Episode 8b

Part 2: Group Work: Problems, Frequency, and Success of Mediation with Peggy Brickman

[MUSIC PLAYING] STEVEN ROBINOW: This is Teaching for Student Success. I'm Steven Robinow. Welcome to part 2 of my conversation with Peggy Brickman about group work. In part 1 of this episode, we discussed her 2018 paper entitled "When Group Work Doesn't Work: Insights From Students." In this paper, Peggy and co-author Eunice Chang discuss their research on group work identifying a number of problems concerning standard practices that one might implement in courses.

In part 2, we discuss her follow-up paper, "What to Expect With Group Work: Problems, Frequency, and Success of Mediation." This paper provides some quantitative data on the percentages of groups that have problems and discusses the successes and failures of mediation. Stick around for a fascinating look into the details of group work. I'm going to begin at the tail end of part 1. Here we go.

You do group work in a class of 300?

PEGGY BRICKMAN: I do. Absolutely. And 280 people, mm-hmm.

STEVEN ROBINOW: And you see gains from group work?

PEGGY BRICKMAN: Yep.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Whatever the reason, whether it's because you change assessments in addition to group—there's so many factors. But at the end of the day, this structure has improved your student performance in your course?

PEGGY BRICKMAN: Yes.

STEVEN ROBINOW: In spite of all the problems?

PEGGY BRICKMAN: Yeah, which is why I keep doing it even though I know it's going to be a hassle.

STEVEN ROBINOW: OK. All right, let's move on to paper 2, then, "What to Expect With Group Work." This is a warning for somebody who's about to embark on group work. So if you're thinking about group work, you want to read this paper. The subtitle is "Problems, Frequency, and Success of Mediation." So talk about what you did—again, set it up and talk about how you set it up for the students, please.

PEGGY BRICKMAN: OK, so going forward, knowing that I no longer want to let students self-select, I also do not want to let students do peer evaluations of each other. And I wanted to know if I do it this way, how many problems should I anticipate having in a semester? Because when we did the other study, we didn't really keep track of the rate that we had problems. It was more of this like, oh, I'm getting an onslaught at the end of the semester.

So I recruited my colleague Jill, who also teaches these huge classes, and she basically was hired just a few years ago. And so she was new to campus and she'd never taught nonmajors before. And so she was going to just take my course and run with it. So we're basically teaching the same course. Same slides, same reading, same everything.

So I'm like, OK, how are you liking it, Jill? And she's like, well, I really like it, but I get these group problems. I get issues and I don't know what to do with them. What should I do? I don't know either. So we decided, let's just collect some data for a year. You have three sections, I have three sections, we have between us just hundreds and hundreds of groups. And so we can keep track of how frequently problems occur, what kind of problems they have.

And then also, there were some instruments that you can use—people who are listening have ever gone to the CATME, this is a site that was created—tons of NSF funding went into creating groups and also monitoring groups using this software. And they have so many publications. And many of them deal with creating instruments to identify group conflict, group satisfaction. And so we were like, OK, so maybe we should start using these as indicators of group problems.

So that was our plan. We all agreed that we were going to teach using groups. We're going to randomly sort students into groups in the first week and then we were going to do a midsemester check-in where we gave some of these survey items that asked about group satisfaction and also any kind of conflict.

STEVEN ROBINOW: There is a link to the CATME website on our web page. So randomly assorted again.

PEGGY BRICKMAN: Totally random, totally random. And then we also said, well, what if we just like—it's such a hassle to make a seven-item assessment that you give to students. And honestly, when I gave it in the past, it just didn't help me identify group problems. So I said, what if we look in the literature and we find all the examples of potential problems that groups have from—mostly social loafing.

So this idea that the more people you have, the more likely that one or two of those individuals in the group will just not do their fair share, because who will know? The studies were done in the 1920s with tug of war. So a tug of war works when you have three people on each side. But once you have six people on each side, they found that it was much more common that some of the people wouldn't be pulling as hard. Because how would you know who wasn't pulling?

