AI and Student Agency with Jason Gulya

The ebook version of my new book, The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching, co-authored with Annette Vee and Marc Watkins, is out! To celebrate its release I’ve interviewed a few of the faculty whose AI-aware teaching we highlight in the book, and I’m excited to share another one of those conversations here on the podcast today.

Jason Gulya is a professor of English and media communications at Berkeley College, where he teaches a variety of online and onsite courses in the humanities. I started following Jason on LinkedIn a few years ago, giving me a glimpse into all the many ways he has adapted his teaching to respond to the challenges and opportunities posed by generative AI. He’s a thought leader in this area, and I was very excited to get him on the line for an interview. In our conversation, he talks about the risks of transactional education and how he pushes back against that model of education through some pretty radical approaches to student agency in their learning. 

Episode Resources

Jason Gulya on LinkedIn

Jason Gulya on Substack

Jason’s book, co-authored with Paul Matthews, Artificial Intelligence, Real Literacy

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:34

And I will build what I call an agency rich scaffold. And so in my classes, I will say, all right, this is what we're doing, this is what we're studying, you design the project. Right? You design what you want to build. And if you look at process-focused pedagogy, that was rule number one, right? To teach process, the student has to be able to have a lot of agency over the product.

Derek Bruff 1:01

Welcome to Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching. I'm your host, Derek Bruff. The ebook version of my new book, The Norton Guide to AI Aware Teaching, co-authored with Annette Vee and Mark Watkins, is now out. To celebrate its release, I have interviewed a few of the faculty whose AI aware teaching we highlight in the book. And I'm excited to share another one of those conversations here on the podcast today. But before I do, I have a request for you, dear listener. This is episode 96 of Intentional Teaching, which means the podcast's 100th episode is coming up soon. I would love your help making it a special one. Here's my ask: What is one idea or example or question or quote from an intentional teaching episode that you keep thinking about? Let me know via email or record a short voice memo on your phone and send that to me. I'm planning to make the 100th episode a kind of clip show where I share excerpts from past episodes featuring powerful insights and your comments about why those insights have stuck with you. Your deadline for this assignment is September 15th, which will be here before you know it. Okay, now on to today's interview. Jason Gulia is a professor of English and media communications at Berkeley College, where he teaches a variety of online and on-site courses in the humanities. I started following Jason on LinkedIn a few years ago, giving me a glimpse into all the many ways he has adapted his teaching to respond to the challenges and opportunities posed by Generative AI. He is a real thought leader in this area, and I was very excited to get him on the line for an interview. In our conversation, he talks about the sometimes transactional nature of education and why that's a problem, and we take a deep dive into how he pushes back against that model of education through some pretty radical approaches to student agency. Seriously, there were several times in an interview where you'll hear me. I'm like, really? How does that work for you? It's a really interesting approach to course design, and I think you'll come away from this interview with lots to think about. Jason, thank you so much for being on Intentional Teaching. I'm excited to chat with you today and get to know you and your teaching a little bit more. Thanks for being here.

SPEAKER_01 3:19

Thank you so much for having for me. I'm excited to meet you and get to talk about everything that's going on.

Derek Bruff 3:24

There's a lot going on. Let's go back in time, though, first, um, before we talk about today. Can you tell us about a time when you realized you wanted to be an educator?

