NLC Community Conversation with Dr. Peter Felten on Engaging Students as Partners in Professional Learning

NLC Community Conversation with Dr. Peter Felten on Engaging Students as Partners in Professional Learning: Video automatically transcribed by Sonix

NLC Community Conversation with Dr. Peter Felten on Engaging Students as Partners in Professional Learning: this mp4 video file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Laura Gambino:
Thanks for joining us. I mean, my gosh, it's the end of the semester, it's a Tuesday at noon and you're all taken to do this. I don't know what the weather's like where you are, but it's beautiful here, Peter. So it's beautiful in North Carolina and you're still here. So thank you all for taking the time to join us for this fourth and final community conversation with some of our favorite national experts, as we often refer to them. Now, for those of you who don't know me, I am Laura Gambino, and I've been working with Bret and Randy in putting the framework together and facilitating some of our different institutes. And I am delighted to welcome my dear colleague Peter Felton to this call. And hopefully many of you have the chance to watch the free conversation that Peter and I had a few months ago, which I mean, of course, you did, right. It was like all over Netflix. It was trending on YouTube, like, who wasn't talking about that conversation? But what we're going to do today is maybe continue thinking together and learning from each other about this notion of engaging students as partners. So what I'd like to do is start by just first telling you a little bit about Peter, if you aren't already aware and I could probably spend the whole hour just reading his bio, but I won't do that. I will tell you briefly that he's executive director of the Center for Engaged Learning and associate provost for Teaching and Learning and a professor of history at UCLA. And he's been engaged in educational research and professional development and professional learning in all sorts of ways for years. He's written Count Them. You need two hands to count them, six books, apparently, including his most recent one, which is Relationship Rich Education. Human Connections Drive Success in college. He's also written a book and It Happens, or co-authored a book called Engaging Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching a Guide for Faculty sort of relevant to this. So welcome, Peter, and thanks for joining us today.

Peter Felten:
Thanks, Laura. Hi, everybody. Thanks for having me.

Laura Gambino:
You're welcome. So a couple of ground rules here or one very important ground rule. You must submit your questions through the chat. OK, I have a long list and we can Peter and I can talk about this all day if you didn't figure that out from watching the video. And we will. But this will be a much richer and deeper and way more engaging conversation if we hear from all of you. Plus, if you've been on prior conversations, you've known that I've been the one managing the chat and surfacing the questions. And now it's time for my two colleagues, Brett and Randy, to practice that skill. So let's put their chat, reading, and question reading to the test with all sorts of questions. So before we jump in with Peter, I do want to just share my screen for a minute, if you'll indulge me. And there's the calendar invite. That's not very exciting. But here under one of these tabs, this is. Heater's BuYeo is the new learning compact page, we created a website or Web page on Georgetown's Red House site, which has both some information about the new Learning Compact Institute, talks about the two resources, the compact itself and 8D Teaching and learning tool kit. And then down here, we have a section on the community conversations. And for each of the four conversations, we have a little section with resources that the Adrianna or Peter have talked about or mentioned, both in their pre-recorded videos and during our conversation. So as you go through, you'll see we've got resources from Adriana and Mary Jean and of course, Jose.

Laura Gambino:
And these are all linked out to actual readings or places where you can find the readings or books. We even have Peter sections already up, somewhat populated. We're going to need a bunch here, Peter. No pressure. I don't know if you saw how many resources we had for some of the other presenters. No pressure here. We're going to need a few from you today. But I think it's it's a great resource page for folks if they're looking for evidence, examples, practices related to each of the different topics that came up during the community conversations. And I think either Christina or Brett has put the link to that page and see Christina nodding. So thank you for that. I'm into the chat so we can have that and please go and use it. And you're very welcome. And I want a little shout out to Christina and some of her colleagues at the Georgetown Red House for putting that together. They did an amazing job. And literally, you were sending a few updates at like 1:00 or 2:00 o'clock, and they got it up and ready for us for today. So including putting my middle initial in my name so we toast to them for doing that. OK, so now Peter's like, hey, this is not so hard. Here we go. You ready? All right, so let's start with the basics just in case. On the off chance that somebody didn't have a chance to watch our conversation that we reported, we'll start with a simple question. Why should we involve students in the professional learning process?

Peter Felten:
That's a simple question, it's also a big it's the whole thing, right? Well, why we should do it? I think there's a couple of reasons. One is it's it's good for us. Right. We spend a lot of time as faculty, administrators, trying to figure out what's happening in our classes, what students are learning, why they're behaving in certain ways, why they respond to our assignments in this way or that way ET. And so there's a very practical reason, which is we can learn a lot from asking students to help us understand their perspectives, their experiences, their...you know, their journey through our colleges, through our disciplines, through our courses. Because one of the things that is very real for me is I got my Ph.D. in history last millennium. I haven't been an undergraduate in a history course in a very long time. I haven't been an undergraduate in the history course during a pandemic when there were cell phones. You know, there's just lots of things that I don't understand what it feel it's like to be anonymous, what it's like to be a student now, et cetera, so students can help us understand those sorts of things.

