Clement and Jeremy discuss scholarly teaching within physics and politics, writing your own teaching material, how to deal with awkward silences, and how to achieve collaborative learning.
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Jeremy Moulton and Clément Moussard from the University of York discuss their use of ideas from Scholars for Teaching and Learning in their own teaching. Clément wrote a book about studying physics and uses a four-step method to help students understand the subject. Jeremy, a politics lecturer, discusses the challenges of teaching in a more qualitative discipline. They both emphasize the importance of creating an optimal learning environment. The conversation was engaging and may lead to future discussions about their scholarly projects. Welcome to the Scholars for Teaching and Learning podcast. This is Phil Martin. We're talking today to Jeremy Moulton and Clément Moussard from the Departments of Politics and Physics respectively here at the University of York. Lucy is joining us shortly. As you might detect, this is a tacked on intro recorded in haste post-fac because we had a few audio issues in the podcast itself. Normal service is about to be imminently resumed. So it gives me a chance to give a brief intro to the conversation itself. And we talked to Jeremy and Clément today about it. Really, the idea was that they were going to talk about their scholarly project, but we ended up talking more about how they use ideas from Scholars for Teaching and Learning in their own teaching, which was equally interesting and just fascinating to hear two different disciplines sit next to each other and discuss teaching and learning and how these ways differ. So hopefully there'll be another chance for them to pop back into the podcast to talk about more about their projects in more detail. But it was a great conversation. I really enjoyed it. And without further delay, I bring you Clément Moussard and Jeremy Milton. So I'm Clément Moussard and I've been in the physics department for about a year and a half, but less than that yet. Before that, I was interested in teaching, like in my graduate studies, for example, I would always spend way more time preparing for courses than doing research, which I think led me where I am. And a few years ago, already four years ago, time flies, I wrote a book about how to study physics for students. And the first idea was to write a PDF essentially to help out students that was tutoring. And then it just grew and grew. And in the end, I just published it on my own through a self-publishing program, Amazon self-publishing program. And so now that I'm a physics teacher, I'm trying to figure out how to try and help students get better at physics and enjoy it as much as I do. Thanks, I'm Jeremy Moulton. I'm a lecturer in the Department of Politics. And I've been with the department for five years now, I think. And yeah, it's really lovely to be here and lovely to have this initiative going on, because I'm very keen on this scholarship of teaching and learning practice and advancing what we do at York. Clement, just a quick question. I mean, you say you wrote a physics book for what age group? I mean, you mentioned kids, is it? Yeah, well, I say kids. It was aimed at first year university students. Okay. It could be read by high school students. I know some high school students have read it. That's fantastic. You're applying it now in what you're doing? To some extent, yeah. To some extent. I mean, do you want me to talk more about what I wrote about? Yeah, for sure. But I mean, one thing that I was wondering if the learning process of these different disciplines is different in itself. So if we're talking about the scholarship of teaching and learning for physics as compared to a more qualitative discipline, are people learning things in a different way? Because we had this paper we were looking at the other day where they talked about physics as being, what was the phrase? Vertical knowledge. Hard pure. Hard pure, things stacked on top of each other, whereas, you know, as opposed to a sort of broad landscape of qualitative ideas. So how, so yeah, what was your, what was your focus in the book? Since I don't know of other topics, it's going to be hard to say that physics is different, right? But what I find when I talk to people, or when I hear people talk about science, that generally they, they think it's a bit more rigorous than it is, or more structured than it is. But in any case, the main structure of the book, the main thesis was that when you think about physics, you have to do it in four steps, essentially, which is the first one, imagine really well, visualize what you're thinking about, what you want to talk about, then write down everything you know about it. So equations that may describe it, initial conditions, that sort of things, and then do the calculations. And once you've done this, wonder, is that right? What does it teach me? Or the question you can ask yourself is, so what? And so if you, if you replace and do the calculation by developing arguments, I feel like that method of thinking can actually apply to many, many different things, right? And funnily enough, actually, one of the feedback I had on my book was, I think last year, someone contacted me to say, I bought that book for my son, and he doesn't like following methods. So he ignored it, but I've read it. So that was the mum of the kid. And she said, since then, I've applied these four steps method to my career, and I've got a promotion. And thanks to the idea, and that was a completely different area of application