October 15, 2025 • 36 mins
Students have varied levels of preparation for traditional types of classes and assessments used in colleges. In this episode, David Gooblar joins us to discuss a variety of instructional strategies that we can adopt to help all students succeed.
David is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa, a regular contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the creator of Pedagogy Unbound, and the author of The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching. His most recent book, One Classroom at a Time: How Better Teaching Can Make College More Equitable, was released in August 2025 by Harvard University Press.
A transcript of this episode and show notes may be found at http://teaforteaching.com.
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(00:00):
Students have varied levels of preparation for traditional types of classes and assessments
used in colleges. In this episode, we explore a variety of instructional strategies that we
can adopt to help all students succeed. Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching,
(00:23):
an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist...
...and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer......and features guests doing important research
and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
(00:51):
Our guest today is David Gooblar. He is an Associate Professor of English at the University
of Iowa, a regular contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the creator of Pedagogy Unbound,
and the author of The Missing Course (01:02):
Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching. His
most recent book, One Classroom at a Time (01:07):
How Better Teaching Can Make College More Equitable,
was released in August 2025 by Harvard University Press. Welcome back, David.
Thank you so much. I'm very excited to talk with you today.
We're very happy to be able to talk with you again. Our teas today are:... David,
are you drinking any tea?I am. I'm drinking an I love lemon.
(01:30):
I have a Jasmine green today, And I have a tea in my pocket, but because my
meeting ran late, I am drinking diet Pepsi. Oh, John.
I think it's only the second time in the podcast I haven't been drinking tea, so
I won't take it personally. I have it here. In fact, it was a
tea that was given to us by one of our listeners in France, but I'll save that for next time.
(01:56):
So we invited you here today to discuss one classroom at a time. Can
you tell us the origin story of the book?Sure, back in probably 2019 I was working for
the Center for Advancement of Teaching at Temple University. And as part of that job, I was doing a
lot of reading of pedagogy research, and I was, of course, coming across a lot of research on
(02:17):
ways to close achievement gaps within the college classroom. There was a lot of work being done on
how to help marginalized students succeed. And it struck me as I was reading all this that I wasn't
seeing this sort of knowledge base being applied in the work of DEI offices across the country. It
(02:37):
was a kind of high time for DEI offices. There was a lot of action, particularly starting in
2020. Universities, responding to Black Lives Matter and responding to a lot of activism,
looking to reform universities, and so DEI offices were doing a lot to try to change the cultures
within their institutions. What I wasn't seeing was DEI offices doing really anything to change
(03:02):
how professors teach. And that sort of contrast, looking at this sort of growing base of knowledge
that the way that we teach can actually change student outcomes versus the part of
our universities sort of devoted to remedying the inequities in student outcomes, sort of ignoring
that. That was the kind of conundrum that started my research and really got me thinking about how
(03:27):
can I close this gap, how can I communicate with the people who need to hear what they can do to
help their marginalized students succeed?Colleges have done a lot to recruit a more
diverse student base, and we know that education can be a really effective way of escaping from
poverty, but has that been as successful for the marginalized students that you've mentioned as it
(03:48):
had been for earlier cohorts of students?Absolutely not, no. So we still have really
striking gaps, certainly the sort of more famous gaps that we know are between white
students and black and brown students, where the gaps in graduation rate are essentially
stagnant for the past 30 years, but similarly stubborn gaps exist between well off students
(04:11):
and economically insecure students. If you look at students from the top family income quartile,
69% of them graduate within six years. That number for the lowest quartile is 26%. First-gen students
are twice as likely to drop out within the first three years as their continuing generation peers.
These are things that we know about, but there's also a lot of research that suggests, not only are
(04:34):
we not closing these gaps, we may be making them worse, which is kind of shocking to think about,
but there are studies that look at the performance of marginalized students and control for
pre-college characteristics like high school quality or pre-college academic performance,
and find that they say low-income students still perform worse than you would expect and perform
(04:55):
worse than their more well off peers. So I still think there's lots that we can do, and it's not
for lack of trying, but it is, I think, lack of trying to influence what happens in classrooms.
So you talk a little bit about marginalized students entering into college, and we also
know that a lot of these students have a lot of social inequities that impact them
(05:17):
before they arrive at our institutions. The focus of your book, though, is, of course,
on what happens in the classroom. Can you talk a little bit about why you decided to focus on in
the classroom instead of what happens before?Yeah, so part of that is that point that I just
made, that I do think that there are things that a lot of colleges are doing that are actually making
inequities worse, but the main reason is that in my work, I write to faculty members, I write to
(05:43):
professors, and so my focus is really trying to be practical. What can we do? It would not make
sense for me to advise professors to put their focus on housing policy or put their focus on
ending racism. We know that most of the inequality that we confront in our classrooms comes from far
afield of our classrooms, that our students are coming to us from really disparate backgrounds.
(06:07):
They have all sorts of things going on in their lives, and most of the causes of the inequality
that we see we can't do anything about. And so that's really dispiriting. So I wanted to sort of
look at, well, what can we do? What are the things that we can change in how we teach that might
actually change the trajectory of our students? I do think that most professors are hoping to
(06:33):
transform their students' lives, even if that's a sort of modest transformation, of transforming the
way they see their subject, or something more capacious, of transforming the course of their
lives. I do think that we're hoping to change our students for the better, and so thinking of, well,
we can't get to the root of these problems, but there are things that we can do. I think
that really helped me sort of focus on what to write about and what to promote in the book.
(06:59):
I know it can be really frustrating to faculty to always talk at a higher level of like,
what are all the underlying causes, but having something actionable is really helpful.
Exactly.And when we have students in our classroom,
we have to deal with the students we have. We can't go back and undo their past experiences with
education and inequality and so forth. So we don't want to ignore the students that we're currently
(07:23):
dealing with. And in the first chapter of your book, you call it imaginary students and imaginary
classrooms. What are some of the ways in which faculty preconceptions differ from the reality
they experience in classrooms, and what causes this disconnect between faculty expectations and
the actual reality they're working withThe broad strokes of the imaginary students
(07:48):
problem, as I think of it, is that most of us imagine our students to be more privileged than
they are. That's the sort of broad thing. There's lots of specifics into that, but generally,
our students are worse off economically, aren't as white as we think they are, or will be before we
meet them, have all sorts of aspects of their identity that make their path through life
(08:09):
trickier than what we imagine they'll be. There's lots of reasons for this. One of the sort of more,
I think, persuasive things that I came across in trying to figure out why we have this kind
of disconnect is the idea that within the sort of hierarchy of universities and what we think
of as university quality, but maybe we should better think of it as university prestige.
