May 23, 2023 • 50 mins
In Episode 137, host Kevin Patton explores the significance of playfulness, transparency, and authenticity in the teaching persona. Drawing from personal experiences training animals, Kevin explains how play is integral to learning, highlighting the importance of incorporating a sense of fun and embracing failures in the classroom. He also emphasizes the value of transparency by sharing our own mistakes and weaknesses, asserting that being open about flaws fosters authenticity and builds trust with students. By acknowledging vulnerabilities and demonstrating a genuine willingness to learn, educators can create a supportive and engaging learning environment. This thought-provoking discussion reminds us of the power of play and authenticity in effective teaching.
- 00:00 | Introduction
- 00:47 | Our Teaching Persona
- 14:23 | Taking Responsibility
- 22:03 | Gestures Impart Meaning
- 32:34 | Playing Around
- 42:54 | Authenticity
- 47:46 | Staying Connected
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To be playful and serious at the same time is possible, and it defines the ideal mental condition. (John Dewey)
Our Teaching Persona
13.5 minutes
Kevin Patton discusses the concept of the teaching persona, emphasizing the importance of authenticity and genuine connection with students. He highlights the significance of being true to oneself while adapting and enhancing certain aspects of personality to create an engaging and effective teaching persona.
★ Storytelling is the Heart of Teaching A&P | TAPP 12 (where Kevin talks about the "storytelling persona") theAPprofessor.org/podcast-episode-12.html
★ Playful & Serious Is the Perfect Combo for A&P | TAPP 13(where Kevin talks about benefits of having a playful persona when teaching) theAPprofessor.org/podcast-episode-13.html
★ End-of-Term Reviews Help Keep Your Course on Track | T
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
>>Kevin Patton:
Education pioneer John Dewey once wrote, to (00:00):
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be playful and serious at the same time ispossible and it defines the ideal mental condition.
>>Aileen Park: Welcome to The A&P Professor, a few minutes (00:14):
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to focus on teaching human anatomy and physiologywith a veteran educator and teaching mentor,
your host, Kevin Patton.
>>Kevin Patton: In episode 136, I discussed topics related (00:28):
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to the teaching persona that we project toour students.
>>Kevin Patton: I was recently thinking about one particular (00:41):
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aspect of my teaching persona, and I'll tellyou about that in just a minute.
But before I do, I want to review what I meanby a teaching persona.
(01:02):
It first came up way back at the beginning,the olden days of this podcast, in episode
12, so that was like five years ago, and Idid an episode that featured a segment on
storytelling and why I think storytellingis a good way to think about what we do as
(01:23):
instructors.
Not only in what we might do in a lecture,a mini-lecture, a demo, a pre-lecture, something
like that where we can really see ourselvesas storytellers, but we're also storytellers
when we're deciding how to build our courseand what kinds of activities to do in our
course, what kind of strategies to use inour course.
It's all part of a story.
(01:44):
We can storyboard those ideas.
So, that came up in episode 12.
In that process, I was talking about the factthat professional storytellers, they adopt
a persona, maybe more than one if they'reactually acting out parts as part of the story.
But if they're just telling the story, ifthey're just the teller of the tale, they
(02:04):
might decide they want to be very dramaticor very active as they tell the story, or
they may decide that they want to be verymysterious or maybe very low-key, or maybe
they want to switch back and forth betweenbeing very energetic and very low-key.
There's all kinds of possibilities, and itdepends in part on the story and it depends
(02:25):
on part on the storyteller themselves andhow they've developed that story and what
their own personality is like.
That's what I mean by persona.
It's the personality that we're projectingin the classroom.
It's not our entire personality, but it'saspects of our personality that we may be
exaggerating or at least pulling to the frontin that context.
(02:48):
We could think of it also maybe in a moregeneral way as our affect in the classroom.
How do we come across in the classroom tostudents?
And that, by the way, is a very importantpart of the teaching persona or storytelling
persona if we want to think of it that way,and that is how is it being received by students?
About the only way that we can tell how it'sbeing received by students is if they tell
(03:13):
us.
We need feedback, right?
And sometimes I get some spontaneous feedbackfrom my students.
As a matter of fact, that happened just yesterdayin a one-on-one I was having with one of my
students, and he remarked about the playfulaspect of my particular persona in the course
that we just started about a week ago, thatthat really came across to him and he found
(03:35):
it very engaging and helpful and was happyabout it.
Now, we could have students that tell us,"Hey, you're just being too playful here.
This is distracting me."
That could happen.
It could be spontaneous like that, or sometimeswe have to just ask them.
We can do a poll.
We can include that as a question on our endof course evaluation if we have the opportunity
(03:57):
to do that.
Or as I've mentioned in previous episodes,I like to do debriefings sometimes in the
middle of the semester and at the end, sometimesjust at the end of the semester and talk about,
well, what worked for you?
What didn't work for you?
If I'm not getting any feedback on my teachingpersona, then I might ask about that.
(04:18):
How am I coming across?
Do you feel like I'm supportive?
Do you feel like I'm a kind teacher?
Do you feel like I'm a rigorous teacher?
Do you feel like I'm too energetic or notenergetic enough?
What's going on there?
That's one aspect of the persona.
But I want to also get back to the playfulaspect that I just mentioned in my own teaching
(04:41):
persona, and that came up right after thestorytelling persona came up in episode 12.
The next episode was episode 13, which I'mnow realizing is I see the number 13 in my
notes here that maybe I should have skippedthat.
Isn't bad luck to have an episode 13?
Don't they do that in hotels, skip the 13thfloor when they're numbering the floors?
(05:04):
I don't know if you want to go back to thatone and listen to it because it might bring
you bad luck.
I'm just warning you.
But that one was focusing on this idea thatbeing playful and serious at the same time
is not only possible, as the quote from JohnDewey at the beginning of this episode said,
not only is that possible, it defines theideal mental condition.
(05:27):
I took that and applied that to this ideaof a storytelling persona that is a playful
one, and that's something that I want to developin my teaching persona.
That's the kind of classroom I want to haveis a playful classroom because we know that
in a playful atmosphere, that's where we'remore engaged.
(05:48):
That's where we pay more attention.
That's where we have more fun, and thereforethings are more meaningful to us.
That's what I like, but I think there areother kinds of environments and teaching personae
that we can use in the classroom besides theone I use.
That's something that we each want to developon our own and we each want to think about.
(06:11):
When I say develop, that's the point I wantto make today, and that is the reason I was
recently thinking about it was I was thinkingabout a particular aspect of that teaching
persona and whether I'm really living up tothe ideal I've created for myself.
I don't think we can expect that of ourselvesanyway to always be 100% playful, 100% serious,
(06:34):
100% whatever it is we decide that we're goingto be in our teaching persona.
I mean, we can't do that 100%, and we certainlydon't want to put our entire focus on that
because then we lose the story.
We lose the content of the story.
We lose those concepts that we're trying toget our students to learn and to understand
and be able to apply.
(06:55):
What I'm saying is is that we do need to thinkabout it occasionally.
Go back to it and maybe tune it up.
In this case, it had to do with an aspectof the teaching persona that I like to project,
and that is projecting the idea that I ama supportive instructor.
That when I say to my students, "I got yourback," I want to really mean it that I got
(07:21):
their back, and I want to project the ideathat I have their back.
There's a lot of evidence that tells us thatif students from the very beginning of the
course feel like their instructor is supportiveand really does have their back and will help
them when the time comes to help them, thenthey're going to do better in that course,
(07:42):
at least as a group they're going to do better.
Probably every single individual in thereis going to do a little bit better than they
otherwise would have knowing that.
Now, we know based on our experience thatnot every student, as a matter of fact, the
majority of students are not going to callon us for help for a variety of reasons.
(08:02):
But if they truly believe that we're willingto help them, then they're going to benefit
from that aspect of the teaching persona thatI'm trying to project in the classroom.
The reason it came up is I was getting a littleannoyed with some students who needed lots
of help, and the stuff they needed help withwas stuff that, well, yeah, I can see how
(08:27):
that could create an obstacle.
You would want a little bit of coaching orat least somebody in your corner saying, "Yeah,
you can do that.
Let's do it together.
I'm right here if you run into any problems."
I was thinking, oh man, this is just so annoyinghaving them calling all the time and so on.
(08:48):
I don't usually think that, by the way.
I usually relish that because I teach entirelyonline these days, and so I'm glad to have
opportunities to have one-on-one interactionswith my students.
That surprised me for that reason too.
But then I realized, hey, this is part ofthe kind of teacher that I want to be.
(09:08):
Not just the kind of person I want to be,but the kind of teacher I want to be.
Both of those are important I think in teaching,but it's more specific when we think about,
well, what kind of teaching persona do I wantto have in my classroom?
I want to have a supportive persona.
If I'm brushing away some of these requestsfor my help right at the beginning of the
(09:29):
course, that's going to affect those studentswho are at the receiving end of that.
