 So let's begin. Welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Transform. I'm delighted to see you here today. We've got a couple of terrific guests on a topic that is vital to all of us, and I'm really looking forward to our conversation. We've been talking about teaching and higher education since the forum launched in 2016. We've approached it from a whole bunch of different angles. What's exciting to me about this week's guests is that they've been researching how to improve university and college teaching. They've been doing this for years. They have a website called Structural Moves and a new book from Harvard Education Press on the subject. They both have a whole stream of ideas based on a lot of research and a lot of practice. And so I'd like to put them up so that we can learn from them how we can improve college university teaching. So to begin with, let me bring one of them, Professor Myra Levinson, up on stage. Professor Levinson, hello. Hi, thanks for having me. And just as a reminder, it's Myra. Think Myra Myra on the wall. I keep doing that. You know there's so many spellings. My mother-in-law was Moira. So Myra Myra on the wall. Well, the way we ask people to introduce themselves in the forum is to describe what they're working on for the next year. So I'm curious. What projects are top of mind for you and also what ideas? What are you thinking about for the next year? All right. I'm going to talk about three but each really briefly. One is I noticed actually in the chat there was a question about whether or not you were working on your group planning a forum coming up on AI and education. So one of the things actually that I'm involved in is a committee at the Harvard Graduate School of Education on AI and education and AI and learning. And so that is something that I'm thinking a lot about this year as I think many of us are and thinking about how it might transform or not our classrooms, our work as teachers, and I think most importantly to me society and how anticipated transformations of society might impact our own work as educators. Second, this has obviously been a really hard semester in terms of things happening in the world that find expression on our campuses. And in some ways I really celebrate how much people are involved in following what's going on in the world and speaking about it. And yet also speaking about it in ways that feel productive across lines of difference has felt really hard. So that's something that I'm working on quite specifically. I direct a design studio on civics and ethics pedagogy here at Harvard. And so we're in to support work on this. And that's related to the third thing that I'm working on and thinking about this year, which is I'm a political theorist by training. And so one of the things that I've been trying to do for some years now is to start a field of educational ethics modeled after bioethics that like bioethics would be informed by questions of policy and practice and help to inform questions of policy and practice and develop theory that can be helpful there. And one of the dimensions of educational ethics is how we think about what we permit, forbid and celebrate in our classrooms and on our campuses from students, from faculty, from visitors, from staff, etc. And so that's also top of mind. Wow. Wow. That is a lot of great stuff. So first of all, AI, of course, we support that we've, we've had a whole series of sessions on AI in the forum, we have more coming up in the chat I threw in my sub stack, which I commend to your, to your colleague. Oh, great. Thank you. We should have courses, so I will grab it. And I just came out of a meeting where people were talking about how to fund civics education. And this is definitely a subject that's a great deal of interest. And your ethics project, we're going to bring you back just telling you this, we're going to bring you back just for your next idea. That is, you know, assuming your president lasts the week. No, no, no, I'm not. That's, it's, it's the pen president that got more in trouble, I think. Yes. But hang on one second. Let me, let me bring up your co-author, Nira, and, and let's see if we can find out what he is up to. Now, Jeremy is also going to prove this, this terrible rule we have that it really helps David Beard to be on the future transform. So just, just to let you know, just to warn you, this is what's happening here. Hello, Jeremy. Hi. Thank you for having us. Oh, it's great to see you. It's great to see you. Where, where have you found you today? I am at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester. And sorry, did you ask where I am or what I'm up to? Well, first, where you are. Okay. That's, that is where I am. I'm in my office up on the hill here. I will kind of follow Nira and talk about three things most relevant to me today. I'm continuing to move through and make sense of and analyze a whole, a whole lot of data that I collected during the, during pandemic schooling and beyond. And so, so in my research, I look at secondary teacher's responses to instructional change and disruption. And so I'm continuing to look at through a few different studies how teachers responded to the transition to remote schooling and out of remote schooling, how it impacted their relationships with students and with each other. So that's some, some research that I'm continuing to do and work on right now. At the college level, I am involved in the creation and design right now of a teaching and learning center that is really focused on inclusive excellence in teaching and part of a broader initiative of the college. There was once a teaching and learning center, but it was really just kind of a one person operation. And we're looking to really kind of more meaningfully stitch this work into the fabric of the institution. And so it's been really exciting to be part of that work. And then most personally, I am looking forward to being on leave next semester to spend it with my six month old baby. And so that's, that's the most immediate and kind of joyous thing