– I am here with Jessamyn Neuhaus, the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence at Syracuse University. We were talking about her recently published book, “Snafu Edu.” Welcome, Jessamyn.

– Hello. Thanks for having me.

– So, most books on teaching offer strategies for teachers to adapt. And one way they bring those strategies to life is by profiling inspiring teachers who develop them and model them. And while that approach might be useful for readers, and I think it can be useful, it can have some side effects. So tell me about what those effects might be.

– Well, Jim, I’d say there’s a really big difference between inspiring and unobtainable ideal that’s gonna make you doubt and question everything you’ve ever do in the classroom or ever will do in the classroom. In popular imagination and many media images of college educators, good teaching is almost always equated with a really limited and limiting version of the professor paragon, a perfect lecturer who effortlessly entertains and enthralls giant lecture halls of students or a tiny entranced seminar of students. In pop culture, good teaching at any level is most often defined as unequivocally transformative. Like every single student will blossom into their very best selves, like in every single class. And each one is gonna be permanently transformed into these joyful learners by the magical, selfless, endlessly energetic, and innately skilled super teacher. And too often, otherwise excellent advice about teaching fails to interrogate this stereotype about teaching. And that’s a problem because that super teacher, it’s not always, but often that he lives in our heads, even if we’re not always consciously aware of it. Too much emphasis on what the best teachers do can backfire. It can become disempowering. It can feed into a huge strain of unhealthy perfectionism in academia. And it can reinforce the completely erroneous idea that good teachers are born, not made, when the exact opposite is true. Every effective educator is always learning and changing because students are always changing. The world is always changing. We are always changing. Our disciplines are always changing. What I think is really inspiring is hearing about someone’s biggest teaching failures, flops, problems, how they navigated those snafus, how they got support and assistance, worked on identifying what they could or could not do to improve on that, or at least understand what was going on, understand the situation, and then they got just a little bit better. That’s what effective teaching looks like for most of us, most of the time, not “Captain, my captain” type moments of transcendent classroom joy. That might happen once or twice in your career, but that’s not what it looks like most of the time for most of us.

– Yeah, actually, you know, that’s a better story too. Like, just from a narrative perspective, not just a story that someone’s doing great and then does great the entire time. Someone fails, you know, tries to get better, and then has, you know, a positive outcome. That’s a better story actually.

– Yeah, I want the movie where somebody really tanks in the classroom, then they read some books, they go to the teaching center, they try something else, it works a little bit better, and by the end of their career, they’ve gotten better over time.

– Yes, and still not perfect though.

– Never perfect.

– Yeah. Okay, so we all struggle. We make mistakes. We have unexpected obstacles and more. And your book sort of offers like a handful of reasons why things typically go wrong. And so tell me what those are a little bit and maybe like identify like one or two you think are maybe of those five you’re like maybe particular problems right now in our current moment in higher education.

– Sure, sure. So in “Snafu Edu” I examine five reasons for things going wrong in teaching and learning: inequity, disconnection, distrust, failure, and fear. An important part of my argument is that these things snafu student learning, wellbeing, and success, but also snafu teaching and instructors’ success and wellbeing. So for example, systemic inequities in higher education, those create obstacles for students and for faculty. Distrust between instructors and students fouls up learning and teaching conditions. In the book, I delve into some strategies for navigating snafus and also detailed strategies for proactively increasing equity, connection, trust, and success. But the one that has been most on my mind lately is fear. Fear, and the corresponding strategy I explore, which is increasing agency. Inequity, disconnection, distrust, and failure, these all feed the many types of fears, crisscrossing everyone’s experiences in higher ed. But in addition, there are so many rapidly emerging and newly powerful sociocultural, political, technological factors, creating fear among teachers, learners, leaders, staff, administrators on college campuses. And at this moment, there’s just so many things from political threats to the mindbogglingly rapid evolution of generative AI. There’s so many different types of fears for so many different groups of people in higher ed. So to my mind, you know, fear is pretty much lord of the snafus right now in higher ed, and fear short circuits our intellectual, psychological, even physical abilities to function, let alone do the hard work of learning and teaching. This isn’t new information. This is just a human fact about being human, that a brain grappling with fear just cannot do much of anything else. To deal with that fact, that’s why effective educators strive to create psychological safety and equity in the classroom. And that’s so students and us, and we and faculty can grapple with the challenging tasks and problems that we’re working with and to build new skills without being derailed by fear. But reducing fear is never easy. And in the book I argue that it’s never just a matter of doing the opposite, what might seem like the opposite of being afraid: being courageous, being not afraid. And to my mind, telling people experiencing fear as learners and or/as educators that they just need to be braver, like, not only does that vastly oversimplify the complexities of fear, but it does not take into account that many, many people, especially right now, they have very justifiable reasons for being afraid and afraid of things with major real life consequences and threats to their safety and wellbeing. So I’m not gonna say be courageous as the proactive strategy for navigating fear snafus, but I am gonna say that we can look for ways to act exercise agency and promote agency for learners as well. Agency is not simply free will or individual effort. Agency is our ability to act in meaningful ways that are congruent with what we value, with what we hope to achieve. Always shaped and defined by the constraints in which we work, the power systems, context of our teaching, learning. So agency has limits, but it enables learners and teachers to maximize their opportunities to learn and to thrive when and where they can. So proactively exercising, finding ways to amplify energy, or, excuse me, agency is our best counter offensive against the ravages of fear. So I do have one example. I’ve been hearing just recently a lot from high achieving students at this moment of fear of being accused of using generative AI for their written assignments, even when they haven’t done so.