If they even get a hint of that going on inmy brain, they're going to pull back and they're
probably not going to ask me for help againeven when they need help.
That's not good, because not only can thataffect them in the course and possibly affect
(09:50):
their success in the course, but it can affectthem in succeeding courses with other instructors
who may be much more supportive than I amand they're just not given that benefit of
the doubt because of the bad experience thatstudent had with me.
I think that carries on into their careerand other places as well.
(10:11):
I think that a lot of times we don't thinkabout that superpower that we have as educators,
and it is a strong, strong superpower thatwe have in people's lives.
The least little thing that we say to a student,especially if we're addressing them as an
individual, can have a huge impact on therest of their lives.
(10:34):
Think about it for a minute.
Think back to your early days of schooling,in grade school, in high school, and as an
undergraduate, and then later as a graduatestudent.
Think about those moments when something ateacher, an instructor, a faculty member,
a mentor said to you that continues to havean impact on you today.
(11:01):
Just in this moment of really trying to focuson what I'm saying, but also trying to think
back, I can think of several things that havebeen said to me over the years.
Some of them have been wonderfully positiveand continue to encourage me, and some of
them have been horrible statements that weremade to me that still affect me in a negative
(11:24):
way to this day.
I don't think they were meant as negativeas they came across to me as I felt them as
I received them, but they certainly weren'tpositive in any way.
That's something that we need to be carefulof.
We need to make sure that when we're havinga bad day and we have them, that we don't
(11:45):
let that carry through to our communicationwith students, especially to individual students,
that we don't let it affect our teaching persona.
Yeah, being tired and being frustrated withthings, being upset with something going on
in our life, maybe even in our professionallife, maybe even with that particular student
we're interacting with, but not let it comeacross because we as professionals are expected
(12:10):
to step beyond that, at least in that momentbecause we want to be supportive.
That is if we've adopted that attitude, whichI think is something we all ought to weave
into our teaching persona, but I certainlyhave adopted it in mind and I want to.
The context in which I was thinking aboutthis was a case where I was letting things
(12:35):
or was about to let things really affect theway I was going to be communicating with students.
Beyond that, it's not just the way I couldhave come across had I not caught myself,
the other thing is, is why are you frustratedat doing this?
That's what I was asking myself.
Because the thing is, is I don't just wantto come across as supportive, I want to be
(13:00):
supportive.
I think that's what should be behind our teachingpersona.
It's not a facade, at least it shouldn't bea facade.
It shouldn't be fake.
It should be a projection of our real selves.
It's just that we're emphasizing some partsof our real selves and putting them out there
(13:20):
for students to see.
That frustration is part of my real self too,but I think in a professional situation, I
need to pull that back and really stick withthose more positive parts of what's going
on inside me with my student, because that'smy role is to be a supporter of this student.
(13:41):
I can walk out of the classroom or step awayfrom that Zoom meeting with a student or phone
call with a student, and then I can vent tomy pets or to the walls or to the books around
me and so on.
I can do that, but that's not something Iwant to do with an individual student.
Yeah, I think that this teaching persona reallyis who we should be.
(14:05):
We should decide who are we going to be asteachers and then work on projecting that.
That's what I mean by teaching persona.
I have a few other aspects of the teachingpersona that I'll get to in some of the other
segments of this episode.
>>Kevin Patton: I want to spend just a moment longer thinking (14:21):
undefined
about that supportive aspect of what our teachingpersona might be like.
Something that I stated I already value inmy own teaching persona, the kind of teacher
that I want to be is a supportive teacher.
For many years, I don't know, maybe it wasdecades, I thought that it's best to let students
(14:47):
be responsible for getting their own needsmet.
That is, I figured if I made myself available,that was enough.
But you know what?
That's based on my own experience as a studentand it's based on my own way of thinking.
We know that there is diversity among ourstudents.
(15:12):
They're not all young little Kevins who dothings the way Kevin always did.
Well, first of all, the context is different.
Things are different now than they were whenI was a young student, and so who knows how
I would've been?
Because the culture has changed, society haschanged, schools have changed, the way we
(15:33):
do teaching and learning has changed.
Yeah, we can't just base it on our own wayof thinking or the way that we did it or what
our attitude might have been when we werein that student or this student's situation.
Now, after years of thinking, okay, if thestudents need help, they're going to come
(15:54):
to me for help, I eventually learned thatto be inclusive, I have to consider the fact
that not everyone knows that they can andshould make direct contact with a professor
to sort out what their needs and goals are.
For example, many, not all, but many studentsfrom historically disadvantaged communities
(16:20):
do not know that they should be approachingtheir professor for help.
Even if they've been told that they shouldapproach their instructors, many of these
students have cultural perspectives that couldblock them from doing so, a hurdle they just
can't get themselves over.
(16:43):
Approaching authority figures isn't alwaysseen as being effective and is seen as something
that could turn out very badly.
Now, me being an older white man as theirprofessor, that might make it even harder
for some of those students, and it may reinforcethose barriers that they have to coming to
(17:08):
approach me.
Sometimes females have hesitancy or outrightfear about approaching a male instructor like
myself, or vice versa, one-on-one or possiblyeven in a small group.
Many students on the autism spectrum or withother so-called invisible challenges will
(17:30):
not reveal that to instructors.
In other words, their challenges remain invisibleto the instructor, so they don't know that
these students are challenged.
Some of those students, depending on the kindof challenge they have, simply will not approach
instructors when they need help.
I've dealt with some students that are likethat.
(17:53):
I know some students that are that very well.
It doesn't fit with my way of thinking, soit's hard for me to imagine that this is so
hard for them to do that, but it is, and I'mjust going to have to trust that it is for
them.
It's like jumping off a cliff as far as they'reconcerned, and I just don't see that.
(18:16):
I can't see that, but that's how it is forthem, at least some of those students.
Even so-called responsible students, likeI thought I was, benefit from instructors
who keep tabs on them and reach out to thestudent when they're falling behind.
As an undergraduate, I couldn't believe thatmy physics professor, Dr. Stacey, in a class
(18:42):
of about 200 or so students, wrote me personalnotes on some low scoring tests, even noticing
my high rate of absences from his lectures,which back then was unusual because the professors
didn't take roll call.
They didn't record absences, but he noticedthat I wasn't there for all of the classes.
(19:07):
But when I became an instructor years later,I forgot how much that benefited me.
But eventually I got it.
And now, I myself keep tabs in a way evenin large courses and reach out to students
who aren't keeping up.
(19:28):
It turns out that it's not that difficultor time-consuming.
I know it can be scary in a large class, evenin a small class it can be scary.
Oh my gosh, if I open myself up to this, allmy time will be taken up by doing this.
I've tried it and I've found that that isnot usually true.
I mean, there are little spurts sometimeswhere it seems a very heavy burden, but it's
(19:53):
only heavy for a short time and not very often,at least, again, in my experience.
But the thing is, it can really help turnaround a student who might otherwise drop
out of college entirely.
You know what?
Even if it just helps one out of those 200students, I'll take it.
(20:14):
That's great.
I've done my job if I help just one studentby doing what I can to keep tabs on them.
Of course, there are limits to what I cando, but I'm going to go ahead and do what
I can.
If we want to project the idea that we wantto have an inclusive course and that we're
inclusive educators and that we have a supportiveteaching persona, then I strongly suggest
(20:41):
that we do not exclude students who may havebarriers to taking responsibility in ways
that our cultural biases have influenced ourthinking.
Perhaps we should avoid those kind of statements,especially to prospective employers when we're
(21:04):
interviewing or maybe going up for promotionand announce, "Well, I want my students to
be responsible.
I force them to be responsible.
Students should be responsible."
Well, yeah, we need to be careful about howwe explain that because it could be taken
as a not very supportive attitude.
(21:28):
That may not be what we mean, but we needto think about how we're expressing that,
and we need to think about how we are livingthat in the classroom as part of our classroom
demeanor.
Perhaps more importantly than the messagewe're sending to prospective employers or
to a committee considering our promotion,probably the most important thing is to think
(21:52):
about how it plays for students because that'swho's going to be affected by our classroom
persona.
>>Kevin Patton: As I just mentioned, I've been thinking about (22:00):
undefined
my teaching persona.
I've been thinking about those aspects ofmy personality, myself that I want to project
to my students to make it a better experiencefor them and make it more likely that they're
going to succeed.
And as I've been thinking about that, I recentlyran across an article that pulled together
(22:25):
some results of recent and sometimes not sorecent research about gestures as we're communicating
with people that I think really plays intothis idea of a classroom persona.
When I say classroom persona, I'm referringto classroom in the very general, broad, abstract,
(22:49):
metaphorical sense.
I don't necessarily mean being in a classroomdoing a lecture.
It could be in a classroom doing lots of things,having a discussion, doing a demonstration,
being involved in active learning processesthat are going on in the classroom.
(23:09):
But it could be in a lab.
It could be in a lecture hall.
