March 1, 2023 • 40 mins
Teaching – and learning – how to be in dialogue is both fun and complex. Join us as we talk with Diane Finegood about building scaffolding for effective conversation. How to foster an ethic of care so that we can practice active listening. We talk about the challenges of power differentials in the classroom and her iterative approach to devolving power through self disclosure and ungrading. How group size matters. And how online and in person classroom settings and tools can be blended to facilitate transparency, respect, and trust-building. How does interruption fit? Diane is both interrupting the “sage on the stage” mode of teaching as well as developing spaces where interruption in dialogue is no longer offensive but more like an orchestra playing.
To learn more about We Interrupt this Podcast and to suggest people we should talk to and topics you think we should explore, please see our webpage at: https://www.weinterrupthis.com or contact us on twitter at @HaakYak. You can find more about Diane on the Simon Fraser University Morris J Wosk Center for Dialogue webpage, here: https://www.sfu.ca/dialogue/about/fellows/diane-finegood.html/ More information about the Semester in Dialogue program is available here: https://www.sfu.ca/dialogue/semester.html
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Episode Transcript
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(00:03):
My sense is that trust is a critical variable in the ability to get to that place where interruption is no longer offensive but is more like the orchestra playing.
Welcome to We Interrupt This Podcast.
(00:23):
I am Laure Haak, your host.
Teaching and learning how to be in dialogue is both fun and complex.
Join us as we talk with Diane Finegood, Fellow at the Morris J Wosk Centre for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University,
about building scaffolding for effective conversation. How to foster an ethic of care for active listening and participation.
How to foster an ethic of care for active listening and participation.
(00:45):
How group size matters.
We talk about the challenges of power differentials in the classroom and Diane's iterative approach to devolving power through self disclosure and ungrading,
and how online and in person classroom settings and tools can be blended to facilitate transparency, respect. and trust building.
(01:05):
How does interruption fit? Diane is both interrupting the "sage on the stage" mode of teaching as well as developing spaces where interruption and dialogue is no longer offensive but more akin to an orchestra playing.
(01:35):
Interruptions is a really interesting conversation. I've experienced the phenomenon in a variety of different ways.
My current role is Professor at Simon Fraser University, where I've been for many years at a Center for Dialogue.
So the concepts of interruption and dialogue fit together really in a fascinating way.
I came to this role through a meandering career that included being a basic scientist,
(01:58):
leading a couple of different health research organizations,
doing a variety of project leadership contracts,
and now actually towards the end of my career,
I'm back in the classroom in a way that is just really exciting and fun,
and interruptions is part of the game when dialogue centers your course.
Why don't you tell us a little bit about how your course works?
(02:20):
You've got a course that is specifically about creating dialogue and bringing a group of people together to try to create a space where productive dialogue is possible.
So tell us a little bit about how this course was created.
The classic model of something called a "semester in dialogue" was created 20 years ago or more than 20 years ago by many people who preceded me into this space.
(02:46):
A fellow named Mark Winston,
who was a bee biologist actually,
but he had this sense that pedagogy needed to be something more than just the sage on the stage or somebody downloading content to students.
And he and other colleagues that came along shortly after him,
developed this model of a cohort-based program,
(03:08):
16 to 20 students, full time 9 to 5, five days a week,
which is quite unusual in the academy.
Maybe more akin to things like a field school than it is to a regular course.
Because it's full time, students are,
are really intensively involved with their cohorts.
So they build relationships.
We sit in dialogue,
(03:30):
we learn and practice active listening and various forms of facilitation and dialogue.
And it's basically life changing for most of the students that take the course.
This is so unusual for them,
so different from a normal course that,
that they build relationships,
they work on projects,
they learn to be in dialogue with each other.
(03:51):
And it's really quite a wonderful experience.
I've now had the benefit of teaching that course three times.Because it's becoming a course maybe for more privileged students, in that full time is really tough now for students,
we've had to do some pivoting and changing.
And so I taught last spring a dialogue focused course.
(04:15):
It was only three credits and it was much less intensive.
But still,
it was pretty interesting in the way centering dialogue connects back to the conversation of interruptions.
I'm still thinking about this 9 to 5, from the from the point of view of the person proctoring, teaching,
posting the class.
That's a lot of responsibility.
(04:36):
So I'm wondering if you can reflect on that from your role as the professor.
So, it is pretty intense. I'll say that.
But I think of it different from when you're teaching a typical university course, where you think there's a certain amount of content that you need to download to the students
and they need to learn these concepts and they have learning objectives,
(04:58):
that sort of thing.
This is a course in which you scaffold experiences.
So over the times that I've taught the course,
I've learned what works and what doesn't work to scaffold for the students,
an opportunity to do things like practice being in dialogue,
practice giving and receiving feedback,
(05:19):
practice active listening,
practice being in an ethic of care for each other,
practice how you work in collaborative groups,
things like that.
And so as you do it and you learn from each experience,
you gain more insight in how to create the scaffold.
Now,
I'm also particularly interested in complexity and systems thinking.
(05:43):
So my courses almost always have a flavor of that to it,
where I might present a framework that I think is important from a complexity point of view,
how we think about complex different from complicated,
and then ask the students to apply it in a particular case,
be in small groups or large groups,
(06:03):
that sort of thing.
It's really quite different from a regular classroom.
And you know,
yeah,
9 to 5 sounds like a lot.
But typically we have many invited guests over the course of the semester,
the students host the guest and they meet with the guests,
find out what the guests would like to talk about.
It's usually a bit unusual for the guests as well because you're asking them not to come and give a powerpoint presentation,
(06:26):
but to be in dialogue with the students.
You touched on something -- that interaction-between conversation.
There is a dialogue,
there's interruption,
but there's also creating the framework that enables people to have these conversations where you can talk amongst and with and over and interrupt.
(06:46):
And so I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about how you talk about interruption and active listening and the interaction between those things.
So you usually set up exercises. For active listening,
it's an easy facilitation plan where you might put students in groups of three or even in groups of two and you give them rules, like let this person talk on this topic,
(07:10):
whatever the topic might be.
And we usually pick meaty topics like power, trust, grading,
which is always an interesting topic for students and its impact on them.
And you ask students to tell stories and not interrupt.
So in an active listening exercise,
you're typically asking students to listen for X number of minutes to the story your partner is telling, and then you get to speak for a couple of minutes and don't interrupt.
(07:37):
So that's one kind of way that you practice something we tend not to be used to --
not interrupting or even offering your thoughts or your support or whatever it is.
So sometimes you need to go to the extreme of saying,
don't interrupt this person in order to practice that activity.
(07:57):
We also in the larger group, sitting in circle,
we must always sit in a circle.
We'll often do it without tables in front of you.
So the student can't put a laptop in front of them and create a barrier between themselves and the rest of the people in the room.
But actually are maybe a little bit vulnerable without having that barrier.
They almost always have name cards.
(08:18):
And even throughout the semester,
even though they know each other well,
we often have guests who don't know them.
And so they have a nice little tent card with their name on it and they stick it in front of their chair.
