Episode 2 - Teaching Excellence, Personalizing the Classroom, and Building Rapport – A Conversation with Dr. Robyn Kondrad

Welcome back to the CFI Faculty Lounge Podcast, where we explore the experiences, challenges, and strategies of dedicated educators. In this episode, host Eric Magrum sits down with Dr. Robyn Kondrad, Associate Professor at JMU’s Department of Psychology, to discuss her journey in academia, her approach to excellence in teaching, and how she fosters strong connections with her students.

In this episode, Dr. Kondrad shares:
-Her journey as an educator, teaching on a ship, and how she arrived at JMU.
-What excellence in teaching means to her.
-The unique qualities she brings to her role.
-How she integrates her personal life into her teaching using real-life experiences, including sharing photos of her own placenta!
-The importance of professor-student rapport and how building strong relationships enhances learning.
-Strategies for balancing faculty responsibilities with personal life.
-Expert advice on managing and engaging large classes effectively.

Dr. Kondrad’s approach to teaching highlights the power of authenticity, connection, and global perspectives in education. Tune in for an inspiring conversation on making learning engaging, personal, and impactful.

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Transcript

But I do use my life as fodder for my class, and I think students really appreciate that.

Welcome to the CFI Faculty Lounge Podcast, an outlet created for continuous learning and actual insights for faculty. I'm your host, Eric Magrum, inviting you to join us in conversation with dedicated educators who share their experiences, challenges, and effective solutions. Today, I'm excited to welcome an esteemed colleague and distinguished teacher, Dr. Robyn Kondrad from the Department of Psychology here at James Madison University.

Thank you, Robyn, for taking the time to be with us today.

Thank you for having me.

Could you take us through your journey as an educator, where the journey started, and how you ended up here at JMU?

Yes. I'm going to backpedal all the way back to my teenage years because I was a swimmer growing up and taught swimming lessons, and coached as a means of employment when I was in high school. And I loved teaching, and I felt like, oh, I'm actually, this is fun, and this is something I'm good at.

I never translated that at the time to teaching college level students as I do now, but I think that was the beginning of my journey as a teacher. When I was in graduate school at the University of Virginia, my mentor, my very first semester there, encouraged me to teach one of his lectures, which was in front of 250 undergraduate students. And I got to choose my topics.

I actually taught about how magicians take advantage of human cognition and perception to fool us. And so it was a really fun topic, and I had a lot of fun figuring out, you know, learning magic tricks and figuring out how they worked and teaching that to students using some of the concepts in cognitive psychology and sensation and perception. And so I was so nervous.

I remember tripping over my words and forgetting what I was going to say and, you know, just being really nervous. But at the end of the day, everyone clapped and they were really supportive. And I just felt like this adrenaline

Yes, it's so fun. It's so great. And I wanted to get back up there and do it again.

So from there, I became really involved at UVA in teaching and teaching really the spaces. So I worked, if there's a program there, I don't know if it's still there, but it was called CAVED at the time. And I became involved in that as a graduate student mentor, teaching undergraduates about the science of teaching and learning.

And then I also helped to develop the graduate teacher training program at UVA. And actually worked with folks here at JMU in the Department of Psychology in developing that program. So that was kind of my early years.

And then as I was about to graduate from graduate school, I happened to have an opportunity to teach on the semester at Sea Study Abroad ship, which is a ship that sails around the world. And it has hundreds of students and crew, and it stops at 12 different places around the world. Wow, cool.

And I, yeah, it was a great experience. I taught three courses on the ship. And the whole idea is that you are teaching something while you're on the ship, that then later you have an experiential learning field trip.

So, for example, when I was teaching Intro to Psychology, I would teach about conformity and obedience and how that happens. How do we get huge groups of people to do things that otherwise they would think was morally wrong or strange? So we would learn that on the ship.

And then we went to, in this particular example, we went to Cambodia and got to go to a museum. Dedicated to remembering people who died during the genocide of the Pol Pot regime. And so it was just a very impactful experience for me as a budding educator to see how important those experiences were in bringing the learning to life and to making it very important and valuable for students.

