Whitney Clay: Welcome to the West Valley College TEACH Center podcast.
Michelle Francis: TEACH stands for training educators advocating change.
Whitney Clay: I'm Whitney Clay, Instructional designer.
Michelle Francis And I'm Michelle Francis, Professional Development Coordinator and Instructor in Child Studies.
Whitney Clay: At the TEACH Center, we support faculty as they cultivate excellence in teaching and learning and welcome their students with engaging pedagogies.
Michelle Francis: In this podcast, we discuss hot topics in teaching and learning. We interview educators about what they are doing in their fields, and we talk to learners about what inspires them.
Whitney Clay: Welcome to the second in our series of three episodes about academic rigor with our guest, Dr. Shamini Dias. In this episode, you will learn how to practice academic and ethical rigor by setting classroom policies that promote equity and support students to engage in deep and meaningful learning.
Michelle Francis: So thinking about faculty in this scenario, they don't want to give up their standards. And if they do these things and they're going to decrease their standards and their students aren't going to be as prepared. So how does one do the dance? Show me. How do I get into the dance where I'm doing this rigor and I'm also respecting who the students are, right?
Shamini Dias:s Yeah, it is truly a dance. So there isn't a, like, single way to do it. You have to first check your assumptions and think of your actions. The first place to go to is that space of reflection and conversation with each other about what are the assumptions that we already bring. We are products of the system that we embody, right? Because rigor often comes crashing in into a clash with equity in the area of assessment. You know, like what I expect of class participation. Oh, well, a rigorous discussion. Everybody needs to bring their ideas and we totally forget that not everyone is comfortable speaking up in their language learners. So what is a truly rigorous discussion is once you examine your assumptions, Oh, I guess my assumption was speaking up. That's what makes it good. Then you start finding actions that allow you to hold that the expectation of contribution, but take away the assumption of only by speaking and start bringing in people in other ways. They could put something on a sheet of paper and share it. Even if you're teaching in person in a classroom, you can have a chat channel projected so, so little things like that. But I guess also the thing that rigor is not it is not merely the holding up of your high standards. And maybe to ease our conscience or our passion, we should simply say the high standards are a non-negotiable. I don't even need to worry about them. I'm never going to let them down. So when when someone says, But equity and so on. All these as you could. Other things I have to do. Those are also non-negotiables. That's what I like the balance of. If you have academic rigor, where is your ethical rigor? They are both non-negotiables. I think that's where we can start from. It's not thinking, Oh, well, if you can't get there in the way, I've set it out in the time I've set up and you can't keep up, then you just don't have it in you. So we need to take away those narratives that we have, our students who keep making mistakes. It's probably not cut out to do math. Because we're ignoring context. We're ignoring process for ignoring formative development. One thing that works quite well is imagining that your high standards are at the top of a mountain, but you're not going to get there in one step. And if you don't provide climbing tools where some rope, where you begin to carve out some steps in the steep paths with some guardrails, how are you going to get up there? Because not everybody can just leap from rock to rock. Right. So if I sum that up, one area that we have to address is perfectionism.
Michelle Francis: Yes, I hear that so much in academia. Right?
Shamini Dias: Hmm. And we make because we are conflating. So I go back to the teacher who's passionate about this subject and is striving for excellence. They think of it, but they mix that perfectionism off, you know? And like you said earlier, you never stop learning. So there's no perfect, is there? There is. It's open ended. But we have a sense of high, high standards of excellence. We mistake that for perfectionism and we conflate it with control and performance. If you can do the math problems, you can write this history essay and you can cite the references, etc. perfectly. You're a good student. If you're struggling with that. I have an implicit bias. You're just not so good at my subject. That is our place to check. How much of a perfectionist are we? How is this impacting the biases I bring and the assumptions I'm making? If I wanted to make a list, right, deadlines. If you don't hit the deadline, I'm going to take away two points. Is that rigorous or is that control?
Michelle Francis: I love it. So you're telling us the list of the things we could work on in our classroom right now, Right. That would really address this? Yeah, I love that. So deadlines.
Shamini Dias: Deadlines. And, you know, the one thing to remember is a lot of the place where our hidden, implicit notions of rigor and assumptions of rigor really tripped students up for no good reason in the world, is in the very unglamorous areas of classroom policy deadlines, attendance. Why do we dock points for attendance when life is happening? As long as the students in the journey of the class are doing the work and working hard, sometimes the hardest, working, smartest students falter because they have two jobs and a few children.
Michelle Francis: Right?
Shamini Dias: Right.
Michelle Francis: Do you want to know my response when my students asked me about my attendance policy? I said, My policy is I'm going to make this class so fun that you're never going to want to miss and you're going to be sad when you do.
Shamini Dias: That's a great policy because you have brought in the rigor of learning that comes from deep engagement and joy and play.
Michelle Francis: Right.
Shamini Dias: Right. So then when a student does miss, a class is just about catching up. But you've also in that this notion of participation, we have a sense of what rigorous participation is. Well, we assign participation points. There is something my mentor once told me decades ago. Why should the student pay the price for the teacher's inability to engage?
Michelle Francis: I love that.