And over time,
the tent cards have become, just by happenstance,
a very interesting tool for the students to try to prevent interruptions when somebody is speaking.
(08:38):
So somebody might be telling a story,
another person has an idea or an add on to the story and they'll turn their tent card up on end as a way to signal that somebody else is interested in speaking.
Sometimes there's a facilitator for a dialogue,
especially when there's a guest.
But other times there's not.
And we're in dialogue,
telling stories on a theme that is important to the students.
(09:01):
I had one group of students who were so worried about interrupting each other but wanting to continue threads that they started to develop a tool where they would use their fingers to indicate who was first to put their tent card up on end and who was second.
Rarely in that setting,
did we get to that place where it was a free for all conversation that anybody could interrupt anybody else.
(09:25):
Another thing -- I was thinking about this this morning, when I was facilitating a session with people in our center where we did something we called question storming.
So question storming is a facilitation technique where you're only allowed to ask questions,
you're not allowed to answer them.
What I really like about that is everybody is more on an even playing field under those circumstances.
(09:47):
If nobody's the expert answering questions,
everybody's questions are appropriate and valuable.
And then there's this really interesting thing that happens about threads of conversation.
If you do question storming one on one,
the threads tend to follow each other.
One person says something,
(10:07):
the next person builds on it,
the person before then builds on that, and sometimes it changes direction,
but the threads can go quite deep.
If you do it with seven people, what happens is somebody asks a question,
people are thinking about that question and what questions they have about that question.
And then somebody else jumps in and asks a different question,
(10:30):
takes you off in a different direction. And then when the people were thinking about it,
they might come back and bring you back to a particular thread.
So it has this really interesting organic landscape feel to it, where you will get a sense of the mapping of where people are interested in that topic.
(10:50):
But it can be a little bit messy and kind of fun.
How that works in person and how that works online is a bit different. So in the online space,
if you do interrupt somebody, or you do want to jump in on a thread and other people want to jump in,
(11:16):
you clash in that audio - digital space, and you can't hear the other person.
Whereas when you're face to face,
you have more opportunity to hear while you're also speaking.
So I do think the dynamic is different face to face than it is in an online environment.
But even when you're face to face with a group of students who've built trust with each other,
(11:40):
then there is a level of respect that they want to afford each other.
And that ethic of care care becomes really important from the trust building that occurs.
And so that's why I think they develop these strategies.
I think in the online space having a mechanism, and not very detailed description of rules,
(12:01):
but something that makes sense to people like just turning your mic on and off.
Like you said, this is a semester long course.
It's five days a week,
all day long.
I cannot imagine being in a space like that for that period of time and not talking-with people.
(12:27):
You know what I'm saying?
Just waiting.
I would be sitting there fidgeting with the tent card.
I can't imagine that there wouldn't be a little bit more of the talking-with happening.
I'm wondering how you see that.
And I'm talking about interruption both in the sense of somebody cuts somebody off,
but also that two people are talking at the same time.
(12:49):
How do you see that play out in your class or do you just not see that?
So,
in a 9 to 5 class,
we'll typically sit in dialogue for 2 to 3 hours in the morning with a guest or a topic that we want to unpack or something like that.
Maybe not every day,
(13:09):
but three days a week out of five,
we'll be doing that.
Usually there's lunch after that. And then we debrief the dialogue that we had, to have that meta moment of -- what have we learned about facilitation?
What have we learned about the dialogue?
How can students that still have to facilitate later learn to improve it?
How did the strategies for not interrupting people work?
(13:32):
And often in the afternoon,
they're free to work on projects with each other because the scaffolding includes work that they have to do on their own,
which is writing a publishable article.
They work in pairs on their facilitation of dialogue.
They work in small groups on projects that carry out through the semester. And they work as the whole group in putting on a public dialogue at the end of the course.
(13:58):
So they have to navigate the complexity of working by themselves in pairs in small groups and in the larger group and make it all work through the semester.
So often part of the day is given over to working with each other.
Now, one of the challenges in answering your question is when we tell them to work on the final public dialogue,
(14:20):
which is the whole group,
we walk out of the room as faculty; I usually have a co-teacher.
So I don't know whether they're much more prone in that environment to talk over each other and to interrupt each other.
I might predict that they are in that space where there's no professor watching,
there's no guest in the room, and they're trying to figure out as a group,
(14:42):
how to work together.
But what's also really interesting about that exercise is the value and importance of building trust before they can do that work as a full group.
So I learned kind of the hard way, that when we were fully online and the group of students we had in the classroom were in diverse time zones
(15:07):
and because we were online, we only did it three hours a day,
because we were online, I could invite some international students into the classroom.
So we had different cultures, three people in France,
one in Ghana,
one in Croatia.
So I learned during that experience that because they don't eat lunch together,
they don't build the trust that they need to build.
So there's this informality without the faculty in the room,
(15:31):
that's super important to their ability to do that kind of work together.
And as a result,
it's an important component of this course.
And I'm not usually in the classroom when they're having lunch
or whatever the more relaxed time is.
And so again,
I'm gonna guess that there's a lot more of that kind of fluid conversation happening in those spaces and,
(15:54):
people moving to talk to this person or that person or in groups.
But I think in those settings,
you probably do get more interruption.
Whereas in the more formal,
I don't wanna call it really formal,
but in the classroom,
when I'm there,
when other faculty are there,
when guests are there,
there's definitely an air of politeness and care that interruption doesn't necessarily work as well.
(16:16):
It reminds me of the conversation we had with Josie's Catalyst Group where everyone was very cognizant of letting people finish their thought, and then a breath, and then they would talk, and I found it a little bit ironic.
(16:52):
Always when we talk about interruption people are -- and even when we're doing this podcast -- we are really cognizant of letting people finish and then taking a beat and then moving into the question.
So I'm gonna push you a little bit more on this Diane.
We talked about the chat.
So I'm wondering if you can reflect about the chat in that online class.
That's a really interesting thing that I've been thinking a lot about, how we use chat in Zoom.
(17:15):
It really started pre-Zoom, in how do we use Twitter when we're attending a conference.
And I'm a huge fan of attending a conference with a Twitter hashtag that enables a conversation to happen,
that isn't happening in the room per se.
You can ask things and you can state things in that space that you can't necessarily do in the room, when you've got the sage on the stage giving you a lecture of some sort.
(17:43):
So it started there for me. When we first went online with the classroom,
I found the chat challenging as the faculty member because I,
as the faculty member and facilitator often of the conversation,
I couldn't look at the chat,
pay attention to the chat and facilitate the conversation in the room in whatever way I needed to.
(18:06):
So for me in that space,
when you're the kind of doing that work,
I found it mostly distracting.
In the classroom though, I think the students found it really helpful.
Especially if they were telling difficult stories,
they would be able to support each other using the chat. You saw lots of supportive commentary happening in the chat without interrupting the flow of the conversation so the flow could continue.
(18:35):
So in that space,
I think that's what it gets used for.
In live dialogue, that sense of politeness and care for each other is really quite dominant.
And in the online space, you just can't really talk over people and have it work is my experience, because really only one person's gonna get the microphone, ulitmately.
