mine to decide. And so when there are rules at your institution that go against your ethical, philosophical, pedagogical values, making sure that you figure out ways to push back on those rules, to break those rules. Again, with a nod or an acknowledgement of the fact that professional risk is not distributed equally, so not everyone gets the privilege of breaking the rules. Great. And then we have time for this really, we just one more question and Mark Kircher has had his hand up for quite some time. He's also coming in, I believe, from Finland. So I'm gonna give Mark the mic here. Hello, good evening from Finland, nice to speak to you. Thank you for a really great keynote, really enjoyed it. But one of the things that occurs to me is a very Anglo-Slemtric perspective on pedagogy. And I guess this isn't so much a question, there's a comment on that, but I'd be grateful for your comments on it. And what I'm gonna say is that when I read your piece and was looking at it, the things you're calling pedagogy, and I would call methods, methodologies for teaching, I would call them frameworks and rubrics, I would call them learning theories. But the continent, and if we go back to the origins of the word in the Greek, I mean an original pedagogy was actually a slave as you probably know, who went along with a student to receive instruction. And they kind of walked a journey. The pedagogue walked the journey. And in fact, it's interesting to look at the relationship with Freire and pedagogy of the oppressed, because the original pedagogs were the oppressed and the wealthy slave sons, and it was sons, were the, if you will, the privileged. So to get back to my point, kind of there's a continental understanding of pedagogy, which is actually about a way of being, which is about being respectable, knowledgeable, being wise, it's about the relationships, it's about care, it's about attending to experiences. So it's kind of, because I was UK trained originally, I used to think that pedagogy was methods that a flipped classroom was a pedagogy, but I don't think that at all now. And I think maybe one of the problems here is that we're kind of using the wrong names or an umbrella term for actually what are a number of different things. And it might be useful to unravel these and pull out pedagogy as something separate. So just curious to know your view and take on that. Thank you. It's an important question. I think that when I use the word pedagogy, probably the person whose use of the word pedagogy I identify with most closely or am inspired by, identify as the wrong word, that I'm inspired most closely by is actually Bell Hooks and the way that she talks about pedagogy. And so I'm inspired to use that word in a way much closer to the way that she uses it. And she's using it, she's adapting her use of it from Ferry's use of the word, but taking it in a really different direction. What I would say is that our language can sometimes get in the way, which is one of the reasons why every time, every paper, every talk where I use the word pedagogy, I talk about what my pedagogy is, what my definition of the word pedagogy is. And I think I actually like the word pedagogy. Sometimes people push back on the word pedagogy because it has a lot of baggage. I also think that the word pedagogy has a certain defamiliarization. A sort of opportunity for defamiliarization where it becomes a word that the second that we use it, we're asked, we're called upon to talk through what we mean by it. And I think that that can be really productive work. And so I did that work in my talk. I'm glad that you're bringing this question to the floor because those kind of conversations about language and why and how we're using it become extraordinarily important. It's an interesting word also because it's been used in so many different contexts, in so many different ways, that it, again, that also forces that conversation. I've only ever taught in the United States. And so there's absolutely a way in which my own practice and my own approach is influenced by the environments within which I've taught. I have worked with people all around the world and I usually tend to find that we, our systems have more commonalities than differences, but where there are differences, they can be extraordinarily significant. And talking through those differences is important. One of the things that I talk about with pedagogy is, and this is why I call it praxis, the intersection between philosophy and practice, is because each of us bring a different approach to teaching, each of us are teaching different kinds of students in different places in different institutional environments. So the idea that we would have one pedagogy or that there would even be one meaning to the word pedagogy ends up being pretty flawed that instead what we need to think about is think about what's my pedagogy? What is my approach to teaching? And I don't wanna create carbon copies of myself. That just wouldn't work. So instead figuring out ways to have conversation with teachers so that they can figure out what self, what full self, in some cases was what partial self because they may not be safe bringing their full self to the classroom. Are they bringing to the classroom and what might that look like in their work? It's kind of an answer to your question, also a little bit of a sidestep of it. There is gonna be a fired side chat this afternoon. Sean will say a bit more about it in a second. So I'm happy to continue that conversation because it is sort of a meaty one. Great. So with that, actually we're going to go ahead and close we are at the top of the hour. So I wanna thank Jesse and I wanna thank everyone who came who showed up. Amazing questions, really, really great rich discussion in the chat. I also wanna thank Stephanie Che who has been in the background helping out so much with all the questions and answers. And that's just wonderful. I do also wanna mention that we do have the fired side chat tonight. Tonight, Eastern Time. If you're in the Pacific Northwest, it's the afternoon. If you're in Australia, it's early morning. So it's at 6 p.m. Eastern Time. It will be held in Zoom, but it's not gonna be a webinar. So everyone will be on screen. You can actually chat back and forth and it's a little more informal. That would be again at 6 p.m. Eastern Time today and you can actually register for it. If you go to the schedule, if you go to dpl.online, which is our sort of main room, our auditorium, and you go to the schedule, if you look down on today's stuff, you can actually see a link out to register for the fired side chat tonight. So thank you all so much for coming and it was wonderful to see you. Thank you so much. See you again soon.