High Structure Course Design for Student Engagement, Retention, and Success:

Changing Higher Ed podcast 264 with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Dr. Justin Shaffer

Transcript: Changing Higher Ed podcast  264 – with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Dr. Justin Shaffer

Introduction to Changing Higher Ed^®

Welcome to Changing Higher Ed^®, a podcast dedicated to helping higher education leaders improve their institutions. With your host, Dr. Drumm McNaughton, CEO of The Change Leader, a consultancy that helps higher ed leaders holistically transform their institutions. Learn more at changinghighered.com. And now, here’s your host, Drumm McNaughton.

[00:00:20] Guest Welcome

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David.

My guest today is Dr. Justin Schafer, associate dean for undergraduate studies and a teaching professor in chemical and biological engineering and in quantitative biosciences at the Colorado School of Mines. Justin’s an award-winning educator who’s taught over 9,000 students since 2012 in multiple areas. Areas that I can’t even spell to be very frankly, like chemical engineering, biomedical engineering, et cetera. He’s an expert at teaching as Bottom Line. He’s also the author of the forthcoming book “High Structure Course Design”, which gives practical hands-on advice for creating STEM courses that engage students in and out of the classroom, and he’s going to join me today to talk about how this high structured course design model can improve institution’s enrollment, persistence, and retention, and graduation rates. Go figure. This is going to be a great conversation folks.

Justin, welcome to the program.

Justin Shaffer: Hey, Drumm. Thanks for having me.

Drumm McNaughton: My pleasure. I’m looking forward to our conversation. This is going to be a little bit different perspective because you primarily work with faculty on course design. In fact, you’re quite the expert when it comes to that. You’ve got a book coming out called “High Structure Course Design”, which really helps professors, and students to some degree, in helping them design the course to where you’ve got better student outcomes.

[00:01:52] Justin’s Background and Passion for Teaching

Drumm McNaughton: But before we get into all that good stuff, please give us a little background on who you are and how you became passionate about this.

Justin Shaffer: Sure. Thanks Drumm. And Yes, thanks for everyone for listening and, learning a little bit about course design with us today. So I’m a chemical engineer by training, for undergrad and then my PhD’s in bioengineering. But it was during my graduate education where I really fell in love with the classroom. I loved being a TA, I loved being able to see how students work together and learn and all the different ways we can teach them. And it really was a book that got me started called, “Scientific Teaching”. I didn’t know that you could approach teaching with kind of a scientific lens and actually use the scientific method to assess how your students are learning and how your teaching methods work.

So I got the bug on thinking about how to, again, apply science to teaching itself. And then I did a postdoc program called SPIRE in North Carolina, where I was trained in evidence-based teaching methods, evidence-based instructional design and course design strategies. And, again, continue that kind of scientific investigation of my teaching, and I found that I really liked that world more than working at the bench. So I used to be a bench research scientist in molecular biology and biochemistry, but working with students, being in front of hundreds of students at a time in the classroom really got me going. I love that kind of immediate impact that you can have in the classroom.

But of course, those immediate pitfalls also happen when you do something and it doesn’t land, you can tell, it hurts right away. But still that kind of environment of working with students, I felt like I could have more of an impact in my career. So I’ve kept that going, now as a teaching faculty member, I’ve been a teaching professor for about 13 years, between UC Irvine, and now at the Colorado School of Mines.

And I really try to focus a lot of my time on working with other faculty on course design while working with teaching and learning centers, working with administrators, showing the value of effective course design principles to maximize student outcomes. Especially in STEM, that’s my background, of course, but what I preach really works across all disciplines.

Drumm McNaughton: And for listeners, this is not going to be getting into the nuts and bolts on how to do teaching, we’re going to be keeping this at high level, and especially for those senior leaders who want to make sure that they’re course outcomes, that their student outcomes are all where they need to be. So that’s the areas and that’s the level we’re going to be focusing at today.

So you’re an expert in course design, in pedagogy, all of those neat things that frankly, I have a hard time spelling, let alone doing at this point.

[00:04:17] Challenges in Modern Education

Drumm McNaughton: What are the problems that you see holding students back in the classroom?