Peter Felten:
And then the other reason I would say is that it's good for students. The research on this kind of partnership work where we bring students into educational development, professional learning experiences is the students learn a lot about themselves and learn a lot about the discipline that they're talking about, because they have to take a different stance than they usually have as a student. And in a lot of ways, they develop a sense of belonging, of mattering that is fairly durable so that they see themselves as a partner at this institution, a partner in their education, so they have more sense of agency, more sense power, more sense of control. And so in the book, Laura mentioned that Alison Cook, either Cathy Belleville and I wrote about engaging students as partners. One of the things we say in there is that these kinds of partnership practices tend to develop the kinds of students we want to teach, the kinds of students who feel like they're really invested in what's happening in the classroom. We feel like this agency and want to act. And so it's a really good way of helping us learn, helping them learn.

Laura Gambino:
Anything just to pick up on that idea of agency, when students have agency in their learning and the learning process, that also can lead to increased retention, which leads to increased student success. So you start to see that link. So thanks for for helping us think about the why of this. And you mentioned that book. You've been thinking about this and doing this for a number of years, that the book was published in twenty. So you quite a bit of experience around this, which is old.

Peter Felten:
It's OK to say.

Laura Gambino:
It's OK, we won't go we won't go there. Now, you made me lose my train of thought. You've been doing this for quite for eons, rain practically since the Stone Age of twenty fourteen. Which our students probably think is the stoney's, but that's not the point. The point is you've been doing this for a while, and yet for some of us, this is still a very new idea. Like so many folks still think about, like, oh, professional development. Like we do that over here. Right, so that we can go teach the students like it's our job to teach them and to be the experts in this kind of shifts that role that we have a little bit. Right. And shifts the role of the student. And do you want to talk about that and what you've seen when that happens?

Peter Felten:
Yeah, that's a really important point. And one of the things I want to start by saying is that different faculty and staff with different identities can engage this work somewhat differently with students that, you know, as a white man of a certain age, students expect on the professor, they assume I'm knowledgeable and I'm an expert. Right. So if I come into a class and on the first day say I want to create this class with you, what do you want to study and all this, and who knows what my students are thinking, but very few of them will say out loud or on student evaluations. He doesn't know what he's doing. Right, but that is not true for all of our colleagues, right? So I've worked with a number of colleagues, especially young, working, especially women of color, who students may not assume are experts, may not assume are are competent to do this. So I start with that not to say don't do this, but to say think about the ways that this is not some panacea that works perfectly for everyone and everyone at every career stage is something you need to build and work to find what's comfortable for you, what works with you and your students, and how can you do this well. So first there's that and that.

Peter Felten:
And then the second is, I think in general, anyone approaching this recognize you do get sort of on unstable ground because we're used to being experts, you know, and it's my classroom and I get to decide what's happening. And so shifting the power can be uncomfortable for us. It can be uncomfortable for students, too, because they're you know, they're used to doing this where we tell them what to do. And there's the old joke that, you know, in my class, I give you the knowledge if you give it back unharmed, I give you an A right. And students often are used to that. And so asking them to step forward and have some courage and since work on patrol in what's happening in the classroom and happening, their money can be challenging for them. So I often suggest people start relatively small, you know, start with an assignment. Start with something I like to do with my students is have them develop or modify rubric that I'm going to use to evaluate something they're writing. I'm a historian, so my students write essays. So a really simple thing I'll do an intro courses is give students a week or so before the first essay is to give students two or three. Examples of essays students have written in the past, unmarked, no names, no way to identify who it is, not on the topic that they're going to be writing there.

Peter Felten:
And I give them the rubric that I'm going to use it to evaluate the papers. And I get them in small groups and I ask them to read one or two of those essays and evaluate them in groups. It takes maybe 10 or 15 minutes to do that for them to do this. Then we talk and they're always much meaner than I. Right, which is partly it's heartening because then I can say I'm the nice guy, you gave this an F. I gave this a B minus. But two other things happen in this kind of exercise. One is. I don't just say what grade did you can I say, OK, so how did you how did you score this thing about having a thesis statement? And the students will say, I couldn't find the thesis statement or they'll say it was on the second page. And why are you putting the thesis statement? Last thing you need to put at the beginning is all the things I preached for decades. Right. And so them saying it a week before the exam or before the essay is really powerful. They're articulating the standards. Back and then the other thing that I'm able to do is say after this exercise, you were in this group and one of your classmates was really good at this kind of analysis.

