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Higher Listenings
Same Side Pedagogy: Less Policing, More Partnership
What if student motivation didn’t have to be a tug-of-war? In this episode, cognitive psychologist and author Dr. Michelle Miller joins us to explore what happens when faculty stop policing students and start partnering with them.
We dig into the research behind motivation, the power of learning student names, and small shifts that can make a big difference—for students and instructors. Because motivated students aren’t born—they’re made.
Whether you're burned out on late work emails or just tired of playing bad cop, this conversation offers a more human way forward.
Guest Bio
Dr. Michelle Miller is the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology and Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World. Her latest book is A Teacher's Guide to Learning Student Names: Why You Should, Why It's Hard, and How You Can.
A Professor of Psychological Sciences and President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University, Dr. Miller writes, teaches, and speaks about maximizing learning in today’s technology-saturated and rapidly-changing world.
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It's a tug of war, right? Here's what you want to push on them and here's what students actually want. These two things are fundamentally in opposition and it's that transactional, oppositional, adversarial space. And I said you know what, maybe there are some ways where, subtly or not so subtly, I can say I'm going to drop my end of this tug-of-war rope and walk around to your side.
Speaker 2:Ever feel like your classroom's become a series of low-level standoffs, where every deadline, email or policy turns into a mini battle of wills. It's exhausting and, let's be honest, most of us didn't get into teaching to play classroom cop. It's exhausting and, let's be honest, most of us didn't get into teaching to play classroom cop. But what if the secret to changing this dynamic wasn't more rules and reminders, but fewer? In this episode, we talk with cognitive psychologist, author, crafter and name-learning evangelist, dr Michelle Miller, about how to create the kind of classroom where motivation flows from connection, not compliance. So if you're ready to trade power struggles for partnership, maybe it's time to take a closer look at teaching from the same side. So welcome to Hired Listings, michelle. It's great to have you with us.
Speaker 1:Great to be here.
Speaker 2:I want to start with a scenario that I think a lot of faculty are probably pretty familiar with. You're sitting at your desk, the assignments are due, yet the LMS is showing a bunch of blanks beside the student names. Or maybe you're in class and students are there, but more in body than in spirit. So what do you think is really going on with student motivation today?
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh. Those who know me know that I always shy away from the big sort of generational like oh, today's learners are so fundamentally different and there's fundamentally bigger problems. That said, I do think that today's students are operating in a very different set of circumstances. They can include things like the pressure to get through school more quickly. We all know that the financial costs, of course, but also other things like the opportunity costs of being in school have gone up. We've reduced barriers to folks who are parents like myself, folks who are going back, the so-called non-traditional students, who I think many of us know are no longer should be considered non-traditional because they're actually in the majority. So they are quite naturally facing more demands, including some very unpredictable demands on their time and their energy. So there's a lot of things that go together in that. So I think that that can lead to that scenario that you're describing of.
Speaker 1:I set it all up and what is happening as I tell people, long ago, when I sat down to write my first book, minds Online. I come at this from this cognitive point of view. I'm like, ok, let's talk about how we form knowledge and develop skills and things like that from this very cognitive perspective. And I sort of realized halfway through. I said but wait, we can build all these great sort of optimal exercises and ways to get those things to happen, but if nobody does them they may as well not exist. So we kind of have to go there, and I've had to go there, even as a so-called not kind of non-specialist in the area of motivation, effort and student persistence. I kind of threw myself into that and said let's combine these things, and have never looked back to that and said let's combine these things, and have never looked back.
Speaker 3:I love that sort of origin story, Michelle, of how you moved from a focus on cognitive operations that are behind knowledge development to this area of motivation and getting students to embrace what you're offering as an opportunity in a well-designed learning environment. I know that more recently, this has started to come out as part of this framework that you're advocating called teaching from the same side. Let's start with a foundational explanation of teaching from the same side. What do you mean by that? What does it look like in practice?
Speaker 1:It really comes down to this idea that maybe I should interrogate what I really picked up during my socialization as a teacher, which was it's a tug of war, right, here's what you want to push on them and here's what students actually want. These two things are fundamentally in opposition, that my role as a teacher is to press people, chase them or, worst of all, kind of get in that sort of I call it sometimes spy versus spy or very this mode of like oh, I'm going to catch them either being dishonest or evading what I've asked them to do and not putting in the effort. And it's that transactional, oppositional, adversarial space. And I said you know what, maybe there are some ways where, subtly or not so subtly, I can say I'm going to drop my end of this tug of war rope and walk around to your side. And maybe I should try proceeding from the assumption that students actually do want to learn what I have to offer them and, as I mentioned, sure behaviors in the moment, none of us are perfect in this way.
