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welcome everyone to liquid margins um this is called back to school engaging faculty with annotation and this is our sixth liquid margins
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so um i just want to thank everybody for joining us today um right now i'd like to introduce today's guest we have betsy barry she's the executive
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director of the center for advanced for the advancement of teaching at wake forest university and christine moscal she's an instructional designer from colgate university
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and jeremy dean he's our vp of education hypothesis he's going to be our moderator today so at this point i'd like to turn it over to the guests and let you say something about yourself
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or just say hello whatever you like so hi i'm betsy um really happy to be here um i'm as uh frannie said you know i'm the executive director of the teaching center at wake forest but i also teach
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my background is in philosophy and religious studies and so i've used hypothesis in my own courses as well as working with faculty here at wake forest to think about integrating hypothesis into their classes
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and i'm christine moscow i'm an instructional designer um for connected learning actually that's my focus here at colgate i work in what's called our learning and applied innovation group in its but we also work very closely with our
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center for teaching and learning i actually do not have a background in instructional design i have a phd in natural resource management and found i taught as an adjunct at colgate and then
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found my way to instructional design as a as a different way to support teaching and learning here at colgate um so i've been supporting hypothesis for a few years now and i wish i had known about it when i was teaching because i definitely would
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have used it but it's exciting to support other people who are using it in their courses great thank you jeremy are you on yes hi uh yeah i'm jeremy dean vice
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president of education at hypothesis i've been working in collaborative annotation for about eight or nine years uh two different companies and before that i was a i got a phd in english at ut so
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i'm also a uh well i'm a lapsed academic a rogue academic uh i'm excited to talk to you guys today about what it's like to go back to school
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right now it kind of feels like it has a whole different meaning in this day and age so my first question uh to the panelists is uh a pretty complicated uh one
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and i mean it you know genuinely but uh how are you doing christine how are you doing right now uh with all that's going on yeah especially in higher ed yeah surprisingly very well
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but um i don't know it's this weird situation where colgate is fully reopening we're a small school of 3000 students and they're expecting 2 800 of them to return
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in less than two weeks so i guess i sort of feel like i'm riding on a bus that's driving off a cliff and depending on how injured i get will depend on like all these other factors in play so that's kind of how i feel but
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right now i'm like enjoying the ride before we get to the cliff that's how i'm feeling but i i kind of feel like there is going to be a cliff you know and i don't know how deep how how big the fall is going to be
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yet yeah let's see what's your metaphor for how you're feeling i don't know i like to use my my friend josh eiler's metaphor of uh how in indiana jones where you know many scenes where there's one thing that
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he escapes and then the next thing all of a sudden comes up and now he has another thing he has to do and that i feel like since march um you know no number of things have come up we've resolved that and then it's like now time for the next thing we've even started talking about spring at wake
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forest as well um just to start planning and it's just it's a kind of ceaseless amount of work and i will say one good thing um about wake forest is wake forest really cares about teaching and thinking
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about teaching so i have been very heavily involved in the university planning for what we're doing at the at high levels which has been a ton of work and it's and all of you at all of your institutions know how much work your administrators
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are putting into this and getting faculty engaged as well and so i'm tired um but i also think the things that we have been able to do at wake there have been moments of inspiration that sort of keep me going
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um but i definitely since it's we're entering month six now essentially of just non-stop work i think a lot of us are just feeling like we need we normally have summers to take a little bit of a break and regroup and strategically plan and we didn't
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have that um so so i think yeah i don't know a good metaphor for just being tired and exhausted but we're a week away from the students coming back and all the different modalities and and supporting faculty with that but i think they're ready i do think
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they may not think they're ready but i definitely think our faculty are ready so um so i'm a little anxious and hopeful and also just hoping i can you know take one week off someday soon maybe maybe next summer i'm not sure
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right uh what what is the plan at wake uh christine said most kids most students are coming back yeah so we have um so there just like many schools sort of there's a discussion of the academic plan and then
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there's also the residential plan and so um we invited all students back residentially um and not all are coming back but we also have flipped our singles versus doubles and also
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preserved a number of rooms for quarantine and isolation so we also rented out other apartment complexes in winston-salem so that students could have singles so a number of students are coming back but but in a