Justin Shaffer: Yes, it’s changed a lot and every time I say this, I feel like an older and older guy, like back in my day we weren’t this way. But, things are changing. I think we all recognize that with kids growing up with phones now and let alone the internet. I got two kids myself and just seeing how they’ve grown up compared to how when I was a kid, don’t even talk about the COVID pandemic and the impacts that had on learning and learning loss and everything. So there’s just this been this big shift in students when it comes to kind of attention span when it comes to, maybe, motivation and drive in the classroom. I still think our students are super motivated and talented, don’t get me wrong, but there’s just something about this culture we live in now where things are immediate, instant delivery, instant satisfaction, gratification. And it’s sometimes harder to get students really invested in a longer term project and to really, care about deep learning and deep success in the college classroom. From my own experience, anecdotes there.

So we have to think about how do we engage this modern student who were born in the two thousands, grew up with technology, so how do we leverage technology to our benefits. But also how do we limit it to our benefits to make sure it’s not encroaching on student learning and, competing for attention span? That’s really what it is. We’re always competing. There’s so many tabs open in our own brains and literally tabs open in our devices. How do we kind of combat that? And so by having a really efficient course design where we have a really engaging and well structured and scaffolded approach to learning, we can really help students succeed and again, stay focused on the task and try to eliminate some of the scatter that’s out there in our current culture and society.

Drumm McNaughton: What are you seeing?

[00:05:51] Impact of COVID on Student Readiness

Drumm McNaughton: because you specifically referenced students coming out of the COVID era. What are you seeing specifically about their readiness for college

Justin Shaffer: Yes, so readiness for college, especially those couple years right away after the pandemic, I felt students were just a little more unsure of themselves, especially when it came to their math skills. Me teaching in engineering and biology here at Mines, we rely heavily on quantitative sciences and math, and students just felt a little bit more hesitant and a little bit more unwilling to engage with those skills and show how they’re able to use them.

Another aspect comes with group work. So a lot of our courses, and I bet a lot of you listening, like to promote experiential learning and team-based learning out there, which are great things, but it does require students to work well in teams and during that COVID era, we lost all that. Zoom is not a replication in breakout rooms for actual teamwork as much as we like. Yes. As much as we like to think it is, Drumm. It is not the same. So, even right now, across the hall from me here at work, I’m teaching this summer class called a field session where students work in teams of three all day, every day, five days a week for three weeks on a plastic, waste and recycling project. How to tackle that problem from a biological perspective. And it’s just full-time in each other’s faces. Right? So you really have to learn how to have good rapport, how to work the ups and downs, how to deal with personalities, right? How to not slack off, how to be a leader. And we’d lost that during COVID. It, I think that was another big thing that’s really impacted students readiness for colleges, that team-based aspect.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes. You’ve been teaching now for how long?

Justin Shaffer: About thirteen years.

Drumm McNaughton: Thirteen. So you experienced pre-COVID students. Is there that big a difference? I know you talked about the team building aspects and math skills and whatnot. I haven’t been teaching, I’ve been in the classroom now for oh, at least 10 years, so I don’t have any experience with that. I do know that the AACNU has their know top five, top 10 traits, skills that they want students to graduate with, critical thinking, work teams, all of these kind of things. But what you’re saying is because students lost the ability to develop these skills during COVID that they don’t have them now, or is there scaffold strategies that need to be put in place?

[00:08:22] High Structure Course Design

Justin Shaffer: Yes, I think, we’ve always been worried about students coming into college and being ready, period. And especially in gateway STEM courses, and that’s kind of my specialty, these large enrollment, introductory biology, chemistry, anatomy and physiology, physics. Those types of classes. My biggest ever was 440 students at a time, an intra bio at UC Irvine, or I like to think of that as 880 eyeballs at a time looking at you, right? And they’re coming right outta high school for the most part, and you do worry about, again, college readiness, period. Especially when you have these big classes. There’s so many moving parts. There’s so many people that it moves at a much faster pace than high school. So we’ve always worried about this stuff. Even going back to when I was a freshman at Penn State, worrying for myself back then.

But something’s been happening recently and I’m not an expert in this area. So I’m just going train of thought here, whether it was COVID or whether it was because of this generation now growing up with the phone and social media influences there. There’s something going on where students, again, I’ll go back to the point I made earlier, just a little less sure of themselves. I even remember reading an article recently on Chronicle, I think about how, a professor was saying even the best of her students who join her research lab, they’re still unsure, like they’re always checking with her, “Hey, can you look at my lab notebook? Can you check this protocol before I do it, can you make sure I’m doing this right?” And she said in the past, that never happens, students would just do it. They were more willing to fail, they’re more willing to try things out. And so now students seem to be a little bit more worried about, being able to again, be on task and do things correctly the first time and getting that outside endorsement from their faculty, from their professors, their instructors, before diving in and trying. That’s another thing with course design, we try to promote failure and having that mindset, we try to build in a lot of activities and a lot of opportunities during the class time to fail, and that’s a good thing to learn from. It’s a perfectly normal and actually required thing, in my opinion, to try and make mistakes and fail. But you do it in an environment where it’s not the final exam, so it’s not a big chunk of your grade, you do it in class, probably no points at all, but you get opportunities to practice, fail, learn from those mistakes, and that will help hopefully build up some more resilience in our students.

