Transcript
00:00:00 Amalie
I think maybe you can.
00:00:06 Camie
Welcome to the pedagogy toolkit. In this episode Amalie and Camie discussed two myths that deal with student engagement, the myth that student discussion and problem solving always works.
00:00:19 Camie
So the dreaded online discussion board.
00:00:24 Camie
What is the first thing that pops into your mind when you?
00:00:29 Camie
Your discussion board.
00:00:32 Amalie
I think.
00:00:34 Amalie
The same setup every time.
00:00:38 Amalie
Every class I've taken as a student is the same.
00:00:43 Amalie
Here's your prompt. Post your response, read your classmates responses. Respond to to.
00:00:50 Camie
Yes.
00:00:52 Camie
That and honestly, I get a little just sense of dread in my heart every time my shoulders tense up a little bit because I know for me, like my brain automatically connects that with dull, uninteresting, and just get this done.
00:01:09 Amalie
Flat compliance, right, right.
00:01:12 Camie
It's not.
00:01:13 Camie
Engaging to me in any way.
00:01:15 Amalie
Now it feels like that.
00:01:17 Amalie
I'm checking to make sure you're engaged, so look engaged.
00:01:20 Camie
Yes.
00:01:22
But.
00:01:23 Camie
But those are not the things that you get, right. You get those really flat responses of.
00:01:27 Camie
I really liked that the author said XY and Z and I think this topic is really great and I think that we should do more of it and in everyday life.
00:01:38 Amalie
And then or you get something that sounds really wordy and doesn't actually answer the problem. No. And a lot of Times Now we're seeing that AI the students are using AI.
00:01:38 Camie
Oh.
00:01:51 Camie
It will talk a lot about the topic of whatever you put in your prompt, but will not actually address the prompt.
00:01:56 Amalie
That's.
00:01:56 Amalie
Problem with lots of flowery words.
00:01:58 Camie
Yeah, they'll sound really smart.
00:01:59 Amalie
It sounds real pretty.
00:02:01 Camie
Real smart.
00:02:03 Camie
Or you get the people who go completely off the rails onto, you know, like a political rant.
00:02:09 Amalie
Conspiracy theory.
00:02:12 Camie
And so.
00:02:15 Camie
It's hard sometimes to set these up well because these are not, you know, in person discussions where you can immediately turn people around or something like that. If you see things going off the rails or if it becomes really flat, you can't ask one of those really open-ended questions, right?
00:02:33 Camie
Or can you?
00:02:36 Amalie
I think maybe you can.
00:02:39 Camie
So.
00:02:41 Camie
In discussions.
00:02:44 Camie
What we get?
00:02:46 Camie
Is flat.
00:02:49 Camie
An AI.
00:02:51 Camie
Non response, yeah or off the rails.
00:02:52 Amalie
Nonsense.
00:02:55 Camie
We've got these three kinds of things, but that is not what we're after when we set.
00:03:00 Camie
These things up.
00:03:01 Camie
We're after engagement, right? We're asking students to extrapolate facts that they've seen in the readings and lectures and articles that they've read and.
00:03:14 Camie
Do something, apply them.
00:03:17 Amalie
Right. We often, I mean, we often when we're working with instructors say to them that's great that you want them to know this information. What do you want them to do with it.
00:03:25 Amalie
And so the discussion board ends up as a place where students can demonstrate what they know how to do with this knowledge.
00:03:31 Camie
Right discussion boards are oftentimes where students are actually meeting course objectives. Like you know when they have to analyze something, apply, evaluate all of those things because you can't do that in a multiple choice quiz. Really not well anyway.
00:03:41 Amalie
And synthesize right.
00:03:52 Camie
Especially if part of the objective is to discuss.
00:03:55 Amalie
You certainly can't do that. It's true, discussing sort of involves discussion.
00:04:01 Camie
Right. You you got to.
00:04:02 Amalie
Write words. It's amazing how that works out.
00:04:05 Camie
So in that.
00:04:09 Camie
We can ask students to look at a video and apply what they've learned. We can ask them to problem solve something.
00:04:18 Camie
But.
00:04:20 Camie
Unless we are.