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de-densified campus and then our classes uh over 50 of them are fully online uh about 10 to 12 percent are fully in person so like labs and studio art etc and then there are some that we're doing blended but we're not doing high flex
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we're doing blended where there's uh you know they may meet once every so often in person but the rest is fully online so those are our our three broad modalities and most of the seats because our big classes are fully online are actually
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online in terms of our coursework and so that's a huge that's still a huge increase of in terms of remote teaching and learning for the students there or it's compared to normal yeah yeah absolutely in fact wake forest has
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um traditionally only had online courses in the summer and usually like 10 courses so 10 courses a year online typically and now it's most of the courses are online so both our faculty and and we actually surveyed our faculty
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i think we found that 10 percent of our faculty had taught online before the spring and that includes at other institutions so we had to go from zero to you know and so it was a big a big ask of our faculty but they're
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amazing and they they put in the work this summer to learn and to think but most of our faculty and students had never experienced remote learning or online education all right let's look from afar it looks like you guys have been doing a great job there christine are
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are students going to be in face-to-face courses or are people going to be there residentially but taking a lot of courses uh remotely my sense is that the majority of faculty are teaching in person
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um they're going to try to um i want to say like it was like about a third of faculty though said that they would teach fully remotely um and online learning here is brand new
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colgate we're a small residential liberal arts college where the face-to-face interactions and teaching is very sacred and i think we have like one edx course that's taught every year and that's it
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so this is all new but so i want to say that face-to-face preserving that face-to-face element socially distance of course i think colgate's working really hard to make it happen although i went to campus today just on a bike ride with my daughter and
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there are tents being set up all outside so there's gonna be a lot of outdoor classrooms set up here interesting interesting um when you guys were talking about metaphors i was
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in my mind i had that uh simpsons uh image of like i think sideshow bob is like walking and he like steps on a rake and he's like oh he like walks and he steps on another rake and he just keeps it's like a field of rakes
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um i know that's not as glamorous as uh as indiana jones but same idea um so uh tell me what it's like to talk about and we'll get there to uh
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to talk about annotations specifically but what's it like to talk to instructors about technology right now uh just generally uh and introducing new technologies and helping
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instructors that may not really have uh utilized a lot of technology maybe even not the lms like just generally what's it like to talk about technology with with instructors and betsy maybe you can start us off yeah i think
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um one thing i've been noticing and we've been talking about here at wake is the difference between talking with them right now about it versus talking with them two months ago and that right now i think they're in a sort of panic of i just got to get this planned and put
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together and so no new no new information please and that's smart i actually think on their part but i would say that um earlier this summer they were really eager to learn particularly if we could connect it to
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what christine was saying about how this tool is actually going to help you preserve that thing that you love so much about in person teaching but that you had trouble with in the spring because we just stuck to the things that
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were just quick and easy and so many of them got very excited about that and so it's really a framing as you all know those of you that introduced technology framing it as and i have a wonderful you know we have a wonderful team of colleagues that i work with at wake forest who did the same
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that you've talked to before i know and um so helping them think through these is not uh um obstacles but actually reinforcing the thing that they want to do uh was was wonderful and helping them think about how you might be able to
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bring this back to your in-person classes after this moment got them really excited too because they didn't think it was wasted effort to learn the tool that's great christine what about you i just i think it's a lot different than
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in the spring because i feel like the spring kind of had this element of this is crisis mode we're going through a lot of trauma right now so i feel like that still sort of is lingering in the air but people i think saw this coming
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so that that has made it a little bit easier like people realize like we're stuck in this together like let's figure it out and i just have to say in working with faculty i just have so much empathy for them and it's really
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hard to be empathetic when they're freaking out about something not working but there just have been so many for me personally um when sometimes when i interact with faculty they
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almost feel like they like will make self-deprecating comments like i'm i don't know technology at all and i'm like well you figured out how to get into the zoo meeting with me you know so so trying to like boost their confidence like
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you might not feel like you're technologically savvy but you're learning i'm here to help you let's take this slow we'll figure it out so i guess that's kind of been the framing for me for how i'm approaching