Drumm McNaughton: It’s interesting you say that. It’s the first time I’ve heard this and it makes perfect sense. Going back and quote, getting mom’s approval or dad’s approval to do something. This really, we just finished a project with an institution around shared governance and trust, and one of the big things that had happened was they changed their admission standards. Faculty weren’t able to put into place the scaffolding strategies necessary. You can just imagine having a class of a hundred students and if in the past there were 5% that were coming from first gen or GPAs below 3.0 or whatever, and all of a sudden it gets boosted up to 20, that’s a huge change.

That’s interesting. That’s really interesting. You’re the first person who I’ve spoken with who have taken this tact, and I think it makes perfect sense.

Justin Shaffer: I hope so, but I don’t think I’m the only one saying this. I wish I could remember her name in that article I read recently that talked about that example with the lab. But Yes, there’s just this endorsement mindset now I think that’s going on with some of our students.

The best of our students. I think they’re still the best. They’re still crushing it, but I wonder if there’s something that’s going on with more of the larger student body there, that they need some more help and support with that. But although though even our best students, I think they sometimes might even more have that mindset where they need this endorsement or approval, for what they’re doing and working on.

,And you mentioned generations status too, right? Yes. Our first gen students. They’re brand new to college. There’s so much to learn. There’s so much to figure out to settle in. Myself, I was first gen, back 20 years ago when I started, oh gosh, longer than that now when I started college. But, it was hard to navigate and figure everything out, and it takes some time. But again, that’s where, solid course design principles come into play. If you intentionally design your course, we can help all students do better, but we can even help some students do it even better to a larger degree, such as first gen.

So we have a lot of literature on this high structure course design principle where we can help all students do better again, but these gaps in performance between, for example, first gen and continuing gen students get smaller. When you add more structure, you add more scaffold and you add more support to your courses. We’re not asking our faculty, to make the courses less rigorous.

[00:12:53] Role of Teaching Faculty and Course Design

Justin Shaffer: We’re not asking our faculty to make it easier or lower the bar, not at all. We’re just adding a more streamlined scaffolded process. So students can work through these courses and succeed.

Drumm McNaughton: And bringing it back to the higher level, student success is critical for all institutions, whether you are at the senior leadership level or the faculty level. It becomes about the enrollment. When you do things like this, when you put in these good course design, you know, you’re still going to have students fail, but they’re not going to be failing at the same rate that they would if you didn’t have these in place.

Justin Shaffer: Absolutely correct. Yes. The literature on, whether it’s just active learning in general, getting students engaged in the classroom, or again, we add the structure outside of the classroom, so what happens before class and after class. Yes, time and time again, these studies are showing better student outcomes, better retention rates, better passing rates and again, closing these gaps.

And I think these are tools that administrators and leaders can use to really promote their faculty and promote their departments in schools and therefore attract new students. Again, I got two kids. My, my oldest is 14, so a blink of an eye he’ll be applying to college and I’m going to be looking at those things. Okay. So you might say on your school’s website, oh, we do experiential, hands-on. Learning, but what’s the evidence for that? Can you show me, can you show, tell me about a physics professor who actually does this well? Can you show me a biology lab that has this in action? Can you even show me data to back that up?

When I work with leaders and faculty, I try to help them figure out, “okay, what are some case studies that you can show off to say that, Yes, we’re doing this stuff for real. Here’s a tangible outcome, here’s actual data, here’s a real person who’s doing this, that then you can now again, use them to, potentially attract, new students to your university, to your program, to your major”.

And I think as college gets even more competitive for enrollment for applications. Right? We keep hearing about this enrollment cliff that’s coming. Right? Whether that’s going to be founded or not, I don’t know, but the fact that it’s just, it’s harder and harder to get good students to come to your school, to come to your university. So the more that we can showcase the positive things we’re doing. Of course, we got great stuff in student life and the dorms and the climbing wall and those things too. Right?

