Day: November 2, 2022

As technologists, we often have our minds set firmly on the future. We have made it a hallmark of our profession to find the latest and greatest to share with our communities. Sometimes this results in innovative outcomes but all too often these efforts result in intriguing “projects” that never seem to take root in the fabric of our institutions.

We are so trained in this approach to reshaping pedagogy that, when we are asked to develop innovative approaches to teaching and learning, we instinctively grasp for our toolboxes instead of considering the pedagogical approach or other purposes of the technology first. All too often, technology guides the purpose and not the other way around.

The weaknesses of this tendency became apparent last year as most institutions were suddenly forced to lean heavily on their technology infrastructures to maintain continuity of instruction during the pandemic. Those institutions with a diverse set of tools that complemented each other and provided faculty and students with low barriers to entry had relatively smooth transitions to remote teaching.

However, those institutions that had not devoted much attention to their technology infrastructures ran into repeated problems as faculty and students bent technology to meet their learning needs. More often, however, we were driven to compromise instruction in order to do anything at all with the tools at hand. Even institutions that had relatively sophisticated technology infrastructures struggled if those tools were hard to use or did not incorporate antifragile design principles.

Challenges always look for weak points in any system. This is true of COVID, which looks for weak points in our biological systems. It is also true of Black Swan events, which will seek out weak points in our social systems. Education is a social system with many weak points. It is based on rigid systems of time (contact hours) and space (“online courses are to be kept separate from ‘real’ courses”). The pandemic disrupted both time and space. As a consequence, it compromised many different systems in unexpected ways. The design of our technological toolsets reflected many of these systemic weaknesses.

This did not have to be the case. Digital technology has the capacity to make our systems less rigid. Online courses can be decoupled from time and space with little regard for logistics like room scheduling. As long as you have power and the internet, you are good to go.

One mistake that many institutions made last year was to move courses online without considering those two essential preconditions. For instance, instead of trying to reduce class sizes, the focus should have been to reduce the need to physically be in class. Instead of expending scarce resources trying to get students into classrooms, technological resources should have been distributed throughout our campuses to allow those students with connection or device issues to come in and use institutional resources such as computers and wi-fi.

Ultimately, the purpose of a classroom is community. We seem to have lost sight of that. Instead, we sought to replace the tool without considering how we could build communities in the absence of physical proximity. The system drove this train of thinking, not the tools. It’s no surprise we saw so many failures under those circumstances.

Our systems measure instruction through imperfect metrics such as “contact hours” that are based on old technological systems such as classrooms. The technology of the classroom drove the system in this direction but then the system assumed its own logic based on that technology. This rigidity created a structural weak point that was attacked by the pandemic. Trying to mimic a singular set of tools centered on the concept of the classroom online resulted in a great deal of dissatisfaction, as well as declines in outcomes, when it came to the quality of our educational product.

For my own classes, I made a conscious decision to ignore these systemic constraints and focus entirely on what my students needed to learn. I carefully analyzed all of the different tasks required to successfully complete my course, designed a set of tools matched to specific tasks, and went on teaching as normal with few compromises in my instructional approach. As a matter of fact, as I wrote in my book, Learn At Your Own Risk, there were many aspects of my instruction that were better than before remote instruction took hold.

My approach isn’t a perfect system (no system of individualized learning can be “perfect”). However, it does illustrate an antifragile approach to integrating the appropriate technological tools available to me. I let the needs of the learner drive my decisions, not the available technology. There were some things that were suboptimal. For instance, in-person contact, particularly for those still struggling to learn how to learn, is almost impossible to replace. Videoconferencing is not a panacea.

So how are we going to be ready for the next set of challenges that come down the road? Everything from climate change to demography are going to buffet our institutions. Climate change makes a repeat of COVID more likely as humans and viruses interact in new and unexpected ways as both struggle to adapt to changes in their ecosystems.

We are going to have to change how we think about technology to make education a much more antifragile system. That means we need to understand how our technologies work holistically with one another to shape our learning environments. But we must also consider, as happened last year, what happens when a particular set of tools is taken away from us by unexpected events. How quickly will our learning ecosystems adapt and heal under similar circumstances?