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faculty is just having a ton of empathy for them because i can only imagine that the pressure's really high on multiple level levels so yeah absolutely and so christine right back at you like
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what is the role of annotation cloud of annotation or social reading in the sort of set of tools and practices um that you are working with instructors to um
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to take on at this moment i've really been framing the use of annotation and hypothesis as a way to build community with your students
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um because you know especially for courses that are meeting like asynchronously students might not have that synchronous real-time interaction so hypothesis the mar creates
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can opens up a community if you or a space for community to develop in the margins of a text which i just think is really powerful and i think is something that instructors i've i've had good luck
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i think peeking people's interest in the tool by framing it in that way because when we're not meeting it's just like we need more social connection in this day and age so i think that's a
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real that's been a really powerful message to me of course there's the deep it it helps with deep reading it helps students see like make their thinking visible to their peers and see the instructor like that's all important too
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but that hasn't really been what i've led with i've led with this is another tool to create community a scholarly community if you will among your students that's what it has been for me yeah i
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love that uh qualifier of the scholarly community and sort of training students to think about themselves as a as a scholarly community betsy what about you how have you been talking about collaborative annotation with instructors there at wake yeah i think
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that uh helping them see this as a place where you can build community is certainly a part of our conversations again um many of our courses uh at wake forest are discussion based not all of them but
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many of them are sort of traditional liberal arts experience and so helping them see that there are tools that can allow that to persist outside of the classroom is really important and i think it's also kind of a um
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a wonderful alternative for the faculty who are like i really don't want to do a discussion board to say that here are things here are ways that you can have discussions that are actually pegged to the text in a way that's really powerful um and i also think because so many of
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our faculty i mean we were having slow but some uptake even before march of hypothesis because so many of our faculty myself included care so much about reading and texts um we're a very humanities-heavy
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institution and so this was a just immediately clear to them when you just show them and that's the key hopefully we can talk about that too is when you show them how it works instead of just explaining it to them and actually having them do it you know
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practice it i think made them realize almost immediately oh i see how this can be helpful in my course um and so we've had a lot of people interested in using it that's great why don't you pick up where you suggested going next by saying like
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you know what other sort of techniques of introducing that you mentioned hands-on and showing them like talk about um and we didn't some schools also hired just a bunch of instructional designers contract ones and we didn't want to do that so we
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created a um i don't like this language but train the trainer model is a quick way to explain it that basically we worked with 66 peer faculty leaders um and we had a learning community with them where we we taught them things
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and then they went out and had groups of 15 faculty in their departments and they had learning communities that they ran for them so it was a sort of scaled way to get to everyone and i think what was really important about that model back to this question of showing faculty
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is that we actually ran it like an online course for two weeks and it was really important to do that so that the faculty got to experience what it was like to be a student in an online course and so we used hypothesis just because i love it and think it's easy
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and i loved it like using it to just talk with one another reading pedagogy articles and thinking about teaching and learning and then we didn't require them to do this in their learning communities but most of them adopted hypothesis for their learning
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communities and so then all the faculty got to see how it worked there and so now so many faculty are adopting it for their courses just because we did this kind of distributed model of we're going to have to enroll you in a course where you actually are student
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using hypothesis and then you're going to enroll your colleagues in a course where they uh use hypothesis so it worked out really what was not an intentional plan to seed hypothesis but it has really worked worked really well for us that's really cool i just love the idea
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that a tool is useful to an instructor as part of their professional work not just in terms of uh their you know teaching part of that or it's also part of their scholarly work as well
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um yeah i i love that uh very cool uh christine how have you guys been introducing you know in a more practical way uh faculty to hypothesis or to annotation well i'll also give a
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little bit of context about just introducing all tools to colgate as all tools to colgate faculty and then i'll position hypothesis there but we're we're kind of taking like uh