for me in my life. Six months old. I've got to say you look pretty good for a parent with a six month old. I appreciate that. She is, she is now sleeping through the night. So I think that makes all the difference. That's the best thing until they turn 21. I think that's amazing. Well, welcome, welcome. And I'm glad for all these projects. In fact, there's a new book on teaching and learning centers just came out from Johns Hopkins, which I'm hoping to get to. And hopefully we can bring the author on the program. Let me let me bring you all up on stage equally here so that we can be together. And friends, if you're new to the forum, what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask our very kind guests a couple of questions about their work. And then they will probably cut loose and describe all kinds of great stuff. But then it's going to turn the microphone over to you. I'd like to hear your thoughts and your questions. So please, as you listen to our guests, think about the questions you have, and they may be based on your own work, your own experience, based on your own curiosity. But the forum is here for you, like soil and green reform is made out of people. So the first question I wanted to ask was, and both of you are educators, and Mira, you've been working in higher education for an even longer period of time. I'm curious, what were some of the findings in your research that surprised you the most? You're looking at how to improve teaching in higher education. What was the most unusual or surprising finding you came up with? That's a really interesting question. Let me give myself a few seconds to think about that by filling the space, by talking, just giving a little background, because I actually think that that might be helpful for reflecting on the surprise. So yeah, I had this like weird career trajectory. I did my doctorate in political theory right after undergrad. And then I became a middle school teacher for eight years in the Atlanta and the Boston Public Schools. And eventually I went in my way back, actually, when my daughter was around the same age as Jeremy's daughter, to academia, because it was a lot easier being a professor than being an eighth grade teacher. And so the constructional moves project in many ways came out of my frustration, and eventually Jeremy's in my frustration, I think, about the ways in which in higher education, including at Harvard, it did not feel as if there was the same level of dispersed knowledge about powerful teaching practices and the conception that you could actually learn them. In higher education, there was the sense that people who were powerful teachers were often really charismatic, or they knew how to do it, and or that it didn't matter, like that wasn't your real job, and or that we didn't know very much. And so it was time to go investigate. And I thought, wait, we know a ton about what good teaching looks like and how to foster learning across lines of difference and for diverse learners. And so this this instructional moves initiative really was in many ways to help higher ed, at least like research universities like we're at at Harvard, right? That's different from many places that higher ed institutions that have been focused on powerful teaching and learning for a long time, recognize and then start to implement high quality teaching practices that in ways, therefore, were not so surprising. But I think, finally, that's given me enough time to think of the answer to your question, which is, I think I was delighted to see and learn from the number of different ways that teaching practices show up in different disciplinary spaces. So in instructional moves, we went into classrooms in neuroscientists and lawyers and medical educators and new and people who are teaching, you know, negotiations and political theory and history, and to see familiar instructional moves but enacted in these very different disciplinary spaces. That was a joy and a learning experience for me. Well, it sounds great. It sounds great. I mean, I just want to make sure that we all hear that it was important takeaways that this is something which we don't support enough in higher education that we don't have that kind of access to fine teaching tactics. And thank you for your background. That's a wonderful background to have that K through 12 as well as the higher education. Jeremy, Mira has teed you up very nicely. So now is your chance to say, what was a surprising finding for you? Yeah. So I think just to build on Mira's background, I too come from a K 12 background. And I, you know, before I pursued my doctorate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I was a middle and high school English teacher. And that's that's very core to my identity as a researcher, as a scholar. And I kind of I think found instructional moves at the right time at kind of a moment of existential crisis in when I was pursuing education research, because I felt so distanced from the complexities of the classroom. And I think perhaps Mira noticed this and invited me into the project, which, you know, I was on for the duration of my doctorate. So that's a little background about me and how I found this work. And I really wasn't, for that reason, very familiar with post-secondary teaching, you know, my wheelhouses were very much secondary teaching. I think that it's interesting. And I think that, you know, several of our instructors have reflected on this is the fact that what's happening at the K 12 level, it takes a long time for it to get up to the post-secondary level and that we often have, you know, there isn't necessarily this vocabulary of teaching at that level, either, but there's more of one than there would be at the post-secondary level. I think one surprising finding for me was the fact that, first, that so few of the people that we looked at had explicit training in pedagogy and instruction. And I think if you're in the academy, if you're in higher ed, that's not a surprise to you. It certainly was a surprise to me as somebody, you know, that