But really thinking about the academic experience, especially in STEM, where it’s can be viewed as a really competitive, I hate the term, but, weed out environment. What can we do to show that, no, actually we have a well-structured, well-designed gateway STEM sequence and, we can choose that to show parents and their students that, “Yes, we’re going to do right by you. We’re going to help you do as best as you can. We got it. We got our stuff figured out”.

Drumm McNaughton: That was a great segue actually, about enrollment. But one of the other things I want to bring up and we talked about a little bit, was one of the ways to attract and retain good students is make sure that your degree programs are skill oriented, so that there’s practice, the internships, the externships, but also in your course design so that folks are learning the skills that they’re going to need out in the workforce.

Justin Shaffer: Absolutely. Yes, I think again, those terms, like experiential learning, hands-on learning, they’re real. People do it. And they should do it because it’s going to help students, again, acquire these tangible skill sets that are going to be valuable. And again, for me as a STEM guy, it makes sense. It’s built into our curricula. Right? We have lab work, we have research, we have internships, and even co-ops, built into a lot of our programs. So it’s easy for us to do that, but still we have to market it and sell it well. One example of that again is this field session course I’m teaching right now here at Mine. So it’s a three week class in our quantitative bioscience and engineering program. The students work all day, every day for three weeks, mimicking a real world experience working in a research lab. And again, our project is on the idea of tackling global plastic waste and recycling from a biological perspective. So students are designing new enzymes that they can actually make in the lab from bacteria to munch on and break down plastics at faster rates. So this is a super realistic project they can take with them then to go, when they apply for pharma or biotech or any type of career. Medicine, chemical industry, whatever it might be, they can say, “Hey, I did this real project. We didn’t know the outcome”. Which is true. We don’t know if it’s going to work or not. They’re designing it, they’re doing the work, they’re figuring out the experiments. But by the end of three weeks, they got some outcomes, they learned a lot, and they can then again demonstrate that to future employers, graduate schools, medical schools, whatever. And that’s only going to help them again, develop and put that skillset into place that should give them future success.

Drumm McNaughton: I have to wonder as you’re saying this, are these going to be injectable to take care of the microplastics outta my brain?

Justin Shaffer: Oh gosh. I think we’re all too far down that river, Drumm. I don’t know if we’re going to be able to help ourselves now. But Yes,

Drumm McNaughton: I’m just kidding with you.

Justin Shaffer: I know. I know. Someday though. Someday,

Drumm McNaughton: Yes. Let’s hope we don’t even need to someday. Besides that. Besides that, so.

Persistence or retention, that’s always one of the big challenges, especially in STEM, is getting students to be able to make that bridge from their first year to the second year, or even keep them in the first year because you’re throwing an awful lot of stuff at them. Obviously, course design is important. But there’s some other things that we’ve talked about that potentially can help you with improving your persistence and retention.

Justin Shaffer: Yes, absolutely. So these gateway STEM courses, again, so like intro to bio, calc one, things like that, traditionally these failure rates are really high. So you look at published literature and I got a presentation I’m going to do with the school later today on this. Some failure rates can be as high as 40, 50, even 60%. Yes, even higher. It depends on the paper, it depends on literature. But Yes, they’re not small. And then, so what happens to you as a student? You come to college, you think you want to be an engineer, a scientist, a doctor, whatever it might be, and then you take these intro STEM courses, which again, that “weed out mentality” is out there, has a 40-50% failure rate and, “what do you know? Okay, I’m done. Like, what do I do now?” So it’s really discouraging. But again, there are strategies to help students succeed in those types of courses. Whether you’re talking about an individual course at one school, across an entire department, or even across an entire university. Or even in a project, I’m working on with the state of Ohio, 20 different colleges and universities at once, trying to scale these processes up. But we can do some things to help here. And you mentioned the pedagogy and the course design. Absolutely. So again, that’s my specialty. I work in this area called High Structured Course Design, originally developed by Mary Pat Wenderoff and Scott Freeman at the University of Washington about 20 years ago. This is that idea again that we had. Scaffolding and structure to a course before class, during class, after class to help students succeed and we have lots of literature to help, to just show that that helps students succeed, drops those failure rates, improves retention and success. Another thing we can do, though, is think about who’s teaching these classes. So as the, administrators and leaders listening to this you think about faculty assignments, that can be a tough thing to do. And you know me myself too, I should say, I am 50% administration these days, I’m an associate dean of undergraduate studies. I don’t have any role in faculty placement, but I understand what it takes to figure that out.

