Episode 3

The Written Word: Simple Changes Have A Big Effect with Bill Davis

MUSIC PLAYING] STEVEN ROBINOW: Welcome to Teaching for Student Success, a  podcast devoted to evidence-based teaching practices to improve student success, and to improve equity and inclusivity in your courses. I'm Steven Robinow, your host. If you are interested in hearing about how minor wording changes in your syllabus can improve student success, or if you're interested in learning about a simple email strategy that can improve student performance and decrease the performance gap in your courses, then please stick around to hear from Dr. Bill Davis of Washington State University.

Before we start, you might like to know that this podcast is divided into chapters. Chapter 2 is devoted to a discussion of how changes in the syllabus can impact student performance. Chapter 3 is focused on a discussion of an email strategy that can improve student performance also. You may have limited time, so if you want to get to the discussion of these research topics, use your podcast app to skip ahead.

I am very excited to introduce Dr. Bill Davis to talk about his research demonstrating how changes in the wording of a syllabus, how changes in faculty growth mindset, and how a simple email strategy can improve student performance. Bill is an associate professor of biochemistry and biophysics in the School of Molecular Biosciences at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. He currently serves as the interim vice provost for academic engagement and student achievement.

Bill is also very active in the education reform community. He is a founding member and leadership fellow of PULSE, the Partnership for Undergraduate Life Science Education, an organization whose goal is to help life sciences departments at all institutions of higher education align with national education reform initiatives. And he serves on the steering committee for Project Kaleidoscope, an organization dedicated to empowering STEM faculty to graduate more students in STEM fields.

Bill has received numerous awards, including recognition for outstanding advising and outstanding teaching. Welcome, Bill. Thank you so much for joining us on Teaching for Student Success.

BILL DAVIS: Thanks, Steve. It's a delight to be here.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Thank you. Before we dig into your research on growth mindset and student engagement and student success, perhaps you could take a few minutes to talk about your path to where you are now, and perhaps why and how you became interested in education research.

BILL DAVIS: Yeah, Steve, love to talk about that. I was looking at the calendar right before classes started, and I realized that this is my 20th year at WSU. That seemed like a nice milestone to do a little bit of retrospection and reflection on how did I get to where I am today. To be honest, anybody that you ever asked this question to, they would tell you it's a nonlinear walk with a lot of sidetracks.

You know, when I arrived at WSU, it was a very different environment for me than what I was used to, primarily because I started out at a liberal arts institution, which was smaller in size than this institution. And I got to know my faculty really well over the course of my five years there.

I went to Northwestern, which is a research 1 institution, but also was smaller in size, in terms of its undergraduate population as well. And then my postdoc, I didn't really have a lot of connection with students. And so when I got here, undergraduates were a population that I really was excited to work with.

When I established my research lab, almost from day one I started to have undergraduate researchers come and join me. I trained some outstanding undergraduates who went on and did really exciting things. And at the same time as I was setting up my lab I had my first teaching assignment, which was a senior-level undergraduate biochemistry class. And I taught that in a team-taught fashion for a full year.

And as time went on, several things started to converge. Number one—well, my research was in the lab. I thought it was going really well and had support, and I was getting invitations to talk about it, there wasn't a lot of high touch with students. It's a really labor-intensive and energy-intensive process. While I would have five or six students, the energy expenditure to support them was really problematic in some ways. And I felt a tension with that.

And then in the classroom, as time went on, I started to teach the way that I observed teaching in many cases, and it wasn't good pedagogy. I was frustrated with, why don't my students understand the basics of glycolysis, even though they've seen it six times or however many. And I thought, maybe it's time to rectify that in some way. And really, instead of looking at them, shift that mirror around.

And so right after I got tenure and promotion to become an associate faculty member here, I had been talking about teaching with people for a number of years. I was involved in undergraduate research. And my chair at the time approached me and said, you seem to like working with undergraduates, and this seems to be something that you're passionate about. Would you step up to become an associate director and help lead and guide the undergraduate programs? At that time there were—across our three majors—probably about 250 students. And I said, why not? Let's do it.

And as I started to move into that space, and I started to move outside of my classroom and think more holistically about student education, it became apparent to me that there was something there. The laboratory work was great. I loved my research. I thought it was successful. But my interest really started to veer off.

So then I started to move more into the educational space, became more involved not only on campus, but at the national level, and getting involved in communications and meetings and talking to people about education. And so as time went on, I took advantage of opportunities where I could find them.

For instance, the summer institutes—I helped bring that to WSU as part of the mobile institutes with Michelle Withers when she was piloting that program. And that was some of my first really hard-core pedagogical training. As I started to take that and play with it in the classroom, I started to realize, hey, there's some secret sauce here.

