Video: Liquid Margins 029 | Where’s Class? Meet Your Students in the Margins (DocDrop)

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so again i just want to say welcome to liquid margins and this episode is called where's class meet your students in the margins today's wonderful guest carmen johnston

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she's an english professor at chabot college and denise majuli williams she's associate professor at san diego miramar college and then our wonderful moderator today erin barker

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um with the virtual background i'm out in your background there but this is my real office i don't know what you're talking about she's she's she doesn't even have to work for a living she's you know she's that

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yeah anyway uh and that's it i'm going to turn it over to you now erin and um thank you everyone for being here um today in liquid margins we're talking about how you use social annotation

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across a variety of contexts when your students are they may be in a hybrid learning format they may be online they may be in person they may be a mixture of all of the above right um but to kick all that off i want to hear a bit about

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your teaching background and your specialties so what um do you specialize in what is your passion and then uh the follow-up question is who are your students

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and carmen well i'll tell you what i'll give you some more think time on this one and carmen we're going to start with you so go ahead

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um so i'll start off with um my college i teach at a community college in hayward california which is in the bay area and i've been at chabot college for 15

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years and i am an english teacher at chabot and so in the community college at least at art college english teacher means you teach everything so i teach creative writing i teach literature i teach composition i

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teach pre-transfer level composition our courses are we do not separate reading and writing so the courses we teach reading and writing together so i it's hard to say what a specialty is i

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love teaching literature i really really enjoy teaching literature um in our courses our english one which is a freshman comp is usually like a non-fiction course and i enjoy teaching that also

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but probably literature is my favorite and i often get to teach a black lit course as well i am i teach in a program called change it now which is a social justice learning

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community so about half of my load of teaching is really focused i mean i teach social justice in all my courses but the change it now is more like a cohort of students so they're students that i usually have for a whole year together

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and so we're able to create a lot of community and chabot is i would say it's predominantly a campus of students of color so

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mostly latino students asian black pacific islander an asian in all the diversity of what asian means arab students

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we have white students at our school but definitely they are the smaller population so it's a very diverse group of students mostly working class and low-income students

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students who you know maybe couldn't afford to go off to college right away or didn't have the grades or just want to save money you know it's just it's community college is such an affordable option um and just brilliant lovely

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wonderful students that i just adore um yeah so that's i forget which other quest did i answer all the questions i think you got most of it and if you didn't i promise i'm not grading you

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today at the end of the session i'm not going to say carmen you get it um no that's perfect denise you want to talk to us about what you teach your specialties and who your students are

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sure i i love that crime and got to go first so i couldn't listen and prepare myself um i also am a community college english professor i love teaching community college you know that i love

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this phrase that we accept the top 100 of students and we're here to support all students reach their goals i've been a community college educator now for 21 years

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and i teach at san diego miramar college i teach english but i also teach english language learners in my district we call that elac english language acquisition

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and much like carmen my student body the students in my classes are are very diverse so there's not one predominant you know native language in the courses that i teach

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we're focused on getting students prepared for academic english and content courses in our english language acquisition courses you

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know multiple skills reading writing listening speaking grammar vocabulary american you know college culture all of that kind of mixed in it together um i'd like to say too that i just love

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how my the students i have in one classroom it'll you know i'll have students from 18 years old to 80 all together you know new immigrants refugees returning students um i don't even international students just

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it's a huge mix and it is such a joy to be there learning with them and to be supporting them um you know with their goals um and we've had some good times working together online hybrid

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um during the pandemic and we had been doing that in our program before the pandemic so we were able to move into that um fairly smoothly in terms of the technology obviously during a pandemic

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there's so many other issues that make it very very very challenging um but our students stayed with us and i just have really enjoyed working with them and we're gonna get to some of those challenges trust me all my questions are

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leading somewhere uh my next question for the two of you is what are your top three strengths as an educator so i want you to think on that for a sec

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everyone else who's attending i also want you to answer that question in the chat what are your top three strengths as an educator and if you're a librarian or a teacher or a professor or an