Peter Felten:
Right. Really harsh, really clear, etc.. Ask them to read a draft of your paper before you turn it in. Right. I'm happy to redrafts, but they're meaner than I am. They know the rubric. So you can read your own. You can ask your peers. Right. And I use that as an example both because it works great for me. I stole it from someone. Some of us know a version of this. Dan Bernstein is a psychologist at the University of Kansas, but it works great for me. But it's also not particularly risky. I do this. It's the rubric we're going to use. It's you know, and so it's an easy way to start that conversation. And then maybe as we build into the semester say, you know, you're doing a bigger project or you're doing a multimedia project as your final essay instead of just a regular essay. What what are the criteria I should use, we should use to think about whether these are good or not, how is this different from a regular essay and getting them talking about that? And so we're starting to then to develop develop perhaps a rubric or some criteria together.

Laura Gambino:
That's great. I love that example because there's so many layers of learning taking place there, but for you and for the students, most importantly, and as I think about that, you know, I also like that it's a nice, easy entry point. It's something that you're already doing and just shift that. So now, as I think about that, it makes me wonder if I put on my professional development center for teaching and learning. That's great. How do I translate this? Like what can I do as a professional development leader to work with faculty and staff to help them design learning activities that will leverage this type of partnership?

Peter Felten:
Yeah, well, there's a lot there. First of all, there's lots of resources out there, so you don't have to invent this on your own. But I would start small and simple with activities that your and needs that your colleagues already have. So, for example, how to evaluate essay's know how to how to design assignments and things like this, and then asking student or asking your colleagues and giving them examples of ways they could bring students into that process. So I'm just one more quick simple example is on assignment design, which a lot of a lot of teaching centers will do some work around because it's an important step. And faculty, we all have to do what we all want of revising our assignments, et cetera, over and over is to adapt the transparency and learning and teaching framework which someone can put in the chat. It's a really helpful thing, but it's based on research with Permira. What's next for students in the American Southwest? It's been developed and replicated in other places, too, and the idea is that often. First, Latin students, when they struggle with assignments, they're struggling with at least one of three things about their son, they're struggling to not understand the purposes of the assignment. They're not understanding the tasks that they're being asked to do in an assignment. And they're not they don't understand the criteria. So how would I know not how would the professor grade this, but how would I know if I'm doing a good job of this? Right. So there's two ways of breaking tilt in. People call this the framework. Right. Transparency and learning and teaching to different ways of bringing tilt in that I think are really helpful in educational development. One, as you could do it in a workshop, just an assignment design workshop where you ask faculty to to read each other's assignment descriptions and articulate what they see as purpose tasking criteria across disciplines.

Peter Felten:
Right. So you're not having historians read other historians stuff because we. We know what historiography means first, undergraduates don't know what historiography means, but historians forget. Right. And then a second way of doing this is to encourage faculty to do a tilt activity, like I described with the rubric for their first assignment in class, you know, hand out the assignment. So this is going to be due next Monday. Everybody get in small groups and just think together about, OK, so why are we being asked to do this? What's the purpose? How is this going to contribute to our learning? What exactly are we being asked to do and how will we know as students were doing it well and then have them articulate that out loud and you don't argue with them. You listen carefully. And when they're confused, clarify, you explain. And that's so powerful in catching those two misconceptions, misunderstandings, etc.. One of the things I've seen with doing a lot of this work with faculty and students is that especially faculty working with first year students, some of us get the sense that students are lazy and some students might be. But often what happens is students misunderstand what we're asking them to do, and they work extremely hard in extremely unproductive ways. But then we see them not completing the assignment, etc., when we say they need to try. When they tried really hard. They just didn't know what they were trying to do, so I that's a long way of saying, Laura, finding things faculty need to work on already and then sort of giving them visions of what's possible if they involve students in these activities.

Laura Gambino:
That's great. Thank you for that. And while I wait for the questions to come in from the group, because I know the question, I just want to go back to you. You highlighted that assignment design charrette activity where faculty and staff can give each other feedback on assignments and activities and ways you can bring students into that process. I think that's really powerful. And I just want to point out to the Nilo a website which has a number of resources related to the assignment design process. It's a really great workshop activity. If you've never tried it as a professional development leader, I encourage you to go learn about it and give it a try. Used a lot at my former institution, and I've done it at a number of institutions across the country every time. It's a really powerful professional learning activity for faculty. And I can only imagine if you were to bring students to the table in that conversation, how much richer it would be. So I think that's that's a great way to start to think about how you can bring students into the professional learning process and try to bridge that gap of, like the faculty we learned over here and students we learned over here. And I'm wondering if you have any examples put you on the spot here, examples of institutions that are bringing students into the professional learning process in in different ways that you might be able to point people to or share with.

