High Structure Course Design with Justin Shaffer

During these late summer episodes of the podcast, I’m sharing some interviews I conducted in much cooler times. Back in February as part of a slow read of my book Intentional Tech, I talked with Justin Shaffer, teaching professor in chemical and biological engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. Chapter three of the book deals with using technology to make visible “thin slices” of student learning. I reached out to Justin, who is also associate dean of undergraduate studies at Mines, to learn about some of the ways he uses technology both in and out of the classroom to learn more about his students’ learning.

That topic quite naturally led to discussions of Justin’s high-structure approach to course design. Justin has a book coming later this year (or maybe early 2025) from Macmillan Learning “High Structure Course Design for STEM” that will incredibly useful to STEM instructors of all experience levels. Justin is now officially the first repeat guest on Intentional Teaching. He was part of a panel way back in episode 9 on studio-style biology courses!

Episode Resources

·       Justin Shaffer’s website, https://www.recombinanteducation.com/

·       Sign-up for updates about Justin’s forthcoming book on high-structure course design, https://forms.gle/PEew6AsgFpijopm96

·       High Structure Course Design on the UVA Teaching Hub, https://teaching.virginia.edu/collections/high-structure-course-design

·       Getting Started with Discipline-Based Education Research on the UVA Teaching Hub, https://teaching.virginia.edu/collections/getting-started-with-discipline-based-education-research

·       Intentional Teaching Episode 9 on Studio-Style Biology Courses, https://intentionalteaching.buzzsprout.com/2069949/12409419-studio-biology-with-scott-chirhart-robbie-bear-and-justin-shaffer  

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Transcript

Derek Bruff: 0:05

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. I am recording this just after sunset on the shores of Pickwick Lake in Tennessee. My family and I are out camping for a few days here. As we wrap up Summer. Hope you don't mind a little ambiance in the background During these late summer episodes of the podcast, I'm sharing some interviews that I conducted in much cooler times. It is sweltering out here right now. Tonight, back in February, as part of a slow read of my book, Intentional Tech, I talked with Justin Shaffer, teaching professor in chemical and biological engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. Chapter three of the book deals with using technology to make visible thin slices of student learning. I reached out to Justin, who is also associate dean of undergraduate studies at Mines, to learn about some of the ways he uses technology both in and out of the classroom to learn more about his students learning. That topic quite naturally led to discussions of Justin's high structure approach to course design. Justin has a book coming out later this year, or maybe early 2025, from Macmillan Learning called High Structure Course Design for STEM that I know will be incredibly useful to STEM instructors of all experience levels. In the show notes, you'll find a link to a sign up form for anyone interested in updates on the book and its release, and you'll find a link to a collection of resources on high structure course design that Justin curated for the University of Virginia's Teaching Hub website, where I serve as something of an editor. I should also mention that Justin is now officially the first repeat guest on intentional teaching. He was part of a panel way back in episode nine on studio style biology courses. Justin, I'm so happy to have you back on the podcast. You were on several months ago to talk about studio biology courses, but I know there's a lot of aspects of your teaching that are pretty interesting, and so I'm glad to have you back to talk about some different parts of your teaching today.

Justin Shaffer: 2:16

Yeah, thanks Derek. I had a blast that came before too, and hopefully we can dive into some different areas and it's great to be here again. Thank you.

Derek Bruff: 2:25

Grea. Well, and I don't think I asked you this question last time because we had a kind of a panel on. So I skipped my usual opening question. But can you tell us about a time when you realized you wanted to be an educator?

Justin Shaffer: 2:38

Oh, yeah. I love this question you have on the top of the pods. You're right. We didn't do that one. And so, yeah, I kind of have a positive and a negative version of answer that question. But when I was in college at the time, that's when I think it was book seven. Yeah, Book seven was just coming out of Harry Potter. So you can place my age based on this conversation. But at first I love reading the Harry Potter books. Then when I was like teens, early twenties, and I just the whole academic side of his experience, like when Harry is going to get his books and go back to school. And I know this sounds hokey, but I really like that part of that book and it really is a positive memory for me when I was younger and then being in college at the same time, I just love going to the bookstore and getting that fresh feel the new semester. So I was I knew I liked the academic experience. I didn't know I wanted to teach because I went to college for chemical engineering. I remember distinctly in high school asking my AP chemistry teacher, You know, what can I do in college where I don't have to go to any more school? Just get a good job after four years ago, be a chemical engineer. What's that? And then kind of went from there. But when I was in college, I did a couple of internships. I worked at Bristol-Myers Squibb. One summer, I worked at Kimberly-Clark, and I just didn't like the corporate environment. I didn't like the structure of it, the politics. Little did I know that exists in academia, too. But at the time I thought, Well, okay, I might be better off for graduate school. So I my joke I tell my students now as I learned, I don't like money and I wanted to be a professor instead. So I went to graduate school thinking I was going to be research faculty knowing I like the academic environment and everything. But I just the research at the bench just wasn't for me, didn't really fit so well. I didn't have great experiences at conferences and things presenting. It was very stressful for me. So but I got introduced to what I affectionately call Jo's Blue Book. And I know you all can't see this now, but I'm showing Derek the scientific teaching book from Jo Handelsman. I got that when I was in grad school, and that really changed the course of what I thought you could do as a educator, that you can actually approach teaching with a scientific lens, study it to publish on it. And so from that point on, I kind of went on the educator route as a teaching professor, which my current role is. So I went through kind of adjunct lecturer, assistant teaching professor, now all the way to this and I'm now even stepping into administration. So yeah, it was kind of some pop culture stuff, some experiences from real life combined with I don't know, I just I really enjoy that the working with students and that kind of immediacy of it.