spent a great deal of time doing pedagogical training. But on that note, I mean, their reflections suggested that relatively small interventions in training could be enormously effective, right? And that folks had really kind of, the people that we highlight have gone out of their way to kind of create communities of practice with instructors, where they talk about instruction, where they exchange practices, and that was really valuable. But we have one instructor that we feature, Dan Levy, who talks about how when he was a doctoral student at Northwestern, he literally just had one hour of explicit training in pedagogy. That hour was from Ken Bain, so good person to spend your hour with. But he said, you know, just in that one hour, that was a memorable and important hour that things that he learned there would likely be rudimentary to K-12 teachers, but they were revolutionary for him as a post-secondary instructor. And this suggests to me both that there is a great need for more training and more opportunities for pedagogical development among post-secondary instructors, but also that like, you know, relatively small changes can make a great big difference in post-secondary teaching, and then therefore, by extension, student learning. Well, this is depressing and very, very good to know. I'm curious, in higher education, we often speak about the powers of active learning, and we've had several scholars and practitioners of that here on the forum. And is that, not that active learning is one single thing, but is active learning a good bundle of pedagogies in your estimation? Sorry, is that a question for me or for Jeremy? That's for either of you. Go for it, Jeremy. Well, Jeremy, go first. So I think absolutely. I mean, I think that, you know, in education, we love our buzzwords, and so I think it's important to actually know what we mean when we say active learning, right? I see and we describe active learning in the book as creating occasions for students to authentically apply what they have learned. And in so doing, they learn to see their discipline, not as this string of disconnected facts that they need to memorize, but rather an organized body of knowledge that they have some ownership and some stake in, right? And they become, they think like experts. And I think that, again, looking at this from the K-12 perspective as well, it's an uphill battle everywhere, but I think that it's especially so in the post-secondary setting. One of the reasons for that is training. And I think another thing that we don't necessarily talk about enough is the fact that some students come into our classrooms kind of expecting passive instruction, right? And expecting a traditional teacher-centered environment for a number of reasons. And one of the reasons is that they've been kind of long socialized into that landscape over many years. Another is that they're like paying for access to the best minds in the field. And they don't necessarily want to hear their peer talk, right? And so there can be kind of some subtle or not so subtle resistance from high achieving students to these sorts of pedagogies. And it's one of the reasons that a lot of folks don't do it. They're afraid of getting poor evaluations or they try something initially, and it doesn't work out. And therefore they abandon it and retreat to the podium. So I think the stakes are high, but it's a two-way street as well, right? That the work of teaching and learning are completely intertwined when we think about active learning. And I think we focus a lot on the inadequacy of the instructor. And maybe we also need to think about the student too on the receiving end. And the very understandable and rational reasons, perhaps, why a student would resist that kind of instruction in the classroom. Yeah, we learned as we're doing this research, we have a colleague here in the physics department actually, who had done research on the same course taught to different sections, one in lecture form and one in more sort of project oriented and, you know, collaborative sort of flipped classroom form. And the students very consistently predicted, felt that they were learning less in the project oriented active learning course, and consistently did better on the assessments, right? But they were really anxious about it. They really were quite sure that they were learning less because they could point to, you know, just less material that was being transmitted, right? And so it part of what's interesting about this is that in higher education, you know, we do value research. And there is very good research, in fact, about learning. And we know a lot about what fosters learning. But outside of, say, education schools, many universities do not actually systematically research what promotes learning in their own classrooms, right? And so we use various proxies that are terrible to, say, evaluate each other's teaching like grade distributions, right? And in fact, English departments on average give more, or students earn more A's than in, you know, the physics department, does that show that they're actually learning less because it's gotten easy? Does that show this more? Because actually it's a sign of mastery, right? Like we use these terrible proxies. We actually do have good research that shows that when students are engaged in active meaning making, when they are the ones having to do the work in the classroom, that is when they are learning. They're not, when they're not doing the work in the classroom, when the educators are doing the work in the classroom, and the students are sitting back, unsurprisingly, they are, you know, gaining fewer skills, developing less knowledge, less likely develop the dispositions of the discipline or the field or the profession, whatever it is that we're trying to teach. But it is very hard because we've been socialized at all to believe that certain things look like learning and usually the very dense content transmission. Yeah. Did Mira's audio just break up for anybody else? Not for me. Okay, okay, so maybe I don't mind. I'm