This is not just about preparing for disaster. We must also grasp the opportunities afforded to us by creating more flexible systems. Climate change is one example of a challenge that cannot be solved by any one discipline or specialty. Like Covid, science must be complemented with social science. If the last year has taught us anything, it’s that sociology and politics have often created illogical outcomes that have killed more people than would have been the case had we simply followed the science. It has taken both science and our social systems to develop and, more importantly, distribute vaccines to slow or stop the disease.

Our systems of learning need to facilitate the construction of bridges between disciplines. The challenges that we will likely face will require a range of interlocking skills and technologies to overcome. Creating an information ecosystem is critical to any large scale effort. Digital technology excels at information exchange. As a social scientist, there is little stopping me from bringing a physicist or biologist into my class. This is true even if the scientist in question happens to be thousands of miles away. The act of sharing research is simple as well.

However, none of this will have an impact if our systems don’t adapt as well. Silos are human constructions. Sometimes we build them into our digital solutions as well where they undermine the potential of the tools. We have to decide to use our tools in such a way as to make our systems antifragile. Our technology will not do this for us.

Blogs on the Hackathons can be found here:

• Out of the Information Thicket – The XR Connection

• Through the Digital Looking Glass: Reflections on Toolset Hackathon So Far

• Ozymandias – The Power of Creating Meaningful Artifacts

• The Power of the Moment: Building Communities of Thought

• Humans are More Complex Than Light: Iterating a Tool for Understanding Tools

We find ourselves in a thicket, trying to make sense of the vast amounts of information that the Digital Age has unlocked. Our tools seem somehow inadequate to the task as all they seem to do is speed up the flows while doing little to cut through the tangles. Extended Reality (XR) is about to unlock a new suite of tools with the potential to help us link humans and their ideas in entirely new ways.

In 1945, Vannevar Bush, who headed science programs for the United States during World War II, wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly called “As We May Think.” His concern in the article was our ability to process and meaningfully link information in an age of large, distributed research efforts, such as the one he had just led to develop the atomic bomb. To address this, he imagined a device to connect, recall, and remix pieces of information, which he called the Memex. The key aspect of Bush’s design of the Memex was that it focused on the linkages between chunks of information, which he called “breadcrumbs,” instead of the information itself.

Bush realized that the flood of information was useless unless you could connect it in meaningful and replicable ways. Knowing it is raining is only useful if you connect it to the need to take an umbrella with you on your walk. Bush, and the pioneers that followed him, recognized the power of computing technology lay in its ability to connect humans and their ideas. The thinking behind the Memex influenced the evolution of computing technology from Doug Englebart’s Human-Computer Interaction to Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web and beyond.

What separated Bush’s piece from most other early computing documents was that he only spoke of technology toward the end. He started with a problem. The challenge that he perceived was not a technology problem. It was challenging of linking and understanding human knowledge. Meaning lives in the linkages, not the information. Technology could facilitate human these linkages. It could not replace them.

Almost 80 years on, we have not emerged from Bush’s thicket of information overload. Instead, the problem he identified is magnified to the Nth degree by our computing and communication technologies. Navigating today’s information environments as a teacher is every bit as complex as the problems that Bush faced. We often struggle to see the connections ourselves, much less make them clear to our students. Our problem is that we’ve been thinking with blinders that focus our attention on the nodes and not the linkages.

Almost all computing technology since the 1970s has been constructed on the metaphor of paper. We think of web “pages” and “documents.” It logically follows that we build tools around the creation, storage, and presentation of artifacts based on those metaphors. We “see” information in this context and miss precisely the kinds of insights that Bush was struggling toward with his conception of the Memex.

Networks are patterns. They are patterns of linkages between people, but they also represent patterns of ideas. Bush recognized that our fundamental problem was one of effectively seeing these patterns of ideas. As teachers, we should recognize that problem. We seek to have our students see the world in a different light by showing them new paradigms. As researchers and learners, we struggle to imagine new patterns of knowledge.

The paper metaphor limits our ability to see patterns differently. We become creatures of habit and context. We see challenges as linear, with a clear beginning and end. Because prose appears fixed, we miss opportunities to bend time and space. Networks are also creatures of time. They bend and morph dynamically. We may miss something critical by assuming it is frozen. (As I’m implicitly doing with this very blog/column.)