Peter Felten:
Yeah, I mean, the single best example of this and. And if the people involved in this project are now doing what Johnny Appleseed and taking it all over is a program at Bryn Mawr College outside Philadelphia. It's called Sult Students as Learners and Teachers. And it is a really it's it's. It is deep and it is not simple, and it is so powerful, right? But what happens in salt is students are employed in this, so they use student employment money to hire students to be consultants to. And its student is a consultant to a faculty member for an entire semester. At both Brima and Haverford College, which they're paired, they do a lot of things together, first year faculty virtually always get a consultant in their first year in one of their courses and then consultant, the student consultant, almost always is outside their discipline because the point is they're not supposed to be disciplinary experts. They're supposed to pay attention to teaching, learning. And that student will meet with the professor once a week to talk about goals and etc. and we'll observe class once a week and observe class and really purposeful way. So the faculty member is saying, you know, students don't seem to want to talk or they always ask simple questions or whatever.

Peter Felten:
And the student, the student partner will be in watching what's happening. If you talk to student partners, what they say is faculty will always routinely say students don't want to engage. They don't seem to engage. I ask all these questions and a student will observe the consultant will observe the class and they'll say, Professor Felten, the first time you asked if students had questions was twenty two minutes into the class. You know, you really want them to engage maybe anyway. So but part of what's so interesting about this program is because the students and consultants and the faculty number are prepared for the semester. They develop trust, they develop, they can go deeper into things. And it's really very powerful. And I know a number of community colleges and other institutions have adopted salt. There's a book that my center, a Center for Engaged Learning, published last year about the people who run salt. I can get that link if you can't find it about building these kinds of student consultant projects. So that is the high end version of lots of places doing this.

Laura Gambino:
And we had we had some version of that, like a twist on that. When that Guttmann we had here mentors who were embedded in our some of our first year seminar classes. And then once a week, the faculty member would meet just for like a half hour with your mentor. And it was an opportunity to get feedback. It was also an opportunity for the mentor to take a more active role in the in the class and help engage the students in different ways. It can be really powerful. Brett Read is unmuted because he wants to read some of the questions, but he also has built a powerful model at LaGuardia that maybe he wants to talk about

Peter Felten:
For a minute. What can I say, one quick learner before we go to Brett with that, which is as someone who works in professional development, one of the one of the untapped resources on a lot of our campuses is the learning, those peer mentors, those learning assistants, the student writing consultants have. And so one of the things I'd encourage you to do is maybe once the term near the end of the term, find a way to zoom or sit down with some of those learning peer learning consultants, the writing center people. Sometimes it's reference librarians, the ones who help instruction librarians and say, what are you hearing from students right now? What's what are more effective assignments where effective things that are going on? Where are their struggles? Not to say, tell me who the good professors and the bad professors are, but like, what are you seeing? Because those especially student consultants, students, tutors and everything have really interesting insights in and see across courses and across the curriculum, sometimes in ways that faculty or staff can't.

Laura Gambino:
And that's such a great way to think about. You mentioned tutors, right. And bringing in like academic support centers or or those areas to bring in non faculty into the conversation. And this idea that we're all educators and we're all kind of figuring this out and working to support students together. But their insights like how often do we have those conversations? Probably not enough at institutions. OK, we should probably let Brad speak now and unmuted for a while.

Bret Eynon:
I have a bunch of thoughts, but I want to surface questions from the chat right now and I'm going to privilege Dorey because she started off here. And so Dorey's question was... When you dedicate the time required to go through an exercise, as you described, where you have students participate in assignment design, some faculty may push back and say that takes too much time. I've got content to cover. How would you respond? Tory, is there anything you want to add to that before Peter responds, no politicians?

Peter Felten:
Great, great question. And, you know, one of the principals in the new learning, compact as being respectful of people's time now, would say that's true both the faculty and students in this case. Right. So I don't think you need to do the sorts of things we're talking about with assignments in for every assignment, for every paper things. So I'd think about when is the right time and when are students ready for this when the students most need this. So in my own example, I do take about half an hour of class time to do that essay reading essays, scoring thing early in the term. And there's a lot of history we could be talking about, but I don't do that for every exam. I do it for the first essay because I think once they get it down. They have those skills and so coming toward the second and the third essays I'm going to be assigning in the term, I'll remind them we did that activity. You know, there's ways you can do this yourself, but I wouldn't bring it in. So part of my response is, you're right, you should be really careful about how much time you're taking in your class with anything. Right. And then but when are the key moments? And then the second thing is it goes back to something. There's a quote I love from Pat Kross, who was one of the founders of people thinking seriously about teaching and learning in higher education. And she said, what? Teaching without learning is just talking.

Peter Felten:
Right, and so the fact that I cover something doesn't mean they've learned it. In fact, if you look at exam scores and things like this, there's plenty of evidence that what often we do doesn't lead them to learn things. And so maybe lean in on what they struggle the most with. You know, you've taught this for a while. You know how hard that content is. Where are the students really struggling just time after time? Some some folks in do decoding the disciplines, which is a wonderful thing you're not talking about talk all these bottlenecks for learning. What are the bottlenecks for learning and lean into that slow down, then do an assignment, Charette, or something like that around that thing, because it does take time. Nobody probably will partner with everything all the time, and even the Bryn Mawr program is talking about salt. Faculty don't have a consultant in every course they teach every semester. Faculty do it periodically and there's some evidence that it's sort of a threshold experience, in other words, once you've sat with a student or a student consultant over and over through a semester, you can't not ask yourself. What's really going on with my students right now? What am I not seeing? So I think one of the things we can try to do is design experiences for our colleagues that help them cross that threshold and start saying what's really how could I involve students?

