Episode 2

The Spoken Word: Instructor Talk with Kimberly Tanner

[MUSIC PLAYING] STEVEN ROBINOW: Welcome to Teaching for Student Success, a  podcast devoted to student-centered, evidence-based teaching practices to improve student success, equity, and inclusivity in your courses. I'm your host, Steven Robinow. Today we'll talk with Dr. Kimberly Tanner about instructor talk, fascinating new work on the non-content talk that our students hear from us. However, before we start, I would like to remind you that this podcast is divided into chapters. You may have limited time. So if you want to get to the discussion of instructor talk, use your podcast app to skip to chapter 2.

Without any further delay, I'm very excited to introduce Dr. Kimberly Tanner to talk about her research on instructor talk, and the possible and likely impact on student engagement and student success. Dr. Tanner is a professor in the Department of Biology at San Francisco State University. Her research group, the Science Education Partnership and Assessment Laboratory, or SEPAL, conducts research on biology teaching and learning, develops scientists as effective instructors, and advocates for inclusion, equity, and diversity in the sciences.

SEPAL promotes partnerships in K-12 teachers, the community, and higher education. SEPAL also provides national and international leadership in the ongoing transformation of undergraduate education in the sciences. Dr. Tanner's research program is and has been supported by, among other entities, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Dr. Tanner has published extensively on discipline-based science education in journals such as Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Cell Biology Education: Life Sciences Education, of which Dr. Tanner is co-editor in chief.

In addition, Dr. Tanner has written two books, guest edited special issues of journals, and produced a number of video-based scholarly products. Dr. Tanner is also very active in the classroom. She continues to teach undergraduate courses for majors and nonmajors, as well as graduate courses. She has led the transformation of teaching in the Department of Biology at San Francisco State by providing over 100 hours of professional development in evidence-based and inclusive teaching practices.

This is just a brief summary of Dr. Tanner's accomplishments and ongoing work. Welcome, Kimberly. Thank you so much for making time for us in your incredibly busy schedule to join us on Teaching for Student Success. Before we dig into your research on instructor talk and student success, perhaps you could talk about how and why you became interested in education research.

KIMBERLY TANNER: Thanks so much for having me. And all best wishes on the podcast. I am an unintentional professor of biology is the way I now introduce myself. Important things to know about me, I'm a first-generation college-going student. And so the goal for me early on was to get myself to college. And I think that then at some point, someone asked me what I was going to do after college. And I had no idea. And they told me, you could be a doctor or a scientist. And I was like, well, I think I might be interested in the scientist thing. What is that?

And they said, they'll pay you to make discoveries in labs. And so I thought that was a pretty good gig to have a paid job after college. And so I started working in labs. And I ended up getting my PhD in neuroscience, which is highly related to ideas around learning, although that's not initially why I went. And while I was a graduate student, I sort of led a double life volunteering with kids and teachers in local public schools here in San Francisco, and just fell into that as a volunteer community service opportunity, and just loved it, and learned a ton.

So when I finished my PhD in neuroscience, I actually ended up taking a job as an academic staff person working on precollege science education, and trying to encourage young people and nonscientists to love biology as much as I loved it. And I probably would have been in that career for the rest of my life. An academic staff member writing grants, working with kids and teachers. But I just met so many elementary school teachers who said, ah, Kimberly. I love the way that we do science together.

But that's not how I learned in college. In college in my science classes, they made me feel kind of stupid. And I'm not going to teach science to little kids because I don't want them to feel that way. I was really struck by that, that discouragement, that profound kind of discouragement, that teachers had experienced that had stuck with them. And kind of in contrast, I worked with high school teachers. And they're like, oh Kimberly. This way that you want to teach science, like critical thinking, or inquiry, that's kind of odd.

And my job is to teach people a lot of information and have them memorize it and then spit it back on a multiple choice test like they do at, and then they would name all the higher education institutions in the San Francisco Bay Area. So I think I got really struck in my time as a precollege academic staff person working with the community that perhaps we as scientists in college classrooms were signaling very different ideas about the way science is done and who science is for than we were intending.

And I didn't really actively go look for a job. But a dozen people sent me a job ad for an assistant professor of biology education at San Francisco State University just down the road. I had been to their library. But I didn't know much more about it besides that. Most teachers trained there in San Francisco. And so I took that job back in 2004. And intervening, the last part of the story I'll tell, is I did a postdoc in science education. I actually did figure out that I wanted to learn how to measure things from humans rather than anesthetize rats, which was part of my graduate training in neuroscience.

And so I did a two-year stint at Stanford in the School of Education there while I was an academic staff person kind of in that era. And so I was prepared to be able to start a research lab. But it was not a direct career path, to answer your question. And my lab, SEPAL, Science Education Partnership and Assessment Laboratory, we've studied a lot of different things over the years depending on who's there. It's not named after me. It's not the Tanner Lab because I'm not the only person who works there.

And so we've just studied lots of different things that are immediately important to the people there, and all with the thread of trying to understand how to make science education more like what scientists actually do in their jobs, and how to make science education be inclusive of lots of different folks, and to help them feel like they belong, and they're part of that enterprise.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Awesome. Thanks so much. Very interesting.

KIMBERLY TANNER: Yeah.

STEVEN ROBINOW: I'll add that you said a lot of teachers are trained at San Francisco State. And that includes my mother. My mother was trained there.

KIMBERLY TANNER: Oh, there you go. I want to say it's a fabulous place to train. And what I—maybe the other piece of the story is what I discovered when I got here were a lot of fabulous scientists and biologists in particular who love their discipline, much like you and I do, who absolutely want their students to love their discipline, and who very unfairly to them had zero training on how to effectively teach the science they know to students before they were hired as professors. It's the great sort of common knowledge, but odd thing in our field, is that we're trained to be outstanding researchers.

