Plug and Play Miniseries Lesson Spotting with AI: Designing Prompts (but not like that)

Photo by Işıl via Pexels.

In my last feature in this series, I talked about using GPTs to help in the process and clarification of your writing. This entry is a bit of a cheat in this series, since it doesn't actually involve prompting a GPT at all. 

Good UX always inspires me to think about how to use some of these strategies more broadly. I remember being mildly affronted during the CITL reading group I attended when I first became interested in better teaching-- did I spend that whole several weeks affronted? Apparently! Clearly it was challenging me in some useful ways-- because one of the resources we read discussed using advertising principles to make learning "stick."  Advertising? That soulless capitalist enterprise? Could help me teach the intellectually rigorous discipline of history? Pish-posh! 

Of course, the only thing we do if we eschew these strategies is ensure that what they're learning in our class presently doesn't seem quite as memorable as literally any reasonably well-crafted local commercial they saw roughly a decade ago, which is what I eventually realized as I considered the concepts that were "sticky" in my brain and why.

With that in mind, you might reflect on ways that new tools introduce themselves to you, and see if that sparks an idea about how you might in turn introduce a concept that is very familiar to you in a way that seems approachable to a new learner. I'll use the original starting page for ChatGPT as an inspiration to explain something, such as instructions or expectations for an assignment. One thing that is inherently challenging is to explain something you know very well to someone else. It can be more challenging than explaining something you only know kind of well., as you have to identify the most significant information out of all the information you know and explain it clearly.

Let's take a look at how ChatGPT introduced itself when I encountered it (this has since changed as public familiarity with the tool has increased):

Original ChatGPT intro screen. Image via Datamation.

This screen introduces the tool by offering a breakdown of examples of things you could ask it ("Explain quantum computing in simple terms"), capabilities the tool has ("Remembers what user said earlier in the conversation"), and limitations the tool has ("May occasionally generate incorrect information.")

What if you tried a Examples, Capabilities, Limitations breakdown for assignment instructions?  I've seen many, many pagelong or multipage prompts for a paper that's only 3-5 pages long. Rather than paragraphs of context and/or admonitions based on past experiences ("12 point font and 1.5 inch margins this time-- I'm talking to you, Bradley"), what might it look like to organize a prompt arount the following structure: 

1. Examples (of excellent work or strong approaches to the work),
2. Needed Capabilities (of the deliverable students will produce), 
3. Limitations (or parameters they need to work within to produce this work)

Obviously a prompt doesn't have to stay in this format-- I'm not suggesting that the original ChatGPT welcome page cracked some kind of fundamental educational code. But instructions that you find clear or helpful in introducing you to a new topic may be useful in turn to incorporate into your own teaching strategies. 

Plug and Play Miniseries Lesson Spotting with AI: Talking to Write

Photo by Işıl via Pexels.

Despite widespread enthusiasm about having AI help generate content, that's not in my experience the best way to use it. One, it's doubtful it knows as much about what you want to convey on your topic as you do. Two, conversely, you're probably better at the content than you are at communicating it clearly. In this post, I'll offer a few suggestions for how to use AI to help with writing and clarity, which could be useful for both instructors trying to create educational/assignment content and students attempting to frame their ideas for coursework.

I tend to think as I talk-- the talking is the thinking, and talking through a topic helps me write it down. When I'm preparing to lead a workshop or give a presentation, I often begin by recording myself trying to give it off the cuff based on the ideas I have right now before I start outlining or writing things down. Then, I use the talk-through as the basis for the outline or script or notes. Sometimes I do this in the opposite direction; a brief and sketchy outline that I talk through and then edit based on what I said. In the past, I've always done this using Zoom and then watching back the recording.

More recently, I've started using a combination of two technologies to begin creating written work. First, I speak the ideas into text-to-speech, like dictation.io. Then, I take that text and ask ChatGPT to make it grammatically correct and separate it into sensible paragraphs. This is so much easier for me than fully typing out all the same ideas-- I can talk just about as fast as I think, while I am a decidedly slower typer despite years of practice at Typing Tutor. This strategy works best if you speak in small chunks and confirm that dictation.io is absorbing it all; I've noticed dictation.io does not capture everything I say if I speak for a long time. It's also important to communicate clearly with ChatGPT or your AI chatbot of choice-- it will attempt to smooth the language and potentially add (too many) adjectives by default, so if you want language adjustments, give clear parameters; if you just want the text to be given appropriate puncutation and capitalization, say so.