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we're just presenting a menu of things for faculty to refer to and we kind of they like create their own learning pathway i wouldn't formally call it that but that's sort of been like we're just going to put a whole bunch of different support on the table
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and you pick and choose what you have the bandwidth to do so i've been offering workshops on hypothesis all summer long um like two a week actually for most of the summer time um
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and and again we have 300 faculty here at colgate so if i get five people that seems like a lot um so in my workshops um i definitely
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start off with a discussion of just reading in your courses and i always ask um faculty like go back to the spring and did you notice any change in your students engagement with the
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reading before and after the pivot to online learning and i've have definitely had a spectrum to like students readings went up engagement readings went up because they had nothing better to do to like i have no idea what was going on
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with students because there was just so much trauma in my class that like whether they did the reading or not didn't matter so i just had the whole spectrum of answers but that's meant to really um start us off in a discussion and reflection of what's the role of
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readings in our course and now that we're mostly like online or in this hybrid mode how do we how can we know that students are engaged in the readings that we give them so then i'm like oh well here's this tool hypothesis
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that and i do i actually have not this book but i have a book that's been heavily annotated like from grad school that i show up and i talk about i show a picture of a colgate classroom where the students are sitting really close they have their readings out and i'm
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like because many faculty expect that students bring the printed readings or the books to class and i'm like you can't see what students wrote in the margins of the text so i actually on zoom i like show hold the book up um
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and so just meant to like frame up like this is the learning environment that we find ourselves in and then i introduce hypothesis i i talk i spend time talking about kind of the pedagogy of web-based collaboration
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and what the affordances are of a tool like hypothesis so i mentioned link um like making student thinking visible is one one segway i guess i give to introduce showing them the tool and then also this
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um philip candy's idea of linking thinking the idea that um within the margins of a text or or um something you can't do in a hard copy text is provide a hyperlink
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to another article on the web so i talk about linking thinking as something that another affordance of web-based annotation is students can be linking to other articles and resources on the
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web and that that also gives them a new way to demonstrate their that they're making connections between what they're reading and other resources out there like connected learning
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right so i i kind of tell that story and then i introduce hypothesis by just showing example pages online that have been annotated so i refer to the marginal syllabus i
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don't know if people they work closely with hypothesis um but it's a teacher professional development program where educators and use hypothesis to annotate articles about equity and education
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so i just use um use them a few readings from the marginal syllabus project just to give people like the 10 000 foot view of this is what the tool looks like here's what here's an annotated page and
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then i kind of pivot into here's some instructional uses of the tool continuing to show example um web pages that have been annotated as part of assignments in higher ed so that's kind of the arc
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of the story that i tell in my workshops but that the workshops again have been the primary way that i've been engaging faculty with hypothesis that's awesome i'd like to sit in on one of those um and i'm definitely going to steal that linking
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send you the zoom link i'll definitely and i like i'm going to steal that linking thinking idea that's really cool um christina i want to stick with you just for a second um and ask are there any particular disciplines where you see this tool getting
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annotation getting picked up more than others or particular types of courses um i would say it's been pretty evenly distributed i have um allison colazar as a friend of
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mine she was on she's in geology here at colgate she was on liquid margins a few weeks ago and also um jennifer blake mahmoud she's a post-doc in um biology here at colgate so though
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they're kind of our science um annotators if you will but i've also had um faculty who heavily use hypothesis in um spanish having students annotate actually annotate in spanish
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um history um i said geology but also geography so i guess i've had we're an interdisciplinary liberal arts college so you it makes sense that there's a distribution across all the disciplines but i really ha
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i i would not say that one discipline has had a higher rate of adoption than another it's been pretty even here you didn't even mention english which is the obvious one but uh yeah that's great that uh it's such a
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wide uh disciplinary um span there what what about you betsy and also just the question about what what types of courses in addition to what disciplines if there are a lot of smaller courses or some of the bigger
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courses are using it as well yeah and and i don't have as much of my finger on the pulse of this as much as kyle and i know he's here so he can chat about this too but i i definitely think before
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pandemic we were targeting humanities just it made a lot of sense that that they were so uh um interested in texts and also some in some ways doing less technology in their courses so it made some good sense to start here but i
