-: Let me just say something real quick.
And then I'm gonna pass this over to Jody.
Who's our lead on this, that we're this, this, this
the content of the session, it was inspired by
an email that, that Jody sent me.
I had sent out an email in early last fall
trying to encourage faculty to continue to think
through, think creatively about how to develop what
in largely applied fields through remote instruction.
And I asked people to share
with me any successes they might be having.
And I heard from a handful of people who sent me emails
about like this long and Jody took me seriously.
She sent me a really rich email
full of really interesting things.
And that launched, really, our relationship.
I had been working in the building
for six years and never really met her.
And she's been working here for 17.
So, you know, I'm the director of the school of the arts.
That's how I met her and, you know, sent that email out
and then she responded and this, this spun out from that.
So that's who I am.
That's how this got kicked off.
Jody, ball's in your court.
-: All right.
Well, I am an adjunct faculty
in the school of art and art history.
And I've been teaching since 2004 in the media arts area.
I also teach during the day, middle school art
at Norris middle school, 46 and Center
not Norris in rural Nebraska.
And when Jack reached out to faculty, looking to
learn a bit more about how we can engage our
remote learners in this pandemic crisis,
I decided to kind of self-disclose
and take a risk and share with him a lot of
things that I'd been doing in my daytime classroom.
-: We have a freeze going on.
Jody?
-: In the middle school and how I've been adapting
are predominantly hands-on kinds of
process-based learning,
to try to invigorate the ways in which they were
dealing with engagement.
So that's a little bit about how this started
and I'm hoping that everyone has worked
with a Padlet before.
If you haven't, in the chat, there is a link that
connects to this Padlet and we're using
a column structure to share our information today.
This'll be open after this session
we'll turn comments off and we'll leave it live
for you to refer back to as a
learning resource in the future.
So the first thing we thought we would want to
kind of engage with you guys about is a dialogue
about what engagement means to you.
Okay? And so if you're able to use this Padlet
on whatever device you're in the meeting with
you would click the little plus underneath
the column that says, "What is Engagement."
And then if you can offer up any just quick insights
for, for you as a teacher,
what does good student learning look like,
sound like, and feel like in your classroom.
And we'll give you about 90 seconds to think about
and reflect and respond to those prompts.
I have major focus issues.
So I love to use a stopwatch because it helps.
-: Well, I will also say that this,
this technique that Jody is using right now
with this you entering into the Padlet,
this is one of the things that she does
at the beginning of her class.
So we're modeling for you here, a way to
engage students right at the beginning of class
in a thoughtful way that is not talkative yet
but get the wheels turning and they actually
have something to do that isn't taking a quiz.
So interesting.
-: So about 30 more seconds right now.
-: Jody or Jack, could either of you reshare
the Padlet link, it's been requested in the chat.
-: Here, I got it.
-: Thank you.
-: Thanks Jack.
-: There's our timer, so if you want to
give yourself about 10 seconds just to wrap up
your thought, and if you need more time to
reflect and write, feel free to go back
to that column, some point in this presentation
and add your contribution if that
wasn't enough time for you.
I know for my spouse and my older child,
they're introverts and slow processors
so they need a little bit more time.
So we have some really interesting comments
about what learning looks like.
Looks like productive chaos.
I liked that one, but that's, that's the love of an
art teacher seeing productive chaos in the classroom.
So Jack, if you would describe what engagement looks like
in a theater classroom, in like a 30 second
elevator speech what would that look like to you?
-: You know, what, what I see here in this column
is a lot of content and conceptual stuff.
And what I would be doing is describing the
gestural language of the class.
So things like, you know, are they are, you know
what kind of eye contact are they making with each other?
How are they leaning into each other?
Are they busy doing things
or are they, you know, on their phones?
Are they, are they checked out?
Are they in an online situation?
It's really interesting because you can see,
if I go here, it doesn't necessarily mean
I'm checked out but it is something that
you want to be thinking about.
And if you see me doing this,
where's my phone, it's up there.
If that's what my timer is.
But if you see me doing this,
well we know something's going on
that's not connected to what's happening here.
So I think, you know, I like to keep,
Jody will talk about this in a bit.
I like to keep the mics on the whole time.
I love the train wreck about people talking at once
because I think the danger of the Zoom format
is that everybody is muffled and muzzled.
And so they don't really have the chance to really feel.
They don't even think it's appropriate to
release energy into the Zoom.
We've been taught to be quiet.
So I like to think, you talk all you want,
when it becomes a train wreck, I'll manage this room.