(18:56):
I keep coming back to,
is it possible for humans to have a conversation like music?
(19:23):
A person talking,
but you can also have another person talking at the same time.
And is it possible for us to be in conversation like that and harmonize with our words and thoughts and actively listen to more than one voice at a time.
(19:47):
And I guess what I'm hearing, is this power dynamic that exists when you're in these meetings,
and when the stage is on the stage,
you gotta sit on your hands and keep your mouth shut and make sure your tent card is down and,
and maybe you can tweet.
I'm wondering, as somebody who's been doing this work in the pedagogical setting,
(20:07):
how do you do that power sharing, power structure --
How do you explore that?
Do you explore that in your discussions with your students?
Until I heard you talk about interruption as a theme, we haven't explored it.
But I would say the larger the group,
the harder it is to have adequate trust with the whole group that you can have those simultaneous talking over each other kinds of conversations.
(20:37):
I think that would be quite difficult.
But what I would say is when you're one on one, or in a very small group with people where you've built tremendous trust and,
and you have a strong relationship,
then it can emerge.
I don't know if full simultaneous talking and listening,
I don't know how easy that would be,
(20:59):
but certainly interruption and talking over each other a little bit can grow the more trust you have.
When you started this conversation, where you started me thinking about this,
my partner and I had gone and had lunch with a couple that we know and two of us are academics and Jewish --
where, you know,
it tends to happen more in that kind of a culture, I'll say --
(21:20):
and the other two are not academics or Jewish.
Typically, what happens when we get together is myself and the other academic,
we will do this,
we'll interrupt each other,
we'll talk over each other,
we'll add on to the conversation in ways that interject and interrupt. The other two are taken aback by this behavior.
(21:42):
So I think culture plays an important role.
And then,
the other instance where that happens for me is,
when I'm one on one with a colleague who I know, I've spent enough time with, and a particular colleague and friend I'm thinking about,
where we know each other so well,
and we know our interest in the topics are so related, that we're quite comfortable when one says something,
(22:08):
the other pushes it into another direction, takes off from that,
goes off in another tangent.
And we don't,
we don't feel any sense of guilt and
no remorse or worry that we've interrupted the other person.
My sense is that trust is a critical variable in the ability to get to that place where interruption is no longer offensive but is more like the orchestra playing.
(22:40):
I want to come back to power. Those two examples you provided, Diane,
the power was not sage and listener.
It was people that are in, I'm gonna say more or less equivalent power levels with each other.
Is building trust actually part of breaking down or leveling out power structures in a classroom?
(23:06):
Well, that's a big question.
I think one of the challenges in the classroom is you can never take away the fact that as a faculty member,
I have to grade the students in some fashion, or I have to report the grade even if I'm trying to use techniques like ungrading where students get to do more self assessment
(23:29):
and there's there's processes that enable them to play into that.
So in a classroom, I think that that's super difficult.
In other contexts though, I've been in spaces
where the power structure is much more balanced.
And two come to mind for me recently.
One is, I run a community of practice on systems pedagogy.
So this is a group of people who either teach in universities or colleges or are facilitators by profession and practice,
(23:58):
but are interested in how we talk more about and engage people more with systems thinking.
So what's interesting is, your question makes me think of one person in this particular group who does have a tendency to monopolize the conversation.
And I have not in that space figured out how to interrupt.
Although I organize it,
(24:19):
I don't really want to control the conversation.
Haven't figured the solution to that one out.
But I've also participated in another community recently
that was really interesting.
So this is a group of women who want a women-only space for dialogue, and have not set up any preconceived notion about the dialogue.
(24:41):
I've been to two of the conversations in this group.
And the first one,
everybody was trying to kinda feel each other out and,
and get a sense of the culture in the room.
But the second one,
after one session,
the second one, which had a number of people who were in the first one and a few new ones,
was really interesting because people did go on at length telling stories that related to each other, and everybody including myself felt perfectly comfortable just sitting back and listening and not interrupting.
(25:17):
And there was no interruption that I could tell that occurred, but really deep meaningful personal stories being told that were building on each other
in not really concrete, clear ways,
but in thematic ways.
It was the first time I'd been in a room where I was really quite happy to sit back and listen to these stories,
(25:41):
however the person wanted to tell their story and where they wanted to go.
So that was,
it was a really interesting exercise in,
can you build trust by creating a certain kind of space?
Like, it's just gonna be a women-only space, and is that enough to have adequate trust that people are willing to listen and actually not interrupt.
(26:03):
A really interesting question would be,
will that group get to a place where in fact,
people do start interrupting each other to carry threads through?
I don't know.
We haven't met enough for me to know whether that's gonna happen,
but I'm gonna watch for it now.
But they're playing scales first and everyone's getting used to where they sit and then,
(26:27):
then you can build a symphony together.
As you're going through the trust building in these classes, are there other ways that you encourage disclosure among the folks participating in the class?
(26:54):
What kinds of reading or work have you done in your career to try to create those spaces where people come into them and feel welcome because of that,
that infrastructure,
as you said, that framework that you're building?
Over the last 3 to 4 years of the pandemic, of Black Lives Matter, of Indigenous Rights in Canada,
(27:19):
I've tried to educate myself.
I've taken a lot of professional development and engaged in a lot of dialogues with other faculty and other individuals to,
to really understand my white privilege,
to understand my power and privilege in the classroom.
One of my co teachers who's taught with me three times is somebody who I deeply respect, a white male,
(27:41):
but also really understands power dynamics in the classroom more deeply than I.
So I've learned a lot from him.
He's the same person I can have interruption conversations with over breakfast that are just wild and crazy.
So I've learned a lot.
I've tried to educate myself.
And what I notice is how I've evolved over that period of time.
(28:03):
Just one example would be, I remember several years ago when a student was talking about the concept of land back and the hashtag LandBack as it relates to Indigenous land in Canada.
And my immediate knee jerk reaction was,
well, that's never gonna happen.
How the hell are we gonna do that?
Our economy is so based in land ownership that I don't,
(28:25):
I just can't imagine it.
Right?
Because it's all their land,
even though we took it,
some of it
through treaty and some of it unceded.
But now I've come to understand,
there are some interesting ways in which land back can occur and how the movement and the topic plays out in different places.
So my own evolution in thinking about these things is important to my ability to create an ethic of care in the classroom.
(28:53):
And even if I didn't understand those things before, I still put myself out there in a way in which I try to get the students to understand that I do care.
So that's one thing.
Another thing that we do, is we try to have one on one conversations with the students on a regular basis.
And initially,
I didn't want to force students into that.
(29:15):
I didn't think my power to have them in a one on one conversation and say it was required was appropriate.
So I didn't require it.
But I've come to understand if you don't require it,
some of the students who need it the most to build a relationship with them won't come.
And I learned that particularly in the online environment.
And then in the classroom,
(29:35):
I think we do it because we use storytelling as a device a lot.
And storytelling on topics that very quickly become hot topics. Storytelling on grading and people's experience of grading is a really hot topic,
because people have been harmed by the grading system extensively in the way post-secondary or even pre post-secondary education occurs.
