Blueprints for Learning: Justin Shaffer on Structured A&P Course Design | TAPP 148

Introduction KEVIN PATTON: Composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein once famously said, to achieve great things, two things  are needed, a plan and not quite enough time. AILEEN PARK: Welcome to The A&P Professor, a few minutes to focus on teaching  human anatomy and physiology with a veteran educator and teaching  mentor, your host, Kevin Patton. KEVIN PATTON: This is episode 148, where Justin Shaffer joins us for a  chat about high-structure course design.

Music. Introducing Justin Shaffer KEVIN PATTON: Hey, I've been looking forward to a chat with my friend Justin Shaffer, and today  is the day. He'll be joining us in a moment, but first, allow me to introduce him to you.  Dr. Justin Shaffer is the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies and a teaching professor  in chemical and biological engineering and in

quantitative biosciences and engineering  at the Colorado School of Mines. And right before I spoke to him, Justin was promoted  to be the Ben L. Fryrear Chair for Innovation and Excellence. Justin has been a university STEM  professor, discipline-based education researcher, and faculty and student mentor since  2012. Over the past 12 years or so, Justin has taught more than 8,000 students  using evidence-based pedagogies at a variety

of institutions in several disciplines and  formats. And he has worked with faculty to add evidence-based practices to their courses  by way of workshops and one-on-one consulting. Justin has this cool website  called Recombinant Education, where you can learn about all the exciting things  he's doing to help us all be better teachers. Hey, one of those things is a book on high structure  course design coming out later this year or early

next year in the Macmillan Scientific  Teaching Series. I can't wait for that. Of course, of course, of course, I have  links to all of this in the notes that are available where you're listening  right now and at the episode page at theAPprofessor.org slash 148. Well, hey,  I'm ready for our chat. Let's get to it. High Structure and Low Structure KEVIN PATTON: Well, I'm here with Justin Shaffer. Justin, thanks for stopping  by and chatting with us today. Absolutely,

Kevin. Looking forward to hanging out for a bit  and talking to you about all sorts of stuff. KEVIN PATTON: Well, I think we're going to start with just this idea of high  structure course design. And as we do so, I think it'd be a good idea to kind of  think about how can I use high structure course design or at least elements of high  structure course design in my own course,

in my own A&P course. Or probably this applies  to any course in any discipline, but, you know, what can we use it for, especially to help kind  of fix some of the things that got broke during that big pandemic, COVID, lockdown adventure, or  series of adventures that we've had recently. And, you know, teaching and learning is different  now than it was before, and the experience of it and the kinds of things that that students  are feeling and facing when they're in a course.

You've written extensively and talked about how  high-structure course design can kind of help with that. So to start off, when you say high-structure  course design. What do you mean by that? JUSTIN SHAFFER: Yeah, a lot of great questions in there and happy to unpack this as we go for sure. So first off,  not my term, not my idea. I kind of wish I could claim that, but I can't. So I always give initial  props and shout outs to Scott Freeman and Mary Pat

Wenderoth. That's at the University of Washington  in biology. Mary Pat's big in A&P. She goes to HAPS a bunch too. But they started publishing on  high structure, the idea of it in the mid 2000s. So 2005, 2007, things like that. And Scott had  a paper. It was around 2010, 2011 in Science. Actually, yeah, *that* Science. They published  stuff on education from time to time. But that really showed the benefits of this model. So I've  just kind of taken the torch with it and apply it

to lots of different situations, as you mentioned.  It's definitely discipline agnostic. So I do it in intro Bio, A&P. I also do it in chemical  engineering because I'm in that discipline too. That's my background. I teach introductory  thermodynamics, material and energy balances, which is our sophomore level Chem-E classes.  And then I also teach introduction to biomedical engineering. And it works across the board. So  discipline doesn't matter. It works. But what

