Doing Good: Personal dictums that align to my values.

Over time I've learned that there are a number of personal and professional things I have a categorical responses to, that I hope align and support my values. These could be requests, offers, or a behavior I'll do in response to some action, social media post, etc. Many of these things make my life easier in that I don't have to think very hard about doing them, there's no debate about if I should, how I should, or other cognitively demanding weighing of social, personal, and professional factors. As I get older I am finding that weighing these factors is kind of stressful and taxing on me, so following these kinds of heuristics is really helpful. 

Here is my current list as I think of them;

Always share job postings I run across in my feeds on social media, and if I can think of someone who may be good for a job forward them the posting. 

One of my work study jobs was to help out at a student employment office and from that experience I gained a better appreciation of how hard it can be for people to find jobs. In sharing job opportunities with my networks my hope is that others who may not have heard about the job see it, apply, and get that job. 

In forwarding job postings to others my hope is that I'm acknowledging the potential in others, and for those of us who suffer from imposter syndrome to give some kind of encouragement and support. When I do forward job postings too many people respond with "Oh, I'm not qualified for that job." and I don't understand that response. My mom always said "Let them tell you no." meaning to apply for the job, even if you think you have little chance of getting it, and don't let your internal doubt get in the way. Sure, you might not get that job, but you could very well get the next job, or be thought of for a future position. 

Always pay for whatever my friend is making or doing. 

I've never understood asking your friends for free stuff from their business. If they're working at some giant retailer, that's a moral gray area for me, but when your friend is working with their own hands to create their own business, I don't get it. A corollary is to always like and share my friend's business posts.  

So what values do the two dictums above reflect? I'd like to think they reflect my belief in the potential of everyone to grow, and become the person they want to be. Not in any achievement-for-achievement's sake way, but for personal betterment, growth, and to make for a more successful community. I don't agree with prosperity theology, but I think there is a humanist equivalent where humans have agency over their own financial future and physical well-being, and that of others. That last part is what I believe we're addressing with BLM, Me Too, and other movements that are trying to address the systems some humans (that look a lot like me) have setup that negatively impact others. It's kind of hard to pull yourself by the bootstraps when someone has cut all of your bootstraps, let alone that expression doesn't make any sense by itself. 

 Never participate in reviews, trainings, or workshops of products where the host offers to pay me. 

I regularly get emails asking me to go to some event sponsored by a textbook publisher, technology company, or another institution where they offer a gift card, or to be entered into a drawing for a trip or some such thing. Sure, I might be missing out on padding my bank account, but if the thing they're selling is all that great I kind of doubt I need coaxing to check it out. 

The value here would be personal integrity, but valuing my time enough not to take these sale pitches.

Always take the meeting. 

Now, if some textbook publisher, technology company, or another institution reaches out to me specifically and wants to meet about a product, service, etc. I'll take it. Sure, they get some of my time, but I will usually try to ask questions of them to get a sense of what problems they're trying to solve, their approach, and if they might have something of interest to me. This also applies to job interviews, publication interviews, etc.

I get the feeling that some might think this dictum runs counter to valuing my time enough not to take a sales pitch, but I think of this more as an opportunity for two-way information flow. With those kinds of paid sales pitches all the information is one way, from the host to you. In a conversation I feel more confident in asking questions, gleaning information from the host, and sure learning about a new product that I might not have known before. The value I hope I'm expressing here is that I love learning. If I didn't, then why teach?

This post is a bit more navel-gazey than I thought I would write for this blog, but I'm becoming more worried about those of us in higher-education that are asked to perform administrative tasks without reflecting on our core values. If we are always buffeted about by endless emails, 2-4 hours tasks that crop out of no where, and the grind of grading then where do we let our values lead our actions?

Making my work boring - Workflows

 

In listening to Cal Newport's Deep Work podcast and reading his book Deep Work, he has a point about making work boring so that we can free up cognitive space to be creative. In asking our brains to address the questions How am I going to do this? What needs to be done next? etc. we're wasting cognitive load on answering questions that have little to do with our actual work. 

To this end he suggests explicit workflows or processes for tasks you regularly complete. For this term I am slowly building these workflows, based on my ideal schedule for Spring 2021, below. 

In setting up my ideal schedule I think about what I want to spend time on, and when to NOT to schedule time. In being chairperson of my department there are a good number of days I have to focus my time and attention on something that comes up. This term I've added -0- to my schedule to be a placeholder for working on those emergent tasks.