SPEAKER_01 3:35

It's so funny because when I was preparing for this, I went and I listened to last the last few episodes that you did, and I was so interested in other people's story. Um and one of the things that happened with me when it comes to you know gradually learning uh that I want to be an educator was that it very much snuck up on me. Um it wasn't a part of the plan when I was in middle school or high school or even for the majority of college. Um and one of the things that, you know, was true for me, especially before I get into college, was I was extremely frustrated by school. Um I didn't like it. I didn't care for it. I did okay in school. I did well enough to get through high school and get to college and do reasonably well. But in even by the time I got to 10th or 11th grade, I didn't really see school as a good place for me. I found it very constricting. I found it very limiting. Um and I was very frustrated by the educational experience. Um and so by you know, when I graduated high school, becoming a teacher was nowhere on the rise. And I had no plans of doing it. I wanted to go into politics or I wanted to go into law. Thankfully, I didn't do either of those things. And what really changed was when I went to college and I started to get a very, very different educational experience. And one of the things that has really sort of surprised me, and I spent some time thinking about this morning, was you know, I went, I went to Rutgers University. So a giant, just a massive university. And one of the things I really liked about it was how anonymous it was, how I could go and kind of do whatever I wanted. And this is something that still sort of surprises me because the foundation of me getting excited about learning was going into these classes with 200, 300 students. And attendance was not mandatory. I took an astronomy class when I was a freshman that was about 300 students. And the average attendance was five. Five people showed up. And actually, that got me excited about education because I got into a space where if you wanted to learn about something, if you wanted to do it, right? It wasn't compulsory, right? People were engaging with it in all different sorts of ways. And in a weird way, that got me excited about it because I would show up with five other people, even though I wasn't an astronomy major, right? I actually didn't own my major until I was a junior. Um, but that gave me the ability to explore, move around. And so it gave me a chance to see, you know, what happens when in that context, attendance wasn't really required. And so I could engage with it however I wanted. Um, and so that didn't get me into education, but it got me into learning. And then by the time I became a junior, I started to think, oh, I can start to do things like this. And I've only started really now to recognize how weirdly foundational that anonymity has been for me, even though I teach connection, I try to build connection in all these ways. But for me, the in a very surprising way, the journey started with just being in a space where it wasn't constricting. I, you know, I could participate, I could be a part of it or not, and I could elect in and out. Um, and I think it's it's been so interesting to me how, you know, for me, the step was to re-rediscover learning and the joy of learning, and then gradually became teaching by the time I was like a junior or senior. Um, and at that point, it was just getting to grad school and then kind of getting from there. So very much corrupted, very uh much snuck up on me. Um, it wasn't something that was my calling, you know, at a certain point. Um, I just gradually got into it.

Derek Bruff 7:26

Well, it sounds like it wasn't just the anonymity, but you had a lot of agency when you got to college that maybe you didn't feel in high school that allowed you to kind of find the path that worked for you.

SPEAKER_01 7:36

Yeah, and I think that in many ways, this is the paradox of teaching college. Because for many of, you know, when I tell people that story, they think, oh, that's such a disconnected experience, which was not my perception of it at all. Right. For me, it was, oh, I have agency here. I can pick and choose. Um, and especially for the first two to three years of my college experience, I didn't have a major until I was a well, I didn't have a major I stuck to until I was a junior. Okay. I moved around and explored, I tried these different classes. I at one point I was a minor in math. Okay. I like tried all these different things. And so I've talked to many people, and they'll say, Oh, you know, I was a wandering, um uh unfocused student. But again, like that wasn't my perception at all. It was all about agency. And and I do think that that is the consistent through line for me that even as I teach connection, I want students in the class, you know, connecting with each other, even though I try to imbue those learning environments with as much agency as I can. And I think though those earlier experiences are our reason, one of the reasons why I do that.

Derek Bruff 8:42

Yeah, yeah. Um, okay, so let's just a little bit. Well, we you started to talk about how you grew from a learner to a to a teacher. Um, let's fast forward to late 2022, early 2023. Chat GPT has launched, and then there was a flurry of generative AI tools that were out there. Um what in your experience as a teacher up to that point helped prepare you to navigate that disruptive effect of AI on your teaching? Because I feel like you were a fast responder in some in some ways.

SPEAKER_01 9:22

Yeah, and I felt like, especially at the time, like I was doing that out of sheer necessity and just keeping my head above water, trying to stay afloat. And I think there are two things that help me. One, I think that having the experience of the pandemic helped in some ways, being able to, you know, already having a few years earlier having this experience where I needed to adjust on the fly. And even when the pandemic happened, yeah, I was teaching some online classes, but that was the first real Ferrari into. Now I'm teaching only a line, only online, only asynchronous. Um, for a lot of our classes at Berkeley, they are asynchronous by design. I'm not allowed to ask a student to hop onto a Zoom unless there's a problem, right? That's the only time that you're you're really able to do that. And so I had this experience, but during the pandemic, I had to really lean into it. And so that sort of adaptability helped me out because then when ChatGBT happened, um, and I also happened to be on sabbatical at the exact moment it dropped, which was also very helpful, right? Because then I could come back and say, well, I really need to figure things out and experiment. And for me, experimentation is the core of it, right? Being able to play with something, self-assess how it went, and pivot if you need to. And the other experience that helped me out was I'm a forced generalist. I mean, my PhD is an 18th century British allegory. It is very niche, right? You're talking about like 10 people in the world who are interested in that thing. Um, and then when I got my job, I basically, you know, I don't teach that anymore. Um, that, you know, I'm teaching these generalist classes to students who, I mean, we don't even have an English major at our college. And so my position and my context has forced me to really think about what it means to be a generalist. And that really helps when you're looking at this technology, having that ability to say, well, I'm not just gonna get more and more niche, I'm gonna figure out some of the big picture stuff. That has really helped me out. And it's also been foundational to my approach, even now, that ChatGPT has been around for three and a half years, something like that. Yeah, it's gonna be in the fall four years, I think. Um, but even now, trying to think about what are the big things to think about? Um, you know, grading, assessment, assessment design, right? Not just focusing on technology. And having that experience when I started very, very niche and then had to become more and more of a generalist has really helped me do that. Because I that's exactly what I think that kind of takes, right? You don't just get further and further into the, you know, the niche space, but you kind of figure try to figure out how things are connected and how they link up where they don't look up.