So that experience really has impacted my teaching philosophy a lot, trying to bring that kind of experience to a traditional classroom setting. And now I'm here at JMU. So, yeah, I'm...

Wow, so many thoughts going through. So, going on that, you said it, the school ship, or I'm sure I'm butchering your words, but the school ship.

Yeah, it is basically a floating university that goes around the world.

And the other part, so I also come from a coaching background, coaching and teaching. And the first lesson, though, that you taught, you talked about magician, you talked something about magician that I couldn't quite attune to, but what you taught, though, was so intriguing to me. Can you talk a little bit about the topic that you taught that very first time that you were in front of those 200 folks. This was a long time ago, Eric, but I can tell you kind of a summary. Yeah, so how do magicians fool us? You know, they use psychology to do it, and sleight of hand, misdirection.

So, you know, when they do these tricks where suddenly scars are coming out of their ears, and they pull a coin out behind your ear, you know, these kinds of misdirection tricks, they're taking advantage of human perceptual biases. So, for example, if you look at something while you're talking to me, I'm going to look where you're looking. It's a natural thing that people do, is to follow someone's gaze while you're communicating.

And so magicians know that, and so they will look where they don't want, they will look at a place that is kind of safe for their trick, right? So they'll look at the place that is okay for you to look while you're not looking somewhere else, and they're doing, you know, the sleight of hand where they're switching something out, or whatever it is that is required for that trick. Interestingly, there's some research that people have done with autistic folks, and curious about if autistic folks were as likely to be fooled by some of these kinds of tricks.

So there's a trick where you toss a ball up into the air several times, several times, and so you're taking advantage of human brain's capacity for finding patterns in the environment. And we have to do that because we have to be able to predict what's going to happen next. And that helps us to make decisions for our own behavior.

So when you're tossing a ball up, tossing a ball up, tossing a ball up, people are looking at the ball and looking at the ball. And as the magician is tossing the ball, they're also looking up. They're following the ball too.

So you have these two different psychological phenomena taking place at the same time. On the last toss though, the magician actually doesn't toss the ball up. They're still holding it.

But they're looking up like they did. And that tricks us into looking up too. And we think the ball has left the magician's hand.

And we're amazed when the ball has disappeared. Where did it go? And so in the study with autistic people, they found that the autistic folks are actually less susceptible to that trick because they are not using the gaze cue as much as someone who's not autistic.

So we got to talk about those kinds of things.

Wow. Again, I think I could just sit here and pepper you with questions about that very topic for hours, but we're going to not do that. But so you are here at JMU and I want to ask you about your role at JMU and what it means to be excellent in your role here at JMU.

That's a very complicated question, I think. First of all, the term being excellent or the phrase being excellent, I think that can really be very different for different people who are teaching different kinds of things and different kinds of environments. I think so much of quality teaching really depends on your personal style and situational factors.

For me, I teach mostly first-year students. I teach in the general education program, and that means that I'm teaching students with a wide range of backgrounds, with a wide range of goals and motivations. I also teach a large enrollment course, so I have 300 students in my class.

So what makes me excellent or what I strive to be as excellent, is probably not the same as other people. Just again, depending on what you're teaching and your personal style too. I had a colleague who's a mentor of mine tell me early in my career.

He was also like a funny person, his personality was a funny guy, and he used humor in his classes. And he said, look, if you are a funny person, then use humor. But if you're not, don't pretend to be, because it's probably not going to fall flat.

Don't do something that isn't authentic. And I thought that was very good advice. I also tried to use that backwards design process, which is something I learned about early in my career as well.

So I like to think about my classes from 20 years down the line. What do I want my students to know or to remember about their experience in my class 20 years later, 10 years later, five years later? Because we know from a lot of science of teaching and learning research, students are not going to remember a large proportion of what you're spending your time teaching them.

So what are my goals for them? What do I want them to take away from the course right now and also way down the line? And then I think additionally, I really try hard because of my experience with Semester at Sea to focus on engaging material.

You can't teach everything. So what are the things that are going to be engaging for the particular students in your class? How can I get students to be active in the learning process?