Not long after Bush wrote his article, Claude Shannon provided the other key piece to breaking the Gordian Knot of information tied to the medium of paper. His “Mathematical Theory of Communication” shattered the idea of communication being tied to analog streams of information. After Shannon, information did not exist in the tunnel of text but in a fractal universe of bits. This insight flipped the switch on the Digital Age. It was now possible to see information not simply as a network of interconnected narratives but as a network of interconnected ideas on the cellular level.

While Shannon’s reality forms the bedrock of general-purpose computing, it has yet to penetrate the human imagination fully. Even under the best of circumstances we build our tools to facilitate the limits of our imaginations. If we continue to imagine based on the limits of paper, our toolmaking ecosystems will continue to build tools to support that vision of the world. We are still networking with the creative metaphor of the postbox.

XR breaks the paper metaphor because it finally treats information as distinct bits, allowing us to remix it. We can bring digital spaces into the real world by augmenting our vision. We can fully enter digital spaces and share networks of ideas in constructed spaces we can manipulate and turn in any way that we want. Virtual spaces open up 3D concept mapping and allow us to practice scenarios in ways that were impossible in a two-dimensional world defined by flat digital spaces. We will be able to walk through ideas. By going into these imaginary spaces, we may finally emerge out of our informational thickets.

Our tools not only shape what we do, they also shape what we think we can do. They bind our realities and our perceptions of what is possible. Everything from product marketing to comparisons with older tools to habits formed through their initial use shape our perceptions of the tools we use. The goal of Summer 2021 Teaching Toolset Hackathons was to push past these kinds of preconceptions and use the collective experience of the ShapingEDU group to introduce the world to creative ways to use digital tools.

This project demanded its own set of tools to be successful. At the urging of Laura Gehringer and Karina Branson, I implemented Miro as a concept mapping tool and brainstorming area for the live sessions. I selected this tool in order to creatively and actively engage the hackathon participants, both during and between live sessions. I used this tool to implement what I like to call “digital constructivism.” In this role, the tool has served well.

As I explored and tried to make sense of the data collected in the concept map, however, it became increasingly clear to me that we were looking at the problem backwards. The tools we were analyzing were driving the conversation at the expense of the tasks we intended them to perform. The concept map, however, reframed how I looked at the challenges we were working through. I perceived a way to flip the conversation so that the teaching goals would frame how we perceived the tools. In this way my concept mapping tool actually served a meta purpose: the tool itself reshaped how we should analyze tools. Ironically, using the concept map tool itself led me to see how we should ultimately frame the project.

When we embarked on the latest iteration of the Teaching Toolset Project, I intended for the group to create a catalog of tools that could achieve specific teaching and learning goals as defined by Diana Laurillard in her book Teaching as a Design Science. These were Practice, Acquisition, Discussion, Inquiry, Collaboration, and Production. To her list I added the challenge of engagement, which I defined as Curiosity. The problem that the Toolset Project sought to tackle, as originally conceived, was that we were uncritically using far too many digital tools. All too often, these tools failed to connect to the tasks that they were intended to perform.

The two hackathons that we have done so far have given the participants a list of tools grouped by proximity and time, allowed them to add to the list, and then asked them to connect these tools to the aforementioned teaching goals. It was my thinking that the critical gap in knowledge was a deep understanding of the tools themselves. Because we so often uncritically adopt tools, we miss opportunities to apply them to the creative practice of teaching and learning. As a result, we miss opportunities or become frustrated with the tools when they undermine our pedagogical goals.

I slowly realized that in the project’s design that I was making exactly the same mistake that I wanted the project itself to overcome: I was missing an opportunity to use the concept tool creatively to better understand how it was itself reshaping the project. The concept map that emerged from the first two excellent sessions on Synchronous and Asynchronous tools was a complex snarl of connections. After the last session, I set to untangling this flying spaghetti monster of linkages. I eventually discovered that the only way I could make sense out of it was to put it up to a mirror.

My initial thinking on the project was to create a guide grouped into the five tool modes Traditional (synchronous/proximate), Informal (asynchronous/proximate), Conversational (synchronous/distant), Presentational (asynchronous/distant), and Combinatorial (XR) but I have since realized that this was a trap. This approach led us down a path where we’re letting the tools drive the instructional pathway rather than collecting and developing tools to support specific teaching goals as laid out by Laurillard. This is exactly the opposite of what I intended this project to do but it’s not surprising that it took this turn given how most of us are used to thinking about the role of tools in our teaching strategies.