Derek Bruff: 5:08

MM Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and it's, you know, it's one of those career paths that makes perfect sense in hindsight. But yeah, maybe at the time there were some some interesting choices to make.

Justin Shaffer: 5:19

Although I'll say Sorry to interrupt you, Derek. I'll, I'll say my wife tells me I should have been an accountant because I like spreadsheets so much, I'd make more money. So I'm in between as an educator and engineer.

Derek Bruff: 5:32

Yeah, well, and one part of your your CV I wanted to ask you about is your post-doc experience at UNC-Chapel Hill, which I take it was not a traditional postdoc experience. Can you say a little bit about that and kind of how that has informed your your career since then?

Justin Shaffer: 5:50

Yeah, I wouldn't be here without that. That's the truth of it. So this program is called SPIRE S-P-I-R-E, and that's at Carolina. You mentioned it's part of a larger umbrella program called IRACDA. I-R-A-C-D-A. I cannot remember what it stands for, but it's funded by the NIH. And the way the programs work is they're typically three year postdocs and they're meant to train future faculty, not just in research, but also in teaching. So we're not supposed to call them teaching postdocs, which is to call them research postdocs with a teaching component, which is really what it was, because I actually still did research and this was kind of the savior for me because I was finishing up grad school Ph.D. I knew I didn't really want to do real research at the bench full time anymore. I couldn't apply for an industry job because my CV was so academic, tailored. But then this these I found about IRACDA programs and I applied for the one at Carolina and I worked for Bill Kier there. So Bill's just retired recently. Carolina. He is a cephalopod specialist, so squid, octopus, cuttlefish and nautilus. And I went to work with him on molecular biology of mussels and squid and octopus. Super fun. But I remember talking to Bill on the phone when I was thinking about applying. I said, Hey, Bill, what do you you know, what do you expect to me in this position? Because I'm coming from that super intense NIH kind of background a lot of stress. What do you expect from me in the lab hours, things. And he pauses. I don't always thank Bill for this. He paused and he says, You know what? Justin I don't have a whole lot riding on ya, so you're going to make this what you want. So I was like, music to my ears at this point. Yeah. So? So I went to Carolina. My son was born there. My wife was there with me, the program was so great because I got I did get to work with Bill in the lab. I got to go squid fishing in Maine, super fun. But then I got trained in how to teach. So I got trained in evidence based pedagogies. I got trained in how to teach college science and engineering courses. Brian Rybarczyk, Ed Neal were fantastic. Parks The program that helped me, but that's also where I met Kelly Hogan. So without Kelly and without SPIRE, I wouldn't be here. So I got to teach at North Carolina A&C State University, which is in Greensboro, North Carolina. I teach two semesters there, intro, bio and then a recombinant protein class. Then I got to teach one semester at Carolina, the intro bio with Kelly and Jean DeSaix, Corey Johnson, help me out with A&P. So it was just such a great kind of proving ground for myself and that really springboarded me on the way to getting my first teaching position at UC Irvine, getting my education research program up and running about high structure courses. And so they're wonderful programs. Whenever I find a grad student who's interested in a teaching path, I automatically send them to the IRACDA program as long as they're in the kind of biomedical sciences because they're funded by NIH. But there are there are other programs out there within STEM and even other fields. If you're not in the biomedical side.

Derek Bruff: 8:42

That's great. Yeah. And I just I think that kind of exposure to discipline based educational research at that point, it's just it's really it's huge. Right. And I've seen this in your work, like it is just kind of shaped who you are as an academic. And so yeah, and Kelly Hogan was on the podcast before, so yeah, yeah, she does great work too. Can you remind me we had a conversation at the POD conference last year. You said you went squid fishing in Maine.

Justin Shaffer: 9:10

Yes.