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administrator you are still an educator so i'm curious about your top three strengths and denise guess what you're going first on this one

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oh no all right so right off the top of my head i think the first thing that comes to mind is that i am always a learner i think i just mentioned i'm actually i'm a learner right now um in the graduate

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work but i think that always having the learner's mindset myself being a student always trying to improve be creative roll with it understand what it feels like to have to ask for an extension to do something that i've

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never done before to be confused that i think is very much a strength as a learner even though i've been in the field and teaching for over two decades now knowing that i'm still learning i think really um is a strength of mine

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when i'm teaching or facilitating students i am completely student focused my whole um just my my focus is always um providing

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equitable access for students for their voices for their experiences for their learning um their activities um i i'm under evaluation right now but i always joke that whenever i'm under

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evaluation when people come in the room they can never find me like where is the news and even in the online setting where is denise right because the students are the center um so that's enough that's something that i think so what is that too i've been

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talking on the fly here a learner student focus i think that i express empathy for students and they know that they can come to me and then i'm here for them i

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think it's really really challenging um to be in a new country to be navigating a college system to be doing that sometimes alone or with family and supporting children or or

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partners who have come here for work um and they're you know i think they that students really really need to know that the relationship with instructor comes before the pedagogy and that i'm here for them no matter what

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happens to you carmen i'm taking notes on that one which is the relationship comes before the pedagogy thank you for answering that first and thank you for having such a great answer um i'll tell you why i asked this

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question carmen you're up well i would say that my my number one um i don't know my best catch attribute as an instructor is my commitment to racial

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justice and equity um and just how that plays out in everything from the books that i teach from the way that i teach to building relationships with students that that is like my primary

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concern um is making sure that my classroom is a safe space for everybody and that we're able to have real talk um and challenge oppressive structures and think about institutionalized oppression

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and give students the language to um to describe their lives and their experience so i feel like that is like my the best thing about me as an instructor is my commitment to racial justice and

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equity inside the classroom and outside of the classroom as well that i'm very much interested in institutional transformation um and i think having that commitment has allowed

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me to challenge myself to make sure that i'm always you know practicing what i preach that if i believe this if i believe things to be a certain way if i have a vision for

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the world to make sure that that vision is happening inside of my classroom also right and giving my students a lot of agency so that we can co-create the classroom space and

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content and everything together so really trying to make my classroom like an oasis away from the oppressive structures that our students have to deal with and i think particularly for community college students the challenges that they're up

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against are are very powerful and and varied i think as you had stated like being refugees being current immigrants often just having to work or take care

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of family members often in families there's struggles happening so i really want my classroom to be a place that um is just safe and um giving and offering some respite from

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their present oppressive um things that our students have to face outside the classroom um i also would say that i'm really fun um i'm very funny i will say that i'm a fun teacher i like to have

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fun i do ice breakers in my class all the time i want my students to feel like when they come into the classroom that they're walking into a party so i really try to create an atmosphere of fun and play

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and i mean i think that's one of the things i like about hypothesis that it really does fit into like this this the play the playfulness that you can have inside of a classroom um and i believe that i've always believed since i was a

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student you know since a young student that learning should be fun like that is a core belief of mine that it should be fun why not um so that is really important to me and i try to have a lot of fun in my classroom and

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and also just um the ability to build community you know i mean all of my students have always said that my class is the class number one where they know each other they know each other's names

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um and they feel like they can be themselves and i just think that that is just such an important um aspect that i get to offer them is that this is just a place where they get to

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be themselves so they don't have to front they don't have to pretend they can make mistakes they can tell jokes they can show who they are um and i feel like yeah that that is one of my my strengths is just being able to build

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community inside of my classroom so i um first off i love the pointing out of knowing students names and calling them by the correct name um i was a middle school teacher for a long time and that

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was really important to me as well because our students in community college as well they move from class to class all the time right and it's easy to be seen as just another body in the room or another

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number or somebody to be graded to you know uh and so it starts with something so simple as using the correct name with our students uh so i asked that question for two