Most recently, I'm intrigued by some of the AI offerings within Zoom to transcript and summarize meetings; in theory, this could mean that a recorded first draft could have a relatively coherent text component to work from. If you have a paid Zoom account, it's worth playing with these features and seeing if they do anything for your process.

Flashback Post: Embracing Options

Hello gentle readers! At present, I’m not doing much blogging– I’ve been spending more time on other projects in my off time (my 80-day Duolingo streak suggests a greater degree of achievement in Korean language study than my confinement to the words “hello,” “friend,” and “ice cream” reveals) as the amount of writing and research I do in my day-to-day work has increased. So, as I continue to generate “future blog post ideas” that are really opaque sentence fragments, I wanted to revisit an old blog post on the writing and prewriting processes– for my own benefit, if no one else’s! And as always, if I can support any of your processes, feel free to schedule time on my Calendly (link in sidebar).

A row of white doors. They'll all get you where you're going!

Whenever I am struggling to gather my thoughts about a project, I like to attend a workshop or a lecture. Though one often goes to a talk to hear about the presenter's thoughts on the subject presented and learn something new (a good reason to go, as a rule), I find that they are also useful for reminding me of things I've forgotten or have neglected, and for giving me the space to think over a problem. By taking in new arguments and information, I have the chance to look at new things in a new way, and am often inspired to look at an old thing I've been turning over in my mind in this new way as well. 

Sometimes I gain a new understanding of what I want to say; sometimes I realize something I've already been expressing, but which has remained opaque to me. One of the most amusing events in my academic life was attending a wonderful talk on campus by Natalie Lira and not only learning quite a bit of historical information but also coming to some realization about my project (I've now long forgotten exactly what it was). When I told my advisor enthusiastically, she said, "Yes, I knew that's what you were doing." It was apparently clear in my writing, but it wasn't clear in my head until I'd had the chance to reflect on it from a different angle. 

An Example: A UIUC Writers Workshop Workshop

So, after a difficult spring, I found myself in an hourlong presentation held by the UIUC Writers Workshop: "Staying on Track With Thesis and Dissertation Writing," facilitated by Logan Middleton and Adrienne Pickett. You can probably imagine what this sort of thing consists of-- a discussion of the various stages of writing (from research and organization to prewriting and drafting to revision and writing groups), some recommendations about writing consistently, some sharing stories around the room about how we organize our notes, how we sit down to write, how we deal with feedback. It had all of the ingredients that you might expect, and little information that was brand new to me.

If I wasn't confronted by wildly revelatory information, why did I find the writing workshop so helpful? Some brief factors:

• It's sometimes necessary to be reminded of things you kind of know already because as humans our memories are short. Anyone who's discussed anxiety with a professional knows that they should do their breathing techniques in times of struggle; anyone who's tried to manage anxiety over an extended period knows the feeling of sheepishness they get when reminded that breathing is an option available to them which they have rudely cast aside.
• Several organizational choices made by the facilitators were also a key factor: beginning the workshop with time to reflect on our own struggles with or approaches to writing; the opportunity for attendees to engage in conversation about each topic as the program proceeded. These tactics created a casual but engaged atmosphere.
• It's also nice to devote some time just thinking about the process of a large task you need to do, to have some outside confirmation that the strategies you are using are considered worthwhile by others.

But these are all preludes to the main topic I want to discuss here. More than any of these other aspects, I was heartened by the ways in which Pickett and Middleton offered options about writing, rather than prescriptions for writing. 

What do I mean by this? Let's take the portion on drafting the dissertation as an example. The facilitators suggested that one should consider scheduling a time to write, and that one should try to schedule more frequent short periods to write rather than fewer long stretches of time. They gave specific examples of this concept: try two hours of writing time four days per week, rather than eight hours on Saturday-- same number of hours, but more spread out. Additionally, they advised setting "small achievable goals"-- for example, 300 words per day; or an hour revising the introduction.

Set goals based on time or words; be consistent-- this is advice that is common, yes, but is also commonly given like this:

• "Oh, you have to write first thing every day if you want to get anything done."
• "You need to write 500 words per day. Every day. Even if you are going to Disneyland."