Derek Bruff 12:11

Okay, so I'm relating pretty hard in part because I was trained as a mathematician, but and I still teach math from time to time, but like my work at a teaching center, I interact with faculty across all the disciplines and help them think through what does teaching and learning look like in your in your field, in your discipline, in your context. And so um the notion that there's you know lots of different ways to approach this topic of how do we respond to G uh to AI makes a lot of sense to me, right? I'm kind of always aware of that. Um, and I think it does give you a kind of set of tools, whereas if you're really focused on kind of one kind of teaching, one approach, um, it's it's a little harder to be flexible and to see possibilities, right, for that for that experimentation that you were talking about. I want to talk to you about the kind of transactional nature of education. And so I'm so so when you say transactional nature of education, what what do you mean? How does that how does that connect to AI? Like how is AI maybe exacerbating that? Um, and and what and and we'll get to kind of what are you doing about it in your own teaching? But kind of can you define the problem for us briefly?

SPEAKER_01 13:18

Yeah, I think that I can boil it down to four main stages, and they're very much connected with each other. It doesn't get everything, but it gets kind of a general sense of how the model works. So, you know, stage number one, students create educational products. The traditional one is papers, but they can be presentations, they can be resumes, whatever you want. But a student creates a product, and the vast majority of the time, it is a one-and-done, isolatable product that we're gonna look at for quality. So they hand it in to a professor and they take a look at it. So step number one is they create the product. Step number two is they hand in that product for a grade. They write that 20-page paper, whatever it is. The professor looks at only that thing. When I was an undergraduate, I had a teacher who the first thing they would do is they would take a sheet of paper and cover everyone's name and title, all the heading. It was fully just the paper itself, just the product. Right. Um, so the students hand that in for a grade. That's the second stage. The third stage is they hand in that grade for a degree, right? It's all about GPA, it's very point-centered, it's very grade-centered. And then ostensibly, they trade in that degree for a job. Those are the four main stages. And it's very much embedded with how our many of our students see education. And one of the conversations I'm always having is with my students, I will ask them, why are you here? Why are you in college? Right. And sometimes, yes, every once in a while I get someone who say, I want to learn, right? Um, but a lot of times it's just, I want to get here for my degree. I want to get here for my certification. And it's very much embedded in so many different ways, big and small, in how we talk about higher ed and how we engage in our courses. And so that, at least for me, is that transactional model of education is one of the biggest obstacles to adapting to AI. Because, and you see this all the time, we see this language echoed with the student who created Einstein, the AI program that could go into Canvas and just complete all the work, right? And they talked about it and they defended it using the transactional model of education. Right? Get going to college isn't about learning, it's about degrees. It's about getting through things as as quickly as we can with as you know, as little work as we can. And with the program Cara AI, which was created by the student at the University of Notre Dame, she sent an email, or sorry, he sent an email to students, um, 10,000 of them. I think she they got about a thousand signups. And it's the same thing. It's a program when it says college isn't about learning, college is about the network, is about the degree, it's the grades. And so I think that there are ways in which the transactional model of education has become a sales pitch for these programs that the vast majority of the time offload a lot of the cognitive work, right? To the extent that the student really maybe they don't learn much of anything and almost none of it stick. And I think that's a signal. I think that's a selling point. And one of the things I try to emphasize is that the language of the transactional model of education, which is all about getting points, getting degrees, right? Not learning centered, it's not just echoed by those small companies, it's echoed by the big one. So if we look for it with grammarly or superhuman, I guess they're known as now, they also use it. They have flooded social media with these programs. And the sales pitch is you can use grammarly to write. And whenever they have those commercials, it's very little writing, it's a lot of clicking, a lot of just like clicking and it's generating something. And like they will have ones and they say, you can use this program and write effortlessly. It will guess the grade for you. It will, you can work with it, click a couple of buttons, and it goes from an 85 to a 97 or whatever it is. It's this very transactional way of thinking about education as opposed to you know leaning into productive struggle or whatever we want to call it, which for you know, for many of us is central to deep learning, but that's not a part of it because the transactional model education is not about learning. It's about getting degrees, getting points as quickly and as easily as we can.

