Designed for Learning

Writing Like You Teach

• Notre Dame Learning • Season 1 • Episode 6

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Can you draw lessons from the way you teach and apply them in your writing? Designed for Learning host Jim Lang thinks so—so much so that he’s written a new book about it called Write Like You Teach: Taking Your Classroom Skills to a Bigger Audience.

To learn more, we flipped the script and asked Kristi Rudenga, director of Notre Dame Learning’s Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence, to interview Jim, a professor of the practice at the Kaneb Center, about his latest project.

He shares his insights on the intersection of teaching and writing, offering strategies for educators looking to expand their reach through engaging, accessible prose intended for broader audiences. He also talks about how a life-threatening health situation shaped the creation of Write Like You Teach.

Key Topics Discussed:

  • Jim’s career trajectory as an academic, speaker, and writer of popular books and columns on teaching
  • The inspiration behind Write Like You Teach and how it bridges his passions for teaching and writing
  • Translating classroom teaching practices into impactful writing techniques
  • Three core areas to consider to write like you teach: questions, attention, and evidence
  • Overcoming impostor syndrome when writing for non-academic audiences by recognizing your role as an educator in both classroom and writing contexts
  • Jim’s personal journey of recovery from a heart transplant and stroke, and how it affected his writing process

Guest Bios: Jim Lang is a professor of the practice in Notre Dame Learning’s Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence. The author of several popular books on teaching, including Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It and Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning, Jim writes regularly on teaching and learning for The Chronicle of Higher Education and co-edits a book series on higher education for the University of Oklahoma Press. His latest book is Write Like You Teach: Taking Your Classroom Skills to a Bigger Audience.

Kristi Rudenga is the director of Notre Dame Learning’s Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence, where she is appointed as a teaching professor. In addition to overseeing the Kaneb Center’s team, strategy, partnerships, and initiatives, Kristi consults with instructors on pedagogical approaches and facilitates seminar series and workshops on teaching and mentoring. She writes about pedagogy for The Chronicle of Higher Education, and she has served on the Core Committee of the POD Network, the national organization supporting educational development.

Resources Mentioned:

Designed for Learning is hosted by Jim Lang, a professor of the practice in Notre Dame Learning’s Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence and the author of several influential books on teaching. The podcast is produced by Notre Dame Learning’s Office of Digital Learning. For more, visit learning.nd.edu. You can also follow Notre Dame Learning on LinkedIn.

