Intentional Teaching
Intentional Teaching is a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching. Hosted by educator and author Derek Bruff, the podcast features interviews with educators throughout higher ed.
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Intentional Teaching
Take It or Leave It with Stacey Johnson, Emily Donahoe, and Lance Eaton
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage.
Inspired by a recent episode of the American Birding Podcast, this episode of Intentional Teaching features a "Take It or Leave It" Panel. I spent some quality time with recent essays published online looking for arguments about teaching and learning in higher education that would be open to debate. For each of these hot takes, I asked our three panelists to take it (that is, agree with the hot take) or leave it (disagree), forcing them into an artificial binary that, I think, led to some robust discussion.
We have three fantastic panelists for our first “Take It or Leave It” panel. Stacey M. Johnson is director of learning and engagement at the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan University. Emily Pitts Donahoe is an associate director of instructional support at the University of Mississippi Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. Lance Eaton is director of faculty development and innovation at College Unbound.
Episode Resources:
"How Accommodating Can (Should) I Be?" by David Galef, Inside Higher Ed, May 2024
"It's Time to Start Teaching Your Students How to Be a Student" by Emily Isaacs, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 2024
"Is AI Finally a Way to Reduce Higher Ed Costs?" by José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson, Inside Higher Ed, April 2024
"No One Is Talking about AI's Impact on Reading" by Marc Watkins, Rhetorica, May 2024
Stacey M. Johnson's website, https://staceymargarita.wordpress.com/
Emily Pitts Donahoe's Substack, https://emilypittsdonahoe.substack.com/
Lance Eaton's Substack, https://aiedusimplified.substack.com/
"Take It or Leave It - Seawatching, Records Committees, and Owls" on the American Birding Podcast
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Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
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See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
... Welcome to Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas and teaching. I'm your host, Derek Bruff. I hope this podcast helps you be more intentional in how you teach and in how you develop as a teacher over time. A couple of months ago, the American Birding Podcast tried out a new format that host Nate Swick called Take It or Leave It. Nate put together a list of hot takes from the birdwatching community, noting that, quote, Birders are full of strong opinions, some serious and some silly. He invited on the podcast two experienced birders to discuss those hot takes. And for each one either take it that is agree with the hot take or leave it, that is disagree. This simple structure generated some fantastic discussion among Nate and his panelists, and I learned a lot about the birding community from listening. I thought the same format would work for exploring hot takes from the higher education community, and I talked a few colleagues into giving it a try. We have three fantastic panelists for our first Take It or Leave It panel. Stacey M Johnson is director of Learning and Engagement at the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities. Prior to that, she and I worked together for many years at the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching, where she was our assistant director for educational technology. Emily Pitts Donohoe is a current colleague of mine at the University of Mississippi Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, where she serves as an associate director of Instructional Support. Emily teaches regularly in the Writing and Rhetoric program at UM, and she's the author of The Unmaking the Grade blog on Substack. Lance Eaton is not someone I've worked with, but I've been an admirer of his work for a while now. Lance is director of faculty development and Innovation at College Unbound, a nontraditional college for nontraditional students. And he also has a blog on Substack one about teaching and A.I. To generate hot takes for our panel. I spent some quality time with recent essays published in the Chronicle of Higher Education and inside of Higher ed and a few other places looking for arguments about teaching and learning in higher education that would be open to debate. For each hot take, I asked our three panelists to take it or leave it, forcing them into an artificial binary that I think led to some robust discussion. Well, Emily, Stacy and Lance, thank you so much for being here and being part of our panel today on the Intentional Teaching podcast. I'm very excited to dig into these hot takes with you all. Thanks for being here.Let's start with our first hot take and I'll just read it here as I've prepared it. Flexibility is a good goal, but instructors should hold the line on attendance policies. As David Galef wrote in a recent essay, and we'll put links to these essays in the show notes Class performance Matters. And if they're not there, they can't participate. So, E, I'm going to call on you first. What do you make of this hot take? Flexibility is a good goal, but instructors should hold the line on attendance policies.
