– Hi, everyone. I’m Niya Bond, the Faculty Developer here at OneHE, and I’m so excited to be joined this morning with Martha Mullally. Martha, welcome. We’re so excited to be talking today about our topic, fostering friendships. But first, could you tell the community a little bit about yourself and how you got interested in this topic?

– Sure. Thank you, Niya. Thank you for the invitation. Thank you for the warm welcome this morning. So my name is Martha Mullally. I’m an Associate Professor, Teaching Stream at Carleton University, which is a university in the capital city of Canada, Ottawa. And I teach, mostly, introductory biology courses. So I teach a course in plant biology. I teach a course in biotechnology. I taught microbiology for several years. I teach genetics. But in addition to that, I was really lucky to do a post doc with the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative, which, at the time, was at the University of British Columbia. And so I learned a lot as a Post Doc, about thinking about teaching. And so that definitely, you know, created a lot of the… It created the training and some of the mindset that I have about teaching. But specifically, sort of how I got interested in this topic, has a lot to do with post pandemic behavior that I saw in my classroom. Our university had a very strict approach to in-person teaching during the pandemic. So we moved completely online, you know, like everybody, in the spring of 2020. But we stayed like that. Really, I stayed completely online until the fall of 2022.

– Okay. Yeah.

– A lot of time to go past. And it was that fall that I walked into my classroom, a second year classroom, right, where people often will already know each other ’cause they will have met in first year and they have a lot of the same classes in common, and my classes are tend to be required courses, so everybody who’s in the room is a biology or biochemistry major, and the room was silent.

– [Niya] Mm-hmm.

– And it just, the silence was what struck me. I thought to myself, there’s something weird about the atmosphere in this room. And, you know, in the next week or so with that group, I happened to ask a question like, “Has anybody here ever been to campus before?” Zero hands went up.

– Mm-hmm.

– Right? So they were officially second year students, but in a lot of ways, they were more like first year students, and one of those ways was, they didn’t have strong peer connections. And so I just became interested in how could I help them develop stronger connections with their peers.

– Yeah. Yeah, and I can imagine that has continued to stay relevant, which is why it’s a timely topic for us to be discussing.

– Yeah, it’s interesting, I think… I mean, I’m not a psychologist, you know, or even at all, psychologists of young people, but of course, I work with them every day, I have two teenagers in my own family which I’m blessed to live with, two cranky sometimes, with beautiful teenagers. And it just seemed like there were like subtle things that didn’t happen for some young people during those times of, you know, lockdown, and isolation, and separation, and anxiety. And that some of those things had to do with how we interact with other people. And, you know, really simple stuff, just like whether or not you have a friend in class, all the way to, you know, when we have difficulties with each other when we’re collaborating or working on a project, how do we work it out with each other? So yeah, it was really just my curiosity that led me to start thinking about this.

– Well, yeah, it sounds like curiosity and care, but I’m hoping we can talk a little bit about, you know, you mentioned some things are within your purview and then some things, you know, might be outside of your purview, your professional expertise. So, like, where did you start and like, what did you zero in on, and then what did you continue to hone?

– It’s interesting, I just started to talk about how you should make friends at school.

– [Niya] Okay.

– Very, very simply.

– Yeah.

– And in my biotechnology class, it’s always been like, a learning objective of the course is to collaborate well with other people.

– Okay.

– And so I just started to be really explicit about what I meant by that. And what I mean by that is, I want you to get to know the other people. So one of the things that I did in both these classes, although I had done it before, but probably I was, maybe a little bit more aware, so everybody had a name tag that they would have in front of them like just folded over a little cue card with their name on the front. And so the TA, the teaching assistant and I, put even… I mean, I feel like we’d always done this, we tried really hard to learn their names and use their names, and that because their names were in front of them, I think, you know, they were able to get to know each other’s names. And even that cohort, particularly biotechnology, because they move around so much and it’s a very collaborative active learning kind of classroom, one of the things I can remember really clearly, is one day, where I said explicitly, “I want you,” for this activity we’re doing for the next 10 minutes or whatever, “go and find somebody that you’ve never spoken to before in this room, and go and work with them.” And this was probably like six or eight weeks into, you know, a 13-week course, so, you know, we’re quite far along. And the teaching assistant and I, we both noticed that they really did it. We’re like, “Oh,” we know that, you know, this group of people often work together, and now they’ve broken up and they’re working with other people. So those are the kinds of, like, pretty low tech explicit things that I did, was like, I learned their names, the teaching assistant learned their names, we try to encourage them to learn each other’s names. But then we also, like, assertively shuffled them to move around and work with different people.

– I love that term, assertively shuffled. I also love what you said about having this collaborative, connective element embedded in your learning outcomes. ‘Cause I think so often, learning outcomes are very like content or subject specific, but this is like a durable life skill that is really important. And, you know, for some, to think of that in like an intro to biology learning outcome might be a little bit surprising. So how did you come to, like, embed that ’cause it sounds like you did that pre-pandemic as well?

– You know, I really learned that from Carl Wieman, and Carl is this very serious physicist. He won the Nobel Prize in physics. You know, he’s not as soft, fluffy person. But I remember him talking to us about learning objectives, and that one of the things that could happen in your learning objectives is that they could be affective. Affective, like, they could be affected then.

– Oh yeah. Yeah.

– And so he said, “You know, it’s totally legit for one of the learning objectives to be realized that quantum mechanics are amazing.”