And oftentimes who teaches these gateway STEM courses tend to be teaching faculty. Myself included, right? I’ve done this now for 13 years and we, or folks like myself, we sometimes we’re trained in pedagogy and evidence-based course design, like I was, sometimes we just decide, “you know what, I like teaching way more and I want to focus my career on this”. In any case, how we got there we’re typically the ones who like this environment, like being in front of hundreds of students at one time, like teaching two, three, even four courses at a time, although that’s a lot to do, four courses at a time.

But we have that mindset and then we’re also, we’re not burdened by having to train graduate students, get NSF for NIH grants, write papers, and I say “burdened by” not to say that’s a bad thing, it’s just a different career trajectory. Research faculty, they’re great at what they do and that’s how they want to spend their time. That’s amazing. Me personally, I couldn’t do that, but I found my calling being in the classroom.

So again, teaching faculty like us, we tend to take on the brunt of these gateway courses. And there is literature too, showing that faculty who might be more teaching oriented, but also who have more growth mindset, have better student outcomes. So it does take, the person in front of the classroom, you know the “sage on the stage”, “guy on the side”, whatever language you want to use, whoever your instructor is, there is a certain mindset that we can have and a certain train that we can have to improve our student outcomes. It can be hard just to drop a brand new professor into an intro bio or a gen chem course, but again, if you have certain tracks of faculty who might want to focus on this as a career, that can lead to some better outcomes too.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes. And the other piece with that is, many times these large section courses are taught by adjunct or contract faculty. They’re not full-time, they’re not tenure track, whatnot. And many of these adjuncts are not getting the kind of training necessary to teach large things or just throw them into the deep end of the pool. And can you swim? Who does that hurt? The student?

Justin Shaffer: It hurts, I think, everybody involved. Yes. If you can’t fill that role for a course, and it’s a critical course to teach, I understand again, from a leadership perspective why we would hire an adjunct professor. And adjunct professors can be fantastic. Absolutely, but often they can be overworked and overstressed. Just like even tenure track faculty, or teaching faculty. That’s a common thing I keep hearing from faculty these days. Overworked, undervalued, overstressed, things like that. But adjunct faculty, the problem there, it’s even bigger, is they’re not that permanent role. So they might be teaching at a few other institutions too. Right? They’re traveling across town to another school. They’re maybe they’re doing online for another school. So it’s hard to make ends meet sometimes as an adjunct and being thrown into to those large courses without the training, without the support, without the permanence, that can definitely be detrimental to the individual, but also to the students too. Hopefully there is some structure in terms of like a course coordinator for these intro courses, where they can be part of the team now and they’re welcomed into that group with open arms. There’s materials for them, there’s training but that’s not always the case. So that can be really tough too.

So again, it comes down to that kind of conscious decision making of who’s teaching what, how do we allocate funds, how do we allocate time and energy to different positions? And I do think, again, our research faculty are outstanding and they have great expertise and they can do a wonderful job in these intro courses, but sometimes, again, maybe having more targeted approaches such as a teaching professor, track or rank in your own institution, having instructors or lecturers tracks that are really valued, they can do a fantastic job and a nice complimentary role, to the research faculty, adjunct faculty who are also teaching these courses.

Drumm McNaughton: Those are great ideas. I have, for many years, pushed, we need dedicated teaching faculty who are trained, which as a segue to the next portion.

[00:23:48] Training Effective Teachers

Drumm McNaughton: How do you train good teachers? Not researchers, teachers.

Justin Shaffer: And that’s the funniest thing. You bring that up, because you ask your students in college like, “Hey, do you think I had to get certified for this job?” And they’re probably going to say, Yes. And you tell them, “no, actually, no you don’t.” And they’re like, “what? What do you mean you don’t have to get. But to teach kindergarten, you have to get certified, right?”

So there’s this weird kind of, in my opinion, this weird kind of disconnect with faculty and teaching expectations where there are no real requirements to do it, other than your degree. Right? Which, does that mean you know how to teach because you have a bachelor’s or master’s of PhD? Absolutely not.

