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SNAFU Happens: A Love Letter to Imperfect Teaching · Higher Listenings

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: I wanted to write a book that would be useful in people's daily teaching work, drawing on the abundant research about effective teaching practices.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: At the same time, I wanted my book to emphasize that daily teaching work is messy, is very hard and it's very messy, and it's not a matter of if but when something will go awry.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: That's the delightful Dr Jessamyn Newhouse, author of the brand new book Snafu EDU Teaching and Learning when Things Go Wrong in the College Classroom.
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: Well, we've all seen the movies, right, the polished professor who captivates a room without breaking a sweat.
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: But, as many of you know, real classrooms are messier.
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: Things go sideways often, and unpredictably.
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: Well, in one of our most playful and liberating interviews to date, we dig into the myth of the perfect professor.
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: Swap some spectacular teaching face plants and unpack a go bag of strategies to help you handle whatever tech fails or classroom fumbles that come your way.
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: Ready to embrace the mess?
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: Welcome to Higher Listenings.
• 1:05
  Speaker 2: I'd like to kick things off with a little cinematic imagination.
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: So picture a college professor, perhaps in a movie, imagining the elbow patches probably not a pipe, because you can't smoke anywhere, it seems, these days and students hanging on every brilliant word.
• 1:22
  Speaker 2: So, maybe set the scene for us what's happening in this sort of stereotypical ivory tower moment.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah Well, first and foremost, this is a performance in every sense of the word.
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: My biggest beef with this representation is that it so completely erases a vitally true part of teaching and learning.
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: They're really hard, they're like really really hard to do effectively, but in this popular representation the educator is just a born teacher and the classroom is completely instructor-centered a very top-down transition model of teaching and learning that in real life, is very limited and a limiting way to learn and to teach.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: My second biggest beef is that the way that these representations often not always, but often reinforce gendered and racialized stereotypes about academic expertise and authority.
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: In addition to those stereotypes, this representation it sets unobtainable expectations for everyone, Even the most brilliant and engaging lecturer in the world.
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: Even that lecturer needs to stop and let students practice doing things in order to learn how to do things.
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: And, just as importantly, the professor has to keep learning as well.
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: So, Hollywood, please show me a professor going to a teaching conference.
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: So show me a professor revising their syllabus, because what they did a few years ago is not working as well now.
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: I'm picturing someone from Dead Poets Society or something visiting the center for teaching and learning and getting some advice from an instructional designer right, yeah, that's right.
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: Going back to their office like, oh my god, that tanked.
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: What should I do next week?
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: Or having an upset student in the coming to complain about a grade and figuring out what am I going to do, like that's what I want to see.
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: It's possible.
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: Those were in the director's cuts and it just didn't make the final version, so I do want to leave that open.
• 3:36
  Speaker 3: Jessamyn, you're bringing up very uncomfortable memories for me of my earliest days as a professor, the first time I watched myself on videotape and how short I fell of my own ideal of what I thought I was doing in the classroom.
• 3:50
  Speaker 3: And what I love about this book is that you're choosing and inviting others to focus on a kind of uncomfortable space in our practice as teachers.
• 4:00
  Speaker 3: So I want to know what drew you to this and why did you write this book and focus on these moments when the classroom in fact does not go so well?
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: Well, as a scholar of teaching and learning, I've always had in the back of my mind how does advice and research about teaching reinforce certain norms and ideals, and not intentionally or consciously, but as discourse, as text, doing ideological work in culture.
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: So when I wanted to write about teaching, I was always asking myself how could I write about teaching, giving actionable advice about teaching in real life, in ways that did not do that, did not reinforce prescriptive ideals?
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: I wanted to write a book that would be useful in people's daily teaching work, drawing on the abundant research about effective teaching practices.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: At the same time, I wanted my book to emphasize that daily teaching work is messy, it's very hard and it's very messy and it's not a matter of if but when something will go awry.
• 5:09
  Speaker 3: I think those of us who have experience in the classroom are routinely surprised by the kinds of unexpected disruptors or difficult moments that can unfold in a classroom.
• 5:21
  Speaker 3: Now seems like a time when it's more likely than ever that things are going to happen that are really not comfortable.