that I never thought about. That's lovely feedback. Yeah, it was great. When you're writing the book, what ideas kind of underpinned, how much of it was based on literature that you'd read about how people learn and how much of it was just from experience? It was mostly from experience. So the these four step thing is from another book that was written a while ago by a mathematician called How to Solve It. And the idea was that mathematician just talked to a bunch of experts, say, okay, I want to figure out what's the difference in thinking between experts and non experts. And he came up with the four steps process that look a lot like what I've just described. Then I just explained it in a way that would make sense to a physics student. So that I think is the central idea. But then I just read about, you know, methods for studying, but that was based on books or based on the internet and based on experience. So for example, you want to use a recall of a recognition. So for example, trying to write down what you remember and compare it to your notes is much more beneficial for your learning than entering a quiz would be, for example. So that's sort of small methods that I picked up. When was the point in which you decided you were going to write a book? And kind of what were the questions? What was the process that happened before then? Because we're starting often at the level of something's happening in my classroom, what's happening or what's not happening? What was the steps there? And then maybe, Jeremy, we could bring you in as well about sort of what questions you have about the teaching that happens in your context and whether and how they compare. So it was during my PhD and I was tutoring a lot of different students and I just kept hearing myself say the same thing again and again and again. So I thought maybe I should just compile it and see where it leads. And the process of doing that actually led me to reading more and learning more about it all, which was quite fun. And also remember that discussion with my PhD advisors, I asked them, hey, I have this idea, I'd like to write a book. Can I get some of my teaching load replaced by this? And they say, no, no, you're during your PhD, you don't have time, you should do that later when you're done. And I thought to myself, well, that's funny. I've heard these exact words since I'm in high school, like, you've got this exam coming up soon. So you need to focus on that and don't do anything else. And I thought, okay, well, the best time is now. And so that was the process, really. So it was noticing what was happening with students or what wasn't happening. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Jeremy, is that chime with anything when you thought about how best to create the optimal conditions for learning in a politics environment? So take it doesn't have the same, you know, you don't have this situation where you've got to say, right, you need to learn this before you can learn this. And then you can, you know, in physics, it's not quite so linear, but is any of that transferable? It's something I've been thinking about a lot recently, because the new subject benchmark statement for politics and international relations came out this month. And if you read it, it's really remarkable how broad they are in that subject. And obviously, there's something about a subject benchmark statement that needs to be broader, right? Because you're talking about all these different courses that are run at different universities. But if you compare the one for politics and international relations with ones, or say, I've not read the one for physics, but other ones in the humanities and social sciences, the one for politics does seem really broad. And you're right. It's not always necessary about building on the past knowledge. I remember on PG cap, we had a session once on threshold concepts. And I was there with one of my colleagues from politics. And she was saying that, you know, there's definitely threshold concepts in politics and talking about some of them. I don't know what some of them are. I don't think they are. So it can be a bit more nebulous, the study of politics, depending on the institution, but also really just depending on the person that's teaching and researching the field. So yeah, I think it can be hard to bring together kind of one idea of like how to communicate how to teach in politics, it can be something you'll see time and again, this claim, and I think it is in the subject benchmark statement that, you know, personal politics is. And so yeah, I think that could really impact the teaching and learning of this. Yeah. If you talk on your very useful biography, which I've jammed up on before we came in, you talk about learning environment, that's what was really interesting, because often when I think of teaching and learning, I think immediately of a relationship between two practitioners, a student and a facilitator. But I think the environment is key, actually. And I think that's coming. That's sort of our awareness of that has maybe changed as well, post COVID, that we've moved environments, we've seen how that's impacted teaching. So can you tell us a bit about that at York, and what kind of issues you're seeing? And yeah, what work you want to do there? It's something that we've been really conscious of in the Department of Politics, that we want to have this learning community, right? Because we know, I mean, there's subtle literature on this that makes it really clear if students feel that they are part of the community and participating in that community, but