Bret Eynon:
Well, that that's where I think the conversation, the chat is really picked up and I appreciate all those all the comments, Gloria's comment about ways to use this page talking about this. But Cameron started to shift us to thinking about doing this work in professional learning contexts. And Cameron wrote, Hey, Peter, could you share a little about ways of seeing this being feasible in community college settings? How can a two year institution build capacity to do this work outside of individual classrooms? Cameron, do you want to add anything to that?

Cameron Shirley:
I think that's it.

Bret Eynon:
Ok, great. Would you like to take that on?

Peter Felten:
Well, first, I wouldn't I'm tempted to turn the question around and ask people like Cameron who are doing this kind of work in community college settings what they're finding. My general response is, I think, to your colleges even more than some universities. Time is so precious for everybody. Their faculty don't have time. Students don't have time. And so how do we do this in effective ways and that that are aligned with the needs of the faculty and their programs. So so assignment design course design groups, which we talked a little bit about in the video conversation I had, I think those are really interesting opportunities. The other is, are there ways that faculty in a two year context, let's say, full time faculty who might be able to engage in some of this work when they're talking with their contingent faculty colleagues, when they're helping people prepare to teach this one dissection course that most of the faculty are not full time who are teaching it? Can they bring in some of the insights or some of the practices from their partnership work to say? And not to keep going back to the same thing, but that that is a scoring activity, here's an activity that you could do with your students. In fact, here are essays written by Dave Davidson, Community College students in the past in this course that you could use as examples to score. Right. And so how do we make it easier for our colleagues to sort of slip in and do small steps? This is the camera. What are you finding in your work or any of anyone else here? Have examples they want to share or ideas.

Gail Fernandez:
Can we talk?

Laura Gambino:
Absolutely. Yes, please

Laura Gambino:
Do, and then we're going to change. I was going to turn to your question next if please share. No, I wasn't.

Gail Fernandez:
I was in ESL teacher. And to your point, Peter, I was always given a set of questions to my students that they would work with the first we would model it. We would take one student paper, go through it together, then they would hear with each other just to, you know, always to get better at writing, to understand each other, to to be better. So there was always that really active involvement. And then we did it every paper. And then toward the end, you know, people wanted you wanted the whole class to read the paper. And then another thing that I find interesting is that when we did a Jim Ed assignment, agented assessment across the college, what you just said before was exactly right, was that some of the assignments were not well written. It was that we weren't we didn't get the answers we wanted because we didn't ask the right questions. But I find it's a little difficult sometimes to get faculty to want to share their assignments and say so. That's my question to you is how do we get faculty to actually submit an assignment and say, hey, could you help me rephrase it or help me get what I want

Peter Felten:
Out of that great question and. And so let me from my experience, one thing I found that's helped is to do an assignment charrette or an assignment design activity where first what's happening is faculty are being asked to, let's say you said tilt framework on a simple assignment. Right. And you can be really careful about what the sample assignments are. So it's not everybody. Bring one in, share one. Right. Because that might keep people away, but use some sample assignments and. I mean, from my own experience, the first time I did that here at Emon, I used an assignment that I knew wasn't perfect and it just got absolutely shredded by my colleagues. And I was like people. It shouldn't be that hard to figure out. This is a history assignment. I'm running the workshop. You know, I seem sort of familiar with it, like, could you at least be nice to me and not anyway so but use those. But the other is you can use assignments that are good. You know, they don't have to be terrible as examples. And so part of what you can do then is be putting examples of assignments in front of your colleagues that maybe they haven't seen before, because one of the problems with the waste is for so many of us, we hold our teaching stuff so close we don't know what other people's assignments look like. Right. And so if you can get a couple of brave colleagues to share examples to start that process. You're both showing everybody what decent assignments look like and then it's easier to say I could do that, you know, because not all assignments were as bad as Peters. And so maybe mine are better.

Gail Fernandez:
No, I agree. I'll just say add two little quick points to that is, one, I would only pick papers that were better than bad papers because I want to embarrass students and we always started off. What did we like about the paper, whether it was the handwriting or anything, just to get people to say positive things?

Peter Felten:
Yeah, well, in that essay activity that I talk about, Joomla students, what I typically do is I give students in a paper and a B plus paper and a B minus paper. Right, or something like that, I don't give a C F that's way too easy. Plus. They need to see what fairly high quality work looks like.