is it, right? So the idea with it is that we can  help students with their learning by scaffolding them through the learning process. So we're  helping students move up through their learning via pre-class, in-class, and after class. And  again, we think of this idea as scaffolding

because we're giving them more supports as  they move through the process. So first, starting with before class, we can do some kind  of content acquisition, whether it's reading, watching videos, a little bit of both, and then  some kind of pre-class formative assessment. Some kind of maybe online quiz, lots of  chances, maybe even unlimited attempts, which is I kind of moved to that model  recently where just keep trying until you

get it. But it's lower stuff, you know, it's  more introductory material, basic concepts, lower Bloom's levels, if you will. But then in  class, we can build on that, right? So we've moved some of that basic content to before class.  So now in class, we can focus on applying it and practicing it and doing group work and doing  active learning and numerical problem solving, if that's in your discipline. All these other skills  you want to develop, you can really use that time

now in class to practice. And it's a little  more fun that way too. And then after class, another round of review and more practice. Now we  got maybe an online homework, weekly quiz online, something like that, but more practice  opportunities. And then you follow that up with your more frequent summative assessments. So,  you know, personally, I don't do midterms anymore. Great call from my colleagues to suggest that.  I'm glad I don't do it. We instead do weekly

quizzes in almost all my classes. So we kind  of chunk our material into weeks now. So you get that pre-class, in-class, after-class, and  then a weekly quiz assessment to modularize the course. But we keep building all the way  throughout it, of course, usually accumulating in the cumulative final, especially in  A&P. That's super important to show the

connections between the different body systems.  So you kind of summarize that again. It's this, you're helping students navigate the learning  process via kind of three buckets, before class, in-class, after class, and providing those  scaffolds and supports along the way. KEVIN PATTON: All right. There's a lot in there.

JUSTIN SHAFFER: Sure. KEVIN PATTON: So correct me if I'm wrong here, but what I'm hearing is that  the high structure part is referring to the fact that the instructor has built an intentional  and pretty extensive structure into the course. Yesterday, I was thinking about talking to you  today and was getting pretty excited about it. And I was thinking back to my undergraduate years,  and I was thinking, you know, things were way

different back then. We would maybe be given a  syllabus, or sometimes we just had to guess as to what the professor wanted us to learn. And then  we, you know, attended lectures and labs if that was involved, and we weren't really given much  in the way of homework. Now, in lab, of course, there were sometimes, you know, problems to  solve and report on and things like that. But, or things, you know, observations to write  up and different things like that. But in the

lecture part of the course, especially, we  just attended lecture. And, you know, yeah, there was an assigned textbook and we better be  reading it, but we didn't know which sections. There were no quizzes or anything like that. In  a lot of courses, we just had a midterm and a final. And that was the only kind of assessment  or any kind of interaction as an individual with the teacher at all. Oh, occasionally there'd  be like a report, like, oh yeah, you have to

do a report and it's got to follow this style.  And that's the end, you know, and then you get a grade on it. And so nowadays, you know, that's  pretty atypical. Back then it was very typical. So I guess I would call that a "no structure" or  "low structure" course that I was usually taking back then. And so what you're doing is adding  structure to it. like, "no don't... you're

not on your own—I'll help you. We're going  to do these things, and then those things, and then and then we'll see where you're at."  Does that sound... am I hearing that right? JUSTIN SHAFFER: You're picking it up completely right, Kevin. Yeah, and I mean I'm a bit younger than  you but even when I was in college in a 01 to 05

at Penn State—uh, similar styles of teaching,  similar classes. You know, clickers were just coming on the scene but I didn't have them in many  of my classes then, so I can relate to that truly. And your definition there of low structure  is actually what's in the literature, right? So if you look at a paper by Kelly  Hogan and Sarah Eddy published in 2014 in CBE, they define kind of the three levels  of structure, low, moderate, or middle,

and then high. And it's just basically  about how many buckets are you filling up you know pre-class in class and after class  how much active learning are you doing in class they have different demarcations of to reach low  middle and high structure and you know and Kelly you know she was my mentor at North Carolina—  I wouldn't be here without her—and you know she wrote the recent book with Viji Sathy on inclusive  teaching and they talk all about structure there

too so you know what kind of whatever terminology  you want to use structure definitely helps you know even though Some days when I got so much  going on with a class on Canvas, in class, clickers, all these other tools, I kind of  pine for the chalkboard old days sometimes.