(08:30):
Almost every professor in this country teaches at an institution lower on the
totem pole than where they were trained. It's the nature of our industry that you get a PhD,
and then you end up getting a job, usually somewhere with less prestige than your graduate
institution. Only a small proportion of American colleges and universities offer doctorates. This
is one part of it. What this means is that to the extent that professors are trained how
(08:55):
to teach, they're trained on a more privileged sub-population of college students than the ones
they actually teach. So that's one big issue. Another big issue is that for the most part,
we don't train professors to teach. This was, of course, the subject of my last book, The Missing
Course. And so what this means, practically, is that I teach very much like my professors taught,
because I learned by watching them, and they, of course, teach by the way their professors taught,
(09:18):
but my professors taught a student body that was far more privileged than our student body.
Now I think it's easy to forget the sort of diversification of the American higher education
system is actually a really recent phenomenon, as late as 1990, which…I don't know about you,
but I remember 1990… 8 out of 10 American college students were white. Right now, that's 55% and
(09:41):
dropping. And so the sort of our sense of what a college student is and what a college student can
do is sort of based on an earlier version of who college students were. And so this comes out in
all sorts of ways. One of the sort of more visible ways that we see this disconnect is in the amount
of time we expect students to be able to put to our classes. And I can sort of feel every faculty
(10:03):
member that's listening to this nod about this. Because everyone is concerned about students not
reading as much, not devoting as much time to their studies as possible. My students work 20,
30, sometimes 40 hours a week on top of being full-time students. An astonishing number of
my students take seven courses a semester. Many of them have family members they take care of,
many of them actually volunteer. They're very, very busy. And when we have surveys of how
(10:29):
students spend their time, typically, although we expect them to spend two hours outside of class
for every one credit hour in class, the surveys suggest that it's about half that that students
spend, on average, about one hour outside of class doing schoolwork for every credit hour
they take. Now I'm not suggesting that we lower our standards or even that we assign less work,
(10:52):
but we're not going to help our students succeed if we don't acknowledge the reality that they
don't look like what we expect them to. So that's one of the more visible ways that our students
are kind of having more difficult lives, to put it bluntly, than what we may expect them to have.
Can you talk a little bit about or maybe provide an example of a way that a faculty
(11:12):
member can support students that have all these tugs on their time and attention?
Yeah, well, a couple of things. The first thing that I always try to do is acknowledge it. I
do think that we can actually achieve a lot by letting students know that we understand that we
are one important thing among many in their lives, and if we don't treat them like our thing is the
(11:37):
most important thing, and they have nothing else weighing on their time, we can sort of
get to a better level of communication with them, where I can make the case to them that doing work
for my class is going to be valuable to them. So that's the sort of the case, or the psychological
approach you can take. The other thing that I think is, like the easiest thing to do,
(11:58):
it's not that easy, is really focus on taking advantage of class time. Like, I don't know what
many of my students do outside of the classroom. That is their lives. That is their time. And they
may have quite different and unequal circumstances affecting the amount of time and attention they
can give to the work that I want them to do. I do know that they have to come to class,
(12:21):
and so this isn't me saying get rid of homework, but I'm much more aware of using class time to
have students do the work that I want them to do. I no longer think it's a responsible thing to just
lecture at students and give them information. I want to take advantage of them being together,
of being in a social environment where they can do work with my guidance and with the feedback
(12:43):
of myself and their peers. So that's one thing that I really think about when thinking about the
inequalities of time and attention that we see.Marginalized students often experience some degree
of imposter syndrome or stereotype threat. What are some strategies we can do to break
that down to create a better sense of belonging for all of our students?
(13:03):
Sure, this is one of the most well established psychological barriers that anyone that faces in
academic domains, stereotype threat, the sort of concern that you may be the target of a negative
stereotype, consumes part of the brain and takes away cognitive resources from the important
intellectual work we hope students will do. So, one of the sort of most effective broad strategies
(13:27):
we can put into place to combat stereotype threat is inviting students to share a broader part of
their lives in our classes. One of the things that we know is that students who suffer from
or who are targets of stereotypes around academic performances, those stereotypes can be mitigated
if students feel that they're not just their academic selves in the class. If students are
(13:51):
reminded that they are not just students, but sisters and brothers and children of parents,
that they are friends, that they are soccer players, that they are interested in crocheting,
whatever it is, they'll have a broader base of self integrity, of self confidence to fend off
stereotypes. It's not that they're going to stop understanding that they might be stereotyped.
(14:13):
It's going to have less power because they're not just going to see themselves as students
within their classes. And a lot of how students see themselves within our classes is based on how
they think we see them. So if they believe that we as professors see them as more than
just their academic performance, they'll be more likely to have that broad base to work from. So
part of that is conveying an understanding that students have a lot going on in their lives,
(14:38):
but also there's lots of little things you can do to invite students to share parts of their lives
in class. I do this thing that I know a lot of professors do, that I call question roll,
where to start the class. I always ask students a question, and everyone has to answer it. And for
me, this question almost always has nothing to do with what we're going to talk about in class,
and it is a no stakes, no wrong answers. Type of question I'll ask, what's the first thing you
(15:01):
wanted to be when you grew up as a kid? What's the best thing to eat for lunch in Iowa City? What's
the best fruit? There's a lot of food related ones, but it's a way to ease students into class,
get them talking before there's any stakes, but also, in a kind of subtle way, it allows them
to share who they are, without them even sort of realizing that that's what they're doing.
(15:24):
And what I'll find is that I start every class with this, and that if I ever forget to do it,
my students are completely up in arms and like they cannot imagine starting class without doing
question roll if I didn't ask my question. So they really get into it, even though at the beginning
of the semester, they'll think it's silly and they'll resist answering questions. It kind of
lays down that precedent that in this class, yes, we're going to do hard work. Yes, we're going to
(15:48):
try to understand difficult concepts, but we're all people coming from various places and that
we're going to have a more successful time if we don't deny those parts of ourselves. So I really
sort of believe in this sort of broad strategy of trying to invite students in, invite more parts
of students. That, to me, is the kind of subtle thing, or a broad thing that can show itself in
(16:09):
lots of different ways throughout a semester, but I do think that if we can think about part of our
job as inviting students to share parts of their selves that may not be obvious to them as relevant
to their academic selves, that we can really help to mitigate stereotype threat for them.