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think actually because of our pure learning communities being across the board i know for a fact just off of the top of my head that there are folks in all the disciplines and all the major divisions of the university that are thinking about ways they can use it i think they'll use it somewhat differently
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which you would expect in different disciplines but um but i i do see that that um and that i was i was intrigued and incited that many folks and disciplines that were not text that were not humanities based
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were just as excited and saw the the value of it as well um and that most of our faculty assigned texts you know even if it's in a science class they assigned a textbook so um so it seemed to work well for them
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what about pushback have you had any resistance to uh hypothesis or collaborative christine is already unmuted she's ready for that question we can go to you christine and give
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give betsy a second um so i had an interesting interaction with a faculty member during one of my workshops where i i just have to frame this as i
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think it was stemming from just this larger place of almost trauma like the way that i have taught like i didn't sign up to do this online anything and here i am stuck with this
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so i just wanna again my empathy hat is on um but during my workshop they just started making comments about how unfortunate it is that students are
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reading texts online now and that they were very much i think they were in um language like a link like a romance language um our department of romance languages here at colgate so i think
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the actual physical act of reading a hard copy of a text was a sacred practice to them as a person and to their discipline so it was one of these like in the middle of my workshop luckily i didn't
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have too many people and i was able to engage in this discussion but um the pushback was more related to just like what does it mean to be a reader online that's so i i love that um you
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use the language of sacred practice especially as a religious studies and philosophy scholar because and i will tell you that i actually do see read it like behind me like hard copy books are i would frame it for myself as being a sacred practice like in all the ways all the baggage that
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comes with that phrase of what we mean by that um and so i actually think uh but it's also there are other sacred practices in these in humanities disciplines too that are tied to discussing ideas and texts and so i think saying yeah that's great
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but there's other things you can do one of the conversations or struggles i had when i first started using this and talking with other faculty was i wanted my students to read hard copies again not necessarily rationally so this is
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related to being a sacred practice but i loved the discussion so much that i was like well that outweighs the value of that in this case and so i i even told some students to buy the book as well so use this and like have that use this for the discussion
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but buy the book because you will have it in your library and that's really important to me and of course they probably rolled their eyes on me like i'm not stuck in you know i'm still still in my old school ways but um but i do think uh reminding them of the other side of
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the benefits can could be helpful there but i i totally am not surprised when you said that i haven't experienced that but i'm not surprised that you had some faculty who are just very sad at the loss grieving the loss of the hard copy book that's what i and i i also think that
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they they also expressed this sense of we're all zoomed out and like we're just like glued to our computers all the time and like so i think they were struggling with like i don't want to be complicit
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in having my giving my students more screen time to do this reading um so yeah that's really interesting yeah yeah so that that jeremy i hope that provides an answer to your question around pushback
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it does and and i would just add that you know like i too i don't have such a lovely bookshelf as as you do back there betsy but uh i also you know consider books sacred um if i was still in the classroom i would
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want students to be buying the books i think um it's hard to to quantify it which may be just fine but i want my kids students get lost in the book in some physical way like go get forget time underneath a tree on campus or something like that as you get lost
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in a book um but in terms of sacred practices uh you know they're you know what there can't be an either or right it's not like you know texts are online
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right and it's not just the books themselves they're physical books that are sacred right there are a lot of practices that surround the books and it's true that when books move online a lot of those practices become harder like annotation and it's
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uh and so i guess uh i'm just thinking that you know you need to preserve some of the analog sacred skills in the new environment and that's that's one way to think about this is that the books are going there
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you know and your students are reading online you're not you're not going to be able to fight against that especially not now maybe right um and so why not focus on some of the sort of corollary aspects of what we consider to be our suite of
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sacred practices in academia um and try to make some of those as authentic um and vigorous as they can be uh online as we as we move into these new uh error you know um
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this is great uh i want to pause here and see with franny uh or nate actually i'll first i'll turn it to you uh betsy and christine just see is there anything that you wanted to share as you were thinking about this conversation this morning