also just have the safety net of knowing it's there, they do better in their degrees. And so we're really keen to engender that feeling. And we started to really consciously think about this in September 2019. So right before the pandemic took hold. And so it became particularly trying time to really try and make that happen. But it's something that we still went for. And so, you know, simple things like making sure we were visible on like the department social media. So we took it from, I think it was something like we had like 90 followers on our Instagram to well over 1000 in a really short space of time, just to kind of show the department is active. So it's just kind of in students minds, they know the community is there. And yeah, we're kind of happy with the results of that it is, I think you're right to say the learning environment, learning community is really important part of the learning experience. And it's actually looking at the National Student Survey questions that have gone out this year. Formerly, there used to be two questions up until this year on learning community, about whether students got the opportunity to work with others across their program, and whether they felt part of a community of staff and students. And those questions have gone now, which I think is a real shame, because it does, I think, give real insight into the kind of feeling of a department, which can be really hard to pin down, right, if you're just popping through for an open day, or post off a visit day, you can really get an impression. But that data, I still think was really useful. And it's a shame that's gone. But nonetheless, it's something that I think still really important. Do you have this kind of thing in physics as well? I think it's Yeah, starting we have, I think we have an Instagram now, because the Department of Physics has merged with the engineering department. I think we have to sort of start again, from scratch. But we have, I think, a page called physics is awesome. On Instagram, I don't know much about it. I should say the Instagram is obviously just one part of it that is kind of visible. And we've got, we have a academic admin role, that's learning community officer, someone that's charged with that as an administrative responsibility. And we've got a associate lecturer in the department, who's doing that role. Now, john has me who's come up some great new ideas. He has a weekly coffee morning for students. So it's like in the politics reception. And it's actually really nice to see how many people come down to that. And again, not obviously not everyone's coming in the department of well over 1000 students, it would run out pastries very quickly. But just I think it's a really lovely thing that students know it's there and know if they ever want to meet peers or kind of chat about current events. They know that that's there every I think last time was Wednesday, this time is Tuesday. Coming into that, and because I am quite interested in how biographies feed into this kind of practice as well. And I was wondering what how we felt as learners, did we feel that we belonged and whether any sense of belonging or misfit has informed any of your work or because actually a textbook or a kind of how to guide I see as it's in a way an invitation to a community of practice as well, isn't it? It's making explicit kind of a method, which may be if you've already been around or encultured into that way of thinking is is there for you, but it's not there for all of our learners. And actually, I think recognising that and kind of putting that kind of resource out there is one way of inviting them into a community of practice. So yeah, I was just wondering how your experiences as learners have informed your teaching or your thinking about teaching. I think in a department like mine, the study of politics can seem, you know, as I said, very personal, and that can very immediately mean party politics, which can be divisive, right? And my experience as an undergraduate student was that a lot of people that were on my course were very keen on party politics. And I was not so much interested in party politics as I was, which I'm still doing now, environmental politics, European Union level politics. And there wasn't kind of the niche group that was the Labour students, the Conservative students, the Lib Dem students. And so I think in our department, we've been thinking that the politics society, which is part of our department is something that's not, you know, Labour, Conservative, right or left, to use that old kind of Green Party phrase, not left, not right, but in front. I haven't actually heard that. It's a good one. So yeah, we're keen to make sure it's not a point of division or interest in politics, which I hope is working. I would have said, in my utter ignorance of both subjects that I, when I think of politics, like politics being taught and physics being taught, I can see that politics would be have much more sort of social curriculum, underpinning it with people kind of the exchange of ideas, having these like, you know, crucibles of debate and things like that. I don't I never thought of that with physics, I always kind of thought like, is that a valid component? I haven't either, to be fair. So when I was an undergrad, I would spend a lot of time. So we have these small weekly exams. And we we had a group of three students that we would end up spending a lot of time with. And we would go to these small oral examinations and just answer questions by by a teacher. And that really encouraged this idea that you should often as much as possible