In other words, many offer prescriptions for what exactly you must do to achieve your larger goal. They take the specific application of a general principle and make it the sole factor in success. Without doing this one weird trick, you'll never make it! (Weirdly, the one weird trick is different for basically everyone in its specifics, and yet everyone persists in believing that theirs will work for everyone else.) This kind of thing always stresses me out more than it motivates me to try it because I can already envision the many ways in which I could fail to carry out the maxim. Middleton and Pickett, conversely, offered parameters for what those goals can look like, which gave us the tools and the freedom to determine our own goals.

I don't mean to suggest that this workshop is the only place to get an option-based approach to writing, or that one can't find success with a prescriptive approach. But it did inspire me to reflect on what I found compelling about the style that the facilitators used and reflect on how I could incorporate this into my own teaching. 

What's the Point? 

It should be no surprise to any consistent reader of this blog by now that in many ways, I teach by learning; that is, my first step is to consider how I have learned and try to mimic that process. Fortunately or unfortunately, variety is a big part of how I learn-- switching settings while writing or studying, typing some notes and handwriting others, coming up with new ways to read or annotate when I have tired of the old ones midway through a semester. 

I tend toward emphasizing variety in my teaching as well. I like to switch between different types of sources to see how something looks different as told through different media or by different types of people. I don’t like to do small group work often because it tends to fall into the same types of patterns, preferring instead the random observations that tend to come out of large class discussions or paired conversations. 

So obviously I liked this idea of emphasizing options rather than prescriptions about completing assignments-- it certainly offers variety! It's hard to provide writing support in our classes because writing is such a solitary activity, and there's something endlessly mystical about it. How does something get written? How does a good something get written? The answer, of course, is that there are as many ways that this happens as there are people who write good somethings. 

When teaching first- or second-year level courses, we are also confronted with the idea that part of our goal is to teach good processes for writing and other forms of analytical work so that students can maintain them for the duration of their lives. How can we encourage the divergent work processes of people who haven't necessarily developed an effective work process yet? Faced with the enormity of this, we tend to double down in our teaching on the things that we can know or declare: we want thesis statements, we want topic sentences, we want evidence and analysis. The only thing we say about the process is, "Don’t start it the night before! We can tell!" 

Incorporating Options

So, how do we lean toward options rather than prescriptions in our classes, while still maintaining clarity about expectations and assignments? 

Outside of Class

I've talked about this a bit before in terms of assigning unstructured research time-- offering students an "excuse" to spend some time thinking over a topic without the pressure of creating some artifact for grading. In a course with a big final paper or a consistent smaller written assignments, this could be broadened into an assignment which encourages students to reflect on what kind of goals might work well for the writing assignments they intend to complete and the time they have to work with. If there is a paper due every other Friday, a student might make a goal to spend fifteen minutes jotting down the main points of every reading after completing it so that she can remember them. Another student might focus on the actual drafting of each paper, committing to have a page written by the Wednesday before the due date each week. And another student might wish to focus on actually having time to edit the paper, and resolve to commit an hour on Friday mornings for a final readthrough. 

This process should also incorporate a continual renegotiation of those goals based on changing circumstances. For example, the student who wished to focus on editing may realize a month into the semester that his work schedule or his other courses never allow an hour for editing on Friday, and so he may wish to alter his goal to be more achievable.

Inside of Class

As far as in-class activities go, lots of teachers do this by spending time on prewriting strategies. Prewriting is perhaps the most wiggly step of the writing process and there are a lot of good resources out there about the many ways that one can prewrite-- brainstorming, freewriting, journaling-- a lot of these are really just fancy words for "starting to write and seeing what happens," which in my experience isn't so far removed from "drafting an undergraduate paper." There are also approaches that diverge from these, like clustering, which is a bit more graphical; and outlining or journalists' questions (what we used to call the 6 w's-- one comes at the end, see?). I like presenting these as options for beginning an independent writing project, and I also like the idea of fostering the opportunity for students to dabble in several of these in class and discuss how each worked for them. Perhaps it doesn't come naturally for someone to cluster (it certainly doesn't to me), but it’s a wonderful thing to try in class when you're not actually scrambling to get the paper done right at that moment.

