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The A&P Professor podcast (TAPP radio) episodes are made for listening, not reading. This transcript is provided for your convenience, but hey, it’s just not possible to capture the emphasis and dramatic delivery of the audio version. Or the cool theme music.  Or laughs and snorts. And because it’s generated by a combo of machine and human transcription, it may not be exactly right. So I strongly recommend listening by clicking the audio player provided.

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Introduction

Kevin Patton:
Teaching expert Elizabeth F. Barkley once wrote, “student engagement is the product of motivation and active learning. It is a product rather than a sum because it will not occur if either element is missing.”

Aileen:
Welcome to The A&P Professor, a few minutes to focus on teaching human anatomy and physiology with a veteran educator and teaching mentor, your host, Kevin Patton.

Kevin Patton:
In this episode, I talk about a seminar on running concept lists and Krista Rompolski joins us for a journal club about content delivery style.

Running Concept Lists Seminar

Kevin Patton:
At the HAPS 2019 conference in Portland, Oregon, I presented a workshop on my long standing practice of encouraging my students to use a technique that I call running concept lists. It’s a technique that helps students build their own very solid conceptual framework.

Kevin Patton:
The idea of building a conceptual framework flows out of the constructivist approach to learning, the approach that we actively construct our knowledge and understanding as we experience and learn things. I first introduced my method of running concept lists way back in episode eight. In a nutshell, it’s a really simple method in which students keep a look out for concepts that come up again and again in the course and keep a list of them.

Kevin Patton:
What I mean by that is that each student starts a list for, let’s say ATP. And then every time they run into ATP, in the course, they add that new fact or new context for ATP into their ATP list. And they might have a sodium list and an acid list and a diffusion list, and even perhaps especially, a carbaminohemoglobin list. By doing this, students not only develop their own list of concepts and thereby by deliberately build their conceptual framework using a writing based strategy, they also develop the habit of looking for core concepts and for connections among all the learned concepts.

Kevin Patton:
There’s a bit more to it. And that’s why I gave the workshop at the HAPS conference last spring. I recorded a version of it and I put that on the TAPP app many months ago, and now it’s time to bring it out for public access at theAPprofessor.org website. Just go to the menu ribbon at the top of any page at theAPprofessor.org and select seminars. And then pick the one about running concept lists. Or use the direct link in the show notes or episode page at theAPprofessor.org/69. There’s a handout that you can view online or print out.

Kevin Patton:
And if you scroll down below that you can watch the video part of it. I know you’ve added up to here with online seminars, right? Especially these days. But if you do get a chance to view it, let us know what you think at the podcast hotline.

Sponsored by AAA

A searchable transcript and a captioned audiogram of this episode are funded by AAA, the American Association for Anatomy at anatomy.org. While you’re there, click the resources tab and select anatomy education resources. There you’ll find a whole list of different resources that can help you in your teaching.

Kevin Patton:
And while you’re there, why not click the membership tab and join us. Remember HAPS members get a deep discount on AAA membership. Once again, that’s anatomy.org.

Sponsored by HAPI

Kevin Patton:
The free distribution of this podcast is sponsored by the master of science in human anatomy & physiology instruction, the HAPI degree. Hey, I’m on the faculty of this program so I know the incredible value it is for A&P teachers. Are you looking to power up your game in teaching A&P?

Kevin Patton:
When’s the last time you had a thorough review of all the core concepts of both anatomy and physiology or comprehensive training in contemporary teaching practice, including techniques of remote teaching? Check out this online graduate program at nycc.edu/hapi, that’s H-A-P-I or click the link in the show notes or episode page.

TAPP Journal Club with Krista Rompolski

Kevin Patton:
Well, we’re here with our very first A&P professor journal club, as I mentioned in a previous episode, that is episode number 68. And as I also mentioned, the director or the coordinator of our journal club is Krista Rompolski. Hi Krista.

Krista Rompolski:
Hi Kevin, how are you doing?

Kevin Patton:
Okay. So she’s in Pennsylvania and I’m here in Missouri and we’re together virtually. And I think we’re all more and more used to doing stuff virtually as we’re teaching through this pandemic. We didn’t plan on that, we’ve been talking about this for a long time. We didn’t plan on having a pandemic journal club, but it’s working out that we’re both getting more and more used to doing journal conversation.