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that i haven't been able to elicit um in in my questions um and then that you or is uh or i i mean i can say more but i think i'm gonna wait for the i'll just let's see if i'm sure the questions will raise the
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things that i will add and if it doesn't come up i'll say something before we end yeah fair enough uh franny or nate has there been any questions in the chat that we want to surface uh for for our panelists
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um yeah there have actually um and you've already sort of touched on this idea of community but um terry elliott um wanted to know asked a question and
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then answered it as well but other people asked it um what does community mean exactly in so in terms of social reading um
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and terry's answer but yours might be different is that it it extends to other networks this idea that it's not just the community and the margins but a larger community so like i was
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thinking of when you were talking about linking to you know adding a link to go somewhere else out onto the web but can you talk about that a little bit well i'll follow up
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um and i think i can tie these two pieces together i'm hoping the community piece and then the linking and i actually i'm glad frannie you raised terry's question because i saw that earlier and i was like oh i want to clarify what i mean by
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building community and what i want to say is just based on my own experience using hypothesis to annotate as part of the marginal syllabus for example but one thing that i think is important to
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reflect on is if you're a student in a course and you don't know all the other students yet or if you like are want to dive into annotation as part of like an organized experience on the web
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like the marginal syllabus project it's very you're very vulnerable to like add a comment in the margin of a text and you don't really know who the people are who are going to see to read your comment
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um and so at first like you have to almost get over that hump of fear like how is this how are the readers of this text going to think about my annotation about my comment but i have found related to building the
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community then when people start replying to your comment it all it's like really invigorating i guess and and like exciting that oh i like something that i
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that came to mind at this point in the reading also resonated something similar for someone else so then i feel like that starts to build connections and links i guess between a group of people who find
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themselves in the margin of a text and that from if you can leverage that um i think that that can help build community around like shared interests right in a course students are there
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they might be there because they have to check the box this is a gen ed course but hoping to like um use hypothesis as a way to to um surface people's interests um that relate to the reading and then
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that relate to each other and then that maybe if people start replying to each other in the margin of the text that that interaction is what starts to build community and connection between people and then of course if you're linking out to other
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communities on the web that also helps strengthen and build networks so that's what i wanted to say there yeah that's great and i want to kind of ask a follow-up because there was another question about
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so in terms of that community you know we're building community it's like a safe place and everything so then how does assessment how do things like assessment and grading figure into that especially if it is a
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you know a required course so those things can seem to be at odds at among the faculty that i've worked with who um have used hypothesis in their courses
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they don't tend to assign a grade like each annotation gets a grade they've you they kind of position annotation or engagement in annotation as part of the participation grade overall
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like you're going to use this tool is there for you to participate in these commun in these discussions in this class so it's i've seen it been used as just an assessment if you will of students
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participation in a course so i have i i think it's i think the question was really well put because it depends on what your purposes are for using it and i actually um part of the reason i love hypothesis so much is the more that i've learned about
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teaching and learning and the more i've thought about my own teaching and what i really care about for my students the more i realize how central the outcome of learning how to read is um it's the most important goal
00:32:36
in my course in any of my courses is that they learn how to read and that they read in a certain way they read in a certain way of course that means i have to teach them how to read and so in my courses now learning how to read is the central outcome
00:32:48
which means that it's also the thing i assess uh the most and do and i do it i do specs grading and so i'm not doing it like eight ninety percent or whatever but i do have a rubric for how to raise certain kinds of questions about a text
00:33:01
etc and so i actually um i don't wanna overwhelm them because i do think it can serve a role for community as well but for me in my course it's actually hypothesis can serve as an assessment tool um and of course there's lots of
00:33:13
practicing that they do and i say okay like so this is the way you ask you you notice this in the text but maybe you want to notice something else here and here's another way you can ask the question differently or extend it or connect it to other things in the text so it
00:33:24
um i think in special cases you can assess reading but i don't think it's like just assessing did you i mean i do have if it's in my participation grade it's like did you do some of them but typically what i did was i said there would be four
00:33:37