• 5:29
  Speaker 3: We're in a very politically contentious environment.
• 5:32
  Speaker 3: Everyone seems to be exhausted, still not quite over the pandemic or having found their feet again.
• 5:38
  Speaker 3: Was that part of the motivation too, that this is a time when faculty maybe need to have these conversations and prepare for these sorts of moments?
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: This moment, this present moment, when there's so many very, very big things going wrong for higher education, brought mostly by outside political legislative attacks on curriculum, our efforts to improve inclusivity, other essential aspects of our day-to-day work, it's a good time to think about scholarship and teaching and learning and educational development as well.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: And I would take it as a big personal victory if, in reading this book, we could draw on the power of humor and laughter, even rueful laughter, maybe I'll say defiant laughter, not mocking anybody, not mocking students.
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: But maybe by not always having to take ourselves so super seriously we can counteract some of those demoralizing, discouraging and disparate teaching realities.
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: I know not everyone is willing or able to engage in the kind of self-deprecating joking, but that's one reason I shared a bunch of my worst mistakes in this book.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: So if you can't share your own, this is my permission to use mine.
• 6:55
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 6:55
  Speaker 2: So, speaking of mistakes and in the spirit of embracing our own blooper reel, do you have a faceplant teaching moment that you'd be willing to?
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: share.
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: I mean, the book is chock full of them, so definitely enjoy while you're reading.
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: But I'll share one that didn't make it into the final draft and it still haunts me.
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: So this was back in 2008.
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: This was in my US history since 1877 survey class.
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: I was really looking forward to class this particular day because we were discussing Born on the Fourth of July.
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: It's a memoir by a Vietnam veteran that students found very easy to read and very engaging and it sparked really good conversations.
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: But when class started that day, I could tell that very few students had done the assigned reading and I reacted poorly.
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: I got snappish and sarcastic and irritated that I said something like why was it so difficult to finish this reading for today?
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: And a student raised her hand and said Professor, we were celebrating Obama's election yesterday.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: It's a presidential election.
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: Oh right, yeah.
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: As soon as she said that, I knew I'd made a mistake and I consider it a professorial face plant for a couple of reasons.
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: So first, it just made me look like a tool.
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: It just wasn't a good look.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: It wasn't like defiance.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: They weren't saying we don't care about your class.
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: They were engaged in something that was meaningful to them and to actually everyone in the country for various reasons, and my reaction was human.
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: It's understandable I was frustrated, but it didn't help me in any way make any kind of productive progress towards my pedagogical goals.
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: And second, it was a huge lost opportunity to connect big national events to exactly what we were studying in class.
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: I could have easily incorporated even something like a 10-minute reflection, maybe even just writing to themselves, if it had been a contentious election or a short discussion or something.
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: It was just a real lost opportunity and I felt like a jackass.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: It was just a real lost opportunity and I felt like a jackass.
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: Well, it sounds like you obviously learned from that.
• 9:08
  Speaker 2: It sort of brings me to my next question, because I think a lot of people would look at this as well.
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: That's how learning happens, right?
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: We have to fall down, we have to make mistakes and we emerge wiser, braver, smarter, maybe better dressed, whatever the case is.
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: But is that an appealing narrative to you, or is that kind of misleading?
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: There are some things about it that are appealing and there is a grain of truth in it, but the narrative is inadequate in a couple important ways.
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: So many of the things that can go wrong in the classroom aren't about our own individual personal actions, some things that we might be able to predict and productively respond to and possibly learn from and mitigate in the future.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: But at times things will go wrong.
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: Another problem with this narrative is how discouraging it can be when we do make mistakes.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: So this narrative really downplays what it feels like to mess up, or when our students mess up, and sometimes when that happens, there's no learning rainbow at the end of this horrible snafu.
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: So take, for example, one that everyone teaching is almost for sure going to encounter A student fails, your class fails.
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: When a student doesn't make it through our class and we know exactly how that final grade is going to weigh down their future academic career, it just plain sucks.
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: The narrative of turning all mistakes into new knowledge is not sufficient for addressing those aspects of teaching and learning.
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: And just one more thing I'll say about it is that this narrative plays into some of academia's worst tendencies, like over-intellectualizing our day-to-day life and fetishizing productivity.