Speaker 1:However, if students really do have a common set of goals, or at least if there's some overlap, some common ground that we can find, that that is going to be more kind of, invitational to them, more motivational to them and, frankly, makes my life as a professor a lot better. And I was especially thinking about these kind of flashpoint areas of conflict. Not that we want to evade all conflict all the time, but there are these areas around grades, deadlines, policies, where I'd find myself sitting in my office going this is not why I went into this to like dicker over again in this, like gaining ground, losing ground way of the five points that you lost in the exam. Shouldn't we be talking about what you got out of the exam and where you can improve your learning? So, yes, idealistic, but really a mindset around what I'm there to do and what students are there to get and how we can bring those two things together.
Speaker 2:You mentioned, like this sort of the adversarial relationship, this tug of war that often is the dynamic between educators and students. I'm wondering did you ever have a moment when you realized I'm actually playing the role of the bad cop?
Speaker 1:The time when all this came to a head for me was during the pandemic, and I think very few of us came out of that experience, as teachers and as human beings, unaffected. But for me, how it played out was this I wasn't struggling with oh no, what happens in Zoom, but what do I still get to do? What do I have to give up, Because this is a big, overwhelming situation? And what are students here to get? What really brought them to the course? What are students here to get what really brought them to the course? And whatever I do, whatever I policies and things, I want to change things. I want to keep, hold the line, let the line go. It should come back to what they want to get out of the course and by having that as my guiding light, I feel like that carried me through. And so, of course, now I'm still thinking of like well, well, that was, that was a big deal to say what, what did students come there for and how can my actions reflect that?
Speaker 3:Michelle? Can you say a little bit more about that? What kind of behaviors from students have you started to see as you've made the shift toward teaching from the same side, and what and what can others expect if they make this transition?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'll pick maybe one I feel very concrete kind of thing that I've done. And again, this is not for every setting and situation. But a while ago I adapted from the incredible teaching leader and revolutionary, carl Wyman the idea of two stage exams. So I haven't I mean don't, if you're in one of my classes, don't picture like, oh, exams, grades, everything's out the window. We still have them and they're still very important. But I do say, oh well, exams should be a learning opportunity and of themselves. And if I mean that I don't really want students to revisit what they might've gotten wrong, well then let's give some time to that. So, basically, students have an opportunity the class period after they've had the big exam, instead of going over the exam, which I don't think helps anybody learn anything.
Speaker 1:Students have an opportunity in small groups to redo the exams as a group and there's certain kind of little performance incentives for doing well on that. But they can talk to each other and the conversations you hear are just tremendous. It's what you would always want to hear, what we envision a college classroom being like. I mean, it's not the only time but students saying no, no, that's not what negative reinforcement means. Here's a better example and here's how I can back that up. And somebody goes oh my gosh, I finally get it, let's put that down. That's really great, and I will tell you. As far as student behaviors and so far, knock wood, this is still true. I have never had a single student dispute a question on any of my exams. That we've done in that way because there's something about having having that opportunity to again, in a relaxed fashion, to talk with in this case, peers and get a perspective on the material that shifts them out of the well. Surely she's wrong somewhere and I can grab a point back, since that's what this is all about.
Speaker 1:It was very, very clear within a semester or two that that radically changed things and students even say it reduces their test anxiety, which, again, if students are just trying to get the best grade for the least effort, that's the assumption. That doesn't even make any sense and I still don't know that. I understand it, but they'll say there's something about knowing that we can sit down later. And this whole experience and it really got me thinking wow, exams run the traditional way can be this very transactional, oppositional, stressful thing I go in. I'm in some kind of a fugue state, trying to make all my way through it. I walk out and then it's like well, here's a number that I got at the end of the day, what even happened there? So anyway, I'm a big evangelist for those. But that's one granular example.
Speaker 2:This sounds like enlightened backward design to me. You're thinking right. I'm thinking about maybe the traditional way to think about it was like how do I get these students to sort of learn these objectives and ultimately pass the exam, versus thinking about, well, the learning is really the place to start, and then how do the activities, including the exams, actually serve that outcome?