Kevin Patton:
So in a previous episode, not only did I introduce the idea of the journal club, but I’ve introduced Krista. And as I mentioned, she’s associate professor at Moravian College in Pennsylvania, and she’s been very active in AAA and HAPS. So you may have run into her there, or may have run into her work in various publications. And so we’re very glad to have you Krista.

Krista Rompolski:
Me too. I’m so thrilled to get to do this little idea that you were interested in it. So I hope everybody else enjoys it just much as I did just trying to put it together.

Kevin Patton:
Great. We have our first article, which I mentioned in our previous episode and I gave a link to it in case anybody wanted to read it and maybe even respond to it. And so what is our journal article this time to start off with our inaugural journal club?

Krista Rompolski:
Sure. And I’ll give a little bit of background on how I chose them, because obviously there’s so much to choose from. I think a lament that a lot of us full time teaching professors have is that there’s so much literature out there but we just don’t have time to read everything we want to or keep up with it unless we’re maybe doing a study or something like that. So I tried to find something within the past year or so.

Krista Rompolski:
And to just start out with something very relevant to A&P though some future journal articles might be more broad in terms of teaching application. But this article conveniently I think is pretty timely for what we’re going through right now in the pandemic. And it’s called the Effect of Content Delivery Style on Student Engagement in Anatomy. And it came out of La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia last year.

Krista Rompolski:
So this is a paper I had read that really had an impact on me and the way I thought about delivering my material. So I thought it would be a great one to share with everyone especially now since it impairs face to face versus online delivery of content.

Kevin Patton:
We’re going to play a summary that Krista did first and then we’re going to come back and discuss the article a little bit. But Krista, tell me a little bit about your thoughts in how you put together your summary.

Krista Rompolski:
Sure. One of my favorite podcasts again, because I can’t possibly make time to read it, especially since it comes out every week is the New England Journal of Medicine’s audio summary. So every week someone, it’s about 20, 30 minutes long, will basically give a brief synopsis of each episode so that if you’re really intrigued by an article or that you find it’ll be applicable for you, you can go grab it or read it or not if you don’t have the time or it’s not relevant for you.

Krista Rompolski:
So I wanted to do something similar, but give enough detail that if you don’t truly have time to read the article that you get a full scope of the methods, the results, the interpretation or application for you as a teacher. So the summaries are a little bit longer, maybe five, six minutes. I tried to keep it there so that you had enough background on the study, enough of an understanding of how they went about getting to their conclusions.

Krista Rompolski:
And I tried to anticipate a number of questions that I might have if I was just listening and include that information in there. So that’s how I approached it, but I’d love any feedback since it is our first time doing this, from listeners in terms of if you’d like them to be shorter, if you’d like them to be a little bit more engaging or in terms of conversation with Kevin and I, totally open to that as well.

Kevin Patton:
Just to emphasize what Krista just said, we really do want some feedback, early feedback, immediate feedback on what’s going on. Because there’s so many different ways to do a journal club and we’re kind of adapting the traditional journal club idea to a podcast. And there are some other podcasts out there that do a journal club and they’re all different in the way they approach it.

Kevin Patton:
So there’s lots of ways to do this, right? So any feedback you can give as to what you liked best would really help us kind of direct to the direction this is going to go. But just like everything in those podcasts, I see this as an evolution over time. And so we need some of that feedback so that we can do our evolution well, right? So let’s go ahead and play that summary.

Content Delivery Style: Summary

Krista Rompolski:
The Effect of Content Delivery Style on Student Engagement in Anatomy by Lloyd White, Heath McGowan and Aaron McDonald, from the department of physiology anatomy and microbiology, college of science, health and engineering at La Trobe University, Victoria, Australia. Many institutions of higher education are moving towards blended learning or even fully online learning in the delivery of their course content. However, the definitions of blended learning vary across institutions, making it difficult to both define and investigate its effects on student learning.

Krista Rompolski:
At La Trobe University, blended learning refers to a mix of face to face and online learning, which both focus on the interactions between teachers, students, and resources in the achievement of learning outcomes. In this study, authors investigated the effects of offering half of their traditional face to face undergraduate anatomy lectures online on student performance, on both practical exams and a summative written multiple choice examination.