(30:02):
And in that environment, that's a good topic to talk about because pretty much everybody has a story that isn't pleasant,
and that they might be willing to tell because other students also will have that common experience of grading being a problematic experience for them.
So in that sense,
storytelling on deeply complex and intimate topics quickly gets to that place where students start to,
(30:29):
to talk about the things that really matter to them.
Where they're able to do that,
they then build trust.
Because if one person tells an intimate story,
then the next person feels a little bit freer to tell an intimate story that will help others understand it.
And then the last way, and this is, how do you get there at the beginning?
(30:49):
Where do you do that?
We've begun to use,
I've begun to use electronic whiteboards as a really powerful tool.
I always set up an electronic whiteboard on positionality for introductions.
So each student gets a square space to introduce themselves however they want, and I do the same thing, and any other faculty in the course do it.
(31:13):
I'm the faculty supervisor for something called camp.
We've created this 3.5 day event during our reading week, which is normally off at SFU,
where students,
undergraduate students, who really are often very isolated,
get a chance to just be in a semester-in-dialogue-like space,
even if it's only for 3.5 days.
(31:34):
And we set up the white board for them to introduce themselves before they come to camp, because we don't have enough time necessarily to have a really deep meaningful dialogue within the space of sitting around a campfire.
Although I hope that we'll have some of those.
But as a takeoff point,
we'll use a white board so that students can introduce themselves in,
(31:56):
in that more meaningful way.
In my space,
I talk about um things like, how I've struggled with my weight all my life, and I introduce my family and my wife and the cat and dog through that space and,
things of that sort.
So that hopefully,
even though I still have that power differential,
(32:17):
I'm still a real person to them.
Adding some humanity into that interaction and not just a position.
I'm the professor,
but I'm also a human.
So I love the e-whiteboards.
Those are awesome.
I love them.
I wanna get back into this idea of classroom and classroom power again.
I have two kids.
They're both now in college. One of the things I saw when they were in elementary school,
(32:40):
middle school, and high school was such an increased use of collaboration in the classroom.
We did not do that when I was in school a gazillion years ago,
We did not collaborate.
You had to have your own work and that was it.
But they were encouraged, perhaps forced, to work in groups on group projects and deliver that project together and grade it together on that project.
(33:04):
There's that,
you know,
how do you grade a group?
But there's also that relationship between the teacher and the student is now between the teacher and a group.
And some of the things I've been reading about
the dynamics in the pre college classroom, where part of what we're starting to see is more of a dialogue.
(33:27):
I know you've been working in the college environment,
but have you had the opportunity to reflect on dialogue in these pre-college learning environments?
So that's a great question.
I personally have done relatively little of that except as a faculty member for a group of students who took on a project working with and wanting to increase dialogue about democracy in a pre-college classroom.
(33:59):
And they tried to introduce a game about democracy to encourage a dialogue amongst pre-college students, so high school students.
I haven't really touched on that area very much myself,
but the question that was embedded in there about power and grading and group work is a pretty interesting topic, and one that I've learned a lot about in this space.
(34:22):
Because, as I described earlier,
students work by themselves,
they work in small groups,
they work in large groups,
they work all together as a class.
What I learned over time was, that my ability to -- in typical ways of grading and thinking about grades -- to get insight into the individual contributions in larger group projects, was
(34:48):
really tough.
That is really, really tough.
And I tried all kinds of things to try to figure out how to learn this.
Now, I think the technique that's really gonna play out and work well,
is this concept of ungrading
Ungrading is a group of practices,
things like writing process letters, as they're described, where a student writes you a letter that reflects on their work within the context of the group.
(35:19):
I'm not in the space when they're doing that group work necessarily,
so I don't have personal insight into it.
But you learn so much when the student reflects themselves on what they've learned,
how they've participated,
what they're doing.
It's really,
really valuable.
One of the things about that, the first time I tried to get students to do that self reflection around grading,
(35:45):
I just introduced it at the very end and asked them to give me a grade and
why they deserved it in the course.
That was a disaster, because they all,
they weren't acculturated to that idea of reflection in the same way.
But over time,
and the last time I taught, by asking them to do this throughout the course,
(36:06):
maybe at the beginning reflecting on what they hope to learn,
what skills they hope to achieve.
And then each month where they can reflect on what they have learned,
where they're going,
how it's going with working in groups.
YHou learn so much more about the student,
even if they won't come to talk to you one on one. Because those are the kinds of questions I'll ask in a one on one conversation.
(36:29):
But sometimes it takes time for them to reflect on that.
And so doing it both in writing and/or face to face helps enormously when it comes to getting insight. 551 00:36:40,300 .--> 00:36:44,169 I've often divided them into the stuff they do alone,
the stuff they do in small group and the stuff they do in the large group for the grades.
(36:49):
And that large group grade, most of the students will get the same grade. It really is based on the composite performance.
Whereas in the individual work,
it's much easier to differentiate between the students who really contributed.
So I haven't got it right yet.
But I think there are some ways to get better insight.
What does it mean?
It means giving power over to the students to self reflect on their grade.
(37:14):
So by giving up some of my power,
I learn a lot more and I'm better at my job. I think that's a really important part of what's going on there.
As that understanding of empowerment in the classroom evolves,
I'm hopeful will get us into a place where we can do dialogue,
(37:35):
we can do conversation in a respectful way and maybe even do that interweaving of voices that is my dream.
To say, instead of having a stage on a stage, is to say there are many people in this group here that have something meaningful to share
and let us create conversation spaces instead of stage and audience spaces where we can hear those stories and share them and listen and learn and build upon them.
(38:09):
Maybe that's my whole point in doing this podcast is to try to find a way to get more people to think,
to understand,
think,
explore that concept.
What I love about what you're doing, Diane,
is that you're going into this in experiment mode.
(38:31):
You're testing,
you're trying,
you're doing all kinds of fun things.
I just glory in hearing that. It is just so wonderful to hear a professor taking that approach.
Instead of saying I have all this knowledge, I need to download..
Well, first of all,
I was a basic scientist for many years.
I studied physiology of diabetes.
(38:52):
So I have a basic science mindset.
I also have the mindset of a mentor more than a classroom teacher.
So I probably spent way more time in my career as a mentor to graduate students,
which is a more one on one nuanced kind of exercise than in a typical classroom.
And I wasn't actually very good --
I didn't have a good sense of how to do the sage on the stage in a classroom environment.
(39:17):
I can do it as giving a talk, but in a classroom that just was never very satisfactory.
And because I had the privilege of going outside the university for some of my career to do some other jobs
and then come back and land at the university in a place where they're doing this unusual kind of teaching which just fit so perfectly with the mindset that I had,
(39:39):
that I could do this work in that kind of a way I wanted to.
Thank you Diane, again, for joining us today.
This has been a really fun conversation!
For more about this podcast, please see our website
(40:00):
at www.weinterruptthispodcast.com.
There, we have show notes, links and other episodes.
You can also contact me on Twitter @HaakYak to recommend topics or speakers for the series.
I look forward to hearing from you.