So I like it to be noisy, locked up screens,
because people are talking at once,
People are engaged in there, you can see it
in the face, but, and again it comes from
a lot of what's in this column, you have to
do these things that are in the column
that make that happen.
That's what I would say, Jody.
-: Yeah. And for me as an art teacher,
engagement is, people are actively doing stuff, right?
I want people actively doing stuff with
their hands, their eyes, and their senses.
And this, this format doesn't naturally lend itself to that.
I'm sort of the opposite of Jack.
I enjoy quiet engagement.
I want to see people doing stuff, but the, the
the loud noise is a little bit of a trigger for me.
And so I have to use different ways to create
engagement, which I'll talk about in just a second,
but both Jack and I just engaged in the next call
and, which is the foundation of what you need to
do to create engagement, which is, is to create
a safe learning environment where students can
share their needs and they, and how they
learn best but you do that a little bit by
self-disclosure.
And this is an important one to Jack,
so I'm going to turn it to him so he can talk about that.
-: Yeah, so it's interesting.
A lot of what we've been doing
I have had an instinct about an intuitions about
and we had a professional development workshop
with a guest, Stephen Brookfield,
who wrote several books,
Critically Reflective Teacher, The Skillful Teacher.
And he talked about always starting a class
or an exercise with self-disclosure.
And I have been talking to colleagues about
bring you to the classroom, not part of you, not,
not the edited you, bring you to the room.
And the, what that does for students is
it helps them see you on this sort of
level playing field with them.
I know I was taught to sort of act like and
think like, I'm the Sage on the stage.
And that's in today's generation of students,
it's, it's hard.
So, the first thing that in terms of doing this
is getting beyond your professional bio.
I went to school blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I love this prompt which comes from a poem
by George Ella Lyon, called Where I'm From.
And it's a fill in the blank thing.
I'm from the sound of what, if I, you know
I'm from New Jersey I don't know what I'd say
the sound of.
So then you can do go through this.
I'm from the smell of, the taste of, the idea of,
and sharing that with the students is a much
more accessible way to present yourself to them.
There are things that maybe are important that
they want to know, not just where did you go to school
but this idea about telling your story,
what are the interesting life details
the touchstones of your youth, that you're proud of
that, that explain who you are and how you approach things.
So for instance, one of the things
two things that I used to talk about
in class all the time was what does it mean
to be blind in one eye?
How did I go blind in one eye?
How does that change the way I enter a room?
What does it mean for me to have lost
a sibling at age seven when she was seven?
These things have shaped the way I interact with people.
And so I tell them those things and I, and how I
manage them, and how they helped me show up.
The other thing then is to be aware of that,
I don't know about you folks,
but I know that my own teaching is often
in response to my life as a student.
So I, I think it's a really great strategy
to talk about your own successes and failures
as a student and how your teaching has been
informed by those.
I think it really de-centers the power in the room.
And I think that's a really important concept.
Jody did another professional development workshop
with us where we were talking about critiques.
And one of the challenges of critiques
and critical feedback in this day and age is,
if the students feel like there is
an unequal power relationship in the room,
they tend to not be very accepting of feedback.
So, getting yourself down here by self-disclosing,
being on the same plane, being a human being with them
and they can feel the authentic you when you come
to the room and they can also feel the inauthentic you.
And I know that we have this notion about professionalism
which is, I don't disclose, that's my private business.
And I guess what I'm here to say is I,
I really want to challenge that assumption.
When you finally do that then you got to be open
through the whole way to change, you know?
I love, and we'll talk about this a little bit later,
gathering in the middle of the class,
anonymous feedback.
After the professional development workshop
I did couple weeks ago with this guy,
Stephen Brookfield, he said something,
"Don't ask students, so how's this going for you?"
Because you're going to get an honest answer.
The next day, I dropped in on a Zoom class,
he was a colleague,
the first thing he did was say,
"So how's this going for you?"
And we got this, it was absolutely, perfectly
confirming what I heard the day before.
A lot of very kind, gentle,
generic statements.
Nothing with meat on it.
And when you do an anonymous, like a poll everywhere
or a Slido, or, you know, even a Padlet,
and it's anonymous, you'd be surprised
you get a lot one, everybody's participating.
And two, they feel safer
over time,
of being honest with you,
the way they will become more honest with you
is you have to model non-defensive responses.
So people used to complain about one thing
in one of my classes all the time
and I always had a justification about it.
Now I would approach that very differently.