Shamini Dias: That's what you said. You know, I'm going to make the class so fun and engaging that you'll be sad when you miss. But you're also in that approach saying, And if you miss, we'll move on. We'll catch you up. The point is the engagement in learning. So things like attendance and participation policies and deadlines are about management, class management and control and compliance. That might have worked once upon a time where you had a completely homogeneous bunch of students who all were residential in the college, who all had breakfast together and could get to class, and that was it. And pretty much had the cultural capital, the shared. That's not the world in which we teach. We teach incredibly diverse populations with complex lives. So perfectionism, rigor as perfectionism in these areas of classroom management actually leads to a block in learning because it leads to anxiety. If they can't turn something in, it leads to bad work. I got to get it in by midnight tonight. I'll just throw something together. There's no learning there. They are not doing rigorous learning because you have what you think are rigorous policies . If you switch that around to say, If I have a flexible, supportive policy, I can hold my excellence up high and insist and scaffold them to get there. They won't do last minute work before midnight where they're not thinking anymore. So why are I my wasting my time grading that? And they've wasted their time actually not learning. We all lose. But if I say I have a stretch deadline, I would love to have it Friday by midnight because I would love to be giving feedback over the weekend. If you can hit that, you must communicate with me and we'll figure something else out. You know, and some of it is improv with some students have modified the assignment to still hit the standard. I want you to show me an argument with good citations, but I've changed the assignment to make it more manageable. Set. Let's break it up into two pieces. Right? To show two things. So our creativity comes in. But the bottom line there is this perfectionism of compliance, which can be swapped out for excellence in learning. That's where your ethical rigor and academic rigor dance well together.
Michelle Francis: Yeah. And I what I especially like about this conversation is this is about opening up that discussion widely and not being afraid to say I don't have deadlines. I was in a meeting and one of my faculty colleagues called me out, said, Hey, Michel, I hear you don't have deadlines. I started to immediately sweat and I was thinking to, I don't have deadlines. Oh my gosh, am I going to be shamed for not having deadlines? And I took a moment and I took a deep breath and I said, you're right. I don't have deadlines. And then I shared with them the language I put in my syllabus. And I think it was really about acknowledging that I don't feel shame because there's a reason. And that's what I think you're saying. We're keeping the standard high, but we're having a rationale for understanding why we're doing something. The pedagogy, the understanding of the why. Yeah. So that when people question it or put us on the spot, we can say this is why we're doing it.
Shamini Dias: Absolutely. And what you just described is what an innovator does. And the first space that they have to occupy socially is probably shame.
Michelle Francis: It's a common emotion in academia, I'm afraid.
Shamini Dias: Oh, and in many, many places. I think of the people who brought a whole new way of doing something right. The first person who thought of recycling the first, you know, Van Gogh never sold a painting, died a pauper because he had a vision of how painting could be done. People who were persecuted for it. Copernicus, Galileo. Being in community, the courage you have to share why and to stand by it. But the more of us get together, the more courage we have. Rigor is one of the biggest areas for transgression and transformation if you're going to work for equity. And so I'm a big advocate, like the collective, strength in numbers, but also that individual courage. Like you, I take my hat off to you in a meeting, you know, then you took that breath and you said, Oh, but here's why I do it. What was the response? Did they did they how did they respond to that?
Michelle Francis: Actually, it was fascinating. They, what they were wondering, they wanted the language because they wanted to change that. They wanted to change their policy, but they weren't sure how and they wanted to know the language so that they could communicate it to students. And then they wanted to know the outcome. They asked me what happens? Did the students not turn in stuff? I said, Actually, no. They all turn it in. I have a deadline. I have a date set when it's due. But students often email me and say, I had you know, my mom was injured, I had a funeral. Great. I'm not grading it that week. I'm going to grade it on the following Friday when I have my grading time set aside. So they have until that Friday, really, to turn it. I don't publicly say that, but I let them turn it in when they need to. That next week I say, sure, absolutely. Give it to me this week. And nine times out of ten, they're getting it to me on time.
Shamini Dias: And probably better quality than had they rushed.
Michelle Francis: Yes. Right. Yes. And they're more engaged in their freedom.
Shamini Dias: Mm hmm.
Michelle Francis: And it frees me up from having to say, oh, your excuse is better than your excuse, although they still feel they need to give me an excuse. But they always communicate with me. That's the fascinating part to me. It doesn't matter if you have you had to garden that day or you had, you know, the death of a pet. I don't have any. There's no value judgement. I'm not judging. I'm just offering up that space to do it at that later date.
Shamini Dias: Absolutely. And so what you just described is the ethical and learning rigor and that learning the ethical rigor and learning rigor supported your academic standards of high performance. You know, it's part of what we call high impact practice. This kind of practice of rigor that dances between ethics, and the context, and learning, and expectation is always going to have a high, yeah, you just have evidence of high impact. But you know, what's a fascinating thing is the question first made you sweat and then the realization it was actually a question out of curiosity and a desire to learn. And so we need to have more courage, all of us, to say, I do this because nine times out of ten more people in our space want to know a bit more.
Michelle Francis: And the how.
Shamini Dias: And the how, how and why. Right. And they want to know evidence from your practice so that they get courage. You got to try that, too. And so we broaden rigor to be that stretching for excellence.
Michelle Francis: On our part. I think that's the other piece. What I love about this conversation is rigor for us as well as practitioners, that we are engaging in the stretching and the expanding and the lack of perfection because we know it's never done. Done. You're always stretching.
Shamini Dias: Yeah, we're stretching our rigor, aren’t we? We’re stretching and finding more ways, more dance steps.
Michelle Francis: Yes, every day. And I think that's the beautiful thing about the work that you're doing in communities of practice and what you're bringing to the conversation is this idea of knowing that it's okay to try something and to change who you are. I mean, I was a no late work, never turn in late work person for a very long time. I look back and feel sad that I was that person, right? Yes, I.
Shamini Dias: But you're not now.
Michelle Francis: But I'm not now. And I think that's the beautiful thing I've been teaching for so long and I still am learning and growing and stretching. And I think that's what we're asking our students to do. Yeah. So to engage in that for ourselves is also really powerful. It's a good model for us.
Shamini Dias: It is, yeah.
Whitney Clay: Join us for the next episode where the conversation with Dr. Dias continues with a focus on rigor in assessments.