Derek Bruff: 9:11

Wasn't there like a weird term you used to describe that process?

Justin Shaffer: 9:16

Oh, nuts.

Derek Bruff: 9:17

Weird. Meaning maybe it's Maine jargon.

Justin Shaffer: 9:20

You know, I don't know if I had a term for it, but it was it just wasn't a big deal to the Maine folks. From what I remember, the Mainers, I forget what they call people from Maine. But yeah, I thought when Bill told me where to go squid fishing, I'm thinking we're going on a boat, we're going to the ocean. It's going to be cool. None of that. So what you do is you just go to the little dock of the bay around midnight, so it's super dark and you just shine a flashlight into the water. And because the squid come up to the surface, this is called doryteuthis pealeii, the North Atlantic longfin squid. And they come up to the surface to feed at night. And you shine that light in there. And you can see these, but I'm doing it. My hand is kind of jutting my hands out together like these sharp pads versus like a fish where you see the undulations. It doesn't they don't do that. So you can see them really clearly. I mean, just throw a net and then you scoop them out. So it's kind of anticlimactic. But we're we're kind of in like a downtown area. And these people are walking around after leaving the bar and they're just kind of looking at us like shrug and no big deal because that's what you do. I guess. So yeah, there might be some term associated with it, but yeah, that was it was just kind of a nonchalant business as usual on coastal Maine.

Derek Bruff: 10:29

that's awesome. I love talking to biologists because they they do such unusual things in their research. As a trained mathematician. I just sit in a room, right? And sometimes I use a whiteboard and sometimes I use paper and occasionally I use a computer. But that's about it. All right. Well, Justin, I think the first time we connected was after a webinar that I did for the folks at Macmillan Publishing, and I think it was on kind of more advanced uses of classroom response systems, which is something that we'll talk about here today. And I shared an activity in that webinar that involved a set of coordinate axes, and I think you liked that idea and you kind of took it and run with it, ran with it in your own courses. Could you talk about kind of how you adapted that idea to your courses and kind of what role that activity played?

Justin Shaffer: 11:18

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think it was, you know, about a year ago this time, actually, I saw Derek on this webinar from McMillan about just that kind of promoting some different practices with clickers and other things. And so the activity you proposed was you have to coordinate axis, so you have four quadrants, right? And you can have then students touch the screen. And so these modern clicker technologies, whether it's iClicker, Top Hat, you name it, they have the ability to touch the screen. So you can pose a question, have students click somewhere to show kind of where they're landing. So instead of just, you know, 1 to 5 agree or disagree, you can actually get two dimensions. And so the example I use now when I do workshops now for for faculty or or McMillan or anyone I do iClicker workshops sometimes I show the axes of in the context of biology. What are your views of performance enhancing drugs? And I do this in my real intro bio class too, and we have on the vertical axis, we have ethical at the top, unethical bottom. And then on the horizontal axis, we have the positive impact to the body and then the left and is negative in back to the body. So you can be, you know, ethical and positive, the body unethical and negative, the body, you know, any of those four options. And so great with doing this with iClickers or any software like this because then the students can touch the screen and you can see the distribution of responses. And so as most students in this case pick unethical and negative impact. But then you got a couple that think that they're awesome. So then we can have a nice discussion about what's going on. But I took that idea and did it a little bit differently is what you're referring to with I Google Sheets or Excel, what you want to use. So I made the axes and the colored in the cells on Excel or Google sheets, and then I had the two extremes. And so then I made it live in class so students could go in and edit the document and instead of just clicking a place, what we did was, is for intro bio, I had on the axes about benefits to society, positive and negative. And then also I it was about the scientific kind of validity or reliability, like how promising is this technique, you know, positive or negative. And then students would actually write in different concepts or different techniques. So they brought in like gene editing, they put in CRISPR, they took some of them put in PEDs, and so they put these different biological pieces or components or concepts on the axes. So it was totally open ended. And then we I put it up on the screen, we got to see where everyone putting them, you know, some students that things were really ethical or positive, but then some they were more like CRISPR was kind of actually a few students put them in different places, so it was cool. So we took that not a single forced coordinate axis closed question, But you can make it super open ended to whatever you want. In that case, by using the Google sheets or the live editing type group group docs.

Derek Bruff: 14:08

Yeah. So that in that first example you had, you had a topic in mind and you wanted to see where students where all of your students would place this one topic on these two different axes in terms of how they thought about it qualitatively. And I keep saying coordinate axes. This is not a mathematical use of coordinate axes. This is completely subjective. But in the second example, each student is coming up with their own example of something and then kind of mapping it somewhere on those axes. And so I'm wondering what like in that one, where does that come in the course and what does it help you do in the classroom with your students?