It could be online.
It could be in the online environment.
It could be asynchronous or synchronous.
I'm just talking about communication in generalwithin the confines of a course.
Maybe I should use that term instead of classroom.
But if I do use it, the classroom inadvertently,I mean course, some kind of a course environment.
(23:32):
It could even be on a field trip, but that'spart of the course.
All right.
One of the things that we can do that researchshows is helpful is use hand gestures when
we speak.
There's quite a bit of research actually thatemphasizes that using hand gestures as we
(23:53):
speak, as long as we're visible when we speak,obviously, but I use hand gestures.
I'm using hand gestures right now and youcan't see me, but I think it probably affects
the way I'm communicating.
I think if I just put my hands in my lap andkept them there the whole time, I don't think
I would come across exactly the same way thatI'm coming across now.
(24:16):
I don't know, maybe there's been some researchon that.
Well, if you find some, let me know.
That would be fascinating to read that.
But the research that was mentioned in thisarticle, which I will have linked in the show
notes as I always do, it talks about the kindsof gestures that we can use when we're communicating,
the kinds of hand gestures, but I think wecan also extend that to body language in general
(24:38):
too, right?
You may already know this about me that Ihave spent many years actively mentoring other
A&P faculty, some of them new to teaching,some of them been teaching for quite a while.
Not only do most of them not really thinkabout their teaching persona much, if at all,
(24:59):
until we have that conversation and then theydo it a lot, but I think they don't really
keep up with it as I'm encouraging us to doin this episode.
I think that they leave on some things thatthey could be thinking about and that would
include hand gestures.
There are many kinds of hand gestures.
For example, there's something called beatgestures.
(25:22):
That would be something like, oh, when youwatch a band leader, for example, and you
see that the band leader may be using theirhand or even a baton to at least during some
parts of the performance give a beat.
They're using maybe just their finger andthey're going down with every beat, first
beat, second beat, third beat.
(25:43):
We often do that as we speak, especially ifthere's a series of things that we want to
emphasize.
For example, in my course, we're always emphasizingthe phrase practice, practice, practice.
When it comes up in class, and I do try tofind every opportunity to bring that in there
because it's one of those playful things andit's also an important principle, right, is
(26:08):
keep reminding our students that the onlyway to get better, the only way to really
understand anything that we're doing in ourcourse is to continue practice, retrieval
practice, all kinds of different practice.
Yeah, we use that phrase a lot, practice,practice, practice.
I just caught myself now, I used a beat gesture.
I just used my hand to on every time I saidthe word practice downbeat, downbeat, downbeat.
(26:33):
We do that a lot.
That might be something to think about andnot hold ourselves back from that.
I think sometimes we don't want to get toogesturey, but really in live performance and
in a sense that's what we're doing when we'recommunicating with students, whether it's
a large group, a small group, or one-on-one,we are performing and we want to get our message
(26:58):
across, and I think we need to exaggerateour gestures a little bit in those contexts.
That's okay and that's probably way betterthan trying to hold them back.
Think about beat gestures when you're teaching.
Another kind of gesture that we do that canbe very helpful are gestures that show openness.
(27:22):
Just turn on just about any TED Talk.
Go to YouTube and find some TED Talks.
There's a bajillion of them there, a bajillionand a half maybe.
What you want to do is watch the gesturesof the people who are speaking.
Look for the ones that have a lot of downloadsbecause those are going to be really popular
ones, so you assume the speaker's really good.
(27:44):
What you're going to see is that they immediatelyaddress the audience with their arms out and
probably their palms facing toward the audience,because that is almost sort of like a group
hug in a way, isn't it?
It's a very open gesture that establishesa kind of connection with each and every audience
(28:06):
member that we wouldn't get if we were juststanding there with our arms down to our sides
or our hands resting on the keyboard so thatwe can advance the next slide, or holding
onto the side of a lectern, or holding ontoa back of a chair or something.
Even if we're very informal and we think we'rebeing open and we feel like we're being open,
(28:27):
if we don't gesture openness and not justat the beginning, but watch the TED Talks
and you'll see that throughout the talk, theycontinue to do that sort of thing.
For many of those speakers, it's their go-togesture.
When they're not doing other kinds of gestures,like a downbeat, a beat gesture for practice,
(28:47):
practice, practice, they go right back tothat open arm gesture or something like it,
their version of the open arm gesture.
Try to find a comfortable open arm or otherkind of open gesture that you can use in your
communications with your students.
Another kind of gesture that would be in betweenthose open gestures is making shapes with
(29:11):
our hands.
Don't we already do that a lot?
I bet, if you're listening right now and you'vetaught A&P for any length of time, you've
probably done that.
Even as an A&P student I used to do that.
And that is, if I'm talking about the eyeball,I sometimes will motion with my hands a ball
in front of me.
(29:31):
If I want to talk about the anterior of theeyeball, I'll use one hand and do a chopping
motion next to my other hand that's curvedto represent that ball that's still there,
imaginary ball.
That's like, okay, that's the anterior, that'sthe front of the eyeball that I want to talk
about.
And then I can start talking about the irisor talking about the pupil and things like
(29:55):
that.
When I talk about the pupil, I might makea little circle with my fingers and show that
I'm talking about a round opening when I talkabout the pupil.
We do that a lot, don't we, with all kindsof structures in the body.
But even when we're talking about processesin the body, we will often take our hands
and make a downward motion when we talk aboutblood glucose level goes down in the circumstances
(30:22):
or the blood glucose level we would expectto go up in this other circumstance.
I'm doing it.
Imagine me here sitting in my office lookingat my notes here and I'm taking my hand and
making a stepwise motion going up.
I don't always use those steps, but when I'mthinking about physiological mechanisms, that's
(30:45):
where my head goes right away is there's alwaysa series of steps involved.
I recommend that we find clear gestures andwe use them and exaggerate them.
I think also we need to think about how ourgestures fit along with what we're saying.
If we're saying something unexpected, maybewe should use some gestures that underscore
(31:11):
the fact that we understand that this is unexpectedto hear from us, or if it's something that
is the same old thing, practice, practice,practice, then maybe we have some gestures
or body language that imparts that as well.
We need to think about gestures not only thatwe make with our hands and our whole body,
(31:31):
but also gestures we make with our face.
Human faces are very expressive, and so weneed to maybe exaggerate some of those expressions
a little bit to get our idea across even betterto our students than if we're not.
And as I say, even in a situation if you'reonly using audio like you would be on a phone
(31:53):
call, or if you use audio, maybe podcastsor something, with your own students as part
of your course, audio summaries of differentconcepts and so on, or audio reviews before
an exam, you can do that and go ahead andmake your gestures while you're doing that,
just as I'm doing now with the podcast.
Because as I say, I really think that doesadd to the efficiency of communication.
(32:19):
There's a link and there are some other informationabout gestures.
I don't want to spoil all the fun, all thesurprises you'll get when you read the article,
but that'll get us started in thinking aboutgestures as part of our teaching persona.
>>Kevin Patton: In an earlier segment, I was discussing playfulness (32:33):
undefined
as a potential aspect of our teaching persona,and I try to incorporate that in my own teaching
persona because I think playfulness reallydoes engage students more than not having
a playful aspect to the teaching and learningatmosphere in a course.
(32:58):
But there is another aspect of playfulnessthat I want to circle back to for just a moment.
I was reminded of it when I read a recentarticle in Times Higher Education about the
value of play, not just playfulness, but actualplay, playing in the university classroom.
(33:22):
As matter of fact, the title of this pieceis called Reimagining University Learning
with Play.
It's really a great essay.
It's really worth reading, and I don't wantto get into all of it here, and I certainly
couldn't summarize it as well as it is written.
It's written by an English composition professor,so no wonder it's so well-written.
(33:46):
Anyway, what it gets into a lot and what Iwant to bring up here is two big things.
One is it's really important to remember thatwhat play is in nature, and we know that not
only humans play, but animals play too.
I learned this firsthand with my work veryearly in my career as a zookeeper and wild
(34:15):
animal trainer, and that included spendingsome time as an apprentice lion tamer.
Many people don't realize how lion tamingis done, not that we're actually taming of
the lion anyway.
It's lion training.
They don't realize how it's done.
The usual method, as like any kind of teaching,there are a variety of different methods that
(34:38):
different people use, but there's a lot ofsimilarity.
Most people, most that are working at thesame time that are contemporaries of each
other are using very similar techniques.
That is true in lion taming as well.
These days, and actually for a long time now,the usual approach to lion taming is using
(35:00):
play.
This is true for training other wild animalsand even domestic animals too, depending on
the kind of training that you want to do.
But it's typical in training big cats thatyou would let your lions and tigers play with
each other and with you and with various propsand equipment and so on.
(35:20):
One thing that we would do is bring our animalsin, let them play around in the performance
arena.
There might be a big globe that one of thetigers has learned to walk on and some young
lions may climb on it and think that's a lotof fun.