This podcast was produced on the traditional lands and waters of the Menominee, Potawatomi and Ojibwe peoples.
(40:20):
I pay my respects to Elders past and present and to emerging and future Indigenous leaders.
It is a gift to be grounding and growing this work within these beautiful forests and waterways.
Thank you also to Emma Levinson for her Interruptions artwork featured on our website,
and to Alan Huckleberry for allowing us to use Bartok's Melody with Interruptions from the University of Iowa Piano Pedagogy video recording project. The segue music is “Observe” by Shane Ivers of Silverman Sound Studios.
My sense is that trust is a critical variable in the ability to get to that place where interruption is no longer offensive but is more like the orchestra playing.
Welcome to We Interrupt This Podcast.
(00:23):
I am Laure Haak, your host.
Teaching and learning how to be in dialogue is both fun and complex.
Join us as we talk with Diane Finegood, Fellow at the Morris J Wosk Centre for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University,
about building scaffolding for effective conversation. How to foster an ethic of care for active listening and participation.
How to foster an ethic of care for active listening and participation.
(00:45):
How group size matters.
We talk about the challenges of power differentials in the classroom and Diane's iterative approach to devolving power through self disclosure and ungrading,
and how online and in person classroom settings and tools can be blended to facilitate transparency, respect. and trust building.
(01:05):
How does interruption fit? Diane is both interrupting the "sage on the stage" mode of teaching as well as developing spaces where interruption and dialogue is no longer offensive but more akin to an orchestra playing.
(01:35):
Interruptions is a really interesting conversation. I've experienced the phenomenon in a variety of different ways.
My current role is Professor at Simon Fraser University, where I've been for many years at a Center for Dialogue.
So the concepts of interruption and dialogue fit together really in a fascinating way.
I came to this role through a meandering career that included being a basic scientist,
(01:58):
leading a couple of different health research organizations,
doing a variety of project leadership contracts,
and now actually towards the end of my career,
I'm back in the classroom in a way that is just really exciting and fun,
and interruptions is part of the game when dialogue centers your course.
Why don't you tell us a little bit about how your course works?
(02:20):
You've got a course that is specifically about creating dialogue and bringing a group of people together to try to create a space where productive dialogue is possible.
So tell us a little bit about how this course was created.
The classic model of something called a "semester in dialogue" was created 20 years ago or more than 20 years ago by many people who preceded me into this space.
(02:46):
A fellow named Mark Winston,
who was a bee biologist actually,
but he had this sense that pedagogy needed to be something more than just the sage on the stage or somebody downloading content to students.
And he and other colleagues that came along shortly after him,
developed this model of a cohort-based program,
(03:08):
16 to 20 students, full time 9 to 5, five days a week,
which is quite unusual in the academy.
Maybe more akin to things like a field school than it is to a regular course.
Because it's full time, students are,
are really intensively involved with their cohorts.
So they build relationships.
We sit in dialogue,
(03:30):
we learn and practice active listening and various forms of facilitation and dialogue.
And it's basically life changing for most of the students that take the course.
This is so unusual for them,
so different from a normal course that,
that they build relationships,
they work on projects,
they learn to be in dialogue with each other.
(03:51):
And it's really quite a wonderful experience.
I've now had the benefit of teaching that course three times.Because it's becoming a course maybe for more privileged students, in that full time is really tough now for students,
we've had to do some pivoting and changing.
And so I taught last spring a dialogue focused course.
(04:15):
It was only three credits and it was much less intensive.
But still,
it was pretty interesting in the way centering dialogue connects back to the conversation of interruptions.
I'm still thinking about this 9 to 5, from the from the point of view of the person proctoring, teaching,
posting the class.
That's a lot of responsibility.
(04:36):
So I'm wondering if you can reflect on that from your role as the professor.
So, it is pretty intense. I'll say that.
But I think of it different from when you're teaching a typical university course, where you think there's a certain amount of content that you need to download to the students
and they need to learn these concepts and they have learning objectives,
(04:58):
that sort of thing.
This is a course in which you scaffold experiences.
So over the times that I've taught the course,
I've learned what works and what doesn't work to scaffold for the students,
an opportunity to do things like practice being in dialogue,
practice giving and receiving feedback,
(05:19):
practice active listening,
practice being in an ethic of care for each other,
practice how you work in collaborative groups,
things like that.
And so as you do it and you learn from each experience,
you gain more insight in how to create the scaffold.
Now,
I'm also particularly interested in complexity and systems thinking.
(05:43):
So my courses almost always have a flavor of that to it,
where I might present a framework that I think is important from a complexity point of view,
how we think about complex different from complicated,
and then ask the students to apply it in a particular case,
be in small groups or large groups,
(06:03):
that sort of thing.
It's really quite different from a regular classroom.
And you know,
yeah,
9 to 5 sounds like a lot.
But typically we have many invited guests over the course of the semester,
the students host the guest and they meet with the guests,
find out what the guests would like to talk about.
It's usually a bit unusual for the guests as well because you're asking them not to come and give a powerpoint presentation,
(06:26):
but to be in dialogue with the students.
You touched on something -- that interaction-between conversation.
There is a dialogue,
there's interruption,
but there's also creating the framework that enables people to have these conversations where you can talk amongst and with and over and interrupt.
(06:46):
And so I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about how you talk about interruption and active listening and the interaction between those things.
So you usually set up exercises. For active listening,
it's an easy facilitation plan where you might put students in groups of three or even in groups of two and you give them rules, like let this person talk on this topic,
(07:10):
whatever the topic might be.
And we usually pick meaty topics like power, trust, grading,
which is always an interesting topic for students and its impact on them.
And you ask students to tell stories and not interrupt.
So in an active listening exercise,
you're typically asking students to listen for X number of minutes to the story your partner is telling, and then you get to speak for a couple of minutes and don't interrupt.
(07:37):
So that's one kind of way that you practice something we tend not to be used to --
not interrupting or even offering your thoughts or your support or whatever it is.
So sometimes you need to go to the extreme of saying,
don't interrupt this person in order to practice that activity.
(07:57):
We also in the larger group, sitting in circle,
we must always sit in a circle.
We'll often do it without tables in front of you.
So the student can't put a laptop in front of them and create a barrier between themselves and the rest of the people in the room.
But actually are maybe a little bit vulnerable without having that barrier.
They almost always have name cards.
(08:18):
And even throughout the semester,
even though they know each other well,
we often have guests who don't know them.
And so they have a nice little tent card with their name on it and they stick it in front of their chair.
And over time,
the tent cards have become, just by happenstance,
a very interesting tool for the students to try to prevent interruptions when somebody is speaking.
(08:38):
So somebody might be telling a story,
another person has an idea or an add on to the story and they'll turn their tent card up on end as a way to signal that somebody else is interested in speaking.
Sometimes there's a facilitator for a dialogue,
especially when there's a guest.
But other times there's not.
And we're in dialogue,
telling stories on a theme that is important to the students.
(09:01):
I had one group of students who were so worried about interrupting each other but wanting to continue threads that they started to develop a tool where they would use their fingers to indicate who was first to put their tent card up on end and who was second.