Justin Shaffer: 14:46

Yeah. So something like that, that specific example was kind of the benefit society, the ethics of the concept. I do that very early on in intro bio to kind of set the stage of, you know, yeah, we're learning about biology in this course, but we want to think about the societal impact of the biology we're doing, the tools we're developing. I think about the ethical situations involved with biology on society. So I kind of use it as a stage setting device, and usually I do that my second day in class, first day classes kind of welcome the class. We do some other icebreaker activities, then we jump into the ethics. And even right now in my introduction to biomedical engineering course I'm teaching, same thing. The second day was about ethics, kind of trying to we're trying as a program here at Mines, which I am. I'm part of this program called Quantitative Bio Sciences and Engineering. We're trying to make a more concerted ethics, a concerted emphasis of ethics throughout our curriculum. So something like that can be used really anytime, though, you know. But that's when I used it. I also teach anatomy physiology. I can imagine using something like that really in any unit when you're bringing up a disease or a treatment for a disease, how these students feel about different things, whether it's the open ended version or, like you said, posing the single question there, and then even thinking about in engineering, because I teach chemical engineering courses too, and I haven't tried this one yet, I'm just kind of spitballing. So maybe it doesn't come out too strong right now, but thinking about kind of a cost benefit analysis is sort of a new device like so for designing a heat exchanger and you have different things you need to tweak with the design, you know, so we can get we can get better heat flow, but it costs more. Yeah. So we kind of think of this coordinate access idea again to kind of get students opinions on where things might land. If we tweak the design a little bit, what might happen to cost, what might happen to efficiency. And we kind of get some predictions there and that might be more like a technical specific example of this idea. But I could see that maybe that working too.

Derek Bruff: 16:38

We're at the University of Mississippi. We're actually putting together a workshop in a couple of weeks, we're calling it "Yes And" and it's about we're calling it pedagogical in improv

Justin Shaffer: 16:51

Love it.

Derek Bruff: 16:51

And so because I think what happens a lot of times is that and what as someone who leads a lot of workshops for faculty is that sometimes I'll put some example or idea out there for something they could do in their teaching. And sometimes there's this kind of initial response of, Well, that wouldn't work in my class. And I think that on some levels that's true, right? The very thing that I describe would not make sense for your class, because it made sense for my class. But there are some ideas and some principles and maybe some technologies there that with a little creative thinking, a little pedagogical improv, you can adapt quite nicely to lots of different classes. And that's what I heard from you just then was like, you're imagining the same basic teaching construct, but you're using it in different classes and for kind of different ends too.

Justin Shaffer: 17:37

Yeah. And I try to push myself further because I gave all STEM examples, right? And you're talking about coordinate axis math to when it goes the non stem. I struggle a little bit more because it's not my background, but I always try to to make that that next step connection as well. So one example that go with going back to these target questions with clickers, right, so you can touch the screen. And so usually when I do demos I'll say Oh well, or do workshop for faculty, I'll have a picture of the skull. Okay, So where is the occipital bone. super easy application of a target question because you can touch on the skull where the occipital bone is the back of your head. But then I say, well, we any art historian in the room and no one's corrected me on this, so I'm going to keep using this example. But, you know, let's say you have a picture of a painting on the screen and you can say, okay, students, can you please touch the screen where this specific painting strategy was used? Or where do you notice this concept that was present in the time of the painter's life was present? You're right. So you can you can be creative in that field, too. You know, I'm even going to try it with passages of text soon. So I'm in next week. We're going to go in my intro BME class about reading a journal article, and that could be reading anything about. Right? So you have a passage of text. Can you can you touch the sentence or the first word the sentence where the thesis is, right? So you can use these types of tech clicker tech in this example, in a lot of different disciplines, even though my brain goes stem world because that's what I'm in. But yeah, you're right. And I love the yes and improv connection. I hope that goes well for you. It makes so much sense, I'm jealous.

Derek Bruff: 19:11

Yeah, it's going to be a fun workshop regardless. I know that. So when you run an activity like this, one of the things I talk about in my book is is kind of a shift from what some have called ballistic teaching. When you launch a lesson plan at the beginning of the hour, nothing can interfere with its trajectory to a more agile form of teaching. So what does it look like in the classroom when you're doing one of these activities and students are adding things to a Google sheet on a set of coordinated axes, What are you doing? What are they doing? What what does the discussion look like? How does how do their ideas affect what happens in class that day?