And then we're parachuted into classrooms all over the country and expected that there is no sort of training needed to be an effective ambassador of the discipline. And so I think I'm known nationally and internationally for having sort of the backs of my fellow scientists that I spent as much time as I had at San Francisco State and other places. Because I've never met a scientist who doesn't want a student in their course to love their discipline. And they just need some tools to be able to do that effectively.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Absolutely. Awesome. Kim, you tell us about your institution, about San Francisco State, and maybe your student population, particularly the students in your undergrad courses.

KIMBERLY TANNER: Yeah, absolutely. I will say that San Francisco State, I won't give you all the technical details, but San Francisco State is a fabulous institution. It felt like coming home in many ways when I started there as an assistant professor. It's part of why I've stayed. We're an incredibly diverse campus culturally, people from all over the world. I mean, hundreds of languages spoken there. We're the home of the first College of Ethnic Studies in the country. It's no longer the only one I think.

And just a fabulous commitment to social justice and inclusion across lots of disciplines. We, like everywhere, struggle to enact that regularly. And we, like everywhere, struggle to dismantle systems of systemic racism and bias. So it's not a perfect place by any means. But my campus is just fabulous and aspirational. The students that I work with are probably the main reason I've stayed. I am inordinately proud that I—well, I'm not proud that I got sick. But I got sick when I was on sabbatical a while ago.

And when I went in to get checked out, the person who checked me in for my appointment was an alum of my course. The person who put an IV in my arm is an alum of my course. My daughter's elementary school teacher was an alum of my course. My son's high school teacher is an alum of my course. So I view the students at San Francisco State as a really key part of my local, regional, state, and national community.

They really do go on to change the world. Our students, once again, I think they come from all sorts of different backgrounds socioeconomically, culturally, racially, gender identity, sexual orientation identities. They're just a fabulous crew. And I have learned no doubt more from my students over the years than I could have ever taught them.

STEVEN ROBINOW: That's awesome. What an ad for San Francisco State. That's fantastic.

KIMBERLY TANNER: Oh, yeah. I got nothing but great things to say.

STEVEN ROBINOW: That's incredible. So let's turn to your research. And really what I'd like to do now is turn the mic over to you and ask you to describe your research on instructor talk and the implications for impacting student engagement and student success. Perhaps you could begin by defining instructor talk, obviously, before diving into it. Thanks.

KIMBERLY TANNER: Yeah, no. Absolutely. I think I'll preface this by saying that the most important discoveries that I think I've made as a scientist, both when I was doing basic neuroscience, and then most of my career as a biology education researcher, are ideas that didn't necessarily come out of formal grants. They came from lived experience, which is why we talk about the importance of diversity in science, and inclusion and science. And this is a great example why. Lived experience is what drives discovery, and progress, and change.

And so instructor talk, to define this, instructor talk we define as all the non-content language that's said by instructors in classrooms. And we focus on undergraduate science courses. But you could study this in lots of contexts. What we do is we record an entire course, or entire class sessions, like we're doing today. And then we delete whatever has to do with content in biology like ribosomes, or mitochondria, or metabolism. And we take out all those conversations of content.

And then we see what kind of language is left. And that language that's left is what we call instructor talk. It's usually language that is shaping the student's experience in a classroom, it's coaching language sometimes, it's explaining pedagogical choices, it's building relationships between students and instructors, or students and students. It's unmasking kind of the discipline and what science is all about, and who should be doing it, and why.

And so instructor talk is an idea that emerged from a really specific experience. At our institution at San Francisco State, I think I had been there for a while. I'd been there for a while. I won't put an actual date. I think I'd been there eight years. And some faculty came to me in my department and said, well, Kimberly, the TAs, the graduate teaching assistants, are talking about this course they take from you and how useful it is. And we walk by the SEPAL classroom sometimes. We see all these community college professors in there talking about teaching.

And because we had a lot of grants that were related to folks who were not necessarily my department, but who were stakeholders in our community. And so a subset of my faculty said, Kimberly, we want to come to the teaching workshops with the big cookies and learn these ideas that we're hearing about second hand. And that was a really, really gracious and I think very brave thing to say. Because a lot of faculty don't want to say like, hey, I have some stuff to learn about this thing I've been doing for 20 years.

And I think some of the people who came and asked to work with me I had co-taught with. And they knew it would be a safe kind of experience. So anyway, long story. Eighty-five percent of our faculty have spent at least 100 hours sort of thinking about innovative teaching and learning. And as part of those interactions, which were graciously funded by the National Science Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, we had faculty and they were learning about active learning, and assessment, and inclusion strategies.

And in particular, active learning, there were a lot of folks, they would experience in our professional development workshops, things like a think-pair-share is a very relatively, I thought, simple strategy where you give students a chance to think. And then the pair part is they talk to a neighbor and they share ideas. And then the share part is maybe you have a conversation as a class. And that was a really nice entry-level active learning strategy that a lot of faculty could go out and try out immediately.

And the vast majority of the folks that I worked with on the faculty had great success with that. And it for some of them, I think, really changed their relationship to teaching. Teaching became fun. And it became a partnership with students. But for a couple of faculty, they said, Kimberly, I went out and I tried that think, pair, share thing you talked about. And it didn't work. And I was like, I'm like, well, tell me more. And I talked to the faculty about it. I couldn't really figure it out.

But then per usual, students—students have given me the best insights in my career. Because I was stumbled on, it wasn't terribly purposeful, but talked to some students who happened to be in classes with a faculty member who had struggled to use the think, pair, share. And I said, well, what's it like? What's that class like? What do you like about the teaching? And what do you struggle with? And they're like, well, I hate active learning. And I was like, but you loved it in Intro Bio when we did it with 300 people. Why all of a sudden in this upper division class do you not like it?

