Listening to two of my favourite podcasts

If anyone is looking for podcast recommendations, these are the two where I listen to almost every episode and it is always worth the invested time! Here are two recent episodes that I loved.

This morning I listend to Tom Tobin on Tea for Teaching talking about his new book, UDL at scale. Usually when I find books on podcasts, I blog about them after reading the book, but in this case I feel that the example he discusses in the episode, an Irish university of technology shifting to whole-institutional UDL, was so inspiring that it’s worth its own shoutout. It is an example of an institution (and I really need to google them some time and look into them more closely) deciding that they want to be the leading university in the country when it comes to inclusion, and then making it happen. Not by forcing everybody, but by making it clear that this is the goal, and then offering the support that teachers need to make the change: an expert consultant, time, funding, whatever. Tobin talks about the shift from compliance to support that he sees as crucial to change teaching at scale, and that resonates with me so much! Teachers want to do good teaching, so rather than policing them why not give them the resources they need to do their best work?

One really small example of whole-institution UDL is changing from asking students to re-apply for disability accommodations every term and having to remind them via their institutional email addresses so that actually happens, to asking them in the initial conversation whether they would be willing to share their mobile number, and then sending the reminders to that as well as the email, which results in many more students replying and re-applying in a timely manner. I don’t remember the total number of students, but I remember that after the change, only two students needed a reminder (and two students is a tiny number in pretty much any group of students, and I am assuming we are in the hundreds if not thousands of students here).

So it is not really rocket science, the “plus one” approach still stands: Do some tiny change, and it can have a big effect already. And then do the next one… But I am really looking forward to reading that book soon!

The other episode that I really enjoyed (and also didn’t take any notes on, what’s with that?) is on Teaching in Higher Ed with Bethany Morrison, where they talk about “fostering skills for civic life”. The parts there that stuck out the most to me were about how to have difficult conversations (including taking a pause for everybody to gather their thoughts, possibly in writing, and then reconvening) and in preparing for them, both by establishing co-created agreements on how discussions are supposed to work (that people can remind each other of if need be), structuring conversations in ways that give everybody a voice, and instructors preparing for classroom management if things get heated. Morrison recommends a lot of great resources, e.g.

• University of Michigan discussion guidelines both for specific events, like 9/11, or specific topics, like cyber bullying
• Their guidance “Making the most of “hot moments” in the classroom” with useful advice for example “critique the statement and not the speaker: e.g., rather than “X’s comment,” you can refer to “the last comment about Y…. what does it leave out?”” or “speak of the effect of “these words,” without attributing motive to the speaker:
  “When I hear these words, I respond like this…”“
• The “Make a Plan Worksheet for Framing and Facilitating High Stakes Discussions: Election Edition” which is super helpful and walks you through the steps of identifying points of connection between the elections and your course, identifying a critical friend to talk with about this, considering what’s at stake, what the goals are, what structures would work well, how to facilitate it, and how to incorporate student feedback
• Instructions for a “How My Profession Influences Policy” explainer assignment where students identify a policy relevant to their future* profession and how the stakeholders were involved in the process and outcome, and connect that to course topics. This would be a great activity with the added layer of connecting it to sustainability!

That’s it for now! Byyeee!

*interestingly, I just noticed how I tend to think about students’ future profession, implying that they aren’t a professional yet, based on the assumption that students are young people just right out of school, when students can be any age and also be already established professionals!

Featured image is me on this windy morning, listening to the UDL podcast