Krista Rompolski:
They also collected anonymous student feedback and monitored engagement with the online resources in order to investigate the relationship between engagement and assessment. There were 169 students enrolled in the undergraduate anatomy course. The course met a total of five hours per week, with two hours devoted to lecture and three hours devoted to lab or practical class. One hour of the lecture was face to face and was supplemented by PowerPoint slides that included strategic blank spaces for students to follow along and annotate.

Krista Rompolski:
These face-to-face recordings were available as audio and video of the PowerPoint in the LMS. The second hour of lecture was substituted with numerous online videos, seven minutes on average with associated worksheets and activities. Video was included of professors demonstrating when needed. Students were given the same PowerPoints with strategic blank spaces to follow along and annotate as they were in the face to face sessions previously.

Krista Rompolski:
Logs of the date and time of each instance that an online video was accessed was recorded by the LMS. And all online content was reviewed by five lecturers who were all involved in the design, production and delivery of the content. In addition to lecture, students participated in a two hour wet lab and one hour dry lab also known as a practical with the purpose of consolidating lecture material. Test questions were tagged as to whether they came from face to face or online content and the data sorted accordingly.

Krista Rompolski:
There were four tests related to the practical content, 12 minutes each with four questions each and one multiple choice examination at the end of the semester. To investigate the relationship between performance on content related to the online material and engagement with the online material, student marks on the online questions were correlated against the average number of views each student made of each video.

Krista Rompolski:
Student grades on the first practical exam were significantly higher for the online content compared to face to face. However, there were no significant differences in questions delivered face to face versus online for the remainder of the three practical exams. There were also no significant differences in results between face to face and online delivery for the summative multiple choice examination. In terms of student engagement with the videos, unique views of videos were strongly correlated with individual performance on practical exam questions covering that online content.

Krista Rompolski:
54% of students watched each video at least once on average and there was no change in the number of videos across the semester, indicating that student engagement remained consistent. The authors noted that less than 25% of total enrolled students attended face-to-face lectures, indicating that students may prefer to watch videos online and not physically attend class. In the student feedback survey, only 28 students of the 169 replied.

Krista Rompolski:
Six students indicated that some online content was rushed and bland, and only four suggested that live face to face was preferable. The overwhelming majority of students did not feel compelled to answer these two questions and didn’t comment positively or negatively, suggesting no strong preference for face to face versus online lecture. However, on the course evaluation sent out by the university, Likert style scores on satisfaction with the course were significantly higher than the university average with the majority of positive comments about the practical components or lab being the best aspect of the course.

Krista Rompolski:
The results of this study show that student performance on practical and written exams is not affected by face to face versus online delivery. Student engagement with online material is the key factor towards performance on questions related to content delivered online. Further analysis done by the authors showed that students who performed well on online content questions also performed well on face to face questions, suggesting that strong students stay “strong students”.

Krista Rompolski:
The authors acknowledged that the inclusion of the three hour practical lab session may have offset the self-directed aspects of the course. Since practical or lab classes serve to supplement and consolidate the course content, any issues and questions students had about their face to face or online content could be addressed in these sessions. In addition, students who averaged less than one view didn’t fail practical exam questions, suggesting that practical lab sessions may have made it possible to succeed without commitment to accessing the online resources.

Krista Rompolski:
In conclusion, second year undergraduate students learn just as well from materials presented in the online environment as they do from face to face lectures and that repeated viewing of short online videos correlates with improved performance on assessments. Therefore, a transition to online or blended learning does not hinder the performance of anatomy students provided the online resources are appropriate and as long as the face to face practical or lab sessions are part of the blended learning mix.

Journal Club Discussion

Kevin Patton:
Krista, thank you very much for preparing that summary for us. And it really did not only hit the high points of where they started and where they ended up, but it gave us enough information in between to let us know how they did it and how they arrived at their conclusions. And one thing I want to mention before we get to our little discussion here at the end is that you and I have not discussed what our impressions are before, have we?

Krista Rompolski:
Nope.