It's hard to do.
It's hard even for a cat to balance on a balland walk it along the ground, and yet we had
(35:45):
a lion that taught himself how to do that.
Why?
By playing.
He thought it was a great game.
By the way, what we did with that is we reinforcedit so that he would do it on command.
In a way, that was his ball.
Later on, every time he came into the performancearena for an actual performance and the ball
(36:07):
was rolled out, he was waiting for his nameto be called because he knew how to do that,
and he wanted to do that because that wasa fun thing for him.
He had mastered it.
That's how a lot of tricks are trained.
You see what the animal wants to do and youjust reinforce that.
Sometimes you nudge it along and set it upif you want a particular cat to try the ball
(36:30):
out.
Well, you can manage that and have that bethe only thing available to play with.
You can nudge an animal toward one prop oranother or entice them on top of something
you want them to jump onto using a littlepiece of meat usually or some praise and hugging
and rubbing.
(36:50):
Lions love to be rubbed.
That's how that's done.
But an aspect of that is that that lion thattaught himself more or less to get on top
of the ball and roll it along the ground,he didn't master that right away.
He had to learn some things about how to balancehis own body, how to get up on the ball without
(37:16):
it rolling out from under him.
There were all kinds of aspects to that, andit was a difficult thing to do, and it took
him quite a while to get really good at it.
It took him quite a while to get bad at it.
After he was bad at it, he then later gotgood at it.
That's something that we fail to rememberI think sometimes with our students when they're
learning A&P.
(37:36):
I think we need to remind our students thatthey forget to remember this aspect of learning,
and that is that it's hard.
In the play part of it, the fun part of playmaybe I should say, comes in when we're done
after the hard part is over.
When the hard part is happening, we're frustrated.
(37:59):
We're sweating.
We're working hard.
But when that part is over, even if we haven'treally mastered whatever it is we're trying
to master in our playtime, when we're done,we feel some level of satisfaction.
We feel like we had fun doing that.
A lot of play that we do as humans, even asadult humans, a lot of the sports we play,
(38:24):
they're not easy, they're difficult.
Sometimes the more difficult they are, themore satisfied we feel when we're done with
a play session.
Whether we've achieved the goal we wantedto achieve or not, it still feels like fun.
It still feels like something we want to doagain.
If we look at teaching and learning A&P thatway and try to emphasize and appreciate, be
(38:50):
mindful of that play aspect of it that we'replaying around here.
It's okay if we fail a few times.
We need to set up a situation where failurescan happen.
Low stakes or no stakes testing is somethingI've talked about a lot over the years in
this podcast.
That would be an example of a way to failand get up again and fail and get up again
(39:13):
without it harming the overall grade, whichwe know is so important in so many different
ways to both students and to the educationalculture at large.
And really just step back and let it be playtimein our class and have fun and really look
for opportunities to have fun and really tryto find ways to emphasize to students and
(39:38):
remind them to be mindful of the fun aspectof it.
But another thing that this article talksabout that I want to call out that I think
is very important, and this worked with lionsand tigers back in the day as well, and that
is the play isn't going to work well unlessthere is a level of trust in the situation.
(40:01):
When I was working with lions and tigers,if I was in there playing with them, they
had to be able to trust me.
They had to know that I wasn't in there toharm them in any way.
That's another thing that people get wrongabout lion taming, that we come in with a
whip and a chair and start beating the animals.
(40:22):
And that's a good way to get them to not trustyou right away.
As a matter of fact, I did at one time workwith some animals that had been treated that
way by someone who didn't know what they weredoing, and the animals were psychologically
damaged, and it took a long time to get themto trust me and even get close to them.
(40:43):
They did eventually start working and playingand so on and it worked out okay, but it would've
been much better had they not had that experience,obviously.
That doesn't work for training, and that'strue for our students as well.
When we come in with that whip and chair attitude,that is we come in with a persona that is
(41:04):
very demanding without also being very warmand friendly and supportive, then we're going
to get into some trouble because the studentsare going to back off and they're not going
to want to play.
They're not going to listen to any talk yougive them about, hey, this is fun, isn't it?
No, it's not.
(41:26):
You're mean.
I know that sometimes students interpret usbeing demanding as being mean.
That's not the kind of meanness I'm talkingabout.
I'm talking having a classroom demeanor thatis not playful, that is the bad kind of demanding,
demanding only.
Sometimes called toxic rigor.
(41:48):
That's not what we want to do.
What we want to do is be that trusted friend,that trusted coach, that trusted playground
monitor who is going to be there and guidethe students along so that they're doing things
safely and they're doing things in a way thatthey can be nudged along like, hey, why don't
(42:12):
you try this?
That's not working.
Here's what works for me.
Here's what has worked for other students.
That trust part is a big part of play, andplay is one of those aspects of playfulness
that really is learning.
That's why animals play in the wild.
They play because they're learning to hunt.
(42:33):
They're learning to defend themselves.
They're learning to do all kinds of differentthings that they will need to do as an adult,
and even as adults they play to practice thoseskills and get better at those skills.
We can apply that principle easily to anyclassroom, including our own.
>>Kevin Patton: In talking about our teaching persona, I mentioned (42:52):
undefined
that it's really coming from our own selves.
It's not something made up.
It's not a facade.
It's not fake.
It's not all of ourselves, but it's thoseparts of ourselves that we want to put forward
(43:13):
and maybe amplify to our students to get themto see us in a way that's going to be helpful
for their learning.
It's going to promote an atmosphere in ourcourse that is going to promote success in
learning.
There's a topic that I want to circle backto because I've already discussed it before.
(43:36):
In a couple of different previous episodes,back in episode 63, I talked about making
mistakes and what to do when we make a mistakeand gave some practical tips there.
And then in episode 51, which came beforethat, I talked a lot about what was called
the case for transparency and why transparencywith our students is important.
(44:00):
Both of those ideas play into an article thatI read recently that came from the Harvard
Business Review, where they were looking atwhat some researchers had done where they
asked leaders in various organizations.
Isn't that what we are?
We're leaders in an organization called acourse.
(44:23):
Anyway, they had leaders in various organizationstell how they would introduce themselves to
their prospective employee, or in our casestudents.
What most of them did was they talked aboutall their strengths.
Period.
That was it.
They talked about their strengths.
(44:45):
The researchers found out that's a mistake.
They did some testing of different groupsand they found that if the leaders also revealed
some of their own weaknesses, some of themistakes they've made, as long as they're
not serious criminal, immoral type thingsthat are lying deep down in there, and I hope
(45:15):
that you don't have any or many of those thatwe need to worry about, but do worry about
them because that's not something that wewant to make part of our teaching persona.
But everybody has weaknesses, and there aremany common weaknesses and common mistakes
that we make.
I can talk about the experiences of skippingclasses when I shouldn't have as an undergraduate.
(45:38):
I can talk about experiences of not studyinglong enough or hard enough or mostly not in
the right way when I was a student and howthat affected my grades.
There's lots of different kinds of mistakes,and they're going to see me make mistakes.
As I mentioned in that episode 63 segmentabout making mistakes, I make mistakes in
(46:01):
front of students, and sometimes studentspoint out those mistakes and how I handle
that is important.
If I resist it and try to fight against itand act as if I did not make a mistake, that's
not good.
No.
Oh, you think my students are going to relateto me, they're going to trust me if I do that?
I don't think they are.
(46:22):
My point here is that our teaching persona,when we're thinking about it, when we're figuring
out what is it we're going to present to students,let's be transparent about, let's be open
and honest about our flaws and put it outthere.
Maybe make an effort to put it out there evenwhen it doesn't just happen to come up in
(46:46):
the course of things and point out what ourweaknesses are.
Come back to it every once in a while andmention it.
Not make it part of the course or part ofthe content of the course, but make it part
of our teaching persona so that it's thereand visible and known by our students.
What they found in the research, by the way,is that people who do that, leaders who do
(47:09):
that, and I would go far as to say teacherswho do that, they're going to come across
as more authentic.
Why are they going to come across as moreauthentic?
Because they're being more authentic.
They're not just talking about the good partsof themselves.
They're talking about the parts that can usesome work.
(47:30):
When we do that, that's going to generatesome goodwill and it's going to build that
trust that we're after.
There's a link, as there always is, to thisarticle in the show notes.
>>Kevin Patton: In this episode, I discussed our teaching (47:44):
undefined
persona, the person our students see us asin our course.
I talked about how we might want to stressour supportive attitude and how we can act
on that and how gestures can influence ourcommunication with students.
(48:06):
I talked about how play and playfulness canbe part of that game of learning, and we discussed
why authenticity is important in our teachingpersona.
If you don't see links in your podcast player,go to the show notes at the episode page at
theAPprofessor.org/137, which I hope is workingby the time you hear this.
(48:36):
That darn website has been having the longestcase of hiccups I've ever seen.
But despite the uncertainty, we carry on,right?