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reasons first off because i think you need to brag on yourselves more um i think the last year has been really difficult for everyone in education no matter the context no matter the way you teach no matter you know any of that

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right and so we need to brag on ourselves more which is also why i ask everyone in the chat to do the same because we need to recognize what we're good at the second reason i asked that is because i was mining information from

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you um every teacher has like what two objectives right the clear objective and the underlying objective um so one of the things that both of you talked about was this idea of

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relationship before pedagogy and now we're going to hop into using hypothesis you knew it was getting there and social annotation talk to me about how you've used hypothesis and social annotation and

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then how that helps build relationships in your classrooms or in your courses so i'm going to add that question in the chat while you think about it and denise or carmen one of you can go

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first if you want to volunteer okay well i gotta go i'm still thinking go ahead carmen yeah yeah well i first just have to say that i was

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introduced to hypothesis by my colleague monique williams who is like a total she's just very tech savvy and she always knows like all the cool

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you know apps to try on canvas and so she had explored hypothesis and she was using it and she you know kind of did like a little workshop with our department and i you know i i like

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that i like learning um apps and things like that too so i was very intrigued by this and i think particularly as english instructors you know annotation is just so important i feel like it's the number

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one skill that we can teach our students and this is skill that's going to help them in all their classes so i feel like in the past when we were pre pandemic and face to face i would you know always come by my students when we'd

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reading a book and like check their annotations and we'd spend a lot of time working on annotation and how important it is and checking it and um i feel like one of the cool things about hypothesis is that

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it kind of does a lot of the work for you you know so it's in canvas so i can just look through it and then just kind of grade it from there um but to your question in regards to like how it helps build relationships

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so often you know as i was talking about earlier like just my pedagogical stance around just racial justice and equity so i am you know 90 of all the readings that i

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use are by people of color and and the context right the issues are so important to our students and so when they're reading and annotating they're reading about things that you know impact their lives

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and that are really important to them and so often you know i might ask them to um you know identify you know three golden lines from a poem or something like that right like three lines that

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stand out to you and they get to highlight and then also to respond to two other people right so that's one of the ways that you know the relationship building happens and then when we're in class you know we'll pull those golden

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lines and especially on zoom we might put them on a padlet and people can comment or they might go into a breakout room and share their golden lines from the hypothesis activity and come up with one that they

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think is the most powerful so they're having these opportunities to talk to each other about these lines um from the literature that really speak to them and how it connects to their own lives and i

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think that naturally you know builds relationship and community because they're so great at when we have that larger discussion you know they'll say oh well so and so yeah will you say what you said in the room about that because

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that was really cool or oh i really liked what uh marissa said marissa you know can you speak to this and so it really helps um build that community and have them see each other as scholars

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because that's also a really big um a really big piece of my class is i want them to identify as scholars right as readers writers and thinkers and so when they're in there with hypothesis pulling

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out these golden lines talking to each other and recognizing each other as scholars i think it really helps them strengthen their relationships and build our community of learners together

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and carmen just to follow up are you providing when you're giving that which sounds like you are but just to clarify when you're giving them say a poem and you're asking them to annotate this poem are you doing that online or in class

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so the annotations are usually online right so we you know upload it into canvas with hypothesis and they'll go in there and they will um annotate it um as

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homework right so they're kind of doing that work before they come to class and so then when we come to class we can look at it together and then um there is the classes in person

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is that correct right now my classes are all on zoom because of hand because of the pandemic yeah so i have one class that's asynchronous so we don't see each other at all and so it's a little bit trickier you

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know having them figure out how to um take those what they've you know reviewed on annotations sometimes i might put them in like a group discussion so that they can talk about

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it and work from it there but on zoom we'll do it together in my other class got it thanks for clarifying i was trying to picture what was happening yeah i mean what

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about this is on cam i'm sorry i'm just gonna say part of my campus is on part of my college is on campus right now but i just chose this semester to stay online denise what about you sorry sure