sorry, Mira. That's okay. I missed the last sentence, but if everybody else got it, that's great. I was just saying we tend to mistake, we've been socialized to think that high levels of learning are measurable by high levels of dense content transmission. Very good. I don't mean that's a great thing. I mean very good. I have more questions, but I want to make sure everyone else gets to ask their own questions. And if, friends, if I'm having any, if I get garbled or blurred, please let me know in the chat. We have a bunch of questions that come up and these are kind of clarifying and I think in many ways fundamental questions. Here's one from our good friend John Hollenbeck up in Madison and he asks, why do we conduct such deep research on teaching and so little research on learning? I do not think they're the same thing. So there's a huge area in fact in education research called learning sciences. I mean there's cognitive science, there's learning sciences, there's research within developmental psychology, like it's scattered in a lot of different places. There is a lot of research on learning and it is true there is also research on teaching and sometimes those really come together and there's research on teaching and learning sort of unified. And it's true, it is that sweet spot that seems really important. And in some ways, I wouldn't say, like I would say in some ways instructional moves, this book that Jeremy and I wrote together, and the website of instructional moves tries to take the research on teaching and the research on learning and do that sort of magical synthesis in part through richly described sort of miniature portraits of classrooms of teachers of students like really working and wrestling together and sort of then deep diving into some of those particular practices because it's right. A teaching move is powerful, only it's deployed at the right time in the right way in response to the learner needs or is seeking or can engage with in order to promote the learning. And what somebody needs or wants to learn may also shape what teaching move you deploy, right? It's like there are general pedagogical moves and there's content knowledge and then there's this magical thing in the middle that's pedagogical content knowledge is not just like generally do you know how to use wait time or generally you know how to bring in a nervous content discussion but say in your own field do you know how to help people master a difficult concept say you know if you are a historian how do you help people understand historical causation, right? And it's probably not just a flow chart with arrows whereas to understand say a certain form of scientific causation it may be that getting people to like think about a flow chart is really powerful but those are two different kinds of pedagogical content knowledge. How do you teach historical causation in a way that's really meaningful versus say how do you teach scientific causation and that also I think is about blending teaching and learning. Very good and just in case people missed this when you said wait time that's teachers learning how to wait after they've asked a question for students to respond. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, there used to be a problem for me when I started teaching in my late 20s in part because I was drinking so much coffee. To be disciplined and not weigh in immediately or not to call on the first person that raises their hand is can be a struggle for sure but I think to add on to what Miro was saying there I mean I think you know there's an old saying I taught it but they didn't learn it we say that a lot in education and I think that well if they didn't learn it I don't think you necessarily taught it right these things are intimately connected and I think on the note of pedagogical content knowledge you know there's a lot of interesting examples in the book where the what really informs the how where like I think a great example of this is Aaliyah El Amine's classroom which we feature in our virtual learning classroom she teaches a course called Emancipatory Inquiry and it's very much about disrupting traditional research paradigms introducing students to different kinds of research youth participatory action research auto ethnography these different forms of research and and she does that and a great example from her classroom is what she calls the teach-in where each day a student will open class a different student will will close class by teaching the class for 10 minutes something that they know or that knows them it's it's a simple problem but it's this kind of way to both build community in the classroom while uplifting different forms of knowledge by calling into question what counts as valid knowledge and it's this beautiful moment where the where the content of the course is kind of folded into how the course is taught in the pedagogical kind of preoccupations of the course so I don't know if there's quite a word for what I'm describing there I think it's kind of like you know we talk about in literature like the marriage of warm and function I think something similar is happening there I don't know if there's a name for it but I you could create such a name we could coin we could coin a term for that and then your new teaching and littering center will be the home of it we have we have more questions coming in I want to make sure that everyone has a chance to ask and here a couple quick questions from our our friend Glenn and this is what is lecturing interactively I think he's responding to a phrase that you used and just want some clarification on that sure I'll I'll start so so and it might be helpful to know that I use that phrase because that is the title of one of the chapters of the book so the book basically talks about create how instructors create a classroom an inclusive classroom culture for learning about lecturing interactively about facilitating discussion a few forms of sort of a problem based education teaching with cases teaching with simulations and then online teaching