Rarely in that setting,
did we get to that place where it was a free for all conversation that anybody could interrupt anybody else.
(09:25):
Another thing -- I was thinking about this this morning, when I was facilitating a session with people in our center where we did something we called question storming.
So question storming is a facilitation technique where you're only allowed to ask questions,
you're not allowed to answer them.
What I really like about that is everybody is more on an even playing field under those circumstances.
(09:47):
If nobody's the expert answering questions,
everybody's questions are appropriate and valuable.
And then there's this really interesting thing that happens about threads of conversation.
If you do question storming one on one,
the threads tend to follow each other.
One person says something,
(10:07):
the next person builds on it,
the person before then builds on that, and sometimes it changes direction,
but the threads can go quite deep.
If you do it with seven people, what happens is somebody asks a question,
people are thinking about that question and what questions they have about that question.
And then somebody else jumps in and asks a different question,
(10:30):
takes you off in a different direction. And then when the people were thinking about it,
they might come back and bring you back to a particular thread.
So it has this really interesting organic landscape feel to it, where you will get a sense of the mapping of where people are interested in that topic.
(10:50):
But it can be a little bit messy and kind of fun.
How that works in person and how that works online is a bit different. So in the online space,
if you do interrupt somebody, or you do want to jump in on a thread and other people want to jump in,
(11:16):
you clash in that audio - digital space, and you can't hear the other person.
Whereas when you're face to face,
you have more opportunity to hear while you're also speaking.
So I do think the dynamic is different face to face than it is in an online environment.
But even when you're face to face with a group of students who've built trust with each other,
(11:40):
then there is a level of respect that they want to afford each other.
And that ethic of care care becomes really important from the trust building that occurs.
And so that's why I think they develop these strategies.
I think in the online space having a mechanism, and not very detailed description of rules,
(12:01):
but something that makes sense to people like just turning your mic on and off.
Like you said, this is a semester long course.
It's five days a week,
all day long.
I cannot imagine being in a space like that for that period of time and not talking-with people.
(12:27):
You know what I'm saying?
Just waiting.
I would be sitting there fidgeting with the tent card.
I can't imagine that there wouldn't be a little bit more of the talking-with happening.
I'm wondering how you see that.
And I'm talking about interruption both in the sense of somebody cuts somebody off,
but also that two people are talking at the same time.
(12:49):
How do you see that play out in your class or do you just not see that?
So,
in a 9 to 5 class,
we'll typically sit in dialogue for 2 to 3 hours in the morning with a guest or a topic that we want to unpack or something like that.
Maybe not every day,
(13:09):
but three days a week out of five,
we'll be doing that.
Usually there's lunch after that. And then we debrief the dialogue that we had, to have that meta moment of -- what have we learned about facilitation?
What have we learned about the dialogue?
How can students that still have to facilitate later learn to improve it?
How did the strategies for not interrupting people work?
(13:32):
And often in the afternoon,
they're free to work on projects with each other because the scaffolding includes work that they have to do on their own,
which is writing a publishable article.
They work in pairs on their facilitation of dialogue.
They work in small groups on projects that carry out through the semester. And they work as the whole group in putting on a public dialogue at the end of the course.
(13:58):
So they have to navigate the complexity of working by themselves in pairs in small groups and in the larger group and make it all work through the semester.
So often part of the day is given over to working with each other.
Now, one of the challenges in answering your question is when we tell them to work on the final public dialogue,
(14:20):
which is the whole group,
we walk out of the room as faculty; I usually have a co-teacher.
So I don't know whether they're much more prone in that environment to talk over each other and to interrupt each other.
I might predict that they are in that space where there's no professor watching,
there's no guest in the room, and they're trying to figure out as a group,
(14:42):
how to work together.
But what's also really interesting about that exercise is the value and importance of building trust before they can do that work as a full group.
So I learned kind of the hard way, that when we were fully online and the group of students we had in the classroom were in diverse time zones
(15:07):
and because we were online, we only did it three hours a day,
because we were online, I could invite some international students into the classroom.
So we had different cultures, three people in France,
one in Ghana,
one in Croatia.
So I learned during that experience that because they don't eat lunch together,
they don't build the trust that they need to build.
So there's this informality without the faculty in the room,
(15:31):
that's super important to their ability to do that kind of work together.
And as a result,
it's an important component of this course.
And I'm not usually in the classroom when they're having lunch
or whatever the more relaxed time is.
And so again,
I'm gonna guess that there's a lot more of that kind of fluid conversation happening in those spaces and,
(15:54):
people moving to talk to this person or that person or in groups.
But I think in those settings,
you probably do get more interruption.
Whereas in the more formal,
I don't wanna call it really formal,
but in the classroom,
when I'm there,
when other faculty are there,
when guests are there,
there's definitely an air of politeness and care that interruption doesn't necessarily work as well.
(16:16):
It reminds me of the conversation we had with Josie's Catalyst Group where everyone was very cognizant of letting people finish their thought, and then a breath, and then they would talk, and I found it a little bit ironic.
(16:52):
Always when we talk about interruption people are -- and even when we're doing this podcast -- we are really cognizant of letting people finish and then taking a beat and then moving into the question.
So I'm gonna push you a little bit more on this Diane.
We talked about the chat.
So I'm wondering if you can reflect about the chat in that online class.
That's a really interesting thing that I've been thinking a lot about, how we use chat in Zoom.
(17:15):
It really started pre-Zoom, in how do we use Twitter when we're attending a conference.
And I'm a huge fan of attending a conference with a Twitter hashtag that enables a conversation to happen,
that isn't happening in the room per se.
You can ask things and you can state things in that space that you can't necessarily do in the room, when you've got the sage on the stage giving you a lecture of some sort.
(17:43):
So it started there for me. When we first went online with the classroom,
I found the chat challenging as the faculty member because I,
as the faculty member and facilitator often of the conversation,
I couldn't look at the chat,
pay attention to the chat and facilitate the conversation in the room in whatever way I needed to.
(18:06):
So for me in that space,
when you're the kind of doing that work,
I found it mostly distracting.
In the classroom though, I think the students found it really helpful.
Especially if they were telling difficult stories,
they would be able to support each other using the chat. You saw lots of supportive commentary happening in the chat without interrupting the flow of the conversation so the flow could continue.
(18:35):
So in that space,
I think that's what it gets used for.
In live dialogue, that sense of politeness and care for each other is really quite dominant.
And in the online space, you just can't really talk over people and have it work is my experience, because really only one person's gonna get the microphone, ulitmately.
(18:56):
I keep coming back to,
is it possible for humans to have a conversation like music?
(19:23):
A person talking,
but you can also have another person talking at the same time.
And is it possible for us to be in conversation like that and harmonize with our words and thoughts and actively listen to more than one voice at a time.
(19:47):
And I guess what I'm hearing, is this power dynamic that exists when you're in these meetings,
and when the stage is on the stage,
you gotta sit on your hands and keep your mouth shut and make sure your tent card is down and,
and maybe you can tweet.