Derek Bruff 17:33

So, how do you push against this with your students? Right? You said they they come in and you ask them, they're here to get a degree, they're here to get a certificate. What what what can any of us do in our own courses to try to try to alter that dynamic in some useful ways?

SPEAKER_01 17:51

I think the single most powerful way to do it, which I rarely see people do, show it to students and call it out. Right? Actually, show them this. So in my literature class this semester, on the second day, we analyzed that email at the university at Notre Dame. It had been sent like a two weeks earlier, and I said, let's look at this email, let's take a look at it. So show them it, show them what that looks like and invite them to find the resonances. Some of them will come in and say, This is how I see education, right? This program is great. You will absolutely get those responses, right? Don't be astounded when you say yes. When they tell when they confirm to you that, yeah, the transactional model of education is how I'm thinking about it. Um, and so you'll get those, but you'll get usually my experience has been that you get very much a mixed set of responses. Um, so I think the first thing is to show it to them and call it out. And when you call it out, talk about what we can create as an alternative, right? I think that it's very easy to just push against it and be negative about it. But I think it's far more effective if we say, we're going to build a different learning culture. We're gonna build something that's gonna be about connection, it's going to be about learning. And then we can be very different about this, but for me, I've designed my classes around process, and part of that has been around alternative assessment. And I try to really lay out for my students this is how we're going to get at process. Um, and one of the things that the research tells us is that there's no single process that people use. To go back to my earlier experiences with being frustrated by high school, one of the things I hated about high school was that I was told exactly how to do it. It wasn't like someone said, create this thing, off you go. No, we came in one day and they said we're gonna do an outline. And then the next day they said, we're gonna create a thesis. And then the next day they're gonna say, all right, we're gonna find quotes. And they uh um scaffolding is not a bad thing. It's a very, very good thing, but you can just as easily over-scaffold something and take agency away. And so I try to design my classes so that we get a process, but don't fall victim to that. So, in a lot of my classes, I will walk them through and I will build what I call an agency-rich scaffold.

Derek Bruff 20:22

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 20:22

And so in my classes, I will say, all right, this is what we're doing, this is what we're studying, you design the project. Right? You design what you want to build. And if you look at process-focused pedagogy, um, as it's been worked out by Donald Murray and others, that was rule number one, right? To teach process, the student has to be able to have a lot of agency over the product, right? It needs to start there. So my students get to design the process, the project. Um, then step number two, they design the process. What are you going to do to build that? And one of the things that I walk them through here, and this is why I'm I'm very much in a supporting role and coaching role, is I ask them to predict, right? So predict what's going to get you to that project and where, if anywhere, AI is going to be in it. And this is a way to get them to start guessing early on, because some of them will say, all right, AI is not going to be a part of it. Cool, we can work with that. Others might say, I want to do a draft and then I want to use AI to outline because I think it's going to help me there. And that's really helpful for me to know because I can I can talk to the student and have convers ask questions like, why do you think it's going to help you there? Right. Um, I've yet to get a student say, I'm going to use AI to generate it from end to end, but at some point I expect it to happen, and then I'll go from there. But students design the project, students design the process, students um implement the process, they go and they start doing the thing, they self-assess, right? One of the things I have them do is, you know, partway through, hit pause, assess it. And sometimes I'll actually have them create a rubric, right? What criteria are you going to look at to assess this project? Do you have to pivot? And so this is a way of create giving them a scaffold where, in a very sneaky way, they're creating the scaffolding, right? They're making choices about what it actually looks like, even as they're following this process. Um, and I do that because my students all have very different processes that have helped them in the past, right? What works for me might not work for you. And then also, this is my way of including all different approaches to AI. Because if I'm teaching 20 students, I might have five students who use AI all day, every day. It is a part of their workflow, it is a part of everything that they do. And I might have five students who are adamantly opposed to AI. I have a student in one of my classes right now who has said, I am an anti-AI advocate, right? I am specifically, I'm very, very vocal in this space, right? And then I might have 10 students who haven't really decided one way for another, of another or another. And that is the makeup of the class. And so I think one of the big challenges here is how do you design assessments to include all of those different approaches? It's so, so difficult. But this is my way to try to navigate that because they get to choose the amount of, you know, where AI is in the process. And that's been very, very helpful because otherwise I feel really bad requiring AI along the way or um banning it. I don't think that works either. This is my middle ground.