So how do we train good teachers either on their way to becoming faculty, so as future faculty, in the graduate student, in the postdoc role? Myself, I had a lot of training as a grad student in my postdoc program, SPIRE. Again, it was specifically for training future educators and future instructors in the STEM fields. But then once they get here too. Right? So there could be new faculty orientation, new faculty academies. Those might only be a day or two though. So is that going to give you everything you need? Probably not. On the STEM side too, typically you get the first year off from teaching at most universities I’ve been at to get your lab set up. So even if you have that new faculty training. Well, you’re aren’t teaching right away, so you have to do some other things. But this is where, in higher ed, and I’m sure many of you listening, have some kind of center for teaching and learning, or a teaching and learning center, TLC, whatever abbreviation you use. But these are places where, on campus, you have dedicated faculty and/or staff, depends on the structure of the organization, who provide professional development, who provide support for your faculty to help them become better instructors. This can be through workshops, could be through one-on-one mentoring, could be from coaching.

One of the best things that you can do is have them come to your class, watch you teach, and then have a debrief and they can tell you about what they learned from you and how you can do better. You want to take that one step further? They record you teach with their phone or a camera, and then you, they force you to watch it.

It’s a terrible thing. Think about how hard it is to listen to yourself talk. How hard is it to watch yourself on video? At least for me. But you learn so much about how you handle your body, how you move your hands, your mannerisms, how you respond to students. Eye contact. All these things are super important in addition to the actual content you’re your teaching about.

So Yes, we need some kind of professional development that can really help. Our faculty become better instructors. And again, that can come from within the centers, can come from peer faculty through mentoring models, and it can come from outside people too. So that’s what I try to do with my own business. I try to provide professional development to STEM faculty and non-STEM faculty as well to improve their teaching, improve their course design strategies and so therefore we can improve our student outcomes. So, there’s a lot of different avenues you can take to do this, but it is an important piece that does need to be addressed and we need resources devoted towards fa faculty professional development when it comes to education and teaching.

Drumm McNaughton: What are some of the resources that institutions can use to find out more and develop these kind of programs?

Justin Shaffer: Yes. First you think about it from an assessment piece. So what’s working right now? And also on the other side of the coin, what’s not working right now. Right? So you can do a lot of things when it comes to looking at maybe past performance data from students. How are students doing in the classroom? What are the passing rates like? What are these performance gaps like again, for example, between continuing gen and first gen students that will tell you some part of the story, but then we also have to look about the courses themselves and the faculty teaching themselves.

So something like, looking at how syllabi are written. So we all have a syllabus for our courses. Right? This is often the first thing students see before they ever hear your voice or see you. And students will make an immediate opinion on who you are based on your syllabi. There’s even data showing that the more student-centered language that is involved in syllabi, those faculty who have that have smaller performance gaps and better student outcomes than faculty who you have more instructor-centered syllabi. So just even the language and tone there is really important. So that’s one thing.

We can also look at the teaching practices themselves. So we know a lot about how courses are designed and how people teach in the classroom. We know what’s effective. We also know what might not be as effective. So we can have surveys and instruments that can assess course design practices where there’s protocols where people come in and watch you teach and they kind of code and write down what you’re doing every couple minutes. You can get a quantified output there on what you’re doing, and that is also correlated with better student outcomes. So we can look at it a lot of different levels from the entire program level. Talking earlier about retention and passing and things like that to the individual course performance level, to what a person’s doing at, minute to 15 of a single lesson. So we can really dissect it a lot of ways.

But you put all that together, we’re going to need people, we’re going to need time, we’re going to need money, to be able to provide these types of professional developments, faculty learning communities, centers for teaching and learning, whatever it might be to help people now adopt evidence-based practices to help them become better instructors, to design better courses. And again, the whole point of this conversation to improve our student outcomes.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes.

[00:29:03] Utilizing AI in Education

Drumm McNaughton: And how can, or how does AI factor into all this?

Justin Shaffer: Yes. So, depends on the day of the week you ask me that, Drumm. Right now, I’m feeling okay about it. Some days I want to take my wife and kids, and we want to move to Wyoming, start a sheep farm, get off the grid before it’s too late. But in the less cynical perspective, though, AI can be really useful because it is a time saver. Right? Of course there’s a ton of issues with it, and I find our students, actually, even my class right now, the students are telling me about how you should limit your usage of it because of the impacts on climate change, the impacts on energy usage, which are real things. Right? How much energy it takes to run these LLMs. But they are a time saver for sure. So, if you’re thinking about designing new activities for class, you’re thinking about designing a new syllabus, learning outcomes, it’s a great brainstorm partner, writing assessment questions.

I’m doing this for so long, I get brain fog at times for writing new biology questions or new anatomy physiology questions for a quiz. So Hey, here’s my quizzes on these topics. Can you gimme some ideas from all but choice questions or short answer questions? Right?