One of the things that we've talked about on many episodes of Tea for Teaching is growth mindset,
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and that's something that I know you cover in your book as well. Can you discuss some strategies that
help nurture a growth mindset in our students?Sure, one of the more interesting things I learned
in doing the work for this book, I of course, had read a lot about growth mindset, and I'm a parent,
so I understand all the research into the encouragement of a growth mindset in individuals,
(16:55):
but one of the things that I saw is that a lot of the big studies that look at the effects
of promoting a growth mindset in the students, the results aren't as good when the environment
students are in work against the growth mindset. So when their peers have a fixed mindset,
and/or when there's a school culture that has a fixed mindset, any promotion of a growth mindset
(17:16):
within an individual is kind of blunted, which makes a lot of sense to me. And so what I hope
to do in the chapter I have on growth mindset is move away from the idea of growth mindset as
sort of teaching students that their brain is a muscle. I think there's a kind of limitation to
sort of telling students to have a growth mindset, and we should focus more on the signals we send to
(17:37):
students about the environment of our classrooms. That much more important is looking closely at the
way that we do things in our courses and asking ourselves, “Is this focused on student growth,
or is this focused on sorting out the better students from the worst students?” So I think
about how we talk to students in our syllabi, how we literally talk to students in classes. Are we
(17:58):
focused on persuading them that we're working for them, that the course is designed to help
them grow, rather than persuading them the course is going to root out the people who don't have it,
or look to your left, look to your right, one of you won't be here, or even sort of the purposes
of assessment. If we can explain to students that assessment is really important for teachers
(18:19):
to understand how students are doing so that we can help them better. Students generally assume,
and a lot of professors talk about it like this, that assessment is to sort out whether
they know it or not, to give them a grade. And of course, that's part of what we do, but to me,
that takes a back seat to the formative aspect of assessment. The main purpose of assessment,
for me, is to see how students are doing, because I want to help them get better. So
(18:43):
those kind of more sort of environmental aspects of a class, I think, make a bigger difference in
promoting growth mindset than talking about it directly and promoting it to students a sort
of individual version of that, one of the sort of strategies that I think goes along with this idea
of a growth mindset culture, is something called wise feedback. Came from research by Jeffrey Cohen
(19:05):
and his colleagues that looks at particularly how we give feedback to students on their work.
They looked at student writing, but I think it can be for any kind of student work. And essentially,
wise feedback has three aspects, where you start by invoking high standards. You sort of say,
I'm giving you this feedback because I have very high standards for you, either because of this
class is really difficult and hard and I'm trying to bring you to a high level, or because I believe
(19:28):
that you're capable of meeting these things, following that invocation of high standards
always has to be encouragement. So I'm giving this feedback because I have very high standards,
and I know that you can get there, that you can work on it, and then you sort of fill out that
encouragement, or you prove that encouragement by giving specific guidance as to what students
can do. So most of us, I worry, have been sort of taught by experience and trained to give feedback
(19:53):
to justify our grade. I think of particularly the early career instructors I work with, who
are very concerned with, for good reason, being challenged about grades, and so their feedback
they give to students on paper, essentially, is, here's why I'm giving you the B minus. Instead,
if we think about this kind of growth mindset approach to feedback, here's where I think you
can get, here's why I believe you can do it, here's how you can get there. I think that's
(20:18):
a much more effective way to get feedback, where you're actually teaching through your feedback.
You just noted that one of the issues is that it's not just something you can do in your class with
students or encourage them to have a growth mindset if that's not what they're observing,
and one of the studies you cite is a study done by Elizabeth Canning and colleagues,
who looked at the impact of faculty mindset on student learning outcomes.
(20:41):
Could you talk a little bit about that study?An amazing study they looked at science professors
at a big midwest University, and I think they surveyed all these faculty members about their
mindsets, not their students mindsets, but the faculty members mindsets. And they found that
the faculty members with a fixed mindset had much larger achievement gaps in their classes
(21:04):
than the faculty mindsets with a growth mindset. This was independent of faculty
identity, by the way. So this was even the case for faculty with marginalized
identities themselves. So it seems that, at least as I interpret it, that our students are taking
cues from us a lot of the time about what's expected of them and what the course is about.
And so if we have a growth mindset, if we come at the world with a sort of theory of mind that
(21:30):
people can improve, that people can get better with practice. Our students will notice that,
and they'll take what we tell them in a constructive way, in a way that they'll
actually work at something. If they suspect from the way we talk, from the way we carry ourselves,
from the way we structure our courses, that we actually have a fixed mindset,
that we believe that generally talent is doled out somewhere, and either you have it or you don't,
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they'll get the message that when they struggle early on in a semester, that there's essentially
not much they can do. And so I do think it really matters how we talk about our subjects, classes,
how we talk about our disciplines, how we talk about what student work is for. There's been
really interesting research done on the concept of brilliance, and certain disciplines value
(22:18):
brilliance in their fields. Philosophy is one that comes to mind a lot, that if you survey faculty
members about what it takes to succeed in this field, philosophy and some other fields, for sure,
rank being brilliant really high. You need to really be smart to do well in this class. Well,
research has shown that those disciplines that value brilliance most highly have the
(22:40):
biggest gaps between privileged students and marginalized students in their fields;
they have the fewest black PhDs, for example, the fewest women PhDs. And so how we think about
what it takes to succeed in our field really matters to students, and whether we tell them
it explicitly or not, it comes across to them.So we've talked about a few different challenges
(23:01):
related to inequity that our students face, and your book explores many others. Can you talk about
a few more examples of strategies that can be used to promote more equity and student success?
One of the sort of best supported strategies for what certainly used to be called inclusive
teaching, I don't know if people still use that phrase, is structure. There were a couple of
(23:23):
really huge, really sort of ironclad surveys about the inclusion of structure into large
lecture classes, and how that helped to narrow gaps that were really, really stubborn, and
nobody seems to know what structure is, so I'll explain it a little bit. Structure in the context
of educational research is really just having students do stuff. It's the opposite of a lecture,
(23:43):
where all students have to do is sit and listen to a lecture. Structure is where you make students
answer questions before the lecture, where you put them in groups and talk about the concept,
where you do a survey in class and have students respond to it, where you have students do writing
in class. It's structuring class time so that students have things to do for their learning.
(24:05):
And so we know that that is really effective, particularly for marginalized students. One of
the reasons why this helps is because privileged students need less from us than marginalized
students. One thing that privileged students have that marginalized students don't have is a
positive experience with school. They like school much more than marginalized students do. They've
(24:25):
had a good experience. They know how to be good students… I'm speaking very broadly, of course…
but on the whole, and they have more resources to help them with that. And so a class period where
all students have to do is sit and take notes and do the work themselves, is going to favor those
students who are good at being students, and it's going to disadvantage those students who have had
a less positive experience with school, who have fewer resources to help them out, with less time
(24:49):
to do the work. So the more that we can structure class time is what I was talking about, taking
advantage of class time, the more that we can help those students. I've also sort of been convinced
that the best kind of structure is transparent and predictable. Transparency really helps students
for lots of reasons. I think part of it is that growth mindset piece, that if we explain to
(25:10):
students why we're doing what we're doing, we will most likely persuade them that what we're doing
is to help them learn, which we can't take for granted that they believe. And the predictability
piece, I think, is really interesting. There's been really, I think, provocative
and powerful research done on the value of taking high-stakes exams, and instead of giving, say,
(25:34):
two or three exams over the course of semester, dividing up the points you'd give to that and
giving students weekly exams, weekly quizzes, and where you ask about the same material,
you just do it more often. This strategy seems to really help economically insecure students,
and there's some sort of disagreement as to why this helps, but one of the reasons why I think it
helps is that economically insecure students are used to and good at focusing on pressing concerns.