Emily Donahoe:So I'm glad you called on me first, because I'm going to hold forth on this for like 2 hours. I could probably talk about this for a long time. Okay. So I'm going to leave this take. I, I think attendance is vital for many classes, including my own. And, you know, in my classes, it's where a lot of the learning happens. Like in community, I teach writing. And so we workshop each other's writing. We do a lot of stuff together, and it's really important that students are in class. But there are a lot of times and increasingly this is the case where I don't want students to come to class, where I would rather they skip class, right? When students are ill, I don't want them in class. If students have a family emergency, I want them with their family. I had a student call me from the side of the road recently. Last semester, the last semester I was teaching who said I just totaled my car. But I'm going to try to make it to class. I was like, No, don't come to class. Right. So I think if you have a strict attendance policy, it incentivizes students to attend even what I don't want them to attend. Right. And and it can create really bad feelings for everybody if students feel like they're coerced to be there. So I don't want to make students choose between doing the right thing for themselves and getting a good grade in my class. Right. So there's a lot more I could say about that, but I'm going to stop right there and let other people. Weigh in.
Derek Bruff:A right. All right, Lance, what about you?
Lance Eaton:Oh, definitely. Leave it as it is. Oh, I read the full piece and there was a lot of, like, grunting under my breath. I. think so. I work at an institute that's adult learners, and their lives turn on a dime. And there are things that just are not predictable. And I they many already navigate, like, different stressors and anxiety. I don't want to contribute to that. I also think like the idea of like, attendance is performative. There's plenty of times I attended class and I was not present. I there were times like I was doodling. I was writing bad poetry, whatever. Like doing all the things that were not related to whatever class it was in. So like, I think there's a there's a privileging of the presence that is a false equivalency. No, if you want to have activities and those activities are part of the students like grade. Sure, I'm also going to have those back ups because I just think that's important. And then I like there's something about this for some classes where it just feels like if by the end of the course you have demonstrated the learning objectives, like why like this? This is where it feels pedantic, it feels punitive, it feels bureaucratic while you missed four classes, but like you kicked ass. Oh am I allowed to say ass, Oh, well.
Derek Bruff:It's my podcast. I make the rules.
Lance Eaton:But like, like you kicked ass on the assignments, but somehow you missed four classes and therefore deserve a lower grade like that. Just that tells us all the wrong messages, that it is about power and it is not about actual learning.
Derek Bruff:Yeah, I hear Josh Eyler's voice in my head now saying grades do not mean what we think they mean. Right? Yeah. Stacey, are you going to join? You're going to take it? I knew it. I knew.
Stacey Johnson:It. I'm going to take it.
Derek Bruff:It's why I called on you last.
Stacey Johnson:But I think this I think it's funny because I can absolutely not disagree with any of the things that you said. All of those things are true. But I think attendance actually is the most important part of my class. I don't lecture, so there's no way you can watch a recording later. I happen to teach lower level language classes primarily. There is no other setting in your life where you're going to get someone talking to you in a language you don't know yet. In a way you can understand and process, and your brain actually has to be fully engaged and processing in order for you to make progress in the language over the semester. So for me, it's not enough for you just to attend. You have to like be there, be in it, be processing, and I'll sometimes take students aside during class and say, if you're going to be here, really be here because we want you here. I know you can learn this, but you can't work on other stuff or it's, you know, you might as well be somewhere else doing something else. So I'm going to take it. I did not read the essay. I imagine I would probably have some of the same reactions that Lance did. But I also want to add a little footnote that I don't have any punitive grading attached to my policies. So I make a very strong stance about attendance. But if you miss every single class and somehow are still able to meet the objectives of the course, there's no artificial. You just didn't show up in the way I expected you to grading. It's mostly just going to be lots of emails from me, hallway conversations, me expressing a lot of concern. It's going to get so annoying. You're going to start attending just to not have to have that talk with me again.
Emily Donahoe:Yeah, I think there are a lot of ways to incentivize attendance that are not grade penalties. Right. And one of the things that I do is ask students to set goals around engagement at the beginning of the semester and then self evaluate on those goals. And attendance is part of that throughout the semester. So they're directly reflecting on how is my attendance impacting my learning or my performance in the class. Right? And they when they start to see those connections, I do think they start to understand the importance of coming to class, right?