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i'm in the same position carmen we're kind of it's like that middle road right where in person kind of happened also then remote for those people that were in person for two weeks and blah blah blah so i'm still online as well

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by choice um and my classes are all online asynchronous and have been and i love using collaborative annotation for this reason because in an online async class you have to have

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student interaction and instructor presence right they have to feel that everyone is there that they're not moving through this class alone in a dark in a self-paced way individually they need to feel part of a

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community in order to be successful um and what um carmen just mentioned is very complementary to what i do as well in my english courses but also i'll speak specifically to my um english language acquisition courses what i love about

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using any type of collaborative annotation is it really i believe equitizes the student voice so whether we are in person in the classroom or on zoom live you know

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there's always going to be the three loudest students and we have all been teaching a very long time and we know all of the pedagogical moves to make sure that we have you know equitable equitable discussions and we have wait time and we do small groups but the the

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truth of the matter is and i was like this growing up it can be very hard for for students especially learning another language to speak up um in person or on zoom on the spot when you ask them something about a reading

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it can also um with um language learning a long time ago i learned german so i just really remember this what we think is enough wait time is never enough wait time so when you ask a question what do you think about this reading or what's

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you know what's your golden line i do that as well and then the three you know quickest students are ready and then the other ones are like still trying to figure out exactly what is the question right and processing that so on hypothesis or on any collaborative

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annotation tool online students have the time and the space to read carefully to prepare what they want to say and sometimes the quietest voice in the classroom is the is the loudest online

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and you get to hear everybody's voice everyone has the space to do it in an equitable way um and i feel like that's the best way for student interaction i also just know from serving students and

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from interviewing that they are done with discussion boards at least in my experience it is like the new death by powerpoint death by discussion board post once reply twice right so for especially language learning if you're interacting with the text and you're

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annotating and you're seeing the the lines that you want to use in your essay later um a lot of times the profile uses like what do you notice what do you think what questions do you have and then they're like oh a lot of people have the

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same question i don't feel silly that i didn't understand what this part was and then i can go in and add it in um and so it does allow for students to build that community um in a way that is not um

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like punitive or on the spot they can take that time um to respond and they can see each other and interact kind of in a more lively fashion depending on how you set it up i don't um i don't like police the language or the

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quality of their responses the same way i wouldn't in a classroom ask people to speak only in complete sentences with you know correct standardized english like you like a gif or gif whatever team you're on and how you pronounce it can be just

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as powerful of a response to a line than a you know paragraph written in standard english with you know topic sentences so being able to respond in ways that

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is comfortable for them and that they are um that they think is fun and lively really gets people into um understanding i think um the reading or the document or the chart or whatever

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the image even more than than you would in a discussion board in my experience choosy mothers choose jeff thank you nate no it's guess i can't decide i just like say it both

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ways whenever i have to say it i i really like that both of you are talking um about this idea of hypothesis as a safe space to express yourself

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and i have to agree with you denise like it's death by discussion board i myself am a doctorate student and every week when i have to do discussion boards in canvas i want to bang my head against the wall

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and wonder if it's actually beneficial to me and i'm actually learning or getting anything out of it and i just really wish that my school used hypothesis they're gonna rename they're gonna remain unnamed for right

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now um but yeah and so this idea of hypothesis as a safe space especially in an online learning environment especially in this past year or two years or maybe coming up three years

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um is intriguing to me and i think uh really gets at where we want our students to be right like they can't come to the table and learn academic material unless they feel safe

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both emotionally um and socially and academically and so i'm curious you guys kind of touched on this a bit if you could give some specific examples of uh maybe students or assignments that

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you've given where hypothesis has provided a safe space for them to express themselves or maybe they have not expressed themselves before if you have one and speaking of think time i've been

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terrible about it i say 30 seconds and then like 10 seconds later you have to say something just brief this popped into my head because we had just been talking about like icebreakers and names and things and um in

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one of my um courses we the first thing that we um annotate is the chapter called the f word by faruza dumas from her book funny and farsi have a lot of iranian students as