(26:01):
We know a lot about how economically insecure students struggle with long-term planning. What
they're good at is short-term planning. Living in near poverty means that you have to focus on
pressing needs, because it's a life of instability and scarcity. And so if the task is study for this
quiz on Thursday rather than study for an exam next month, we're going to help those students who
(26:28):
have fewer resources to do that kind of long-term planning, the long term thinking that is involved
in preparing for a midterm or an exam in a month or two. So thinking of our structure as, yes,
having students do stuff, but wherever possible, make it transparent, so that students always
know why we're asking them to do the work we're asking them to do, and if possible, predictable,
(26:50):
so students can sort of count on our classes as being a reliable source of support and help in
a world that is less than reliable for them.So one of the things your book addresses that's
often ignored in many books about effective teaching is a focus on student disability.
Can you talk a little bit about this chapter and some recommendations on what institutions and what
(27:14):
faculty can do to help create a more supportive environment for students with disabilities?
It's one of my favorite parts of the book, partly because I learned a lot, and so we know that
disabled students struggle in our institutions, that they graduate at a much lower rate than their
able bodied peers, and that the numbers we do have about their success are probably under selling
(27:35):
the problem, because something close to a half to 1/3 of students with disabilities actually report
their disability to their institution. So we know that plenty of students, even plenty of students
who get institutional support in high school, aren't telling their institutions in college,
and so aren't getting the support they need, and aren't getting recorded in these studies. What I
did in the course of my research was I kind of looked at the history of disabled students in
(27:58):
the academy, and I found, probably unsurprisingly, that the Academy had to be sort of dragged kicking
and screaming to care of and educate disabled students. It was only by force of law in the 1970s
that American institutions of higher education began admitting disabled students in large numbers
and admitting them into mainstream classrooms. But going over that history, which was of course, also
(28:24):
the history of the creation of Student Disability Services offices and the accommodation system
really made me think of how we take for granted this system that we really shouldn't accept as
being the way things should be. Essentially American colleges and universities were told
that there was this new population of students with different needs coming into the academy,
(28:48):
and that they had a mandate to give them as good an education as everybody else, and that was an
opportunity to tell professors in particular, look, you're going to get a lot of new students
with different needs. Maybe you should change the way you teach. Maybe you should change the
way that you approach your students, because your students are going to have some different needs.
We didn't do that. We didn't do that at all. We didn't touch the center of our institutions at
(29:11):
all, in terms of what I think of as the center of our institutions, our classrooms. Instead,
we created an office on the margins of our institutions, and a system that too often allows
professors to change very little about how they teach. In fact, seems designed to allow you and I
to change very little about how we teach, and even if we look at the language that universities use
(29:33):
around accommodations, it very much is about students have a right to an accommodation,
but only if it doesn't interrupt the educational standards, are very often the way they're phrased,
and I just don't understand what educational standards could be if they're not helping all
of our students learn. And so this idea that we can help certain students, but only if it doesn't
(29:56):
interfere with some vague sense of standard that is unconnected with helping our students that I
just don't understand. And so I really want faculty members to sort of rethink how they
approach a class before they meet their students. We very often think of our disabled students as an
exception, as something that comes after the fact. We meet our students, we tell them the syllabus,
(30:20):
we tell them the way it's going to be, and then you start to meet some disabled students who say,
by the way, I have an accommodation request, and you make an exception for them. So I'm
very much drawn to, of course, Universal Design for Learning, which is, of course, a long time,
broad approach to teaching, it comes from many disability activists, that seeks to,
(30:41):
before we meet our students, design our classes so they'll work for everybody. This is an ideal.
It's not easy to do, but it's the right approach, rather than pretending that all
of our students are able bodied and then being surprised every time that we get X number of
disabled students asking for a change. So I go into a lot more detail in the book, but that's
one of the reasons why I love writing despite how much I hate writing, is that sometimes you
(31:05):
can learn something. Is that actually doing this research really opened my eyes to kind of what
we take for granted about the place of disabled students on campus and how the system seems set
up to cast them as exceptions. In my opinion, that underlies a lot of their struggles to succeed.
It'll be interesting to see how the updated regulations to Title II of the ADA,
(31:28):
which addresses public institutions, helps move this work along, because it does require
this proactive approach around access, especially around digital technology.
Yeah, I don't have high hopes, but I do have hopes.
So we focus a lot on in-person classes. Can you talk a little bit about the relationship
of the contents of your book to online classes.The reason why I mostly address in-person classes
(31:53):
is because that's most of my experience. I am skeptical of a lot of online education. I know
that there's a lot of people who've done really great work, and there's a sense in which sometimes
that online educators have had to focus on some of these issues before people in person have had to,
particularly around generating good community, where you sort of have to work harder. I do hope
(32:16):
that all the principles that I advance will work in sort of any classroom. I just think
that we do faculty and students a disservice if we pretend that online education isn't harder. I
think it's harder. I do think that we are doing people work, care work, and that good teaching
(32:36):
has to do with forming relationships with our students and helping them as human beings.
I used to have this joke when I worked for a teaching center when people would come in
for advice about their teaching. I'd say half jokingly, all right, I want you to imagine that
this is your student, and you're their teacher, and you're trying to help them. I do think that
(32:57):
sometimes we sort of get away from the idea that these are people that we have relationships with,
they’re professional relationships, they’re educational relationships, they’re relationships.
I think that that relationship is harder to see in an online environment, at least it is for me,
and so it takes more work to nurture and make work. It certainly can work, but it's harder.
(33:17):
Challenging, both for the students and for the faculty. It goes both ways.
We always end with the question (33:22):
what's next? Well, what's next for me is, I've just been
recently made Director of Programming at Iowa called Gen Ed. Lit is what we call ti, general
education literature. It's a class offered by the English department that every undergrad at Iowa,
except for English majors, has to take. So about 3000 students every year take it, 150 sections,
(33:49):
something like 60 or 70 instructors. Most of them are graduate instructors, and my role is I oversee
this course, and I'm a supervisor of all of these instructors. So I took the position because I'm
really passionate about training new instructors and helping people learn how to teach better. And
so for me, it's an opportunity to put a lot of the ideas that I've been thinking about and writing
(34:13):
about for years into practice with people who are actually on the front lines, which is a terrible
metaphor, but I'll use it anyway. But teaching our undergrads, and in particular in this course,
teaching students who, for the most part, haven't chosen to be in the class, which is, as you know,
one of the more challenging teaching challenges that we face. And so I'm really excited about
(34:37):
helping new instructors find their feet and helping figure out, particularly at this time,
where everyone is worried about AI, helping to figure out how to teach literary reading
skills to a generation that I think could really benefit from developing them.
And a generation that spends much less time reading than prior generations. So
(34:58):
it's a nice challenge to be addressing and working on it, and I hope it's successful,
and maybe, if so, you can share that more broadly so we can all improve this.
Yeah, definitely sounds like a challenge that might keep you busy for a little
bit anyway. Well, thanks again for joining us and sharing your work.