It seems to be a fundamental human trait to become fascinated with the tools instead of the tasks which we have designed them to perform. Or, as Diana Laurillard says, “tools and technologies, in their broadest sense, are important drivers of education, though their development is rarely driven by education.” (Laurillard, Diana. Teaching as a Design Science, p. 2, Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition). I would actually take this a step further and say that tools often eclipse our ability to imagine the tasks they were meant to perform. We think of the car, not the drive. This reality has become a central conceptual challenge in the Teaching Toolset Project.

As technologists we have a particular bias in this direction because mastery of our tools has been what has always set us apart from our colleagues. Therefore, to channel Foucault, we control the language around technology and use it as an instrument of power. Many of us are individually aware of this reality, but the systems we exist in have reinforced this part of our identity. Most institutions only recognize our value because of our technological distinction.

The alternative view of our role, reshaping systems of learning, disrupts established structures too much for many institutions’ comfort. This conceptual constraint has always been a matter of intense frustration to me. I always look at tools as a means to an end and never an end unto themselves. I judge tools based on how far and how fast they allow me to create my ends, whether we are talking about creating a photograph or a lifelong learner.

In an era of digital tool glut, keeping our ends firmly in sight becomes even more important. When everyone seems to advertise the latest and greatest at the expense of intuitiveness and capturing human creativity, we end up with a smorgasbord of increasingly complex tools that obscure our goals instead of augmenting us to greater possibilities.

As I attempted to clean up the sandbox that was created during the first two hackathons, the tool reshaped how I envisioned the final product of our efforts. Instead of creating a manual divided into the five tool modes, it compelled me to see a new structure based on the 6+1 instructional tasks laid out by Laurillard. Like an origami, the tool showed me I could take the work of the participants and reverse it to create the opposite: seven sets of tasks with tools to support them. In this way, the tool itself fulfilled the purpose of the project and created a meta understanding of how we think about tools.

Like art, our use of tools is a mirror for human ideas and identity. Digital Age tools amplify this effect through their innate bias towards transparency, they lay bare implicit human assumptions. As masters of our tools, we can grasp these opportunities to see new patterns that emerge from examining our challenges in a different light. Tools should always augment us as human beings by allowing us to create, see, and experience in ways that are unexpected. They are the gateway through the digital looking glass. The world will never look the same again.

We tend to undervalue the value of our students’ creations and, as a result, so do they. Digital tech gives us unprecedented power to create. It also gives us power to preserve, duplicate and share artifacts of our learning journeys in ways that paper cannot. But with that bounty also comes challenges. We are flooded by the products of creation. When creation was scarce, it was valuable. When thousands of TikTok videos compete for the world’s attention, the danger lies in undervaluing the gems among them.

We are also flooded by a plethora of options when it comes to tools for creation. Which media and media creation tools make the most sense to preserve the work of learning. Conservatives among us will argue that the discipline of writing is essential for developing the necessary mental skills to be considered learned. I won’t argue with the importance of writing but it can now be shared easily. It doesn’t have to go from the student’s printer to the teacher’s filing cabinet. It can be scrutinized much more broadly through the mechanism of blogging with comments, to cite just one possibility.

The importance of taking that writing and those ideas and using them as a foundation for other kinds of media should not be underestimated in a world dominated by videos, web pages and slide decks. The friction associated with creating visual artifacts has declined markedly in recent years. This kind of creation also constitutes a vital skill.

Applying rigorous methods to more creative production is a key to separating student work from the masses of ephemera that have emerged in today’s media environment, but rigor must be coupled with meaning to achieve true value. Are we asking our students to produce throwaway objects or are we asking them to invest in creating something that is meaningful to them and not just as a box checked off of our syllabi? How we ask them to employ digital tools is at least as important as selecting the tools themselves. All of our tools tell stories. We need to make them meaningful ones.