Derek Bruff:Yeah, I haven't done the goal setting, which I like a lot. I do often will have a kind of self-assessment of class participation for students and I try to frame it around, How are you contributing to the learning in this community? Right? How are you contributing to your peers learning? Are you bringing interesting perspectives and resources? And that can happen in a lot of different ways. Often in my classes, some of that happens during class discussion, but a lot of that happens in online spaces that we're in. And I think part of the reason I like this is that it it helps students think about their class participation differently. I think a lot of students come in thinking that it is a performance that they're doing right. I have to speak up in class because my professor is expecting me to say things, and the more things I say, the better. And that's not really a very nuanced understanding of what class participation is for, right? It's it's, it's to help all of us learn. And so I try to reframe them that in that direction. But I love the idea of having them articulate goals along those lines. I do wonder I wondered this for a while. And Lance, you kind of touched on this. If I'm having them do things in class as activities and I am counting that in some fashion as part of their grade, as a class participation grade, th does seem to be a de facto attendance policy. Yeah. And so how do you respond to that? Lance Does it, or is that okay then? And is it not okay because it's that.
Lance Eaton:S like, I think in that context, when I have them doing those activities, like those activities are grounded in alignment. So in class writing assignment, which is how I would often start face to face or synchronous courses, is this mixture of like reflection and preparation for what we're doing next. In that that classroom, which will be, you know, minimal lecture and more dialogue, group activities and things like that. Yeah. And so like there's a that I can tie to the objectives of the course and if a student is missing it, like I can create opportunities for them to make it up to for for demonstrating their ability to do that. In that case, it does require the student to be responsible on the follow through. So like I think that's also part of it is like, okay, like I, I will make room for those things and then it is on you because we've all set the responsibility of the like we this is what we've committed to. And I realize other things happen. But as, as adults, you know, and this is true of of traditional college age students like this now is a thing for you to pick up. And if you don't, that's fine. Like these activities are going to probably be 10%, but they are things that I can directly tie in aren't just the performative piece that there's an intentionality to why they're there and what we're doing with that. Those pieces.
Derek Bruff:Yeah, it's not it's not just checking a box, but it's part of the learning sequence that you've planned for these students. And so if they miss a step, they're still going to need to kind of go after that step one way or another, even if it didn't happen when and where you you had kind of anticipated it might.
Lance Eaton:Those can be other things like peer review as well, or peer dialogue as you know, taking in Stacey's context of of language like you can find those things that require or that like will still be contributing to the learning and structure those and be prepared for some level of, of flexibility where it makes sense for for, for making up.
Derek Bruff:Okay. Well, I'm going to move us on to our second hot take, which is on a related topic, acknowledging that Emily still has an hour and 55 minutes left of soapboxing on this first one, but you do have a blog, so feel free to write that out. So here's number two. Many students are arriving today at college without the "studenting" skills they need, and it's up to faculty to teach them those skills explicitly. Quote, and this is from an essay by Emily Isaacs coaching, coaxing and holding students responsible for developing and practicing skills and habits that will enable them to learn. So take it or leave it. It's up to faculty to teach our students studenting skills, and I will let any one of you get us started.
Lance Eaton:I'm going to leave it so hard that it's going to be spinning. Okay. Oh, I have strong feelings. Clearly, I didn't do it. I didn't do as much prep as Emily, but I definitely in gearing up. Oh, I was just like, oh, I heard the same thing when I was a college student. 26, 27 years ago. You can literally go into the history of higher ed and going all the way back in the United States to the 16 and 1700s hear, the same thing, I think more so currently. Like we forget how different of a world it is that students are growing up in than the world we lived in. In like, yes, there's all these tools that make life easier, but they're also things that make it much more complex. Like I did not have to grow up in a world of navigating a digital identity, right? And that is taxing. That is like that is a cognitive load. You are just carrying like a sack of potatoes on your back. So like a very strong feelings about that, you know, And I think what I hear more in this is, you know, institutions have continued to try to build these supports, right, like every institution has over these last 25 years, build out these different types of supports. Your first year seminar, your, you know, variety of students support success. I mean that's become this massive existence on these campuses. But there's still something missing. And so I don't know it's so much about the students, but it is about how like what is it that we're missing or is this just something that always happens and we have to figure out how comfortable we want to be, will be with it. And somewhere within that, I think is faculty also feeling just the more burden of so many things being asked of them? And this might be the most tangible, easily thing to point to.
Derek Bruff:Okay. So I'm hearing it's not that much different today than it has been over the last 400 years. And that also faculty alone shouldn't be kind of carrying the burden for solving this problem.