[JIM LANG] Welcome to'Designed for Learning,' a podcast from Notre Dame Learning. I'm your host, Jim Lang.(cheerful upbeat music) Normally on this podcast, I'm the one doing the interviewing. But today, we're going to turn the tables because I have a new book out this month. And my colleague, Kristi Rudenga, will be taking over the hosting duties and asking me a few questions about the book. Kristi is the director of Notre Dame's Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence, where she's appointed as a teaching professor. She oversees the Kaneb Center team and is responsible for the center's strategy, partnerships, and initiatives. She also consults with instructors on pedagogical approaches and facilitates seminar series and workshops on teaching and mentoring. She writes about pedagogy for 'The Chronicle of Higher Education.' She has served on the core committee of the POD Network, the national organization supporting educational development. So, Kristi, take it away, you're the host now.[KRISTI RUDENGA] Thanks, Jim. Happy to be here. Although I would have enjoyed listening to you do both the interviewer and interviewee parts.[JIM LANG] That would be fun.[KRISTI RUDENGA] Ideally running back and forth between microphones and ideally different voices.(Jim laughing) So next book, we'll do that. But I am very excited to be here to talk about your new book. But before we dig into that, can you give us a quick sketch of your career and your prior publications?[JIM LANG] Yep, so my career actually started, I got my PhD at Northwestern in British literature, but my professional career started actually at the Searle Center for Teaching Excellence at Northwestern. And so that was my first job. I was an assistant director there for three years, and I worked with graduate students or new faculty on their teaching. And I really enjoyed that work, it got me interested in teaching and learning in higher education, even though that wasn't my field for my dissertation area. But the problem was I enjoyed talking to people about teaching, but I wanted to teach myself more, do some of that work in the classroom in my discipline. So I went on the job market and got a job as an English professor at a small college in Massachusetts, Assumption University. And I did it for two decades actually. But during that time, I taught regular classes in literature and writing and stuff that any English professor would do. But I had taken an interest that carried over from the Searle Center about teaching and learning. And so I was writing things for The Chronicle of Higher Education. I wrote a few books on teaching and learning during that time period as well. And then I founded our Teaching Center at Assumption in 2013. And eventually, as a couple of those books were successful, I started to get a lot of invitations to speak, and give workshops in other campuses. And as a result of that, I decided to step away from my full-time teaching and have a part-time career as a writer and speaker as well as continue to teach as an adjunct at Assumption. And I did that, I tried to do that. So essentially I was away from an institution for two years. I definitely missed being on a campus, an institution and being able to just gather with colleagues and talk on an everyday basis about teaching and learning. And so I was real grateful when I came here and spoke at Notre Dame and you asked me if I might be interested in coming back to a campus. And I said yes, and I'm here now, which has been great. This is my second year at the Kaneb Center. And I'm really enjoying the balance between, again, having some time to do some writing and speaking, but also then being affiliated with the center and meeting a lot of new great colleagues. A college campus, as far as I'm concerned, is the best place to work in the world. It's just filled with hope and energy and young people and ideas, and I just love this atmosphere. So I'm really glad to be in that atmosphere again. And so, yeah, that's my professional career. My writing, I essentially started writing for 'The Chronicle' in 1999. And I've probably written close to 200 columns for 'The Chronicle' at this point. But in the meantime, I've also been doing some writing of books. And probably the best known of those is 'Small Teaching,' which came out in 2016. And that is the book that helped me make a little bit of a name for myself in this area. And then the one that followed after that was about distraction and attention learning. And then we have this new one, which is called'Write Like You Teach.'[KRISTI RUDENGA] Great. So how did you go from all these other books that were pretty directly about teaching to a book about writing?[JIM LANG] So, of course, I came from a background where I loved writing always. I was an English professor here, English student, I'm sorry, major here at Notre Dame. And my master's, my PhD were all in literature. And I taught creative non-fiction writing at my career at Assumption for many years. So I love the process of writing, but also thinking about writing, how writing works. So that was always an interest for me. And so as I writing about teaching, I was trying to put those things together, like thinking about how the things I've learned about writing and and the things I've learned about teaching, how might those come together? Essentially I was trying to find a way to put my two major interests together, teaching and learning and writing. And I also noticed that people were asking me questions about writing, for example. People would ask me like, you've written for these more public publications, so like, I would like to do that, how do I do that? So most people get trained in very academic writing. And over time, I started to think about this. Well, how do you do that, actually? How do I do it? How do I learn to do that? And what strategies seem to be successful? In the meantime also, I started editing and then co-editing a book series, which was designed to help people write about teaching and learning for a broader audience, not just only their own disciplines, but also higher education more generally. And I started to work with them to say, okay, here's some things you need to think about as you're expanding beyond your discipline into more writing for people who are not in your discipline. And so I tried to put those ideas together, and eventually came up with this idea that if we want to think about how to-- If you think about non-fiction writing, most people read non-fiction because they want to learn something, right? So like I'm coming because I want to learn how