 Full disclosure, I might be a little bit behind. I did look at the, you sent along the forward to the book. I read that chapter one, the Wiggins of the Tide, UDL stuff, I read that. Is this chapter two now? This is chapter two. And the good news, Patrick, is that you are exactly as caught up as probably many of the people are going to watch this short video. And luckily for us, hey, look, it's a segue. Luckily for us, Shona is about to take us through a two to three minute synopsis of chapter two, which will prepare us all to have a discussion. So Shona, the floor is yours. Okay, so this chapter is titled, Guiding Learning Through Engagement. And even though there's a PowerPoint, trust me, this is a short synopsis. So Darby begins this chapter with a discussion of learning about teaching from a dance studio and basically talks about how in a dance class, you don't teach the advanced moves first, you start small. And once a student masters the small move, then you can add on to it. And she asks basically, why do we treat academic teaching differently than that? Why do we expect students to be able to just jump into the complex advanced moves without scaffolding or teaching them the smaller things? So throughout this chapter, which I argue is basically an argument for scaffolding or at least for tiered engagement throughout a course. She states, students who find an assessment meaningful are more likely to work hard on that assessment, learn from it and complete it successfully. And essentially talks about how there are many ways of course to make assessments meaningful and to make other elements of a course meaningful, but one way is to scaffold or at least to give incremental feedback on parts of an assignment or parts of a lesson or module. She goes on to break down, I don't know if you've noticed, but the chapters seem to go with a series of sections and one of them is models and then the final one is usually principles. So they connect, but she talks about several models or ways we can do this, breaking down complex tasks and giving feedback at each step. Linked to that, she talks about releasing content strategically, so using the conditional release function that is built into many LMS systems, but to do that intentionally and potentially sparingly, not just because it's a tool. She also talks about how many of these things could be on graded and uses the quote from Jose Bowen that the tennis net doesn't grade your swing. In other words, you learn from the process of missing in tennis or hitting the net, but it's not grading you, but you're still getting better. And so I liked that quote. Another way is to look for cues and clues in classroom interaction. In other words, we might not be noticing as much in our online classrooms as we would in an in-person classroom, but if we really focus on paying attention to what students are misunderstanding, where there might be questions, and she gives lots of ideas for how you could respond, not just to individual students, but at scale. And then finally, she talks about, well, here on this slide, I have the final principle as giving feedback and giving feedback frequently, but she also mentions providing summaries or discussion highlights at the end of major sections like modules to sort of keep students on track. And I think what I appreciate most about this chapter is the recognition that most of us were never taught any of this unless we or happened to be in an education department or have been trained in pedagogy. And now we're also trying to do it online. And so my big takeaway is that scaffolding doesn't really need to be intense or a whole lot of extra work for the faculty. And that regular engagement, whether it's through assessment or other activities, can save time, energy and stress for us and for the students. And that is the end of my show. Fantastic, thanks for your answer. So now we'll just take kind of two minutes before we open up the general discussion. Is anyone have something that they wanna add to that summary? So something that was a key point, you think that Darby was trying to communicate that wasn't included in Shana's very nicely PowerPointed presentation. Anyone got something they wanna throw in? Yeah, no, just to say that I did read the first couple of paragraphs there in the dance studio. And I believe the book is based on the teaching small book but teaching small online. And I think it was in the forward, they mentioned that the guy wrote the teaching small book had this kind of epiphany while he was coaching or watching his kids being coached. And I said, bingo, that's the same thing has happened to me when my kids were small, they're in swimming lessons. I was a teacher at the time and I just watched these instructors break down the strokes and even like introducing the kids to the water and putting their face in and floating and talking with scaffolding, literally holding them then take your hands away, hold them. So this kind of step by step. And I remember thinking, yeah, we should be doing that in classrooms more just breaking things down and connecting things for kids. So it's that kind of coaching physical kind of connection that really makes sense in so many different areas. So I thought that was really, really neat to begin with. Yeah, no, I agree. And well, at this point, we'll transition into a general discussion I guess and I'll work up what you said there. First, she mentions the scorpion kick specifically as a thing in soccer. And that made me Google scorpion kicks. I'm gonna tell you a bit. If you Google scorpion kicks, what you're immediately gonna find is a female martial artist who invented a scorpion kick as a way of kicking someone. And I