teaching digital space and initially when we were working on instructional moves we were going to leave lecturing out all together because you know mono directional information transfer is in fact not information transfer it can make you feel really good like you know in those few minutes you feel really great wow I know all this stuff but you know next week you don't know very much at all but when we went around to our colleagues in the learning centers both around Harvard and more broadly nationwide they were like oh my gosh like that's like way the two ways that the university professors teach is lecturing in discussion so if you're not going to help us with that you're not helping us right like let's start where people are so we thought okay well we're not we can't try to teach people how merely to lecture well because lecturing is not teaching but interactive lecturing is teaching because interactive lecturing is when you are having the students interact with the content with the skills with each other potentially with the professor with the world right and there are lots of different ways that you can have students do that even in the context of a lecture so Jeremy do you want to talk about some of those in part because I think we may have lost Brian for a minute oh did I did I disappear or did I stall out you did but I just cute Jeremy up to give some examples if I heard that oh great sure yeah I mean I think that thank you the the the instructors that we feature in the lecturing interactive chapter I think are notable for how sparing the how sparing their lecturing is I think they've really kind of taken the research on this to heart that that if you're not giving students occasions to really grapple process and think about what you are offering in the lecture then there's kind of an illusion of learning that's taking place and I think you know hearkening back to the earlier study that Mira mentioned the students that were in the traditional lecture class thought that they had actually learned more than those in the active learning class and part of that is because they're kind of witnessing charisma on stage from the from the instructor right and so the instructors that we feature are offering occasions to turn to a neighbor and discuss what they've learned so far they incorporate live polling into their classrooms to spur further discussion to gauge and check for understanding to kind of locate misconceptions and determine what needs reteaching they offer moments of silent reflection and so so it's not just kind of one like Mira said mono directional exposition from from the instructor so I think that that's like a big shift that that has to happen in a lot of classrooms and as one of our one of the instructors that we feature talked about part of it is like a fear of giving up control on the side of the instructor that if if I hand over some some control of this to students that's going to be total chaos and and that is often not the case and I think that we kind of have this belief that we need to we need to stand up there and explain and explain explain but it might be that by by lecturing more sparingly by offering these occasions for application that students are better able to access and take up lectures when we do them for shorter periods and they would be in a lengthier kind of format so that's really kind of what's what's at the heart of of that chapter but again again I think that it's important that the folks that we feature there I think that some of them were even a little like you know I'm I'm not a lecturer why you why are you featuring me in this chapter right because they really don't identify with that modality but they haven't necessarily cast to decide all together because because there are benefits to it I think we just need to limit how long we spend at the podium and the one thing I'd love to add is that I do think that many of these examples are things that people who do identify as lecturers can try out without it's being too high stakes for them right so what you say is all right you've probably chunked your lectures anyway like you think all right first I'm covering x concept and now I'm going to cover y concept and then I'm going to show an application of this and why this matters in our field or something okay at the end of x concept either you know put a question on the slide and have students turn and talk to each other or you could like ask a question and have a multiple choice poll that they answer with their phones or whatever and you see did they get it or you might have them do a problem individually or together and then discuss it for like three minutes and now you get to go on and lecture about y concept you're not losing a ton of time it's a little like it's a it's small enough and defined enough that a faculty member can try it out and then ideally they'll think oh my gosh like I am suddenly understanding why I have to reteach this thing you know next week or oh my gosh my students are getting it after all or they asked me this great question that leads us in you know whatever excellent excellent that's such a great feeling and and that and that should be a feeling that we want to achieve right and return to we have more questions coming in and friends again if you're new to the form or you're new to shindig or the bottom of the screen is a white strip with different buttons on it and the question mark is the one where you can type in a question if you want to join us on stage bearded or not just just click the raised hand and this is one from our friend at Valparaiso University Ed Finn and then asks do you feel there's a misconception that it is either lecture or the guy in the side mentality it sounds like what you're describing as a faculty member as an active participant and I think you've been talking to the to that pretty well yeah I mean I think you should take this yeah I mean I think that it's I think that we tend to view it as this binary right either either you are the sage on the stage or you're the guide on the side but I think that the