– Yeah.

– Based on that fear, their choosing, their strategy is to upload their papers into an AI checker, and then revise, keep changing and checking until it reports 0% generative AI content. And that is such a waste of everyone’s time and energy.

– Yeah

– Fear-driven actions are rarely, I mean, if ever the route to effective learning and teaching. So as educators then where could we exercise agency in that situation where fear is driving something that’s creating an obstacle? So, obviously, it doesn’t extend to going back in time when generative AI doesn’t exist, or doesn’t change the fact that this is a real issue. Changing assessment means in this age. So where do we have an agency? Could we create more assessment transparency? Could we find ways to build trust with students so they do not take that unnecessary fear-driven step, revising and editing, not to improve, but outta fear of being accused.

– Yeah, you know, when you said that, “Fear,” I sort of thought to myself like my LinkedIn feed, it is just filled with fear, not only fear of expressing fears about what’s happening to the teachers, but also the people that are selling them stuff.

– Yeah.

– Right? And making arguments about what we should be doing are also like playing on those fears and sort of, you know, rearing them up in order then offer a solution to them. So, I mean, you’re absolutely right. That totally makes sense to me.

– Yeah.

– So in the book, you know, you offer this process for responding to problems. And you have handy acronym, STIR.

– I love acronyms.

– Stop, think, identify, and repair. Right? So walk us through, you know, what that looks like in practice.

– So like my first book, “Geeky Pedagogy,” in “Snafu Edu,” I’m writing pretty directly to nerds like me. So people who love their scholarly subjects and who maybe aren’t as quick thinking on their feet in social arenas as they are academically skilled. So the STIR framework, I had my peeps in mind, ways to productively navigate those professorial face plants for those of us with highly trained brains who excel at pondering and thinking. So first step is stop, call a timeout. That might be in class, halting class business as usual. Pausing. Pausing allows you to gather your thoughts, silence your knee jerk internal, or worse, external commentary. And then think. Think, use that that awesome brain. Examine the situation with as much clear-eyed curiosity as you can summon. What’s really going on here? Identify, describe, define, explain what exactly has gone sideways, and this might be just for you or it might be with the student, it might be with a group of students. And then repair in whatever is in your power as an individual educator in your unique teaching context, shaped by all the factors that go into that. Apply the short term patches or implement the long-term changes needed to mitigate and reduce the snafu. And I chose repair very deliberately because of that ginormous streak of perfectionism that runs through academia. And there is no perfect snafu-proof way to teach and learn. So I thought I’d share one example from the book. It’s a super common snafu that on the surface seems like a small issue, but touches on some big ways that things can go wrong and create obstacles for learning and for teaching, specifically by eroding trust in the classroom. And that is side conversations, side conversations during class. So here’s how I… It’s one of those things. Like, just, it happens once, and you don’t notice, but then it can become a real issue. So and this is from, I’m reading from the book now.

– Yeah.

– Okay. A STIR strategy for diffusing distrust, including identifying the source of the distrust and repairing the breach in the moment of the event looks like this. Stop. Call the class to a halt or your instinct might be to ignore the side conversation or pretend it’s not happening. But if we don’t address it, distrust can spread. Other students will be like, “Why is she letting this side conversation happen?” They might be, “Why do those people keep talking? I’m trying to listen.” So think where is this trust springing up and what’s the necessary next step for addressing it and for diffusing its power to negatively impact the classroom environment. Identify, and this would be a case where you do it for everyone in the classroom, saying something like, “Well, before we go on, I need to address an issue I’m seeing right now.” And throughout the book I do have some sample wording, not because I think you should memorize word for word exactly, but just to give you a sense of what you might say in that moment. And then repair. Reduce the potential conflict and diffuse distrust by saying something like, “It’s hard for me to hear and for others to listen when there’s these side conversations. So talking over someone makes it really difficult to listen fully, and it’s disrespectful to our learning community. So everybody, I would just want us to make an effort to make sure everyone has a chance to be heard and to speak clearly.”

– Yeah, that’s great. And so I’m sure the book is filled with these great examples of things going wrong, not a stop, identify, think, repair.

– Including from my own vast selection of things I did really badly, so-

– I’m sure most of us who have taught for a long time could write our own books about all the things we’ve done wrong. I definitely could write like a long one about that. So, all right, that’s great. Thanks so much for talking to us today, Jessamyn.

– Thanks for having me.

– Yep.