Well, it's been my pleasure. Thank you so much for the work that you
do and for talking with me today.Thank you. We're looking forward to
(35:21):
future conversations with you.If you've enjoyed this podcast,
please subscribe and leave a review on Apple podcasts or your favorite podcast service.
To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.
(35:42):
You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com.
Music by Michael Gary Brewer.Editing assistance provided by Madison Lee.
Students have varied levels of preparation for traditional types of classes and assessments
used in colleges. In this episode, we explore a variety of instructional strategies that we
can adopt to help all students succeed. Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching,
(00:23):
an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist...
...and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer......and features guests doing important research
and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
(00:51):
Our guest today is David Gooblar. He is an Associate Professor of English at the University
of Iowa, a regular contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the creator of Pedagogy Unbound,
and the author of The Missing Course (01:02):
Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching. His
most recent book, One Classroom at a Time (01:07):
How Better Teaching Can Make College More Equitable,
was released in August 2025 by Harvard University Press. Welcome back, David.
Thank you so much. I'm very excited to talk with you today.
We're very happy to be able to talk with you again. Our teas today are:... David,
are you drinking any tea?I am. I'm drinking an I love lemon.
(01:30):
I have a Jasmine green today, And I have a tea in my pocket, but because my
meeting ran late, I am drinking diet Pepsi. Oh, John.
I think it's only the second time in the podcast I haven't been drinking tea, so
I won't take it personally. I have it here. In fact, it was a
tea that was given to us by one of our listeners in France, but I'll save that for next time.
(01:56):
So we invited you here today to discuss one classroom at a time. Can
you tell us the origin story of the book?Sure, back in probably 2019 I was working for
the Center for Advancement of Teaching at Temple University. And as part of that job, I was doing a
lot of reading of pedagogy research, and I was, of course, coming across a lot of research on
(02:17):
ways to close achievement gaps within the college classroom. There was a lot of work being done on
how to help marginalized students succeed. And it struck me as I was reading all this that I wasn't
seeing this sort of knowledge base being applied in the work of DEI offices across the country. It
(02:37):
was a kind of high time for DEI offices. There was a lot of action, particularly starting in
2020. Universities, responding to Black Lives Matter and responding to a lot of activism,
looking to reform universities, and so DEI offices were doing a lot to try to change the cultures
within their institutions. What I wasn't seeing was DEI offices doing really anything to change
(03:02):
how professors teach. And that sort of contrast, looking at this sort of growing base of knowledge
that the way that we teach can actually change student outcomes versus the part of
our universities sort of devoted to remedying the inequities in student outcomes, sort of ignoring
that. That was the kind of conundrum that started my research and really got me thinking about how
(03:27):
can I close this gap, how can I communicate with the people who need to hear what they can do to
help their marginalized students succeed?Colleges have done a lot to recruit a more
diverse student base, and we know that education can be a really effective way of escaping from
poverty, but has that been as successful for the marginalized students that you've mentioned as it
(03:48):
had been for earlier cohorts of students?Absolutely not, no. So we still have really
striking gaps, certainly the sort of more famous gaps that we know are between white
students and black and brown students, where the gaps in graduation rate are essentially
stagnant for the past 30 years, but similarly stubborn gaps exist between well off students
(04:11):
and economically insecure students. If you look at students from the top family income quartile,
69% of them graduate within six years. That number for the lowest quartile is 26%. First-gen students
are twice as likely to drop out within the first three years as their continuing generation peers.
These are things that we know about, but there's also a lot of research that suggests, not only are
(04:34):
we not closing these gaps, we may be making them worse, which is kind of shocking to think about,
but there are studies that look at the performance of marginalized students and control for
pre-college characteristics like high school quality or pre-college academic performance,
and find that they say low-income students still perform worse than you would expect and perform
(04:55):
worse than their more well off peers. So I still think there's lots that we can do, and it's not
for lack of trying, but it is, I think, lack of trying to influence what happens in classrooms.
So you talk a little bit about marginalized students entering into college, and we also
know that a lot of these students have a lot of social inequities that impact them
(05:17):
before they arrive at our institutions. The focus of your book, though, is, of course,
on what happens in the classroom. Can you talk a little bit about why you decided to focus on in
the classroom instead of what happens before?Yeah, so part of that is that point that I just
made, that I do think that there are things that a lot of colleges are doing that are actually making
inequities worse, but the main reason is that in my work, I write to faculty members, I write to
(05:43):
professors, and so my focus is really trying to be practical. What can we do? It would not make
sense for me to advise professors to put their focus on housing policy or put their focus on
ending racism. We know that most of the inequality that we confront in our classrooms comes from far
afield of our classrooms, that our students are coming to us from really disparate backgrounds.
(06:07):
They have all sorts of things going on in their lives, and most of the causes of the inequality
that we see we can't do anything about. And so that's really dispiriting. So I wanted to sort of
look at, well, what can we do? What are the things that we can change in how we teach that might
actually change the trajectory of our students? I do think that most professors are hoping to
(06:33):
transform their students' lives, even if that's a sort of modest transformation, of transforming the
way they see their subject, or something more capacious, of transforming the course of their
lives. I do think that we're hoping to change our students for the better, and so thinking of, well,
we can't get to the root of these problems, but there are things that we can do. I think
that really helped me sort of focus on what to write about and what to promote in the book.
(06:59):
I know it can be really frustrating to faculty to always talk at a higher level of like,
what are all the underlying causes, but having something actionable is really helpful.
Exactly.And when we have students in our classroom,
we have to deal with the students we have. We can't go back and undo their past experiences with
education and inequality and so forth. So we don't want to ignore the students that we're currently
(07:23):
dealing with. And in the first chapter of your book, you call it imaginary students and imaginary
classrooms. What are some of the ways in which faculty preconceptions differ from the reality
they experience in classrooms, and what causes this disconnect between faculty expectations and
the actual reality they're working withThe broad strokes of the imaginary students
(07:48):
problem, as I think of it, is that most of us imagine our students to be more privileged than
they are. That's the sort of broad thing. There's lots of specifics into that, but generally,
our students are worse off economically, aren't as white as we think they are, or will be before we
meet them, have all sorts of aspects of their identity that make their path through life
(08:09):
trickier than what we imagine they'll be. There's lots of reasons for this. One of the sort of more,
I think, persuasive things that I came across in trying to figure out why we have this kind
of disconnect is the idea that within the sort of hierarchy of universities and what we think
of as university quality, but maybe we should better think of it as university prestige.
(08:30):
Almost every professor in this country teaches at an institution lower on the
totem pole than where they were trained. It's the nature of our industry that you get a PhD,
and then you end up getting a job, usually somewhere with less prestige than your graduate
institution. Only a small proportion of American colleges and universities offer doctorates. This
is one part of it. What this means is that to the extent that professors are trained how
(08:55):
to teach, they're trained on a more privileged sub-population of college students than the ones
they actually teach. So that's one big issue. Another big issue is that for the most part,
we don't train professors to teach. This was, of course, the subject of my last book, The Missing
Course. And so what this means, practically, is that I teach very much like my professors taught,
because I learned by watching them, and they, of course, teach by the way their professors taught,
(09:18):
but my professors taught a student body that was far more privileged than our student body.