instructors that we feature really showcase that that there is a healthy balance between those things right in our lecturing chapter we end with a metaphor from one of our instructors that compares this to going down a stream right and the lecturer is kind of steering students down the stream but there are these kind of strategic island stops along the stream that that that you know students disembark the lecturers boat they get onto the island they try something out they apply something they have a discussion and then they get kind of back on on on the boat right until the next stream and so forth so I think you know the book is full of metaphors like that which I love and we really you know kind of tried to try to be colorful in in in how we how we went about talking about the teaching but I think it's a really beautiful way to think about what a classroom can be right and so I think that there is this kind of you know dichotomy that's kind of set up by the field but I think that there is a lot more I think it's a lot more complicated than that and that folks are doing much more complicated things in their classroom oftentimes yeah and I appreciate this question because I think it's right that we have set up two binary of a dichotomy between the sage on the stage or the guide by the side and the concern of many people is but wait I do have something that I want people to learn right like and so how do I make sure that my learning goals get met like you know I do need students to be able to do linear algebra when they you know leave my class or you know whatever and so I think part of the what we try to unpack in the different chapters like in facilitating discussions one of the big foci is how do you hit your learning goals in the context of a discussion where the students are actually you know the ones generating much of the content of that right and so we high we have conversations with a whole bunch of different faculty and we highlight different practices for how they make sure that it's not just a free-for-all how it doesn't go off on a tangent but you don't just get one dominating voice there like how can you help make sure that students are developing the knowledge and the skills that you care about but in the context of the students also leading the learning that in ways comes up in every single chapter and so yeah I agree eventually what we are we are the leaders we are the creators of learning spaces and we are always engineering the content that students are engaging with the people they're engaging it with and what were the tasks that we're asking them to do and so and so we have a lot of control and yet our control always has to be to create these spaces of active engage by students with the material and with one another creators of learning spaces what a great phrase for this to a really resonant one well building off of that we we have a bunch of questions in the pipeline and and one goes right to that and this is again I'm hitting up John again for this I don't see anything but assessment grades are still the corner of the realm for students what does good teaching do about grade pressures well one thing that I think is important is say to share the kinds of research that show that when students are engaged in more problem-based learning and more collaborative learning in fact their mastery does increase and so if you are engaged in mastery a based grading of any kind including like giving a test and saying how many of these questions did you get right you are more likely to have higher scores and hopefully therefore assign students higher grades if you engage in more act you know based learning strategies so that's one piece of this is that this is not a trade-off in any way the other thing is that there's both questions about like overall grades right average grades or score or something and then also distribution of grades right and we know that in basically every institution and virtually every classroom we see inequalities in say grades and scores and rankings etc and we often see inequalities in learning and mastery that are associated with features that should not impact learning right I mean maybe that engagement you know different levels of engagement yes should impact learning you know if I'm busy playing Pokemon you know I'm not going to do as well but there are questions you know things about say class background racial and ethnic background gender whether or not we are caretakers of children or older adults in our families whether or not right you know also are we first generation in school all sorts of things that are demographic features of ourselves have huge impacts on who we are in the world but should not in fact have impacts on our potential for learning and say our potential for getting A's in a course and there's a lot of research that shows that when we implement learning and teaching strategies that pull students into the learning and help them engage with the material in real time that actually democratizes learning and is going to both raise everyone that's like this physics study also actually help not fully resolve but reduce inequalities and inequities in learning and so then you'll get higher grades and a more respectable and just distribution of grades fantastic yeah the only thing that I would add there is that I mean just as our instructional moves in the classroom you know need to be more interactive and more inclusive I think that we this also demands pretty critical rethinking of traditional grading paradigms right and and those and there are alternatives to those right you know we contract grading labor-based grading Brian I know you've had Jesse Stommel on this on the program who does you know ungrading I think that too often grading and learning have kind of become conflated and this is something that in my I teach courses on schooling and education and this is something that that we really try to get under the surface of and you ask students you know if if there is a grade attached to something are you going to do the the riskier assignment