So you can get some time savers there for sure. It can help with, feedback and grading even looking at student work. There’s a lot of ways to use it and I’m definitely not an expert in this case. There’s a lot of great people out there doing work on AI and higher ed, as I’m sure you all know. But, yes, it can definitely help though with that overall professional development, course design, brainstorming ideas, to make yourself a better instructor, make your courses a little bit better.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, I’m kind of at a loss for words, Justin, because this has taken me back to my own time teaching. Some of my faculty members, a while ago when you’re talking about different professors doing different things. In the syllabus, I remember one of my faculty, professor Kalam, he was of German descent. He got his PhD at Harvard. So, you can imagine a heavy German accent with a Boston accent from Harvard overlaid. And, he was the most incredible professor I ever had, teaching physics of the atom one and two. We’re in quantum mechanics, we’re in all sorts of these high-level things.

His syllabus had cartoons in it, his idols, he used to say were the King of Id and Darth Vader. He brought this humor into it, but he was brilliant and very approachable. And I think that’s what we want for all of our faculty_—to be approachable, to be able to teach courses at the level where the students are and help lift them up to where they need to be.

Justin Shaffer: Yes, couldn’t agree more. Me personally, I’m a Calvin and Hobbs guy. I do include those strips in my course lessons for sure. I try to find examples for thermodynamics, which it’s possible given the scope of Calvin and Hobbs.

Justin Shaffer: Yes, they’re great comics. And then other great thing about Calvin & Hobbes is you pass it on to your kids. They help some learn vocabulary as they learn how to read. Calvin has a good language base. But Yes. Yes, it’s true. He has got some big words in him for a first grader.

Drumm McNaughton: And of course, there’s going to be a lot of folks there who don’t even know who the King of Id or Calvin and Hobbes are because, are they still in circulation?

Justin Shaffer: That is fair. But yes, you’re going back to your point about being approachable.

Yes. I could not agree more. I think, we’re role models really for our students. Whether we like to think of that or not. Right? We’re modeling behavior. We’re modeling what it means to be a scientist, to be a professor, to be an intellectual, whatever word you want to use, and that should reflect not only the disciplinary content, technical skill side, but also the human side. Right? So I think the best thing that can happen for an instructor is to screw up in class and we all learn from it. So just two weeks ago or so, I had the worst quiz of my life in my material and energy balances class. It’s a sophomore level chemical engineering course. I don’t know what I was doing when I wrote the quiz solution, but I botched it so bad, and they called me out on it in class, rightfully so. I stopped for a second, looked dumbfounded, and I said, “oh, well, let’s make lemonade outta lemons here”.

So we figured out what I did wrong. We talked through it live, both sides of us students to meet to and back and forth, and we figured out was wrong. We had a good laugh about, and I said, hopefully everybody, you learned a lesson here about having some grace. Because yes, you were a little upset at me because I screwed up the quiz and it’s part of your grade.

But don’t worry, I’ll take care of that. Which I did, I helped them out with the grade, that wasn’t a big deal. But I told them, “you guys as students, you were so generous to me, you were so thoughtful. We went back and forth, we had a cordial discussion about it, we figured out what was wrong, and you gave me some grace”. Right?

And so, I told them, we all make mistakes. We all screw up”. So, we learned this, we worked through this together. This was year 13 for me. I was cool with this. If this would happen in year two, I probably would’ve had an anxiety attack and had to leave the room because I wasn’t as experienced. So that’s another thing, the more you do this, like any discipline, like any field you’re in, the better you get at it. So I was okay with it. I was able to handle it, duck off of water’s back. But again, earlier on in my career, I would’ve a little more trouble.

But again, the point is that let’s be humans for them. Let’s let them approach us. It doesn’t mean we’d be best friends with them. There’s boundaries, of course. I don’t, I have my own boundaries with my students. I don’t cross them. They don’t cross them either. But while we’re in the classroom, again, we’re on the same team, let’s work together, let’s learn a lot, let’s also have some fun.

Drumm McNaughton: That’s what they’re going to remember going forward.

Justin Shaffer: Yes.

Drumm McNaughton: Absolutely.

[00:34:16] Final Thoughts and Takeaways

Drumm McNaughton: Justin, this has been a fabulous conversation. Thank you so much. As we always do. Three takeaways for university leaders and board members.