Kevin Patton:
So I feel like I’m a stage magician. You and I have never met before. We have not prepared, but I mean, we did kind of talk about… Krista is the one that really did a lot of research to find some relevant articles. And she got my input a little bit on how to winnow that down, or not how, but the actual winnowing process. And we settled on doing this one for a variety of reasons as our first one. And we have a few more that we’re ready to go with as time goes on with this journal club.

Kevin Patton:
And we did talk a little bit. I mean, we threw out a little bit of our impression, but we didn’t really go into detail. So we didn’t really do that intentionally, but we just realized today as we’re preparing to record this, that this really is going to be a very organic conversation because we didn’t do that kind of prep. I mean, we did the prep of both reading the article and thinking about it a little bit, but I’m not sure what Krista’s big takeaway is. And so we both agreed that I’d go first and give at least the major takeaway from it.

Kevin Patton:
And I have two things that really struck me on this. And one is kind of embedded in there a little bit. I can’t really remember how overtly it says this, but in my mind, what I was hearing is, it doesn’t always matter how you teach something or how the students are… what methods they’re using to learn. That’s not the important part. And that’s the thing that we talk about the most as A&P teachers when we’re being A&P teachers and when we’re talking to each other.

Kevin Patton:
So when I go to HAPS, I want to learn some new techniques for teaching and for helping my students learn. I want to talk about the techniques I use and share those. I want to debate about that. What’s better, this kind of teaching and learning or that kind of teaching and learning? And there are many different ways of doing all that. And so what I took away from this is that’s not the important question. The important question is how engaged the students are.

Kevin Patton:
And then when you hear that, you’re like, of course. I mean, just in my own life and my own learning that’s what’s important, is how engaged I am. It’s better when you have a very engaged teacher and when you have a course that’s set up in a way that resonates with the way I learn. Sure. Actually I’m kind of giving both takeaways there by saying that, is the first takeaway was that the big question isn’t so much how we do it. And that leads to the second big takeaway for me, and that is student engagement.

Kevin Patton:
So now I’m thinking this really needs to be more front and center for me as a teacher, that I really need to start with that question, how engaged are my students going to be and how can I encourage them to get engaged? So that was my first impression. Krista, what did you get out of this when you first read this?

Krista Rompolski:
Well, I think this article is really timely because right now we were all forced to reimagine our courses midstream. And for many people that have never taught online, I think the biggest barrier can be your own belief in its effectiveness. So I think that this article, if you’re just looking at test performance, so I want to be very clear about that. This is just saying test performance, right? Not any of the other amazing things that can come out of face to face engagement or of course even online engagement. But if you’re just worried about your grades, it’s very clear that they can do just as well without having you face to face.

Krista Rompolski:
And I don’t know about you Kevin, but as a professor, that was something, even though I’m relatively young in my career, I say relatively because I can’t get away with it saying young in my career anymore. I love the face to face because I like talking to people. I like putting on that performance of a lecture especially when I feel confident about it. But I have to realize that that’s a lot more about me than it is about the students.

Krista Rompolski:
So when I sit back when I’ve had days where I’ve afterwards said, “Man, that was a great lecture.” If I’m being honest with myself, it wasn’t because the students were answering questions right or that they were very active. It was that I didn’t trip up and everything flowed well and I thought my explanations were great. None of that has anything to do with student engagement.

Krista Rompolski:
And so I took away from this that we’re here to deliver material to students in a way that excites them and motivates them. We’re not here to show how much we know. So I really liked that kind of take away from the article or at least that was a big takeaway for me. I also want to point out that this may read like this is a flipped classroom. It really isn’t because what they did in this article, that’s interesting is isolate everything. So they made everything is the same, except the face to face versus online.

Krista Rompolski:
But in a true flipped classroom, you might be doing very different activities in a flipped classroom format versus the traditional lecture. So for example, in this article, in person and online, they gave them the same handout of activities. In a traditional lecture, you wouldn’t have a handout of activities, right? So I want to discourage anyone at least slightly from thinking that this is a purely flipped classroom or the model of active learning. It’s a little bit different, but what it did do was really isolate the effect of being in person. So it’s good in that sense.