But I can't because we know this works. There's  so much evidence now, my own research included, and many others showing that you add that  structure, you add that frequent assessment, frequent quizzing, it improves student outcomes,  it improves student feelings of belonging, it reduces achievement gaps. So, you know, the  evidence is there. And I would hope that all of us here as, you know, A&P practitioners  mostly listening. There might be the rogue

ecologists listening or the rogue economists.  That's okay. You're welcome to, right? But, you know, we like to base our decisions on  evidence as scientists, engineers, and the evidence just keeps mounting that, you know, this  kind of system works for student success. However, I always like to tell folks when I work with them,  especially when I do professional development work with faculty, is that you have to tailor  things to your specific situation, right?

There's not one single one-size-fits-all  approach that you can clone in class to class to class. I mentioned off the  top, I teach five different disciplinary courses with high structure. They all look a  little different, but they have the same kind of model, that pre-class, in-class, after-class.  So you really have to take the evidence, take the practices, and then apply them  to your own situation, your own students,

because you're going to know them way better than  I ever would. So you'll have to kind of feel it out and see. And there was even a great paper by  Ann Casper in Michigan with Scott Freeman as well called True Grit. It was about the grit involved  with trying and then fixing and trying again and modifying again and trying again to get it to  work. because it took them a few tries to get the high-structure model to work for their  specific institution. So, again, that just

highlights the need to tailor these approaches.  It's not like a kit from Thermo Fisher for PCR. You just pop it in and add your agents, you know,  and go, push, go. There's a little bit more. KEVIN PATTON: If only we could do that. JUSTIN SHAFFER: Yeah, even though there, though, I guess there is some  manipulation with, you know, melting temperatures and number cycles and things  like that. But yeah, but point being, again,

customize this approach. Get inspired by this  approach, but then stay alert for your own needs. KEVIN PATTON: Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because in my podcast over the years,  I have, and the reason I got into this was, I was approaching the end of my teaching career. And  that part is pretty much finally done now in terms of teaching A&P in the classroom. I was thinking,  man, you know, I've learned a lot over the years.

Things are way different in my classroom  than they were when I first started teaching. And looking back, I noticed that they just kept  changing over and over. So what you get at the beginning and you get at the end are very, very  different things in terms of how my course was delivered, how it was designed, how I interacted  with students, how the students interacted with

each other. And so, you know, I've adopted some  of the things that you just mentioned, some of of those things because I would become aware of them  somehow, probably mostly through like workshops and interactions with HAPS or my colleagues in  HAPS or talking to people in other disciplines and, you know, hearing what they're doing and  like, ooh, there's this new thing in math courses

we're doing, like, oh, I could use that in A&P.  And, you know, just picking up things all over the place and probably a whole lot of what you just  mentioned, and I think that's the secret sauce in this, is taking those things that you hear or read  or see in a journal or whatever, and then making it work for your own students in your own class  and the way that you're already doing things.