If the website is down when you visit, goto Listennotes.com.
That's Listennotes, all one word, dot com,and find us there, or really, you can find
(48:59):
us anywhere you listen to audio, but you wantto look for a place that actually has the
show notes visible.
Once you find the show notes, you can exploreany ideas mentioned in this podcast.
While you're there, you can claim your digitalcredential for professional development just
for listening to this episode.
You're always encouraged to call in with yourquestions, comments, and ideas at the podcast
(49:24):
hotline, that's 1-833-LION-DEN or 1-833-546-6336,or send a recording or written message to
podcast@theAPprofessor.org.
I'll see you down the road.
>>Aileen Park: The A&P Professor is hosted by Dr. Kevin Patton, (49:45):
undefined
an award-winning professor and textbook authorin human anatomy and physiology.
>>Kevin Patton: This episode is not to be used as a personal (49:58):
undefined
flotation device.
undefined
be playful and serious at the same time ispossible and it defines the ideal mental condition.
>>Aileen Park: Welcome to The A&P Professor, a few minutes (00:14):
undefined
to focus on teaching human anatomy and physiologywith a veteran educator and teaching mentor,
your host, Kevin Patton.
>>Kevin Patton: In episode 136, I discussed topics related (00:28):
undefined
to the teaching persona that we project toour students.
>>Kevin Patton: I was recently thinking about one particular (00:41):
undefined
aspect of my teaching persona, and I'll tellyou about that in just a minute.
But before I do, I want to review what I meanby a teaching persona.
(01:02):
It first came up way back at the beginning,the olden days of this podcast, in episode
12, so that was like five years ago, and Idid an episode that featured a segment on
storytelling and why I think storytellingis a good way to think about what we do as
(01:23):
instructors.
Not only in what we might do in a lecture,a mini-lecture, a demo, a pre-lecture, something
like that where we can really see ourselvesas storytellers, but we're also storytellers
when we're deciding how to build our courseand what kinds of activities to do in our
course, what kind of strategies to use inour course.
It's all part of a story.
(01:44):
We can storyboard those ideas.
So, that came up in episode 12.
In that process, I was talking about the factthat professional storytellers, they adopt
a persona, maybe more than one if they'reactually acting out parts as part of the story.
But if they're just telling the story, ifthey're just the teller of the tale, they
(02:04):
might decide they want to be very dramaticor very active as they tell the story, or
they may decide that they want to be verymysterious or maybe very low-key, or maybe
they want to switch back and forth betweenbeing very energetic and very low-key.
There's all kinds of possibilities, and itdepends in part on the story and it depends
(02:25):
on part on the storyteller themselves andhow they've developed that story and what
their own personality is like.
That's what I mean by persona.
It's the personality that we're projectingin the classroom.
It's not our entire personality, but it'saspects of our personality that we may be
exaggerating or at least pulling to the frontin that context.
(02:48):
We could think of it also maybe in a moregeneral way as our affect in the classroom.
How do we come across in the classroom tostudents?
And that, by the way, is a very importantpart of the teaching persona or storytelling
persona if we want to think of it that way,and that is how is it being received by students?
About the only way that we can tell how it'sbeing received by students is if they tell
(03:13):
us.
We need feedback, right?
And sometimes I get some spontaneous feedbackfrom my students.
As a matter of fact, that happened just yesterdayin a one-on-one I was having with one of my
students, and he remarked about the playfulaspect of my particular persona in the course
that we just started about a week ago, thatthat really came across to him and he found
(03:35):
it very engaging and helpful and was happyabout it.
Now, we could have students that tell us,"Hey, you're just being too playful here.
This is distracting me."
That could happen.
It could be spontaneous like that, or sometimeswe have to just ask them.
We can do a poll.
We can include that as a question on our endof course evaluation if we have the opportunity
(03:57):
to do that.
Or as I've mentioned in previous episodes,I like to do debriefings sometimes in the
middle of the semester and at the end, sometimesjust at the end of the semester and talk about,
well, what worked for you?
What didn't work for you?
If I'm not getting any feedback on my teachingpersona, then I might ask about that.
(04:18):
How am I coming across?
Do you feel like I'm supportive?
Do you feel like I'm a kind teacher?
Do you feel like I'm a rigorous teacher?
Do you feel like I'm too energetic or notenergetic enough?
What's going on there?
That's one aspect of the persona.
But I want to also get back to the playfulaspect that I just mentioned in my own teaching
(04:41):
persona, and that came up right after thestorytelling persona came up in episode 12.
The next episode was episode 13, which I'mnow realizing is I see the number 13 in my
notes here that maybe I should have skippedthat.
Isn't bad luck to have an episode 13?
Don't they do that in hotels, skip the 13thfloor when they're numbering the floors?
(05:04):
I don't know if you want to go back to thatone and listen to it because it might bring
you bad luck.
I'm just warning you.
But that one was focusing on this idea thatbeing playful and serious at the same time
is not only possible, as the quote from JohnDewey at the beginning of this episode said,
not only is that possible, it defines theideal mental condition.
(05:27):
I took that and applied that to this ideaof a storytelling persona that is a playful
one, and that's something that I want to developin my teaching persona.
That's the kind of classroom I want to haveis a playful classroom because we know that
in a playful atmosphere, that's where we'remore engaged.
(05:48):
That's where we pay more attention.
That's where we have more fun, and thereforethings are more meaningful to us.
That's what I like, but I think there areother kinds of environments and teaching personae
that we can use in the classroom besides theone I use.
That's something that we each want to developon our own and we each want to think about.
(06:11):
When I say develop, that's the point I wantto make today, and that is the reason I was
recently thinking about it was I was thinkingabout a particular aspect of that teaching
persona and whether I'm really living up tothe ideal I've created for myself.
I don't think we can expect that of ourselvesanyway to always be 100% playful, 100% serious,
(06:34):
100% whatever it is we decide that we're goingto be in our teaching persona.
I mean, we can't do that 100%, and we certainlydon't want to put our entire focus on that
because then we lose the story.
We lose the content of the story.
We lose those concepts that we're trying toget our students to learn and to understand
and be able to apply.
(06:55):
What I'm saying is is that we do need to thinkabout it occasionally.
Go back to it and maybe tune it up.
In this case, it had to do with an aspectof the teaching persona that I like to project,
and that is projecting the idea that I ama supportive instructor.
That when I say to my students, "I got yourback," I want to really mean it that I got
(07:21):
their back, and I want to project the ideathat I have their back.
There's a lot of evidence that tells us thatif students from the very beginning of the
course feel like their instructor is supportiveand really does have their back and will help
them when the time comes to help them, thenthey're going to do better in that course,
(07:42):
at least as a group they're going to do better.
Probably every single individual in thereis going to do a little bit better than they
otherwise would have knowing that.
Now, we know based on our experience thatnot every student, as a matter of fact, the
majority of students are not going to callon us for help for a variety of reasons.
(08:02):
But if they truly believe that we're willingto help them, then they're going to benefit
from that aspect of the teaching persona thatI'm trying to project in the classroom.
The reason it came up is I was getting a littleannoyed with some students who needed lots
of help, and the stuff they needed help withwas stuff that, well, yeah, I can see how
(08:27):
that could create an obstacle.
You would want a little bit of coaching orat least somebody in your corner saying, "Yeah,
you can do that.
Let's do it together.
I'm right here if you run into any problems."
I was thinking, oh man, this is just so annoyinghaving them calling all the time and so on.
(08:48):
I don't usually think that, by the way.
I usually relish that because I teach entirelyonline these days, and so I'm glad to have
opportunities to have one-on-one interactionswith my students.
That surprised me for that reason too.
But then I realized, hey, this is part ofthe kind of teacher that I want to be.
(09:08):
Not just the kind of person I want to be,but the kind of teacher I want to be.
Both of those are important I think in teaching,but it's more specific when we think about,
well, what kind of teaching persona do I wantto have in my classroom?
I want to have a supportive persona.
If I'm brushing away some of these requestsfor my help right at the beginning of the
(09:29):
course, that's going to affect those studentswho are at the receiving end of that.
If they even get a hint of that going on inmy brain, they're going to pull back and they're
probably not going to ask me for help againeven when they need help.
That's not good, because not only can thataffect them in the course and possibly affect
(09:50):
their success in the course, but it can affectthem in succeeding courses with other instructors
who may be much more supportive than I amand they're just not given that benefit of
the doubt because of the bad experience thatstudent had with me.
I think that carries on into their careerand other places as well.
(10:11):
I think that a lot of times we don't thinkabout that superpower that we have as educators,
and it is a strong, strong superpower thatwe have in people's lives.
The least little thing that we say to a student,especially if we're addressing them as an
individual, can have a huge impact on therest of their lives.
(10:34):
Think about it for a minute.
Think back to your early days of schooling,in grade school, in high school, and as an
undergraduate, and then later as a graduatestudent.