Emily Donahoe:I think I agree. I was going to take this take. So but I agree with Lance that there's only so much faculty you can do. And it's really, really important that they are taking advantage of other support services. Right. It shouldn't all be on faculty. But I do think, you know, if we have had this same problem for 400 years or whatever, it's been right. Maybe it's time that we take some responsibility for helping students learn how to learn. Right. And you know, one thing I find myself saying constantly these days and all the time is that we can only teach the students that we have, not the students that we wish we had. And I think it's a reality that that there's a lot of students who, through no fault of their own, really haven't been adequately equipped with the skills that they need to succeed in college. And I think this is a system problem, a structural problem that we can't solve alone. But I think there's some things that faculty can do to mitigate it. And if it's our job to facilitate learning, then I think we should also be making sure that students have the skills that they need to learn effectively.
Stacey Johnson:I'm going to take it. And once again, without disagreeing with anything Lance or Emily have said, because I agree with all of those things as well. But specifically thinking about how my classroom is the same and different from other classrooms on campus and what skills students are going to need to be successful in my classroom, it it's like a level of hubris on my part to think that all of my students who have four or five other faculty members this semester, plus their entire history of education before me, are going to know exactly what it's going to take to be successful in the class that I've spent decades refining and thinking about and studying and trying to get perfect every year. So and I think if we're not really careful as faculty, that we can fall into that trap and say, Man, these students really aren't getting my class. They're missing something they lack studenting skills when really I haven't done that process of breaking down, what are my actual learning objectives? What are the skills that students are going to need every step of the way? And then how can I make sure I'm empowering them with the tools for success rather than just assuming that they're going to come ready, which I think is a totally different issue from like if I hear the word learning loss in connection with the last few years, my head explodes like that's not possible in a human brain, but whatever. But specifically thinking about my classroom and how I approach my own students, I'll take it. I'll take.
Lance Eaton:You. Oh, I just want to the addendum to that. I think is also that piece of it to the to what you were saying, Stacey, of like often we step into the same classroom or like we we go into these places to teach and we think we course correct but it's with a different audience, right? So like I think there's something about oh, I thought I solved that problem. Right. And this is also why I'm not saying this is this group, but like many of us have seen and I've been guilty of like the syllabus bloat where you get every possible solution so your syllabus grows and grows in like I think there's also a little bit of that. There's a little bit of like, you know, the same things come up and you think you're correcting form, but this is a different audience. This is a different group of learners. And even though you might have learned the lesson of what wasn't working, you haven't found a way of like augmenting or adjusting that for who is this new group?
Derek Bruff:Yeah, I think there's also there's a note in this hot take of students being deficient, right, that they're kind of coming in and they're lacking things that they should have had or that they used to have or something. And I don't I'm not super comfortable with that framing. I had on an early episode of the podcast I had on Maryann Winkelmes, who runs the Transparency and Teaching and Learning Project. And one of the things she argued was that students who come to college and she was I think she was thinking traditional age students, but but they may come to college with some generic study skills that got them through high school, but now they're in specific disciplines needing to learn in disciplinary ways. And that's what Stacey's comment made me think of is like, yeah, maybe they have some studenting skills, but they've never learned linear algebra in my class before, right? And and, and there are particular ways to go about that that are more or less helpful. And so I'm kind of comfortable saying, yeah, we should, we should try to onboard students and kind of help them develop those disciplinary skills. But saying that because, you know, I, I don't know. I'm I also feel like weird stuff happened in the last four years. And so a lot of us are missing pieces of what we would have been if there hadn't been a pandemic. Right. In terms of our social skills, in terms of how we live our lives. And so I don't know. I feel like having a little grace for students who who had a very different, you know, high school or middle school experience than any of us expected.
Stacey Johnson:That's fine.But I was not a great college student or a great grad student. I just, you know, spent a lot of time trying to get by on witty comments and charm and things that absolutely were not great study skills, but, you know, that's that's like part of the learning process is throwing a bunch of stuff at it, figuring out what works and finding a field where you're excited about the processes it actually takes to get to an end point. I was an okay student. I want to go back and I was fine.