Krista Rompolski:
Another thing I took away from this was how difficult it is to truly isolate the effects in a classroom or to make a controlled experiment of a classroom. And the authors acknowledged that by talking about that practical class. So they had that three hour lab in person every other week. And there’s no way to know for sure what content from in person versus online wasn’t being addressed in that classroom. And I know from being a lab instructor of A&P when I wasn’t the lecture instructor, how often I clarified things during lab from lecture for students.

Krista Rompolski:
So I like that they acknowledged that, that it really does make it so difficult to have a truly controlled experiment in a classroom. But I don’t know if that’s realistic or something we even want, because then we’re creating sort of a robotic approach to teaching, which really isn’t our reality. I also want to mention that they reported that the face to face attendance was really poor, it was less than 25%.

Krista Rompolski:
So there’s more evidence that we need to reevaluate how tightly we cling to the importance of face to face and how much of that is our own bias about the value of that, especially in this time COVID. So those are my main takeaways from the article beyond what I already summarized. So I don’t know, Kevin, how often have you gotten a chance to experiment like this, whether face to face versus online, and what’s your experience been of student performance?

Kevin Patton:
It’s funny that you should sort of describe the idea of what they did here and not being necessarily 100% natural and trying to isolate the different aspects of it. That really struck a chord with me because I’ve had the experience of teaching traditional courses face to face. And of course there’s a variety of ways to do that. I mean, I’ve been in a course where I had 300 students in a lecture hall and there’s not very much interaction between me and the students.

Kevin Patton:
And I’ve experimented with ways to try and increase interaction and try to make it more interactive than I’ve seen other people do or I experienced myself as a student. And my point is that I’ve done that, but I’ve also done in a community college, which with much smaller groups where it naturally is more interactive. So I didn’t have to work as hard in creating that interactivity. And so I’ve done that, but I’ve also done web enhanced and what they now call a hybrid type course.

Kevin Patton:
And so I’ve done a little bit of that and I’ve also done actually quite a bit of that and now I teach completely online. So I’ve kind of run the gamut. And to be honest, I didn’t know about online teaching when I first started teaching, it hadn’t been invented yet. I mean, we had correspondence courses, but that’s a whole different thing. I’ve kind of had that whole spectrum. When I first started teaching online, I thought my first impression of it before I taught online was that, “Well, you can’t really teach A&P online.”

Kevin Patton:
You can’t teach anything very well online because it’s totally disengaged. I need to be there in front of the class. I need to be doing this with the class. When I started teaching online, I found it to be very different. And like anything new and different, it’s uncomfortable. And so that kind of confirmed some of my biases that, see, it’s just not the same. But the more I got into it and the more I learned about how to do it well, and the more I really observed other people or talked to other people who had been doing it a long time and doing it well, the more I learned about it and now I love teaching online.

Kevin Patton:
And now I can see that I have to do things differently. And yes, I do miss performing. I miss going out there and being the center ring act and showing my wonderful slides that I really worked hard on and the logic of the story that I’m telling in this lecture. And another thing I miss too, is when you’re lecturing, a lot of times I have insights that I never had before. I’ve been doing A&P for decades and I’ll be teaching and all of a sudden it’s like, that’s how this and that fit together. I never really appreciated that linkage or that aspect of that linkage.

Kevin Patton:
And so when I walk out of a class, sometimes that was a great class because I learned something new that I didn’t know before. And now that you say it this way, Krista, I’m thinking maybe those classes that I thought that were my best classes really maybe were among my worst because I wasn’t necessarily engaging the student, I was all inside my own head thinking about this linkage. And so I think that that’s an important observation, is that there are different ways of doing things and sometimes we just kind of get so comfortable and so wedded to a particular kind of way of doing things that we don’t appreciate the other ways of doing things and that they can work just as well.

Kevin Patton:
Another thing that you just brought up Krista, is this artificiality of comparing different things that you do in class. For me, I’ve never really done what’s called scholarship of teaching and learning. I’ve had some seminars, papers I presented and so on, and they were more descriptive of, here’s what I tried, here’s what I found. End of it. I didn’t really have control groups. I didn’t really do any of that because it was just an organic part of what I was doing as a teacher.