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: Above all, every mistake has to lead to something productive and positive.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: And, last but not least, perfectionism.
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: We have to fight that perfectionism.
• 11:09
  Speaker 3: So what is the appropriate response in these kinds of cases where there's no rainbow to bring joy to wrap the story up, where you sit with a failure of your own or of your students and there is no redemption story to find there?
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: that I recommend.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: One is talking about teaching.
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: So talking with other trusted people about teaching, even listening to podcasts like this.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: We're such a closed door culture around teaching that emotional labor is really amplified by feeling stranded and alone.
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: So finding connections, maybe off campus friends, mentors.
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: And then the other strategy I recommend I hope this doesn't sound too counterintuitive is to lean into learning.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: So talking about, yes, I can learn from this, yes, there might be something to learn, but not framing it as, oh, so I made it productive.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: Or oh, I took the horrible bowl of lemons that was handed to me and made delicious lemonade.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: No, I had to choke down each lemon.
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: That's sour and miserable.
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: And because learning doesn't look like it looks in the movies sometimes it's just this laborious slog and it's R-rated and painful because there's a lot of swearing and struggle.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: But because we're academics, because we do, at heart, love learning, that that can be helpful to us when something just is bad and it's hard.
• 12:56
  Speaker 2: What I'm getting from that, too, is giving ourselves some grace, and maybe we need to remind the inner voice that this is really tough work.
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: This is not going to be the only mistake I'm going to make and, if I have the right intention, hopefully at the end of the day that maybe that gives me a little bit of solace to carry on and to not let that become a drag on how I view my role as a teacher or my impact.
• 13:21
  Speaker 2: You know.
• 13:22
  Speaker 3: I want to shift this a little bit toward preparation and the contribution that I think you're making quite significantly to not just learning how to cope with snafus in the aftermath, but thinking about them in advance and preparing that.
• 13:37
  Speaker 3: You know way you prepare a good lecture.
• 13:38
  Speaker 3: Thinking about also preparing for these inevitable moments.
• 13:41
  Speaker 3: As Eric said, we are going to make these mistakes, things are going to happen.
• 13:44
  Speaker 3: So he mentioned Robin Williams and Dead Poets Society.
• 13:47
  Speaker 3: I love that you booed that, because that is such a no shit to Robin Williams.
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: Robin Williams is brilliant, but that particular depiction gets under my skin.
• 13:57
  Speaker 3: Of course, for all kinds of reasons, it's very problematic.
• 14:01
  Speaker 2: We should do an episode on that where we get a bunch of faculty educators to pick apart, pick it apart.
• 14:07
  Speaker 3: I also love the movie, but, yeah, I'll ruin the movie for people like me.
• 14:10
  Speaker 2: Ruin, the movie for everyone, right, right.
• 14:12
  Speaker 3: also love the movie, but, yeah, from the movie for people like me, ruin the movie for everyone, right, right.
• 14:14
  Speaker 3: So though it's unlikely that any of us is going to be a robin williams in the performance sense, right, we do have those moments of flow where we are just, we're feeling it like we are doing our mini lecture and everything's I mean whatever you say, I at least, and maybe it's my lens on the past, dreamily remembering yes, exactly the nostalgia effect here for me.
• 14:36
  Speaker 3: So you're having that moment and then you call on a student and you mispronounce their name and you do it again the next week and you do it again another time and they finally have had enough and they just say that's not my name or that's not how you pronounce my in front of the class, right so?
• 14:53
  Speaker 3: Here, you've got this moment.
• 14:55
  Speaker 3: What do you recommend we do to prepare for that kind of thing?
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: first, this is a snafu that literally everyone teaching is going to experience at some point in one way or another learning correctly pronouncing and using each other's names in class and in interactions with students.
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: But let's be honest, learning names is hard and in interactions with students.
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: But let's be honest, learning names is hard.
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: And I have to give a major shout out here to Michelle Miller's book, a Teacher's Guide to Learning Student Names.
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: I mean, like chef's kiss, that should be required reading for everyone working in higher education.
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: There are ways and means for learning names and helping students learn each other's names.