Laura Gambino:
So if I want to pick up, unless there's more in the chat thread that I'm missing, but I want to I want to talk about the charrette for just a minute more and kind of get over this idea of faculty resistance. And one of the things that I would always say to faculty, it's not so much that you're submitting an assignment. You're bringing something with you and you're taking it back. Right. So you can bring us an assignment that hasn't worked so well that you're looking for some help with or something that works really well and you want to tweak and you want to get feedback on. And we kind of leave it open and we even did it. Sometimes we're like, just bring an idea for an assignment. Right. And it's a little bit of what happens at the table, stays at the table conversation. And then, you know, it starts with with in the structure that Nilo proposes. It starts with the faculty talking about their assignment. Right. So so they're explaining they're kind of saying, here's where I could use some feedback. And I think when you do it that way, it's less threatening and that you're just kind of getting this feedback and taking advice, like you're submitting it into academic affairs and the Center for Teaching and Learning.

Laura Gambino:
And it's going to be stored somewhere. No, it's just bring it. You're going to have you're going to get some feedback. The other thing I'll say, I love the interdisciplinary work. I think it brings such different perspectives to the conversation. Right. I always say, oh, it's an English faculty and a story and sat down at usherette, really have the punch line. But it's just a really great activity. But it can also be done in a disciplinary context. I did that when I was at Texas with a version of it and we would have once a once a semester we would bring our agents in. And it was it was less about critiquing, but more about just sharing the work we're doing and what that starts to do in the disciplinary context. It's less about making the assignment understandable and more about understanding the assignment in the context of the program. So in so many ways, in professional learning that we can leverage this type of activity. And I saw something popping up about bringing students into conversation. So let's go back to the questions. Oh, so Brett's posing the question to folks saying that faculty will be comfortable with bringing students into the professional learning conversation like this. So we're putting a question out to the group. I see.

Peter Felten:
I see what you did there. I yes,

Gail Fernandez:
I think we should be. But I think we sometimes say we don't have the time or we don't always know. The fear is students are going to give the wrong answer or teach incorrectly. But that's often not true. Yeah, yeah. Obviously depends on the subject as well.

Bret Eynon:
But I think that Cameron has an interesting point here. You know. Ways that using peer mentors or work study students, other students that have a relationship. Can help ensure that help address faculty concerns. Because I do think that there are sometimes concerns on the part of faculty, will the students be responsible? Will I get torn to shreds by students? Will I be embarrassed in front of my peers?

Peter Felten:
Yeah, yeah. Those are fair concerns. And I see this work as long-term work to sort of how do we build steps of trust, you know, experience a little bit of the vulnerability and say that worked OK? Or I learned from that that I'm not going to do that activity again. I'm not going to run that workshop again. But finding ways to bring in to build some trust towards students and and also thinking to Gail's point about asking the right kinds of questions about students. I think sometimes as institutions we ask students questions not to be too crass that are sort of like, would you like fries with that? And that's not a question that actually. I mean, I don't want to ask my students that it's like that's not the job of the institution to say how much do you like this? Right. So asking students one of the things are teaching center does here is we do midcourse focus groups where some consultants will go in to a course at a faculty members invitation and to a focus group with students about what's helping them learn and what could be changed to do better. And one of the things I find fascinating about that is in my context if you ask students what's helping them learn in a class, especially the first year, second-year courses, one of the most common things they say is frequent quizzing. You know, lots of daily accountability if you ask them what they like about the course. They almost never say free until you get to the end of the course, right. And so it's a very different question. What's helping you learn and what do you like? And so helping your colleagues in your education, in your professional learning work, trying to get the right questions out there, learning center and questions, community-centered questions.

Bret Eynon:
And then maybe that's part of what professional learning. Context does is both models that gets those questions out that, you know, I think dories point about Bill addressing the question of vulnerability know, so that helping faculty feel less vulnerable, because that's part of what goes on in both the professional learning context and in the classroom. Yeah. Can I make my own?

Peter Felten:
Yeah. You know, in one of the interesting things, I think some of us maybe we don't want to learn too much from this, but I see both in the pandemic and in a lot of the workaround antiracist pedagogy is for at least are my white colleagues making ourselves a little more vulnerable in the classroom actually is a good way to build trust in the community. So one of the things I learned in an antiracist pedagogy workshop last summer that I've done since then that's been really powerful is instead of doing some sort of introduction, you know, glib or whatever that I normally would do, I show an old family picture. And it's one of my favorite pictures. It's the only picture I have. My father before he was an adult and he's three with his family, and he was raised very poor farmers in Wisconsin. And you can see it's a farm. You can see they have no resources. And I'm named for my grandfather. And so I can say so, you know, you want to know a little bit about me. So, yes, I have a PhD in history and everything, but that's my dad, the cute little one. He's the only one in the whole picture who graduated from high school. Right, and it's an interesting way to introduce yourself. And one of the things I found is when I do that with my students, I never ask them to send pictures, but many of them do. Or they tell me stories about themselves, right? And so there's way, you know, some of this like can we be vulnerable? Maybe I'm just it's the end of a semester, some, like worn out, more blunt than I should be, lots of our colleagues are vulnerable all the time. You know, some of us who are white and men, maybe we need to create some space to be a little more vulnerable and and and maybe students won't punish us for it. Maybe no worse for in this case, a little more human.