be working with some somebody else. But not as a big group, because that's not necessary. Like there's no, I don't think there is much debate in physics. Well, there is at a high level, of course, but as an undergrad, you're more like trying to grapple with a new language, really. And in that language, it's useful to talk it with other people. So spending a lot of time with two, three friends, people you like and just discussing what you understand, trying to explain the perspective that you got, for example, that allows you to link three or four different topics that is really useful. And having your friends being like, Oh, yeah, I understand that. That's a great idea. I don't see it like that, though. And then they explain their things, too. And that's a great way of learning. And in that sense, I'm seeing a common thread with politics, right, getting the opportunity to discuss these things and to make those links and with other people where you might not initially have made that leap, and others can and getting to discuss it, I think is really important. And probably any subjects you get in here, they'll say much the same, right? One of the really important things about the university level education is getting the opportunity to really discuss it and to pick things apart and to take kind of wild logical leaps that might go nowhere, but could go somewhere really exciting. So in the physics department, we have something that I find really useful as tutorials for the first year students. So we have the concept of pastoral supervision, which I think we have across all departments. So I end up having 20 supervisees, and eight of them were first year students. And it was really useful to say, Well, okay, so you four come in my office, and we'll just talk about physics. And we did that every two weeks for the first term. And so the hope is to encourage the students to then keep working together. Now, I don't know how well that is working, because of the randomness of here are four students, maybe they don't click, right. So it's a good idea to try and make them work together. I don't know how to sort of systematize it and make sure that the people actually click and that they keep working together at the end of these tutorials. I know some students keep doing it, but not most of them. When you experienced that, it sounds like that happened quite organically, that you did have that small group tutorial kind of support, and you felt comfortable. Do you think that other questions there about how to make that work? Because you said, you know, how do I make it work? Are there factors that are there that are not just about the bodies in there? Because that sounds to me like an interesting kind of piece of work, actually, to look at how, you know, how and whether small group work does work for learners now. And I guess if we're using that model, we should know that it should work, right. But I mean, that's kind of moving from the scholarly teaching to the scholarship of learning and teaching. It's just kind of how do we know what's going on there when it when it looks good? What's it like? Five questions in there. Choose your favorite. They look comfortable, right? And people are not afraid. So if you have a small group, people should not be afraid of sharing wild ideas or being really naive about things. But how do we as a department or as individual lecturers make this happen is a good question. And do you talk about that with colleagues if they're supposed to talk about that? Right. I talk about it to students. Maybe it's something we have a bit more departmental level discussion with. And it's something that with the semesterization and modularization process that I think might be going better in the future. Right. So we often find that students get into their seminar groups week two and occasionally someone misses a week because of illness or whatever. So by week nine, they've maybe had eight sessions together, maybe, if they've all been there the whole time. And then they're really getting to know each other and work together. And then the term's over. And by next time, they're going to be put into new groups because of timetabling issues. So stretching the term into a semester, hopefully, is going to engender that feeling a little bit more of being in that small group consistently and taking a module fully through to the end together. So I'm hoping come September, we're actually going to see a lot better experience of this kind of small group teaching, really paying dividends. How do you guys both handle things like, presumably, there's obviously in physics, you've got the, let's say you've got to get the principles of Newtonian physics, and there are parts of politics where you just got to say to students, right, guys, this is just stuff that you've got to internalize, you need to absorb this. And before we get to the really juicy discussions and stuff like that, you need to sit down hitting the books. How do you get what do you think is the best way of delivering that? So you got lectures, which people seem to be wavering over, I think, during COVID, they were just like, well, you know, why don't we just flip our lectures, and then lectures now coming back and people see value to getting people in a room and doing a bit of chalk and talk. How do you guys deliver your content? And what's the balance of all these different modes? I'm a big defender of the lecture format. And I've actually done some research in our department to get students views on this, because as we're going through the modularization, semesterization process, there was a discussion