And there's no real benefit. It's not like people are going to recognize that you were the reason that they won the tug of war because of your massive strength. So we came up with a list of potential reasons why students might not be participating, and we just made one question as part of the survey. Are you having trouble with one of your group members, yes or no?

And then if yes—we didn't even ask who the group member was. We just said, which of these best describe the problems that you're having? So they're not attending, they're not putting in adequate effort. Maybe they're actually being rude or unhelpful.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Right.

PEGGY BRICKMAN: So we did this at the midpoint of the semester and then we decided to determine what exactly was going on. So any group that through either mechanism, either they answered on the satisfaction questions that they were dissatisfied or they had conflict or if they just said any member of the group—there's groups of four—just said, yes, I'm having a problem with a member of my group.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Mm-hmm.

PEGGY BRICKMAN: We then emailed all the individuals in the group, asked to have a meeting with them. And then when we had the meeting, we let them talk through what was the challenge, what were some of the problems. And then we followed up at the end of the semester after we did the mediations and gave all the students in the entire class the same satisfaction and conflict surveys again where we ask them how satisfied are you with your group members?

We went through and identified and said, OK, there's a Sankey diagram—if anyone knows with like a river diagram that we created in the paper that we start with all our groups, and then we said, how many groups had problems, how many groups didn't? And then of the groups that have problems, what happened when we mediated? And then what the outcomes were and compared them.

I worked on this over the summer with Austin Lannen, who is one of our RAU students. Amazing. Incredibly smart and hardworking. I had to go do some summer institutes, so I was gone for three weeks. I literally left him with a book called Statistics Using R by Andy Field. And he read the entire book, learned how to do all the stats, made the Sankey diagrams. I mean, there's no stopping. He's now a middle school teacher in Texas.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Oh.

PEGGY BRICKMAN: He is a gift. Amazing student. So that was the study that we did.

STEVEN ROBINOW: OK, so there were almost 300 groups. And of those 300, 43 reported problems.

PEGGY BRICKMAN: Yeah.

STEVEN ROBINOW: So what is that percentage-wise?

PEGGY BRICKMAN: Less than—I mean, 10? Something a little more than 10? Like 11 or 13. Yeah.

STEVEN ROBINOW: So you can anticipate 11%, 12% of your groups are going to have problems somewhere in that range.

PEGGY BRICKMAN: Mm-hmm.

STEVEN ROBINOW: OK, I've done the math. 43 out of 300 is a little more than 14%. OK, now you got these reported problems, talk about that. So some came from mediation, some didn't.

PEGGY BRICKMAN: Yeah, this is the fascinating thing, because I thought, oh, 43 groups. So you got to contact 164 people.

STEVEN ROBINOW: All right, let's fix the math here. 43 groups of four is 172 people.

PEGGY BRICKMAN: Email them all. And then I had to create cheat sheets for myself about what everybody said about everybody—who are the group members? Who said what? And then I also looked at their group assignments to see if there was some consistency with what they were saying. Like they say, person A did nothing. You're like, well, I just looked at your group assignment, I will say that rather than doing peer evaluations, I started having students write acknowledgments just like a science paper. Basically say who did what in this assignment that you turned in.

So if in the acknowledgments they were like person A did this, this, and this, then I'm like, well, why didn't you report something in the acknowledgments if you're having trouble with them? So I contact the 43 groups and Jill did as well. What we found was that about half of them declined mediation because they said, actually, once we got the email, we had a discussion and we talked through our problems.

And we found out that person A just had a midterm that week and was feeling really behind, but that they would really like to try to make it up on the next assignment and do a little bit more work. So they declined mediation, and then we sort of followed them till the end of the semester and looked at their satisfaction, and they seemed just as satisfied as the groups that never said they had a problem in the first place.

So I'm hoping that people who listen to this will think, oh, that's not so bad. All I have to do is send an email to students who are indicating a problem and they may be able to solve it themselves.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Right. Interesting. There's another episode with Bill Davis that talks about emailing students, and it's—sometimes it's just communication, right? Communication is good. Anyway, sorry, go ahead.