Then things started to kind of spiral, as I became more involved in other national projects, like the PULSE project, and started to talk to other like-minded people who were thinking more systematic at the departmental level and institutional levels. And then eventually, that led to PCAL and talking about faculty leadership development, and how do we develop the next generation of people who are going to help us transform what we do in higher education.

The other important thing that really happened was about the same time as I got done with the mobile summer institutes, we had sort of a crisis in the department where we needed someone to step up and teach a large-enrollment freshman introductory biology course. So it's one semester of a two-semester sequence.

I thought about it, and I said you know what? I think that's where I want to be. And so I took that opportunity, really started to have sort of, I want to say a sandbox, where I could go in and I could do pedagogical transformation. I could do experimentation. And because it was high enrollment, I had enough students that I could start to get formative feedback that was meaningful. But also over time, I could really chart summative assessment and start to look at what are these changes really doing in this environment, in this context.

As the years have gone on, we've done multiple projects in this course, because it has a lecture and it has a lab. There's a lot of really interesting questions that you can ask in both of those spaces. You sort of have a small classroom environment in the laboratory. You have a large single section of lecture where you can do some other really interesting and innovative questions to ask.

And the other part of it that I really enjoyed is I've tried to be really purposeful and systematic about partnering with young faculty who are also interested in STEM education. If you look at a list of collaborators, many of them are assistant professors at different institutions. Being able to help them grow their careers and ask questions, and sort of have my class be that laboratory where they could come in, help me ask the right questions, help me gather the right data in order to make informed decisions in the course environment that I teach in has just been so incredibly valuable. And I think it's had a high impact on my students and their development as well.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Yeah. That's fantastic. Thank you. Speaking about your students, can you tell us a bit about your institution in the student population, particularly the students in your undergraduate courses?

BILL DAVIS: So Washington State University is in Pullman. We're in a rural area of the state of Washington. We're eight miles from the Idaho border and about 30 miles north of the border with Oregon. Here in Pullman, we have about 16,000 students total. Of that, we have probably about 30% to 35% of those students are first-generation students.

In terms of underrepresented groups in higher education, Hispanics are our largest population. We have a large population of Indigenous farmworkers and other Hispanic populations across the state that we serve. They make up probably about 15% to 20% of our student body. And then we have other groups as well that come to us here at WSU.

My classroom—one of the things I've done over the years is major demographics. And it's largely representative of the university as a whole. Although because it is a life science classroom, the one area where we tend to see some divergence is in the representation in terms of gender balance. And we see more individuals who identify as females than we do males. But that's a national phenomenon in the life sciences.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Thanks, Bill, for sharing that context and background. But let's dig into the research today. You've been kind enough to share with me a manuscript you're preparing concerning faculty growth mindset and the impact on student engagement and student success. It's fascinating. At this point, I would like to ask you to describe your research and the outcomes.

BILL DAVIS: Yeah. So this is a great example of one of those projects where we had a young faculty member who came to us. Her name's Elizabeth Canning. And she's in the psychology department here.

And a person in our provost's office actually ran into her at a new faculty orientation. And I started talking to her about her research when she was a graduate student and when she was a postdoc as well. And she had done this really interesting work in life science classrooms about faculty mindsets and student mindsets, and sort of the intersectionality between them and what impacts those have on student outcomes in terms of course performance and student experience in sort of psychometric areas.

And so I immediately reached out to Elizabeth and introduced myself. And we started now a collaboration that's been going on for almost two years. And it's been actually a lot of fun to do, because it's gotten me into some areas that I'd always been interested in about knowing—I always love to know more about my students. I like to know what makes them tick. And it was a way to kind of unearth some of that.

And so we started talking about what was known about mindsets. And there's—you know, it's kind of a problematic area in some ways in higher education, especially. Because a lot of the research has been done at different developmental stages than we see for most of our college students.

A lot of K through 12 work, especially around the age of the middle school years, has been done. And that's where a lot of the—like Carol Dweck's work and other people have really been focused. And the literature on mindsets in higher education settings is a bit mixed, to be honest. There's been—as you might expect, it's been a little bit "depends on where you look and who you ask" as to what's found with it.

So one of the things that I was talking about with Elizabeth when we first met was really are there simple things that you can do to try to shift the environment inside of a classroom. And I'm looking for simple and low barrier to entry, because I teach 450 to 550 students. I don't teach a—if I was teaching only lab sections with 20 students, it would be easier for me to—a little bit difficult. But it would be easier for me to come in and do a lot of high-touch, one-on-one communication and engagement with students. But in a large lecture setting, that becomes fairly difficult.