00:04:23 Camie
Guiding that discussion, unless we've set them up with the facts that they need, unless we have modeled what a good discussion should look like, not only before they ever discuss anything, but also during the discussion and unless we are monitoring what is happening in the discussion.
00:04:44 Camie
Them.
00:04:46 Camie
It's really easy for us to get those first three types of responses.
00:04:52 Camie
So what we look for in a discussion, let's pretend that.
00:04:58 Camie
We have a problem solving discussion.
00:05:01 Camie
OK.
00:05:02 Camie
Solve the world we've asked students to read this article.
00:05:06 Camie
And I'm going to go with this article that I.
00:05:08 Camie
Just read the other day, OK?
00:05:11 Camie
An analogy in this article says you can't set an attacking field for a fast bowler in cricket without first knowing how to play cricket.
00:05:21 Amalie
That makes me laugh because I don't know what it means, and I've I've watched a fair bit of cricket. I right. I sat and watched some just a couple weeks ago, but I don't. And I I I don't know what those words mean, right. Like I know that a bowler is like the picture.
00:05:41 Camie
Like I know some things about cricket.
00:05:43 Amalie
No, there's wickets.
00:05:43 Camie
I know.
00:05:44
Great.
00:05:46 Camie
But I I don't know what this means at all, and this article was not about cricket or sports. OK, it it wasn't. And so I'm not sure what to do with that as a student. And so we have to make sure that the things we're giving, whether they are analogies or content facts and think about the knowledge.
00:06:06 Camie
And content of your field or discipline.
00:06:09 Camie
That's what you're trying to get students to get to for your course.
00:06:13 Camie
And when you put in crazy analogies like.
00:06:16
This.
00:06:17 Camie
That means something to you, but maybe don't mean anything to your students.
00:06:24 Camie
It has to be meaningful to them. They have to be. You want them to be specific to what you're talking about, #1. So this sports analogy in an article about education really fell flat with me. Right, because it.
00:06:40 Camie
Ohh it did not expand my understanding. Let's just say that.
00:06:42 Amalie
I remembered working with the woman who was my my mentor when I started as a teaching, as a TA, and we were in a class one time and she asked the students something and they whatever the.
00:06:57 Amalie
Something I can't even remember what it was about, but the students answered something about Cinderella.
00:07:03 Amalie
And and she initially thought the student meant the band.
00:07:12 Amalie
It turned into a delightful misconnection of that because.
00:07:18 Amalie
My mentor was just older enough.
00:07:22 Amalie
That Cinderella was right in her wheelhouse, and these students were just young enough that they had no idea what she was talking about. And she tried to make these discussions about said and it didn't go well at all.
00:07:37 Amalie
That's really forgotten about that until just this moment.
00:07:39 Camie
Say that happens to all of us.
00:07:41 Amalie
As ohh yes.
00:07:43 Camie
And you're talking about something that you think is really relevant in your mind is just common knowledge and it's not.
00:07:49 Amalie
It's not. It's not. You're an old so.
00:07:53 Camie
To problem solve.
00:07:56 Camie
In a discussion right, you have to have very specific facts, yet has specific facts about the field about the topic.
00:08:06 Camie
And about the problem. Yeah, right. So in a discussion, even if you're not problem solving, you have to set your students up with all of those things, no matter what you're asking them to do, because in essence, we're problem solving in every discussion we're asking them about a specific set of things and asking them to apply something else.
00:08:27 Camie
Whether that's for a solution or for, you know, clarification or whatever it is, we are in essence going through those same kinds of steps.
00:08:38 Amalie
If they don't know enough about what their.
00:08:42 Amalie
Discussing.
00:08:44 Amalie
They don't know they they can look at their menu of skills to choose from, and they don't know which skills to pull. They don't know which facts they need. They don't. If they don't know enough about what they're.
00:08:56 Camie
Right, talking about and I will say so I.
00:08:57 Amalie
Thing.
00:09:02 Camie
I have I have an instructor who also has been using AI again to.
00:09:10 Camie
Creates skeletal outlines for all of her lecture videos and.
00:09:16 Camie
This is.