Gail Fernandez:
I always try to humanize my class from the very beginning, we always like introduce ourselves. And just like I think so you create that atmosphere where they feel safe and, you know, not every class works perfectly, but, you know, they want it. I had older students often, not always. And they want to talk and they want to actually share and learn their respect for the ESL. Students are very respectful that the one thing that they don't like to do is share in the teaching, like you said, because they consider you the expert. And to get them to not think of you as the expert is hard.

Peter Felten:
Yeah, well, in this is where the disciplinary difference might also come down because stories point. Absolutely. You know, some people have really structured curricula. And if students don't learn this in this pre-nursing course, they're not going to be ready. And that, you know, so so really thinking about this and then using this these kind of activities judiciously in ways that are going to build student agency, build student trust and students sort of engagement with the work.

Laura Gambino:
So as we as we think about bringing maybe bringing students more into the actual professional learning process, what are your thoughts about, like, conversations? Because I'm thinking, you know, this idea of like faculty, you're going to be resistant to having students at the table, like, have you done or do you know places where they actually in the professional development leaders kind of work with the students beforehand to help them understand their role in the process and their voice and, you know, like what the situation is going to be. I don't know if you want to speak to that.

Peter Felten:
Yeah, I think I think that's really important, Laura. And and there's a really maybe obvious but really important distinction. So even in the salt program that I was talking about with the student consultants, the consultant student consultants also are part of a seminar that meets once a week where they meet with each other, the other consultants and a facilitator. And they talk about the process. Right, because students will need support in being a consultant for things like this. Students need to be prepared if they're going to come in and talk to a group of faculty about assignments and all this. They don't necessarily trust all of us either. And so they might tell us what they think they're supposed to say. So helping, you know, helping them see this is what we're hoping out of this not this is what I want you to say. But I want you to be real with faculty and talk about, you know, both what excites you in the classroom and what's difficult or or whatever it happens to be. And and also setting up some ground rules often. So, for example, don't use don't use anything that's identifiable unless you're saying something really positive, nothing identifiable. So you can talk about bad assignments and things like this. But don't mention that it was my class. Right. And so that's one side of it. The other side is not to help them prepare so much that really what we're doing is like now what you need to say to the faculty is this right so that they feel like it's scripted or anybody else feels like it's scripted, but just students often.

Peter Felten:
I haven't been asked anything about themselves as learners except do they like stuff, and so they'll often have to spend some time. Thinking that through and finding ways to talk about it, and so one of the things I think that can be really powerful I love in the new learning compact framework is how do you build a culture of this? Because I and not just for faculty and staff, but a culture where when students come in and in those first courses they're taking, they're doing some of these activities. And so they get better at it. And then in their second term, their third term, they're actually having some more agency, having some more investment. That's really powerful. Let me give you the one warning about it, which is students who feel like they have agency in the classroom feel like they have a voice. We've got some research that says. Students who don't feel that much agency, if they have a class they don't like, they just check out, right. Students who have agency, they're mad. They're like, this should be different. You know, this could be better. Right. And so you almost have to be willing to to take some of that. The risk that comes with agent student agency, but that's one honestly, that's what I'm one student saying, but it doesn't always feel good for them or for us when they're right.

Laura Gambino:
So let's let's think about this. This could of culture change for a minute, Ray, because we've got lots of examples of what we can do at the coarse level and in our classes. And I know folks are sharing some great ideas in the chat and watching the chat kind of go by. It's fabulous. How can know that faculty development, professional development leaders here, how can they play a role in this culture shift? How do we move from beyond kind of this course by course instance of it to this more broader culture? What advice do you have? I told you the first question was,

Peter Felten:
I know, I think one is as much as you can model. And modeling substantive partnership with students. Because I think in a lot of institutions, we'll have one student show up or you have a student worker and so you in in your center and so you have them come to the workshops and like, thanks, Peter, for being the awesome student worker when that's not actually positioning that student as having any expertise or anything to contribute, they help us get coffee. Right. So that's that's not it. But having students substantively involved, there's a really wonderful example from University College London where the teaching center there, which is called something else, but it doesn't matter, was doing a lot of work on curriculum design. That's something that centers in the U.K. do more than they do often in the US. But, you know, curriculum design, curriculum provision in all this. And one of the things that that center did in the educational development professionals there did is they asked over and over, where are the students in this work? It was just one of them and was one of the questions sort of on there. So you're working on this. What's the process? How are students engaged? And they said at first, for the first few years, the answer was like, what are you talking about? How would we do this? But the really fascinating thing, they studied this over five years by year four and five departments and programs that were going through like round two or three of revision. We're asking themselves where students. So how do you build those kinds of questions and are those kinds of models and examples in that other departments can pick up on without forcing it? Because I think sometimes if we force partnership, you know, every department has to have partners in whatever. That often doesn't work. People don't understand it. They don't value it. They do it poorly. And then it becomes that thing we shouldn't do, because remember, we did it two years ago and it was off.