And she had worked with other people before. And this is a fairly common question. And so we started to think about, what could we do to try to shift student mindsets? And also, turn the lens back on the instructor as well at the same time, and really start to look at what impact does faculty mindset have on student performance. And more importantly, what's the intersectionality of the students' perception of faculty mindset on their experience in the classroom.

And we started broadly with the work and the questions that we asked because we just didn't know if we were really going to find anything. And, again, that's because the literature tells us that you could see some differential impacts, depending on environment and stuff like that.

And so we designed our first project to really be—and both of them really have this element of how do faculty communicate, or how do instructors communicate to their students even starting on day one. Is there language that can be used? Is there a framing of how they view education that could be simply conveyed? And what impact would that have on students?

So with a large classroom, you can run experiments where you sort of have mixed cohorts that are together in a similar experience in the classroom. And so our first study was really about what does the syllabus convey to students about faculty's views about their abilities—about their ability to grow, to change, to transform, and to improve.

And so we did this really interesting study where in the learning management system, we were able to set up essentially two communication channels for students. And one set of students—a mixed population. We didn't control for any other variables other than we just randomly assigned students into one of two groups.

And then each group saw a different version of the class syllabus. And each version of the class syllabus, there was one version that had language that would be traditionally found in what we would call a fixed mindset approach from faculty. And the intervention itself was about the communication about office hours.

And we thought that would be a good thing to target because that's one of those areas where if you go to a luncheon or a brown bag with faculty, and they talk about student engagement and things—I tell my colleagues sometimes being a faculty member is like being the old Maytag repairman. It's the loneliest job on the planet. Because you can offer office hours and things, and sometimes students—they don't come. They don't engage. And I think there's something about the way that we communicate and the way that we present ourselves to students that probably has an impact on that.

And we had some plans about how we would do some secondary work. And unfortunately, we started this project in 2020 in the spring, which was the pandemic semester where things shut down halfway. So we had this design where we would have a fixed mindset message in one syllabi, and we would have a growth mindset in the other syllabi, both of them related to office hours.

And, I mean, I can read these things if you want to see them, or when we publish we'll have these things in there. But it was a very small subtle change in the language. And we were tracking students as they were coming into office hours, making sure that we kept track of who was there, and who showed up, and what they were discussing. And we started to collect that data. And then eight weeks later—poof. [LAUGHS] So much for that plan.

But we were still able to look at using surveys. We did a presurvey at the beginning of the semester, and then we did a postsurvey at the end of the semester. And those surveys were designed to really focus on different elements of how the students were experiencing the classroom, and how they came into the classroom based upon their personal lived experiences before the time that they got into my biology class.

And so we were able to collect—and still, even with that problematic semester of the modalities and the way that we delivered things, we were still able to collect enough data that we were able to see that even the subtle shift in language was having a strong effect on certain populations of students. And one of the groups of students that we really saw this for was for our first-generation students. And there's a whole literature on first-generation students and their experience in the classroom, their experiences in higher ed is a sort of a general edifice.

And so what we were able to find was that in the experimental group where we use this growth mindset language from the instructor, we were able to see some pretty important shifts in different ways that the first-gens were seeing things. And one of them was we were able to really normalize things like impostor feelings in the classroom—that feeling that I don't quite belong here, and I don't know why I'm here.

Our first-generation students were basically the same as the non-first-generation students in the growth condition versus when we used a fixed-mindset language, there was a distinct difference between the first-generation and the non-first-generation students. And so we're starting to normalize that experience of students in the classroom by doing this.

Another one was related to effort cost. The basic question we asked them was, I have so many other responsibilities that I'm unable to put in the effort that's necessary for this course. So it really gets at is it worth it? Is my time spent on this worth it?

And I would say for the first-generation students, again, in that growth condition, they really were very similar to our non-first-generation students. Whereas, in the nongrowth, we were seeing some differential effects. And our first-gens were, I would say, in a situation where they were more at risk because of their perception and their lived experience in the classroom from that.

STEVEN ROBINOW: That's an amazing result. I mean, do you want to talk—maybe define for some people that may not be so familiar with equity gap or performance gap or your [INAUDIBLE] there, and how difficult that is to move?

BILL DAVIS: Yeah. So an equity gap—and this is something that we—I'm starting to pay a lot more attention to right now, especially as I look at a systems level at WSU, and starting to look at our general education curriculum more holistically.

An equity gap is where there is a differential performance however you want to measure that. It could be through performance on a single exam or a single assessment. It could be performance across the course of an entire semester or quarter in a class. An equity gap is when, because of someone's—some personal trait that they have or something about their background, they perform differentially to others.