However, I must admit that I remember finding these sorts of activities only minimally helpful when I've been in classes where they've happened, and I think much of the difficulty there is timing. You've gotta talk about prewriting early, while people have time to benefit from it before they really should be writing the paper, but it's also hard to do prewriting before you've done any research, which I had rarely done at that point. So, I think a spirit of experimentalism is best-- ask students to use prewriting activities to brainstorm a hypothetical paper based on something you've all already discussed together in the course, and talk about the results. 

How do you balance options and prescriptions for writing, as a teacher or a student?

Plug and Play: My Much-Anticipated Proclamation of Love for Rubrics

Grab your colorful writing implements! It's rubric time! Photo by @alyssasieb.

In the Spring of 2017, long before I ever thought about becoming a CITL grad affiliate or even particularly understood my own interest in teaching, I participated in the "Four Friends and a Book" reading group hosted by a CITL grad affiliate. We read parts of Ken Bain's What the Best College Teachers Do and discussed how Bain's ideas related to our own practices and disciplines. I recently rediscovered the discussion questions and my answers that we each prepared in advance of these sessions, and realized with a start that this was the beginning of the story I promised to tell you so long ago, about how I became a rubric enthusiast.

In the Beginning: A Skeptic

A selected excerpt from my notes on the Pre-Meeting Assignment for Meeting 3, in response to a question about whether rubrics were the tools of excellent teachers or merely time-consuming busywork:

• I’m struck by “Students focus on grades. Sad, but true” (7)

• I think this could have potential usefulness for conveying some of those learning aspirations that Bain references repeatedly, though the rubric’s obsessive focus on the grade is why I have shied away from using them before. They always seem to be something that promises to make the subjective objective by putting it in a chart—“mastery of material” or “effective use of evidence” is now clear and undeniably interpretable because it’s in a table!

• I do like the idea of students helping to create these—that would give me a sense also of not only what they expect but what they know and what I could work on explaining.

This list of reactions struck me as interesting for a few reasons.

• First, I am notorious (with myself, at least) for taking notes that have no content other than the quotation I thought was "interesting." Can you elaborate, past Leanna? No, I could, apparently, not.

• Next, wow, was I skeptical! Rubrics "could have potential usefulness"-- that's Leanna-speak for "I guess you may have a small point and I don't like it."

My referenced qualm about the concept of rubrics, meanwhile, now strikes me as being a super-real critique of many rubrics I'd seen as a student and in teaching workshop examples, which I found impenetrable and not very specific, likely because they were trying to be all things to all graders--vague enough you could use them for many different projects or pieces of writing.

What is a rubric?

There are a few different styles of rubric, the most common three of which are well-described in Know Your Terms: Holistic, Analytic, and Single Point Rubrics. I tend to be most comfortable with an analytic rubric, which breaks down criteria of an assignment and helps the grader look at each in isolation to arrive at a total score. For example, the rubrics I’ve featured here previously in posts about teaching The Underground Railroad and The Crucible have been analytic rubrics. 

However, rubrics don’t have to be so detailed to be useful. My simplest "rubric" was one I scribbled quickly on every one of the weekly reflection papers for my Fiction and the Historical Imagination class. It began from the instructions from a document called Weekly Response Expectations:

 

• Comment thoughtfully on reading.

• Use evidence from reading.

• Tie readings together, either within week or with previous weeks.

Which turned into a little abbreviated list that I added to the bottom of each paper with a brief comment about each:

 

• Content

• Analysis

• Connections

 

If you had all three, you had full points. If you missed one or two, I noted they were missing. If you could have done more, I noted which needed a little attention. It's not that this is an example or perfect or ideal rubric making-- this could have been a lot better! But for a frequent and low-stakes assignment, it made life quite a bit easier to organize my thoughts in this way, and it seems to lead students toward some quite intriguing and freeform thinking, which was my hope and my goal.

What Changed?: Why I Like Rubrics

As you can probably tell, my feelings about rubrics changed from the time I was writing about their “potential usefulness” to the time I was creating a new and tailored rubric for every assignment I graded. This moment of reflecting on and talking about rubrics in concert with other teachers set off a chain reaction– I tried it, I liked it, and I didn’t want to go back. So, here's the verbs that rubrics help to do:

Refining

One of the critically helpful things about getting into rubric construction was how it forced me to refine how I was conceptualizing the assignment before grading it-- indeed, before I even assigned it. I wanted students to know how they were going to be graded before they started working on their assignments so that they knew how to prioritize their time and attention, what I was looking for, and so that they had the best chance of actually succeeding at that assignment's goals. So, I needed to figure that out, and often breaking things down into the rubric forced me to clarify my instructions and reflect on what was actually important-- every single one of four criteria cannot be fifty percent of the grade, so how much, exactly, should each be worth in the final score? How can I best express success in each criterion via words on a page to actually make them specific and helpful, rather than leaning on a vagueness like "mastery of material"-- what will showcase that they have mastered the material well, and can I just straight-up tell them to do that in the instructions and isolate it in the rubric?