of, you know, should we have recorded lectures online that we refresh occasionally, but put more time into our seminars. And the feedback we got from students in focus groups around the department was 100% keep lectures with points that you know, I didn't think about the mental health benefits of getting together, even if you're not participating conversation, but knowing you have peers around you to participate in that conversation is really useful. I think on the front of the conversation, I wanted to know. I mean, that was a big thing, because you came under a lot of fire with principles of flip learning. And you had like, well, you know, people don't learn by just passively receiving stuff. I think I've been to some, I think all of us have been some really useful lectures. And it would be there is something there that's worth keeping. But I'm sorry, I've remembered your question now. So just escaping quickly about, you know, the concepts you have to learn, and how you get that to stick. I think, again, this might be something that's common in physics in that I teach a first year module called what is politics. And a lot of it is these are kind of the building blocks or kind of key concepts that you'd want to know. So something like Marxism, that kind of a name, everyone hears, and you want to know how to apply it feminism, elitism, principles of policymaking, like nudge. And some of it might be a bit dry at the beginning. But I do think case studies, you know, showing this is how it may or may not work in the real world provides that hook that draws students in, and kind of making sure it's not just conceptual, and that you are providing cases that kind of spark interest and asking students to go, this is one case. Are there any other ones that you're thinking of right now and creating that hook? And yeah, I do think the addition of cases is often what can make, because you've always you've got people in a room, it will be conceptual, and you've got people that will be very practical. And you want to kind of bring both along for the ride. So I think you've got to kind of cater to both. But yeah, it's the same in physics. Well, yeah, there's about the lecture, I think there's no one way to lecture, right? You can do things in very different ways. And one of the things I've been trying with quite a lot of success in the master's level was to make a lecture that's actually also an exercise class. So I think the benefit of the lecture is, you develop an argument, and they see you develop an argument over a thread of many lectures, and they see how it builds on each other. And that's great. But every time there was, well, not every time, but most of the time, there was a small calculation that was doable, but that needed a bit of thinking, I just say, Well, it's your turn now. And then I would just wait for five minutes and walk across the room and look at how the students are dealing with it. And that worked because there were 15 students in the class, right? So I tried to apply something similar in second year, where this time, I asked simpler exercises, but it was about numerical values, I was teaching about planets. And I said, Okay, can you calculate, for example, the density of this planet to tell me what it means for, is it a gas planet, is it a rocky planet, whatever. And that didn't work as well, because one student ended up giving the answer, and all the others would wait. And I think the difference was the size of the class, I couldn't just walk and talk to the students about what they were doing. So next year, I'm going to start teaching in first year, and then I'm going to have 200 students in front of me. And I'm still wondering how I can include that practice aspect. And the reason I care about the practice aspect is because I know that a lot of students come to the lectures and do not do anything else at home. And it's hard to encourage them to, and especially in the first year, they have many other things to deal with, like it's the first time they live on their own. So they have to, you know, plan their budget, cook their own food, and etc. And they don't want to work at home. So I'm just trying to make sure that for those who don't, they still have the minimum education that they need. And practice is a fundamental aspect of that. Feedback is a fundamental aspect of that. And I found that feedback, maybe you don't necessarily need to wait until, you know, they have done an exam and you give them feedback, maybe you can just tell them, okay, try this out, then wait, and then give the answer. That's one form of feedback that's fairly cheap, but important for the students. So that's what I'm thinking about how, how do you make this work, when you have so many students that it's impossible to give them your attention, attention individually. It's tricky. Yeah. Sorry, I was just gonna say, funny how kind of different maybe our fields are, because when you said I do a lecture and exercise class, I 100% put into my yoga or something. It might work to be honest, help with engagement. Spark, which is fascinating, actually, where the students so in a high school, they decided that all the students need to have PE just before philosophy or whatever. And they have shown that the grades do improve. Because of whatever, I mean, you know, if we're really going to stretch that, it's something about stimulation of students in what has traditionally been perceived as a passive kind of space for knowledge transmission. And what you're saying is interesting, you're bringing in little bits of the tutorial, the more active learning, you've got those two