was quite confused by that for a while. Anyways, I was a rabbit hole. I went down for a while. I recommend you go in that rabbit hole. It gets into performative kata competitions and then it ends up putting you in bed at about two in the morning. So choose wisely. But I thought that was a great example. And there was another couple of points that were in there that I think are worth commenting on. And the one was just how unpleasant it is to grade and how much time it takes to grade bad assignments. And frequently that's our own fault because we ask students to do things that they don't know how to do. And as a result, they give us failed assignments, which is terrible for them. They didn't enjoy it, but it's horrible for us to market because not only would we give a terrible mark out, but it takes forever to go through. You guys know this. It takes 10 times as long to mark a poor assignment as a good assignment. But there's also, I think like a, there's also kind of an equity issue in there as well. And we forget, I think, how many students are coming in. And this is especially true at CBU, given our new demographic where they're coming from a totally different school system, a lot of them with our international students. But in general, students who come from a different educational background often haven't learned a lot of these steps. And so as a result, it's not that the students aren't trying to give us a good assignment. Frequently they don't know how to write in a meaningful way. They don't know how to go through. And so not only is it going to produce a better assignment and increase engagement and all these to have those little steps, the staff will kind of learning there. But also I think there's a social justice aspect to it as well, if we take the time in our courses to ensure that everybody gets up to the level where they can perform, that ensures that those students don't get further left behind. Absolutely. One of the things I thought was interesting about both the epiphany, right? That it seems like multiple folks have had with coaching or athletic training or anything like that is that like you can be, well, I shouldn't say you, fun fact, I have a black belt in Teguando. And so I don't know how to do a scorpion kick though. That was my follow up. But now none of us are ever going to mess with you. But I, you know, so I taught martial arts for a while, you know, on the side and I never, I have never made that connection, right? Like even though when you're teaching a form or a particular kick or whatever, it, you do that just sort of because you have to, right? You can't, especially adults, you can't teach them how to do the full move until they kind of incrementally move toward it. You know, kids are rubber, most of them and can do anything the first time, but once they're a certain age, it becomes more difficult. But I never really made that connection to teaching until much later, to teaching in college classrooms, much later when I started reading and thinking about these kinds of methods because I came into college teaching from a lot of folks who sound similar to Darby, who, you know, it was like, here's the content. Go teach it. It's very content-driven way of thinking about teaching. And so this is almost a reversal, right? I always sort of think about it as the content actually kind of comes last in planning. And anyway, so I just am really interested in how like I could be one person who's doing both of these things and I never ever made that connection until I started reading about it. And then the light bulbs started to go off. Yeah, it ties it nicely to a comment she made in the first chapter about how if we want students to do something, including, you know, read the syllabus, incentivize it in some way, that they're gonna skip over anything they can skip over in the class and just do what's required. And so requiring them to do those steps through either, she used a specific example of conditional release. And for people who don't know how to use to do conditional release in Moodle, I'll put some of the links from the CTL in the discussion forum. It's really easy in Moodle. Or using if, you know, so we don't overwhelm ourselves as well using things like peer feedback. And I'll put a link there as well for how you can use the workshop lesson tool in the workshop tool, whatever it's called to create anonymized peer feedback opportunity. Oh, I didn't even know about that. Oh, it's super cool. I just, I tried it last semester and it was one of those maybe this is gonna be a failure or maybe it's not, but it seemed to work pretty well. Let's open it up to Jeff or Kay Lee. You guys have something you'd like to throw into the conversation? Lots Kay Lee, do you wanna go first? I'll go first. There was a point on chapter on page 35 where there's a quote that I, it stuck with me and it was teaching requires a certain humility. So thinking about like the shortfall that happens when we teach and then recognizing that, you know, part of it is us and explaining which goes back to the first chapter around being explicit in communication but also recognize, you know, it's not just on the students to take everything that we put out but how and reflecting on how we put that information out or how we say that certain information and then quickly addressing any issues that come up out. I think that was important in this chapter as well when talking about teaching. Sorry, go ahead, Jeff. Oh, yeah. Yeah, one thing I found interesting was the whole discussion of conditional release. I've actually been making quite a lot of use of it this year and it's the first time I've made any use of it. I don't, maybe I made some use of it last