00:09:18 Camie
Like it's basically just.
00:09:20 Camie
Specific questions that draw out the information that she wants students to focus on, so it's just questions. It's a list of questions that's just going to outline. It's not anything real fancy.
00:09:32 Camie
But she uses AI to give her kind of foundation. If it says something, you know she doesn't want, she removes that. She adds in questions that she may want, but it gives her a foundation to start with.
00:09:45 Camie
And that gives students something to focus on. It lets them know what facts they need, because those are the facts they're going to be doing something with.
00:09:54 Amalie
I know there are several of us here at Global campus who in our.
00:09:59 Amalie
In our templates for the classes that we're developing, we'll have a section that is things to keep in mind for each lesson overview, and that's exactly that. It's giving the students a target for what they need to kind of keep in the back of their mind what they need to pay attention to what information they.
00:10:18 Amalie
Need to.
00:10:19 Amalie
To know is relevant to pullout.
00:10:21 Camie
Exactly. And you know, in something like a skeletal outline, it keeps them engaged in that specific lecture because they're answering questions. So they're listening more actively.
00:10:30 Camie
It.
00:10:31 Camie
It's just helpful all around and it gets them the facts that they need to do the things. The other thing you need when you're doing these discussion boards is to.
00:10:40 Camie
So.
00:10:41 Camie
What skills right? You need to know how to do the thing that you're being asked to do. Uh, you need to know what you're being asked to do, and you need to have had some kind of practice or modeling of that skill.
00:11:00 Camie
Because you don't know how to hit a target if you've never if you.
00:11:05 Amalie
Can't see it right? It was going to say it's easy for us to say.
00:11:09 Amalie
They should know how to answer a question in a discussion board, or they should know how to respond to somebody. But if every discussion board they've ever done, they've treated they that we talked about at the beginning. Why? Why would they know how?
00:11:19 Camie
Their brains, yes.
00:11:24 Amalie
To do this and we have to remember too that.
00:11:27 Camie
Well, we're fighting what our brains have automatically checked out when they hear the word discussion board. Yes, because mine automatically checks out when I hear the word discussion board. And I work with them all the time, so I know that they're.
00:11:37 Amalie
Yeah.
00:11:37 Amalie
All like that. We have some really good discussion of what's going on in some of our classes, but my brain still just trades back to well and I've been working with a professor and I'm super excited to see how this pans out in the class after she teaches it in her initial information to the students, like in the syllabus.
00:11:59 Amalie
She has examples of what a good response looks like.
00:12:03 Amalie
Examples of what a good response to the response looks.
00:12:05 Amalie
Like.
00:12:06 Amalie
And really gives them something to see so that they've got their requirements, they've got their guidelines, they've got their rubric. They also have an example. So that's goes back to that universal design for learning. We can, there's all these different touch points, so they can see what they're being asked to do.
00:12:25 Amalie
From lots of different perspectives.
00:12:27 Camie
Exactly. And that's what we're looking for. The other thing in discussions.
00:12:34 Camie
If you're not monitoring, you don't know when things are falling flat. You don't know when students are using AI to not even answer your prompt. You don't know when they're going off the rails, so monitoring that is really important so that you can get to the guiding part.
00:12:54 Camie
Because guiding within is also kind of a form of modeling, because you'll be responding to these.
00:13:01 Camie
And hopefully.
00:13:03 Camie
We're not responding to take over the discussion, right? I know a lot of times in discussion boards, students also like their brain automatically goes, oh, the instructor has said this. That is the end even if the instructor is not meaning to become the expert there. If if something is mentioned.
00:13:16
Right.
00:13:21 Camie
Well, that's what the professor said. So that's what it must.
00:13:26 Camie
Instead of.
00:13:27 Camie
Keeping that conversation going, extending the conversation, extending the learning, that's what we're trying to do when we participate, right when we guide the conversation, we want to guide it in certain directions, but we want to do that in something that you and I have talked about before on the podcast, and that is with really great open questions. Absolutely a good open question.
00:13:48 Amalie
If the best is if it's a question you genuinely don't know the answer to, or genuinely want the answer to and not that you already know what the answer is.