Think about those moments when something ateacher, an instructor, a faculty member,
a mentor said to you that continues to havean impact on you today.
(11:01):
Just in this moment of really trying to focuson what I'm saying, but also trying to think
back, I can think of several things that havebeen said to me over the years.
Some of them have been wonderfully positiveand continue to encourage me, and some of
them have been horrible statements that weremade to me that still affect me in a negative
(11:24):
way to this day.
I don't think they were meant as negativeas they came across to me as I felt them as
I received them, but they certainly weren'tpositive in any way.
That's something that we need to be carefulof.
We need to make sure that when we're havinga bad day and we have them, that we don't
(11:45):
let that carry through to our communicationwith students, especially to individual students,
that we don't let it affect our teaching persona.
Yeah, being tired and being frustrated withthings, being upset with something going on
in our life, maybe even in our professionallife, maybe even with that particular student
we're interacting with, but not let it comeacross because we as professionals are expected
(12:10):
to step beyond that, at least in that momentbecause we want to be supportive.
That is if we've adopted that attitude, whichI think is something we all ought to weave
into our teaching persona, but I certainlyhave adopted it in mind and I want to.
The context in which I was thinking aboutthis was a case where I was letting things
(12:35):
or was about to let things really affect theway I was going to be communicating with students.
Beyond that, it's not just the way I couldhave come across had I not caught myself,
the other thing is, is why are you frustratedat doing this?
That's what I was asking myself.
Because the thing is, is I don't just wantto come across as supportive, I want to be
(13:00):
supportive.
I think that's what should be behind our teachingpersona.
It's not a facade, at least it shouldn't bea facade.
It shouldn't be fake.
It should be a projection of our real selves.
It's just that we're emphasizing some partsof our real selves and putting them out there
(13:20):
for students to see.
That frustration is part of my real self too,but I think in a professional situation, I
need to pull that back and really stick withthose more positive parts of what's going
on inside me with my student, because that'smy role is to be a supporter of this student.
(13:41):
I can walk out of the classroom or step awayfrom that Zoom meeting with a student or phone
call with a student, and then I can vent tomy pets or to the walls or to the books around
me and so on.
I can do that, but that's not something Iwant to do with an individual student.
Yeah, I think that this teaching persona reallyis who we should be.
(14:05):
We should decide who are we going to be asteachers and then work on projecting that.
That's what I mean by teaching persona.
I have a few other aspects of the teachingpersona that I'll get to in some of the other
segments of this episode.
>>Kevin Patton: I want to spend just a moment longer thinking (14:21):
undefined
about that supportive aspect of what our teachingpersona might be like.
Something that I stated I already value inmy own teaching persona, the kind of teacher
that I want to be is a supportive teacher.
For many years, I don't know, maybe it wasdecades, I thought that it's best to let students
(14:47):
be responsible for getting their own needsmet.
That is, I figured if I made myself available,that was enough.
But you know what?
That's based on my own experience as a studentand it's based on my own way of thinking.
We know that there is diversity among ourstudents.
(15:12):
They're not all young little Kevins who dothings the way Kevin always did.
Well, first of all, the context is different.
Things are different now than they were whenI was a young student, and so who knows how
I would've been?
Because the culture has changed, society haschanged, schools have changed, the way we
(15:33):
do teaching and learning has changed.
Yeah, we can't just base it on our own wayof thinking or the way that we did it or what
our attitude might have been when we werein that student or this student's situation.
Now, after years of thinking, okay, if thestudents need help, they're going to come
(15:54):
to me for help, I eventually learned thatto be inclusive, I have to consider the fact
that not everyone knows that they can andshould make direct contact with a professor
to sort out what their needs and goals are.
For example, many, not all, but many studentsfrom historically disadvantaged communities
(16:20):
do not know that they should be approachingtheir professor for help.
Even if they've been told that they shouldapproach their instructors, many of these
students have cultural perspectives that couldblock them from doing so, a hurdle they just
can't get themselves over.
(16:43):
Approaching authority figures isn't alwaysseen as being effective and is seen as something
that could turn out very badly.
Now, me being an older white man as theirprofessor, that might make it even harder
for some of those students, and it may reinforcethose barriers that they have to coming to
(17:08):
approach me.
Sometimes females have hesitancy or outrightfear about approaching a male instructor like
myself, or vice versa, one-on-one or possiblyeven in a small group.
Many students on the autism spectrum or withother so-called invisible challenges will
(17:30):
not reveal that to instructors.
In other words, their challenges remain invisibleto the instructor, so they don't know that
these students are challenged.
Some of those students, depending on the kindof challenge they have, simply will not approach
instructors when they need help.
I've dealt with some students that are likethat.
(17:53):
I know some students that are that very well.
It doesn't fit with my way of thinking, soit's hard for me to imagine that this is so
hard for them to do that, but it is, and I'mjust going to have to trust that it is for
them.
It's like jumping off a cliff as far as they'reconcerned, and I just don't see that.
(18:16):
I can't see that, but that's how it is forthem, at least some of those students.
Even so-called responsible students, likeI thought I was, benefit from instructors
who keep tabs on them and reach out to thestudent when they're falling behind.
As an undergraduate, I couldn't believe thatmy physics professor, Dr. Stacey, in a class
(18:42):
of about 200 or so students, wrote me personalnotes on some low scoring tests, even noticing
my high rate of absences from his lectures,which back then was unusual because the professors
didn't take roll call.
They didn't record absences, but he noticedthat I wasn't there for all of the classes.
(19:07):
But when I became an instructor years later,I forgot how much that benefited me.
But eventually I got it.
And now, I myself keep tabs in a way evenin large courses and reach out to students
who aren't keeping up.
(19:28):
It turns out that it's not that difficultor time-consuming.
I know it can be scary in a large class, evenin a small class it can be scary.
Oh my gosh, if I open myself up to this, allmy time will be taken up by doing this.
I've tried it and I've found that that isnot usually true.
I mean, there are little spurts sometimeswhere it seems a very heavy burden, but it's
(19:53):
only heavy for a short time and not very often,at least, again, in my experience.
But the thing is, it can really help turnaround a student who might otherwise drop
out of college entirely.
You know what?
Even if it just helps one out of those 200students, I'll take it.
(20:14):
That's great.
I've done my job if I help just one studentby doing what I can to keep tabs on them.
Of course, there are limits to what I cando, but I'm going to go ahead and do what
I can.
If we want to project the idea that we wantto have an inclusive course and that we're
inclusive educators and that we have a supportiveteaching persona, then I strongly suggest
(20:41):
that we do not exclude students who may havebarriers to taking responsibility in ways
that our cultural biases have influenced ourthinking.
Perhaps we should avoid those kind of statements,especially to prospective employers when we're
(21:04):
interviewing or maybe going up for promotionand announce, "Well, I want my students to
be responsible.
I force them to be responsible.
Students should be responsible."
Well, yeah, we need to be careful about howwe explain that because it could be taken
as a not very supportive attitude.
(21:28):
That may not be what we mean, but we needto think about how we're expressing that,
and we need to think about how we are livingthat in the classroom as part of our classroom
demeanor.
Perhaps more importantly than the messagewe're sending to prospective employers or
to a committee considering our promotion,probably the most important thing is to think
(21:52):
about how it plays for students because that'swho's going to be affected by our classroom
persona.
>>Kevin Patton: As I just mentioned, I've been thinking about (22:00):
undefined
my teaching persona.
I've been thinking about those aspects ofmy personality, myself that I want to project
to my students to make it a better experiencefor them and make it more likely that they're
going to succeed.
And as I've been thinking about that, I recentlyran across an article that pulled together
(22:25):
some results of recent and sometimes not sorecent research about gestures as we're communicating
with people that I think really plays intothis idea of a classroom persona.
When I say classroom persona, I'm referringto classroom in the very general, broad, abstract,
(22:49):
metaphorical sense.
I don't necessarily mean being in a classroomdoing a lecture.
It could be in a classroom doing lots of things,having a discussion, doing a demonstration,
being involved in active learning processesthat are going on in the classroom.
(23:09):
But it could be in a lab.
It could be in a lecture hall.
It could be online.
It could be in the online environment.
It could be asynchronous or synchronous.
I'm just talking about communication in generalwithin the confines of a course.
Maybe I should use that term instead of classroom.
But if I do use it, the classroom inadvertently,I mean course, some kind of a course environment.
(23:32):
It could even be on a field trip, but that'spart of the course.
All right.
One of the things that we can do that researchshows is helpful is use hand gestures when
we speak.
There's quite a bit of research actually thatemphasizes that using hand gestures as we
(23:53):
speak, as long as we're visible when we speak,obviously, but I use hand gestures.
I'm using hand gestures right now and youcan't see me, but I think it probably affects
the way I'm communicating.
I think if I just put my hands in my lap andkept them there the whole time, I don't think
I would come across exactly the same way thatI'm coming across now.
(24:16):
I don't know, maybe there's been some researchon that.