Speaker 3:What I heard you saying there that I thought was also surprising to me was teaching from the same side also has some really significant benefits for the instructor. The most painful kinds of conversations I've had in my own experience is a student disputing the structure of the question that they got wrong. They're arguing with me about the question instead of being focused on the learning. So you're also reducing some administrative burdens that are, frankly, kind of unpleasant antagonistic interactions with students.
Speaker 1:It struck me that when I was in those situations that you're talking about, I mean, not only they're demoralizing, they don't help anybody, but they also proceed from this underlying metaphor of what I've called like a piecework metaphor of, okay, I need you to give me this thing and I'm going to pay you in points.
Speaker 1:And so I've made a practice to look back and say, well, where am I maybe communicating that to students? And how does that connect to things like deadlines, like, well, I'm going to pay you less because you were late with this object, this piecework that I needed to have. It's like, wait a minute, you know, record, record, scratch. That's not what's going on here at all. I need to know that you're engaging with this, putting in the effort you need to succeed and you've gotten this so that you can go on to the next thing or accomplish those other goals. So I try to position both of us against the challenge of the material and everything I say and do, and get away from the like well, if you get it by here, here's where you know, by this date, this is what I'll give you.
Speaker 3:You've mentioned a couple of times in the, even in the brief conversation we've had so far, that this is compatible with maintaining high standards and holding students accountable for ultimately learning at a high level. Can you say a little bit more about how that unfolds?
Speaker 1:What gets it across more than anything is a phrase that I have found myself using a lot. I say I want to see your best work, and I put it kind of back on them Like what do you need, whether it's time, answers, help, what do you need to show me your very best work? And that's where I think this is, if anything, more in line with student accountability and less in line, if you think about it again, kind of that old school mentality that I absorbed early on. It was get them to give you kind of something and again you pay them accordingly.
Speaker 1:In the points and here too I realized what good does it do me to have a bunch of papers that came in at 30 seconds to midnight if they're really less good to read? And so that really puts it back on Susan. They find it surprising, but it's also pretty effective and it gets that across in the proverbial nutshell of like this is not about ticking a box or having that negotiation. I want to see the best writing you can give me. I want to see the best performance that you can on this factual quiz that you're putting together, and so on.
Speaker 2:There's something interesting that's happening there too. When I'm telling you what it takes, the time I need, and committing to a deadline myself, it's not something that's being imposed on me. So I mean, I have to believe that if I make a commitment that works for me, I kind of got to live up to that.
Speaker 3:Talk about the motivational fuel of that kind of interaction. I mean, it might be a bit terrifying as a student, especially as an 18 or 19 year old, to have a professor ask me you know like I want to see your best work, what do you need? And it also immediately puts me in the position of evaluating my work according to my own standards, like is this really the best I can do, right? I think that that calls forth a kind of energy that I think most faculty would love to have their students embrace.
Speaker 1:Wow, I hadn't thought about that, but I think you're so right there too. If I can just get one student who's formally maybe thought of this as like well, I'm just trying to kind of get by here, I can get one student to say, well, what could I accomplish if I took an extra day? What would that look like? And again, for students who do have those demands on them their kid was in the ER all night long. They work at the local hospital. Now we're having a health crisis and everybody's called in for extra shifts. There was a roommate problem For those students to be able to say, yeah, I know I can do better. I don't have to turn in something that I can't be proud of, then that is, that's a really great opportunity. So I think there's lots of fronts where this can be a positive, and definitely that metacognition and kind of taking more self-ownership is is so important.
Speaker 2:I want to shift gears a bit. I want to talk about something that might seem a little maybe out from left field, but it's student names. Yeah, I think this might be a favorite topic of yours, at least lately, anyway, because you literally wrote a book on it, a teacher's, a teacher's guide to learning student names. Why you should, why it's hard, how you can. So how does learning student names which seems like a pretty daunting thing, I think, if you got a lot of class, how does that sort of factor into teaching from the same side?
Speaker 1:Especially since the pandemic. How many of us have been talking about like, oh, we aspire towards this classroom. That's positive, where we're individuals, and what better way to do that than to actually use names in the book? I have a link towards the end of the book of a set of lectures that are online, where it's a big, seemingly anonymous course. I mean, think about the classic like lecture room and the lights are dark. But this lecture has a way of interacting with an audience really of students where he's able to pick up their names on the fly and that just changes everything.