or you're going to do are you going to stay in kind of the safe lane and undoubtedly they all say the the ladder right so I think that that demands I mean in some ways therefore the traditional grading scheme is sort of incompatible with some of these more active classroom practices that we're talking about right if we're really asking students to go out on a limb to take a risk to be okay with getting it wrong can we necessarily stick to an age-old kind of antiquated system that that may be in many cases arbitrary and and and quite problematic for all the reasons that Mira just said here here excellent I love this connection to ungrading or at least you know changing upgrading and rethinking it you'll see in the chat you have just a chorus of supporters on this we have we have more questions coming in I want to make sure we get a chance to get to as many of them as possible before we're out of time because we only have about 10 minutes left and this is from our friend Ken in Salonaro and she asked a quick question Jeremy mentioned a book that included having student-led inquiry for the first and last 10 minutes of the class on something they know or something that knows them is that one of the books in the chat this this is our book yeah this is so that you can find this in the in the last kind of core chapter of the book which is virtual learning there you go there you go and and if you have if you haven't seen it from the way on no no no problem I'm trying to help you sell books here on the bottom left of the screen is a kind of tan colored button which has a link to the Harvard Education Press copy of that so thank you and just to just to add on I know Mira mentioned this earlier are the I what I think is really kind of unique about this book is that it really brings you directly into these instructor's classrooms it builds the scene there are these kind of detailed descriptive low inference vignettes that are then followed by these sections of what's happening in this instructor's classroom where we really pull it apart bring in the instructors and students voices and and and relate it to relevant research and classroom considerations and I think that that that's quite different than a lot of pedagogical resources that you see at the post-secondary level which really kind of take the the instructional moves out of context and so you know this is one way to to see effective instruction in action and think about how you might implement what you see in your own instructional context bravo this is this is great we have the question which is a pretty deep and probing question from our good friend in the Houston area Tom Hames and he asks us this one and I'm trying to anticipate how you would answer but I think it's that's too good for me to do that correctly how do you teach creativity over conformity Jeremy you're you know rethinking education schools and society first anyone right oh man um well I think that uh I think that it's hard and I think that one of the reasons that it's hard um and hopefully this isn't a non-answer but I think that one of the reasons that it's hard is because many of us have have been again socialized in schooling spaces that really value conformity over creativity and I think I think to to kind of break that we have to do a great deal of self-reflection at every step we need to ask ourselves what kind of our goals are for every single thing that we do in the classroom um but um yeah I don't know if this is if this is a great answer but I think that I think that it demands kind of moving away from uh what we envision stereotypically when we envision a college classroom or or a secondary classroom um can I yeah please sorry I didn't want to cut you off sorry keep going no no go ahead save me no I'm thinking about actually this um example that you gave of Aaliyah El Amin's classroom where you know she has these students do the teachings and teach each other and you had mentioned that this was actually the enactment through the pedagogy of in fact some of the uh sort of intellectual um and methodological stances of the class as a whole I actually think that that is what almost every really great uh higher ed instructor does is within the classroom they are enacting um the the the creativity and the insights and the ways of thinking the dispositions of their discipline through engaging students in sort of the learning of it and the developing of their own identity as people within that discipline uh we have a colleague Joel Mehta uh along with other colleague Sarah Fine wrote a really wonderful book called in search of deeper learning and there um they sort of rethink the instructional triangle and they talk about how in every really great learning situation uh you see um students developing mastery they're exercising creativity and they're developing an identity as a person who is that doing that kind of thing and capable of doing that kind of thing as a swimmer as a mathematician as a cell biologist whatever and I am thinking about say we have a um portrait of Paula Arlotti who is a neuroscientist um and she is in her classroom inviting students to think with her about these complex questions about the brain and she is in this undergraduate classroom kind of replicating the experience of being in her lab where where people in her lab will be teasing around ideas and trying to figure out what do we know what do we not know what's important to know and I think many of the classrooms actually that we feature feature that kind of bringing in of the creativity of the discipline the reason that people are faculty are teaching this into the classroom space I love that that's terrific that's that's yes I warned you Tom's question would be a good one and and both of you took that in such great directions thank you thank you thinking together is a phrase I use with my students a lot which I really want that to be the case we also have a question from Geno Bondo and this so this broadens it out a bit and perhaps Jeremy this is one for you based on your thinking about educational