• 15:31
  Speaker 2: We call it.
• 15:31
  Speaker 2: We have just done an interview with Michelle Miller, so if you want to dig a little further into that, there's an episode.
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: For that, as I like to say yeah.
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: And here's where I come in, where Stanford comes in, is there's so many ways this can go wrong.
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: So I use two repair strategies for when I mess up a name or when a student messes up my name, and those two strategies are first, use a script and second, apologize.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: When I say script, I don't mean literally a script like actors use, but I do mean having at the ready a collection of short phrases or sentences that we can use almost automatically in tense or difficult interactions or when we face plant.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: So script in this context it doesn't mean memorize, but it does mean practice.
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: So now, maybe you're super socially skilled and so you're an off the charts extrovert and never for one second do you feel the need to practice for human interactions.
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: You don't know what I'm talking about.
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: It's sounds like a completely foreign language to you, and if that's you, well, I love that for you.
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: How nice.
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: But for the rest of us, scripts really help.
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: So I combine my repair strategy for scripts with apologies.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: So when I do that and it happens, I have the script.
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: I'm sorry, use the correct name.
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: Names are important, I know we've all been working on remembering and using them.
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: I apologize for that error.
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: Apologizing isn't fun and again, positionality, context, always matters.
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: It won't look the same for everyone every time, but if we can, when we mess up, a short, quick apology is an effective repair strategy.
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: Using a script can ease that pain a little bit because it's less reactive and more automatic.
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: And I have one too, for when students call me Mrs Newhouse or they try some variation of Jessamine.
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: Often it's my first name and it's mispronounced, so it's a double whammy.
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: I can say something like it's my first name and it's mispronounced, so it's a double whammy.
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: I can say something like thank you so much for that comment.
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: Before we get to that, just a reminder that while we're working in this context, in this learning community, I ask that you use my professional title, professor Dewhouse.
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: It's not easy to remember.
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: I just messed up so-and-so's.
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: You saw me do it three times, but I appreciate your effort on this.
• 17:52
  Speaker 3: So you've been using this word repair all through this conversation.
• 17:56
  Speaker 3: That seems quite intentional, can?
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: you say more about why you're talking about repair.
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: Well, I first of all did come up with we have a weakness for them in Scholarships for Teaching and Learning an acronym, so it's STIR Stop, think, identify and Repair.
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: It's just a way of framing some of the preparation we can do for when the snafus hit the fan.
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: A reminder that in situations that pose problems, when things start to go wrong, we can often exercise some agency in the classroom, taking a beat to stop and using our big brains to think about what all might be going on and then to approach with curiosity, try to identify all the factors and then, when it's possible, take steps to repair the snafu.
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: And I do just want to note here I note it in my book this work is not addressing the very worst case scenarios for classrooms, like active shooter physical threats.
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: That's not a stir moment.
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: But I love that you picked up on repair instead of fix, and I didn't choose it just for the acronym.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: I thought really hard about how to normalize mistakes and missteps while avoiding that narrative we were talking about earlier.
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: I didn't want to suggest in any way to readers that they should be delighted about messing up because, oh, it's just a stepping stone on the way to success Barf.
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: But to my mind, repair strikes that right tone by suggesting patching it up as best you can.
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: But yeah, you're still going to see where there was a break or a hole or whatever.
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: It has a DIY flavor to it and, as I've mentioned before, I really want to normalize the fact that there are some things outside our control, outside the classroom, outside our universities and colleges that cause snafus, so it's systemic inequities.
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: You're not going to solve all the problems that systemic inequity causes, but you can maybe make some smaller pairs, maybe just in one type of interaction or one assignment or one classroom activity.
• 20:01
  Speaker 3: I'm sensing an abiding commitment to the idea that the classroom is a community of sorts, and it seems to me that the word is appealing there as well, because any of these snafus mishandled does more to degrade that sense of community.
• 20:18
  Speaker 3: And I think there's also a sense of repair, perhaps, in trying to heal the community.
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah, when we talk about classroom community, I like to tell this story.
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: My husband started a community garden in our small rural upstate, new York town.
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: Well, the first year, first of all, it was terrible weather, there's vandalism, and then there was a horrible tomato blight where some people, to try to stop the blight, were pulling up other people's tomatoes plants.