And they said, well, the instructor says things like, we're just going to teach. You're just going to teach yourself today. I don't even have to work. Or if you have a brilliant idea and you think you have something to share, you can turn and talk to your neighbor. And so the language. It became apparent from talking to students that an active learning strategy on its own is not enough, but that the language around that active learning strategy seems deeply influential into how it's received by students, whether or not students will comply with that active learning strategy, and how they interpret sort of the purpose of it.

And I think in my career, I think we—I had been very purposeful around language. But I don't think I had ever seen that as a variable to be studied in classrooms or a variable that would make or break another faculty member going out and being successful with the strategies I was sharing with them. So it was a very humbling moment, because I'm like, wow, there is, I don't want to call it magic fairy dust. But there's this whole variable that we're not teaching in professional development that could largely influence their success.

So we started studying it. And maybe the last piece I'll say before I sort of stop is that this kind of research is not possible without extensive, thoughtful, safe collaboration. So we had about 30 or so instructors from Bay Area community colleges that we'd worked with in professional development. We had about half to 2/3 of my department participate and record their classrooms and turn in those audio recordings. And we had postdoctoral scholars in the lab who managed all that data so it could be completely anonymized.

So I'm in the data set. But I don't know who's who. And then we get these transcripts out, and then we can be scholarly and analyze them without anybody feeling put on the spot. And those are some of the discoveries that allowed us to make lots of discoveries. So I'll stop there for a minute. But that's kind of the story of the emergence of instructor talk and what it's kind of about.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Great. Thanks. Can you talk a little bit about the methods about how you code and the sorts of—and the positive and negative instructor talk that you've now divided into categories?

KIMBERLY TANNER: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think when we first started working on it this fabulous postdoctoral scholar in the lab, Shannon Seidel, who's now a professor at Pacific Lutheran University, and Jeff Shinksy, I should also say he was a really close community college collaborator on all of this, and lots of other fabulous people in the lab. I was trained as a qualitative analysis researcher during that postdoc that I shared with you. And so we took all these samples of instructor talk. We didn't define them by time. We sort of defined them by what was being said.

So people can talk for a page about a dog. We call that one instance, the telling the story of their dog. It's also possible that folks can say one sentence that's about coaching students on how well to do an exam, and another sentence it's about unmasking science, and another sentence that's explaining pedagogical choice. So for good or for bad, there are all sorts of choices you can make methodologically. We call these instances in instructor talk. And some of them are short and some of them are long.

But we felt like we needed to honor the content of what was being said. And so we tried to follow that. So you can parse out then the number of instances of instructor talk in a sample. It can be a whole class session or a 15-minute chunk of time. And we have some sampling strategies that we've used. And then you look for the kinds of things that are being said. And we in particular were motivated by some theoretical framework. So one theoretical framework is instructor immediacy.

So in communication studies and other scholarly fields, this idea of immediacy, how close, socially close, a student feels to an instructor, or socially distant they feel from an instructor, there's some evidence that that influences student learning. There's some evidence in ethology with animals that that's influential. And so this idea of language that might promote instructor immediacy, language that might make a student feel closer to their instructor, was a theoretical framework that guided us in coming up with some categories.

Student resistance, that's not really a theoretical framework. But there's a huge concern about student resistance. And so thinking about that in terms of how instructors explain their pedagogical choices, what kind of language they use. There was a lot of different theoretical frames, I guess I will say, that influenced us.

The initial study, we came up with five categories. Building the instructor-student relationship was the most prominent one, language that was where the instructor was promoting that immediacy in a variety of ways, coaching students, being respectful like, hey. We're going to end at 2:00 because I know a lot of you have to get to another class, or get to a job.

That would be an example of building instructor-student relationships. We had the second most prevalent category, which was really, really pretty high up. There was establishing classroom culture, which was explaining—a lot of different sorts of things. But most important people in this classroom aren't on the stage that the people sitting around you if you're going to learn a lot from your colleagues. That would be an example of establishing that classroom culture.

The third most prevalent category of the five that gets written—sort of predicted to be there by a lot of people. People assert all the time it's important to explain your pedagogical choices. There is no evidence necessarily, I think, that that is key. But we did see a lot of that kind of language. I'm going to use this clicker question to try and see where we're all thinking. And that'll help me decide what maybe we do next. So thanks for being honest. Don't just pick an answer just because you think I want to hear it.

And then we had the two last categories were very rare, and much, much more rare. Sharing personal experience was a whole category. And that is pretty evident. I used to sit in the back of the classroom and never say a word. Or when I was in college, and those kinds of things. That was more rare in our sample than I think it might be in other contexts because our folks were saying different kinds of things. I predict that might be a bigger signal other places. But that was the fourth most prevalent category.

And then the last one, kind of sadly, and maybe you'll be surprised by this, is unmasking science. How does the discipline get done? Why is it important to have different perspectives in science was very rare. We didn't talk in that context about how science gets done. So those are the five major categories. And we didn't really call it positively phrased instructor talk. That was just the instructor talk framework. And that's how we coded.

Colin Harrison then came to the lab. And Colin is a fabulous researcher, is now at Georgia Tech. And Colin came in and he actually helped us scale up. That initial framework was built on one course. And we said, well, does this apply to lots of other courses? So Colin came up with a really wonderfully fair sampling strategy so we could look at scale. And so we studied 60 courses across 25 institutions, still all biology, and still all people who'd work with us. So it's a biased sample. You've got to remember that. And showed that that framework was applicable to 90% of the instructor talk instances we found in that large data set.