I wanted to just stop and really emphasize  that because I've mentioned a few things in the podcast where I've said, hey, I tried  this and it sounds crazy, but it really works. And then I'll have people come back to me,  you know, individually, and they'll say, okay, you know, I'm frustrated with what's going on in  my course, or I just want to freshen things up. And I want to try that. I'm intrigued by that.  And sometimes they'll ask me for like, well,

how did you do this part? How did you do that  part? Because there's always practical matters. You know, you can say weekly quizzes, but what  does that mean? Is that at the end of the week, at the beginning of the week? Is that  a long quiz, short quiz, you know, all those questions. So they would ask me those  kinds of questions. And then sometimes, you know, they'd circle back to me and say, okay, I did  that last semester and my grades got worse,

not better. So what's going on? You  know, my answer is, I don't know. You know, I guess you just have to keep looking.  But the thing is, is that what I'm doing in my course is in a certain context that's different  in that other person's course. And not only that, there are possibly some things that  didn't come up in our conversation that are different in my course than their course  in terms of implementing that particular,

whatever strategy it was. You know, maybe I forgot  to tell them something I do, or some change I had to make to make that work better, or whatever. And  it might turn out that whatever that strategy is, it's not going to work in their course. Or  it could be that it has to be adapted in a much different way, rather than taking it  exactly the way I did it, maybe they need to

mush it around a little bit and combine it with  a different strategy. Or what I've found a lot of times is, if I dive right into a new strategy,  sometimes I need to back off of that and say, no, this is... This is too different. You  know, I'm not, you know, even if it's just too different for me, that's why it's not  working. Then I back off of it a little bit and just kind of dip my toe in and try a little bit  of this. Like, let's say frequency of quizzes.

Let's say I give no quizzes and then all of a  sudden I'm giving two quizzes a week. That's a big change. Maybe I should give one quiz every  other week at first and see how that goes. JUSTIN SHAFFER: Yep. KEVIN PATTON: So I like that you brought up, you know, the fact that we adapt these strategies to our  own situation. And there's lots out there now,

as you mentioned. So one could, if somebody  wants to adopt every strategy that's been proven to be effective, some of them  are going to counteract each other. JUSTIN SHAFFER: Oh, they do. KEVIN PATTON: You know, and not only that, some of them just  aren't going to work in your course. JUSTIN SHAFFER: Totally true. Totally true. Yeah. And I love that. You told your brief  story there about how your class before is a lot

different than it is now, right? That idea of  self-change is really important with teaching, right? And reflecting on how things go and kind  of growing. And I actually keep this quote on my little notes here on my MacBook. So I'm going to  read it verbatim. It's from Chris Tovani. It says, "my wish for you is that each year you look  back at your career and laugh with embarrassment about the way you used to teach. If you do  this, you will continue to learn and grow."

And I think that's true. I look back at my early  courses. My first class was at North Carolina A&T and Greensboro, North Carolina, intro bio.  And on my last day of class, I had a little survey. And I asked the student, what was the most  important thing you learned? And it was intro bio, bio one. So a lot of the students were talking  about energy and molecules and photosynthesis.

But then one student, and I'll never forget  this, they wrote on the page, they wrote, "the most important thing I learned in this class  was to never take another class with you again." So, you know, which, I'm not everyone's  cup of tea, right? Don't get me wrong. But I learned from that because I look back  now, you know, that was 2012. And wow,

how was that class? It was high structure, but  not, in my opinion, well designed at that point, because I was, you know, still postdoc at Carolina  and figuring things out, you know, but, you know, kind of grown as I've moved We've gone, and even  recently for me now, I've definitely played with, like you mentioned, frequency of assignments and  other types of evidence-based teaching strategies. But I've been trying to add on what the folks  in the literature call authentic assessments,

right? So trying to add more authenticity to  our courses to give students an opportunity to apply their knowledge in a way that they  might actually do in the real world, right? So as an example of that, in A&P last fall,  we did a health and wellness project where students had to propose an intervention  they would do during the semester with the goal of improving some aspect of their health  and wellness. So I had students, you know, add

chin-ups every day to their workout routine. I had  students who tried to go to sleep an hour earlier. Some actually did cold plunges every  day in our clear creek here near Golden, near campus, and, you know, in the  frigid water and try to see if cold plunges would help any aspect of their immunity. And then they had to, you know, send a little  report halfway through and at the end make a make a flyer or write a brief two-page  paper on what they learned about them