I would really listen and say, wow,
I didn't know that that's how this works for you.
Well, let me go back and think about
how I can adapt this,
and make this work for you.
So I think if the more you model this
non-defensive response and they see you adjusting,
the more honest feedback
you're going to get from your students.
So that's that column. Jody?
-: Thanks, Jack, that was awesome.
Related to engagement, is the idea of
breaking up your instruction
and full disclosure on this one,
I suffer from some pretty intense attention issues.
I'm also a learner that misunderstands or
doesn't see things the first time.
Sometimes I have to read things several times.
And so I need to have my instruction chunked
into like 10 or 12 minutes of information
for my attention span, and then have the
opportunity to process that out of my
working memory, into my long-term memory.
And if an instructor doesn't do that for me,
I will fail.
And I recently, you know,
I recently struggled
with a big project that I needed to do and I
missed some significant parts and I had to redo it.
And part of that was my issue.
But part of that was also, you know,
you're going to hear my middle school bells
in the background, apologies.
It was also my need for having that instruction
chunked in a little bit different way.
And so in this column, I've just put some,
two things in this column related to
it's understanding attention span for our
college students and understanding working memory,
if you haven't explored that concept before for learners.
And then over here, we're going to go
over to this column that says tools and apps.
And since this was a speed session,
what I did is I threw a lot of different tools at you
that you can integrate with online asynchronous teaching
as well as online, remote synchronous teaching
that can give you tools to create those interactions
and dialogues with your whole group instruction
like we're doing here, or what's your breakout rooms.
Slido is a new one for me.
It's a polling app.
Padlet, I'm using right now.
Mentimeter is great, it allows you to
create all sorts of interactive slides
and learning assets,
Kahoot is a game-based one.
Quizizz is, I never can say this one right,
is also a game-based one.
And then I just learned about Pear Deck
a few days ago in the digital showcase
here at UNO.
and Pear Deck is like, amazing because it can
overlap on top of existing PowerPoints
and resources you might have,
and create interactive elements.
And I know for the teachers,
I know for all teachers we spent so much time
creating these learning assets
and then suddenly we're teaching in this new way.
And we want to use those learning assets
and make them interactive rather than
rebuilding, you know, our systems.
So I'm really excited about Pear Deck
and being able to use that.
I learned that from an economics professor
at UNO.
Nearpod is another one that's kind of interactive.
Wooclap allows you to create anonymous feedback.
Flipgrid, you guys know about,
Slack is another one.
So, and then Gimkit is another game one.
So this is a whole bag of tools that we're
not going to explain in this session
but we're going to throw at you for you to look
at later on and explore how you might use them
to break up your instruction into 10 to 12 minute
segments that you then allow your students
to process that content in some way
-: I would say Jody, has threw this Padlet thing at me
I want to use all of these things.
And I realized the last time, when I started
using these tools, I wanted to get good or
pretty good at one before I moved on to
number two and number three.
So it's a long journey.
You don't have to try to do five of these.
Pick one.
-: Yeah I'm a collector.
That's the artist in me as I have collections
but I also have two or three that I really go to.
So for my middle level kids, I love, I love Padlet
because the back end of Padlet has so many
different formats and structures you can use.
It's, you know, a seven-year-old
to a 70-year-old can navigate it.
But you're going to find two or three
that really work for you
There's another bell,
we have a lot of bells at my school.
-: We got 6 minutes, Jody.
-: I know, that are going to help you,
and connect it to that 10 to 12 minute chunking
of your instruction.
Engagement happens when we communicate with other people.
And so it's really important to create
opportunities for dialogue and connection.
Was this one you were taking, Jack?
-: I'll say real quickly here
this allow for peer-to-peer connection.
This was really different for me and
I realized that I needed to get out of the room.
So I actually was doing that right before
we went to distance learning in the spring.
I would leave the room and ask the students
to talk because, I hate to say it,
I'm a large presence in a room
and it's hard for students to feel like they really can
step up when there's a large presence in the room.
So I learned to leave the room.
And then when we got into Zoom, what I, what I
learned from Jody, what I wasn't doing it yet
was, send them into breakout rooms without you.
Like, what do you mean without me?
Well, they learned to do it, it's really cool.
The other thing that I really liked about
what both Stephen Brookfield and Jody
taught me, is send them into the room with some
thoughts that they've recorded already,
which is why this Padlet is great.
So you start with, you know, two to three minutes
of thinking like we did about what is engagement.