Justin Shaffer: 19:52

Yes, wonderful question. Yeah. And then I think that's a great word, being agile, because you got to be nimble on your feet. If you have your lesson plan, which, you know, when you first start out teaching and even if you've been doing it for a while, you might map it out, you know, with a kind of maybe five minute blocks, ten minute blocks, maybe even a little bit more granular. You can't trust that that right. You can use that as a guideline, but you don't really know if you're going to hit that or not. And that's especially new with true with a new prep. So in this BME class I'm teaching now, biomedical engineers. First time I'm doing it, I got my lesson and in an hour and a half I know what I want to do. I got my slide deck. We'll see, we'll see, you know, because you've got to do it first to feel it out. But it's okay. And I also maybe now that I'm kind of 12 years into this faculty career thing that I'm to the point where I don't get as flustered anymore. When things do go a little bit off, I'm okay if we get a little off track, I'm okay if we don't finish as much as I want to because I know it's going to be okay versus early on, brand new instructors. And I would certainly do this myself. I would get a lot more worried about getting through what I had to do, especially if you're part of like a team or you all do the same stuff like a multi section intro, bio class. So a lot more pressure if you're in to get through the material, right? But what happens is when you get an activity like the one you're talking about, the Google Docs and the group sharing things, you just kind of have to flow with it, let it breathe. You know the first thing, though, when you're doing anything like that is to make sure students can actually do it and make sure the tech works. So check your permissions, check the sharing settings. I've run into many problems where I don't have it right. It's like five hands go up, right? Well, okay, what did I do wrong? So make sure that works. But then once they get into it, you got to give them a little time. You might only think, Oh, well, they're going to look at this axis. It should only take them a minute to find what they think, what they want to do and write down. But in reality, they're they're orienting themselves to look to see what the actual screen looks like. They'r thinking about what I want to write. There might be thinking about do I want to be able to see what I'm writing? So and they're talking to each other too, because I do. This is a group activity, so you want to make sure that you give the time for the students to do it because it's going to take longer than you think. But then depending on what you get, you like that. Like I said, you let that breathe, you know, so you might might take a 10 minutes debriefing that if you get some really cool ideas you've asked students to because this is how they don't no one knows who they wrote. You might ask them, okay, is anyone willing to tell us why you put this one way up here in the top right quadrant versus somewhere else? And we kind of riff on that, go back and forth, and then there's something like right on the line or maybe maybe now we'll do a clicker question on the fly. Oh, look, there's one right in the middle. Do you guys think it should be in the top right or the bottom? Right now we vote on it. So so you kind of use those tools at your disposal to be flexible and coordinate from there. And again, I think it is a longevity thing from being an instructor that if you don't get to something or something has to be dropped, it's not the end of the world. So so if something like I do an activity like that and we get to a really cool discussion, I just let it go because I realize we're all into this now. But why do I need to cut this off to get to something else?

Derek Bruff: 22:59

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that that also raises a question. I get a lot from faculty who start to think about some of these interactive approaches in the classroom is like, how do you make the time for all of this? And so and I you've mentioned already your research into high structure courses. So how do you structure a course so that you have class time available to do a rich activity like this and let it breathe a little bit?