year for the first time. And I have been finding it very useful. What I found interesting in the book was that apparently they've studied whether it has much effect in face-to-face courses and found that it doesn't. I wonder about the format of those face-to-face classes and whether mine might be different. I'm definitely intending to continue using it when we go back to face-to-face. I'm gonna, having now seen that apparently there are studies that say it doesn't, it's not effective, I'm gonna keep an eye and try and judge for myself, maybe even try and figure out whether I can study it somehow because I think my courses are just structured a little differently from maybe the sorts of courses that they were looking at. Even my face-to-face courses are, I don't know, almost online. Anyway, yeah, I found that interesting and sort of puzzling. So that's something I'm gonna take away from this and look into further. As you say, I think what, I didn't find that puzzling actually, maybe that it didn't have an obvious effect but that it had a more profound effect in online teaching. Given how much feedback I've gotten from students that their single biggest problem with online teaching, apart from the lack of human interaction, is scheduling. So I had one that just by accident, it was a late edition of a class and we literally couldn't find a time for two synchronous components that fit in everyone's schedule. And so I just made half of it asynchronous, half of it synchronous. And the feedback I got immediately was about a half to a third of the class was I begged for a second synchronous time. So I created a poll, went through and found a synchronous section that would work just for them. And then I recorded the asynchronous content, essentially, but allowed them to come in and sit in on it if they wanted to. Because that was what they said, is that they just, they got overwhelmed because they didn't schedule things. And I think that aspect, the conditional release forces them to come in and do things on a timeline. And that keeps them from procrastination, death by procrastination. And so that's something I'm definitely gonna, I've already doing it a little bit but I'm definitely gonna coming into our second half, after the reading break here, I'm definitely gonna start doing a lot more of those little baby signposts you have to move past. I mean, I think part of it is just that I, and I think we all sort of think of our own courses as, oh, surely everybody else does it this way too. But my courses or my first year physics courses anyway are very, very structured and have been for a very long time. Where there's just sort of a sequence of hoops that students should jump through. And it is, it's all about scaffolding and about a lot of it is about getting them to engage with the material before we hit that material in class so that they come to class ready to discuss it and so on. And what I've always found in the past is I set up these lessons on Moodle to try and get them ready for class and a fraction of the students do them. But it is a fraction, it's often a fairly large fraction but then there are students who just don't do them. And I know, I can look week two of the course and say, oh, well, these 10 students aren't doing the lessons. I already know they're gonna fail the course, right? And I can warn them, but sometimes I do, right? Explicitly, one-on-one, you really should be doing the lessons but it's very, it's surprisingly predictive. So this year, I made everything else like the assignments and everything that follow on conditional on doing the lessons. And now I don't have a fraction of the students doing the lessons, it really is basically all of them. And so I'm going to be interested to see next year when I go back to face to face whether that pattern will hold. So one of the comments that struck me in this was the discussion about, well, discussion about discussion groups and it kind of resonated. So Derby's writing this pre-COVID, which means that it's more of a traditional style of online learning because a lot of the tools that we're using like this, this pretty seamless video communication, I mean, this stuff didn't exist in March, or it was really, teams didn't exist with this functionality, Zoom barely had it, et cetera. But even though we've got this face-to-face interaction, everybody knows the students won't use it, right? This is, if you spend any time on academic Twitter or anything else, there's been countless articles written on this, students won't turn on their webcams. So it really resonated with me that the use of a discussion forum to do what I've heard faculty complain about a lot, which we can't read the class anymore. And so you can't gauge the speed. You don't know when you're going too slow, you don't know when you're going too fast because you don't see the quizzical looks, the board looks, et cetera, the look of abject terror you get in students' eyes sometimes, they're like, ah, what am I in? And then you slow things down and you come with a new analogy. So how are you guys, I've got discussion forums, I've got anonymous feedback, but they're mostly used for people if there's something seriously wrong, they send me a message, like, we desperately need this. I haven't gotten students to engage well in a way that's where there's real active use. Are any of you guys using and succeeding in discussion forums? And if you are, what are you doing? Not really. So, yeah, well, I mean, I've tried to use them for years and years and years and really never had a lot of success with them, right? And I mean, I think it's the nature of the beast of the courses that I'm teaching, right? In say an upper year, a