Well, if you find some, let me know.
That would be fascinating to read that.
But the research that was mentioned in thisarticle, which I will have linked in the show
notes as I always do, it talks about the kindsof gestures that we can use when we're communicating,
the kinds of hand gestures, but I think wecan also extend that to body language in general
(24:38):
too, right?
You may already know this about me that Ihave spent many years actively mentoring other
A&P faculty, some of them new to teaching,some of them been teaching for quite a while.
Not only do most of them not really thinkabout their teaching persona much, if at all,
(24:59):
until we have that conversation and then theydo it a lot, but I think they don't really
keep up with it as I'm encouraging us to doin this episode.
I think that they leave on some things thatthey could be thinking about and that would
include hand gestures.
There are many kinds of hand gestures.
For example, there's something called beatgestures.
(25:22):
That would be something like, oh, when youwatch a band leader, for example, and you
see that the band leader may be using theirhand or even a baton to at least during some
parts of the performance give a beat.
They're using maybe just their finger andthey're going down with every beat, first
beat, second beat, third beat.
(25:43):
We often do that as we speak, especially ifthere's a series of things that we want to
emphasize.
For example, in my course, we're always emphasizingthe phrase practice, practice, practice.
When it comes up in class, and I do try tofind every opportunity to bring that in there
because it's one of those playful things andit's also an important principle, right, is
(26:08):
keep reminding our students that the onlyway to get better, the only way to really
understand anything that we're doing in ourcourse is to continue practice, retrieval
practice, all kinds of different practice.
Yeah, we use that phrase a lot, practice,practice, practice.
I just caught myself now, I used a beat gesture.
I just used my hand to on every time I saidthe word practice downbeat, downbeat, downbeat.
(26:33):
We do that a lot.
That might be something to think about andnot hold ourselves back from that.
I think sometimes we don't want to get toogesturey, but really in live performance and
in a sense that's what we're doing when we'recommunicating with students, whether it's
a large group, a small group, or one-on-one,we are performing and we want to get our message
(26:58):
across, and I think we need to exaggerateour gestures a little bit in those contexts.
That's okay and that's probably way betterthan trying to hold them back.
Think about beat gestures when you're teaching.
Another kind of gesture that we do that canbe very helpful are gestures that show openness.
(27:22):
Just turn on just about any TED Talk.
Go to YouTube and find some TED Talks.
There's a bajillion of them there, a bajillionand a half maybe.
What you want to do is watch the gesturesof the people who are speaking.
Look for the ones that have a lot of downloadsbecause those are going to be really popular
ones, so you assume the speaker's really good.
(27:44):
What you're going to see is that they immediatelyaddress the audience with their arms out and
probably their palms facing toward the audience,because that is almost sort of like a group
hug in a way, isn't it?
It's a very open gesture that establishesa kind of connection with each and every audience
(28:06):
member that we wouldn't get if we were juststanding there with our arms down to our sides
or our hands resting on the keyboard so thatwe can advance the next slide, or holding
onto the side of a lectern, or holding ontoa back of a chair or something.
Even if we're very informal and we think we'rebeing open and we feel like we're being open,
(28:27):
if we don't gesture openness and not justat the beginning, but watch the TED Talks
and you'll see that throughout the talk, theycontinue to do that sort of thing.
For many of those speakers, it's their go-togesture.
When they're not doing other kinds of gestures,like a downbeat, a beat gesture for practice,
(28:47):
practice, practice, they go right back tothat open arm gesture or something like it,
their version of the open arm gesture.
Try to find a comfortable open arm or otherkind of open gesture that you can use in your
communications with your students.
Another kind of gesture that would be in betweenthose open gestures is making shapes with
(29:11):
our hands.
Don't we already do that a lot?
I bet, if you're listening right now and you'vetaught A&P for any length of time, you've
probably done that.
Even as an A&P student I used to do that.
And that is, if I'm talking about the eyeball,I sometimes will motion with my hands a ball
in front of me.
(29:31):
If I want to talk about the anterior of theeyeball, I'll use one hand and do a chopping
motion next to my other hand that's curvedto represent that ball that's still there,
imaginary ball.
That's like, okay, that's the anterior, that'sthe front of the eyeball that I want to talk
about.
And then I can start talking about the irisor talking about the pupil and things like
(29:55):
that.
When I talk about the pupil, I might makea little circle with my fingers and show that
I'm talking about a round opening when I talkabout the pupil.
We do that a lot, don't we, with all kindsof structures in the body.
But even when we're talking about processesin the body, we will often take our hands
and make a downward motion when we talk aboutblood glucose level goes down in the circumstances
(30:22):
or the blood glucose level we would expectto go up in this other circumstance.
I'm doing it.
Imagine me here sitting in my office lookingat my notes here and I'm taking my hand and
making a stepwise motion going up.
I don't always use those steps, but when I'mthinking about physiological mechanisms, that's
(30:45):
where my head goes right away is there's alwaysa series of steps involved.
I recommend that we find clear gestures andwe use them and exaggerate them.
I think also we need to think about how ourgestures fit along with what we're saying.
If we're saying something unexpected, maybewe should use some gestures that underscore
(31:11):
the fact that we understand that this is unexpectedto hear from us, or if it's something that
is the same old thing, practice, practice,practice, then maybe we have some gestures
or body language that imparts that as well.
We need to think about gestures not only thatwe make with our hands and our whole body,
(31:31):
but also gestures we make with our face.
Human faces are very expressive, and so weneed to maybe exaggerate some of those expressions
a little bit to get our idea across even betterto our students than if we're not.
And as I say, even in a situation if you'reonly using audio like you would be on a phone
(31:53):
call, or if you use audio, maybe podcastsor something, with your own students as part
of your course, audio summaries of differentconcepts and so on, or audio reviews before
an exam, you can do that and go ahead andmake your gestures while you're doing that,
just as I'm doing now with the podcast.
Because as I say, I really think that doesadd to the efficiency of communication.
(32:19):
There's a link and there are some other informationabout gestures.
I don't want to spoil all the fun, all thesurprises you'll get when you read the article,
but that'll get us started in thinking aboutgestures as part of our teaching persona.
>>Kevin Patton: In an earlier segment, I was discussing playfulness (32:33):
undefined
as a potential aspect of our teaching persona,and I try to incorporate that in my own teaching
persona because I think playfulness reallydoes engage students more than not having
a playful aspect to the teaching and learningatmosphere in a course.
(32:58):
But there is another aspect of playfulnessthat I want to circle back to for just a moment.
I was reminded of it when I read a recentarticle in Times Higher Education about the
value of play, not just playfulness, but actualplay, playing in the university classroom.
(33:22):
As matter of fact, the title of this pieceis called Reimagining University Learning
with Play.
It's really a great essay.
It's really worth reading, and I don't wantto get into all of it here, and I certainly
couldn't summarize it as well as it is written.
It's written by an English composition professor,so no wonder it's so well-written.
(33:46):
Anyway, what it gets into a lot and what Iwant to bring up here is two big things.
One is it's really important to remember thatwhat play is in nature, and we know that not
only humans play, but animals play too.
I learned this firsthand with my work veryearly in my career as a zookeeper and wild
(34:15):
animal trainer, and that included spendingsome time as an apprentice lion tamer.
Many people don't realize how lion tamingis done, not that we're actually taming of
the lion anyway.
It's lion training.
They don't realize how it's done.
The usual method, as like any kind of teaching,there are a variety of different methods that
(34:38):
different people use, but there's a lot ofsimilarity.
Most people, most that are working at thesame time that are contemporaries of each
other are using very similar techniques.
That is true in lion taming as well.
These days, and actually for a long time now,the usual approach to lion taming is using
(35:00):
play.
This is true for training other wild animalsand even domestic animals too, depending on
the kind of training that you want to do.
But it's typical in training big cats thatyou would let your lions and tigers play with
each other and with you and with various propsand equipment and so on.
(35:20):
One thing that we would do is bring our animalsin, let them play around in the performance
arena.
There might be a big globe that one of thetigers has learned to walk on and some young
lions may climb on it and think that's a lotof fun.
It's hard to do.
It's hard even for a cat to balance on a balland walk it along the ground, and yet we had
(35:45):
a lion that taught himself how to do that.
Why?
By playing.
He thought it was a great game.
By the way, what we did with that is we reinforcedit so that he would do it on command.
In a way, that was his ball.
Later on, every time he came into the performancearena for an actual performance and the ball
(36:07):
was rolled out, he was waiting for his nameto be called because he knew how to do that,
and he wanted to do that because that wasa fun thing for him.
He had mastered it.
That's how a lot of tricks are trained.
You see what the animal wants to do and youjust reinforce that.
Sometimes you nudge it along and set it upif you want a particular cat to try the ball
(36:30):
out.
Well, you can manage that and have that bethe only thing available to play with.
You can nudge an animal toward one prop oranother or entice them on top of something
you want them to jump onto using a littlepiece of meat usually or some praise and hugging
and rubbing.