Our lives consist of a series of artifacts. Some are committed to memory. Some are tangible objects. The most powerful involve the mating of the two. That special book or picture touches off memories of what is fleeting. This is the core of what it means to be human. We all have history and are part of our families, communities, and cultures. All of these produce artifacts. Some are more persistent than others but any one of them can acquire deep, personal meaning to us. This is what we remember and becomes part of us. Time is fleeting. Our artifacts are what root us to experience. Shelley’s sonnet “Ozymandias” can serve as a powerful metaphor for the tenuous connection between the permanent and fleeting.

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

— Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias”

Like all other memories, our learning experiences can be simultaneously fleeting and permanent. The most powerful experiences combine the two and our tools must be used to connect them in a meaningful way to have a lasting effect on the minds of our students. However, all too often we handicap our imaginations as we consider how to structure learning experiences and the tools needed to facilitate them.

We have at our fingertips today an unprecedented set of tools for creation. Our challenge is unlike that of Shelley and his contemporaries. Pen and paper pretty much represented his range of options. Within decades, we added photography and then film to create, capture, and share our memories. In the last 40 years we have taken all of these media and given them to the masses. In the last 20 we have made it possible to share them widely.

We are faced with the challenges of opportunity. Even while it has opened the doors of creation to many, the democratization of creation has cheapened its value as a container of memory. What used to be a precious scrapbook of family memories is now a vast database of photos and videos of precious moments. The challenges now are ones of sorting and tool selection. For a precious few of those artifacts, the connection to memory remains as powerful. We assign meaning. It is not a given.

Our students must create objects to which they are prepared to assign meaning. It is this power of meaningful memory that we need to tap into as teachers. The problem is that all too often we cheapen the memories of learning by letting our tools limit the universe of possibilities open to us to create those memories. Our students learn that school is about the creation of nothing more than cheap, ephemeral artifacts and treat the experience accordingly.

Our challenge is to use our tools for creation and sharing to build powerful networks of meaning and memory from their learning journeys. We cannot do that if we treat their artifacts as disposable meaning, relevant only within the context of an assignment or assessment. To do this we must turn artifacts into experience.

This is not in any way to denigrate the experience of writing as Shelley experienced it. Creation is as much a product of constraint as it is of opportunity. Using our tools to reimagine those constraints is part of adding importance to our memories. Instead of the traditional paper, have your students create a photo essay. Teach them how to adapt their ideas from one medium to another. Have them work publicly and share with their peers and the world beyond the classroom. These are all ways that we can turn the confusing array of digital tools to create more precious artifacts of their work. It is networks of ideas mated with powerful tools that allow us to create scarcity and meaning out of excess and meaninglessness.

Meaning comes from scarcity. We must actively create scarcity as part of our quest for deep learning. “More of the same” will generate nothing more than the same from our students.

The purpose of asynchronous tools is to create statues that stand the test of time, maybe not as long as Ozymandias, but at least past the course or college experience. How can we use these tools to string together the times we are together with our students and complement their power to achieve meaning and not just the routine of assembly line learning? How can we use them to awaken the creative spirit within them and motivate them to do more than the minimum necessary to “get through” the class? These are all questions that we will explore.

Time is our only truly non-fungible asset. Deficits of money can be made up but deficits of time are impossible to recover. As teachers, we struggle with this every class. We understand that time spent with students is absolutely precious. It can never be made up once the clock at the end of a term runs out. It is difficult recoup even within the context of a single class session. Time is a truly scarce resource.

Scarcity doesn’t always breed perceived value, however. Students often struggle to find motivation. They sit through classes out of a sense of obligation or a belief that showing their faces will increase their grade. Their perception of time in an instructional session can often stretch toward the infinite (“When is this going to be over?”).

The reality is that we waste a lot of time in any class. The density of knowledge that we can ask our students to absorb within a given live session is even more constrained than that marked out by the clock hands. Lessons in a single class session can usually be counted on one hand, if that. One of my grad school professors (the only one who bothered to teach me anything about teaching) told me that you can’t expect students to absorb more than 3 points in a given lecture. Your challenge as a teacher is making sure that they absorb the right three points. I have found this to be a good yardstick of what I can realistically accomplish within a single session but even that is often an optimistic measure.