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well um but it's all about how her name feruza was the f word and how no one could say it right and all these things she changed her name like a lot of my students will say you know my name is this in their first language but just

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call me jane and i'm like no no i'm not calling you jane we're going to learn to pronounce your name correctly and we're all going to call each other by you know unless you really want don't change it for me right um so this reading is all

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about how furuza changed her name to julie and then she got married and then her name was julie dumas and then it was like nothing it didn't match her right and then she tried to go back but it was this knot of her professional life and her family called her one name and then

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her she had kids and was trying to figure this all out um so this this space for students to engage with like what do you think about how she changed her name and then also reflect on oh

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should i change my name or did someone in a previous class change my name for me did someone tell me your name's too hard so let's just shorten it which is terrifying that this is happening but it does happen to to my students sometimes

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um so it provided that kind of safe space for students to engage with the topic that's highly interesting names right and a chance to introduce themselves in this interactive way and

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learn how to use hypothesis or how to use the collaborative annotation tool because it's it's a whole cognitive overload if you're learning the technology tool and you're learning a really hard or you're you know annotating a text that's like pretty a

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lot of content right off and you're learning new for my students new grammar and vocabulary and sentence structure right so trying to to step into it so that we just do it in a in a fun way in a topic that makes sense get through the

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tech issues and then as we move throughout the semester then we can focus on topics and readings and charts and graphs and things that are our deeper knowledge or that could be more advanced for them but

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we're no longer worried about the technology of how to use that right um and then the last thing i would say about just all of that is that it's a lot a lot of um just the the tools are sometimes presented as

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things for students to consume passively like you're just going to watch this or you're going to listen to this lecture you're going to read this and then take a quiz but it's just like all passive right and so what i love about collaborative annotation is that

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they're actively involved and the discussion takes them where they want to go [Music] i love that comparison between passive learning and active learning using

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social annotation and hypothesis and it's funny denise because now i'm like considering all my assignments that i do for my doctorate program i'm like passive positive anyway um that's a whole other conversation for

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them too and same just didn't carmen what about you well you know i was thinking a lot about a couple of things i mean one is um

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i'm doing in my literature class right now we're doing the theme of the class is called resist the canon right and so we're talking a lot about the litter the literary canon and about students experiences in high

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school and the books that they've read and we started the course off by reading a short article called mirror mirror windows and sliding doors um and it's actually about children's literature and the and the

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importance of having diverse authors and that each book could be a mirror a window or a sliding door um and so you know it was the first kind of hypothesis assignment that we did in the class and i really liked it because it

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was very introductory right so i think very similar to what you're talking about denise like and it's a it's a very simple article to read um but powerful and so as they're learning hypothesis right they they're

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engaging in something that and also just really speaks to them because they get an opportunity to talk about you know the books that they read and what what books were mirror windows and sliding doors um and the books that

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weren't right and so on the on the annotated site you can see them having a conversation about oh i read that book and i hated the great gatsby or you know catcher in the ryan like i'm having those conversations too so i think you

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know it's i feel like part of it is hypothesis and part of it is the text itself that the text itself provides and i think this is similar to what you're talking about that you know when you choose these

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texts that really speak to our students then that's where that discussion can come alive right um and it becomes a safe space for them to have conversations that they've never really had had an opportunity to talk about

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like i can imagine for many students that there isn't really a lot of space for them to talk about their names and the oppression that they face i mean i know so many students that have had you know maybe they say their

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their name in their their home language um and then the teacher says well i'm just gonna call you charlie right and so there often isn't a lot of spaces for them to talk about that so i can imagine denise with an assignment like that that it would just be

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super vibrant and and opportunity for students to share these hurts actually that they've experienced in education and a lot of my students when we were talking about the mirrored windows and sliding doors they started to become

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very upset because they realized that there was so much knowledge that had been held from them you know so many um books that they could have read um that the teachers in their k-12 just didn't

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choose to to share with them and so i think it can also build there's that safety but it can also be um build a lot of camaraderie amongst the students i like this idea of like flipping the