sort of extremes of, is it three people in a room sitting together, or is it 200 in a lecture theatre. But what's interesting and common is the kind of social exchange that's happening there, whether it's you and a learner, or whether it's learner to learner, which I think is an interesting dynamic, which we often forget about in a lecture space. But Jeremy, I think you're right, students go there because there are conversations that happen around the content that we think we're transmitting, which arguably are just as valuable kind of incidental learning stuff. Something I think is really interesting is what staff and practitioners think a lecture is versus or compared to what students think a lecture is, and how explicit we are about those expectations as well. And yeah, is that something you talk about with learners? Do they get? It's something I try and communicate, at least what my intention is. So it kind of frames it for them that in my mind, a lecture is the kicking off point, I introduced the subject, and then I've given readings that they read to kind of take the next step. And then they discuss that in the seminars that that's the kind of framework in my mind. Now, there's two things that can run up against. One is timetabling, that sometimes you can have a lecture Monday, and you think, okay, great, the students have the seminar on Wednesday, easy peasy. But they might have a bunch of other sessions between then and a bunch of other reading they'll have to do. So that might not work for them. But also just learning styles, maybe some people really like to read beforehand, and use the lecture as the kind of confirmation point where everything falls into place. Hopefully, it's still a good one. But at least I kind of share that framing of how I'm using it. So in the politics department, you have one lecture, one seminar, one lecture, one seminar. Exactly. Yeah, that's fantastic. What do you do in physics? Many lectures. Okay, a few seminars. Oh, wow. Okay. So maybe one seminar for nine lectures, something like this. Which is why I tried to really force the practice into the lecture. I'm afraid that for a lot of students, it just doesn't happen. Yeah. If you had your free reign, what would it look like? Half half, right? Yeah. I'm kind of really surprised. Yeah, I can't imagine teaching that way at all. I was expecting kind of physics to be a bit more information transmission based. But you know, the way you described it was not. I mean, I think that's a pretty interactive lecture. So you're going around making sure students are on task breaking up with activities. And I think I was comparing it to how Yale put all their lectures up on for free. So I can see why Yale lecture if I can watch one on critical theory. I don't know why. But yeah, this is hardcore chalk and talk, which was literally guy holding Professor Paul Fry. Yeah, I still remember. And he he he was so he was the guru and he would stand there and it was very much sage on the stage and he delivered a performance, you know, around and he would talk through these ideas. I don't actually use the chalk. He just sort of held it. Very good thing in hand to wave. But yeah, but I mean, the students were getting loads out of it. I mean, they were sort of he was making these critical theory jokes and they were laughing in the right places. So clearly, which I did. But it was an effective way. I mean, it seems a bit to be an effective way of teaching. But I kind of I wondered how utilized that format is now. But it's interesting to hear that you've got, you know, in physics, which you kind of think is being a bit more like information transmission that you're still see still so important to get in that interleaved learning, got to break things up practice. You've got to get the recall in there. You need to get opportunities for just spaces and like breathing space between delivery of sections. Well, I suppose one of the things that you don't necessarily realize when you don't do physics that the content is very, very small, actually. Right. There is not much information to transmit. So I remember at the end of my undergrad, I sat down and I took a piece of paper and I was like, OK, so I think it can derive thermodynamics and fluid dynamics from Newtonian mechanics. And I think I can show that. So some of the things are conserved, like the energy is conserved, the momentum is conserved. I can show that from Newton. And then I know other things are conserved, like mass and charge. And then conservation leads me to understanding transport of, for example, how fast perfume is going through a room or how fast nutrients are moving in a nuclear plant or how fast heat is transported through a wall or whatever. And then the first thing is Maxwell equations. And then I realized, well, that's it. That's that's two years of learning and I can write it on a piece of paper and that's all right. So the point of the lectures is to make the students discover that for themselves, if you will. And the way to do this is to show, well, OK, here's what matters and here's how you understand it. And now let's apply it again and again and again and again and again. So practice is very important. And the information is very small, a small amount. So that's why I'm a bit worried of the sort of lecture where you just show things and don't make the students practice, because then what they do is they see you practice over and over again, which I think is not enough. Do you get nervous around silences? Because I noticed you said you were you said something when you were talking about going around and keeping them to