Derek Bruff 23:42

Yeah, but I think most faculty I talk to who want to take a middle ground, they set some boundary line. You can use AI for this part, but not for this part, or on this assignment and not for that assignment. And sometimes those boundary lines I find are really thoughtful, right? They've thought a lot about what is the hard work of learning in this course, where is AI going to interrupt that or shortchange that? Where could it actually be helpful? And then they have all the students do it the same way. And I think there's a like a sanity move there, right? Like if I have 20 students who are all doing 20 different things with AI, it's hard for me as an instructor to track all that and manage that and guide that. And so, so how do you do that? It does seem and you're teaching five courses at once, right? So you've got a lot of students who are using AI in different ways. Um like, like, do you uh do you just have a bigger brain space than the rest of us? How do you juggle all that?

SPEAKER_01 24:41

No, I I think that the big I won't call it a hack, but one of the things that has saved me, especially when it comes to product blow. And I think one of when anyone who wants to teach process, I think something we have to be very, very conscious of that if we the standard for many professors is that when we get to teaching process, instead of a student sending in a single product, suddenly they're sending in five or six or seven products, right? So try to cut down on that.

Derek Bruff 25:10

All right, there's the there's the pitch, there's the outline, there's the annotated bibliography, there's the storyboard, right? Like all of those things. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:18

And that will accumulate for the professor and the student very, very quickly. And I think the key here is intentionality, right? When you're going or designing this, know you know which ones you really want to give you know full formative feedback on. Like really, you know, let them have it. This is what I want you to think about. That doesn't have to be for everything, right? If the student is sending in a project, right, a basic project description, I can review it in about five seconds, right? Like, yeah, this looks good. I want to need some work, right? The project and the process, right? It's really about them leaning into it. Almost never they need full formative feedback from me. So I might be able to review those, you know, give a quick look, know if an intervention is necessary or conversation is necessary, and whatever else.

Derek Bruff 26:08

You might look at a project description and you're like, okay, 19 of these are fine, and this one is way out of scope. So I'm gonna give that student my attention right now. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:19

Yes, yeah, absolutely. And be very, very intentional with that. I think that's that's the key. And then also, and I actually find this not just a hack, but I find this to be more interesting. Um, having students doing some of that work, which actually helps them out, right? You want to create something, where do you think AI is gonna fit in that process? Well, why? Right? Why do you think it's gonna it's gonna outline? Um, and try, I try to to set things up in a way that I'm as efficient as possible. It doesn't have to be a full assignment. So, one of the things that I do in my class is if someone sends in blank and I really have something I want them to think about, something I want to have an exchange with, right? Conventionally, I might ask them, you know, resubmit the entire assignment, right? Which is more work for them, more work for me. And one of the things that I've I've learned to do is in Canvas, so we use Canvas as our LMS. I make the comments a part of the assignment. I will say, all right, this is really interesting. Let's have a quick back and forth before I give this a complete, let's have a back and forth about blank, right? So you thought it was going to be good for an outline. Why did you think that? And that gives me a much more efficient window. It's it's much closer to a chat where I might be able to have a quick back and forth with the student and I tell them, you know, this is a part of the assignment, you know, responding to me. So I might give it a try again or an incomplete on canvas now. Once we have that chat, I'm able to say, well, the student's getting it, right? We're having this back and forth. They're doing the explaining, um, which honestly is more interesting for me and I think more helpful for them. And I I'm I get a little bit closer to an assurance of learning, as much at least as much as I can. But I've learned to really lean on getting them to explain more and me to explain less, which manages the work, it manages the workload and also gives me like insight into how they think a little bit more.

Derek Bruff 28:19

Yeah. Yeah. So okay. So let me then ask the the reverse of that question. Do your students look at you and they're like, Professor Gulia, what are you doing? Like, I think I'm doing all the work.

SPEAKER_01 28:33

Sometimes I think that there is some selling that needs to happen. Okay. And I think this is, you know, for any approach, if we're gonna focus on process and we're gonna focus on alternative assessment as I do, I think that we have to do a lot of selling for it. Um, students will push back. Um, students will say, this is harder. This is more difficult. And one of the big examples I come back to is I'm not a huge believer in rubrics, right? Uh, at least in rubrics where I create it and I use it to determine their score. But I really like student created rubrics. Okay. I think those are really, really helpful, right? When students actually think about it. And and this is where I help them out, right? Um, because I would love to just say a student create a rubric and just like send them free, right? Go and do that. Um, but that is where I use more scaffolding. Um, and that's where AI also helps me out, helps me out in terms of managing my workload, helps them out. So if I have a student creating a rubric, I will sometimes get that response of, yeah, I feel like I'm doing too much work here. And that's where, so some students they just want to go and do it. I might tell them, um, you know, create your project, your process, and identify the three criteria you're going to use to assess it. And they'll go off, and that's cool, right? That doesn't bother them. Right. Um, but for many students, they want way more structure for them. And that's where I might give them an option of using a custom chatbot. And this has been very, very helpful, where I can give them a custom chatbot and it will walk them through it so that they might be able to, you know, five minutes let the let the chatbot know what their project is, what they value, right? What they're really working on, what skills they're working on. And that chatbot will give them the table version of it. Okay. And that really helps them out. It gives them additional scaffolding. So it kind of kind of um draws out of them what they're working on and some of the values, but it it does a lot of the smaller things, which can be very time consuming, right?