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script on academics to some degree right we've talked about like passive learning and students not being able to access academics or learning and that not to sound like a marketing

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professional because i'm not in marketing but that hypothesis can help flip that script so that students can then access um the academics can then discuss the academics and then feel safe

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discussing it together whether they are asynchronous or synchronous or hybrid or in person pick your option of the week um

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so my next question for you is azure thinking about the rest of the term or the next year is how do you plan to use social annotation differently or similarly

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looking ahead this is kind of correlated to that but i'm just going to address some things in the in the chat about discussion board related to um to collaborative annotation because i

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think that's part of it so i i guess i should i said by discussion board i still believe that there are good ways to use discussion boards i love doing small groups i love doing um

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peer review but i think that whole group discussions you know that post once reply twice every week for every type of reading is too much and i think from my interviews with students remember that

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they're not just usually taking one class so i was talking to students who had four classes or three classes and that they were doing a discussion board in every class every week

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that is definitely death by just it's just too much right so for me um moving forward i i don't i i like it's another activity right it's like we have this toolbox of activities that we use

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um at the appropriate times for the type of of content or our goals for the course or where our students are thriving right or where we want to bring them so sometimes i'll do

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some readings um that are collaborative annotations sometimes we'll do a small group discussion board instead sometimes we'll do a flip grid sometimes we'll post the um you know the golden line on a padlet along with an image or you know

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so like using it not like i only use hypothesis but like using it in ways throughout the semester and i have also felt that i think we learned a lot of tools during the pandemic because everyone went remote

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and now we want to leverage continually leverage those tools moving forward no matter what type of um like modality we're in so it's not like oh we're in person now we'll never use

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this right look just like harmonizing this is a great way to use it for a prep for the in person for homework so everyone reads it everyone's discussion as an instructor we know the common themes or questions and then we come to

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the classroom we can have a more fruitful discussion um so i think weaving it in no matter the modality and with the other more traditional things is the way that i'll continue to use it [Music]

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what about you carmen yeah i was just gonna say ditto i don't know i have a much more to am but i really like what you're saying denise in regards to it being a tool right and you use it amongst the other

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tools that you use and i don't i mean i have to say i don't actually use the discussion board that much so it's interesting to hear people just to hear you know the death by discussion board so it's really got me

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thinking a lot about how i use it and when i use it um i saw on one of my colleagues canvas site they actually break students up into small groups and use the discussion board that way so they're

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just having a discussion amongst like five people and i thought that was a real intriguing way um to use the discussion board because i think it makes it less um overwhelming for students you know if

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you're just kind of building with five people and having that conversation so i think trying to use the annotations in that way um you know one thing that my mentor monique who i mentioned earlier

00:35:40

show me was too like just on the document itself kind of doing your own annotations and saying like oh pulling out a quote what do you think about this particular quote and having the students respond on hypothesis or you know having

00:35:54

little pointers and questions so i'd like to do more of that kind of putting questions on the text itself and then having them use hypotheses um to respond to the to things that i want

00:36:07

them to think about in the text in addition to the things that they're highlighting um and i think always just trying to figure out you know creative ways and to how to how to use it in a playful

00:36:18

way like you were mentioning i love flip grid um padlet maybe making collages doing wordles you know i just feel like trying to make it as fun and creative for the students as possible

00:36:33

i think what you're talking about too carmen in terms of putting the questions in almost like pre-annotating yeah before the students access the text it's almost a way to think about guiding students through the reading as well

00:36:45

and helping them access the text i mean even those of us who have years of education look at sometimes look at some of these texts and they're like yeah mind blown right like i need to read

00:36:58

this eight different times um yeah so i like that a lot i have a lot of professors who actually do something very similar uh so i know that we are over time there are some questions in

00:37:12

the chat franny do you want to help me um grab those yeah and also aaron um our guests have agreed to stay a bit longer and um i'm not sure what your schedule

00:37:24

is if you have to leave but maybe you can go until around 10 as well yeah so let's um first off i want to like i i'm inspired by both denise and carmen