You go into a breakout room,
and then you ask them not to talk about their own thing.
They have to pick somebody else's anonymous entry.
Can you scroll down just a little bit, Jody?
Pick somebody else's anonymous entry,
and then they're gonna, you know,
talk about the blue one, there it is.
Make nonjudgmental observations,
ask questions of each of it to each other.
And then when you come back to the common room,
you don't bring a report.
You share one of the the common questions
that we seem to hear around these breakout rooms.
And, and so it never just becomes report.
And if you're not talking about yourself,
students start to actually listen to each other,
which is really interesting.
As opposed to, it's my turn I'm done.
And now I check out.
So I think this peer to peer dialogue
and exchange is really critical to getting
an active group going.
-: All right.
And then this, we wanted to discuss this issue
of camera's off and on
and how we do or do not
measure engagement based upon a person's face.
Right?
And so the first thing I would put out
there is grace and patience.
During the day, I teach to a room of my remote
kids are have no cameras on,
and they just have a little picture of their names.
And it is incredibly hard but they never
turn their cameras on in my building.
And so I found other ways to measure their engagement
whether it be they raise their hands,
they respond through the Padlet.
When we get to the college level, I think
it's really important to have that same
grace and patience,
but also maybe step up on professionalism
and ask our students to maybe do a 50-50 rule
or an 80-20 rule.
Give those introverted students who might
also have Zoom anxiety,
an opportunity to kind of lean into
or slowly get into the session.
But as there'll be times when your camera is on
because there is a lot of research
I don't have a column on it here.
I should've put it on here,
related to the human face and how
engagement happens with our human faces.
And I have the goofiest face,
and I make the goofiest expressions.
And when my students see me and are able to interact
with this humanness, I do believe they learn more.
And so one thing that I've been doing is giving,
and I teach an art class,
And so this is part of our curriculum,
is I've been giving the students the opportunity
to create a Zoom background that kind of lets them
have an identity that they want to have, right?
Or tells a story about themselves
connecting back to that disclosure.
And so the space of sharing the face
can also be about sharing identity.
So that strategies that have worked for us
with the camera issue, and it's a complex one, for sure.
Do you have anything to add to that, Jack?
He's got one thing.
-: Yeah. You know, I actually very deliberately
do not use virtual backgrounds.
But that's because I live in a space
that I'm comfortable showing.
-: Yes, exactly.
-: What is behind me is very personal,
and I do it on purpose because I want the
students to ask, what is that behind you?
I said, those are pictures of me as an actor.
That's an Andrew Wyeth painting.
This is why, what I'm thinking about.
And so there's ways to do-
I resisted the virtual background that, you know,
you pull down off of whatever
because it's, it's, it is generic.
I love what Jody's suggesting,
just make your own.
-: We only have two minutes left and we have three columns.
So I'll go over them really quick.
The camera issue to me relates to the issue
of first-generation college students, which I am one.
I was homeless for a period of time in middle school.
And I'm really proud to say
that I went to college and graduated
and I just got admitted to a doctorate program at UNO.
So I am like so proud of all of this
but we really need to think about our
first-generation students and what they need,
related to that disclosure, they don't,
maybe someone doesn't want to disclose
where they live.
I know I wouldn't have when I was
in my first years of undergrad.
But there's a lot of other issues related
to first-generation students that I pose
to people to think about.
So I've put some things in here for you to
think about, how you consciously create space
for different kinds of learners.
I put some resources in here related to
hybrid and remote instruction that have helped me.
And then Jack and I wanted to make sure that one
way to stay engaged is you have to have a healthy teacher.
So if you're not a healthy teacher
and not taking care of yourself,
a healthy faculty member, to use a more proper term
then you can't be engaged for your students.
And so we have this column here.
These are resources that have helped me stay,
stay sane and, and do self care in a pandemic
while teaching.
And we wanted to make sure to give you guys those as well.
Jack, did you have any last followups?
I think we had like 10 seconds.
-: I just say, thanks, Jody.
I continue to learn a lot from you and, you know,
there's a lot of types of questions in
the chat that I'm not sure I can answer.
So I think that the fun thing about this is,
it's all about experimenting right now,
which I'm really into.
-: There are tons of questions
in the chat that I didn't see earlier.
So I was kind of in the moment.
My, my email is J L Boyer,
@UNOmaha.edu.
If anyone wants to have
a discussion about
anything we've showed
in the Padlet
I love teaching people,
and I love learning with others.
Please, please send me an email.
I, I love to connect.