to do something, or I have a new idea about something or some guidance for something. And so people coming from that, they want to learn something. So we can then think about that as a writer, I'm the teacher in that situation, right? I'm educating a reader about something that I know about. Especially an academic writer, I'm an expert in this area, I have something that I can teach people. And so that got me thinking about the fact that, you know what, there's things that we can do in the classroom that do translate actually into our writing practices. And so once I had that idea in mind, it was easy for me to then go back to the teaching process and say, okay, where are the connections here? Where are the moments in the classroom designing a class, teaching a class, working with students individually? All these moments in the teaching process, how do those have alignment to something in the writing process? And so once I had that thought in mind, the book flowed pretty naturally, from that initial conception. I'll say to people now, write like you teach, that's the thesis, that's the main thing you need to know. Is the thesis essentially contains the big idea. And once people have that idea in mind, I think people will be able to reflect on their own experiences. Oh, yeah, right. I teach like this, I could see that in my writing, right? I'm doing this or I'm not doing this in my writing, how could I make that happen? So essentially, though, the book then gives models and examples of how to do that. And so the goal is not only to give some ideas but also spur people's own thought processes about their own teaching. Like they taught one great class, and they want to say, wait a minute, what made that class work? Will that also work in my writing? So that's the goal, of not only providing guidance but also inspiration for people to think on their own about how this conception could help them.[KRISTI RUDENGA] Great. I love the idea of that and that you're giving away the thesis for free.[JIM LANG] That's true.[KRISTI RUDENGA] Could you share maybe some concrete examples of what that means, to write like you teach?[JIM LANG] So I have three areas I think are easy areas to understand the thesis basically. The first one I would say is about questions. And I think traditionally, college courses have a course description at the start. Where it's like, this course will cover this in this semester. It's one paragraph of what this course is all about. And I think, I've been making this argument for teachers at the same time, which is that, that way of introducing a course is not really designed to motivate a learner, not to spark curiosity, intrigue someone and invite them into a learning journey. What people are interested in is not so much about answers, it's about questions, right? So if they have an interesting question, or you show them an interesting question and they think, huh, yeah, I'd like to know the answer to that question.' So we can actually frame college courses as responses to questions, right? But then we can also then think about our writing projects in the same way. And so in the book, I look at some different ways to, some very successful non-fiction books which have been based on questions and work backwards from them and then see, okay, how would this inspire you to find the deep questions in your discipline and then use that as the basis of a book or even a short essay. And the goal is to really think about the fact that my goal is to intrigue a learner, spark their curiosity. And what's the question that would really help make that happen, either in the classroom or in a piece of writing? So the first thing I would say is design with questions in mind, which works in both contexts. Another one is attention. So this has been a long standing interest for me, is attention. And so in the book I wrote about attention, I make the case that attention is a challenging thing for all humans. It's always been challenging for humans. We think about it as a modern problem, but that's not really the case. We've always been challenged by our attention. So we can think about, as a teacher, you can say, well, I wish my students would pay better attention. The kids these days, they can't pay attention anymore, right? But the argument I make in the book, and I'm replicating in this book as well, is that actually we have a role to play in supporting student attention, right? So I can just walk up there and lecture for the entire time and just straight exposition of a subject matter. Or I can think about the fact that this is a body in a seat for 75 minutes trying to do hard cognitive work, right? So as I recognize that, I might say, you know what, actually that learner needs some breaks. They need some things to keep them going over this long period of time, trapped into a chair in a little room with a bunch of other people, right? So I can cultivate and support student attention with my teaching practices. And the same thing is true for a writer. Again, we can think about the fact that we're experts, we know a lot of good stuff, and we're helping people understand complex things. So a reader is going to come to my work and might be challenged by it. But that means that I can then think about, that's a learner who needs support for their attention. So a couple of easy examples are, you can write an article in which you run on for pages and pages with content and ideas, or you can think about a very simple practice of breaking up the text with section breaks, subtitles that will guide a reader through the process of understanding and keeping the big picture in mind, and then also just giving them a little break, right? So I can get to the end of a section, take a little bit of a cognitive breath, and then go to the next section, right? Those are easy things to think about how do you break up a piece of writing in the same way we break up a class period? I don't want to talk for 75 minutes, let me talk for 15, 20 minutes, we stop, we do something, then we move on, maybe I lecture a little bit more. So the same structure that we put into a lecture or any other class period, we can put that into a piece of writing as well. So that's one thing you can think about. Now, also little small things we can do for attention. For example, key terms or ideas from a piece of writing, put them in bold or italics or something like that. Bold words, italicized words, will sometimes, like if you open a page of a book, for example, your eye immediately goes to any bold words, right? So again, it helps me understand, okay, there's a lot of