Derek Bruff 30:41

Um, and I I'm I'm making a guess here, but it I'm guessing the chatbot kind of interviews the student about their project. Yep. Right? There's a back and forth to this conversation, and then based on that interview, the chat bot suggests, say, a simple rubric that they can use.

SPEAKER_01 30:58

Yep. And they can send me the entire chat. I do this through Play Lab so they can use it for free with no caps. They send me the chat, and and again, I think that there we have to be intentional. I don't read the entire chat. And I tell students this, right? The chat's really for them, it's to help them build it. I kind of scroll down to the bottom, take a look at the rubric they created, and I might flip through if I want a sense of just what happened or what didn't happen. But again, there it's it's about their ownership. If they are using the chat bot to create a rubric that they have ownership over and that they're going to use and apply, I don't feel like I need to come in and say, you know, here are the 10 things to change about it, because it's about their ownership. So long as they're doing that work, I'm I'm happy with it. Um, and then it's about managing their workload, managing my workload. Um, and that's been very, very helpful and something I learned to do because I've gotten that response of I feel like I the students would say that I feel like I'm doing too much work here. And that kind of is a way of me meeting them halfway because I've learned that whenever I created a rubric in the past, I always felt like I learned the most from creating the rubric, right? That I learned through the very process of it. And I want students to learn how to do that because I think it's really, really helpful to do. Um, and also if I have in a single class, I have all different kinds of projects. It's also crazy for me to have one rubric that I'm going to apply to everything. It's it's just not doable, is my way of giving them working more flexibility into the assignment itself.

Derek Bruff 32:31

Okay. Um yeah, I I the having students create a rubric is something I have experimented with, but typically we do it as a class. We're all making the same kind of product. And so we're gonna look at examples of that product, we're gonna talk about what makes a good infographic or a good podcast, we're gonna build that rubric as a class, and then we'll all use that rubric. Uh whereas your this is much more flexible to individual students. Um I wonder where so in my example, I'm gonna have them all make a podcast episode. And so I have set some goals for this assignment. I set some kind of parameters, some boundaries for this. Um how do you how do you provide some what's your version of that? Like how do you make sure the students are heading in a useful direction given the course that you're teaching and the the students and the context?

SPEAKER_01 33:28

I do think a lot of it has to do with building out in the open. Um, and I do want to have shared objectives. Um and we do. So for my classes, uh you know, especially the ones that have alternative assessment baked into them, we have the core skills, right? Everything is designed around those core skills, and this is the way to actually kind of help them out. So in my literature class, they are, I'm gonna test myself here, um, collaborating, communicating, managing a writing process, and reading closely. Everything, every assignment goes under those core skills. And I develop those by taking a look at our CLOs, at our course learning objectives. They don't come out of nowhere, right? I one of the things that I think really helps is we don't, most of the time we do not have to reinvent the wheel. The first thing I do when I'm trying to design a course or redesign a course is I look at those learning objectives and I think about how can I boil it down? And that's where I came up with those four core skills. And so those in many ways are the goals, right, that we're move where we're moving towards. So if students are creating a project and they're really stumped, I will ask, I will tell them, go back to the goals, right? See if you can work those in there. And that helps them out, right? Because it gives them something that they can work with, that helps them ground their expectations and ground that rubric. Um, every once in a while I have a student who creates a rubric that I just think, well, really want to start to redirect this, but usually they're they're pretty good at it. Um, but that's been my compromise. So that in many ways they're working in in a kind of uh sneaky way, right? They're working in the course learning objectives, they're working in the core skills, um, even as they're doing it in a very agency filled rubric exercise. Okay. Um, and and that is my way of kind of balancing both things.

Derek Bruff 35:21

And if you've got a student who has constructed this project and their process and their rubric, and and let and one of those four core skills is just absent entirely, that's where you might redirect, right?