But 10% of those instances we couldn't code with that framework. And they all had the commonality that they seemed discouraging. Here's one. Come right in. You're on time today for a change, which is a quote of an instructor saying something to a student maybe arriving late. Or there's another one that says, so when you're plotting these graphs, you're being sloppy. I don't think you're really paying attention to what you should be doing, kind of like a deficit model of students, putting the blame on them as opposed to, I'm not really teaching you how to do those graphs very well.

Or the third one, which some people would say doesn't sound that negative, but I'll share it, which is a quote—usually this one was the kind of thing you'd hear on the first day of class. If coming in here, you haven't had a biology course before, you're going to have to work harder than other people. And you're going to have to catch up.

And that's an example of basically telling students you're kind of behind before you've even started. And so those are three examples. When we started trying to come up with sort of categories to capture them, it actually turned out that all of our five major categories we had started with, you could have an inverted or negative version. And you could sort of code these 10% into it.

So we now have a positively phrased instructor talk framework and a negatively phrased instructor talk framework that are exactly mirror images in terms of the major categories, but the flavor of the language, and whether or not it's encouraging or discouraging, is what's really substantially different. I'll stop there.

STEVEN ROBINOW: OK. Well, one nice thing that I hadn't picked up on in the papers was that it's only 10% that's negative at the moment and 90% seems positive. So that seems good.

KIMBERLY TANNER: It's only 10%. But I will say that we're now starting to study instructor talk in places where faculty have not had professional development. And we predict that that 10% number is going to skyrocket.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Interesting. So the notion of instructor talk has not really been studied. You're really the first to bring it to higher education. But in social psychology, my understanding is that this is work that's been done. And so it has been previously shown that this sort of talk really does impact student performance.

KIMBERLY TANNER: Yeah, I think this is a place where you can look at a lot of different literatures and a lot of different areas and see the importance of language. Another framework that influenced us when we were thinking about coding the language, studying the language of science instructors in undergraduate classrooms, was stereotype threat. So stereotype threat is a social psychology phenomenon where it doesn't have to be language, but you can use language.

We know that women aren't as good as men at math, but we want you to take this assessment. It's like 13 words, or it's a tiny small change in language. And you can plummet the scores of women that you know perform in the 90th percentile to be performing at half their ability. You know they can score well on this. But if you put some language in front of them that signals to them that somehow they might fulfill a negative stereotype associated with a personal characteristic, then they underperform.

And Claude Steele and lots of colleagues, he's not the only person, but is, or pioneers in that. There are lots of examples of people studying teacher language and student language in K through 12 systems. And I think that what we brought to it was to try and establish non-content language as a measurable variable in undergraduate science education. There are examples of studies where people are studying active learning and they get different types of outcomes. And there are lots of explanatory factors.

I would put a lot of money on instructor talk as being one of the reasons why we can have people go out and use very similar strategies, seemingly, but then get really different student outcomes from those active learning strategies. It's not the only variable. But I think it's the one that is prevalent in every classroom. We've never had a classroom where we can't measure some instructor talk. And it's also a variable that is quite amenable to quick and easy change. And in terms of overturning structures and making change quickly, I am a firm believer that small change can make big differences.

And small changes in language could phenomenally change the experience of an instructor who's really trying their best to promote learning for all of their students. And it could profoundly change the experience of students. It wasn't until after I started studying instructor talk that I had memories of my own. I remember being in a genetics course. I remember the instructor saying something like, we're not going to study the genetics your dad studied. An apparently very innocuous statement. I don't think that instructor was malintentioned or trying to discourage me.

But I think then the next thing I remember was everybody getting up and leaving the class around me. And I had just spent the whole course thinking about, well, genetics is not a word that was really said in my family. My parents are a wonderful family. But they're not scientists by training. And if I said that word at the dinner table, maybe I would be trying to be condescending, or highfalutin, or whatever term in your culture it is.

And what about my mom? Why wasn't my mom part of the conversation? And so that's just my own personal reflection of a stereotype threat moment. It didn't take very much language on the part of that individual to make me question my own presence there. And I persisted through that. But I think that anyone who feels like they have an access of their identity that doesn't fit with the dominant culture that they're sitting in may experience those things a lot. And then that's discouraging.

And that's not even related then to, how do you introduce a pair share? So I think language is important for a variety of reasons. I'll also say Colin Harrison, who was the fabulous postdoc in our lab who helped scale up the instructor talk studies, also wrote a wonderful review article on microaggressions in the classroom, which gets to language that's more discouraging to people specifically based on personal identity characteristics. And that is trying to bring some of the ideas of Derald Wing Sue and other fabulous colleagues who are in other fields to undergraduate science education.

We didn't find a lot of microaggressions in our samples. But once again, I think as we start to scale up and look at classrooms where faculty may have not had the opportunity to do professional development, or be part of communities to reflect on these things, we might see a lot more microaggressions, negatively phrased instructor talk, that's really dismantling the instructor-student relationship in ways that relate to students' personal characteristics. So that's something we might study.

STEVEN ROBINOW: And so as an ex-administrator, this is making me think about equity gaps, or achievement gaps, or performance gaps, and the possible impacts there of instructor talk on that.

KIMBERLY TANNER: Oh, I think it's huge. And I think the stories that I hear from my wonderful students, lots of different backgrounds, but especially my students of color, and especially our Black African-American students, with the murder of George Floyd last year and trying to hear and listen to our Black students, we had a wonderful effort by my chair Laura Burrus called Lifting Black Voices that asks our Black students in a way that we hope didn't burden them, they were very gracious to share with us what they experience on a day-to-day basis.