Kevin Patton:
And I’m a very experimental teacher. I think a lot of people listening to this podcast are experimental, they want to learn new things. Otherwise, why listen? People in HAPS and in AAA and so on, also experimental teachers, because they want to learn new things. That’s why they’re there, to learn new ways of doing things or learning why some of the things they’re doing maybe aren’t the best way to really be doing them, even though that’s how we were taught or how we were trained to teach.

Kevin Patton:
A lot of what I’ve learned in the last podcast, I went through a lot of the formative online testing that I do. And I recently brought that up in a HAPS town hall meeting too. So in the podcast, I wanted to kind of expand on that a little bit. Because it’s something that’s been very important for me and I’ve had this long time use of it and things I’ve tweaked and things that worked and things that didn’t work for me.

Kevin Patton:
And I have put that out there before, I published it in various areas, but not really as a research article. Because when I go from mostly in class teaching for that example, mostly in class teaching to mostly online teaching, I just did it and I had all these students. So I can tell you how they did compared to previous groups of students. So, I mean, in a way I kind of have a control, but not exactly.

Kevin Patton:
And probably if I was going into it thinking I’m going to design an experiment, I’m going to do an experiment and see which is best, I probably would have done it differently and recorded things differently in that. But I didn’t, it was just part of what I was doing as a teacher, is I’m going to try this and see if it works. And it probably won’t. So who cares? That’s okay. There’s always next year. And I’m sure I won’t harm them too much. And so, yeah.

Krista Rompolski:
The tough thing about doing scholarship of teaching and learning is that to do a study that has this level of control, you really have to plan very well ahead. Not only in terms of the actual content of what you’re delivering, but getting IRB approval, everything like that. And I don’t know about you Kevin, but I think a lot of people limit that they get their teaching assignments very late or they change or a pandemic happens. So it’s very challenging to plan ahead.

Krista Rompolski:
So very often we’re doing a lot of the scholarship of teaching and learning retrospectively. So looking back at and saying, well, was there something defined in this course? Rather than having the opportunity to design it in advance? So I personally, not go off topic, really excited about everything that will hopefully come out of what we’re going through right now, in terms of teaching and learning, comparing face to face versus online results.

Krista Rompolski:
And I’m sure some are trying to very tightly replicate their in class experience and some are totally going a different direction. And I think time will tell which is the right way to go under the circumstances that we’re all in right now. So to tie back to the whole point of the article about engagement, I think we’re going to find that there are so many ways to engage students online that we haven’t thought about.

Krista Rompolski:
And I’ve had several experiences teaching online and not having that face to face lecture and going into that thinking, this isn’t going to be as fun or how will I know that they don’t understand, and if I can’t see their faces and things like that. First of all, in all our learning management systems, there are so many tools to engage with students. There’s also, if you are dealing with students that maybe aren’t intrinsically motivated by the material, well, you can engage them by doing little things like frequent quizzing, or frequent little mini assignments that maybe don’t count for very much, but giving them stuff to do on a couple of times a week that they have to be checking in with the course.

Krista Rompolski:
And then rather than something I was calling my online lectures when I teach are just sort of more of an online conversation that goes throughout the week. At my previous institution, we had VoiceThread and I really liked that pool. And I haven’t found one that can do the same thing yet where I can post the slides with audio narration and they can listen to one slide at a time. So it’s not like a video that you have to watch the whole thing. But then right on that same slide with my audio track, a student can text or record either audio or video, a question.

Krista Rompolski:
So throughout the week, part of their assignment was to ask or answer two or three questions on that slide set basically. So my slides or what would be the traditional in class lecture became a living discussion board that went throughout the week. So it wasn’t just a one and done type thing. And it gave students, at least from the feedback, so much more time to digest the material than they would in one class, because they had questions that occurred to them four or five hours after class was over and they would just forget to shoot off an email or not bother and things like that. So that’s just one example. There’s so many other ways to interact with students online than if you only have them for class or office hours, which nobody attends anyway.

Kevin Patton:
That’s amazing. I learn something really cool every time I talk to you, Krista. And I had never heard of that tool. That’s amazing. I’m going to investigate that a little bit further for myself. But as you mentioned, there’s so many tools out there. And that’s part of the fun of some of these organizations like HAPS and AAA that you really can’t… That’s why I keep tuning into as many of those town hall meetings as I can, because I want to hear what other people are doing.