00:37:36

today uh this is why i love my job um and getting to work and talk with educators across the country because i learned so much and also i just continue to think that

00:37:50

we have so many inspiring educators um and we need to continue to recognize all of you and the work that you're doing um every day so let's take a look at some of the

00:38:03

questions in the chat uh this is i think a follow-up to what we have just talked about uh denise and carmen there's a question from and uh i'm going to mispronounce this and so isawa if i'm

00:38:17

saying that incorrectly please please let me know do you require students to make a specific number of annotations and do you think it matters i tend to ask for a specific amount of annotations sometimes it's i mean i

00:38:34

think it really depends like we were just looking at um what were we just looking at we were just looking at uh excerpt from a novel called brown girls and we were

00:38:46

talking about language and style so i asked them to like pick their five top words from the from the piece and two golden lines right and so i do i think it's just really important to be

00:38:58

specific with students um and it and it is graded and it's mostly like you did it or you didn't do it it's not like you know i'm not commenting on the annotations but just making sure they did it because we're going to use it in class you know when we get back together we're going to talk

00:39:11

about it and i feel like you know for english teachers one of the hardest you know one of the hardest things is getting our students to read and be accountable for the reading you know um and so i feel like hypothesis for me

00:39:25

really helps with that because it's they can do it right on the page i can see that they've done it and i know then that we're gonna have a really fruitful and productive discussion in class and it's kind of one of the things for me as

00:39:37

an instructor that i tell them like basically you know there's only a couple of things that you have to do in english class and one of them is read like you just have to you know or else we're not going to be able to do it's kind of like

00:39:49

if you're a carpenter you wouldn't go to your job site without your tools you know like you're not going to be able to do your job so you have to read and it's kind of the thing that i'm like i will freaking kill you if you haven't at least read the book so i feel like

00:40:01

hypothesis is really helpful for me as an english instructor just keeping them accountable for the reading yeah very similarly to you carmen i love that um carpenter um analogy as well

00:40:18

um you know i do i think that being very specific on the expectations is super important right so similarly depending on what the topic is or what we're doing i often have them annotate mentor texts or or types of writing that we're going

00:40:31

to work on so like what do you you know what do you notice about this section how do they incorporate this quote how do you what do you think about this last line you know so so being very specific

00:40:43

of what i want them to do in each one um but i do just give completion points i do not grade for quality of responses um what i do instead of like

00:40:56

uh instead of reading their their comments to look for quality i just engage during on in hypothesis with them so i will give certain questions and then if someone has a short answer or something funny i'll ask like for

00:41:09

further thoughts or i'll add on another question and so i'm modeling that interaction and that's where my um that's where my time is spent is interacting with them not judging them

00:41:28

franny you wanted to say something i can see it everyone can always tell by my face and i want to say something uh there's a question from casey in the

00:41:39

chat um we might have already kind of covered this but she wants to know like along with safe space how can hypothesis help build community and connection through interactions i haven't used it that way before please

00:41:52

provide any suggestions and i'm thinking maybe she is that what comes to mind in that question is this idea of requiring students to reply to each other or look back at each other's annotations

00:42:08

possibly um and i think maybe she's asking denise and carmen if you require that what that would look like i mean yeah i i do require that on some of them not all the time but sometimes i do require them to

00:42:23

um speak back to each other i mean often especially in my class where it's where we have our zoom meetings we're going to use the annotations and so that's the spot where they will um you know they'll go back to their

00:42:36

hypothesis to find the quota the golden line and they'll have a discussion with each other um you know when we're in our breakout rooms but i would say to me the thing that's gonna

00:42:47

hypothesis is the tool it's the content that's gonna really spark the discussion and spark the community and connection so i think it's really about you know being very thoughtful about the text that you

00:43:00

choose and how is it going to speak to the students is it exciting is it something that matters to them is it something they can relate to is it something that's um i don't not controversial but that's

00:43:12

just powerful um i think it really starts with the text that you that you use and then like we were talking about the hypothesis is the tool right so it's hypothesis isn't going to do it on its own you definitely have to