Speaker 1:But getting back to that, that I deal more generally. So it's important for individuating that. It's also cognitively. It's anything but low-hanging fruit, as you know in the very subtitle of the book why it's hard, where do we get into? But it's an area where a bit of concerted effort pays off in outsized ways in student perceptions.
Speaker 1:Now, I was surprised when I went to write this short book that there wasn't more systematic research on this. However, what research is out? There just stopped me in my tracks because it had students kind of estimate how many names the professor knew and how hard they'd worked on this and they really overestimated. So even if you don't get everybody. Having some strategic names really gets students' attention and, as I also, the beginning of the book starts with the flip side, which is what happens if you don't try at all, which was me in my first foray into instruction as a graduate student.
Speaker 1:I mean, I thought I was just nailing everything as I was presenting and you know work so hard on my materials and I get these evaluations back, and I got roasted for a lot of things. But she said she didn't even try to learn our names and I'm just going oh, oh, that's right, I didn't even try. I don't want to assume that if you don't know your students' names, there's a lot of reasons for that, but it certainly can create the impression that, hey, I'm just here giving material and enforcing policies instead of wanting to know what you think about this Sarah and what you think about that Asa, and so on.
Speaker 2:It takes a lot of courage to do that right, because then the risk is I mispronounce someone's name, I misremember their name, or maybe I've been saying the student's name, and then after several weeks they work up the courage to say actually it's Eric, not Eric.
Speaker 1:Or my name is Sam. Yeah, oh gosh.
Speaker 2:Yeah, how do you recover in this situation? Do you offer any guidance around navigating those scenarios?
Speaker 1:You got to get out in front of it. You really really do. It's all on the front end. So it's getting in the habit, as I say in the book, of first of all attending. Another one of my things I love to write about is attention. And yeah, you don't have attention, focused attention. Nothing is really going to happen in memory or otherwise.
Speaker 1:Attend and then trying to say it back, which serves a couple of purposes. But also that's the time to where it's like oh, your name's not Eric or Sam or what have you, to get the pronunciation down. So, exploiting the heck out of that initial first few minutes of an interaction, that's where you also have the social goodwill I get my, I check my ego at the door for a lot of reasons when I teach, and this is one just to say again initially oh, am I saying this, help me, help me say that, right? And oh, and we're talking for a few more minutes and before they walk out the door say wait a minute, can I? Your name was Eric, right? So exploit the initial interactions, that early kind of goodwill and acceptability, getting that habit of attention and repetition early on, and that's that'll set you up about as well as you can be.
Speaker 3:I will never forget the first time a professor called me by name in my first year as an undergraduate in a large physics course. I had no idea that he knew who I was and that just transformed the amount of energy and attention I brought to that, to that course, every time I was there. So clearly there's a motivational component to to this. For students like if you know my name, that matters a great deal, right? At least it certainly did in my case.
Speaker 2:It's also like belonging and community within that too, right yeah, it's a pretty powerful way to feel like, okay, you should be here because I know you. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So things like that Easier to be on the same side, right when we all know? Have that sense that we're known and that we do belong.
Speaker 3:So if we want to start teaching from the same side you know right away somebody's listening to this podcast what are three small things that they might do to move in this direction.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, I do think that that availability piece although it might seem tangential I mean I know from my own practice this was a big deal to again say I do want to see your best work and therefore if you have one question and you're working on your work on Friday night, hey, I'm all for that. I did say I wanted you to be working hard on this, so of course you're out there, but you hit one question and you can't proceed or do your best work without that question. I would rather address that now than we wait five days and you try to fit it into the class so saying, hey, you can send me something to to the cell phone here, a calendaring program. I actually also see that as as of a piece with this as well. So I've got a link that I relentlessly push on students and say you can press this button and pick a time, because maybe again it's a 15 minute thing. Or I sometimes will have a little couple points of extra credit early on to say just set a time to talk to me for 15 minutes using my calendaring program. And I always tell them too it's like all right later when things are stressful and falling apart at the end of the semester. You don't want to be figuring out how to get in touch with me then. So availability is one, I think reviewing syllabus language there's been a lot of great work in the last few years on syllabus warmth.