Derek Bruff:I mean, I didn't know what I was doing either, right? Like I was a great student. I got A's all the time, but I never I never felt like I was just kind of blindly following some tasks that were in front of me. And and I appreciate all the assets I had to bring to that education. Right? That a lot of other students don't have. But yeah, it is. It is part of the process. It's part of it. It's just it's part of education is to figure out how to do education and how to make it meaningful for yourself. Okay. Speaking of no, there's not a segue way here. I want to talk about AI. So here's our next hot take. All right. I was I was struggling, but there's no seque,
Emily Donahoe:Generative AI needs no segue.
Lance Eaton:Right It's already there.
Derek Bruff:It's in the room with you. It's on the phone right, right now. Okay. So Jose Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson have a new book out on teaching with AI, and they wrote in an op ed recently. They made the argument and here's so here's a hot take. Generative AI should handle the routine and tedious work of an instructor, freeing up time for, quote, the most important educational and relational tasks. Stacey, I would like to start with you. Are you going to take that or leave it?
Stacey Johnson:I'm leave that one so bad I would like more detail about what are the routine and tedious tasks. Because one thing that is a huge time investment every semester is writing a recommendation letter is for my students. So am I supposed to hand that over to AI instead of going back through our work together over the last few years, thinking about who they are and what their goals are and really giving them the best shot at med school or their first job or whatever it is I'm trying to recommend them for. Or is it that I'm using AI to respond to student questions that are thoughtful when they're really maybe in distress and I have information they need, but instead I'm using an AI to generate something feasible or plausible? Is it writing lesson plans where I'm actually an expert who's been trained in it and has been creative in this field for decades? But I'm going to let this machine read through all of my syllabuses for the last 20 years and come up with something. I just I don't see what the routine tasks are that don't require all of me, all of my compassion and all of my creativity. And that is why this job is so hard, because we want to teach and do service and do research and be there for our students. And it takes so much of us to get it done and we have to make hard choices. But I don't think farming stuff out to my laptop is the right choice.
Emily Donahoe:I'm going to totally agree with Stacey. I leave this take and I'll tell you so I was reading through the article. Here are some of the things that they said could be outsourced to AI. One is writing syllabus policies. One is finding course materials. One is providing grades and feedback on student work. Right. And I think, you know, this this take kind of started with this idea that that AI can free up time for the most important educational and relational tasks. That's the direct quote. And I think the premise of this is totally wrong because it assumes that there is any work that is not relational right. Like I think all of these tasks are highly relational. If I'm writing syllabus policies, I want my students to hear my voice and like know who I am in my syllabus policies. If I'm responding to their work, if I'm giving them feedback on their writing, they need to know that that's me on the other end, right? It's not a thing that I could automate, especially because, you know, the most effective and durable forms of learning happened in the context of a relationship. And outsourcing teaching to AI is a great way to lose credibility with students and lose that relationship and lose a lot of potential for learning. So, I mean, I think if faculty feel like they can't concentrate on those important tasks because they're too busy doing other things or they're overwhelmed, then we should decrease faculty workload or decrease class sizes rather than using AI as an excuse to just continuously ramp up the expectations for productivity.
Lance Eaton:So yeah, if I was in a place that I felt more utopic, I would take it. But I have to leave it, and I actually just finished their book this morning. I listen to the audiobook and like there's lots of great stuff there. I do think there are places where they're like, I think about the pure, some of the other bureaucratic responsibilities of some of the work that we do that is more like not with the students, but shuffling papers to within, within, you know, chairs, deans, directors, etc.. So like, Oh yeah, sure, I could see some spaces where like this would be great to then allow for the more 1 to 1, the more relationally oriented. But even if those tools got to the point where you could actually use them in that way, it's not going to free anything up. This is a tool of capitalism. And what this means is for every task it frees up like administration will find new ones to fill those gaps. And this is a thing for me with with generative AI, for all the work that I've done and lots of talks and working with faculty and institutions and all of that, like still have to like at the end of the day, this is a tool of like hyper productivity and the goal is never to decrease the work, right? Like it or the amount of time we're working on things right So there's never going to be a like, oh you only have to work 30 hours now. You only have to work 25. It is, oh, you can now do even more. And I expect that the new bar is set and that new bar still requires even more cognitive work from us, so we get even more exhausted. Oh, if this frees up things like here's the thing is this frees up things so you can be more relational with students. So let's cram ten more students into your course.
Derek Bruff:Right? You've lost the gain that you just achieved if there was such a gain, right?
Lance Eaton:Yep. So for me, it's it's like, man,if we lived in a different world, I could maybe take it, but I'm a leave it. Wow.