themselves and what measurements they made and  whether it worked or not. And it was really cool to see some of them you know especially one  student that did the chin-ups they you know started they couldn't do any on the first day you  know but then by the end they were doing six in a row so that was really cool documentation that  they could actually add an exercise routine but then they had to talk about the a and p concepts  behind that right about what happened in that case

among muscle strength gain. So adding something  like that authentic to the course right now, my students are finishing up writing the NSF  GRFP two-page research proposal for my intro to biomedical engineering course. And that's a  literal thing they could submit if they wanted to, right? To try to get graduate school funding.  So I've been playing with that more recently as I'm getting older, trying to make, you know,  because sometimes classes can be artificial,

right? With our sub-structures of assessment and  outcomes. And again they don't really mimic the real world so adding that authenticity  um I think can be really beneficial and really powerful if done in the right way but  again well even with that you got to figure out is this am I implementing it the right  way am I doing it the right frequency with how many check-ins on their drafts how am  I getting feedback you know there's so many

variables with teaching and and learning and  it does take just iteration to figure that out. KEVIN PATTON: We'll be back in a moment. Badge Break KEVIN PATTON: You're listening to episode 148 of The A&P Professor podcast for  Anatomy and Physiology faculty. We'll get right back to our chat with Justin Shaffer about  high-structure course design in a moment.

But first, let me remind you that listening  to this episode and reviewing the notes at the episode page can be documented with a  professional development credential that can be shared in the form of a digital  badge or certificate. It helps you keep track of your independent professional  development activities and it provides evidence for your records or reports. Just go  to theAPprofessor.org slash 148 and click on

the link to claim your digital credential.  Okay, let's get back to our conversation. Transparency, Expectations, & Flexibility KEVIN PATTON: I love that quote, you know, about looking back, you know, at our early  teaching and being embarrassed. And, you know, I can certainly relate to that. And it's funny,  too, how I've had former students and colleagues and so on make, in just an ordinary, you know,  out in the hall conversation, make reference to,

like, the strategies, you know, Kevin uses in  his class. And they're based on something 10 years ago. And it's like, oh, shoot, I stopped  that a long time ago. I don't do anything like that. You're right. That's not the best way to do  it. So that's kind of funny. But something else, too, that really struck me, and  I'd like your opinion on this, when I've added structure to my class,  because I think it's going to help students.

For example, in my regular A&P lecture class, I  had a lot of fairly low-stakes online tests that students did on their own time. And it was  open book, open internet, open everything, although those were the days not so long ago  when we didn't have artificial intelligence. JUSTIN SHAFFER: Oh, gosh. KEVIN PATTON: But even then, I'm not sure it would help them on all  their test questions. But the rumor was, oh, take Patton's class because it's  all open book. Well, number one,

it's not all open book. There's a lot of  open book. And, you know, it's not like... Opening the book and copying the answers out  of the book. A lot of these questions were application questions that you would not find  in the book in that form. You would find all the information you would need to answer that  question, but you wouldn't find the answer to

that question. You have to do some processing  too. So, you know, that part was left out. So all these people expecting this easy class,  and they found out that actually it wasn't, my A&P class wasn't that hard because Because  we were doing all this structured stuff, and so we were actually learning. But what  was troublesome to them was they were used to showing up for class Monday, Wednesday, Friday,  now we're going to have a test. Monday, Wednesday,