(36:50):
Lions love to be rubbed.
That's how that's done.
But an aspect of that is that that lion thattaught himself more or less to get on top
of the ball and roll it along the ground,he didn't master that right away.
He had to learn some things about how to balancehis own body, how to get up on the ball without
(37:16):
it rolling out from under him.
There were all kinds of aspects to that, andit was a difficult thing to do, and it took
him quite a while to get really good at it.
It took him quite a while to get bad at it.
After he was bad at it, he then later gotgood at it.
That's something that we fail to rememberI think sometimes with our students when they're
learning A&P.
(37:36):
I think we need to remind our students thatthey forget to remember this aspect of learning,
and that is that it's hard.
In the play part of it, the fun part of playmaybe I should say, comes in when we're done
after the hard part is over.
When the hard part is happening, we're frustrated.
(37:59):
We're sweating.
We're working hard.
But when that part is over, even if we haven'treally mastered whatever it is we're trying
to master in our playtime, when we're done,we feel some level of satisfaction.
We feel like we had fun doing that.
A lot of play that we do as humans, even asadult humans, a lot of the sports we play,
(38:24):
they're not easy, they're difficult.
Sometimes the more difficult they are, themore satisfied we feel when we're done with
a play session.
Whether we've achieved the goal we wantedto achieve or not, it still feels like fun.
It still feels like something we want to doagain.
If we look at teaching and learning A&P thatway and try to emphasize and appreciate, be
(38:50):
mindful of that play aspect of it that we'replaying around here.
It's okay if we fail a few times.
We need to set up a situation where failurescan happen.
Low stakes or no stakes testing is somethingI've talked about a lot over the years in
this podcast.
That would be an example of a way to failand get up again and fail and get up again
(39:13):
without it harming the overall grade, whichwe know is so important in so many different
ways to both students and to the educationalculture at large.
And really just step back and let it be playtimein our class and have fun and really look
for opportunities to have fun and really tryto find ways to emphasize to students and
(39:38):
remind them to be mindful of the fun aspectof it.
But another thing that this article talksabout that I want to call out that I think
is very important, and this worked with lionsand tigers back in the day as well, and that
is the play isn't going to work well unlessthere is a level of trust in the situation.
(40:01):
When I was working with lions and tigers,if I was in there playing with them, they
had to be able to trust me.
They had to know that I wasn't in there toharm them in any way.
That's another thing that people get wrongabout lion taming, that we come in with a
whip and a chair and start beating the animals.
(40:22):
And that's a good way to get them to not trustyou right away.
As a matter of fact, I did at one time workwith some animals that had been treated that
way by someone who didn't know what they weredoing, and the animals were psychologically
damaged, and it took a long time to get themto trust me and even get close to them.
(40:43):
They did eventually start working and playingand so on and it worked out okay, but it would've
been much better had they not had that experience,obviously.
That doesn't work for training, and that'strue for our students as well.
When we come in with that whip and chair attitude,that is we come in with a persona that is
(41:04):
very demanding without also being very warmand friendly and supportive, then we're going
to get into some trouble because the studentsare going to back off and they're not going
to want to play.
They're not going to listen to any talk yougive them about, hey, this is fun, isn't it?
No, it's not.
(41:26):
You're mean.
I know that sometimes students interpret usbeing demanding as being mean.
That's not the kind of meanness I'm talkingabout.
I'm talking having a classroom demeanor thatis not playful, that is the bad kind of demanding,
demanding only.
Sometimes called toxic rigor.
(41:48):
That's not what we want to do.
What we want to do is be that trusted friend,that trusted coach, that trusted playground
monitor who is going to be there and guidethe students along so that they're doing things
safely and they're doing things in a way thatthey can be nudged along like, hey, why don't
(42:12):
you try this?
That's not working.
Here's what works for me.
Here's what has worked for other students.
That trust part is a big part of play, andplay is one of those aspects of playfulness
that really is learning.
That's why animals play in the wild.
They play because they're learning to hunt.
(42:33):
They're learning to defend themselves.
They're learning to do all kinds of differentthings that they will need to do as an adult,
and even as adults they play to practice thoseskills and get better at those skills.
We can apply that principle easily to anyclassroom, including our own.
>>Kevin Patton: In talking about our teaching persona, I mentioned (42:52):
undefined
that it's really coming from our own selves.
It's not something made up.
It's not a facade.
It's not fake.
It's not all of ourselves, but it's thoseparts of ourselves that we want to put forward
(43:13):
and maybe amplify to our students to get themto see us in a way that's going to be helpful
for their learning.
It's going to promote an atmosphere in ourcourse that is going to promote success in
learning.
There's a topic that I want to circle backto because I've already discussed it before.
(43:36):
In a couple of different previous episodes,back in episode 63, I talked about making
mistakes and what to do when we make a mistakeand gave some practical tips there.
And then in episode 51, which came beforethat, I talked a lot about what was called
the case for transparency and why transparencywith our students is important.
(44:00):
Both of those ideas play into an article thatI read recently that came from the Harvard
Business Review, where they were looking atwhat some researchers had done where they
asked leaders in various organizations.
Isn't that what we are?
We're leaders in an organization called acourse.
(44:23):
Anyway, they had leaders in various organizationstell how they would introduce themselves to
their prospective employee, or in our casestudents.
What most of them did was they talked aboutall their strengths.
Period.
That was it.
They talked about their strengths.
(44:45):
The researchers found out that's a mistake.
They did some testing of different groupsand they found that if the leaders also revealed
some of their own weaknesses, some of themistakes they've made, as long as they're
not serious criminal, immoral type thingsthat are lying deep down in there, and I hope
(45:15):
that you don't have any or many of those thatwe need to worry about, but do worry about
them because that's not something that wewant to make part of our teaching persona.
But everybody has weaknesses, and there aremany common weaknesses and common mistakes
that we make.
I can talk about the experiences of skippingclasses when I shouldn't have as an undergraduate.
(45:38):
I can talk about experiences of not studyinglong enough or hard enough or mostly not in
the right way when I was a student and howthat affected my grades.
There's lots of different kinds of mistakes,and they're going to see me make mistakes.
As I mentioned in that episode 63 segmentabout making mistakes, I make mistakes in
(46:01):
front of students, and sometimes studentspoint out those mistakes and how I handle
that is important.
If I resist it and try to fight against itand act as if I did not make a mistake, that's
not good.
No.
Oh, you think my students are going to relateto me, they're going to trust me if I do that?
I don't think they are.
(46:22):
My point here is that our teaching persona,when we're thinking about it, when we're figuring
out what is it we're going to present to students,let's be transparent about, let's be open
and honest about our flaws and put it outthere.
Maybe make an effort to put it out there evenwhen it doesn't just happen to come up in
(46:46):
the course of things and point out what ourweaknesses are.
Come back to it every once in a while andmention it.
Not make it part of the course or part ofthe content of the course, but make it part
of our teaching persona so that it's thereand visible and known by our students.
What they found in the research, by the way,is that people who do that, leaders who do
(47:09):
that, and I would go far as to say teacherswho do that, they're going to come across
as more authentic.
Why are they going to come across as moreauthentic?
Because they're being more authentic.
They're not just talking about the good partsof themselves.
They're talking about the parts that can usesome work.
(47:30):
When we do that, that's going to generatesome goodwill and it's going to build that
trust that we're after.
There's a link, as there always is, to thisarticle in the show notes.
>>Kevin Patton: In this episode, I discussed our teaching (47:44):
undefined
persona, the person our students see us asin our course.
I talked about how we might want to stressour supportive attitude and how we can act
on that and how gestures can influence ourcommunication with students.
(48:06):
I talked about how play and playfulness canbe part of that game of learning, and we discussed
why authenticity is important in our teachingpersona.
If you don't see links in your podcast player,go to the show notes at the episode page at
theAPprofessor.org/137, which I hope is workingby the time you hear this.
(48:36):
That darn website has been having the longestcase of hiccups I've ever seen.
But despite the uncertainty, we carry on,right?
If the website is down when you visit, goto Listennotes.com.
That's Listennotes, all one word, dot com,and find us there, or really, you can find
(48:59):
us anywhere you listen to audio, but you wantto look for a place that actually has the
show notes visible.
Once you find the show notes, you can exploreany ideas mentioned in this podcast.
While you're there, you can claim your digitalcredential for professional development just
for listening to this episode.
You're always encouraged to call in with yourquestions, comments, and ideas at the podcast
(49:24):
hotline, that's 1-833-LION-DEN or 1-833-546-6336,or send a recording or written message to
podcast@theAPprofessor.org.
I'll see you down the road.
>>Aileen Park: The A&P Professor is hosted by Dr. Kevin Patton, (49:45):
undefined
an award-winning professor and textbook authorin human anatomy and physiology.
>>Kevin Patton: This episode is not to be used as a personal (49:58):
undefined
flotation device.
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