So I do a lot of collaborative learning, and I do that with large enrollment classes. I think it's important to try new things. So I think sometimes faculty can get into a comfort zone, and it feels a little scary to try new things.

This is working. Why should I do something that might not work? But for me, I think that's important.

It keeps me fresh. It keeps me excited. And sometimes it doesn't work, and I have a good laugh about it with my students, and we move on.

But I think that it's really important to always be evaluating what you're doing, and if you're achieving the goals that you've set in the first place. And let me just say one other thing, Eric, if I can. The last thing I want to say is I think I, more recently in my career, I have realized the importance of building rapport with my students.

And so I really try to build in a lot of different ways of connecting with students, especially because I do teach those large classes. And I find that makes a big difference in the energy in the class, and student motivation, and getting students to class, getting them to be active and engaged.

I'm going to ask you actually to expound on that before I ask my follow up question, the rapport specifically.

Yeah, so rapport is just the connection, the emotional connection really that you have with the students, and what the students, the connection students are making with their instructor and the content of the course. So, I used to not really worry so much about that. It's not my job to be your best friend.

It's how I used to think. But after I got a little bit more involved in the scholarship of teaching and learning, and a little bit more involved in more experience with teaching, I think I started to realize that a big part of getting students to learn the things you're hoping that they learn is to motivate them in the right way. So, I think that the things that I do to build those connections with students also motivate them to be in class.

So, to give one example, even though I have 300 students in my class, after every exam, my TAs and I, and I have a big army of TAs that help me, we will send emails to the top percentage of students who have done well and the bottom percentage who aren't doing well, and we'll check up on them How are you doing? Notice that you didn't do well on this exam.

Do you want to come in? Do you want to talk? Or, wow, you did really well.

Are there any strategies that really worked for you that we could maybe pass on to some of your classmates who are seeking help? Just trying to show that you're interested in the students and you care about their success, I think goes a long way in motivating students to want to come to class and do the homework and to do the learning.

I think an important piece there is the authenticity there. It's not just a, I'm trying to give you a Braveheart speech or a win one for the Gipper speech, just to motivate you so you do better in my class. It's an authenticity that comes with that.

I'm imagining that students can see through if it is not authentic. Would you care to comment on that?

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So one of the other things that I do, and this relates to the question of authenticity, is at the beginning and end of class, I think a lot of faculty do this.

They talk to their students, hi, how are you doing? But I'm actually, believe it or not, a little bit more on the introverted side, the extroverted side, and so I wanted to build these connections intentionally with my students, and I really dreaded the 10 minutes before class, because it's like, what am I going to say? How am I going to have these authentic conversations?

I don't want it to feel like a canned thing. How's the weather? And so, I actually took advantage of, it's called the Fast Friends Procedure, and it's a social psychologist who is interested in how people become friends.

And some people are really good at it, and some people aren't so good. So what differentiates those two groups? And this social psychologist created a list of questions through their observations of people interacting.

And these are the kinds of questions that you ask as you start to build a deeper relationship with people. And so I kind of had those metaphorically in my back pocket and was amazed at how much easier it was to walk around the room and talk to people out of the blue. So I actually have my teaching assistants now as part of their training, learn about the Fast Friends procedure and how to...

It's not having small talk, it's having meaningful talk. I like to call it meaningful talk. And that's how it ties back into the authenticity.

You know, like, don't just do something to do it. I actually have to be interested in having this conversation with you and building those connections.

Absolutely. And then if I'm a listener and I'm wondering, do I have good rapport with my students? How would I have an out-of-body experience and assess if I am doing well with my...

If I have good rapport with my students or if I were to go watch a classroom, what would good rapport look like? Are there telltale signs for that that you look for?

Yeah, absolutely. Actually, I'm going to put a plug in real quick for a teaching toolbox that I just wrote on this very topic. I think it'll be published in a couple of weeks.

So there's actually a lot of research on building rapport. In fact, some of the research is done by our colleague in the Department of Psychology, Brian Seville. So, there's a checklist that you can use.

I'm trying to remember the name of it. It's the Professor Student Rapport Survey, I think, is the name of it. And it has, there's a short version of six items and a 34 question version.