reform Gen asks in my experience helping faculty upskill and good pedagogy is often difficult if it's not prioritized by the administration e.g. does it form part of promotion and tenure did you touch on how to remediate this and by the way up in the chat a bit someone mentioned launching a teaching and learning improvement program which went over like an anvil yes it's okay so how do we do this how do we do this so I think I don't think that the book adequately answers this and I think that the you know the hierarchies of the university are certainly present in the book so so on on the one hand I think that these instructors that we feature don't view scholarship and teaching as these two discrete app activities that that never intersect right I think that all of these instructors view students as having the capacity to change their change there that the instructors minds about something and that students voices and insights and perspectives ultimately thread their way into scholarship so I think they they don't necessarily view these as separate things that said I think you know a good number of the folks that we feature are considered lecturers they're not considered tenure track right professors and that's this enables them to really focus on the teaching they're not held to these kind of the the standards of scholarship that someone in a tenure line position would be um so and that's not all of them right but I think that the the folks who kind of I think that you it is so hard to get to get um faculty on board with some of this because there aren't necessarily the incentives there and the incentives are very much grounded in the research especially at the research university like like the one that we feature um I mean I think that part of it uh can really come from building a strong community of practice which is something that we emphasize at the end I think that I think that uh even though the terrain is difficult I think that people want authentic opportunities to share practice to talk about what they're doing in the classroom because too often the work of instructional improvement is this kind of private and isolated affair and it shouldn't be that way it needs to be a kind of joint enterprise um I think sorry no no go ahead sorry sorry sorry no that that was it the one thing I would very quickly add is also it can help people understand that they will actually work less hard and feel better about what they are doing with a lot of their time yeah that's in itself an incentive yeah many faculty have to teach a lot and if we can say look we can make your time your time spent doing that feel more productive and better yeah that's a big incentive yeah I I hate I hate to say it but that is actually where we have to stop it's actually a good point to stop uh because we are out of time but uh first of all that was a great question uh thank you so much Jen and both of you that was a great answer I love uh mirror how we take us to uh faculty doing better feeling better and uh and being able to work well I think this is fantastic and both of you this is an important book that the higher education needs to really really take seriously um how how do we find out what you're up to next how do we how do we track you online where do we keep up with you all I'm easy to I mean you know uh Harvard always does a good job of making sure that um that Harvard academics are easy to find Google me and you'll find me uh I mean like in a way that's that's probably as easy as I can say very good and when when you have something to show on your ethics project I'm really serious please let me know we will bring you back I will come back anytime and and I'll put it in my calendar to ping you in the spring thank you and Jeremy how about you where do we keep up with you you can google me as well I have a much lower profile than than Mira but I will also make a plug for the instructional moves website so the the book is not the only place to to find the wealth of knowledge that these these instructors have the website is and and perhaps one of us can drop it in the chat um it's it's really a repository of rich classroom videos instructors talking about their work and you can follow different developments that are happening on that project directly through that website so highly recommend checking it out excellent and thank you Mira for putting that in the chat yeah and I will say that I was just talking to our long-suffering colleague Josh Bookin about the fact that I think we should add a module on AI instructional moves in AI you absolutely should in in the chat in effect our good friend Brett Anders had a question about that he has a book on AI literacy as well as a very active YouTube he's the American University of Armenia and I strongly recommend checking him out but we've done checking you out you both have been fantastic guests this has just been heartening and practical and so wise thank you both so much for sharing so much of your knowledge for this really cool book thank you for having us even though I don't have a beard that's okay we'll still bring you back please be well Mira thank you again and and take care Jeremy please enjoy that awesome college thank you thanks so much take care and don't leave yet friends we have just to let you know to wrap things up thank you all for the really really good questions if you want to keep talking about instructional moves you can do it on social media just use the hashtag FTTE and here you can find me on Twitter Macedon threads blue sky or or my blog if you'd like to go back into our previous sessions and take a look at our sessions on teaching and approving teaching just go to this archive tinyurl.com FTF archive we have sessions coming up on other higher education topics on anti-racism mental health and we have a community gathering coming up just go to the future transform at forum that future of education that us thank you again all for being with us it's great as we just said thinking with you hope you're all well take care and we'll see you next time online bye bye