It's an onslaught. It's a constant onslaught of people making assumptions about you that aren't true, people ignoring you, people microaggressing on you. And I was struck and humbled that one of the things that some of our Black students in the sciences said is that when instructors pay attention to their teacher talk, that's how they talked about it because they had heard us talking about instructor talk, that the teacher talk in a classroom made all the difference in the world for them.

Whether or not the teacher or the instructor said, hey, everybody in your group has an important thing to say. And I want you to start with the person whose first name is at the beginning of the alphabet and go around. If there was that sort of structure and focus on inclusion by the teacher or the faculty member that those were the places where they felt more safe. I don't think instructor talk is going to solve institutional racism. Let me be clear.

But I was really struck that those were the kinds of strategies that enabled our students who are marginalized on a daily basis to feel like they belonged and to feel like they could be heard. And so I don't know why any faculty member wouldn't want to then attend to that power that they have in a classroom. Because language in a classroom is absolutely power.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Absolutely.

KIMBERLY TANNER: Yeah.

STEVEN ROBINOW: You're studying in a format of science courses. But you're studying non-content talk in a science course. These sorts of changes, or these sorts of—this sort of work is going to impact nonscience courses as well. Won't it?

KIMBERLY TANNER: Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I think that's where I want to demonstrate disciplinary humility. I think that many of my colleagues in the humanities might take a look at this and be like, well, of course, Kimberly. How is it that the language you use in a classroom is not at the center of what you talk about? And so it could be used in lots of different disciplines. I think it could be used at lots of different cognitive levels, lots of different contexts. You could look at it in the context of faculty meetings, honestly.

I mean, it's a little bit different. But the kind of language we use with each other. But I think that to give a shout out to our colleagues in the humanities in particular, I think that non-content language might be more central to their teaching and the training they get to teach, whereas in the sciences, so much of the focus is on the language of the content. Am I talking about the latest way to talk about proto-oncogenes? Or how many five-syllable vocabulary words am I going to introduce?

And so that perhaps we get distracted would be a kind of way to put it in the sciences. And we spend a lot of focus on our content talk and less focus on our non-content talk. So I think it's relevant in lots of different contexts. But I think in the sciences, and it's part of why I have stayed this long in this unintentional professor position, I often think that colleagues and faculty instructors are not malintentioned; they just haven't had the opportunity to have someone say, hey, have you thought about this sort of piece of the puzzle of your teaching?

And I will say everywhere we look, it seems important. Graduate student Kate Gelinas, who's now a community college professor, studied instructor talk in the context of graduate teaching assistants and laboratories. It's there. I have other colleagues who aren't associated with my lab who I love their work. So we're not the only people who study instructor talk now. Other folks who I encourage you to look up in the literature are studying instructor talk on the first day of class, and what kind of instructor talk is being used on the first day of class in different contexts.

Other folks who are looking at student perceptions, so we have a new paper coming out about student perceptions of instructor talk. Because you can record all this and you can categorize it, but people say, Kimberly, who cares if students aren't registering this? And so Dax Ovid and Mallory Rice, who are postdoctoral scholars, who are coming out of my lab right now, have collaborated with Perry LaGavarte, and Joshua Luna, and Karen Tambayong, who are wonderful students who do an analysis of student memories of instructor talk.

So do they even remember anything? As well as them presenting them with a randomized set of instructor talk and seeing if what we categorize as positive they think is positive and what we categorize as negative they think is negative. And the punch line of that is statistically yes. Statistically, students as a population categorize what we think of as negatively phrased instructor talk as negative, contributing negatively to a classroom. And what we categorize as positively phrased contributing positively.

There's one interesting exception to that. And that is language around grading. So I will say that in our negatively phrased instructor talk, we categorize lots of language that has to do with using grades to motivate students as in the negatively phrased piece. Because we lean on literature that takes away from learning. If people are doing it for points, and they're doing it for grades, it's like taking a focus away from learning. Perhaps unsurprisingly, students love it when faculty talk about grades. And they think that's really helpful.

And they want them to talk about grades more. And so there's a discontinuity about the language around grades that I think is a bigger discussion and a bigger conversation. And I hope you have somebody on the podcast to talk about ungrading because I think there's a whole movement around grades and ungrading and changing the sort of relationship between faculty, students, and grades. And we see that in our own small way in how students respond to instructor talk samples about grading.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Interesting. But right now at this point, you've laid out the framework really elegantly about instructor talk. And you have this beautiful framework now to talk about it. But the papers I've seen don't connect yet directly instructor talk and student success. So I assume that is the work that's coming.

KIMBERLY TANNER: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And I think those are more complex things to measure because you need to measure a student characteristic, identity, belonging, something like that.

At the same time, you're measuring instructor talk perhaps in the same classroom. And so I think we're working up to that. I'll also say that in the larger context of our department, the professional development that I alluded to where 85% of our faculty have done 100 hours or more of really thinking innovatively about their teaching and learning together as a community that over the course of the years of that effort, we have seen the success of our students of color, especially our, I don't like this term, but underrepresented minorities. Our African-American, Latinx, and Indigenous students. We've seen that flip in those years.

We don't know why. Lots of things have been changing. Lots of other projects are happening besides ours. But you're statistically as likely to persist in the fourth year in a science major now regardless of your personal racial background. And that was not the case many years ago. We can't connect that directly to instructor talk. This is a challenge in higher education about causality. But I predict it's a lot of different factors. When we ask—we have another study Mallory Rice is working on writing up right now.

We ask a student, what makes you feel included in your classroom? It's a mix of experiencing active learning and then instructors being kind. And a lot of that relates to the types of instructor talk language we see. So I think it's sort of like saying, oh how can you prove that this one sort of piece of the puzzle is really critical for any large complex outcome? I don't think instructor talk is the only thing that is important or going on.