Now I think it's easy to forget the sort of diversification of the American higher education
system is actually a really recent phenomenon, as late as 1990, which…I don't know about you,
but I remember 1990… 8 out of 10 American college students were white. Right now, that's 55% and
(09:41):
dropping. And so the sort of our sense of what a college student is and what a college student can
do is sort of based on an earlier version of who college students were. And so this comes out in
all sorts of ways. One of the sort of more visible ways that we see this disconnect is in the amount
of time we expect students to be able to put to our classes. And I can sort of feel every faculty
(10:03):
member that's listening to this nod about this. Because everyone is concerned about students not
reading as much, not devoting as much time to their studies as possible. My students work 20,
30, sometimes 40 hours a week on top of being full-time students. An astonishing number of
my students take seven courses a semester. Many of them have family members they take care of,
many of them actually volunteer. They're very, very busy. And when we have surveys of how
(10:29):
students spend their time, typically, although we expect them to spend two hours outside of class
for every one credit hour in class, the surveys suggest that it's about half that that students
spend, on average, about one hour outside of class doing schoolwork for every credit hour
they take. Now I'm not suggesting that we lower our standards or even that we assign less work,
(10:52):
but we're not going to help our students succeed if we don't acknowledge the reality that they
don't look like what we expect them to. So that's one of the more visible ways that our students
are kind of having more difficult lives, to put it bluntly, than what we may expect them to have.
Can you talk a little bit about or maybe provide an example of a way that a faculty
(11:12):
member can support students that have all these tugs on their time and attention?
Yeah, well, a couple of things. The first thing that I always try to do is acknowledge it. I
do think that we can actually achieve a lot by letting students know that we understand that we
are one important thing among many in their lives, and if we don't treat them like our thing is the
(11:37):
most important thing, and they have nothing else weighing on their time, we can sort of
get to a better level of communication with them, where I can make the case to them that doing work
for my class is going to be valuable to them. So that's the sort of the case, or the psychological
approach you can take. The other thing that I think is, like the easiest thing to do,
(11:58):
it's not that easy, is really focus on taking advantage of class time. Like, I don't know what
many of my students do outside of the classroom. That is their lives. That is their time. And they
may have quite different and unequal circumstances affecting the amount of time and attention they
can give to the work that I want them to do. I do know that they have to come to class,
(12:21):
and so this isn't me saying get rid of homework, but I'm much more aware of using class time to
have students do the work that I want them to do. I no longer think it's a responsible thing to just
lecture at students and give them information. I want to take advantage of them being together,
of being in a social environment where they can do work with my guidance and with the feedback
(12:43):
of myself and their peers. So that's one thing that I really think about when thinking about the
inequalities of time and attention that we see.Marginalized students often experience some degree
of imposter syndrome or stereotype threat. What are some strategies we can do to break
that down to create a better sense of belonging for all of our students?
(13:03):
Sure, this is one of the most well established psychological barriers that anyone that faces in
academic domains, stereotype threat, the sort of concern that you may be the target of a negative
stereotype, consumes part of the brain and takes away cognitive resources from the important
intellectual work we hope students will do. So, one of the sort of most effective broad strategies
(13:27):
we can put into place to combat stereotype threat is inviting students to share a broader part of
their lives in our classes. One of the things that we know is that students who suffer from
or who are targets of stereotypes around academic performances, those stereotypes can be mitigated
if students feel that they're not just their academic selves in the class. If students are
(13:51):
reminded that they are not just students, but sisters and brothers and children of parents,
that they are friends, that they are soccer players, that they are interested in crocheting,
whatever it is, they'll have a broader base of self integrity, of self confidence to fend off
stereotypes. It's not that they're going to stop understanding that they might be stereotyped.
(14:13):
It's going to have less power because they're not just going to see themselves as students
within their classes. And a lot of how students see themselves within our classes is based on how
they think we see them. So if they believe that we as professors see them as more than
just their academic performance, they'll be more likely to have that broad base to work from. So
part of that is conveying an understanding that students have a lot going on in their lives,
(14:38):
but also there's lots of little things you can do to invite students to share parts of their lives
in class. I do this thing that I know a lot of professors do, that I call question roll,
where to start the class. I always ask students a question, and everyone has to answer it. And for
me, this question almost always has nothing to do with what we're going to talk about in class,
and it is a no stakes, no wrong answers. Type of question I'll ask, what's the first thing you
(15:01):
wanted to be when you grew up as a kid? What's the best thing to eat for lunch in Iowa City? What's
the best fruit? There's a lot of food related ones, but it's a way to ease students into class,
get them talking before there's any stakes, but also, in a kind of subtle way, it allows them
to share who they are, without them even sort of realizing that that's what they're doing.
(15:24):
And what I'll find is that I start every class with this, and that if I ever forget to do it,
my students are completely up in arms and like they cannot imagine starting class without doing
question roll if I didn't ask my question. So they really get into it, even though at the beginning
of the semester, they'll think it's silly and they'll resist answering questions. It kind of
lays down that precedent that in this class, yes, we're going to do hard work. Yes, we're going to
(15:48):
try to understand difficult concepts, but we're all people coming from various places and that
we're going to have a more successful time if we don't deny those parts of ourselves. So I really
sort of believe in this sort of broad strategy of trying to invite students in, invite more parts
of students. That, to me, is the kind of subtle thing, or a broad thing that can show itself in
(16:09):
lots of different ways throughout a semester, but I do think that if we can think about part of our
job as inviting students to share parts of their selves that may not be obvious to them as relevant
to their academic selves, that we can really help to mitigate stereotype threat for them.
One of the things that we've talked about on many episodes of Tea for Teaching is growth mindset,
(16:34):
and that's something that I know you cover in your book as well. Can you discuss some strategies that
help nurture a growth mindset in our students?Sure, one of the more interesting things I learned
in doing the work for this book, I of course, had read a lot about growth mindset, and I'm a parent,
so I understand all the research into the encouragement of a growth mindset in individuals,
(16:55):
but one of the things that I saw is that a lot of the big studies that look at the effects
of promoting a growth mindset in the students, the results aren't as good when the environment
students are in work against the growth mindset. So when their peers have a fixed mindset,
and/or when there's a school culture that has a fixed mindset, any promotion of a growth mindset
(17:16):
within an individual is kind of blunted, which makes a lot of sense to me. And so what I hope
to do in the chapter I have on growth mindset is move away from the idea of growth mindset as
sort of teaching students that their brain is a muscle. I think there's a kind of limitation to
sort of telling students to have a growth mindset, and we should focus more on the signals we send to
(17:37):
students about the environment of our classrooms. That much more important is looking closely at the
way that we do things in our courses and asking ourselves, “Is this focused on student growth,
or is this focused on sorting out the better students from the worst students?” So I think
about how we talk to students in our syllabi, how we literally talk to students in classes. Are we
(17:58):
focused on persuading them that we're working for them, that the course is designed to help
them grow, rather than persuading them the course is going to root out the people who don't have it,
or look to your left, look to your right, one of you won't be here, or even sort of the purposes
of assessment. If we can explain to students that assessment is really important for teachers
(18:19):
to understand how students are doing so that we can help them better. Students generally assume,
and a lot of professors talk about it like this, that assessment is to sort out whether
they know it or not, to give them a grade. And of course, that's part of what we do, but to me,
that takes a back seat to the formative aspect of assessment. The main purpose of assessment,
for me, is to see how students are doing, because I want to help them get better. So
(18:43):
those kind of more sort of environmental aspects of a class, I think, make a bigger difference in
promoting growth mindset than talking about it directly and promoting it to students a sort
of individual version of that, one of the sort of strategies that I think goes along with this idea
of a growth mindset culture, is something called wise feedback. Came from research by Jeffrey Cohen
(19:05):
and his colleagues that looks at particularly how we give feedback to students on their work.