Kevin Patton:
That always gives me ideas on not necessarily doing it the way they’re doing it, but it gives me an idea for how I can tweak what I’m already doing and help with that evolution that I talked about that not only applies to my podcast, but applies to our teaching. I think when we’re paying attention as teachers, we’re also evolving as teachers. And you mentioned the interaction, something that I have found is I think I have better rapport or maybe I should say I get to know my students a little bit more deeply in an online class compared to at least the larger regular traditional lecture classes, just because of the way it’s set up.

Kevin Patton:
You can really have those individual conversations, but you also learn more about them. And I think there are some people I’ve mentioned on the podcast a number of times that I’m naturally an introvert. And so you wouldn’t know it sometimes at meetings, but I wouldn’t necessarily in a class be the first person to raise my hand. It’s not until I get very comfortable with being a student in that class and get comfortable with the instructor and get comfortable with my classmates that I’m ready to do that.

Kevin Patton:
And there are some students who never reached that level of comfort. And being online, it’s sort of like social media where you hear from people that you wouldn’t expect to hear from very much. And of course that has a dark side to it in social media where you’d rather not hear what some of those people have to say. But online, it really works out well and you can really engage students more and you learn more about them as people, as individual people. And I think having those kinds of connections really engages me more as an instructor.

Kevin Patton:
And there’s been quite a bit of research that shows that students who feel connected to at least one faculty member tend to stay in school longer and be more successful and end up really achieving the degree, not necessarily the same degree they came in for, but achieving a degree. And there are unfortunately so many students who don’t get that far. But if we can engage them, then they can. And you can really do that in online education.

Kevin Patton:
And I know a lot of people that haven’t done much of that don’t believe it. But I can see you shaking your head. By the way, we’re connected not only by audio, but video as we’re doing this. We didn’t record the video, but we’re just recording the audio so I can see Krista shaking her head.

Krista Rompolski:
Well, it’s funny you mentioned that. A few hours ago I did a Zoom call, sort of a reunion with three of my students from my online pathophysiology class last summer. And they were always working together, they kind of came into school together. They’re all doing EMT hours and all applying PA school at the same time. And all of them had really unique things to say about how the class last summer got them to think differently just about themselves, the way that they learn and then not toot my own horn about my class, but how much they’re applying that material in their daily life, getting their clinical hours and things like that. But the point is that a year later I’m doing a Zoom call because they wanted to catch up with me.

Krista Rompolski:
And I was that professor that has stuck with the three of them. And what a privilege that is for what we do? I have professors that I still think about and I mean, I guess I could tell them that maybe I will, this will be a good inspiration. But there’s a couple and they made such a humongous difference. Not even their class, but just the way that they approached me as a student, trusted me as a student, believed in me. And what that got me through at times, it’s immeasurable.

Krista Rompolski:
So why not be that professor? And you can absolutely do that online. Like you mentioned, I got to know my students so much more usually because the classes are smaller, but they don’t necessarily have to be. There’s a lot organically built in, a lot more room and time to approach your professor when you don’t feel like you’re bothering them because class just ended and they’re off to somewhere else. So it gives you that natural breathing room to meet whenever it’s more convenient for your schedules, it allows more time that then maybe you would feel like you had with professor in person.

Kevin Patton:
That reminded me of something you just said about you have those teachers in your own history that you think about and maybe you should reach back and talk to them. And I’ve done that a couple of times in my career. But an assignment I’ve given some of my students in the HAPI program and it’s an ungraded assignment and I don’t check up on them, but I tell them your assignment is to go find one of your old professors or even a high school teacher that really made a difference in your life. And just try to track him down, reach out to him and just say, “Hey, I appreciate you.”

Krista Rompolski:
That’s awesome.

Kevin Patton:
Even if it’s just that short. And the day where we’re recording this on, I think I saw something that this is national teacher’s day or world teacher’s day or something like that. So I’m giving you an assignment, dear podcast list. Your assignment is to go to that one teacher, reach out to them somewhere. There probably holdup somewhere, not here in front, very many people are going to want to hear from you because we all know that, you all know that, I know that, Krista just mentioned that, that we as instructors, that’s where it is, that’s where it is for us.