And typically, when we look at equity gaps, we look at equity gaps between, say, first-generation and non-first-generation students. And typically, the gap is such that the first-generation students are statistically different and usually lower in performance, however that's measured, than the non-first-generation students. You could look at equity gaps in terms of gender identity for individuals, ethnic status, and things like that.

So one of the things that I've done in my classes, with the help of our Office of Assessment, I've been able to really start to track equity gaps over the years. And you're exactly right, Steve. They are extremely difficult to move, and to really—to fill in.

My experience has been that there's usually not a home run if you have a large equity gap. There's not a single intervention, oftentimes, that you can do in order to bridge that. It's usually like with most other things, you get small effects.

And so you start to add those up—1% or 2% for an intervention. You get enough interventions together, now you're talking about some real progress. And I think that's typically what we've seen in my class over the years.

STEVEN ROBINOW: And what you've just described is an intervention that's syllabus-based. This doesn't even have anything to do with what's actually going on in the classroom, right? This is a syllabus-based intervention. And you've been able to demonstrate, at least with what—if I understand correctly, in terms of impostor syndrome anyway, completely get rid of the pre—the gap that would have existed without that.

BILL DAVIS: Yeah.

STEVEN ROBINOW: It's amazing.

BILL DAVIS: It is. It's almost voodoo. [LAUGHS] Not to disparage voodoo practitioners, but it is an interesting intervention because it really is—it's low stakes. It's easy to implement. And it's nothing more than language.

And so after that first semester when we saw that impact, it became—I'm a big believer in you run experiments. But if you start to see effects, then it becomes incumbent upon us to really think about operationalizing those. Because then it becomes—

If you know that there's something that's good—like in medicine. If you know that the vaccine works, it almost becomes—with some limited exceptions, it becomes unethical to really not use it as a generalized tool. So that next semester after we ran the syllabus experiment, we institutionalized that language into all of the syllabi that students received.

STEVEN ROBINOW: So maybe at the end of this if you're willing to share that with us, we can post that on our website for our listeners so that they can see that. That'd be awesome.

BILL DAVIS: Yeah. They could develop their own. They may find the magic solution here that's even better than what we came up with too, which would be awesome.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Yeah, absolutely. The manuscript you shared with me talks about a different intervention, in terms of faculty growth mindset, where you focus on the faculty and changing their growth mindset. And then asking them to do a few things—again, very simple, very content-agnostic issues that seem to have had a very dramatic impact, again, on the performance gap. Can you take a few minutes to talk about that?

BILL DAVIS: Sure. So when we saw the effect on the syllabus, we started to think about so are there other small interventions that could be done. And there was actually an intervention that I'd been working on for a couple of years independently. And what it had to do with was sort of a gut-level belief—I think that's what I would call it at this time-- that it was really important to communicate to students after major assessments about their performance.

And to be not only transparent, but to be encouraging in some way, or to really touch base with students about it. And it's difficult to do in a large-enrollment class because you can't really send individualized emails to all 500 students talking about their performance.

And so what we did was Elizabeth and I started talking about that. She said, you know, there's an opportunity here for a really interesting experiment, where we can take this communication about exam performance, and turn it into sort of a controlled experiment where we have one group of students who receive a fixed mindset communication about exam performance. And then we can have another group of students who receive a growth mindset version of their exam performance feedback. And we can see what happens with those two.

And so we designed this really—it was a little bit unwieldy and complicated the first semester because I had to really manage things behind the scenes, but it actually paid dividends later. And so what we did was we took the class, and we split it into sort of three tranches of student performance on exam one. So we had the students that performed a certain level above the average on the exam. And this was a standard 100-point exam over the first quarter of the material in the class.

Three tranches—high achieving—basically students that were more than about 10% above the average. We had our second tranche of students who were the students who were about 10 points above to about 20 points below. And then we had a third tranche, which were the students that were significantly below average—more than 20 points or so.

And then within each one of those, we divided each tranche into a control group of students and an experimental group of students. And so the control group got a fixed-mindset message, and the experimental group got a growth-mindset message. And it was very similar to what we had done with the language that we used for the syllabus language related to office hours.

It was about improvement and belief and supposition about how I view learning for the growth mindset. And then for the fixed mindset it was kind of the standard language that you might expect about, this is your exam. This is your performance. If you want to improve, come talk to me type of language.

So we did that for exam one. And then we did a similar messaging after exam two as well. And so these were early interventions. And then we waited to see what would happen later in the semester with students. And so, again, we're early in this because we just really collected the data for fall of 2020, and then spring of 2021.

What we did was we went ahead and we looked at what happened with the students that received the two different types of messaging. We looked across the different tranches of exam performance over the course of the entire semester. And there were some really interesting things that we saw in terms of differential student behavior. And, again, we're going to focus largely on non-first-generation students and first-generation students.