I'm wondering, as somebody who's been doing this work in the pedagogical setting,
(20:07):
how do you do that power sharing, power structure --
How do you explore that?
Do you explore that in your discussions with your students?
Until I heard you talk about interruption as a theme, we haven't explored it.
But I would say the larger the group,
the harder it is to have adequate trust with the whole group that you can have those simultaneous talking over each other kinds of conversations.
(20:37):
I think that would be quite difficult.
But what I would say is when you're one on one, or in a very small group with people where you've built tremendous trust and,
and you have a strong relationship,
then it can emerge.
I don't know if full simultaneous talking and listening,
I don't know how easy that would be,
(20:59):
but certainly interruption and talking over each other a little bit can grow the more trust you have.
When you started this conversation, where you started me thinking about this,
my partner and I had gone and had lunch with a couple that we know and two of us are academics and Jewish --
where, you know,
it tends to happen more in that kind of a culture, I'll say --
(21:20):
and the other two are not academics or Jewish.
Typically, what happens when we get together is myself and the other academic,
we will do this,
we'll interrupt each other,
we'll talk over each other,
we'll add on to the conversation in ways that interject and interrupt. The other two are taken aback by this behavior.
(21:42):
So I think culture plays an important role.
And then,
the other instance where that happens for me is,
when I'm one on one with a colleague who I know, I've spent enough time with, and a particular colleague and friend I'm thinking about,
where we know each other so well,
and we know our interest in the topics are so related, that we're quite comfortable when one says something,
(22:08):
the other pushes it into another direction, takes off from that,
goes off in another tangent.
And we don't,
we don't feel any sense of guilt and
no remorse or worry that we've interrupted the other person.
My sense is that trust is a critical variable in the ability to get to that place where interruption is no longer offensive but is more like the orchestra playing.
(22:40):
I want to come back to power. Those two examples you provided, Diane,
the power was not sage and listener.
It was people that are in, I'm gonna say more or less equivalent power levels with each other.
Is building trust actually part of breaking down or leveling out power structures in a classroom?
(23:06):
Well, that's a big question.
I think one of the challenges in the classroom is you can never take away the fact that as a faculty member,
I have to grade the students in some fashion, or I have to report the grade even if I'm trying to use techniques like ungrading where students get to do more self assessment
(23:29):
and there's there's processes that enable them to play into that.
So in a classroom, I think that that's super difficult.
In other contexts though, I've been in spaces
where the power structure is much more balanced.
And two come to mind for me recently.
One is, I run a community of practice on systems pedagogy.
So this is a group of people who either teach in universities or colleges or are facilitators by profession and practice,
(23:58):
but are interested in how we talk more about and engage people more with systems thinking.
So what's interesting is, your question makes me think of one person in this particular group who does have a tendency to monopolize the conversation.
And I have not in that space figured out how to interrupt.
Although I organize it,
(24:19):
I don't really want to control the conversation.
Haven't figured the solution to that one out.
But I've also participated in another community recently
that was really interesting.
So this is a group of women who want a women-only space for dialogue, and have not set up any preconceived notion about the dialogue.
(24:41):
I've been to two of the conversations in this group.
And the first one,
everybody was trying to kinda feel each other out and,
and get a sense of the culture in the room.
But the second one,
after one session,
the second one, which had a number of people who were in the first one and a few new ones,
was really interesting because people did go on at length telling stories that related to each other, and everybody including myself felt perfectly comfortable just sitting back and listening and not interrupting.
(25:17):
And there was no interruption that I could tell that occurred, but really deep meaningful personal stories being told that were building on each other
in not really concrete, clear ways,
but in thematic ways.
It was the first time I'd been in a room where I was really quite happy to sit back and listen to these stories,
(25:41):
however the person wanted to tell their story and where they wanted to go.
So that was,
it was a really interesting exercise in,
can you build trust by creating a certain kind of space?
Like, it's just gonna be a women-only space, and is that enough to have adequate trust that people are willing to listen and actually not interrupt.
(26:03):
A really interesting question would be,
will that group get to a place where in fact,
people do start interrupting each other to carry threads through?
I don't know.
We haven't met enough for me to know whether that's gonna happen,
but I'm gonna watch for it now.
But they're playing scales first and everyone's getting used to where they sit and then,
(26:27):
then you can build a symphony together.
As you're going through the trust building in these classes, are there other ways that you encourage disclosure among the folks participating in the class?
(26:54):
What kinds of reading or work have you done in your career to try to create those spaces where people come into them and feel welcome because of that,
that infrastructure,
as you said, that framework that you're building?
Over the last 3 to 4 years of the pandemic, of Black Lives Matter, of Indigenous Rights in Canada,
(27:19):
I've tried to educate myself.
I've taken a lot of professional development and engaged in a lot of dialogues with other faculty and other individuals to,
to really understand my white privilege,
to understand my power and privilege in the classroom.
One of my co teachers who's taught with me three times is somebody who I deeply respect, a white male,
(27:41):
but also really understands power dynamics in the classroom more deeply than I.
So I've learned a lot from him.
He's the same person I can have interruption conversations with over breakfast that are just wild and crazy.
So I've learned a lot.
I've tried to educate myself.
And what I notice is how I've evolved over that period of time.
(28:03):
Just one example would be, I remember several years ago when a student was talking about the concept of land back and the hashtag LandBack as it relates to Indigenous land in Canada.
And my immediate knee jerk reaction was,
well, that's never gonna happen.
How the hell are we gonna do that?
Our economy is so based in land ownership that I don't,
(28:25):
I just can't imagine it.
Right?
Because it's all their land,
even though we took it,
some of it
through treaty and some of it unceded.
But now I've come to understand,
there are some interesting ways in which land back can occur and how the movement and the topic plays out in different places.
So my own evolution in thinking about these things is important to my ability to create an ethic of care in the classroom.
(28:53):
And even if I didn't understand those things before, I still put myself out there in a way in which I try to get the students to understand that I do care.
So that's one thing.
Another thing that we do, is we try to have one on one conversations with the students on a regular basis.
And initially,
I didn't want to force students into that.
(29:15):
I didn't think my power to have them in a one on one conversation and say it was required was appropriate.
So I didn't require it.
But I've come to understand if you don't require it,
some of the students who need it the most to build a relationship with them won't come.
And I learned that particularly in the online environment.
And then in the classroom,
(29:35):
I think we do it because we use storytelling as a device a lot.
And storytelling on topics that very quickly become hot topics. Storytelling on grading and people's experience of grading is a really hot topic,
because people have been harmed by the grading system extensively in the way post-secondary or even pre post-secondary education occurs.
(30:02):
And in that environment, that's a good topic to talk about because pretty much everybody has a story that isn't pleasant,
and that they might be willing to tell because other students also will have that common experience of grading being a problematic experience for them.
So in that sense,
storytelling on deeply complex and intimate topics quickly gets to that place where students start to,
(30:29):
to talk about the things that really matter to them.
Where they're able to do that,
they then build trust.
Because if one person tells an intimate story,
then the next person feels a little bit freer to tell an intimate story that will help others understand it.
And then the last way, and this is, how do you get there at the beginning?