But we are certainly marching towards trying to understand how it is influential. And Colin Harrison in particular, I think, has some wonderful ideas of laboratory experiments we're going to do where we're going to purposefully construct some videos that have different flavors and types of instructor talk, or the absence of instructor talk.

I personally hypothesize that the absence of any instructor talk is actually the most problematic. I think that if you go into a classroom, and you talk science for 50 minutes, and you walk out the door, and you don't do anything to build the instructor-student relationship, you don't get your students to collaborate with each other, you don't talk about how science gets done, I think that I personally predict that's going to give the sort of poorest student perceptions, or poorest student experience.

And then I predict that that's going to—would dramatically influence their grades and all sorts of other outcomes, and their sense of belonging. And so we can manipulate that a little bit more precisely with videos in a laboratory experiment than we can in sort of all natural a course that's going on. I also think the next big thing to do is to really encourage lots of people to study instructor talk in different contexts just because building the category of building the instructor-student relationship was most prevalent in our context.

And the category of establishing class culture was prevalent in our context. I don't think that's going to be the case in other contexts. And some of the papers that are coming out from other labs really highlight that. And so I think it's an exciting time in the field because I think instructor talk is a really important variable.

I don't think there's a right or wrong way to do it that we know of right now. There's no magic form of instructor talk that I'm telling you you should do. But there's a lot of variability in different contexts. And I think that that is a really rich landscape to try and understand which flavors of instructor talk and which contexts might be important for which students.

STEVEN ROBINOW: So the notion of a course with no instructor talk where it's all content lacks the ability to develop that relationship between faculty and students, right? Because you lack the ability to be kind. I mean, how can you be kind to your students if all you're doing is yammering on about photosynthesis or something?

KIMBERLY TANNER: Right. Yeah. No, absolutely. And I do think that kinds of measures where we will see—I predict we'll see differences are things like sense of belonging or self-efficacy, those types of measures. But those things are not trivial to measure. So that's the other piece when people are like, oh Kimberly. But you haven't hooked us to student outcomes. And I'm like, well, I don't think it's quite that simple. And just because you can't connect that really directly, I do not think that does not mean it's important.

And the student perceptions of instructor talk paper is the first step to really establish that. Students, they know what—they hear what we say, they remember it for a really long time. And I'll also say, I don't talk with my family a lot about what I study. It's very distant from kind of what people in my family think about what I do. I'm the only person who has a PhD in my family. I'm the only scientist per se.

But I did talk to my dad, who's like over 80 now. And at some point, he was asking me what I was doing. I was like, well, what do you remember from college? Your first semester in college, what do you remember? This is not research, but it is the lived experience that I think grounds a lot of the way I think about instructor talk. My dad, who's 80 years old, who never finished college. He went for one semester and then left. He said, well, I remember this chemistry professor saying, forget anything you think you learned in chemistry in high school. Because it was all wrong. And it was ridiculous.

And your teachers didn't know anything. And you don't know anything. And most of you aren't even going to make it through this class. And my dad was really excited to go study chemistry. He came from a tiny little town in Tennessee, tiny little school. And of all of the freshman experiences and the small amount of time of the one family member I have who spent in college, that's what he remembers is instructor talk. And so once again, I don't think that that—that's not research level. But I'm just going to say, I think that our language has profound effects and lasts for a really long time with folks.

I will be very surprised if that doesn't have all sorts of ramifications for more proximal measures in terms of student success and student access.

STEVEN ROBINOW: That's awesome. We look forward to these coming papers and the coming research because I think it's going to be fascinating and super impactful for your students and everyone's students. I'd like to spend the rest of our time talking about your students, you, your motivations, and perhaps a few interesting stories. So I'm going to ask you a few questions. And if I ask anything you want to pass on, go ahead.

KIMBERLY TANNER: OK.

STEVEN ROBINOW: I'm intrigued, and a lot of listeners I think will be intrigued, about departmental transformations. And you've engaged your department in a transformation of their teaching. Can you talk a bit about that effort, how you got the department on board? Because this is a major issue. How do you get the department on board, what resistance you met, how long you've been doing it, how it's going, and what advice you would have for others that might want to improve the learning experiences for students across the department?

KIMBERLY TANNER: Yeah. Yeah, well, I will say, as always, I don't think I have the answers, but I'm happy to tell some stories. I will also say that if anybody ever asked me if I would publish on this, I never thought I would. But Melinda Owens, who was a postdoc in the lab who's now at UC San Diego, published a paper called "Collectively Improving Our Teaching." So if you want to snoop around and you want more of kind of the research angle on it, you can take a look at that.

I think that the biology department at San Francisco State put out a job ad to hire someone with a focus in biology education. So I think that the opportunity for change started before I was ever hired. I think there were a lot of folks who before I was hired who had a lot of different reasons for wanting to hire someone with—and I would call myself a science faculty member. I'm like everybody else. I was tenured on the same criteria. Science faculty with an education specialty.

And so I've done some research on that. I do deeper discipline-based education research. But the work that I am sort of doing with fostering faculty change is not research-oriented. Anyway, long story, my department hired someone like this. So I think it goes way back. And I don't think it's specific about me. But I think I was able to build on that momentum. I think I did not go to my department to tell anybody how to teach. I say regularly, I'm not the best teacher in my department by far. Oh my gosh. There are people who have 35 years’ experience teaching.

They have more experience than me, they have all sorts of assets and skills I don't have. So I'm not the best teacher by any means. But I definitely guess I have some connections to the literature, and to theoretical frameworks, and results from other fields that my faculty are busy looking at ecology frameworks, or how cells divide. They don't have time to do that. And so I'm able to bring those kinds of that kind of expertise.