And for those who want a definition, first generation, the way that we defined it, was students who don't have a direct family member who's been in a higher education setting past the K through 12 system. There's slightly different definitions of first-gen, depending on who you talk to.

So what we saw was that if we looked at performance on exam two after exam one's messaging, we really didn't see any effect on student performance that we could really pull out from that point forward, at least on exam two. When we looked at the students—and the students were kept the same. So they received similar messaging for exam one as exam two, depending on how their exam performance was.

One of the really interesting things that we found was that when we looked at exam three, and the performance on that exam for those students, now we started to really pull out some really interesting effects, where for our first-generation students in sort of that fixed-mindset language that I provided to them, there was an equity gap.

And the first-generation students in a fixed-mindset environment, as far as my communication on the exams, were performing lower than the non-first-generation students. And it was about 10% on the exam, which is a couple of letter grades. I mean, it was significant.

And we did control that for things like, what was the student's current GPA? Some other covariates that we looked at were things like the student's own mindset. Did they have a fixed or a growth mindset? And then we also tried to control for whether they were underrepresented—from an underrepresented group other than first-generation or non-first-generation.

What was really interesting, and really, I was just dancing when I saw this data, was that on exam three for the students in the growth-mindset communication, the equity gap essentially disappeared for the first-generation students. They were performing at the same level as the non-first-generation students.

And more importantly, they were performing—they didn't—nobody saw a deficit or a drop in their exam performance. They basically look like the non-first-generation students across the board. So we were able to, through that really simple intervention about language—and, again, we could share this if people want to look at it.

It was an easy communication to send out. I use the learning management system, just looked at the exam performance, pulled out the email addresses, and sent these emails. It took me maybe 30 minutes on a Saturday night after the exam was scored to do this for both of them. So that was really exciting.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Exciting is an understatement, Bill.

BILL DAVIS: The other thing that we saw was that that was not just for exam three. But in the lecture part of the course, we also eliminated the achievement gap, or the equity gap, for the first-generation students across the course of the semester.

So, again, these are the students who didn't withdraw, so I don't know about that population. But at least for the ones who stuck it out and were able to get to the finish line, there was no equity gap in the growth mindset group between the first generations and the non-first-generation students. I don't know that I've ever seen it.

I've been working on it—I'll be honest. I've been working on this equity gap for—gosh, I took over the class eight years ago. And I had worked on it for eight years. And we were able to find some big hits that got us closer to eliminating the equity gap, but it had stayed constant for quite some time.

So, I mean, just to let people know, I started out in this class in the early 2010s, and it had an equity gap of about 20% or more between first-generation and non-first-generation. I mean, that's malpractice. Sorry. I'm going to throw around some strong language and say that was educational malpractice. And—

STEVEN ROBINOW: Agreed. Agreed.

BILL DAVIS: —one of the first things that we did was thinking about motivation and things like that. And so we actually changed the labs to make them project-based labs. So we took away sort of the old traditional labs that had been done up until that point.

And they were very traditional. They were good labs, but they were traditional in the sense that they really were come in, measure something, report it, and then kind of set it and forget it.

And we introduced the HHMI SEA-PHAGES project for the entire semester for all of the students. So we transitioned from one section of SEA-PHAGES with 18 to 24 students—Julie Stanton, who's now at University of Georgia, had done that work for us to help us pilot that. And then we expanded it out to every student in the class got to experience that.

And that actually dropped my equity gap in the course from about 20% down to about 10% to 8%. That was one of the few interventions I've ever seen that had a large effect. But then it had sort of just trickled around 8% to—6% to 8%, maybe 10%, depending on the semester. And then this—I don't think I've ever seen a zero before, which is incredible.

STEVEN ROBINOW: That is amazing. Right. So there had been a number of changes through the years that had nibbled away at it. And one intervention, the SEA-PHAGES project, that made a significant impact. But after that point, you weren't able to make any progress until you did something that, again, had nothing to do with the content.

BILL DAVIS: Right. It's independent of content. It's about how I communicate to the students. Absolutely.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Yeah.

BILL DAVIS: You know, and I've been asked quite a bit as I've talked to people. They're like, well, aren't you somebody who—if you were to talk to me on the street, I think people would say when it comes to student learning, you probably already have a growth mindset.

And I would say, yeah, that's probably true. But everything that I've done to try to convey that hasn't been as effective as that one showing, that one communication, to the students. I don't know how it works, to be honest. We're still trying to sort of operationalize and rationalize that.