small upper year course engaging with a lot of sort of opinion, not opinion, but issues where there are multiple perspectives that can be supported, right? Maybe students are more willing to dive in and have a discussion. First year physics? Well, they're terrified of being wrong, right? And I do everything I can to try and encourage them to be wrong and to revel in being wrong because by being wrong, we learn to be right, but that is quite a struggle. So, yeah, I've used discussion forums for years and had essentially no uptake. And I've thought of how I could, you know, like it's the usual thing, right? If you want students to do something, unfortunately, it always seems you have to put marks on it. And, you know, I understand why that is. They're very busy and they have to prioritize, but every now and then I wish that they would just do things that will help them learn. But yeah, so I haven't figured out, like I have so many incentives already, so many marks on stuff to do in my courses already, I'm reluctant to introduce yet another. And so I haven't. So, I mean, I get lots of interaction with my students, but it's almost all one-on-one chat on teams, not in forums. They're perfectly willing to ask me a question one-on-one, but they don't wanna ask me a question in public where they're gonna look dumb, right? Yeah, Shona says totally for anyone who's not monitoring the chat. Yeah, this is, I guess another point that's worth emphasizing there that Derby talked about is make sure you use this stuff selectively so you don't overwhelm students the million-on-one tasks, otherwise they're gonna stop doing them as well. So, you know, don't have them jump through 10 million hoops. And I guess tying in the first chapter as well, make sure that the hoops we have them jump through are explained, the utility of them, right? So that they don't feel like they're just doing busy work, right, or that they can't move beyond at the speed that they want to move beyond, et cetera. Yeah, I had some students actually who told me that discussion forums and their other classes worked fantastically. So, when this is done, first, anyone who is in the, anyone who is watching the video, please, in the comments, come in and throw. If it will work for you, let us know. But second, I'm actually gonna reach out to my students and ask them what worked in the other classes. The Darby had some advice, you know, the incentivization is one for sure, getting in and interacting with your students. Apparently, there's some meta studies that suggest that not only did that increase the engagement, but also the quality of the interactions, going through and summarizing. I thought about maybe actually requiring students to go in, but also requiring students to do some summarization exercises and peer review of summarizations as well, some things where they're interacting a bit more. But, yeah, Kaylee, what about in the library? You guys do faculty development things. Do you use these sorts of things with faculty into the work? For discussion boards, I don't, when we're teaching, we don't really use discussion boards because most of the times it's one-shot sessions. And so, I guess for engaging and trying to recognize those, as I call it, the Kanye face, it's a meme. Anyway, which is like a blank stare, right? So when I'm teaching, I kind of incorporate games and gamify the lesson so I can see where I'm losing them. So sometimes I'll use online, so sometimes I'll use Kahoot because then it's anonymized so they don't feel like they're saying, oh, I got the wrong answer, right? And they feel more willing to guess or participate. But, yeah, we wouldn't use discussion forms because we don't have a modal course. We teach this session. But, yeah, like I said, to guess the Kanye face or the look of confusion, I often just... It's a meme face, I've not heard that. Yeah, it's a meme. I feel like you need to post it in the... I just looked in the chat, but I'm not sure which one it is if you search for a GIF and of like Kanye just staring. It was like in an interview. I often use it in my slides and it's just him staring at the interviewer just like, I don't know what's going on. So... Okay, I search for that except I don't know what GIFs are. I only know what GIFs are. Oh, let's not share that. Eternal debate. I don't know if it's that one. Anyway, right now. So it seems like now that we're getting into Kanye, it might be time to really quickly wrap this up since we've also hit our 11 p.m. And I promise I keep these on track. So I do encourage people to continue the discussion in the forum down below. I'll put those links that I said there. Just by way of final, final summary, I thought there was a one sentence he had that was really nice for this chapter and it was a small signposts and feedback. And that's pretty much, I think if you wanted to take in four words or however many words that was, this whole chapter, that's it. Small signposts and feedback, which goes into the broader metaphor of the last chapter of figuring out what your end goal is and then Google Maps plotting a destination. So our first point is what are the higher learning outcomes we want in the course and then structuring things to get there, but then also having signposts just like if you use your Google Map directions, you have to know when you hit the corner, turn left. So have those signposts so the students know that they're on track and provide opportunities for feedback for them to let you know when you're going off track. All right, so that is it for today. I'm going to stop this recording now. If people want to stick around, you're welcome to, but please continue the discussion if you choose to in the forum.