Kevin Patton:
And so to hear the feedback that we really made that connection with our teacher is going to be golden to them. Another assignment I have for anyone listening to this podcast is to give us some feedback on this journal club idea and on how you think this episode went, what suggestions you have for future episodes. And we’re going to be doing this as an occasional kind of thing. So every episode is not going to be a journal club. But we’re going to be doing this regularly so we need that feedback so that we know for the next one we have some ideas that we can work with as we kind of mold this into whatever shape it’s going to finally take.

Kevin Patton:
And Krista, it’s always a pleasure talking to you. I really appreciate the assignment you gave me early on in reading this paper. And it’s one that I would not probably have run across myself, would not have popped out to me, but I’m glad we read it. So-

Krista Rompolski:
We’ll have to find a paper that we have some debate about. Because I think we were pretty [crosstalk 00:42:28].

Kevin Patton:
We agreed on everything here.

Krista Rompolski:
We’re just typical.

Kevin Patton:
We need something we’re going to argue about. It’ll be interesting when that happens. But if anybody listening has something that they would like to debate us on regarding that, or have an opposing opinion or whatever, then go ahead and shoot that to us. And we might be able to get it on the air, we might address it in a future journal club or something like that. And if anybody has good articles that they want to suggest as well, go ahead and send that into the podcast hotline or podcast@theAPprofessor.org and I’ll pass that along to Krista and we can go from there. So Krista, it’s been a lot of fun. I’m looking forward to our next journal club.

Krista Rompolski:
Same here, Kevin. Thanks so much. Thanks everyone.

Sponsored by HAPS

Kevin Patton:
Marketing support for this podcast is provided by HAPS, the Human Anatomy and Physiology Society, promoting excellence and the teaching of human anatomy and physiology for over 30 years. One of the highlights of HAPS membership is the opportunity to attend the annual conference. It’s a chance to learn, to share, to rekindle friendships and make new friends with people who love to teach anatomy and physiology.

Kevin Patton:
This year would have been my 31st consecutive annual conference. And you know what? By golly, I’m going. But due to the current circumstances, this year’s annual meeting will be a virtual conference and I’m going. To see that list of all the cool virtual events planned, just go to theAPprofessor.org/haps, that H-A-P-S. Click on the events tab, and then on HAPS 2020 virtual conference. And you’ll see the list of things that HAPS has planned for us.

Pandemic Teaching Book (please share!)

Kevin Patton:
In the previous episode, I mentioned a free ebook that I recently published. It’s called Pandemic Teaching: A Survival Guide for College Faculty. It’s a little over a hundred pages and it’s a quick, easy read, about two hours. And it’s chock full of ideas, tips and mindsets that help us move to remote teaching and be successful at it. I’d really love it if you could do me a favor. Please, could you take a moment and share it with three colleagues at your school? One of them being whoever organizes the professional development for your faculty.

Kevin Patton:
Really, after going to all the trouble of putting it together, I’d like folks to get some use out of this book. It’s a free download from all the major ebook stores. Just share this link I’m going to give you to see a list of different places to find it like Amazon, Kindle, Barnes & Noble NOOK, Apple Books, and all the list goes on. So that link is books2read, that’s books, the numeral 2, read.com/pandemicteaching. Once again, books2read.com/pandemicteaching.

Kevin Patton:
And could you also take a moment to mention it in social media and share that link when you do it? I sure do appreciate your help with this.

Staying Connected

Kevin Patton:
Hey, don’t forget that I always put links in the show notes and at the episode page at theAPprofessor.org in case you’ll want to further explore any ideas mentioned in this podcast or if you want to visit our sponsors. And you’re always encouraged to call in with your questions, comments, and ideas at the podcast hotline. That’s 1-833-LION-DEN, or 1-833-546-636. Or send a recording or written message to podcast@theAPprofessor.org. I’ll see you down the road.

Aileen:
The A&P Professor is hosted by Dr. Kevin Patton, an award-winning professor and textbook author in human anatomy & physiology.

Kevin Patton:
This episode does not contain any animal byproducts, plant byproducts or synthetic materials. In fact, it doesn’t have any ingredients.