We think it probably has to do with some of those other dynamics that we saw, for instance, with the syllabus project, where we're kind of regulating impostor syndrome and helping students overcome that and some of these other barriers that they could have psychologically within the classroom through their experience and how they interact with the core space and the instructor and other things. But yeah.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Yeah, it's amazing. It's incredible. I mean, that reducing the equity gap, getting rid of it, is incredible, that one change could take you from an 8% to 10% gap to zero, and not impact the student performance. So now they're performing at the level of the group that they were—that you were measuring them against previously.

BILL DAVIS: Right. Right.

STEVEN ROBINOW: That's amazing.

BILL DAVIS: It is.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Yeah. I was going to ask you what you think's going on, but you've already told me you have no idea what's going on—why this is—I mean, it's motivational, right? It's motivational, right?

BILL DAVIS: [LAUGHS]

STEVEN ROBINOW: What do you think's going on?

BILL DAVIS: As far as hypotheses go, I really think there's an intersection here between how the students perceive the faculty mindset, and then how that impacts them at a personal level. Do they feel included in the classroom? What is the community aspect of all of this?

Another thing that I think is going on is it really, I think, has to do with engagement and motivating engagement with the course. And so the evidence that I think that we have for that right now is we looked at in the online management system, we were able to go in and pull that whole semester's worth of data for every student in the class, and we were able to look at how much were they accessing the class, how frequently were they accessing the class material.

Now, we don't quite know on the back end what they were quite doing with it. But we do know something about frequency and their willingness to come in and utilize class material. It turns out that we saw a pretty strong effect, where the students that were in the growth mindset category, regardless of their class or their exam performance, were in there accessing that space more than the students who were in that fixed mindset. It's hard to make that full connection, but it really looks like that motivational aspect and that feeling encouraged and feeling like there's somebody there who cares about you is really important for these students.

You know, first-generation students, what we do know about them from the literature and stuff is they really don't feel connected. And I'll give you a really important example of this that I learned. And this was through an anecdotal talking about something else on campus one day in a group of instructors.

Here at WSU—and I think this is true in a lot of institutions—there's this spirit of being a legacy coug. Legacy coug—cougar. So I've met students who are—WSU has only been around since about 1890. And I've met like fourth-generation cougars, and this is a point of pride. And I think a lot of other institutions do this as well.

But when a first-generation student walks into that environment, they don't hear that. What they hear is, here's a group of people who are privileged, who know the system, know how to manage it, know how to manipulate it. They have support at home. They have people who, if there's a problem, they can pick up the phone and call somebody and get something fixed.

First-generation students don't have that. And so they need to build that social capital with somebody when they come to the university. Oftentimes, we think about how to do that in sort of nonacademic settings. But I think it's really important that we think about how to do that in that academic setting.

STEVEN ROBINOW: And done in ways that was not threatening was inviting and allow them to participate comfortably in their comfort zone. Interesting that you used grad students for that, and the grad students may have—maybe that's part of the magic there as well, is getting the faculty out and graduate students in. Who knows?

BILL DAVIS: And one of the things that I think about coming out of the pandemic—I mean, we're not done with it, obviously. But one of the things that I think about is, and I encourage my faculty now to do, is to really think about how do we sustain that culture of support that many of us built? How do we take it from for many of us what was a virtual environment and bring that back into the classroom?

And I think there's some really nice intersections there with that growth mindset work about—thinking about how do we frame the communication. How do we tell students we care about them? And not just that academic performance that everybody's so concerned about. But how do we care about them as whole humans? And it's really difficult to do. But you know, that's—if I could rebuild a culture, that's what I would want it to be built around.

STEVEN ROBINOW: You are rebuilding a culture. You're building a culture where if you want students to care, show them you care first.

BILL DAVIS: Absolutely, yeah.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Show them you care, and then they will. Yeah, absolutely. So that's amazing. We're going to have to have more talk in the future about other research projects of yours. That's fascinating. Thanks for sharing your research today and these data. The impacts are amazing, the fact that the changes were very minor. It's amazing.

So I'd like to spend the rest of our time today talking about your students, you, your motivation, and perhaps a few interesting stories. Again, as I think I said to you earlier, if I ask you a question you don't want to answer, just go ahead and pass. We'll move on.

But I thought actually we'd start with tech equity—something that campuses have been dealing with. How do you and your university ensure that all students have access to technology, particularly in this past year? That's been an issue for many of your students that they haven't had access to the technology that they've needed to really even participate. How has WSU dealt with that?

BILL DAVIS: It's interesting that you bring this up. And I'm going to kind of digress a little bit and then come back to it, and I'll talk a little bit about what we did. But if you look back over the course of the last year and a half especially, I was really struck. There was a report that I just saw from the state of Washington that really talked about this issue in the K through 12 system.