From my ideal schedule I've been writing them in my journal (see The Time-Block Planner Feedback) and then adjusting my schedule as needed. Hopefully I'll be able to identify when my ideal schedule broke, and then create a new one for Fall 2021 with the lessons I've learned this term.

For each of those items in my ideal schedule I created the following text files to capture what I do during those times. 

A good number are blank, but over the break I thought about a few of them, below. Email is something Newport talks a LOT about, so I thought it would be good to solidify what I do first and make sure I only check email a few times a day. (I've since kept it open, but just mute the tab.)

This is how I grade quizzes, including my rubric. 

For office hours a good amount of the time students are not there, but I do need to take time to reach out to students. 

In doing this I keep feeling like I am programming myself, which on the surface seems to run counter to what academics would seem to prize; thinking about the world. Yet, what do I want to use my limited brain power on, the little or the big things?

It also feels nice to put these things down somewhere, knowing I can come back to them in the future and make them better. Maybe I learn enough AutoHotKey or Python to automate a good amount of what I do? Maybe I realize I dislike doing some of these tasks and find ways around them? Maybe I just iterate on them term over term, and come to a place of peace that I can't improve every task... Yet. 

Faculty Focus: Students' Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: Five Ways to Break the Cycle

The article Students' Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: Five Ways to Break the Cycle from Faculty Focus does a great job of identifying areas faculty can help students develop a positive self-image regarding their studies. In math classes I feel this issue is especially acute, given how many times students are unwilling to offer answers or solutions for fear of being labeled 'stupid' or worse.



I do a few of the suggestions in my current setup:

1. Provide opportunities for metacognition. During the weekly binder checklists, and group quizzes, students have an opportunity to reflect on what they have learned and how. During nightly Check-Ins students are asked to think about the material from the day, and how well they know it. 
2. Flip roles. In using the POGIL roles every student has a responsibility, and occasionally will become the manager of the group that day. In addition to "Creating leadership roles empower students who feel disenfranchised." it also provides structure to the group work, my main motivation for using them.  
3. Create check-in points. My nightly Check-Ins are graded based on completion, and sometimes include the "muddiest point", "most important point", and "write a question to build understanding" questions. 
4. Build in moments for dialogue. While my Check-Ins do have reflection questions, they don't specifically address negative self-image in the class. This is one question category I will try to incorporate into Check-Ins this term. Questions like "What if, after doing a bunch of homework and getting some questions right and some questions wrong, you start to feel discouraged? You start to feel like you just can't get this stuff, and that you're not 'smart'. What are you going to tell yourself to get out of this funk, and back on track?"
5. Point it out. In my mini-lectures I do try to address process skills, and one of my usual 'spiels' is addressing anxiety and negative self-image. I try to relate to students explaining that I have anxiety about how each class will go, and that I use that anxiety to prepare for that class. I also make it clear that grades are a measure of understanding, not whether you are a good person or not. 

What do you do to disrupt a student's negative self-image, or their unhelpful self-fulfilling prophecies? 

Reflections: What I do once a class ends.

This is the second in my line of posts about reflections, why they're useful, what I do to reflect, and what I do to help my students reflect on their own performance. Today we're looking at what I do at the end of the term, and how I prepare for the next time I teach a class. As an adjunct I regularly teach the same classes from term-to-term and anything I can do to help my future self quickly prepare for a class is beneficial.

At the start of each term we all have ideas about learning activities, assessments, grading structures, rubrics, and other aspects of how we are going to run (or at least manage) a course. At the end of a term we have seen how they have worked, how they didn't, and ideas for how to make them better. During finals week, for each class I take a half-hour to an hour and write a page or two on all the components of a course. This is a short example of what I started with for my Calculus III course:

Calculus III Reflections notes. 

These are very rough notes. Some of these notes I would have probably edited for wider distribution ("... if you don't force them to!"). But this is what I wrote when I was trying to get these ideas on paper. And this is the point of this exercise, get your ideas on paper quickly before the term is over and you forget. I usually create these notes during my final exams, so I can see all my students and remember what worked and didn't work for them. It also helps me think of policies to include in the syllabus if there was a particular situation that arose with a student. I include these notes in the front of my course folder.

At the start of the next term, I open my course folder and the first thing I see is this list of do's and don'ts, and don't even think about it's. These notes have helped me start preparing for a course much more quickly. I can focus on what needs to be revised, updated, or created, instead of wondering what I did last time. 

What do you do to at the end of each term to help yourself prepare for the next? Please share your experiences with me here on the blog, on LinkedIn, or Twitter.