Speaker 1:Kevin Gannon has a great advice guide on your syllabus to kind of get out of that you know, I demand and you must which is how a syllabi can be written If we are going to hope the students do read our syllabi, to say we will and I suggest and here's how. So really kind of going through and reviewing and that could even be a nice, nice little roll of AI for those who are comfortable and conversant. Be a nice little roll of AI for those who are comfortable and conversant. Tell it to go through and make the syllabus seem more same side language, adding why, where we can you know, why don't I accept work after the last day of the semester and so on.
Speaker 1:And I think, lastly, kind of adding one new area of kind of flexibility and autonomy for students If a hey, a late work, oh, kind of open late work policy isn't for you.
Speaker 1:There's actually lots of scholarship, of teaching and learning that's come out recently on things like what happens when you give a you know one or two sort of freebies the get out of jail card or whatever and incorporate that, no excuse needed, here's something that can give you an extension or make up for an absence and and so on. And yeah, delving into other other areas of of choice, I'll put in a plug for an article that I reviewed in my Substack newsletter a while back by Simon Cullen and Daniel Oppenheimer. I always love his work and, without kind of getting again too much into the technicalities, they did systematic testing on what happens when you give students options for the types of assignments they want to do or let them opt into different kinds of attendance policies, and they actually found that some of those elicit more work from students and better work from students. So, availability, language especially in that syllabus and flexibility, autonomy those are the three big areas I'd push people towards.
Speaker 2:You're apparently a crafter and we know you're a prolific writer, so I'm curious about how these creative pursuits like knitting, journaling, writing books sub stack. How does that shape the way that you show up for your students?
Speaker 1:of folks lately have been talking about what. What are some areas of sharing with students, and commonalities and showing yourself as a human being in ways that are appropriate for the context can be so helpful. I guess, with the writing I'll just say that that just gives me a lot of empathy, a lot of empathy for students. I mean, if I sit down like, oh my gosh, I gotta get a newsletter issue out, I got a blank page and I know it reminds me on a weekly and daily basis how hard it is to put something like that together and to do my best work and also do it in a timely way. And then you think about our students who some of them the last week or two of the semester, I mean, they're putting out these amazing papers and it helps me not take it personally if the work is sometimes not all it could or should be, or if it does come in a little bit late. It lets me kind of talk to them. You know, one writer to another.
Speaker 1:We can really exchange a lot of ideas and empathy there and I guess, with the crafting, here too, I love to bust myths and one of them that I love to address is like, oh, these generational vides and who does what in our society.
Speaker 1:A lot of your students are probably crafters, and not all of the middle-aged demographic and not all female either, and so it's something we can talk about. So if I drop it into conversation or I wear my handmade scarf or sweater or something to class, you'd be amazed and you'd say, oh, I like to crochet. I do it a lot during the stressful parts of the semester, and then maybe they show up with their yarn the next time and yeah, I've got the receipts, I've got handmade gifts in my office that will prove it. So there, too, it's another thing where we can talk about and find some perhaps surprising for some areas of commonality common struggle, common triumph, and be again on the same side talking about how we make it through this challenging life of ours well, I think the next time I see you I'm going to ask you if you busted a mitt lately.
Speaker 3:Um, phrase, michelle miller, myth buster. So are there myths that you see on the horizon for teaching from the same side that you want to proactively bust?
Speaker 1:Oh my yeah, Just to come back to that idea that students just want the best grade for the least effort is one, and I would also like to bust a myth that a lot of motivation, scientists, and really psychological science in general, is one of our biggest contributions. It seems simple, but just the idea that these are not fixed traits. I mean there are fixed traits that people have, but those are actually pretty few and far between. A lot of what we do is pretty situational, and so what are the environments and the conditions under which we will put forth more effort than maybe we have to? What are the conditions under which we will put forth more effort than maybe we have to? What are the conditions under which we authentically engage? So remember, motivated students are made, not born, and sometimes even small shifts in our language, our messaging, our policies and how we set this learning journey up can make the difference and whether we see that motivated student come out or whether we don't.
Speaker 3:I just think that's the perfect note to end on. It's so empowering. Really appreciate that perspective, Michelle, and for your sharing this idea of teaching from the same side.
Speaker 1:Likewise, I love the feedback that you all have given and the examples that you've offered, and I have a lot to think about as well.
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