They looked at student writing, but I think it can be for any kind of student work. And essentially,
wise feedback has three aspects, where you start by invoking high standards. You sort of say,
I'm giving you this feedback because I have very high standards for you, either because of this
class is really difficult and hard and I'm trying to bring you to a high level, or because I believe
(19:28):
that you're capable of meeting these things, following that invocation of high standards
always has to be encouragement. So I'm giving this feedback because I have very high standards,
and I know that you can get there, that you can work on it, and then you sort of fill out that
encouragement, or you prove that encouragement by giving specific guidance as to what students
can do. So most of us, I worry, have been sort of taught by experience and trained to give feedback
(19:53):
to justify our grade. I think of particularly the early career instructors I work with, who
are very concerned with, for good reason, being challenged about grades, and so their feedback
they give to students on paper, essentially, is, here's why I'm giving you the B minus. Instead,
if we think about this kind of growth mindset approach to feedback, here's where I think you
can get, here's why I believe you can do it, here's how you can get there. I think that's
(20:18):
a much more effective way to get feedback, where you're actually teaching through your feedback.
You just noted that one of the issues is that it's not just something you can do in your class with
students or encourage them to have a growth mindset if that's not what they're observing,
and one of the studies you cite is a study done by Elizabeth Canning and colleagues,
who looked at the impact of faculty mindset on student learning outcomes.
(20:41):
Could you talk a little bit about that study?An amazing study they looked at science professors
at a big midwest University, and I think they surveyed all these faculty members about their
mindsets, not their students mindsets, but the faculty members mindsets. And they found that
the faculty members with a fixed mindset had much larger achievement gaps in their classes
(21:04):
than the faculty mindsets with a growth mindset. This was independent of faculty
identity, by the way. So this was even the case for faculty with marginalized
identities themselves. So it seems that, at least as I interpret it, that our students are taking
cues from us a lot of the time about what's expected of them and what the course is about.
And so if we have a growth mindset, if we come at the world with a sort of theory of mind that
(21:30):
people can improve, that people can get better with practice. Our students will notice that,
and they'll take what we tell them in a constructive way, in a way that they'll
actually work at something. If they suspect from the way we talk, from the way we carry ourselves,
from the way we structure our courses, that we actually have a fixed mindset,
that we believe that generally talent is doled out somewhere, and either you have it or you don't,
(21:53):
they'll get the message that when they struggle early on in a semester, that there's essentially
not much they can do. And so I do think it really matters how we talk about our subjects, classes,
how we talk about our disciplines, how we talk about what student work is for. There's been
really interesting research done on the concept of brilliance, and certain disciplines value
(22:18):
brilliance in their fields. Philosophy is one that comes to mind a lot, that if you survey faculty
members about what it takes to succeed in this field, philosophy and some other fields, for sure,
rank being brilliant really high. You need to really be smart to do well in this class. Well,
research has shown that those disciplines that value brilliance most highly have the
(22:40):
biggest gaps between privileged students and marginalized students in their fields;
they have the fewest black PhDs, for example, the fewest women PhDs. And so how we think about
what it takes to succeed in our field really matters to students, and whether we tell them
it explicitly or not, it comes across to them.So we've talked about a few different challenges
(23:01):
related to inequity that our students face, and your book explores many others. Can you talk about
a few more examples of strategies that can be used to promote more equity and student success?
One of the sort of best supported strategies for what certainly used to be called inclusive
teaching, I don't know if people still use that phrase, is structure. There were a couple of
(23:23):
really huge, really sort of ironclad surveys about the inclusion of structure into large
lecture classes, and how that helped to narrow gaps that were really, really stubborn, and
nobody seems to know what structure is, so I'll explain it a little bit. Structure in the context
of educational research is really just having students do stuff. It's the opposite of a lecture,
(23:43):
where all students have to do is sit and listen to a lecture. Structure is where you make students
answer questions before the lecture, where you put them in groups and talk about the concept,
where you do a survey in class and have students respond to it, where you have students do writing
in class. It's structuring class time so that students have things to do for their learning.
(24:05):
And so we know that that is really effective, particularly for marginalized students. One of
the reasons why this helps is because privileged students need less from us than marginalized
students. One thing that privileged students have that marginalized students don't have is a
positive experience with school. They like school much more than marginalized students do. They've
(24:25):
had a good experience. They know how to be good students… I'm speaking very broadly, of course…
but on the whole, and they have more resources to help them with that. And so a class period where
all students have to do is sit and take notes and do the work themselves, is going to favor those
students who are good at being students, and it's going to disadvantage those students who have had
a less positive experience with school, who have fewer resources to help them out, with less time
(24:49):
to do the work. So the more that we can structure class time is what I was talking about, taking
advantage of class time, the more that we can help those students. I've also sort of been convinced
that the best kind of structure is transparent and predictable. Transparency really helps students
for lots of reasons. I think part of it is that growth mindset piece, that if we explain to
(25:10):
students why we're doing what we're doing, we will most likely persuade them that what we're doing
is to help them learn, which we can't take for granted that they believe. And the predictability
piece, I think, is really interesting. There's been really, I think, provocative
and powerful research done on the value of taking high-stakes exams, and instead of giving, say,
(25:34):
two or three exams over the course of semester, dividing up the points you'd give to that and
giving students weekly exams, weekly quizzes, and where you ask about the same material,
you just do it more often. This strategy seems to really help economically insecure students,
and there's some sort of disagreement as to why this helps, but one of the reasons why I think it
helps is that economically insecure students are used to and good at focusing on pressing concerns.
(26:01):
We know a lot about how economically insecure students struggle with long-term planning. What
they're good at is short-term planning. Living in near poverty means that you have to focus on
pressing needs, because it's a life of instability and scarcity. And so if the task is study for this
quiz on Thursday rather than study for an exam next month, we're going to help those students who
(26:28):
have fewer resources to do that kind of long-term planning, the long term thinking that is involved
in preparing for a midterm or an exam in a month or two. So thinking of our structure as, yes,
having students do stuff, but wherever possible, make it transparent, so that students always
know why we're asking them to do the work we're asking them to do, and if possible, predictable,
(26:50):
so students can sort of count on our classes as being a reliable source of support and help in
a world that is less than reliable for them.So one of the things your book addresses that's
often ignored in many books about effective teaching is a focus on student disability.