Justin Shaffer: Thanks, Drumm. This was really fun. So I think for, again, leaders and board members listening, one thing would be to really think about, these gateway STEM courses. So just tying it back into stem. Right? We know these courses are super impactful for our students. They get them started on their careers moving forward in STEM, whether again, it’s engineering, medicine, science, whatever. But we have to do them right. And course design, proper pedagogy, active learning techniques are really important. So let’s put our resources in those large STEM lectures, and that’s even getting more important now, as I keep seeing stories online in the Chronicle and other places about even larger lectures, fewer faculty to teach them. Right?

So, we really have to do these classes, right? Another thing I would say is to value and take care of those teaching faculty who might be teaching these courses. Oftentimes, if not all the time, we are untenured, we are paid less than our research faculty colleagues, which you can argue makes sense because we’re not bringing in grant dollars. I totally get that. But again, making sure that we have a good working environment, that we are viewed as equal in terms of voting rights, in terms of other rights on campus for progression through a career series. It doesn’t have to be tenure, but perhaps moving up from assistant, teaching professor, associate teaching professor, like a parallel track. Right? So making sure we’re valued. because again, we as teaching faculty tend to do the brunt of these large courses, these gateway STEM courses. We also serve as inspiration for our research faculty colleagues. There’s been papers shown looking at a social network analysis on teaching influences on different STEM departments and the teaching faculty are the ones that have the biggest impacts on the rest of the department, especially on the research faculty colleagues. So if you think about prioritizing impact, we’re the ones, again, spending a lot of time on developing our courses with evidence-based strategies, learning new ones as well from the literature and conferences. And then we’re the ones that share that onto our research faculty colleagues. So we make a big impact on our colleagues and our students that even aren’t in our own classrooms.

And then the last thing I would say with regards to this three theme on course design and everything is, to again, think about those professional development opportunities for your faculty, whether that’s a annual or semi-annual professional development day, which I see has done a lot of community colleges. Whether it’s having a fully staffed and run teaching and learning center. Whether that’s one for the whole university or even per unit.

I know larger schools like Arizona State, they have them per college, like there’s one just for the college of engineering. But whatever you can do to provide support to these, ancillary services staff and faculty that run these centers for teaching and learning, that’s also always going to drive impact. It’s going to drive positive student outcomes, therefore drive, hopefully, enrollment, persistence, retention, all these great metrics we need to worry about, but having the support mechanisms for our teaching faculty, for our research faculty, for all of our faculty to do well, that’s another important thing to think about and take home.

Drumm McNaughton: Those are great takeaways. Thank you. What’s next for you?

Justin Shaffer: Yes. A couple years ago, I had a birthday that ends in Zero, and I know those of you listening know what

happens when that happens. I, it was not 20 unfortunately, but, it’s a multiple of 20 though. And, I start to rethinking about what I want to do with my career.

And being able to try to do all that I can to improve STEM education in higher ed’s kind of been my mission. I want to get outside my own silo and do what I can. So I’ve taught almost 9,000 students in 13 years, which sounds like a lot, but it’s still just a small drop in the bucket. To all the STEM students nationwide and worldwide.

So I’m really trying to get outside my comfort zone. I started my own business, Recombinant Education, where I provide education (https://www.recombeducaprofessional development services for faculty). I have this book coming out that you mentioned, Drumm, High Structure Course Design, and I’m also partnering with other groups to really drive high-impact change.

So I work with Kathy Alami and Alami Education, and we’re doing large scale stem course redesigns. I mentioned earlier, briefly, we have this project in the state of Ohio called “Ohio’s Strong Start and Science”, where we’re working with 20 different colleges and universities to redesign their intro chem, intro bio, and anatomy and physiology series to really promote positive student outcomes. So you think about the impact that a project like that can have with high-touch support for these schools is really, really exciting.

Yes, so I’m not sure where this is all going to go for me in the future, but I just love working with faculty. I love working with leadership to help improve these STEM student outcomes and to do everything I can to make that happen at this point.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, thank you Justin, so much for being on the show. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. I look forward to next time our paths cross. This has been fabulous.

Justin Shaffer: Absolutely, Drumm, thank you so much for having me, and I hope this was a valuable use of everyone’s time. So thanks everybody.

Drumm McNaughton: Absolutely. Thank you, sir.

Thanks for listening today and a special thank you to my guest, Dr. Justin Shaffer, associate dean, undergraduate studies and teaching professor for Colorado School of Mines. Justin, thank you for a fascinating conversation. You make this sound so easy. I know it isn’t, but oh my gosh, I wish all institutions would be doing the type of things that you and your colleagues are doing in the classroom.

For my listeners, thank you so much for listening. We’ll see you next week.