Laura Gambino:
And curiously, we have a couple of minutes left, so I just want to touch on one thing. You know, you know well the connection between asset and professional development, as does Artemis, apparently. What role can students play in that assessment and professional learning process?

Peter Felten:
Yeah. Artemus has some things to say about it. Well, you know, you get if you ever talk to dogs about assessment, to say they've got a lot really on their minds when it comes to that. So... There's a couple of things that come to mind to me about this question of assessment and student roles. One is. I found students consulting with us about assessment to be really helpful, partly because they see things we don't see. Including how awful some of our assessments are. You know what, the surveys were asking students what we think they mean and how students interpret them, they're not always the same or the way students do or do not take certain activities seriously. And then we use them as a sort of high-stakes assessment for a program. So one is asking students, you know, this is our goal in this program. We're trying to help students develop this capacity, this knowledge, the skills. Where would we do that, like how would we see that in your work, what would it look like from your perspective if we were seeing this? So getting a couple of students and helping them, helping them understand your tasks, and then having them tell you where do you think this would come? All right. So that's one way.

Peter Felten:
A second is to perhaps if you have the resources to do this, I have a few students, maybe employees again, who you can train a bit to both read assessment results with you and maybe do some focus. Have the students be skilled enough to do some focus groups or interviews with their peers around certain questions? I used an example. I didn't use this example in the in the video from Iran where we found that first gen students were not participating in certain programs and we didn't quite know why. So the people in charge of this program sent a survey to first gen students saying, why don't you do this thing? And the students didn't respond because who responds to a survey that says, why don't you anyways? So we hired some first students, trained them up a little bit, and they interviewed other first students about their attitudes, experiences, thoughts about certain things. And we got really rich data from those interviews because it was peer to peer conversations. So that's different than we would get if we had surveyed a whole bunch of students. So thinking about sort of targeted ways where students can bring instant perspectives, student identities can bring some real value into the assessment process that you don't have right now.

Laura Gambino:
That's a great thank you for that. You know, it occurs to me like students, obviously, and they're just to kind of summarize as we get to the end of time here, students can really enhance the professional learning process. But this professional learning process also enhances student learning. And so you think about what that experience of interviewing, for example, gave to that first generation student, you know, and what they took from that and what how they were able to use it moving forward was probably just as powerful as the data that you got in learning about why students weren't engaging with things. So it's kind of this reciprocal learning that happens when we engage students as as partners. So we are we we're just about out of time. And I don't know, we're going to ask Brett or Randy, I don't see that we've missed anything in the in the chat if we have someone.

Bret Eynon:
But I think and made a really strong point here about this question of vulnerability that's been running through the chatter and the fear that people have and that the value of giving instructors tools to deal with potential scenarios that might come up. Yeah, and we don't have a lot of time for that. I will point people towards the tool kit has a number of methods. Peter, if there's anything that you can say quickly about

Peter Felten:
That, just really quickly and great question. The key, I think, is you can do partnerships on design activities that don't you don't have to worry about that real time feedback then. Right. So we're designing this assignment that I'm going to use next term. We're doing a course design activity for a course I'm going to teach next term. So if I feel vulnerable, if I feel uncomfortable with what my student partners are saying, I don't have to do it. I mean, I can I have to navigate that, but I don't have to teach that way. That's very different than being standing in front of a class and asking for feedback or something and getting that feedback and having to sort it out. So we often use design activities as a way into this work because it's much it's more in faculty control.

Laura Gambino:
Yes, and I agree with and that is a great suggestion. I like that idea kind of lowers the stakes and builds a little distance for faculty who may be less safe. So I see the clock is just two to four p.m., which means we are out of time. But I want to thank you, Peter, for this really thought provoking discussion and helping us think in new ways about ways we can build partnerships with our students, both in the classroom and in the professional learning settings. I think really important because as you know, as we talked about at the beginning, like building that agency with students in these different ways will help improve retention and student success. And that's really what all of us are all about all the time. So thank you again. I just want to do one more quick plug and shout out for the where is it? The page on the Red House site, which will have all the resources from all four community conversations. We will be adding the ones that came up in this conversation to the page shortly. So please do check that out. Book market visited often we encourage you. And if you have other resources that you think, you know, we'd love to hear what they are. And thank you all again for taking part both today. And I see somebody just posted the links to the website again. Thanks for joining today's conversation. And in other conversations, this was the fourth and final community conversation, and it was a great way to end talking about students with no better way to end this conversation. So we wish you all a very good and your semester and stay well and stay healthy and take good care.

Peter Felten:
Thank you all.

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