Derek Bruff:Okay. I think that's our first consensus on one of these hot takes.
Emily Donahoe:You aren't going to play devil's advocate Derek?
Derek Bruff:I can. Try. Yeah. You know, there's a there's an appeal here, right? That somehow we wish we had more time for the kind of heart of education. Right. But I you know, I think a lot of faculty can relate to that. But I think what the three of you have articulated is that it's not clear that AI will save time in a significant way that that would get us there. Right. So I'll poke a little bit. So, Lance, I know one of the things you've been doing in your your blog is having AI read and summarize research literature for you. Do you feel like that that has saved you time, that particular use of AI, has that made you has that changed kind of how you spend your time with it? That's not teaching, right? It's a it's going to teaching adjacent. But but do you see a potential upside for using AI in that context?
Lance Eaton:I think it's it's reaffirmed. I hope it does not save me time in any sense other than it gives me a stronger sense of what's in an article. If it's worth going into for a deeper dive. The summaries, you know, and I'll continue to tweak the questions and play with it and stuff like that. But the summaries are okay. Like they don't. They don't. This is something I think about a lot. It's like to really use it well. You need like a deep you need two buckets, like the bucket of understanding how large language models work and how generative AI works, beginning a good understanding of what the the words are that are or images are, that is, you know, popping up on the screen. And then you need the like the domain knowledge. And with my domain knowledge, it's enough to know that like these summaries are there's sometimes like there's a few recently that I'm like, oh that's curious. Like, I do want to go back and look and explore. But that hasn't really say like it's we all have this. I'll take a step back of like, we all have this. I'm sure all of us have the giant to read list of books as well as the giant to read folder of articles. And so this is maybe help me move like it's giving me a way to work, not feel as overwhelmed about those articles, which is great. I don't know that it saves me time because I'm mostly trying to do this as like a way of demonstrating or sharing to share some of the research out there. So that other people might go and delve in a little bit deeper to if they see something they like. So I'm doing it more as a interesting experiment than I am feeling like, Oh wow. I feel like I've really gained a deeper understanding about whatever this particular article or research is doing.
Derek Bruff:Gotcha. Yeah. Quick sidebar, having somewhat recently moved out of an office that I had inhabited for ten years. That stack
Lance Eaton:How big was the stack?
Derek Bruff:was like a foot tall.
Lance Eaton:It was a file, it was a file folder of a.
Derek Bruff:Shredded and recycled every single one. I just cleaned the slate. It's not going to happen. If I haven't read them in ten years, I'm not going to read them. Yeah. So let me continue to play devil's advocate here for a second and I'll pitch this to Emily or Stacy if you want to weigh in. So I have taught enough writing to know that there are moves that students make that need feedback that are very common and happen a lot. Right? Whether it's grammar or syntax or just kind of simple rhetorical moves that they're making. Back on Twitter, back in the old days, there was a hashtag called hashtag need a red stamp. Like these things that students do so frequently that I wish I just had a stamp, I could just put it on there. Right. And there are there are grading assistant tools that will actually allow you to quickly and easily copy and paste feedback on multiple student assignments. So might that be a place where AI could take a first pass through student writing, give some low level feedback to students, and then you look at a second draft of the student's have responded to after that, that first draft.
Emily Donahoe:I think it depends a great deal on what kind of platform we're talking about, how it gives feedback, how it's prompted. I don't fully trust a student to just not a student. I don't fully trust an AI platform to be able to look at student work and say, you know, here's what needs to be done. And especially at a first pass, right, The things that I would trust at the most are lower order concerns like grammar and not kind of higher order concerns. And it's no use tinkering with the grammar if your paper is totally off topic. Right? And so I mean that I think that's a problem. And the other thing is just, you know, if students want to do that to improve their work, I'm okay with students trying to figure out how to do that and even helping them figure out how to do that. But I'm never going to take a paper that a student gives to me and give that to an AI and say, give the student feedback. Right? Because I think that just I think that just totally ruins the the chance that I have at a relationship and a real connection and exchange with that student.