Justin Shaffer: 23:24

Yeah, that's that's the great lead in, so thanks, Derek. the high structure design. I mean, I couldn't do what I do without it and, you know, and I didn't invent this, you know, I wish I could claim that, you know, I'm writing a book on it. But again, I didn't come up with the term. So it really came out of biology, education, research in the kind of 2005 to 10 range. So Scott Freeman, Mary Pat Wenderoth at UW were two of the early champions in this and they published a lot on this including in Science and even Science will sometimes publish education stuff and one of Scott's really his papers was there but the idea with high structure is and this is similar to things you'll hear from Kelly Hogan and Viji Sathy talking about inclusive teaching and structure is that we're just giving students the scaffold to help manage their learning. And what I mean by that, well, you have some content, some things you move ahead of time. So you might think, Well, yeah, we ask our students to read the book ahead of time, but do they actually do it? Probably not. There's a lot of literature that shows they don't. There was one paper from econ that showed 6% of students actually do the pre class reading when they're asked to do that was on the low end. I think the high end I've seen it maybe 30%. So it's still pretty low across fields, but if you do you know carefully developed pre class work which in my wheelhouse is pre class reading guides. So these are Word documents that I make custom for my materials for my book, my video, whatever I'm using. And by my book and videos, I mean, you know, my textbook or Khan Academy videos, not stuff that I actually write, but these are just the word docs that students will follow along with. They answer questions, they define terms, they fill out tables, they draw pictures, whatever it might be. But it helps me be really transparent with my students about what I want them to know, because I always tell my students, I want to know what you know, what you think I want you to know. And the reading guide is the first crack at that transparency. So they do that. They do some kind of pre class assessment. This is really important too. So having a formative assessment before a class on the reading or the watching or whatever they're doing, so important because if there's no carrot or some students might think of as a stick with a quiz, unfortunately they don't do it. So you have some kind of threshold that they have to meet before class. I give you usually three, if not unlimited attempts to do this. You get to see the right answer. So it's very low stakes just to check because I want them to have the same foundation coming in. Right. So you do the reading, the reading guide, watch the excuse me, do the reading questions before class. I do that on Canvas or something. Then we get to class. Now, I don't have to cover all the basic stuff. Getting back to your question, right, So good example I like to say for this is the cell. So we're teaching it at the cell in intro bio. You know, you got your list of organelles. Those of you might be flashing back to biology right now, but you think all the different parts of the cell I don't have to lecture and point to on the slide. That's mitochondria. Here's what it does. That's the golgi. That's what it does. Because you've done that ahead of time. You read about it or you watch the video. You did a matching exercise on canvas. Instead. I can say,Oh , here's a a cellular disease, here's what it does, here's the genetics of it. Which organelle do you think is responsible? so we can apply what you read. So I'm still assessing you on organelle, structure and function basically, but I'm doing it in a in a much more relevant medical application, higher level way. Now I'll take time to talk. Don't get me wrong, I'm not an anti lecture guy I talk in class, but I came up with I'm still workshopping this term, Derek, so feel free to poo-poo it but I've come up with this term of when you want to when you want to lecture in class with this high structure model, but you're not lecturing on the basic stuff. You're you're carefully selecting what you're lecturing about. So I call it selecturing. So I'm going to there you go thank you. So I'm going to selecture on certain topics that I know are going to cause trouble that I know are difficult to comprehend or I know need clarification based on the pre class work. Right? So so there's still talking going on, but with a lot of active learning around it. And that could be in the form of clickers problem solving group work, case studies, you name it. But yeah, but so long answer, very long answer to your question. In order to be able to do some of this stuff and let it breathe, you got to move some stuff ahead of time. And that is a huge question I get when I work with faculty on high structure. I do workshops on high structure it, you know, how do I have the time to cover all this stuff but still do the active learning that you're talking about? Well, that's it. You move some of it ahead of time.

Derek Bruff: 27:45

Yeah. That reminds me of another principle I talk about in my book, which is creating times for telling. So when students walk in the door, even if they've done the pre class work, they may not be ready for that selecture of yours right? Like you've still got to do some work to get them to the point where they are going to be ready to understand and want to hear that explanation of that harder thing. Right. And that's where the activity comes. The experience comes to get them to the point where they've they've maybe made some predictions. They've they've surfaced some prior knowledge. Right now. They've they've they've got everything primed to understand your five or ten minute lecture, which wouldn't have happened if they just kind of come in cold or. Yeah. The other thing I suspect about you, when you gave that example of a, you know, here's some kind of disease that's coming in which cell organelle is going to be affected here, You don't mean that rhetorically, do you? You're actually going to poll your students and ask them vote on one of these five options, right?

Justin Shaffer: 28:46

Correct. You're correct. Absolutely. And this goes back to your Agile comment, because if I give a question like that and oh Tay-Sachs disease is a good one, Tay-Sachs is a is a disorder where the chloride channel and the lining, especially of the lungs and other respiratory tissues is affected so that you get a mucus buildup. And it's very devastating disease. It's related to transport of chloride ions across the membrane. So students need to understand about membranes and proteins that go into the membrane are made by the endoplasmic reticulum. So I'll pose that question about, okay, well, here's a description of Tay-Sachs. It's a defect due to a mutation of the transport protein in the membrane which organelle these things are most affected. And that's a literal question. Clicker question for me, right? So I get to see the responses. If I got 95% correct, great. You got the reading. You're able to apply that. Well, it's usually not that high. That one's probably like in the fifties, you know. So that's a great opportunity then to be adaptable to the moment.Maybe if it's 5050 or 50, 25, 25, we turn that to a peer instruction moment, have a talk and then click in again, I love doing that. Or if you know, again from experience as instructor, you know how much time is what's going on with the clock. S, you know, maybe it's 5050, but you realize I don't have a lot of time. Okay, well, good. Let's talk about this now. Let me explain it. Or if I had time, I'll call on who from endoplasmic reticulum wants to talk versus who from lysosome wants to talk. And we'll debate it a little bit. So you got to be agile on your feet. But yeah, you got to have the data to do that. So you know, just asking to the show hands or just asking for a few responses doesn't give you the full feel. That's why I like polling technology so much, because you get everyone to everyone to chime in and not let you dictate the direction of the lesson where you need to go.

Derek Bruff: 30:31

MM Yeah. And you know, I used to tell folks like, if you're coming from a full on lecture model and you're trying to kind of add some of these interactions, think about the rhetorical questions you ask and, and like, could you turn it into an actual question where you really do want to hear what everyone says? Often we ask those rhetorical questions where because we're trying to kind of lead students to a certain thought process and we want them to kind of get to the next thing. But, you know, we give them 4 seconds to think about it if that, and then we give them the answer. Right? And so that's the rhetorical part about it. Like like it's just it's not it's not a genuine question.