Prioritizing

Past Leanna was affronted by how rubrics focused on the grade, whereas I apparently saw the process as being more about the mystical process of providing tailored feedback, with the grade hinging upon it but incidental to "the point." I now tend to see "the grade" and "the feedback" as two aspects of the process of grading (which is, obviously, not universal-- if you are ungrading or teaching in an ungraded context, great!). If you can simplify "getting to the grade," you have more time to tailor your feedback. This is something I mention frequently in my current role-- it's not that you are skimping on grading by doing it more quickly; rather, you're making more efficient the parts that are not personalized so that you can spend your time tailoring the more individualized feedback to the student, instead of just writing "Remember to proofread your paper before submitting" on thirty-seven separate papers and trying to ascertain after reading whether this feels like a B+ or an A- paper. 

Guiding and Aligning

When I was a teaching assistant, there was quite a bit of uncertainty regarding the role of the teaching assistant. In many ways, our sections were like our own class, and we ran them in fairly individualized ways. In others, we had little power to craft the class in our own image. The result was quite a lot of inconsistency, as an assignment you interpreted as being "about" one skill or content area might be interpreted by another teaching assistant for the same course to be "about'' a different skill or content area, and the professor leading the course might have still another take. Now that many of the folks reading my blog are likely professors or teachers of some type themselves (hooray!), you have the power to help the folks you are supervising or may one day supervise in your courses figure out how the heck to grade student assignments by creating a rubric and collaborating on minor edits as each assignment approaches in order to align assignment expectations between sections. In an individual way, making rubrics also helped me create consistency across assignments-- is there a reason why I think organization should be thirty percent of this project but only ten percent of the last one? If so, I should make that clear; if not, I should try to figure out how important organization should be to this type of project.

If you have strong feelings about rubrics (positive or negative), you’re obviously not alone. If you want to share them with me, feel free to drop them in the comments! 

Take My Advice: Four Tech-Fueled Efficiency Tips I Wish I'd Known Four Years Earlier

If you'd like a tech-fueled inefficiency tip, this image should serve. 

I have always been technologically curious, but as one grows and changes, perhaps it is inevitable that one realizes what they didn't previously know or appreciate; so too have I realized that there were lots of technological possibilities that I was slow to take up. There seems to be an undertone of skepticism among folks in academic humanities circles about using technology, systems, or techniques for efficiency and an even greater fear of admitting one has engaged in such behavior, and so I perhaps unnecessarily developed an aversion to using it to support my research; though I was keen on incorporating tech into teaching, my process of doing so was admittedly prone to making my preparations more time-intensive rather than less (implied, I think, by my observation in this 2018 reflection on preparing my Fiction and the Historical Imagination course). Part of this, I think, was a symptom of a peculiarly humanistic tendency (or so it seems to me) to feel that to save time is to be cheating in some way; that if our work is valuable it is valuable because we agonized over it at great length, and can be said to have depended upon no one but ourselves and our incredible intellects. Ultimately, however, both students and the work, not to mention my own well-being, have been better served by embracing ways to make life a little easier and a little more collaborative. As a result, in this post, I'm reflecting on four things I came to appreciate in the last two years or so that I really, really wish I'd been doing the whole dang time.

Use OCR

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is much better than it used to be, and it doesn't have to be perfect to be helpful. I think I became hesitant to try again with OCR after an ill-fated attempt at digitizing a single issue of Cosmopolitan magazine so I could "perform Digital Humanities" on it as an undergraduate. However, toward the end of my dissertation writing process and into my current work I've seen how improved the technology is and how much I now take it for granted. If you have archival photos or scans, try using Adobe Acrobat or a free OCR tool to recognize the text. This will not only make it more accessible if you are distributing it to students, but also make it easier for you to search for terms within it (which would have come in very handy had I figured this out earlier in my dissertation research process, as I worked almost entirely from archive photos and scans while writing).