00:14:00 Amalie
That's the key is it's it's figuring out how to ask this how to ask that information so that.
00:14:07 Amalie
It gives it's. How to ask that information? How to ask that question so that the student?
00:14:15 Amalie
Doesn't feel like they're having to. There's a right or wrong, right?
00:14:21 Camie
And that's hard. It is hard. It's a skill that, you know, we all have to work on. I still have to work on it myself, and it's because it's constantly reflecting on wait, what?
00:14:33 Camie
Did what I just say communicate to other people? It's not. What did I mean when I said this? Right. It's like stepping back from what you just said or type and going, how's the other person going to view that?
00:14:43 Amalie
That that's a really hard thing to learn, too. Of that, what I meant is not what's important. What was received is what is important. There's the punishment is all about, for example, punishment is all about.
00:14:59 Amalie
The person being punished if they don't perceive it as punishment, it's not punishment, and vice versa. If they do perceive it as punishment, then it is, it doesn't matter.
00:15:08 Amalie
If you.
00:15:09 Amalie
Thought it wasn't, had a had a dog that would jump on the counter and I just had it with him one day and he kept jumping on the counter, kept jumping on it.
00:15:19 Amalie
And I was at the dish. I was doing dishes, and I turned the sprayer on him.
00:15:24 Amalie
And he loved it. He thought it was great. I had another dog that if I had done that, she would never have come back in the kitchen again.
00:15:33 Amalie
It it it it's it depends. It has nothing to do with.
00:15:36 Amalie
What I meant right?
00:15:37 Camie
Well, you know that saying perception is reality. Yes and I.
00:15:43 Camie
Both love that saying for things like this and hate.
00:15:45 Amalie
It for other other things.
00:15:47 Camie
But but it but it can be true like what? What you're perceiving that that is where you're living. And so reflecting back on what you said to make sure that.
00:15:58 Camie
How are they receiving this? Are they receiving this as this is the end of the conversation because now I have spoken? Or are they receiving this as oh, let me think that through and.
00:16:11 Amalie
Look at this in a different way, and that's a. That's a really hard line to walk well. And sometimes you have to tell a little white lie and say, oh, I hadn't ever thought of it that way before. Yes, dear students. You know, let them believe that they are geniuses who came up with.
00:16:31 Amalie
Information that no one had ever thought of. Let them have that moment.
00:16:33
Before.
00:16:36 Camie
Yeah. Well, because it is new information for them and they should be excited about it. And and like you said earlier, you know this is really about a journey of.
00:16:47 Camie
Learning together.
00:16:48 Camie
And so, sometimes legitimately, students may come up with things that you haven't thought of before, but when they don't. But it's new to them, you can say ohh, that's a really interesting point. I hadn't thought of it that way before, have you?
00:17:00 Camie
Thought.
00:17:00 Camie
Of right this this and this because that leads them into a dialogue.
00:17:05 Amalie
And a dialogue requires 2 yes, minimum of two. It has to be a back and forth. It can't just be you.
00:17:14 Amalie
Saying yes, you're right or no, you're wrong.
00:17:17 Amalie
Right.
00:17:18 Camie
So looking at feedback guiding the discussion so that students are going where we need them to go, but also.
00:17:28 Camie
Not in a way that that ends the discussion, right. So we're being careful about that.
00:17:35 Camie
But our biggest thing is to kind of overcoming this discussion. Board paralysis is what I think of it as.
00:17:43 Camie
Where?
00:17:46 Camie
You know.
00:17:47 Camie
Discussion boards don't always work. We know this, that's that is the myth that is busted. They don't always work and so.
00:17:57 Camie
Coming up with ways that they can work because they are important, it is important to engage with your colleagues and your instructor with.
00:18:06 Camie
The topic and the skills that you are learning in that class, that's how you grow. But we need to start by giving students the facts that they need and skills they need to do that we need to model what they should be doing, monitor their progress and guide them through it.
00:18:24 Camie
That's it. Those are the keys. That's it.
00:18:31 Camie
Thanks everyone for joining us here on the Pedagogy toolkit. Don't forget to subscribe.