I think we're at a point where we have to understand that these tech platforms and this technology that we use, this is not optional. This really is moving towards a public utility. It's essential for the work that we do and the way that we keep connected with each other. And so I'm hoping that we can not lose that as we move forward out of the pandemic, and that we can really improve that ability for everyone to have access to this kind of technology.

Gosh, there were heartbreaking stories last year. How do you have stable tech support when you're couch surfing, when you have family members who are fearful that you're going to be COVID positive, and they don't want it in their home. And so you are living on couches week to week. How do we have any kind of stable learning?

So one of the things that we did at WSU was we decided that we would use university resources and CARES Act and some of the earlier legislative monies that came in, and really put some of that aside as a tech support for our students. And so we contracted with a wireless provider in order to be able to send out hot spots to students. We set up IT support in many of our campus parking lots, including campuses across the state.

We had a Chromebook loaner program, where they could request a Chromebook. We would mail that to them at no cost to them. They could have it for the entire year. And then they had a purchase option at the end of the year that was prorated. Unfortunately, we ran out of hot spots and we ran out of Chromebooks pretty fast. [LAUGHS] But we were able to order more, and we were able to serve, I think, most of our students who needed that.

STEVEN ROBINOW: So the demand was significant?

BILL DAVIS: That was what we tried to do, but the inequities were still there. It laid bare all of what we had been hearing and some of what we feared actually [INAUDIBLE] in the social and economic structures of this country was all there to see on display.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Amazing. What a year. OK. Let's move beyond that now. You've spent a good chunk of your career now doing education research and focusing on student learning. I'm wondering if you've thought about how that choice has impacted your life in other ways—maybe not even around the university?

BILL DAVIS: Oh, wow.

STEVEN ROBINOW: I mean, you're out to dinner with friends. You look around the world. Has it changed the lens with which you view so many things?

BILL DAVIS: Yeah, absolutely. I was trying to be succinct [LAUGHS] and come up with just a couple. One of the things that it has helped me do is to better understand K through 12 education.

And what I mean by that is early in my career it was always if K through 12 could just produce better students—if they could just send us students who are ready for college, our jobs—we could educate them and everything would be puppies and rainbows, or visions you have of some sort of utopia.

One of the things that shifted for me was I started to really understand how difficult it really is, and especially as you start to overlay the developmental aspects. That gave me a new perspective. And I think I've become more appreciative of what people in K through 12 do.

And the other thing that it drove me to do is to really look around and say, you know, I don't think I can complain about this because I have a College of Education here on campus. And I can go talk to people. And I can find out what's really happening, and I can become better informed.

Yeah. The other thing that it shifted for me was this lens about equality versus equity, and that equity lens and how important it is to really think about the individual as much as possible, to really—we want to bend things. We want to put things together into groups and into categories. But it really reminds me that it's the individual story that matters the most sometimes, even in a class of 550 students.

And then as I look around in the rest of the world and I start to think about things, I see it differently now. I see that equity lens, and I start to really think about maybe there is a good reason why this is needed for this individual, but maybe it's not needed for other people.

I don't think equality is really the answer to a lot of these problems that we have. I think it really is about equity, and taking that sort of granular approach, and thinking about it holistically at the individual level.

STEVEN ROBINOW: I just want to make sure everybody understands the difference between equity and equality there. Equality is that a group gets the same resources, right? That's the idea. As a group, everybody gets the same resources versus equity, which is what you've been speaking to, which is more individualized—that each student gets what they need because everybody has different needs. You want everybody to learn, and whatever they need to get there is what we want. We want to help them get to that point.

BILL DAVIS: Absolutely. And the other thing that I learned in the classroom through this was what's often good for one student or one small group of students is often good for other—all of the students. I'll give you an example.

I know faculty sometimes feel frustrated by things like accommodations and the accommodations process for students who have learning needs. And I would oftentimes take those accommodations, and I would say, well, if this is good for one student, why don't I do it for all of them? So if one student needs to have flexible attendance, is there a way that I can build that in for all of my students because life happens.

If I'm recording the lectures for one student so that they can keep up with it because they're ill or something else is happening, why am I not doing that for all of my students? Why can't some of this really become about equity for all?

STEVEN ROBINOW: Maybe just a few more, maybe more fun questions? Or maybe the first one is not so much fun. What's been your greatest classroom failure, or maybe your most disappointing moment in a classroom?

BILL DAVIS: Boy.

STEVEN ROBINOW: It can be a funny story. It doesn't have to be too serious.