Stacey Johnson:So I in my field applied linguistics error correction is something that we think about and talk about and research quite often. So I go back to my belief that all learning is language learning because everything we learn is mediated through language and that if it applies to error correction for language learning, it applies for error correction for all sorts of learning. And so there's there's really conflicting evidence, but there's a few things that seem to be true. And one is pointing out student's mistakes has almost no effect on their future performance. It can affect a lot of things like your relationship with them, their belief in their ability to learn or improve over time. It can affect the very next thing that they do. Like you point out that they made this grammatical error and then very next time they correct that grammatical error. But if you're trying to correct a pattern over time, it has almost no effect. And there are things you can do to help students mature into different ways of writing or different ways of expressing themselves. But a red stamp won't help with that. So even if you're trying to do that, why why are you wasting student's time on something that research doesn't conclusively say is going to help one way or the other? But there's a lot of evidence it's not.
Derek Bruff:Well, and I'm going to I'm going to quote Marc Watkins, who who's in the next hot take. But Also, I interviewed him recently for the podcast, and he pointed out that if you if you give an essay to a ChatGPT and ask it for like help me make it better, it will give you some advice. And if you change it and ask it again, it will give you some advice. And if you change it like it's just going to keep giving you things to fix, right? There's no end to it. That's how it's designed, which is, to your point, Lance like we have to know what these systems are actually doing, right? It's going to keep coming up with something that you could change. But that's not that's not necessarily how you help someone be a better writer. Right. Okay. So here's my next hot take. It is also AI related. And as mentioned, it's coming out of an article by our Mississippi colleague Marc Watkins. At a time when students use AI reading assistants to create their own bespoke summaries of important texts. Quote, This is a quote from Marc. We should introduce friction into the reading process of a digital text, not to make it more challenging, but to ensure students slow down and process a text.
Stacey Johnson:I'm happy to go first on this one. I love processing and friction while reading. I think I will take this and I don't think it has anything to do with AI or digital reading. I think that all of us read for big themes naturally for like big general comprehension. We're just trying to get through text, even texts we're, enjoying. We're trying to plow through them. And the luxury of a college classroom or really of any classroom is that we get to slow down and really spend time with texts in a way we don't outside of classrooms very often. So, yes, this is where we introduce friction. This is where we in intentionally ask students to stop and do processing activities to make sure they're not just glossing over words, but they're they're imagining they're making new meaning. They're their sense making with things. They're posing questions or creating. That's the good stuff. That's what that's what education is. love that.
Emily Donahoe:Emily Yeah. I am also going to take this take and not just because Marc and I teach in the same department. I agree with with Stacy. You know, one of the things to keep in mind is that there are lots of different types of reading, right? And, you know, we're not always reading just to summarize or extract information, which is kind of what an AI reading assistant does. You know, I teach in writing and I also teach literature. And, you know, sometimes when we read literature, we aren't just reading to get the plot right. We're reading to ponder the language and make connections with our own experiences or like, God forbid, enjoy how the language works or the sound of it, right? I mean, could you imagine asking an AI to like, summarize the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock? Like that would totally defeat the purpose of reading it. And I. I can imagine contexts in which reading assistants can be useful, right? Maybe I want to help students engage with a scholarly article or a piece of literary theory. Right? And I don't really need them. It's not part of my goal for the class that they learn how to dig in and do that like independently. That's kind of graduate school level stuff, but maybe I want them to engage with the ideas so they can use an AI reading assistant to help them parse the article. So like, in that way maybe it would be useful. But I think, you know, we've been having a lot of debates on social media about a perceived decline in student reading skills, and I don't know kind of where the evidence is on that. Anecdotally, it seems to be the case that a lot of students are not coming in with the same kinds of reading skills that they have in the past or maybe strengths in other areas. And so I do think it's important even when when students do need to simply summarize or extract information, that they'd be able to do that on their own. And I think introducing a reading assistant into that process too soon can really, you know, impede their learning. So, you know, a lot depends on context, a lot depends on your goals, a lot depends on the students skills and strengths, right? I it's it's really complicated. But in general, yes, I agree with Stacy that like slowing down and doing that work, that's not just purely extracting information is is one of the benefits of being in college.