stuff on this page, but eventually I'm going to get to this point where this thing is going to be a core thing for me to remember. So it's helping, those small font choices actually can help me understand the key ideas and point my attention to the things that matter in the work. Again, you can't overuse that technique, right? So if everything is bolded, then it doesn't draw attention anymore. But if you have a page where one thing is like that, it really helps. So thinking about those small things that you can do in a text that will draw my attention and show me where it'll most be repaid with my attention. The final thing I would say maybe is about evidence. We all come from evidentiary traditions, right? So like as an English professor, my tradition is we quote from the text and we look at literary scholarship. Those are my evidences for making an argument about a piece of writing those are my source of evidence. You're a neuroscientist, so your evidence is going to be things like experiments, or FMRIs from the brain. All those are different kinds of forms of evidence, right? So each discipline has its own forms of evidence. The problem is we're trying to write for a broader audience, and that's the subtitle of the book, is taking your teaching skills to a bigger audience. So if I'm going to work beyond my own discipline, you have think about this for a second, right? I can't just follow my own evidence traditions because my reader might be in a completely different tradition. And as a result, I want to think about how to expand the kinds of evidence that I use. So instead of just doing like making an argument about the power of literature, for example, I'm not going to just show a bunch of quotes from texts, but I also maybe want to show some interviews with people, I want to maybe show some images that illustrate the ideas I'm showing or maybe even point to a study in cognitive psychology about how we know this has an impact on the brain. So I'm trying to broaden my evidence scope so that people have more entry points to the argument that I'm making. Having said that though, the other problem with academic writers with evidence is overloading it. We're used to people challenging us. So I give a talk at an academic institution, People are going to say to me, okay, wait a minute, that's wrong, clarify that for me.' So I need to have a bunch of stuff ready to support my claims. A non-expert reader doesn't need all that stuff. Now, you should have the expertise, you should have the evidence available to you. But the text itself doesn't need to contain everything you know, everything that supports your ideas. So we want to think about a little bit less evidence and more context for each piece of evidence and varying the evidence a little bit. So that's the core idea there is. Vary it, streamline it, and maybe give a little bit more context for each piece of evidence. So those are the big three areas, there's other ones in the book. But questions, evidence, and attention are good ways to think about opportunities to translate from-- And by the way, the evidence piece also makes sense in the classroom too. And most people do it in the classroom almost by instinct, right? So I don't just show text slides for 75 minutes, I might put an image in there, I might play an audio clip, or I might give an example from my personal life to illustrate the issues, right? So all these things we're bringing in in the classroom, same thing in a piece of writing as well.[KRISTI RUDENGA] This is great. And I think all of the awareness of audience and their attention is really the culmination of a career as an English professor and teaching person, really in the Venn diagram of those things.[JIM LANG] That's right. And yeah, attention is just such a fundamental thing. And it's part of what we do is, every discipline does, you have to pay attention closely to things. But, I've learned over time that one of the things that we can do with students in a literature class is help them pay more attention to each word, each phrase. We can find meaning in multiple areas of a text, so same thing in a piece of writing as well.[KRISTI RUDENGA] Yeah. So I got to participate in this seminar last year that you led for faculty that roughly followed the contours of this book, which was a very cool experience. And one thing that really struck me there was that early on in the semester, so many of these scholars and faculty members who were in this, including myself, and some of these folks just very, very highly accomplished in their field, were just blindsided by what I would describe as feelings of imposter syndrome as they set out to write for these broader audiences. And suddenly hitting these psychological blocks that they maybe hadn't seen for a few decades. And this makes sense in the imposter syndrome literature as you're doing this new thing for a big audience and a new audience. But what would you say to people who are experiencing that when they think about writing for a broader audience?[JIM LANG] Yeah, this is the goal, this is the main, maybe the best thing I could offer in the book is this conception, this framing of it, "write like you teach," is empowering, it's enabling. To say, okay, this seems like a mysterious thing, how do people write for the public? How do I write differently from the way I write now? But actually, the goal of this is to say, listen, you know how to educate people, this is already in your wheelhouse. Either you study teaching and learning, or you have experiences there, you have instincts. All those things can come into play and guide you through this very challenging thing you're trying to do. It is challenging, I'm not saying the process is easy, but at the same time, it's not something you're necessarily born to do, you can learn to do this. And the way to learn it is to recognize this body of knowledge I already have, could be synthesized and translated into this other context. And so the words I keep saying to people, enabling and empowering, that's what the goal of the book is, to help people see, I can do this actually, because I'm an educator, I'm just educating in a different context here. So I definitely recognize that issue that many people have. And I sometimes hear it in the background, people say, I don't want to do that kind of writing, I just like writing my own discipline. And sometimes when I push them a little bit they say, well, yeah, I wouldn't mind doing it, but I'm not sure how to do it, I can't do that kind of writing. So that's my point, is to say, okay, you can, but let's think a little bit of how you could get from where you are now to this place you want to be. And to do that, we're going to go through the classroom and to draw on things you're already an expert at.