giving them the tasks. And is that something that features in either of you? Are you happy to sit back and let them? What would that be about? Is it you don't mean discomfort with just the science in a room or more about wondering about whether learning is happening? Well, yeah, wondering whether learning is happening. But I get this thing where I'm teaching a language as a qualitative subject and everything. And I get this thing where I'm I want to give them thinking time. I know I know for a fact that I'm biased against like setting a question and having some crashing silence and not knowing whether they're thinking about it or if it needs some intervention or they've even been listening to anything I've said. So I feel like this cultural impulse to feel the silence. And I like sometimes I certainly think I'm kind of letting that lead me. And what you do need to do is step back and let them, like you say, do tasks and figure things out for themselves. But in a lecture where you've got an hour or, you know, two hours, and you're very time bound, do you ever feel any pressure to sort of jump in and answer for them or shivvy them along? Or do you happy with just stepping back? A hundred percent. I jump in. Yeah, it's fine. It can be awkward. And maybe this is something I should kind of an impulse I should fight and kind of let that awkwardness right now. But in a lecture, if I ask a question and silence reigns, I'll answer it. I won't. I won't leave that hanging because often I want to move on anyway, like there's something I want to get to. I've used it as a kind of rhetorical point. But I definitely when I first started doing seminars, I couldn't stand the silence, you know, of letting a question linger. And so I would really kind of drive the conversation along. But as I go on, I'm kind of getting more jaded or just like more happy to kind of let that happen and see what it produces. But I wouldn't say it's kind of radically improved my teaching practice, you know, letting those silences. Right. I do wonder if kind of at least for me, really trying to infuse people with kind of get them involved in a kind of consistent conversation has been a bit more fruitful overall. I think, Lucy, you asked the right question about silence is like, what does it mean? Are they thinking or are they wondering what the hell is happening? Should I do something? So it's a really difficult one. So in that small class, I teach in master's level, not too hard because I can walk and talk to individuals and see if they're writing. So silence range for most of the class. But I don't have to feel the pressure in my little bubble. There's no silence. I'm always talking to someone. One of the things I do is I so because it's exercises that I like to give them and not jumping jacks. Right. I give progressive hands also because of what I'm always worried about is to make the exercise too easy for some people and too hard for some others. So the way I try and deal with that is I ask an exercise that's fairly open. Then I wait a bit and go talk to people. And then I add one hint that makes it a bit easier. And then a second hint. And that allows me to also break up the silence, if you will, fairly often. Now, because we also have, you know, now Mentimeter and that sort of things. One thing you can do also is just put a slide on the board and ask, OK, well, here's a question. And then there is silence, but there's also answers coming in and words coming in that you can comment on. So it's not necessarily silence, but there's still space for the students to think, which I think is good. Can I just come in because it strikes me this is the longest conversation I've had about teaching ever. Right. I don't know if you guys are on time, we're on 40 minutes. And I'm really keen that just we move on to one final bit because as ever, there's not like that much time. I just think it's so interesting that in terms of we've probably collectively spent a huge amount of our academic lives teaching. And for me, and I'm in a teaching support role, I've been moving from a research role to a learning and teaching role over the last 10 years. And this is still the longest conversation I've ever had about teaching, which I think is connected to the environment we're in and the value that's placed on teaching. And I kind of wanted us to move to what are the particular challenges of maybe looking at teaching in a scholarly way and then moving towards sharing that with a kind of teaching commons in a research intensive, because I think that's a big part of where that comes from. So, you know, everyone here is so reflective about their practice, people really care about students and learning. Where is that going? And how do you think, you know, what are some of the issues there? How are you going to get this out of this room? Okay, so we've actually made some room for it, which is, yeah, I'd agree. I think it's a fantastic thing. I do feel quite lucky in the politics department that we do take teaching really seriously. And we have long conversations about teaching practice there, which I think are fundamentally important to the revision that we have there and do shape what we do in a really important way. We also have funding support for scholarship in our department, which may happen in other departments. I'm slightly ignorant of that, but I've done quite a few projects now funded by the Scholarship and Learning Environment Fund, which, you know, have impacted on what we do around modularization, semesterization, things like continuing the lecture. So they can, you know, the scholarship we do can impact