PEGGY BRICKMAN: That's awesome. So then there were the ones that declined—that underwent mediation.

STEVEN ROBINOW: That's a big sigh.

PEGGY BRICKMAN: That's a sigh, but it was—OK, so that was 22 groups. Twenty-two groups. Some of them were very sad because when the students would come to the office for mediation, the student who they were reporting, for example, wasn't doing very much work would then admit that they had been deeply sick the entire semester.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Oh.

PEGGY BRICKMAN: And the other students are just horrified—like mortified.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Right.

PEGGY BRICKMAN: Because they're like, oh, I didn't know. Like I feel horrible now. Like why didn't you tell us? Well, I thought I would be able to catch up, I thought it would be OK. So it did make me realize, I guess like Bill, sometimes they just don't communicate and aren't comfortable communicating with each other. And we think, oh, they got phones, they're all texting each other right and left. No. Sometimes they're like just too freaked out, I guess, to communicate with each other.

STEVEN ROBINOW: And it's a random group. They're developing their relationships through the course itself.

PEGGY BRICKMAN: Yeah. They don't really know each other very well. Some of them we would have an absentee member that just failed. Like they just dropped out and sometimes that happens, and that's fine, and then the group was like, well, I think we're fine now that that person is gone. So then the majority of the groups that underwent mediation ended up with a satisfactory outcome. They felt that the end of the semester they were pretty happy with the way their groups went.

We definitely had a lot of groups that didn't change. They opted to just work it out even after mediation and it didn't go well, and they were unhappy at the end of the semester. When we followed up with an email and asked them, they said, yeah, the other group member said they were going to start doing whatever, but it didn't work. They didn't follow through.

Retroactively looking at it, I wish we had just dissolved the group, which is what I did. In two of the cases I just said no, this is too much. I would end the mediations by saying, OK, we've all talked about what a good group member would do and made these decisions.

Do all of you feel like you could go forward from this day starting fresh? No hard feelings about anything that happened in the past, do you feel like you could trust each other enough to work together? And sometimes they were just like, no, I don't feel like I would trust that person. I'm not going to assign them duties, I wouldn't feel comfortable with it. But that was two.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Two out of 300. Randomly assigned.

PEGGY BRICKMAN: Yeah, yeah. So now, moving forward, I definitely, anytime I use groups, I just ask them that simple question. I will say that we looked at data from the surveys, the satisfaction and the conflict, and they're just not good at identifying real problems. Students would be loath to give someone a 2. But they're perfectly fine saying like, yeah, there's problems. There's these kinds of problems. But this idea of like quantifying it, it just really didn't work.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Which is no surprise. Group work is hard. It requires an expert to determine the dynamics of a group and how it's going. There are professionals who do this. So to take students who are novices, one, in the field you're trying to work with them on and expect them to be able to accurately assess the level of pain in their group is—yeah, that's not a reasonable thing to ask, so they can't do it well is no real surprise.

PEGGY BRICKMAN: And I will say, I've had these ongoing debates with myself and with other researchers who work on group work about—they call it homophily, which is birds of a feather flock together. So that students will very often—when they choose a group, will choose individuals that they feel comfortable with externally. Like they look at them and they're like, you look like me, you're the same ethnicity, race, gender.

And so in my campus, this idea of the randomization, I was really worried that we would end up with one black student with three white students and whether they would feel comfortable and included in the group. And I will say that right now, it's about 50/50. I mean, I've had students who would come to my office hours, one black student in an all-white group, and say, I would never have sat with these people. I would never have been friends with them, but they're great. And we study together, and it's just like made me realize that UGA is a different place than I thought it was. Fantastic.

And then I've had other students who say, I'm having a real problem with my group, and then I go and sit there and I'm like, OK. The one black student is basically being excluded from lots of the outside of class activities and the discussions that are happening in class.

And so I feel like in all those cases, it has been alerted—they've alerted me and said I have a problem in my group. And I've said, OK. Sometimes I've had one woman with three men and she said, I don't feel comfortable with them. Have had discussions with them and I'm like, let's just move the group, let's just rearrange these groups.