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: And there was a meeting where everybody was like screaming at each other and up in arms.
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: There had to be a lot of ongoing discussion about what are shared agreements, who's going to use these tools, what are we going to do and not do?
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: And that's what I think of when people say classroom community, not kumbaya.
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: It takes a lot of work and a lot of structure and things happen.
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: You know, there's a hailstorm in August and people's crops are decimated.
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: So you just have to think of community as something that is very rewarding and it works really well, but it requires a lot of structure and work.
• 21:33
  Speaker 3: Without question, I think, and there are risks, I suppose, or threats to it.
• 21:37
  Speaker 3: Could you say a little bit more about what you see as the triggers and how we might manage those in the classroom?
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: Sure, I think the most important thing I have to say here, the thing that I see Snaphoo really adding to our conversation, is that these five things I talk about inequity, disconnection, distrust which exists, no matter how much certain politicians want to convince us it doesn't.
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: It creates obstacles to students' learning and obstacles to effective teaching, especially for any faculty member who doesn't quote unquote look like a professor.
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: Look like a professor.
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: Disconnection and distrust are also aspects of higher education that researchers have been showing for a really long time, with major upticks in the post-pandemic era.
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: These create problems for students' academic success.
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: Like a student just doesn't feel connected in any meaningful way to the subject or the institution, it's going to be a lot harder for them to persist.
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: Instructors need to experience some sense of connection to their work, to students and the institution.
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: And distrust I mean talk about snafus in the classroom.
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: Trust is the bedrock, but it often isn't central in our minds when things go wrong.
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: And speaking of behaviors, students' fear can manifest in behaviors that on the surface look like something else entirely.
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: So something that looks like disengagement or inattention or even disrespect can be rooted in deep student fear of failure or baggage left over from previous bad experiences in the school setting.
• 23:23
  Speaker 3: We've talked a lot with experts in this field about the importance of trusting students.
• 23:28
  Speaker 3: One of the most interesting dynamics of the AI conversation that's been unfolding the last several years has been centered around trust.
• 23:35
  Speaker 3: And there's clearly a segment of faculty who just aren't willing to trust or ready to trust their students and they want to monitor, they want to catch, they want to police them in some way, or at least their instinct is drawing them in that direction.
• 23:51
  Speaker 3: Could you say a little bit more about that level of distrust coming from an educator and how that manifests?
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: Well, when I was writing this whole section on distrust and increasing trust, I really wanted to get away from what seems to me to be like just a little bit too glib of an assertion that faculty need to get over themselves and trust students.
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: The work that's involved to trust students there are different levels and frankly, that's a bigger ask for some people than others.
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: And yet at the same time there are elements of distrust distrusting students in particular that can really snafu teaching and learning in virtually every context, and what I would like to emphasize is it can make our teaching labor so much harder and more awful than it has to be.
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: So let's take that example.
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: I mean I know very, very few people are thinking about it right now, but generative ai in the classroom I know like nobody's talking about, but nobody's thinking about that.
• 24:48
  Speaker 2: What is that exactly?
• 24:50
  Speaker 3: That's so last year.
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: Oh man, if only so.
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: If your starting point right now is distrust of students.
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: So if your starting point is you assume students want to cheat, that they do not want to learn how to do the things you want to help them learn, you're in a world of hurt.
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: Now I'm not suggesting a Pollyannish view of students here, but let's say your starting point is assuming that most of your students want to learn how to do stuff, and I would include in that they want to learn how to adhere to the academic integrity policies of their college and university.
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: I'm going to assume that as a starting point Now you've got a whole bunch of different options and avenues for working with students, as we're all trying to figure out something that we're in the midst of right now, and that's not just more effective teaching, it's less stressful and it's more rewarding.
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: So I've gotten quite good at apologizing.
• 25:51
  Speaker 2: By the way, it's just sort of a product of how I seem to operate in the world, and it does get easier.
• 25:59
  Speaker 3: We usually start our Mondays with an apology.
• 26:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 26:01
  Speaker 2: So what's the value in telling students I messed up?