So, you can actually do that yourself as a form of reflection. Or you can ask someone from the CFI, we do consultations at the CFI, to come in and help to administer that with your students and then look at that as feedback. But I also think, you know, as just someone who goes in, observes a class, you can tell really pretty quickly how the rapport is going.

Are people smiling at each other? Are they interacting? Are they talking?

You know, are people willing to raise their hand and answer questions in the class? I think these are pretty common signs that students are feeling comfortable and that comfort and that safety come from a positive rapport that they feel with the instructor and with their peers.

Thank you for that. And it's quite obvious that you've thought quite deeply about your pedagogy specifically with large classrooms. So you're well known for large classroom pedagogy.

Could you provide one piece of advice for faculty who are teaching large classes or maybe are going to teach large classes that would significantly enhance but yet be a low hurdle for them to improve their pedagogy or their classroom experience?

Yeah. Well, first of all, I think the mindset is important. I think if you haven't taught large classes before, it might feel a bit intimidating at first, especially because there's maybe a negative bias about large classes.

Large classes can't be active. Large classes are just a more traditional lecture-based podium-bound, multiple-choice test-bound. So I think changing that mindset is a first step.

There are so many ways to engage and activate students in large classes, and you may have to rely a little bit more on technology than maybe traditionally you would have, but there's also very low-tech ways of engaging students in large classes. So I think first of all, having the mindset of this is just going to be a different kind of challenge. Every kind of class has their own challenges, and in large classes, one of the bigger challenges is how do I keep everybody engaged?

How do I keep everybody coming to class? So it's just a different kind of challenge. So one of the things that I really love in my large class and students really love are using the polling software.

So in a smaller class, it's easier for students to feel comfortable speaking up in class. So you ask a question and a student will just answer it. But in large classes, you really have the advantage of numbers.

And I'm a data-driven person, and I think many of us are as faculty members. And so I love using polls for all kinds of things in the classroom. For example, using anonymous polls.

Just recently, I asked my students, how many of them know somebody or have themselves been binge drinking? And here's the definition of binge drinking. So these are anonymous polls and we practice for that.

So students know I'm not going to know how they respond. And so they're comfortable responding, but they can then see in a class of 250 to 300 students, what does their data actually look like? And a lot of times students are shocked by what they find out.

And then we can compare that to national data. How do we as a class at JMU compare to national or even international trends? And so I think in a way, large classes are advantageous for getting to do things like that.

So again, I think my biggest recommendation is to have the mindset of what are the advantages of being in a large class setting and how can I use technology to leverage those advantages.

Absolutely. I would be one that would be fearful, to be quite honest with you, if I was to go into a large classroom just because I'm used to smaller classes, although it's getting up there in numbers. It used to be like 20, now it's like 40, 50-ish.

But I know you're talking about like 300, correct?

Right. Yeah. I have 300 students.

Actually, I have two sections of 300 students.

So I have a lot of faces. You with the face answer your question. Yeah.

Well, and that's a good example, though, Eric, of how do you transition from a smaller environment to a larger environment. So I think one of the things a lot of faculty will do to build rapport is to learn students' names. And how the heck are you going to learn 300 students' names?

Well, that's the wrong question to ask. In a large class, you're not going to learn 300 students' names, probably. Some people might.

But what you can do is divide your class up into sections. And so, you know, in my class, I kind of mentally have eight sections of the class that I divide up. And I'm, and I intentionally, students generally sit in the same place.

So, you know, intentionally, I go into each of these sections, and I try to set a goal of learning one name, you know, one or two names in these different sections. And eventually, you get to a point where, you know, you might know 20 or 30 names. And when you use those names, even in a large class, it makes it feel like you know a lot more people's names than you probably actually do.

But that helps to make the room feel smaller.

Very good. Such a intuitive way to do it, just the sections, I just would have never been creative enough to make that connection.

Yeah.

So switching gears just a little bit. We want to get listeners' ideas of the faculty, who they are outside. And so, are there hobbies or personal interests that help you bring new energy and perspectives into your role at JMU?