But I do think that—I use it as an opportunity. For example, in both of those cases, I sat with the group during class and watched what was happening. And then I asked the one student who felt excluded, do you want to tell them how you feel about what's going on with the group? And they said yes. And then I said, do you want me to be there? Yes. And then I've sat down and they've said, I can't do it. And then the student got up and left.

And in the case of the woman with the three men, I said, yeah, she's decided she would rather work with another team, someone that she doesn't feel excluded by, and they were like, we weren't trying to exclude her. And I said, well, I mean, aren't y'all all engineers? Really good at math and science? Doing really well on the test and she's not. And so when the group starts to discuss things, you're not listening to what she's saying, she doesn't feel comfortable because you're getting it so fast and you're not taking a chance to find out what she might know, and it's just making her feel worse about the course.

And they were like, I didn't mean it. We didn't mean it. I'm like, I know, I know, but these are the kinds of things, when you're in a group—in this case, two of them were engineers, I was like, I know you all work together as groups. Maybe this is an opportunity to start thinking about how you're interacting with all the students in your life. It isn't necessarily the most important thing that you finish first. Maybe there's some interaction skills that you could have picked up on from working with this other student that now you haven't had the opportunity for.

STEVEN ROBINOW: OK, so that makes me think of a lot of things. One of them is—so there's a couple of ways you could handle this in the course. You could just continue doing what you're doing and handle individual cases as they arise knowing that—let's take your African-American students, that if they're the sole person in the group that half of those groups are going to be problematic, you could set up the situation so that there's never fewer than two female in a group or two minoritized students in a group so that they're never a minority.

You could completely segregate the class, which, of course, is the whole point of randomizing, you want to get away from that. How have you chosen to move forward with that decision? Or that choice?

PEGGY BRICKMAN: This is what I started realizing, was that I can ask students what their racial group is and I can group them that way, but in the end, what someone looks like on the outside isn't necessarily telling you a lot about their personality. And so instead I've opted to have them spend more time talking to each other about what their personalities are like. Like what kind of major do you have? What things are you interested in?

And try to see each other as people. I don't know, by looking at someone's skin color, what their experiences in life had been. And so instead, I've been opting to have them spend more time in class sharing about their personalities and what things interest them. So they do a getting-to-know-you assignment where they talk about like what's their favorite book or movie and what's the kinds of things they did this weekend.

If I do have a report of a problem—for example, I had a group with one black student, three white students, and they had indicated that the black student had not contributed at all to their group assignment. And so I emailed them, and the black student responded by, yes, I did contribute, and the reason I didn't contribute a lot was because they had a meeting and did not invite me.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Ooh.

PEGGY BRICKMAN: So I was like, OK, we're going to meet after class as a group. So I said, could y'all just stay after class just for a minute or two so we can talk about what's going on with your group? Oh yeah, sure. So I said, well OK, so explain to me what's going on. So the black student said, I wanted to contribute, but they had their meeting without me. And they said, well you didn't come to the meeting. She said, I told you I have class at 2:00, so I can't be at the meeting at 2:00.

So I said, OK, this is what we're going to do. You all are going to send the assignment to the student who didn't get to participate, and now she's going to put her work in and then I will regrade it. And you're going to make sure that next time when you meet, all the members of your group can meet together at the same time so that this doesn't happen going forward.

And then of course, I asked all of them, I was like, do you want to continue working together? Because I've got groups that had students who withdrew and they'd love to have a hard-working group member. And they were like, oh no. No, no. No. I felt like saying to them, do you not see what I see? It was like subconscious that they had excluded her and they never really thought, oh, what do you mean? It's like she told you, you didn't listen to her. Like you were looking for what you thought you would see, which is she's not a hardworking student, she's not one of you.

So I felt like that was kind of a learning moment for them. Now does it happen all the time? No. No it doesn't. Like I said, half the time. But for me, one of my major reasons of using groups is to soften the edges between our white students and our nonwhite students in a classroom like mine and where they get to see different perspectives. It falls on me to help mediate in these situations and to observe more during class when I see a student who's maybe not being included to go over and check on them and find out what's going on.