Can you talk a little bit about this chapter and some recommendations on what institutions and what
(27:14):
faculty can do to help create a more supportive environment for students with disabilities?
It's one of my favorite parts of the book, partly because I learned a lot, and so we know that
disabled students struggle in our institutions, that they graduate at a much lower rate than their
able bodied peers, and that the numbers we do have about their success are probably under selling
(27:35):
the problem, because something close to a half to 1/3 of students with disabilities actually report
their disability to their institution. So we know that plenty of students, even plenty of students
who get institutional support in high school, aren't telling their institutions in college,
and so aren't getting the support they need, and aren't getting recorded in these studies. What I
did in the course of my research was I kind of looked at the history of disabled students in
(27:58):
the academy, and I found, probably unsurprisingly, that the Academy had to be sort of dragged kicking
and screaming to care of and educate disabled students. It was only by force of law in the 1970s
that American institutions of higher education began admitting disabled students in large numbers
and admitting them into mainstream classrooms. But going over that history, which was of course, also
(28:24):
the history of the creation of Student Disability Services offices and the accommodation system
really made me think of how we take for granted this system that we really shouldn't accept as
being the way things should be. Essentially American colleges and universities were told
that there was this new population of students with different needs coming into the academy,
(28:48):
and that they had a mandate to give them as good an education as everybody else, and that was an
opportunity to tell professors in particular, look, you're going to get a lot of new students
with different needs. Maybe you should change the way you teach. Maybe you should change the
way that you approach your students, because your students are going to have some different needs.
We didn't do that. We didn't do that at all. We didn't touch the center of our institutions at
(29:11):
all, in terms of what I think of as the center of our institutions, our classrooms. Instead,
we created an office on the margins of our institutions, and a system that too often allows
professors to change very little about how they teach. In fact, seems designed to allow you and I
to change very little about how we teach, and even if we look at the language that universities use
(29:33):
around accommodations, it very much is about students have a right to an accommodation,
but only if it doesn't interrupt the educational standards, are very often the way they're phrased,
and I just don't understand what educational standards could be if they're not helping all
of our students learn. And so this idea that we can help certain students, but only if it doesn't
(29:56):
interfere with some vague sense of standard that is unconnected with helping our students that I
just don't understand. And so I really want faculty members to sort of rethink how they
approach a class before they meet their students. We very often think of our disabled students as an
exception, as something that comes after the fact. We meet our students, we tell them the syllabus,
(30:20):
we tell them the way it's going to be, and then you start to meet some disabled students who say,
by the way, I have an accommodation request, and you make an exception for them. So I'm
very much drawn to, of course, Universal Design for Learning, which is, of course, a long time,
broad approach to teaching, it comes from many disability activists, that seeks to,
(30:41):
before we meet our students, design our classes so they'll work for everybody. This is an ideal.
It's not easy to do, but it's the right approach, rather than pretending that all
of our students are able bodied and then being surprised every time that we get X number of
disabled students asking for a change. So I go into a lot more detail in the book, but that's
one of the reasons why I love writing despite how much I hate writing, is that sometimes you
(31:05):
can learn something. Is that actually doing this research really opened my eyes to kind of what
we take for granted about the place of disabled students on campus and how the system seems set
up to cast them as exceptions. In my opinion, that underlies a lot of their struggles to succeed.
It'll be interesting to see how the updated regulations to Title II of the ADA,
(31:28):
which addresses public institutions, helps move this work along, because it does require
this proactive approach around access, especially around digital technology.
Yeah, I don't have high hopes, but I do have hopes.
So we focus a lot on in-person classes. Can you talk a little bit about the relationship
of the contents of your book to online classes.The reason why I mostly address in-person classes
(31:53):
is because that's most of my experience. I am skeptical of a lot of online education. I know
that there's a lot of people who've done really great work, and there's a sense in which sometimes
that online educators have had to focus on some of these issues before people in person have had to,
particularly around generating good community, where you sort of have to work harder. I do hope
(32:16):
that all the principles that I advance will work in sort of any classroom. I just think
that we do faculty and students a disservice if we pretend that online education isn't harder. I
think it's harder. I do think that we are doing people work, care work, and that good teaching
(32:36):
has to do with forming relationships with our students and helping them as human beings.
I used to have this joke when I worked for a teaching center when people would come in
for advice about their teaching. I'd say half jokingly, all right, I want you to imagine that
this is your student, and you're their teacher, and you're trying to help them. I do think that
(32:57):
sometimes we sort of get away from the idea that these are people that we have relationships with,
they’re professional relationships, they’re educational relationships, they’re relationships.
I think that that relationship is harder to see in an online environment, at least it is for me,
and so it takes more work to nurture and make work. It certainly can work, but it's harder.
(33:17):
Challenging, both for the students and for the faculty. It goes both ways.
We always end with the question (33:22):
what's next? Well, what's next for me is, I've just been
recently made Director of Programming at Iowa called Gen Ed. Lit is what we call ti, general
education literature. It's a class offered by the English department that every undergrad at Iowa,
except for English majors, has to take. So about 3000 students every year take it, 150 sections,
(33:49):
something like 60 or 70 instructors. Most of them are graduate instructors, and my role is I oversee
this course, and I'm a supervisor of all of these instructors. So I took the position because I'm
really passionate about training new instructors and helping people learn how to teach better. And
so for me, it's an opportunity to put a lot of the ideas that I've been thinking about and writing
(34:13):
about for years into practice with people who are actually on the front lines, which is a terrible
metaphor, but I'll use it anyway. But teaching our undergrads, and in particular in this course,
teaching students who, for the most part, haven't chosen to be in the class, which is, as you know,
one of the more challenging teaching challenges that we face. And so I'm really excited about
(34:37):
helping new instructors find their feet and helping figure out, particularly at this time,
where everyone is worried about AI, helping to figure out how to teach literary reading
skills to a generation that I think could really benefit from developing them.
And a generation that spends much less time reading than prior generations. So
(34:58):
it's a nice challenge to be addressing and working on it, and I hope it's successful,
and maybe, if so, you can share that more broadly so we can all improve this.
Yeah, definitely sounds like a challenge that might keep you busy for a little
bit anyway. Well, thanks again for joining us and sharing your work.
Well, it's been my pleasure. Thank you so much for the work that you
do and for talking with me today.Thank you. We're looking forward to
(35:21):
future conversations with you.If you've enjoyed this podcast,
please subscribe and leave a review on Apple podcasts or your favorite podcast service.
To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.
(35:42):
You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com.
Music by Michael Gary Brewer.Editing assistance provided by Madison Lee.
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