Justin Shaffer: 31:07

I remember one study (sorry to talk over you). I remember it was one study I saw about the time. I think the average was one second. I saw for for how long people wait. Yeah. So that's something you can definitely work on with people is letting not only the topic conversation go, but letting giving yourself time to count to five Mississippi in your head before you move on. But turning that rhetorical into a real question, I love that idea.

Derek Bruff: 31:29

Yeah, because often we're asking that because it is a good question, right? But students need the time to process that and come up with a conjecture of some answer. Yeah. The other thing I've heard about the all that pre classwork is that you probably see this where your students come in with varying levels of background in the course that you're teaching. Right. We see this in math all the time where half my students in calculus have had calculus in high school and half of them haven't. And of the ones who had it, some of them actually learn something and some of them didn't. And so they're kind of all over the background, all over in terms of their background knowledge. But I find that giving a nice pre class assignment helps to level that just a little bit. Right? Everyone has at least had this one pre class thing to work through, so they're not coming in at wherever they were on August 1st. They're coming in with a little bit of actual instruction in this material. And I think it I think it helps kind of invite more students to participate in those in-class activities because they've had a chance to to kind of come up with something. They're not coming in as cold as they might be.

Justin Shaffer: 32:34

Yeah, 100% agree. It's kind of like saying that norm for the day. Here's what you need to be at. And that's definitely true in math, chemistry, biology. Some of my students haven't had since ninth grade, so they've got four full years or even longer since they've seen anything biology related. But even if it's true, like I teach this class called Material Energy Balances, which is our sophomore year chemical engineering class, it's kind of our first real chemical engineering course, higher level than anything they were taking. So that's brand new to everybody. So it's important to have that level setting no matter what the background is. And also, though, making some of these assignments really flexible or optional is important. So the reading guides I mentioned, I don't collect those, I don't grade those because I did it once. So I've learned from my mistake is that when you have my. Yeah, right. That's what we all do. My my daughter's former kindergarten teacher would tell her and tell her classmates, You know, when you make a mistake, your brain gets bigger. So I like to think that too. But I tried making them required and students. I don't want to use the word revolt in a strong way, but they didn't like that because they felt like, well, just more something more to do. It's another thing to check off the list. But when you have them optional and you show data. So I have a paper in CBE showing the efficacy of using reading guides before class on student learning. I think they buy in a lot more so. But if students are if they really need the prep work, they're going to spend a lot of time on that. They're going to read it very carefully and answer everything, do all the activities. But if you had a student took AP bio last year, which in some cases is like three months ago, because now it's August versus May, they don't need to do that work and that's cool. They can do the reading questions. They still know the content based on the questions that I want them prepare for and then they can jump right in the class. So it's helping kind of level that playing field, like you said, and accounting for different background differences, which totally exists across the board no matter what discipline you're in. And I think we're seeing that exacerbated here in recent years. Now, as these students have gone through high school with a lot of online classes and remote classes and there's been a lot what's the term they use, learning loss, You know, a lot of issues that have happened. So we at Mines I feel like we're seeing we're in a good place. Our students are doing really well. Overall. There's definitely still individuals we're helping out more. But I've heard other universities that issues been getting worse and worse with the preparation level. So having that high structure model, having that baseline before class to get them ready, being flexible with your assignments, and then just being there as an instructor too. And that's the other secret, not really secret to this, but one thing that Scott published recently, I believe is 2020 paper, they talk about the heads and hearts hypothesis for high structure and active learning specifically. So it's not just implementing these evidence based practices in the class of high structure of active learning. Now I'm getting more into authentic assessment too, which is really fun in my classes, but it's not just doing it, but it's having that compassionate piece of instructor, too, that you got to be there. You got to care, right? And I think we all do as educators, we're there for a reason or we want to chose this career path. We want to teach. But you have to explain that to your students. So you have to show that you know that you're there for them. You're there to support them and being flexible with them. So having that compassion or caring side, the heart side of that, that piece of the pie seems to matter to when you're implementing these types of practices and hopefully being an effective instructor.

Derek Bruff: 35:51

Yeah. And that that means that that's not always space that STEM faculty are comfortable kind of talking in. But, but that but there are really tangible steps you can take as an instructor to signal to your students that you are interested in their success. You want them to learn. You want them to do well. You don't have to be all touchy feely about it. You can can be kind of structural about it, and I think there's a lot of value there.