STEVEN ROBINOW: So how did that group work together after that point?

PEGGY BRICKMAN: Fine.

STEVEN ROBINOW: It improved?

PEGGY BRICKMAN: Yeah, yeah.

STEVEN ROBINOW: So then everybody had a much better experience in that group?

PEGGY BRICKMAN: So—I mean, I think these are all good things. I definitely don't want anyone to have a really negative experience in class as a result of me asking them to be in a group. I've definitely had students who were suffering from like social anxiety, who are really struggling with some real challenging mental health issues. But they've come and told me and said, maybe I shouldn't have signed up for a class of 300 people where I knew I'd have to interact with people. And I've said, OK, let's try to figure out how to make this work for you.

And in all cases, I always say like, you don't have to work with a group. No, no. I want to be with a group. I don't want to be the person who's just up on the side all by themselves. There's very few students that want to do that. I will let them, but almost all of them say, no, I enjoy having someone I know in class that I can talk to.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Interesting. So one of the interventions you use is to socialize the students, force them to socialize with each other and learn about each other, which is great. I was wondering if there are videos available that are demonstration videos. Maybe that's the wrong term.

Situational videos that a class that is doing group work should watch, and it's like, hey, let's watch this video and talk about what you see is happening as a way to sensitize students to these situations. You could set up that situation and show it, and of course it could be a cartoon. It doesn't have to be—they don't have to look like us. It could be any scenario you could imagine.

PEGGY BRICKMAN: Yeah. I'm thinking Hal White—at the University of Delaware, they got acting students to act out the kinds of scenarios that you would see in project-based learning classes where the students are meeting outside of class, and those are great and they definitely go through it. Mine would have to be different because in his videos, there's a mediator, like a student peer instructor who's part of the group. And a lot of those videos were developed to help the peer instructors, they weren't necessarily developed for the students themselves.

I also know that there's a great project—it's a chemistry group and I'm blanking on the name of it—who has developed some reflective tools that students can use. And we have started using them in some of the mobile summer institutes for the groups there to just self-reflect on what does it mean to be a good group member?

I will often give those to colleagues who ask me for like an evaluation. I'm like, this is better because kind of like a self-evaluation where you think about what it means to be in a group. The other thing that we started really doing was describing what it meant to have a certain role. So in the first paper with Eunice, we use the pogo roles, which are like, you're the facilitator, you're the recorder, you're the spokesperson. That just did not work in our situation.

But instead, we would take an assignment and break it into four pieces. So they do a genetic testing assignment. One person's responsibility is to research the genetic tests. The other person is to look at resources that help you with the sort of ethics of deciding if you should get a test. Each one of the members has a sort of defined role, and then they bring their information together and they work during a class period to consolidate it.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Oh.

PEGGY BRICKMAN: That is super helpful to think about giving them more assigned duties rather than just read my mind what it means to be a facilitator. It's like, I studied for years to learn how to facilitate groups and I still struggle with it. So it's not like you're just going to be able to do it as an undergrad.

STEVEN ROBINOW: That's interesting. So the traditional roles that people still use in groups—you be the recorder, you be the—you've thrown that out and you've jigsawed in the event.

PEGGY BRICKMAN: Yeah.

STEVEN ROBINOW: So you give each a task. You do task A, you do task B, you do task—so all the A's could get together and work collaboratively and do it and then come back to their groups and report out and discuss. And by doing so, you've gotten them—while they're each working individually on their own task, which is interesting, because I'll come back to something you say in your first talk about in your first paper, but then they come back collaboratively to teach each other what they've learned and then to assemble the final document for reporting out.

PEGGY BRICKMAN: Right.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Because early on—and I'm pretty sure this has to be in the first paper, in groups, students don't work collaboratively. You think they're going to work together, but they're not. Each person is doing their own bit, sort of jigsawing it on their own, but the failure there is they slap it together instead of work collaboratively to generate a document that makes sense.