Friday, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, now we have  another test. That is their involvement in the course. They don't do anything else. And so when  I add the structure of like, no, you have these online tests you have to get done. And there  were some other things they had to do, too. You know, again, you know, the before, during,  and after class thing it gets back to. So they would kind of, at first at least, they would  rebel against that. You know, tell me, wow,

this is the hardest class ever because there's  just so much stuff to do. How does anybody keep up? And so what, I mean, I assume that  you run into that kind of a reaction, especially for students that haven't had  a high structure course before. Yep. So how do you manage that? How do  you coach students through that? JUSTIN SHAFFER: Yeah, so those expectations for workload and productivity and just getting these assignments  done is really important to be clear on that. And

earlier you were talking about how you had to kind  of guess what your professors wanted. So I'm a big believer in transparency when it comes to teaching  and high structure allows for that transparency because you can be very clear with all this  process. And it even starts with backward design and writing your learning objectives and aligning  everything to that because you can design your assessments and your assignments and activities  and your readings to always be tied into what

you want students to be able to do. So I always  tell my students, I want to know what you know, not what you think I want you to know. And I also  tell them, though, that, yeah, there are these assignments before class. We're going to be active  and doing stuff in class. You're going to have weekly homeworks online or something. And I'm not  doing this just to give you busy work. But again,

the evidence from the literature shows this is  beneficial. So I show them the data, you know, on the first day of class, like I have a couple  of graphs I show them from a couple of different papers showing the benefits of active learning,  the benefits of high structure. And I always reinforce it as we go, you know, here's why we're  doing this. So, you know, being clear with your students about the why of your course design and  always inviting them to talk to you about the

course design and getting frequent feedback  as well. wow, that's so important for this. Asking them at least at the midpoint of the  semester, if not even more frequent, doing a mid-course survey about what's working for the  class, what's not working. But then also asking

them, what are you doing that's working? What  can you do to improve? So kind of a four-question sequence there takes five, 10 minutes tops, and  it can be really powerful for both you as the instructor to get feedback on the course design  and the students to reflect on their own progress through the course. But all that being said, how  do you kind of promote the work and getting it done? So, You've got to have those expectations, I  think, and hold them because, again, we know this

works and we know this helps. Again, I have my own  data. Other people have lots of data on various aspects of this course design model that shows the  benefits of doing it. At the same time, you've got to be flexible too, though, because I was just  at BYU recently doing a workshop for their life science faculty. And my colleague there, Jamie  Jensen, said she has a "life happens" policy, which I do too. I just don't call it that, but  I told Jamie I'm going to steal her title there.

And basically you allow for drops, right? You  allow for uh make made up assignments if you need to however you want to do it I'm a big  fan of the drop model so if we have you know 15 pre-class assignments one a week you get to  drop three just no questions asked right so if you're busy that week a family something work  what does it matter just laid on it didn't want to do it who cares just don't even tell me you  just get to drop it you know you can still do it

whenever you want it just you know won't affect  your grade in any way shape or form so you know being flexible with these things. But also kind  of going back to our conversation about tailoring the style. So when I was at UC Irvine teaching  human anatomy there, these are students who were either in nursing programs or on their way to  medical school or dental school, PT, whatever. And they were so gung-ho to learn anatomy, which  was great. So it was really kind of easy in a way

to have these many assignments, Monday, Wednesday,  Friday, pre-class every day, right? We'd have a pre-class assignment, reading the book and doing  a pre-class assignment on their online courseware. But when I came to Mines, I'm teaching intro bio  here, reading A&P as an elective. And most of my students are engineers, chemical engineers, for  example, and they're not as into it. So also they

have five other, four other technical courses at  the same time with a huge workload. So I've moved to a weekly model. So now for A&P here, every  Wednesday, we have a pre-class reading guide and a pre-class assignment do. And that just  helps them be much more predictable. You know, every Wednesday, there's this one thing to do  before class, and that sets you up for the next

couple of days of the class. And it helps with  the workload management. So I think as long as you're clear in communicating the value of the  assignments, and again, it's not just busy work, it's not just me being a cantankerous  person and giving you extra work to do. It's rather, whether this is going to benefit you, but  be flexible with how you allow the assignment to