Justin Shaffer: 36:17

I agree. And I'm not that touchy feely guy for sure. Yeah, I'm not really. I, I will help you out however I can, but I don't put that kind of emotional side front. But but you know something as easy as using their names, right? I still am shocked by how many students tell me you took the time to learn my name. Like, that's such an easy thing. Even if you have 60 or 100. I know you're you might not learn everyone's you might have. I used to teach 440. I didn't know everyone. Believe me. But, you know, just asking their name in class, right? Even if it's weeks seven and they haven't responded like, Oh, what's your name again? You know, and just having helping out with that, that's one little thing. Doing a mid-course survey where you're asking students, how are things going so far? And then responding to that feedback to show that you value their opinion. Actually in class on Friday, I'm going to try this for the first time, going back to the target question idea, I'm going to have the Emoji Emotion panel up with all like 12 different emoji faces. I'm going to say, Oh, how are you feeling about our class so far?Click the face that represents you. So just in, this is week three for us. So I'm just doing little things like that and you don't have to again, kind of show that super emotional side of your persona if that's not who you are. And I'm not. I'm very in class, I'm very extroverted, I'm very excited, I'm very enthusiastic. But inside I'm actually very introverted. You know, you ask me to return some thing to Kohl's, I'll say. No, I can't do that, you know, But in front of the class, I'm a different person. It's kind of like an act, you know? But yeah, but you're right. You're right. And you got to, as an instructor, you got to play to your strengths. And no matter what you are on that introvert extrovert spectrum and just make sure you communicate the value of what you're doing. And then using structure helps with that.

Derek Bruff: 37:57

Yeah. And the other thing I think that's true about structure, you mentioned the learning loss that happened as a result of perhaps some less than optimal learning that happened during the COVID 19 pandemic. I think there's also a lot of students who missed a year or two of learning how to learn. And and this was true before the pandemic, right? We'd students coming to college who had maybe done well in high school and had kind of figured out certain strategies that worked well in that learning environment. But but they need a different set of learning skills in college. I think that's been exacerbated by the the remote teaching and such. But I think that's another that's another reason to lean into high structure because you're giving your students that scaffold they need if they don't know how to succeed in a college level course in biology or engineering. Right. You're you're, you're guiding them through a set of activities and practices that will help them learn the material. But if they can continue to do those practices, it's going to help them succeed in other. Courses as well.

Justin Shaffer: 38:55

Exactly, because you can continue on. And I've had students tell their the follow up class, they ask the instructor where the reading guides at? and they come to me like, what's this about? You know, so not in a bad way or anything, but, but, but, but I like to think about with high structure is, is that it helps students develop self-regulated learning. It helps students be more metacognitive because there's so many check in points. So I have this term in the book I'm writing, I call RPO or retrieval practice opportunity. So not not run play option, not talking about football. We're talking about retrieval practice, opportunity. So when you do have structure, by the time you get to a weekly quiz or an exam, it's even further down the road. You're going to have at least six or seven RPOs under your belt for a certain LO for a certain topic. So you're constantly assessing what do I know, what do I not know? And this model too, we didn't talk about it, but growing up online, this works great in online courses. So I use high structure with async online with sync online remote. It works across the board because especially think of an online course you don't have that eye to eye physical contact with your instructor. Maybe you're seeing them on a screen at best. That structure can break down pretty quickly and be kind of a little bit more lost. So having the high structure in the online class I find even more important than maybe sometimes face to face, where I'm not there physically to guide students through all the time.

Derek Bruff: 40:20

I love that. Well, yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Justin, for coming on Intentional teaching. This has been great. I know our listeners are going to get a lot from from our conversation here today. Thanks for being here.

Justin Shaffer: 40:29

Oh, thank you. It's always a blast to talk to you. And I hope I see you in Chicago for POD this year, if not sooner.

Derek Bruff: 40:35

That'd be great.

Justin Shaffer: 40:36

Awesome.

Derek Bruff: 40:38

That was Justin Shaffer, teaching professor in Chemical and biological engineering and associate dean for undergraduate studies at the Colorado School of Mines. As I mentioned at the top of the episode, Justin has a book coming out later this year or early 2025 called High Structure Course Design for STEM. And you can learn more about that book and Justin's other work by following the links in the show notes. There is a slightly longer version of this interview with Justin available to my Patreon supporters. If you fast forward to the last 10 minutes or so of that interview. You can hear Justin share more about his recent and upcoming discipline based educational research, also known as DBER. Justin has a great collection on the UVA teaching hub about that topic, too. 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. This episode of Intentional Teaching was produced and edited by me, Derek Bruff. See the show notes for links to my website, the intentional teaching newsletter and my Patreon where you can help support the show for just a few bucks a month. If you found this or any episode of intentional teaching useful, would you consider sharing it with a colleague? That would mean a lot. As always, thanks for listening.