PEGGY BRICKMAN: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I get it from their perspective. We do the same thing as faculty. We have some job, and the ideal would be for us to divvy up the workload. Why am I reading all 100? Let's the two of us read 50 of them and then the other two read the other 50 and then we'll compare notes with each other, and just like in a good committee, you need a leader who is willing to say, like these are the critical components that I want everybody to do, but let's not repeat the same process, all of us doing exactly the same thing.

Instead, let's see if we can't like divvy it up a little bit and then try to see how we can fit it together. Or just even do parts and then have the experience—like for example, with the genetic testing, we have four different scenarios. And then you have to say like which of the genetic tests would work and which is the cheapest. And so they all—each one, each member of the group has one part, and then they come back together and they're like, yeah, I agree; yes, I agree; no, I don't understand. Like, what are you saying? How come that one doesn't work? And they check each other.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Mm-hmm. Nice, interesting. OK. So let's summarize. The next time you teach these large enrollment nonmajor courses, how will you manage them?

PEGGY BRICKMAN: I will place them in groups randomly at the beginning of the semester. I will allow them to have time to meet each other. We do like a who are you? What kinds of things do you do? We usually start off with some easier group projects where they just brainstorm ideas and everybody brings in a source and they kind of summarize what they've found in their sources.

I will do a midsemester check-in, maybe one-third through the semester where they indicate if there's problems. Single question, is there a problem? What's going on? And then I will mediate with those groups that indicate they have a problem. And I am going to tell those groups that most of the time they can solve it on their own, which I'm totally fine with, if that's what they want to do.

But that when there are problems that they feel like they can't solve on their own, they need to come and talk to me about it and I will give them the options of moving to another group or they could stay together, but that students that moved to new groups are often a lot happier. Even your very poor-performing students, they sometimes have gotten—

For example, I had a student who was—he's like, it's all my—it's all me. I've been a terrible group member. Like I have not participated at all. I was having some challenges in my other classes. I just—and I said, OK, but I'll put you in a new group, but I really can't do that unless you are willing to start working. No, I'm willing. I'm totally willing. All right, I'm going to put you right up front so I can see what's going on. I'm going to supervise, and it worked fine.

STEVEN ROBINOW: And what happens to the group that's gone from four to three?

PEGGY BRICKMAN: Usually I will absolutely ask them like, OK, so now y'all are less members. I can add another person or I can put you guys in different groups. Like I can completely dissolve you. And most of the time the comfort thing, they're like, nah, let's stay. No, we love each other. And sometimes they'll say, I don't want another person because the unknown quantity, it might just be better for us.

And most of our projects are designed to be much better if you have four members but still doable with three. If you get down to two, I'm like, nah. No, y'all. Come on. This is not fair. You're not going to be able to succeed. But I'm still researching it. The grad student I'm working with right now, [? Saikat ?] Samudra, is looking into labs and how students choose groups in labs.

And the eternal question of, should I just make the groups? Does it make a difference if I let them choose their own members or if I sort them into different groups in terms of this comfort level? And finally, how many of these groups in labs have real problems where they need to be intervened and really recommendations to lab instructors about what they should do in lab groups?

Because when I would go around and talk to people, they'd say, I don't want to use groups in my class. I'm like, well, do you use it in lab? Well of course, we have to. We only have three spectrophotometers, so they have to be in groups. So I'm like, OK, we need to do a little bit more work trying to figure out how do we advise teaching assistants and lab instructors for their groups.

STEVEN ROBINOW: So you're really addressing problems in group work that, as you say in your papers, that are really understudied, these issues of what are the problems, not what works.

PEGGY BRICKMAN: Yeah. It's like we're at like 3.0. Like 1.0 is like, oh, does group work work? Yes it does. OK, then 2.0 is like, oh, whoopsie, sometimes it doesn't work. And then 3.0 is like, all right, what are we supposed to do to actually get it to work and how do we mediate when it's not working so that we can actually help instructors make it work?

STEVEN ROBINOW: Right. And you're doing this in large classes. And the initial work undoubtedly is in small courses, small class sizes, and the game changes when you scale up. It just creates a new problem.

PEGGY BRICKMAN: Yeah.