be turned in and graded and drops and things like  that. And then also, again, tailor that frequency of these to your students and your population and  be aware of, oh, crap, it's OCHEM 2 midterm week. Maybe we, you know, take this one a little bit  lighter, right? So if you can, things like that. KEVIN PATTON: Okay. So one thing that occurred to me as you were going  through your list of ways to react and what's going on in your course. It occurred  to me that when you, like your drop policy,

your "life happens." I love that. It's going  to be out there now. So it's not just you that heard that and can steal that phrase.  But, you know, the "life happens" part. JUSTIN SHAFFER: And we all need to give Jamie credit. KEVIN PATTON: Yeah. Yeah, right, right. So kudos to Jamie. But the thing that  occurred to me when you were bringing that up is I've had some of those kinds of policies in  my course as well. And I believe in them. And

I think that that helps learning rather than harms  learning. But I had to kind of come around to that because that's not what I was used to in my own  experience as a student and in my early career as an instructor. And then, you know, when I float  that idea out to other educators, the reaction isn't always a good one, or at least it wasn't. I  think it's a different environment now than when I first start playing around with them. But, you  know, I got pushback, like, oh my gosh, they're

not going to learn how to be responsible. You  know, if they're a nurse in a hospital, they can't just not show up three days out of their month  or whatever. So therefore, you're harming your students. That's not helping them at all. Well,  so do you see any issue with doing that or do you think the benefits outweigh any harm that can  be done or even is there any harm in doing that? JUSTIN SHAFFER: Yeah, I think, you know,

I agree with that point of view on some things,  right? You know, so you can't be overly permissive with this. You know, you can't allow unlimited  makeups on everything or unlimited attempts. I think that's doing your students a disservice  in a way because there are limits, I think, to expectations. And that does not map into  the real world, like you mentioned with the nursing example. Now, I know a lot of people  are moving towards mastery-based grading or the

overall term people use is ungrading. And I do use  elements of that in my courses that I mentioned, like on the pre-class, right? Super  low stakes, basic content acquisition, maybe worth 5% of the total course grade. I don't  really care if you take unlimited attempts on that because I want you to know the baseline to  get the class. Then we can start applying that,

building on that, as I mentioned earlier. However,  when it comes to a higher stakes assessment, whether it's just a weekly quiz or the final exam  or a project, you do have to have some level of, at least in my opinion, some level of rigor  there and expectations to have a little leeway. So in my introductory thermodynamics class,  for example, we typically have 17 quizzes. You get to drop two or three because  everyone has a bad day, right? No big deal,

but you still got to do really well  on 15 of them. So even though, yeah, someone might argue, oh, you're giving  them a way out. I'm like, well, yeah, but they still got to do awesome on 15 to earn  a good grade in the course. And I do mean that students earn the grade in the course, right?  So I think that's important to consider on that line of thinking there with the kind  of expectations for dropping and things.

Also, the reason drops are great is from  kind of a management perspective from us as instructors. So, right, if I have a class of  440 students, which I used to teach at Irvine, I'd do that for intro bio, and I'd actually  have two of them back to back. So I was at, you know, pushing 900 students or more every  fall quarter. If I didn't have drop policies you imagine how many makeup requests I get how many  extended apps extended you know assignment policy KEVIN PATTON: Yes I can imagine that!

JUSTIN SHAFFER: Right, right. So it's really a kind of a management thing that helps on our end too  so yeah we're giving the students a little bit of slack with having a bad day and don't worry about  it, life happens, but for me too it's going going to be a benefit so um so I think that way even  clickers right I'm sure many of you listening use some kind of pull response system in class for  me you know if we have 30 days in the semester

we'll use clickers you get to drop three and  I don't care why you get to drop those three, the batteries died, your phone died, you just  didn't show up right otherwise I don't want students coming up to me with a piece of paper  with their clicker answers written on it say here's my grade for the day you know here's my  clickers for the day give me the points especially

when it's 400. So all these little things like  that, it's more of a, it's a management issue to help with keeping yourself sane when it  comes to these especially large classes. KEVIN PATTON: We'll be right back.