(30:49):
Where do you do that?
We've begun to use,
I've begun to use electronic whiteboards as a really powerful tool.
I always set up an electronic whiteboard on positionality for introductions.
So each student gets a square space to introduce themselves however they want, and I do the same thing, and any other faculty in the course do it.
(31:13):
I'm the faculty supervisor for something called camp.
We've created this 3.5 day event during our reading week, which is normally off at SFU,
where students,
undergraduate students, who really are often very isolated,
get a chance to just be in a semester-in-dialogue-like space,
even if it's only for 3.5 days.
(31:34):
And we set up the white board for them to introduce themselves before they come to camp, because we don't have enough time necessarily to have a really deep meaningful dialogue within the space of sitting around a campfire.
Although I hope that we'll have some of those.
But as a takeoff point,
we'll use a white board so that students can introduce themselves in,
(31:56):
in that more meaningful way.
In my space,
I talk about um things like, how I've struggled with my weight all my life, and I introduce my family and my wife and the cat and dog through that space and,
things of that sort.
So that hopefully,
even though I still have that power differential,
(32:17):
I'm still a real person to them.
Adding some humanity into that interaction and not just a position.
I'm the professor,
but I'm also a human.
So I love the e-whiteboards.
Those are awesome.
I love them.
I wanna get back into this idea of classroom and classroom power again.
I have two kids.
They're both now in college. One of the things I saw when they were in elementary school,
(32:40):
middle school, and high school was such an increased use of collaboration in the classroom.
We did not do that when I was in school a gazillion years ago,
We did not collaborate.
You had to have your own work and that was it.
But they were encouraged, perhaps forced, to work in groups on group projects and deliver that project together and grade it together on that project.
(33:04):
There's that,
you know,
how do you grade a group?
But there's also that relationship between the teacher and the student is now between the teacher and a group.
And some of the things I've been reading about
the dynamics in the pre college classroom, where part of what we're starting to see is more of a dialogue.
(33:27):
I know you've been working in the college environment,
but have you had the opportunity to reflect on dialogue in these pre-college learning environments?
So that's a great question.
I personally have done relatively little of that except as a faculty member for a group of students who took on a project working with and wanting to increase dialogue about democracy in a pre-college classroom.
(33:59):
And they tried to introduce a game about democracy to encourage a dialogue amongst pre-college students, so high school students.
I haven't really touched on that area very much myself,
but the question that was embedded in there about power and grading and group work is a pretty interesting topic, and one that I've learned a lot about in this space.
(34:22):
Because, as I described earlier,
students work by themselves,
they work in small groups,
they work in large groups,
they work all together as a class.
What I learned over time was, that my ability to -- in typical ways of grading and thinking about grades -- to get insight into the individual contributions in larger group projects, was
(34:48):
really tough.
That is really, really tough.
And I tried all kinds of things to try to figure out how to learn this.
Now, I think the technique that's really gonna play out and work well,
is this concept of ungrading
Ungrading is a group of practices,
things like writing process letters, as they're described, where a student writes you a letter that reflects on their work within the context of the group.
(35:19):
I'm not in the space when they're doing that group work necessarily,
so I don't have personal insight into it.
But you learn so much when the student reflects themselves on what they've learned,
how they've participated,
what they're doing.
It's really,
really valuable.
One of the things about that, the first time I tried to get students to do that self reflection around grading,
(35:45):
I just introduced it at the very end and asked them to give me a grade and
why they deserved it in the course.
That was a disaster, because they all,
they weren't acculturated to that idea of reflection in the same way.
But over time,
and the last time I taught, by asking them to do this throughout the course,
(36:06):
maybe at the beginning reflecting on what they hope to learn,
what skills they hope to achieve.
And then each month where they can reflect on what they have learned,
where they're going,
how it's going with working in groups.
YHou learn so much more about the student,
even if they won't come to talk to you one on one. Because those are the kinds of questions I'll ask in a one on one conversation.
(36:29):
But sometimes it takes time for them to reflect on that.
And so doing it both in writing and/or face to face helps enormously when it comes to getting insight. 551 00:36:40,300 .--> 00:36:44,169 I've often divided them into the stuff they do alone,
the stuff they do in small group and the stuff they do in the large group for the grades.
(36:49):
And that large group grade, most of the students will get the same grade. It really is based on the composite performance.
Whereas in the individual work,
it's much easier to differentiate between the students who really contributed.
So I haven't got it right yet.
But I think there are some ways to get better insight.
What does it mean?
It means giving power over to the students to self reflect on their grade.
(37:14):
So by giving up some of my power,
I learn a lot more and I'm better at my job. I think that's a really important part of what's going on there.
As that understanding of empowerment in the classroom evolves,
I'm hopeful will get us into a place where we can do dialogue,
(37:35):
we can do conversation in a respectful way and maybe even do that interweaving of voices that is my dream.
To say, instead of having a stage on a stage, is to say there are many people in this group here that have something meaningful to share
and let us create conversation spaces instead of stage and audience spaces where we can hear those stories and share them and listen and learn and build upon them.
(38:09):
Maybe that's my whole point in doing this podcast is to try to find a way to get more people to think,
to understand,
think,
explore that concept.
What I love about what you're doing, Diane,
is that you're going into this in experiment mode.
(38:31):
You're testing,
you're trying,
you're doing all kinds of fun things.
I just glory in hearing that. It is just so wonderful to hear a professor taking that approach.
Instead of saying I have all this knowledge, I need to download..
Well, first of all,
I was a basic scientist for many years.
I studied physiology of diabetes.
(38:52):
So I have a basic science mindset.
I also have the mindset of a mentor more than a classroom teacher.
So I probably spent way more time in my career as a mentor to graduate students,
which is a more one on one nuanced kind of exercise than in a typical classroom.
And I wasn't actually very good --
I didn't have a good sense of how to do the sage on the stage in a classroom environment.
(39:17):
I can do it as giving a talk, but in a classroom that just was never very satisfactory.
And because I had the privilege of going outside the university for some of my career to do some other jobs
and then come back and land at the university in a place where they're doing this unusual kind of teaching which just fit so perfectly with the mindset that I had,
(39:39):
that I could do this work in that kind of a way I wanted to.
Thank you Diane, again, for joining us today.
This has been a really fun conversation!
For more about this podcast, please see our website
(40:00):
at www.weinterruptthispodcast.com.
There, we have show notes, links and other episodes.
You can also contact me on Twitter @HaakYak to recommend topics or speakers for the series.
I look forward to hearing from you.
This podcast was produced on the traditional lands and waters of the Menominee, Potawatomi and Ojibwe peoples.
(40:20):
I pay my respects to Elders past and present and to emerging and future Indigenous leaders.
It is a gift to be grounding and growing this work within these beautiful forests and waterways.
Thank you also to Emma Levinson for her Interruptions artwork featured on our website,
and to Alan Huckleberry for allowing us to use Bartok's Melody with Interruptions from the University of Iowa Piano Pedagogy video recording project. The segue music is “Observe” by Shane Ivers of Silverman Sound Studios.
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