STEVEN ROBINOW: All right, that's cool. Thank you, Peggy. I think it's time to move on to—do you have a few minutes?

PEGGY BRICKMAN: Sure.

STEVEN ROBINOW: OK. Time to move on maybe to something a little more fun. Let me see what I've got planned for us. So let's spend the rest of the time talking about you, your students' motivation, and maybe more importantly, some interesting stories.

PEGGY BRICKMAN: OK.

STEVEN ROBINOW: So how has your work in group work—in this research in group work—or just your education research work, how has that impacted how you view and interact with the world outside of academia? I don't want to hear about classes, I don't want to hear about campus. I want to hear about when you're at the market or you're out to dinner, which, of course, none of us has been for a while, or you're on the bus—

PEGGY BRICKMAN: OK, so I do a lot of yoga, and it has made me realize the importance of community. I've taken yoga classes where you walk in, you don't know anybody, you just start doing it. Versus like creating those connections, the social part where you actually talk to people, share something about yourself, creating that vulnerability and also connection that's so important.

And so I think that's where I would take the benefits of knowing someone in your class and taking that outside. And people will often work together. They'll be outside of work and in the market or talking to somebody, and you don't realize that it's actually really important to open yourself up a little bit and tell someone your name, ask about them.

And these things that make class more enjoyable can actually make your world more enjoyable, too. Like this isolation—and especially with COVID where you're not talking to anybody and you just start realizing like, whoo, this world sucks if you're all alone in your house. So the beauty that's out there. It does require you to make a connection and share a little bit more about yourself than maybe you used to be comfortable with with strangers on the street or at your yoga class or the gym.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Right. Beautiful. I like that. That's really nice. What's your favorite story to tell about teaching? Do you have a favorite story you like to tell?

PEGGY BRICKMAN: Oh, favorite story. I mean, there's so many. What I like to do is to just—like I was in the hallway today with one of my colleagues who had just had fourth test, everyone's miserable, they were emailing them. And so what I shared with him were the same kinds of suggestions I'd gotten from friends of mine who also teach.

One is my very best friend here in town. I said, I got this really nasty email from a student one time, just like venting and horrible. And she said, well I'm Italian, and so I always tell my students, you need to come into my office. And she said—I say, I will not answer this. You come to my office.

They come to her office, and then she says she prints out the email and she gives it to them and says, please read this to me. And then they can't because there's this anonymity, like a Tweet or Facebook or something. You just say something nasty. And then she very carefully tells them what it means to be a responsible adult, and if you have problems with people, you deal with them face-to-face. You don't just send somebody a nasty email.

I also told him that Kelly Hogan, who's a fantastic instructor at UMC, told me when I was feeling down, oh, I always email the top 20 students in class and I have lunch with them. Or I just grab a coffee. I just invite them. Because after you've given a test, you hear a lot of griping, but you never ask those, they don't gripe. And she said it's nice because you can tell them like, I want to take you out for coffee, you did fantastic, and I'd love to hear how you're succeeding in this class. Like what are the things that are helping you? Like let me know that.

And she said, and I always feel like a light bulb inside afterwards of like, this is why I teach. I want to know why I'm not reaching students, but I also want to know why I am reaching students, and otherwise you just think like, oh, wow, I don't know what's happening. So the stories I remember after so many years in so many—like literally, tens of thousands of students, are the ones where my colleague says, oh, this horrible thing happened, I don't know what to do, and learn from that.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Which leads into my last question. Do you have a story about a transformational moment for you? A moment that transformed your teaching or your views on teaching or your views on your students?

PEGGY BRICKMAN: So I've always struggled with this—when you're teaching nonmajors, to get them to understand the significance of what they're learning, that it really is relevant to them. And I remember when we went to the summer institute, Robin Wright read that passage about the guy's daughter who's dying of cystic fibrosis, and then she does the entire unit on cystic fibrosis. And everybody in the room was crying.