BILL DAVIS: No, no, no. I—you know, there's sort of a lot of small moments, and then there's a lot of sort of those big moments. The one that stuck with me and has motivated me the most was the first semester I taught my large-enrollment biology class, I looked at the data at the end of the semester, and I realized that my failure and withdrawal rate was more than 30%.

And when I looked at the equity gaps and realized what they were, that was pretty devastating. That was a failure, and it was malpractice, I mean, as I look in the mirror. And that semester probably motivated me as much as anything in my life to really think about how I come into the classroom, what my role is, and how do I help students be their best? So that was one of those inflection points of transformation.

STEVEN ROBINOW: I think it's really interesting what you said. And I think it's a hard thing to say to faculty. I've been an administrator. You're an administrator. But the notion of getting faculty to personalize their student performance—it's our job to educate these students. That's our job. And when we fail those—when we give them failing grades, who's failed here? I mean, they failed, but we've also failed them. It's owning your student performance. You can't help everybody, but certainly more than many of us do.

BILL DAVIS: As time went on in that realm, Steve, I think I became more balanced in the way that I looked at things. And what I realized was that, yes, I had an important role to play. And while I would love for—I always wanted to have that zero semester. I would love to have had a semester where everybody passed, that Pollyanna vision.

The pandemic especially really brought it home for me, very starkly, about how much is not in my control when a student walks into my classroom. And that there are parts of the educational experience that, yes, I have direct influence on. Yes, I can choose better pedagogies. I can choose to be student-centered. I can choose the way that I communicate. But even then, not every student is going to benefit from that.

And oftentimes, that's not because of who they are. It's not because of who I am. It's because of the chaos and the swirl of the universe around each one of us. That was a very humbling experience to turn the mirror around and look at myself.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Fascinating. That's great. Last question. What was your sweetest or most poignant moment teaching—maybe the most surprising moment?

BILL DAVIS: Wow. Oh, gosh. Wow. There's two. One of them happened multiple times, and it was to have my students give me an ovation on the last day of class. [LAUGHS] It was amazing. It was—and that happened multiple semesters.

The second one—this was a number of years ago. My daughter had a very serious illness. I was going to have to take a leave of absence. I was trying to figure out how am I going to announce this. Because it's basically—it was the midpoint of the semester. I had spent this time to really build a community, and now I was going to have to step out of it. And I said, you know, I'm just going to be open and transparent.

And so I walked in, and I told my students. I said, you know, so this is the last day that we'll be together this semester because my daughter has this illness. And I'm going to go on ahead and take this journey with her. And I opened up with them about what that meant.

I had students that came up to me weeks later who said, I had that situation, or my sibling had that situation, or I know other people who have it. To hear you talk about it, and to be open about it, and be able to just be OK with it and be there helped me understand, or helped me—motivated me to do something different, or inspired me in some way.

Those moments were incredible. I never felt so supported by my students, which was an interesting thing. It was not what I expected out of the situation. And it just inspired me about the humanness of what we do—how impacts can happen in such subtle ways that we don't anticipate. And, again, going back to the original part of our conversation, it had nothing to do with the course curriculum. I still have students who ask about my daughter.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Yeah. That's an amazing story.

BILL DAVIS: Yeah. That's pretty special.

STEVEN ROBINOW: You really gave your students an opportunity to show their humanity to you. That's very brave. All right, Bill. Next—we're going to have to come back and talk about institutional change with you and many other things in future discussions.

But for now, I'd like to thank you so much for your time that you spent with us today. Your evidence demonstrating a link between faculty growth mindset and student success is stunning, to say the least. I suspect it may be surprising to many. But what an amazing way to impact the student performance and something that really is so easy to implement, and that you've been able to get rid of the equity gap is game-changing.

In addition to this podcast, our website will have references related to this discussion, including hopefully some sample language from your research if Bill is willing to share. And, again, Bill, thank you. Thank you so much for your time. This has been really just a wonderful time to spend with you.

BILL DAVIS: My pleasure, Steve. It's been fun. Thank you so much for this opportunity.

STEVEN ROBINOW: For more information about Bill Davis, his research and his favorite books and papers, please go to our website, teachingforstudentsuccess.org. Thank you for spending time with us today. I hope you found this discussion interesting and helpful. If you have, please share our podcast and website with your friends.

Thank you for caring about your teaching and your students. Thank you also to the growing army of education researchers out there working to improve the learning experiences and learning environments for all students, with the goal of providing opportunities that help all students succeed—an honorable and important goal.

Those of us at Teaching for Student Success would love your feedback. Please contact us through our website at teachingforstudentsuccess.org. Teaching for Student Success is a production of Teaching for Student Success media. Let's end this podcast with some music by JuliusH. Some of Julius's music can be found on Pixabay.

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