[KRISTI RUDENGA] Great. So since I know that there is nothing you love more than talking about your feelings,(Jim laughing) this was your first book back after some, medical turmoil, shall we say?[JIM LANG] Yes, to put it lightly.[KRISTI RUDENGA] Yes.[JIM LANG] For sure, yeah.[KRISTI RUDENGA] So can you tell us about that and about what that means to you to have a book out after all of that?[JIM LANG] Absolutely. Because in some ways, the book is connected to it in terms of I had to write this book as I was learning to speak again. So the short version is, a virus attacked my heart. I mentioned that I was away from academic life for two years. And part of it was, I took away, I did that deliberately to step away, and had this plan for what I was going to do. But this other thing intervened and made it a little bit longer than it should have been. So a virus attacked my heart. It was a very rare thing to happen out of the blue. It was very sudden, it was very intense. Sort of destroyed my heart in the space of a couple weeks. I was on life support for a couple months. And as a result, I got a heart transplant. And that was great, I'm fine now. Tufts Medical Center was a miracle worker. But I had a stroke during the surgery. It turns out I actually had several strokes. And it's not uncommon for people on life support, especially if you have a lot of tubes going in and out, there's blood circulating everywhere, so it's not uncommon. So I had two smaller ones and one large one. The large one was in the area that controls language expression, it's called Broca's area. As a result, when I first woke up from the surgery, I couldn't speak at all. So it took me-- It's interesting to see. Initially I thought, well, my life is over basically, right? If can't speak and write, I can't be a teacher, I can't be a writer, all these things I was committed to. But I remember a neurologist came to see me a few days afterwards. And he said,'Okay, tell me about what you can say.' At that point I was getting some words back. And I started to say something and then I let out a swear word. There was no gap in that. He was like, "Okay, you know what, that's actually a really good sign. One of the first things you get back is essentially your ability to swear." So I was like, that's great because that's in my wheelhouse, I already do that enough already.[KRISTI RUDENGA] Central to our human needs.[JIM LANG] Yeah, yeah, exactly. So he said based on that, and based on other things he's hearing from me, he said,"You're going to get it back, you're going to largely get your speech back." Which is largely true. There's still little things I struggle with here and there, but it's largely true. And so that's been a real miracle for me, to be able to come back. And the thing about this book was I actually signed the book contract while I was on life support in the hospital. So I'd been leading up to signing the book contract before that. But when the contract actually came in, I was on life support. I think my brother actually signed the contract for me. Don't tell my publisher that. But I think that's actually what happened. I actually don't remember doing it. So when I got out, I was like, 'Okay.' First I let the publisher know, listen, it's going to be a little longer than I thought it was going to be. And it took me about six months to get to the point where I felt like I was comfortable being able to write. And one of the interesting things about the stroke was that the challenge of learning to speak again is you have to learn to say again every word that you already know essentially for the first time. Usually as soon as I would say a word, it would come back to me. By the way, there was no issue with me understanding things. I could say the words in my brain, I just couldn't get them to in my mouth. So the first time I would say it in my mouth, then I got it back basically. But we all know a lot of words. So that process took a very long time for me to just say lots of things over and over again. That was true when I was writing too. So as I was writing, I noticed that I was using the same words over and over again. And this is one of the things I actually argued in the book, and I argue all the time to people. Vary your word choices, right? After the first draft, I was like,'Boy, this writing is not great because you did not do that.' I really couldn't. So over time, I had to go back and rewrite things multiple times. And I think as a result, this is probably my best written book. I spent a lot of time with the prose itself. And so that to me, this book is, on the one hand is associated with some trauma with me, on the other hand, though, it's a real accomplishment for me to see how I was able to work my way through this process multiple times, writing, rewriting, and finally getting to the final part, that I'm very happy with. So yes, I hope people enjoy the book. A lot of stuff went into it.(Jim laughing)[KRISTI RUDENGA] Well, we are definitely grateful that you made it through and are doing well. And also grateful to have you with us at the Kaneb Center and at Notre Dame. Is there anything you can tell us about where listeners can get the book or where they could learn more about it?[JIM LANG] Yes, the book is from the University of Chicago Press. It's available online everywhere like all books these days. And people can reach out to me through my website as well. The only social media I'm really on is LinkedIn. And I'm happy to chat with people on LinkedIn and connect on email, or however they want to get in touch with me. And I'm looking forward to having conversations with writers. Actually every time I do a workshop on this material, I get new ideas for myself as a writer. And so I love to connect with people and work with them on these ideas as well.[KRISTI RUDENGA] Well, thank you so much for speaking with us today. And we are happy to have you.[JIM LANG] All right, thank you. Yes, thank you. You did a great job as host by the way.[KRISTI RUDENGA] I was debating the appropriateness of saying something like, hope you learned some excellent podcast hosting tips and tricks here.[JIM LANG] Let's not get carried away.[KRISTI RUDENGA] Okay, fair enough[JIM LANG] All right, thank you.[KRISTI RUDENGA] Thanks, Jim.[JIM LANG]'Designed for Learning' is a production of Notre Dame Learning, at the University of Notre Dame. For more, visit our website at learning.nd.edu.