Use Excel

You know you can use Excel for whatever you want? You don't even have to be a card-carrying "quantitative researcher." Here's one thing I now use all the time and which would have worked well in conjunction with the idea of OCRing things: the UNIQUE function, which can take a list of items and strip out all the repeats, leaving only one iteration of each name, number, list item, etcetera. Imagine how much more easily I could have answered questions about how many disabled children were represented in an issue of a periodical if I'd known this.

Use the Internet

You don't have to do everything yourself. Some subjects have existing resources, whether entry-level memorization and practice activities on tools like Quizlet or Kahoot or mid- to higher-level activities created by other instructors and distributed on educational resource sites like MERLOT or the Zinn Education Project or through affinity groups like the Reacting Faculty Lounge or via personal blogs (hi!). Some activities pitched to high school learners can be employed usefully in a higher education setting with a few tweaks. Some materials can also be created by students as part of their learning process; instead of making a Quizlet for students to practice with, ask groups to create their own Quizlets of the top five or ten topics / terms / concepts and compare their results. 

In short, I wish that I had appreciated earlier how many other things existed that I could use rather than reinventing the wheel every time. Sometimes it seemed like it would have been harder to find and enact an idea elsewhere than creating it myself, but looking a little harder could have paid off-- not only would this have saved me time, but it would have been useful to me to see how other people were approaching teaching various topics to inspire the activities and assessments that I created.

Use a Repetition-Mitigator

Relatedly: If you do have to do something yourself (making an activity, grading), you don't have to create everything from scratch every time. It's great to make something new! As I've mentioned in a previous post on career preparation, if you are an early career teacher, it's in fact essential to make some new things if you'd like to be able to fruitfully reflect on those experiences in later job interviews or teaching statements. However, if you save time on some of the more rote requirements and/or incorporate already existing resources, you'll have more time for creating novel activities and giving meaningful feedback. 

Efficiency in grading is one example of this. Rubrics and comment libraries (either technological ones, like within LMS systems, or low-tech numbered lists you can show to students in conjuction with papers marked with corresponding numbers) can allow you to skip writing "Needs to use at least three sources" in paper comments seventeen times, leaving additional time to write more specific and useful comments like "Your paper's argument might benefit from a closer read of Source A" or "If your goals are X, you should focus on Y aspect of the homework for next week." I only started appreciating what a time-saver this could be late in the game, and I wish I'd used it more thoughtfully and more often.

What tips, strategies, or tools do you wish you'd appreciated and used earlier? Feel free to let me know in the comments-- I just may have to start adopting them myself.

Related Links: 

One of my favorite activities supported by an existing resource: after being asked to deliver a short lesson to a group of epidemiology students on the fly during my time at the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, I followed a brief lecture on the history of polio with asking students to play the Smithsonian National Museum of American History's Got Ramps? Architectural Barriers Game and compare notes on which endings they achieved. 

If you're interested in the NMAH's work on polio, or thoughts on incorporating museum resources and exhibits into teaching, you may be interested in revisiting this 2017 post on the curator's interview with David Serlin.

Year in Review: Goodbye, 2021!

It's time once again for my new yearly tradition, the Year in Review! An excuse to look back on what lessons have been spotted in the past twelve months. 

• Flashback Post: My Approach to the Lesson Plan - in preparation for a CITL workshop on Lesson Planning for Discussion Sections (a topic that everyone running a discusion section seems to want help with but which is rarely treated), I revisited an old post about lesson planning. 
  

• Pedagogical Possibilities: Quick Accessibility Tips for Text- After taking several online courses in accessibility in teaching and web design, I realized that that the tips offered tended not to be a part of the curriculum for developing teachers that I knew. This post set out to give some easy, quick pointers about making text a little more accessible, based on what I had most often observed in history courses. 

• Current Project: Portfolio Page- As I geared up job searching in earnest, I wanted to find a way to bring some of my work that was publicly available together in one convenient place, so that I might be able to showcase various pieces without suggesting employers look through the entire history of my blog or click links in my resume. The portfolio page I created here became a standard page on Lesson Spotted that I update periodically.