So I thought, that's interesting. I don't know if I want to try that because I don't think I could have read it, but I've often thought, well, we could use some videos. So for example, we have a video that we use of Hank Gathers who died of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy in the '80s. And it is a genetic disease that they can now test for, but it can be debilitating for athletes. And so it's one of these sort of ethical issues about, should we have genetic testing for athletes?

And so it's a 30 for 30 ESPN video, and they interview his brother. And they literally show the footage of him dying on the basketball court. It's really moving, and also, it's a really common genetic disease. And so a few years after doing it—I mean, it gets the students really discussing. We had a student who came and said, my father had HCM. That freaked me out so bad, I don't want to come back to class. That, you're like, ah!

So it ripped up me and Zach, my co-instructor, and we just felt absolutely horrible. And so we turned and asked the student like, what would have helped? Do you think another example? Because we were thinking, well, get another example, and then it's breast cancer, and someone else's parent died of that.

And so their answer was, I'd just like to maybe hear a little bit of a trigger warning. And we came back and said, like the whole unit is about the kinds of genetic tests and the fact that not everybody's going to die. If you have this allele, it's totally fine. If you have another allele, it's really problematic.

And so knowledge is power. Just thinking to yourself, I'm terrified, I can't move on, it's like, no. Because genetic testing would actually be super-beneficial. You might find that you have a relatively harmless allele that doesn't cause many serious problems. And so it has made me very conscious that by engaging them emotionally, you run the risk of exposing someone's vulnerability, and it's important to kind of give them a warning and to talk about why you're doing it. Like it's not just voyeurism.

There's actually going to be some result and to warn them ahead of time, especially if you're going to—it was mostly with videos, because they're very impactful. You actually see a person who's going through a challenge and maybe weeping or just like incredible vulnerability.

STEVEN ROBINOW: So that's interesting. So yeah, so how do you—so you triggered this student unintentionally.

PEGGY BRICKMAN: Yeah.

STEVEN ROBINOW: And did the student ever come back or did the student drop the class and that was it?

PEGGY BRICKMAN: No, no. Continued throughout the semester. But we just—it gives you that leaden feeling in your stomach. You don't—you're like, I did not mean to hurt someone. I feel terrible about that. And it just sticks with you. You're saying like, what kinds of things stick with you and change you forever, and it's things like that where you're like, wow, I mean, I really hurt someone. And that was not my intention.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Right, right. Yeah. I was once lecturing on connective tissue stuff and you think is boring as hell, but it's fascinating stuff. And I talked about a condition called Ehlers-Danlos, connective tissue disorder. And after class a young woman came up and told me she had it. And we talked about it. It was very interesting, but not triggering.

PEGGY BRICKMAN: I mean, I've had the reverse. I've had—well, I guess the inverse—where a student will say, my mom is this, I'm so fascinated by this. I want to learn more and more and more about it. And so I've been like, OK, all right. Just everybody is unique. You can't anticipate what's going to bother them and what kind of a day they're having. And you are—I just think—and biology is really intimate. It's really about your life and what you care about. And so it is definitely powerful. And you have to realize the potential harm that comes with that kind of power.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Perfect. Nicely said. And I think that's a perfect note to end on, Peggy. I want to thank you so much for your time that you spent with me today. I look forward to this new work on group work and how we can help all students have a meaningful experience working collaboratively with others.

In addition to this podcast, our website is going to put a link to your—to Dr. Brickman's papers. We'll put up—we'll put up a reference on jigsawing and—so let's see. We'll put something up on jigsawing on CATME.

PEGGY BRICKMAN: Yeah, for sure.

STEVEN ROBINOW: We might put Hal White's—a link to Hal White's videos up there.

PEGGY BRICKMAN: If they're still up there. They're so classic. I don't know if they're still there.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Well, we'll look and we'll see if we can find and we'll put those up. And again, Peggy, thank you so much for your time. This has been a really fascinating, fun conversation. Really enjoyed it.

PEGGY BRICKMAN: You're welcome. It was really cool.

STEVEN ROBINOW: For more information about Peggy Brickman, her research, and her 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. Please share our podcast and website with your friends. 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 Julius H. Some of Julius's music can be found on Pixabay.

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