annotations that would be assessed throughout the semester and they knew in advance and then they would practice beforehand and i would give them feedback but those four i would assess with a rubric and so they would obviously put more time into reading and giving better annotations
00:33:49
but it wasn't really community they weren't communicating to each other necessarily although they did get credit for that but for me it was really them engaging with the text almost like the sort of this could be a tool even if they couldn't see each other's
00:34:01
annotations i could use it that way too um so yeah so i think i hope that gives you all some ideas of how assessment could work without it being so stifling that they uh they would stifle their um communication but it was still really
00:34:13
important to me to do and that's why i did it i want to make one comment and then follow up with you betsy about something you said um you know one thing i've thought about i haven't thought this out fully but you know if you know you always see something like collaboration
00:34:26
is like a 21st century skill right or something like collaboration is something that we should be teaching students instead of the more sort of harder skills from previous sort of rubrics that have been designed for what student outcomes should be um and i think if collaboration is a skill we're
00:34:38
trying to teach and an outcome that we want to achieve i've thought about this and i've never put into practice i've been a classroom that like how somebody is responding to classmates with their with their in a threaded conversation right
00:34:50
how they are building on other people's ideas like the very idea i hesitate to put to make it you know uh analytic to say like building community is something that can be assessed but community skills and collaboration
00:35:03
skills may be something that can be incest or at least addressed right how a student is interacting with classmates how they're building knowledge with classmates can be addressed through the visibility as christine has been saying uh of
00:35:16
of hypothesis and the way it makes reading and thinking invisible but betsy i want to follow up with a very specific thing that you said about reading right this is something i've been thinking a lot about lately and it's a little tangential perhaps so i think you know talking about reading and introducing
00:35:28
reading um is uh is you know essential to college uh uh experience and so it probably would resonate with your with your um instructors to frame it as you know
00:35:41
reading being so vital but you know just not to push back but to hear a little more about it like your students are literate when they arrive at your course right and so what do you mean when you say teaching reading they need to learn to
00:35:53
read what are some of those you mentioned a rubric which i'd love to see at some point but like you know what does it mean to learn to read for your course for your discipline even though they probably know how to read in a kind of fundamental sense there are other literacies they're developing like
00:36:06
can you be more specific about that yeah so i think and it depends on discipline so i noticed too when i've taught because my phd is in religion i do but i'm an ethicist by training so i really read like a philosopher and so i can i'm going to look up some
00:36:18
things that i can share with you too about participation in philosophy classes that can be helpful but for me it's um really learning how to how to read for argument and to see assumptions and to see connections between ideas
00:36:32
and so it's not just like i literally read the words but what's and and in the literature class it would be other things that you're seeing behind the words in a philosophy class it's understanding motivation for arguments it's understanding the structure of a text
00:36:44
um so i it's it's really and i mean i sort of nerd out on this maybe my students are like oh please no but once they start to figure it out they're like oh wow and they can take that with them when they're reading a newspaper or what and they can read other texts that aren't
00:36:57
actually texts that also are arguments so a podcast or something along those lines it doesn't actually have to be a text text um but helping them learn how to um quote-unquote read
00:37:08
for argument is really what i mean along those lines and i could say more about that but i want to bore all your all your watch those who are watching now i'm just curious when you do that though when you see you and you say reading for argument do you have like you know
00:37:21
three or four things underneath that that you would normally say like these are some different ways to read for argument like you said assumption like find assumption or find things like that yeah so the first thing is that they can summarize an argument so that actually i think
00:37:33
a lot of us just assume that that's the baseline and easy they are terrible at that i mean and not they we we all are terrible at actually understanding somebody's argument and being able to summarize so i don't actually think that's a low-level skill if you're actually
00:37:45
holding them accountable for really understanding the argument of what is being read so that's one of my outcomes in my rubric is like are you accurately understanding what reasons support what conclusions etc
00:37:56
so so here's what they say why do they say it what are their reasons that's like the that's i think a first step is so it's not just summarizing literally i'm quoting what they said but why do you why did they say that which other part of the text actually
00:38:09
supports this part of the text etc um and then what's not said that supports that argument and then also and this is for me part of reading is do you agree or not
00:38:22
do you agree with their argument and so in my rubric they actually have to in they actually do evaluate the text so that's all students are required to learn how to evaluate the text in the margins of their reading so do
00:38:34
you agree with this argument or not and why you know so being able to say why and then another one i often had them do because for me synthesis is really important just in their life skills is how is what you've read here whether you
00:38:47
agree or disagree related to something else in your life or something else you've read elsewhere and so they have to bring in a quote and that's the linkage i think that christine was talking about so those are the four very broad when i do hypothesis rubrics
00:38:58
those four things but certainly if i were teaching like an intro critical thinking class or i taught intro writing before it was very argument heavy i'd spend much more time talking about the details of argument structure and doing assignments on but on those lines
00:39:12
but i think broadly if they do those four things if they can get good at seeing arguments seeing what's missing from the arguments uh being able to evaluate them well and connected to other things that they've read i am