00:43:25

make sure that you're picking the right text yeah i definitely agree with that and i also think that when you let go of requiring i mean there is expectations

00:43:40

we're going to all like answer these questions and comment and all of this and i expect you to do a couple to your your classmates but students will do way more when they're invested in it so you have an amazing text that speaks to them

00:43:53

and they understand how to use the tool and they see me in there they're chatting with each other i'll open it and be like what just happened overnight you know all these interactions because they're invested in the

00:44:07

community that they've built they've built not me and they're invested in the conversation that's happening around a text that speaks to them and then you can then you're not worried about did everyone do it three times because

00:44:20

everyone's done more than that granny wants to say something i have no quicker face yeah i actually had a question i had a question that i've been wondering for a long time um it's pretty general um so

00:44:41

you know we talked about building community and that seems to be successful with this and so what happens to um competition does that go away because you know when

00:44:53

you're in college when i was in college it seemed to be very competitive you know and there was always that person in the class never me who is like the most competitive and and

00:45:05

those people are kind of intimidating i think but you know i think competition can be healthy and unhealthy and so how can if you could just talk about that if that question is clear i mean i don't

00:45:18

know if it's because i'm at a community college but competition isn't a thing i'm at our level um i think students are more in competition with themselves because they're trying to transfer you

00:45:30

know i don't think they're like trying to get a better they're trying to get an a for themselves so they can go to cal they're not like i need to be the top whatever in the class so there's not a lot i mean i i haven't seen students be competitive with each other

00:45:44

more with themselves and trying to you know get the grades they need to get to their next goal i don't know i feel the same way i feel like carmen and i faces like looked the same we saw that we're both like

00:45:57

i mean i think it's it starts from the beginning of the student body but also the class right like we're not grading on curves you're not competing like this class is not built on competition i want everyone to get in i want everyone to

00:46:10

succeed i'm helping everyone reach their goals we are absolutely not in competition with each other and i don't i don't often feel that from my students either it's not a thing i mean just just to add to that i mean i

00:46:21

think there may be i mean there might be other spaces on campus like i could see maybe in stem or maybe in courses where the instructor doesn't have an equity stance

00:46:34

i know there are instructors that may say something like look around you know everyone's not going to be here by the end of the semester you know and that creates a sense of competition and a

00:46:46

sense of urgency so i don't want to misspeak and say that it just doesn't happen at the community college level i would say similar to denise it doesn't happen in my classroom because that's not what i'm about and that's not the space that i want to

00:46:59

create for students and it really is about i mean i tell them all the time that you know in my opinion college is about jumping through hoops and i'm not trying to set the hoop on fire i'm not trying to make my class you know have

00:47:12

spikes through the hoop i want it to be as comfy and and and not easy because it needs to have rigor but i want i want them to succeed i'm not trying to be an obstacle

00:47:27

yeah that's awesome and i think you know uh and my question was yeah maybe irrelevant to this discussion but um it's just something i've been wondering about and also i went to

00:47:39

college a long time ago and probably it was a different situation i think the world has gotten slightly nicer maybe in some ways slightly we can i i hope that we're more aware of

00:47:53

how we can be nicer how about that that's what i think about um i think we're out of time franny uh so i'm not sure if you want to wrap this up yeah yeah i think we better wrap it up

00:48:07

um first of all thank you for being here to our wonderful guests and thanks for staying a little bit over and um everybody in the chat uh also thanks for your

00:48:19

great comments and questions and again apologies to everyone about the closed captioning that's completely our mistake and we're going to correct that so um

00:48:33

the next liquid margins will be sometime in march and we'll let you all know um and uh it's just been a really wonderful and fruitful conversation

00:48:45

and thank you aaron for moderating from your beautiful home yeah i know uh okay great um so again there'll be a recording of this

00:49:01

hopefully by next week and we'll send that out to everyone who came here today so again thank you denise and carmen this is so wonderful and we will see you next time on liquid

00:49:13

margins you