SPEAKER_01 35:36

Yep. Yeah, no, exactly. Um, and common. And this is where, I mean, in person, there are so many different strategies you have to talk to that student and work, whether it's with them individually or do it with group work or as a class, there are so many ways to do that. And even online, I'm learning that there are you know very effective ways to reach out to them, coach them, bring them through. And that's also the work, right? And if we're having that exchange, right, I'm getting closer and closer to feeling like I'm assured that learning is happening here and something something is happening beyond just getting the points. Because one of the things I think we need to do when we're challenging the transactional model of education is being very mindful when we're creating assignments that are very compliance focused. And I'm trying to create assignments where it's not really about that, but we do need to hit the objectives, right? We do need to hit those goals. And I think trying to balance that in public is very helpful because it lets students see that. Um, because that's I mean, that's that's the tough part, but I think that showing students how we're doing it and how we're trying to do it, that gives gives them a sense of my process too. And I think that's that's really, really helpful for them to see and essential for them to see.

Derek Bruff 36:50

Now, earlier you talked about connection, and I heard connection with other students as part of that. I don't know if that's what you meant, but the what you've just described could be done in isolation, each student working their own thing, right? Interacting with you regularly throughout that, but not necessarily with each other. So, how do you think about your classes as learning communities when you're when you're implementing all of this?

SPEAKER_01 37:17

So I personally think that the most effective way to get students to lean into productive struggle, to not just offload the thing, is going to be the human-to-human connection, right? The rapport with other students, with the professor. And I think that that is true for on-site and online. That's one of the big commonalities here. Um, and I'm very influenced by scholars like Flower Darby, who does a lot of work in, you know, the joyful online professor. Like, how do we bring joy into it? How do we bring connection into the online classroom just as much as the on-site class? Um, because, and there's so much research that backs this idea. One of the big obstacles here is that, and I I mean, the pandemic didn't start this, it's been happening for a long time, but uh, for many of our students, they're so lonely. The classroom spaces have become such lonely spaces, and reintroducing connection is really, really important. I'm very intentional about creating community and trying to figure out how to do that, right? Whether it's giving um, you know, in small ways, giving video feedback on work. That has been really, really helpful. Um, every once in a while, I'm trying to figure out a way to scale this, but I've actually, you know, started to do handwritten notes to students and take a picture of it and put it there, right? Like I am human, right? Um, and I think that you know, finding these little ways to really bring our humanity into the course and getting students to really connect with each other. One of the things that I have been on and off frustrated by is, you know, how certain parts of LMSs and Canvas does this too, right? How they're not really building human connection anymore for various reasons, right? I wish discussion boards were, as a general rule, a place for human connection. And a lot of times they're just not. I think we can reclaim them, right? But it takes a lot of work. Um we can reclaim them for human connection, or I'll more often to use something as simple as a Google Doc or Microsoft 365, and we can have a collaborative document and write towards each other, um, write at each other, and you know, put in comments, put in images, put the you know, multimedia just on the page. And find I'm always trying to find different virtual spaces for my students um to build that community, especially as they're so used to my students are often so used to seeing um parts of the LMS as places of disconnect, right? Discussion boards where they're not really connecting with each other and might have 50% AI. Very transactional. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, that's it, right? And and and one of the things that, and I'm not going to push a I'm not going to insult anyone who does this because I 100% understand why. My students go into something like a discussion board and they recognize that they are they have to do one response and two replies to other students. Their response needs to be 200 words, their replies need to each be 100 words, right? They have this template. I don't even know where it came from. I don't know if anyone just started doing it, and I understand why you do that because you want to bring in engagement, but that's as transactional. Well, I won't say as transactional as it gets, but it's really, really transactional, right? Um, and part of it is I I'm constantly trying to look at the way that Canvas and other LMSs are designed and thinking about well, can we reclaim it or is it just too far gone? Right? Is it just too because I can put whatever I want in discussion board instructions, but they students will still bring that template to the fore. Um, I still will have a discussion board that I think will be very open, very human, very much designed for human collaboration. And I'll see student responses, and they all have the word count at the at the bottom of them, right? There's like little indication that the transactional model has made it into the discussion board.

Derek Bruff 41:22

Um, and it's it's a it's constant negotiation. Here's a great threaded discussion among my students, and lo and behold, every single post has 95 to 105 words in it.

SPEAKER_01 41:31

Yeah. I know, yeah, that there's this arbitrary thing that students have have been taught, and I don't fault them for it at all, but yeah, it's just like I'm trying to be very good at you know, as much as I can at looking those moments and saying, you know, what can I do with this? What does that mean? Should I look for other ways to design, especially an online class? Um, human-human collaboration, what can that look like? But because that that's what I think we need to do, right? When we see the transactional model pop in like that, like how are we going to approach it? What are we going to do with it? Right.