00:39:24
super happy that they have that's all that matters in my courses in many ways that they can do those things well if they can do those things then i think we probably have a different society so i hope that uh i hope that that carries on beyond the classroom because
00:39:36
that seems to be some of the essential problems in america right now that uh you're attacking christine you've also talked about framing this in terms of reading and showing that book right do you want to talk more about types of reading different specific
00:39:48
sorts of literacy i mean i don't i don't really engage in like different types of reading when i show up the book it's really meant to be an exercise and like students
00:40:01
might not be able to like have physical text in front of them to annotate right now but one thing that's been on my mind that maybe loops into some of the things we've been talking about earlier is actually when i'm doing my workshop i
00:40:15
actually call attention to the practice of annotation and whether that is something that faculty members even talk about at the beginning of a class like i was thinking back to my own
00:40:26
education and i don't know like i can't remember actually ever being explicitly told like i expect you to write on the margins of the text and to highlight and this is the types of comments that
00:40:39
you should be making in the margins of the text so i've actually been starting to include that as a point of like reflection among the faculty in my workshops of like do you even discuss annotation with your
00:40:52
students well like regardless of the reading like do you talk to them about engaging how should they be engaging with the reading that's in front of them whether it's online or like printed out in front of them so i
00:41:04
think i yeah i just i mean jeremy i'd be interested in your perspective as an english well i i mean as anybody who's sitting on one of my webinars knows i used to hand out billy collins as marginalia yeah right every class so i made it
00:41:16
pretty explicit even though i didn't have the visibleness to it but there's something i want to follow up with you about uh what yeah what's out of 10 faculty members that you've talked to how many have made a practice in the past do you think of being explicit
00:41:29
about when i when i pitch that question to the group and i'm like looking at their zoom videos i do feel like they're pausing and like like like they're put on their thinking face like oh
00:41:41
so i don't exactly know but just judging their reactions on the zoom screen i feel like it is something that they might not actually do in their classes um so i've just been trying to like i don't
00:41:55
know again like go back to basics if you will like what what what is it that we expect our students to be annotating in the margins of a text like what what kinds of thoughts would be there and again this is where i talk about well we want them
00:42:08
to make connections like this chapter reminded me of what we talked about in class last week you know or this chapter reminded me of the front page of an article in new york times today so like just being so so yeah so i just
00:42:22
i really go back to talking about like what does it mean for students in your course to be annotating like what what kinds of things what kinds of thoughts do you want them to be having
00:42:33
in as they're doing the reading and then how can they make that explicit invisible to you and to each other there is um i'm sorry i've been like scrambling like trying to find i'm going to post a bunch of links in the chat just in a second but um
00:42:46
i think there are some disciplinary resources out there that for if you're talking with specifically in the humanities of course and not necessarily in others but on how to read for history one of my friends from rice caleb mcdaniel has a nice blog post on how to read for history
00:42:59
there are a couple of things on how to read for philosophy that colleagues have done and actually one of the things i'm going to share is not about reading it was from earlier but about how can i participate and it's like a hundred ways in which a student can participate in a conversation in a
00:43:11
philosophy class and it totally applies to um when you're when you're reading uh and annotating a hypothesis but there's also this like old 1950s book that is so outdated and terrible but i
00:43:23
still love it uh by mortimer adler called how to read a book um and it has and it's just sort of it's just this lovely thing that to me as a nerd who loves thinking about reading that i even had my students read sections of like this is really important they're
00:43:36
different ways of reading and you're getting different disciplines they're going to expect you to read differently and you know in a philosophy class i may ask you to read two pages but to spend two hours on those two pages in history you're going to read 300 pages in half an hour
00:43:48
and how do they they don't they don't they've never been taught that so hypothesis can be a real tool to help them learn those disciplinary differences of reading as well it's just so exciting and i think getting faculty to realize this is a
00:44:01
potential for them to make their reading better which is what they often complain about is the students aren't reading well and so if they're not doing it with something well maybe we should teach them how to do it do it better right um so i'll post some
00:44:14
of these links in here that you got you all can look at but just wanted to say that too yeah that'd be amazing i would i'd love to to read those how to reads um and i've been thinking a lot about that and talking a lot about that with the faculty i'm talking to
00:44:25
i'm imagining that it's about time for us to wrap up and respect people's time to move on with the rest of the day i have to admit i don't know what i'm going to do with the rest of the day because this is such a wonderful conversation it kind of can't be beat i'm just going to go
00:44:36
back to something far less interesting for the rest of my uh afternoon but i have enjoyed this thoroughly um i've learned a lot and i'm i'm really thankful for both you guys sharing your ideas um
00:44:50
and i just you know hang in there um you're doing great work um and you know be well yeah and i want to thank everyone and i i did have a another question it was
00:45:02
actually my own but i'm just going to throw it out there like maybe as an exercise people could have students when they're at home if they actually have any hard copy books at home um they could pick one up and start to
00:45:14
annotate it in it and see what the difference is between doing that alone in a vacuum and then coming back and doing that in the community online so just an idea
00:45:27
um but yes thank you this was an amazing show uh
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