Lance Eaton:I'm going to go with leave it. Oh yeah, yeah I zigged, I think and I'll tell you I'll tell you why is I blame Foucault I've talked about this before in this work. I will blame Foucault of trying in in graduate school, trying to read through Foucault in a class with other students where there was slowing down in and talking about different like we were only reading 20 pages of history of sexuality and them slowing down and being able to talk about things. And I'm still like flipping the book upside down, thinking I need a secret decoder for it and like in I consider myself a reader, right? Like, like that is that is a core part of my identity of reading hundreds of books each year or both, a mixture of reading and listening to audiobooks. And so I think this idea of an assistant of something that is there to step in is also really important. Like there are still lots of texts that it doesn't matter how slow like slow down in the you know, it doesn't matter. It's it is extremely hard for me to get and I'm never quite sure that I get it. So there somewhere within this is like, how do we build better confidence of readers? Maybe that's part of what this is, but I've just had so many reading experiences that are like, I don't even feel comfortable in being able to summarize, never mind, analyze or like understand what it is that I'm reading. So I think about learners like that, that that assistant would be helpful. I think about, you know, folks that are dyslexic, which I know this is just kind of the catch all. But like, man, that, that, that assistant feels really powerful. Like for me, a game changer was audiobooks. I started listening to them in high school and like tone is something that was completely oblivious to me in reading. Like I read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I tried to read that like seven times in like middle school and high school. Everyone's like, You should read it. It's great. I kept trying to read it. It made no sense. And then I listened to the audiobook and it was, you know, it was read by Douglas Adams and it was this like British voice and like that, between the tone and the delivery is like, Oh, this supposed to be funny and oh, I'm getting the lines. It's like, so I just think there's so much of that and so many different types of writing and so many different types of writing are doing different things that any time we can give road signs and that something can be a little more help to draw out in the moment, I do think leads us to be better readers, and I don't think it can always happen in class, and I don't think students can always feel comfortable in class. Like I wasn't comfortable in that that class to be like, I don't understand what he's saying because it was a graduate class. But that happens in undergraduate classes too, to, to, to, you know, to say, I'm ignorant in this. Like, not when you're supposed to have done the reading. Yeah, there's something about that for me that, that I would I would take it.
Emily Donahoe:I think one of the things I think one of the things that you're pointing to Lance, is something that I keep coming back to, which is that, you know, we have these tools and even when we ask them to do very specific things, an individual student could use it in ways that supported their learning and a another student could use it in the same way. And and it would impede their learning. Right. And so, you know, for you or other other folks who are trying to read complicated texts, using this as a tool for understanding helps you get further. And then for some students, right, it it gets in the way because they would be able to understand it if they just spent a little time with it. Right. And so I don't know. I think helping students develop their own skills and metacognition to be able to realize what's happening when they are using these tools. Right. Am I short circuiting learning? Is this actually helping me go further? Right. Helping them reflect on that and understand that I think is going to be key going forward.
Stacey Johnson:I think I also hear you hinting at student agency rather than top down decision making from people outside of their experience, maybe allowing students to be fully in control of their experience.
Lance Eaton:Hmm.
Emily Donahoe:Power to the students.
Derek Bruff:Well, I think that's a good place to leave it. There are many other hot takes we could explore together, but I think one of the artificialities of a hot take is, is that there's one right answer to whatever problem that we're looking at, right? And so that that is rarely the case as we have explored here today, there our students are different from each other. They're different from us. Our teaching contexts are different. And I think we have to be mindful of all of that. And it's it's a little dangerous to come out and say everyone should do X, Y, or Z. That's almost never the right answer. But thank you, all three of you, for jumping in today. And sharing your perspectives and your insight and your experiences and your wisdom. I really enjoyed our conversation and I hope our listeners have too. Yeah. Thanks so much for being here.
Emily Donahoe:Thanks. This was fun.
Stacey Johnson:This is a lot of fun. Thanks, Derek.
Lance Eaton:So thank you all so much.
Derek Bruff:Thanks to our three. Take it or Leave It. Panelists Stacey Johnson, Emily Donahoe and Lance Eaton. I really enjoyed our conversation and all the nuance they brought to these hot takes in the world of higher ed. In the show notes. For this episode, you'll find links to all the essays I mentioned during the panel, as well as to information about our fantastic panelists. I would love to hear from you about today's Hot takes. Which ones would you take and which ones would you leave? You can click the link in the show notes to send me a text message. Be sure to include your name so I know who you are. Or just email me at. Derek at Derek Bruff dot org. Intentional teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the Online and Professional Education Association. In the show notes, you'll find a link to the UPCEA website where you can find out about their research, networking opportunities and professional development offerings.
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