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: Does that build trust and connection, or are we risking eroding authority, especially for folks, like you said, who might not look like, you know, a typical professor?
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: Well, here's the answer.
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: And at certain moments and in some contexts, apologizing won't do the repair work we want it to do where it leaves them too exposed to, for example, student biases, or in a department culture where it's going to be misread.
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: All that said, I will share my personal experiences with it.
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: I hate admitting I did something wrong.
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: I've got a big, wide, unhelpful streak of perfectionism myself.
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: But a real turning point for me was when, during the pandemic, when I really had to up my game in the learning management system and I inevitably made a mistake like click the wrong button or put in the wrong date I realized because of the context I'm like we're all working through this and they know that I'm just learning this learning management system I started being able to say, hey, everyone, I'm really sorry, I put in the wrong date for such and such assignment.
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: I changed it, thanks for your patience.
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: And I got so much freedom from using that strategy.
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: So instead of obsessing over a misstep or acting defensively, I could immediately address it and it became automatic.
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: So it freed up all my mental space for moving forward and in my experience, it helped create a classroom culture where errors, small mistakes, missteps could be addressed very quickly and then we could all move forward.
• 27:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah, no baggage, no mental.
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 27:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so our listeners don't really know me that well, just put that out there, but they may be interested to know that I'm actually an avid doomsday prepper.
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: I'm joking, although I do think about that from time to time.
• 28:09
  Speaker 2: Should I be stockpiling more food and water in my basement, but use the metaphor of a go bag.
• 28:15
  Speaker 2: So maybe tell us a little bit about what that is and why you think faculty actually need a go bag, maybe more than ever, and I'm not sure if that's related to climate change or electromagnetic pulses coming from the sun or something.
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: I love the metaphor of a go bag.
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: Having a go bag means you're packed and ready for when things go sideways.
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: In popular culture, in prepper world, it means you're packed for the apocalypse.
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: So it's my snarky way of saying we can at least have a few things we can grab when the you know what hits the fan so what's, what's in your go bag besides, like mres and you know, snacks or yes, there's always snacks.
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: Yes, there's always snacks.
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: There's always snacks in there.
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: I can't be hungry, do anything productive or useful, let alone figure out how to respond productively and usefully when something goes wrong.
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: If I'm hungry, I'm definitely on the hobbit meal plan of six or seven meals a day.
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: Probably the thing I reach for most often and most deliberately in my teaching go bag is the stop step of stir.
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: I find it very empowering and effective, just personally and strategically in a whole wide variety of circumstances in teaching and actually meetings, all kinds of interactions to slow down and pause for thought.
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: I'm not a theatrical person, I don't do professor performances, but I will kind of very deliberately say, hmm, that's really interesting, I need to think about that, and then really pause and think.
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: Sometimes, if it's other kinds of interactions in the classroom or one-on-one, I'll say, okay, that's a lot to consider.
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: So I'm going to pause for a second and sometimes you could do something like I'm not really sure what a good next step is here.
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: So why don't we all take a five-minute break, get a snack and I'll keep thinking and I'll come back with a plan and so on and so forth.
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: So taking a beat gathering my thoughts, that's a real go-to for me.
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: And the other one I really use a lot is the one I mentioned earlier about leaning into learning, meaning taking a look at whatever has snafu'd my success or my students' success and figuring out if there's a takeaway or, in my case, something I could go read about and possibly write about.
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: And, to be clear, sometimes the learning really is just man, that really sucked Like.
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: Sometimes that's it.
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: So that's why articulating I'm a wordy word person, so sometimes even just articulating that I feel really bad about this.
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: That might be the only learning I'm doing, but it can be really empowering to that sense of agency.
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: What can I do and not do to reach into that go bag?
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: Look at the mistakes, missteps and models as a chance to learn.
• 31:21
  Speaker 3: Jasmine, thank you so much, thank you.
• 31:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks so much that you.
• 31:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks so much.
• 31:24
  Speaker 2: That was wonderful.
• 31:25
  Speaker 2: Thanks for having me.
• 31:26
  Speaker 2: Higher Listenings is brought to you by Top Hat, the leader in student engagement solutions for higher education.
• 31:35
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• 31:41
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• 32:28
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