• Current Project: History SoTL and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion- My final piece of work as a graduate student, this post is a reflection on how scholarship on history teaching and learning treats DEI issues and suggests paths that could be fruitfully explored in the field. Submitted as part of my application for the Teacher Scholar Certificate at CITL.  

• Pedagogical Possibilities: If You're Drawing a Blank on Canvas- Just as my time at UIUC was winding down, the campus announced a switch to Canvas as the predominant LMS for university courses. This post aimed to set out some basics of Canvas for those apprehensive about the switch.   

• Current Project: Life Updates- Perhaps the most dramatic post of 2021, I talked about my new position as a Faculty Engagement Specialist, starting a new phase of my life and career. 

• Enough About Me: Deformalizing and Deformatting- As my interests and my daily activities changed, I have become more and more fascinated by using ways of communicating ideas that change my perspective simply by forcing me to reckon with medium rather than just a message. This post was an experiment in following that idea to a logical end: what if instead of writing a post about doing that, I made a post that was that? 

• Current Project: A Post That Took Seven Years (Kinda)- My dissertation became available for digital reading, a fact I reflected on here. 

• Current Project: Taking, Talking, and Thinking Through Career Development- An invitation to chat with folks in the UIUC History Department about career diversity prompted my to reflect on three mindsets that helped me in my career shift: taking, talking, and thinking. 

Fewer posts this year than last, but decidedly more upheaval; overall, a list of posts I think encapsulates the year gone by. Many posts center on life and career events, with only two posts I would characterize as outside of that dynamic. Looking ahead, I'd love to make an interactive year in review for next year. Here's to seeing what Lessons are there to be Spotted in the year to come!  

Current Project: A Post That Took Seven Years (Kinda)

Me with a very official diploma. Photo by Saniya Ghanoui. 

Just about the time that I was setting into the warm bathwater of life after the PhD this month, I received a notice from the Thesis Office at the University of Illinois that my dissertation is now available on IDEALS. It is an odd feeling which lots of people have reflected on before-- seeing something has become available in some sort of "finished" format which to you feels, looking back, like it was concluded both too soon and too late. 

Folks have asked me what I plan to do with it, and the truth is I'm not yet sure. At the moment, I am satisfied with the fact that I got the most significant (to me) portion of the dissertation into print (the first chapter, as “‘Every One of Them Are Worth It”:  Blanche Van Leuven Browne and the Education of the ‘Crippled Child’”).

It was also important to me to release the dissertation with the most access possible. As I've moved away from a career in which it is paramount to publish at all costs, I wanted people who were interested to be able to read about the things I've found if it could at all benefit their lives, interests, or activism. I could see publishing it as a monograph or sorting it into more articles someday, but I could also see it as many small pieces; portraits of the activists who fuel its arguments in shorter and more personal formats. 

However, although the dissertation's content does still feel important to me-- telling stories that lots of folks have never heard about people who they've never known of--the dissertation itself represents a lot of things beyond what's in it. Perhaps this is part of the difficulty of coming to terms with what it means. It's the thousands (literally, thousands) of pictures from archival and secondary research in my storage (the archival photos with lots of typescript and thumbs; the secondary research scribbled pencil notes in whatever tiny notebook with a dog on the front I was carrying at the time). It's the hours spent revising and recycling its contents not only into proposals, drafts, and conference papers but into endless permutations of fellowship applications to fund (or attempt to fund) its creation. And of course, its the hours and days and years of feeling that you are, potentially, doing every single thing in your personal and professional life entirely wrong. (The dissertation has a way of exaggerating; even now, just the phrase "the dissertation" gives me a frisson of dread.) 

It's also the personal impacts of the dissertation process on the person you are. For me, it made me humble in the classroom, as I saw my own writing having the same exact problems as that of the students I taught (move the last sentence of the paragraph to the beginning and you'll have a topic sentence!). It made me a competent and resilient traveler, as I had to go to over a dozen archives across the country and pivot around multiple catastrophies (a car crash, a bad Airbnb, a suitcase held together with tape) to get to the finished product. And honestly, it made me pretty miserable a lot of the time.

In short, at the moment, my plan is to let it breathe, and get some distance, and take some pride in what it is without moving straight to wrangling it into a new form after this one was so hard-won. So, if you'd like to read, skim, or search it, you're welcome to; just save your edit suggestions for... some future time when I'm more ready for them! 

Enough About Me: Deformalizing and Deformatting