departmental level. But certainly, I think we should be working on external engagement as well, because I do genuinely think that the work we do here at York is a pretty good standard and could be shared with other universities. And I feel you said you published a bit on this. Yeah, I mean, I mean, one of my questions is going to be about, I guess, dissemination. And I think sort of by definition, almost, if you're involved in teaching, if you're on a teaching scholarship contract, you're both ideally placed to do a bit of scholarship and teaching research, but also very difficult to find the time and to work it into schedule. So yeah, first open question to both of you about like, do you have any plans for dissemination? And how do you work that into your to your already packed schedule? I'll say today, I've taken a break, I'm about to submit a article to the Journal of political science education. So hopefully later today, we'll be sending something off for that. So fingers crossed. Well, I feel perhaps to come back on one of the barriers into why this is not happening is just the academy as a culture is very individualistic. So if you have good ideas, you're almost tempted to keep them to yourself, because then you can have good student feedback. And so I mean, it's not what we want to do. But that that's what the incentives are right now. So that's difficult. Publishing about what you do is one way around this, because even though you're sharing, it's still good for you, right to do it. What I'm hopeful will happen and in the next few years, because right now, I think we're in survival mode. So that's a big problem. We need to make mods and Sims right, which takes a lot of time. But maybe in a couple years, hopefully, we'll have more space to to think about how to share. And one of the things that feel like that, you know, feel like in the physics department, the head of teaching wants to do is to have a working group for all the TNS across physics and engineering so that we can share ideas and try and make something happen either as research or just workshops where you can just share what has worked with hasn't. So it's about that recognition of the value of what's happening as well as sharing and obviously wanting to do that for good practice and for learners, but actually to have it institutionally kind of acknowledged and sounds like some departments have got those structures in place, or at least the starts of them and there's will to do it. But I think you're right, there's always a crisis that sort of getting in the way of that at the moment. But something else that's helping it, though, is there is a clear career progression now at York on the TNS pathway, right? So we've got our first senior lecturer TNS in the politics department now, and knowing that there's a professor in TNS, it shows that there's that pathway. And so it does incentivize people to produce that scholarship and to disseminate it to good journals. And so I think, certainly, we're going to see a lot more of this in coming years. I hope so. The central recognition of that as well, even though it's sort of relatively limited resource, we're looking at creating a kind of drop-in module for staff who are interested in developing a scholarship trend. So that would be right from I'm doing some reflective practice on my teaching to I want to go public with this in whatever form, whether that's sharing it at a learning and teaching forum or actually publishing in peer review. So I think it's coming, but it's still sort of I mean, in a way, it's quite a nice time to be part of it because you get input there and it's, you know, you get to have conversations like these. But it's I think there has been a real sea change in terms of teaching and discussions about teaching across the sector. I don't think we've quite caught up with the structures around that yet, but it's not it's not a kind of side thought anymore. And that's for various different reasons, some of them kind of more or less problematic, I think. But, you know, I think that sort of going public about teaching, sharing about teaching, there's definitely more of a culture of support for that. So, yeah, I think the UK and York in particular is doing amazingly well. In France, there is no recognition for teaching zero at all. And I think so we're on the right path. Right. But now all the recognition you've just talked about is promotion and career advancement. So that's still individual. I feel like perhaps one day we'll have ways to recognise group success also, and that that would fundamentally improve exchanging. And that would change the culture around actually this is a commons rather than an individual practice, which is the problem, isn't it? It's the problem with the rest culture that actually that what we don't want to do with scholarship is bleed into that, you know, or take on all of that as a kind of structure. I think one of the things I find really attractive about scholarship, and I had a research career as well, is that this does feel more communal. I mean, it's about relationships and classrooms. And I think that that does something fundamental to the starting point in terms of reference. Yeah. Yeah. Fingers crossed for that. We'll see how it goes. I mean, I think individual scholarship still has a place, but it shouldn't be the only the only way. Yeah. Brilliant, guys. OK, well, thank you very much for your time. It's been really nice. And we'll hopefully do it again sometime. Thanks so much. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much. Yeah.
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