I think approaching it from a mutual learning perspective, I have learned so much from my colleagues. I learned as much from my colleagues as they did from me. So I think it was really a community-based effort. And that made it really important. And it helped to have the imprimatur of Howard Hughes Medical Institute and National Science Foundation supporting that and saying, hey, we care about that. And this is really important.

I think really importantly, we base our discussions on evidence. And that was novel. I mostly see that when I can get faculty members to see they can collect evidence about their teaching, not do research, you don't have to do research. But an index card at the end of every class, or a Google form in this time of COVID, if you can always be collecting systematic evidence from students in your class, not to be graded, just to inform you, that, yeah, it's addictive for a lot of faculty.

And I had co-taught with several folks where we were doing that. And they would say, oh my gosh, Kimberly. You just told them how that worked, that biological phenomenon worked, and you did a clicker question. And they didn't change their mind. How's that possible? And I'm like, that's happening all the time. I'm not a bad teacher. But I didn't get through to them. And I need to try something else. That didn't work.

And so I think the role of this discovery, this epiphany that you can use your scientific skills in classrooms, you don't have to be a researcher. You just have to be systematic and not listen to the four people who are shouting at you from the front row, but get an index card from everyone, or a Google form from everyone. And then I had 300 students. People are like, Kimberly, how do I read all those? I have postdocs and grad students. And I'm like, me too. I read a sample. I take a random sample, a 10% sample. Science up about it. You can do this.

That those things were really, I think, helpful, and that it wasn't a particular strategy or a particular way of teaching. I always tell people, don't teach like me. I mean, I have a very particular background. Teach in the way that you yourself feel comfortable.

I'll also say, even though it wasn't by design, that that collaborative approach and that evidence-based approach meant that, and the fact that we had postdocs who made it safe, and who made it anonymous so we could all contribute data but nobody on someone's tenure committee knew anything that could influence their opinions of other people, it meant that we ended up publishing papers to help get those postdocs forward in their career.

So the instructor talk paper is one example, as half of my department is on that paper and really proud of it. And it's on their websites. We also had another discovery, which we're not talking about here, called DART, or Decibel Analysis for Research and Teaching. Because it became really clear that if you did things like active learning, the noise in classrooms went up.

And one of my colleagues said, well, Kimberly, how do we know we're doing anything besides lecturing? And we were like, well, let's measure the noise. And we came up with another wonderful tool that is for under-resourced institutions like ours to measure if anything beyond straight lecture is happening in a classroom.

That ended up being a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper. So we didn't start off in the beginning saying, hey, we're going to engage all these faculty and they're going to publish papers with us. But I think keeping it in the context of evidence, and keeping it in the context of asking questions and discovery was very proximal to my colleagues. And then having products come out that are wonderful things in our classroom, changes in the success of our students, and research publications, also kept it proximal to our science identity. It wasn't this other strange education thing.

I can't say that we planned all that from the beginning. But I think those are some of the things that were really important. And I think going as a team, I will say, I said 85% of my faculty spent 100 hours. There were 15% of the faculty who were like, Kimberly, I'm not interested. I don't want to do this. I like how I teach. I'm a really great lecturer. Students love to listen to me talk. You can tell me. I can talk a mean streak.

And I'm great colleagues with them. One of them was the chair of my tenure promotion committee. So not vilifying people because they maybe aren't quite ready, or they have a different stance. I invited even those 15%. We still invite them to things that we're doing. I don't think about my colleagues as students. But thinking about students as human beings, and thinking of my colleagues as human beings, and just trying to support them wherever they are, and whatever they're interested in doing.

I will say the most important thing that came out that's not written down in a publication is that our faculty meetings are different. And that's in part my dean was a co-architect of all of that professional development with me. My current chair was an architect of that, the associate chair. And so our faculty meetings now, we take time to think and write before we have a discussion.

It's not kind of a free for all. We have a speakers list. We do pair shares. We do clicker questions and faculty meetings anonymously to get a sense of what people are thinking about things before we take a vote so that we can maybe have more discussion if we're really split, or so that our junior faculty don't have to express a contrarian opinion in front of someone they feel like is going to judge them for it.

And so all those active learning assessment inclusion strategies, what I'm most proud of that's not in a paper anywhere is they've poured it over to the culture of science in a faculty meeting. And to me, that's a win. Because if we don't change the culture of science in places outside the classroom, whatever change we've made inside the classroom will not last. It will not last.

STEVEN ROBINOW: That's super interesting.

KIMBERLY TANNER: So that's maybe an answer to departmental change. It ain't just for classrooms.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Yeah, that's super interesting. That sounds like a fun meeting to come to and listen to. So let me ask you something. I don't know if you thought about this. You made a career choice to become an education researcher. I wonder how that impacted your life in ways that you haven't thought about that have nothing to do with the university teaching, just you.

KIMBERLY TANNER: Oh. Yeah, I don't know if it's the research part or the educator part. But it definitely just tunes up your lens of all social interactions and dynamics. I think it's influenced my spouse. My spouse is a CEO of a neurobiology startup, gives a lot of webinars, does a lot of meetings, and he came home the other day and said, yeah. A person in his company said, oh you've got to go ask Kimberly what we should do to make this more engaging. You got to do one of those Kimberly things. And of course, they're not Kimberly things for people that aren't me.

I think it's also made me really see inequity, and unfairness, and discrimination in the world everywhere. When you study it, it's hard to just not see it everywhere. It's good to see it everywhere. It's made me more empathetic. I'm a white dominant culture person. You're not looking at me, but the color of my skin has opened so many doors. People make so many assumptions about who I am, and where I come from, and the privileges I may or may not have. And I can pass. And they make assumptions that are incorrect.