– [Niya] I love it!

– I was like, “What?” So I have in my plant course, one of the learning objectives is like, recognize that plants are amazing. And in biotechnology, you know, learn to work with other people, can make connections with other people. And so now, more and more, I just come back to that. And so the great thing about the learning objectives is, right, it gives clarity for you and for them. And so, if I get somebody pushing back about, “Well, I don’t wanna give a presentation,” “I don’t wanna work with other people,” then I just have a chance to say, “Well, that’s actually one of the goals of the course.” So, you know, if you are not willing to do that, you’re not gonna be able to demonstrate the competencies that we’re hoping for in this course. So it can be a helpful tool kind of on both sides, right? Like to build the environment, but then also to reinforce the things that you’re wanting and expecting.

– Yeah, and I was gonna say that, you know, you had mentioned that, like your practical name tag example is pretty easy to implement, but the kind of culture your cultivating for students to feel safe and brave enough to go walk over to someone they don’t know, even if though it’s in the same class, must be part of your, like, transparent teaching and something that you’re working towards probably before the course even begins.

– Yes. Yeah. I think that it’s interesting ’cause I’ve been thinking too about just like everybody, right? like, how are we teaching intro courses, and feature artificial intelligence and learning models, right? Like, how do I teach people definitions of things when the computers can do all of that stuff for us? And I think part of how we do that is by having students accountable to us in person live in class, which means, often, oral presentations, or a conversation with the professor, or a presentation to the whole group or to a small group. And in order to help people to be comfortable enough to do that, then I have to create an environment where people start to feel comfortable talking to each other, talking to the room, talking to me. And so, yeah, I’ve been trying really hard to do that. And initially, right, there’s no assessments around this stuff. And then we kind of work up to, you know, at the front end of the course, it’s just answering a question or it’s just interacting briefly. And then we’re kind of working slowly towards people giving presentations and hopefully, the environment becomes comfortable enough that people are able to be brave. Because, particularly in an introductory biology course, students are surprised –

– Sure.

– if we ask them to speak.

– Sure. Yeah, I teach often introductory writing, except I am exclusively online and asynchronous, so what you said about intro courses in the era of AI and trying to build like those authentic connective opportunities, is also on my mind in different ways, yeah.

– Yeah, it’s a huge challenge for all of us. And it’s just making me think more and more about how… about the value of the in-person piece of the teaching, and that I think we have to leverage that even more. Like, it makes me wonder, like, “What about a four-hour class?”, “What if we come for the whole day together?”, which is not probably possible. I think that time has to be used so effectively in terms of them having chances to demonstrate understanding.

– [Niya] Yeah.

– Because when they demonstrate understanding, when you’re not present with them, there’s just a lot of temptation for them to use a tool to do that for them instead of to do it themselves.

– Mm-hmm. Well, and I like that everything you’re saying is coming back to that, like kind of human interactive element, which is an important part of any teaching-learning experience, right?

– Yeah. Yeah. That’s where the richness is, right? The interacting with each other, interacting with the teaching team, that’s where… There’s so much possibility there, right, to co-develop and co-build understandings and learnings. And that’s what makes being in class really special. And so, I think… I mean, I’ve always felt this way, but I think, like, it becomes really, really clear when you think about alternative ways of trying to assess, and ways that maybe don’t capture that person’s actual understanding, they capture, instead, like a person’s kind of immediate desire to fulfill some course requirement.

– Mm. Mm-hmm.

– Right? I have to do the assignment, and I have seven other ones, and I have to do it as quickly as possible, so using AI to help me do it makes sense as opposed to, I’m right in the room and there are other people in the room with me, and, you know, I feel that much more accountable to myself, to other people. And that hopefully, that creates incentive in a space where people also feel safe, to stretch a little bit and to demonstrate learning and to even feel safe enough to make some mistakes.

– Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I’m wondering if you have any resources or recommendations for anyone in our community who kinda wants to learn more about this topic, or even just things for them to think about, kind of as a closing thought for them?

– Let me think. So I’ve got one very simple idea, which is in my big course, the plant biology course I taught this semester, which has about 200 people in it. I had this bonus mark, if you could name five people, you just name five other people in the class.

– Yeah.

– You can get a bonus mark. And they were really into it. And, I mean, of course, I also do a lot of active learning in peer instruction. People are working on things together in class, but I thought five was kind of a stretch goal, for a person to know five other people in the class, and lots of them were able to do that. So that’s one example. And we had a little bit of a competition too, between the teaching assistants and I, about how many people’s first names we could name.

– [Niya] Okay.

– Which just kind of makes it fun for students. I would really recommend people reading Peter Felten. Peter’s written a lot about, you know, this relationship-rich teaching, relationship-rich learning. He’s written it from both, like, a faculty perspective and a student perspective. And definitely, I had a chance, Peter spent a year on my campus a couple years ago, I had a chance to talk to him and read him, and I was really inspired by those ideas and I think that’s a great piece to read.

– Yeah. Well, thank you for that. We’ll definitely be linking to that work. And I so appreciate your time today. This is such an important conversation, and we’re so grateful that you are sharing your insights and some inspiration with our community this morning.

– Thank you, Niya. Really appreciate it. It’s really nice to get a chance to talk to you and I hope that this inspires people to create warm classrooms where students get a chance to get to know each other.

– Thank you, I’m sure… No, I know it will.