Derek Bruff 42:03

Yeah. Yeah. Well, last question. You mentioned experimentation with a big part of your of your approach to adapting to AI. Um, what what's next? What are you ex what are you planning to experiment with this year as you continue to figure out what to do with these tools and how to respond?

SPEAKER_01 42:20

I'm trying to figure out how to have metacognition in my course. When I talked, when I talked about those core skills, um, I want to have metacognition on there, metacognition and reflection, but I don't because I feel like I didn't have enough of a grasp of it yet. I didn't feel like personally ready to like, can I actually get to the point where I feel like I can cross that off and say a student has that ability? And for the last year, I kind of said no. I don't feel like I, I mean, the core skills, yeah, it's a reflection of the class and the students and everything. It's also a reflection of me and what I feel like I can actually assess. Um, so one of the things I'm working on now is trying to figure out what would it even mean to have metacognition and reflection skills really built into the core of the course? Because I do think it's one of the big things we need to teach. And then the question is, you know, how do we do that? How do we do that in purposeful ways? How do we do the challenging that we need we need to do in order to make students and ourselves aware of the biases and how we think, how how we process that, you know, and everything else. Um, but that's something I'm struggling with now and trying to figure out, you know, really concrete ways to do that. Because I think it's really, really hard and it's it's weird because I think many of us agree that we need to teach metacognition, but there's not a ton practical about like how to do that right now with this AI floating around. There's some stuff, but it's hard to figure out like, you know, how what would that actually look like on a weekly or you know, weekly or even daily basis. So that's what I'm exploring now.

Derek Bruff 43:59

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think you're right. I I I've been advocating for metacognitive, metacognitive reflection in any assignment that's going to touch on AI. I think you should build in some version of that. But I've been pretty vague about what that actually means in practice. Like, do you ask your students, was it helpful, was it not? I mean, I think that's a good place to start, but that's not that's a pretty kind of crude way to help students learn more about their own learning, right? Like, what if we gave them uh some frameworks or some tools or you know, are there activities that could kind of specifically build that awareness of how learning works and how learning works for me and how AI intersects with that? Um, yeah. So I think I think I think there's a lot of work to be done there.

SPEAKER_01 44:38

So yeah, I think it's hard because metacognition at its core, as far as I understand it, requires us to step out of ourselves.

Derek Bruff 44:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:47

Right. I think I think the big thing for me is whenever I think of metacognition and reflection, it's about just leaning more and more into that first person. But in fact, I'm I'm gradually learning that true metacognitive exercises, it kind of uh uh forces us to assume that we're someone else watching us do something that exploited. And that's that's really hard to do, right? It's hard to do that in a practical way. But I think that I, you know, for me, whenever I gave reflections, it was always, you know, um, how did it go? What would you improve, right? That and then it just feels like it, I felt I feel now like that's not quite doing the work I want it to do with metacognition. And that's that's where I'm sort of stuck on. Cause I think that many of us have those vague activities that we've been taught to do in the past. And it's just like, is that actually building metacognition, or does it become this throwaway assignment? And sometimes I think it's a throwaway assignment. Yeah, yeah.

Derek Bruff 45:39

Well, and to your earlier point, though, if we're gonna move against this transactional model, we need we need to show students a different way, right? And if that means learning is the goal, then we have to teach them how to learn. Um right. Well, thank you, Jason. We've covered a lot of ground here today. Um, and I know we could keep covering more ground. There's a lot to talk about, but I really appreciate you taking some time and giving us a little window into uh your teaching and and what it looks like right now. Thanks for being here. You're very welcome. It was a pleasure. That was Jason Gulia, professor of English and Media Communications at Berkeley College. Thanks to Jason for coming on the show to talk about his course and assignment design. I appreciate how Jason continues to experiment in his teaching, responding to AI, yes, but also to other challenges we face in higher ed today. He is leaning into a very different kind of learning experience for his students, and our interview has me thinking about how I could build elements of that into my teaching one day. You can read more about Jason's teaching in the Norton Guide to AI Aware Teaching, which features concrete examples of AI aware teaching practices from Jason, and from many more thoughtful, effective instructors. The ebook is available now, and the print edition will be available in September. See the show notes for more information. Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPSIA, the Online and Professional Education Association. In the show notes, you'll find a link to the UPSIA website where you can find out about their research, networking opportunities, and professional development offerings. This episode of Intentional Teaching was produced and edited by me, Derek Bref. See the show notes for links to my website and socials, and to the Intentional Teaching newsletter, which goes out most weeks on Thursday or Friday. If you found this or any episode of Intentional Teaching useful, would you consider sharing it with a colleague? That would mean a lot. As always, thanks for listening.