Well, I teach human lifespan development. So I think I have a very easy time of using personal experiences in my class because it's life. So I was the crazy person who had, when I had my first child, she was just born, you know, minutes old.

And I was the person who said, okay, can you just please hold my placenta up and shine a light? And here, can you stretch it out a little bit more? You know, I teach prenatal development and birth, and I really want to have this picture to show students, you know, because they just don't know what a placenta is and they don't know what it looks like.

And so I think if you look at my student evaluations, that is a memorable moment for my students. But I do use my life as fodder for my class. And I think students really appreciate that.

And they think it's kind of cool when my kids don't have school and I have to bring them to work with me. They come in and here's this nine-year-old version of the baby that they saw during the language development class. And now look at her, you know.

So they get a real life, you know, they get to see this progression of lifespan development in real life, which is something that I think is really fun to be able to do. I have probably a hundred different videos of my kids, you know. I just showed in my class the other day, we're talking about gender identity development.

And I had taken a video of one of my daughters when they were two and a half years old and another video when they were five years old, and asked the same kinds of questions. Is mommy a boy or a girl? Is daddy a boy or a girl?

What does it mean to be a boy? What does it mean to be a girl? Can you change your gender if you want to?

Can you be both genders? You know, a series of questions that I asked. And so the students got to see this real kid developing over time with this concept that we're just kind of, it's a dry concept that you read about in your textbook, right?

But now it's come up in real life and they can see this development in real life. So yeah, I think my whole personal life I use in my class, I think, but not just one particular thing.

I can see how students would relate to you so well. I do a little bit of that and I can't say all of what you said about how you use your life as fodder for your class, but I also try to do that. So even with the using your life as fodder for your classroom, what strategies do you use or employ to make sure that your personal and faculty responsibilities don't overwhelm each other or overwhelm you?

I feel like I'm still working on that. Aren't we all still working on that? I don't think I'm perfect by any means, but I think over the years, I have realized how important setting boundaries are.

I've gotten a lot better about being firm with setting certain limits. For example, the frantic student who e-mails you at 11.31 and their assignment is due at 11.59. I used to feel a lot more responsibility or obligation to help that student right away.

And so, yeah, I think I've gotten better at trying to set some boundaries. And yeah, I think I know when there are certain times of the year that are going to be much busier. And so I think I've gotten better at anticipating those moments in both my personal life and my professional life.

I also think that COVID has helped, at least for me in that regard, because I think as a culture, people were forced to think of each other as whole people, as opposed to someone who is a professional that leads some other secret life. Because we're all whole people. We all have other parts of our lives, just as students do, that affect us in our professional role.

So I think that that has helped to reduce some of the stress that might be associated with trying to keep these two lives very separate and never letting anybody know when something is going on with your family life that might be impacting your professional responsibilities.

I think I could say this about most faculty, including especially myself, we're absolutely still learning how to do the boundaries deal and set those and be firm and have fidelity with those boundaries. So the last one that I always, I love this question, which is if you could hop into a DeLorean with Doc Brown and Marty McFly and gun it to 88, travel back in time and give yourself advice before your first day at JMU, what advice would that be?

Yeah, I spent a while trying to think of the perfect piece of advice for this question. And I think what I came up with was to take advantage of the many amazing resources that we have at JMU for professional development. I think when I first came to JMU, I was not a new faculty.

I had been at Appalachian State for five years prior to my position here. But I think that I tried to learn a lot of things on my own. And I wish I had taken more time to, for example, attend more of the CFI workshops.

I think I would have gotten to develop my network earlier and gotten to know more people developing that network. I think I probably would have learned a lot more and saved myself some time in the process, because sometimes it's great to be a self-starter and it's great to learn things on your own, but sometimes taking advantage of the Hive mind is useful and is more efficient. So yeah, I think I would tell myself, don't spend so much time in your office, get out into the campus community and go to the workshops and go to the lectures and become more enmeshed in the community earlier on.

And that is what I and our listeners will do. Thank you so much, Robyn, for being on our podcast today.

Yeah, this is fun.

Thank you.