Whereas my wonderful colleagues of color, people make assumptions about them, they're just wrong. They're just incorrect. And those things are foisted on them. And so I think also as an education researcher who has attempted to learn a lot from other fields that just have for years and years, social psychology, higher education more broadly, there are fields with wonderful scholars who I have learned immensely from.

And it ports over not just to my classroom, or my education research, but how I view local decisions in politics, what it looks like when I am in public settings and I see who gets waited on at a bakery, and who's been standing there for 15 minutes, and people aren't paying attention to them.

I mean, there's just it turns on a lens of the unfairness in the world that is humbling and frustrating but allows you to, I think, see places you can make change as a bystander often and have a positive impact in every area of your life.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Nice. Wow. Yeah, very nice. Two last questions we're going to try to squeeze in before you've got to go.

KIMBERLY TANNER: Yes. Yes.

STEVEN ROBINOW: I wonder what's your greatest classroom failure, or your most disappointing moment?

KIMBERLY TANNER: Oh, wow. Yeah, that's—I have so many. There's so many to choose from.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Just pick one. Just pick one.

KIMBERLY TANNER: I always tell my students. Yeah, I'll just pick one. I will say my greatest failure or classroom moment, once again, was taught to me by my students, which is that I had always really valued bringing in the stories of people and human beings into Intro Bio, and really emphasizing all different kinds of people should do science. And then I had a group of wonderful upper division students, all students of color, who were helping me build some more culturally responsive curriculum.

And we did an exercise together. I was like, well, what do you remember from Intro Bio? Who do you remember? What humans were there? And pretty much everyone they remembered and can name was white. So the people that were highlighted in the course who were successful scientists tended to be white people. And then the people who had maybe been wronged, or not treated well by science, Henrietta Lacks, we had the story of Cynthia Lucero, several women of color, always ended up being people of color.

And so that is a huge failure on my part. And I didn't see it. I didn't see that. And I was basically I think reflecting a lot of the dominant narratives, like we'd talk about who won a Nobel Prize, or something like that. And we talked about Rosalind Franklin. Rosalind Franklin was the wronged white woman in that story. But they really let me see my class in a way where I was mortified.

This was about the same time that Jeff Schinske, my community college colleague, was publishing on something called Scientist Spotlights, which is the integration of the stories of lots of different people from counter-stereotypical backgrounds as a way to teach science, not something extra. It's the way to teach the content. And so it was part of that project that my students let me see like, wow. I have really failed you in these examples. And we are going to change that. And what's fabulous is that those students went on to be authors on a paper.

Student-authored scientist spotlights will be coming out soon and are part of a project to really change broadly and to get faculty to purposefully look at who are the humans I'm representing? What are their characteristics? And what am I messaging inadvertently that I didn't intend to message? And that's one of my greatest failures. Yeah. It's changed.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Great. But it's changed—right? It changed you. Right?

KIMBERLY TANNER: It's changed. Yes, change is inevitable.

STEVEN ROBINOW: So last question. What was your sweetest or most poignant moment in the classroom, or most surprising?

KIMBERLY TANNER: There are so many. But here's one that just has stayed with me for a long time about what really is the point of teaching. So metacognition, this idea of engaging students, and thinking about their learning, and having them see that they've learned, not just an instructor give them a better grade. I did a lot of students writing their ideas about something before we study a topic, and then collecting that when we were in person; now it's all electronic.

And then after we study it, and they do activities, they're doing things, then handing it back to them and saying, hey, take a look at what you wrote two weeks ago. And then find as many things as you can about how you think your ideas have changed, just in the same way we were talking about my ideas changing about teaching. And I remember being in person, this is a while back, and kneeling down. One of the students in my class had called me over. And I kneeled down next to her.

And we were doing an activity where we were looking at what they had written previously. And I'd put it at their desk as they came in. And she said, Kimberly, there's—I don't know quite what we're doing. I think we're doing peer grading because we did a lot of peer reading other people's stuff. I don't know who this person is but they're completely lost. They don't understand anything about how the biological world works. I mean, this is not right, and this is not right, and this other thing is not right. And where did this paper come from? Have they not been in class for the last two weeks?

And I said, I so appreciate that's such a thoughtful reading. What name is at the top of the paper? And it was her name. And it was just this incredibly profound moment for her and for me that that's what teaching and learning is about as a neuroscientist. It's about being a different person and a better person hopefully, a more armed person with knowledge when you leave classroom experiences than when you started.

And so to me, that moment of that student recognizing how far they had come in two weeks in their understanding of things that they had come to see as critically important was really profound. And I try and cultivate that moment for everyone that I work with in my personal and professional life as much as I can. Because that's fundamentally and neuroscientifically, in my opinion, what teaching and learning is all about.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Wow. That's a powerful story. Two weeks. Amazing. That's great.

KIMBERLY TANNER: Two weeks.

STEVEN ROBINOW: That's great. Kimberly, we're at the end of our time. I'd like to thank you so much for the time you spent with us today. We look forward to your future work in the impact of instructor talk on student engagement and student success.

KIMBERLY TANNER: Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. I feel like this is not my usual situation. I have talked for too long and I have not heard as much from you. But I appreciate you hearing the stories of me and the people that I work with. And I wish you all the best.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Wonderful. This has been great. We're going to—on our website, we'd like—we'll be putting up some references to instructor talk, and maybe some of your other papers, we'll put up some stuff on DART, other things. And again, thanks so much for your time. And we'll have you back. Thank you, Kimberly. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.

KIMBERLY TANNER: Bye-bye.

STEVEN ROBINOW: For more information about Kimberly Tanner, 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 have found this discussion interesting and helpful. If you have, please share our podcasts 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 to 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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