The pandemic and remote teaching showed many of us the limits of synchronous teaching. Students weren’t even engaging to the same level as they had during in-person sessions (and that was a low bar). The fact is that much of a given hour of synchronous instruction is repetitious. If it’s repetitious it doesn’t need to be synchronous. The first 5-10 minutes of my classes are usually spent checking roll, making announcements, and recapping highlights from the last session.

None of those things need to take up precious synchronous time and can be shifted into asynchronous tools. Taking roll can be automated by having students put their names in a saved chat or with numerous other tools. It is better to send announcements through an online course shell. Recapping lectures is unnecessary if you record a Zoom session and post it for later review.

Expository talking, aka lecturing, also took a hit during remote teaching. Many of us practice some form of the Socratic method. We quickly discovered that question-and-response really doesn’t work well with a bunch of anonymous black boxes in a Zoom session. Like announcements and recaps, moreover, the same level of interaction can be achieved through pre-recording lecture highlights and pushing that off into asynchronous time.

Using various methods, therefore, I liberated close to 80% of my synchronous time from the time vault during remote instruction. This drove me to think hard about what to do with the remaining time. Attention spans online are even shorter than they are in person. There was also an expectation that, since the session was being recorded, the student could go back and review the tape if there was something he or she missed.

The key to making synchronous time as productive as possible was doing something instead of just talking about it. I had always nibbled around the edges of this in my in-person classes but I never really trusted student-driven work to actually drive the class. I wanted to control the narrative in the classroom to make sure we “covered the material.” Giving control of the pace of the class to the students was a scary prospect and, after all, wasn’t I, as the “expert in the room,” abdicating my responsibility?

Faced with obvious indifference using online tools, it was clear that I needed to pivot decisively toward creating moments centered on the students, not the material. I would have to trust that the material would take care of itself. In in-person settings simulations often were a good way of creating immediacy and active learning. However, this was challenging in an online setting where interpersonal interactions are often more stilted. Instead, I asked myself where my students needed the most help. I started working back from my assessments and determined that analysis and argument were conspicuously absent from most of their work. The solution (HT Ruben Puentedura) was to introduce the Toulmin Argumentative Method directly into my live sessions.

This work consumed many class sessions as we dissected each students’ argument. My knowledge of the subject plus techniques of argumentation and research were brought to bear as I walked them through the steps of constructing an argument. The students were then tasked with finding sources that supported their arguments. In this way I sought to develop a community centered around intellectual inquiry. The tools used were very simple. I used Zoom and shared my screen with a concept-mapping tool. After the sessions I cleaned up the diagrams a bit and shared them on Canvas. This would have been more difficult to do using traditional, in-class tools. But it drew power from the collaborative synchronicity of the work online.

The central goal of this activity was to stimulate conversations and group practice to collectively unlock the riddle of their research projects. As Diana Laurillard points out, conversations are central to any learning experience. We can have most kinds of conversations asynchronously but they are reshaped, some might say limited, by their lack of immediacy. The key to generating effective conversations is creating opportunities for the unexpected and these are far easier to achieve synchronously. This is a more important distinction than whether that interaction happens in close proximity or at a distance.

We should not assume that returning to “traditional” classrooms will automatically return us to where we want to be, forgetting the lessons learned from remote instruction. As we discussed in a previous blog, most “traditional” classrooms did not take full advantage of the potential for the student-teacher relationship. Conversation was often one way. Over the last decades, learning space design has worked hard to overcome these initial biases. However, even the most innovative classroom will lose much of the benefit of immediacy if the teacher uses it to teach in a “traditional” way.

Digital Age tools can speed the flow of ideas but they have to be applied strategically in order to achieve the “decisive moment” where deep learning occurs. Information alone is not sufficient to stimulate ideas. Those ideas must resonate within the community of learning. Ideas are central to our humanity. Therefore, if we want to share our humanity, we must also share our ideas. If we want to teach in a learner-centric world, we must find ways to connect our humanity. This is where digital tools can help us. They give us tremendous power to amplify how we connect humans to each other. This reality forms the core of all synchronous learning experiences.

Good teachers shape realities and do so with intentionality. Synchronous experiences are the most visceral realities that students can experience in their learning process. These are the spaces where we can “perform” as teachers. However, they only work if they are also spaces where our students can perform as well. Teaching is all about achieving that “a-ha” moment in our students.