Three Legs Morph Into Three Tracks

London Stansed People Mover. CC BY-SA 3.0

The three-legged stool that encapsulates the teaching philosophy of the Summer Institute in Teaching Science is not just theory—it is reality embodied in experienced faculty who teach an intentionally transformative curriculum. Each of the three legs summarizes an entire summer of faculty and curriculum development. Each informs a ten week track in the learning environment that we use to move faculty over three summers from “Tellers” to “Transformers.”

What follows is an approximate transcript of the podcast.

00:53] Mike: Well, in the previous podcast episode, we reviewed the historical roots that led to the creation of the Summer Institute in Teaching Science, or what we call SITS. That conversation included the three founders of SITS Bill Lovegrove, Brian Vogt, and myself, Mike Gray. Today I'm going to talk with Derrick Glasco, who is part of the next generation of science faculty. Welcome, Derrick.

[01:22] Derrick: Thanks for having me.

[01:23] Mike: Derrick has a PhD from the University of Missouri. I guess Mizzou, or however you say it.

[01:29] Derrick: That’s out there, either one is okay.

[01:31] Mike: Okay.

[01:32] Derrick: Yeah, mizzou oftentimes if you're talking about sports.

[01:37] Mike: Okay. All right. Do you have a mascot or is this a substitute mascot?

[01:42] Derrick: No, it's the Mizzou Tigers.

[01:45] Mike: Okay. Kind of like the Clemson Tigers?

[01:49] Derrick: Yes.

[01:50] Mike: Okay.

[01:51] Derrick: Just wearing a different jersey.

[01:53] Mike: Okay. Did you do undergraduate there as well as graduate work?

[02:00] Derrick: No. I went to a state college. Missouri Southern State University in Joplin, Missouri. That's in Southwest Missouri. And it's about an hour from where I grew up. Just kind of your local regional school.

[02:19] Mike: Is that what you aspired to go there, like, when you were growing up? Since that was regional, that's where you saw yourself headed?

[02:27] Derrick: Well, oddly enough, yeah. I didn't really think about which colleges I would go to too much. I knew I wanted to stay around close enough to home, but I basically got accepted into the honors program there, and so that was like a full ride scholarship situation. So that was a great motivator. Yeah.

[02:53] Mike: So what did you major in there?

[02:55] Derrick: Biology.

[02:56] Mike: Okay.

[02:56] Derrick: I went in wanting to go to med school originally.

[03:00] Mike: Sounds familiar. Yeah, I have a similar story to tell.

[03:06] Derrick: Yeah. So, chemistry minor.

[03:10] Mike: Same here. So you went on and you got your PhD from Mizzou, University of Missouri. In what area?

[03:21] Derrick: Well, officially it's biological sciences. That's the program. I call myself a cell and developmental biologist. That's really the field. Studied brain development for the bulk of my research using mice and zebrafish. So I just call myself? Cell and Developmental Biology.

[03:41] Mike: Okay. So when did you come to join the faculty at BJU?

[03:48] Derrick: Fall of 2011. Pretty much fresh out of graduate school.

[03:53] Mike: We were glad to have you. So, what? Twelve years now?

[03:59] Derrick: Yeah, I'm going into my 13th year of teaching.

[04:03] Mike: So speaking of teaching, what courses do you teach?

[04:07] Derrick: I teach general Biology one, which is the majors level general biology course and Genetics and Advanced Cell and Molecular Biology and Developmental Biology and various labs.

[04:22] Mike: So at the end of next summer, that'll be the 20th year of SITS. I plan to move on from my endeavors here, and Derek will take over for me as the director of SITS. Been kind of my understudy now for good five years anyway, so I appreciate him in many different ways. I wonder, since you had an undergraduate experience in a secular institution and a graduate experience in a secular institution, particularly in graduate school, where I assume knowing at that point medical school was not what we were pursuing any longer, what influences at University of Missouri were formative for your views on teaching and learning?

[05:23] Derrick: Well, to answer that, I sort of have to start back in my undergrad experience just to say that I really never considered teaching when I was going into a biology major. How I got out of premed is a very long story for a different kind. I transitioned, really, to really loving research and a lot of the unanswered questions that were posed in my classes that I was in and really just had a great relationship with a number of professors there, and it looked like a great job. They were excited about what they did, really.

[05:59] Mike: Okay.

[06:01] Derrick: I mean, I can't say all of them, but many of them, yeah, just the idea you can just walk into someone's office and they're pecking at their keyboard and they turn around and they're glad to see you and to help you, that was pretty influential for me. It's definitely not what I was expecting.

[06:19] Mike: And was that a teaching institution?

[06:23] Derrick: It was a yes, a teaching institution at the time. They definitely have a little bit of research going on now. Probably about 5000 students, I would say. But, yeah, primarily teaching.

[06:36] Mike: So teaching was valued there?

[06:38] Derrick: It was valued, yes. So I definitely went into graduate school very open to the idea that I think I want to teach.

[06:52] Mike: The Odd man out, though, at a research institution.

[06:55] Derrick: Right. It's not something you walk around saying all the time, but you do find other people are there interested in teaching. But my first teaching experience was not so great. I taught a non-majors lab course, like a separate course, not attached to the lecture, that had its own lecture, and it was full of Apathetic students. I vividly remember the back row oftentimes being filled with people who were just there to sleep or something. It was interesting. It was discouraging in a way. It's like, this isn't exactly what I was thinking teaching was going to be. I did that for a few years, and I took a break from it because I got some fellowship, basically. But I became part of this Preparing Future Faculty program at the graduate school. And it was great. It was all about faculty life, faculty experience. Even then, there still wasn't a whole lot of practical teaching training and really looking at just overall the teachers that I had in graduate school, I would go back and say, yeah, my undergraduate teachers were better overall, better experience, as in continued research, success doesn't automatically equal good teaching. And much like we know, of course you can be very successful at research and still be a really bad seminar speaker. So just the idea that looking at that and looking back, I did feel definitely like a subconscious dissatisfaction with my own learning experience. It felt very fragmented. And when things really started clicking latent, undergrad and all through grad school, I had this feeling like some of this should have made sense earlier. I'd really like to be a part of making a more optimal path for students if I become a teacher.

[09:16] Mike: But not a lot of direction about how to do that. Just a hunger for it to happen.

[09:21] Derrick: Exactly, yes. I wouldn't say I had any direction specifically. I definitely felt a calling to do it. But yeah, when I came here, I was coming as a blank slate, basically.

[09:39] Mike: Hunger says a lot though.

[09:41] Derrick: Yes.

[09:41] Mike: That's part of the teachability part.

[09:43] Derrick: Yes. But I was definitely ready to do something different than I experienced for the most part.

[09:51] Mike: So twelve years ago, you would have been in SITS for the first time.

[09:55] Derrick: Yes.

[09:56] Mike: So did that feel like a collision or like maybe I'm finally getting some concrete direction about how to create optimal learning environment?

[10:13] Derrick: Yeah, it was very eye-opening right away. Subconsciously, I guess I had already figured out that there was something wrong with how a lot of teaching had been done with me as the receiver. So I wasn't resistant really to anything that could have been brought up. I would say I was on board pretty quickly. It made a lot of sense pretty quickly.

[10:44] Mike: So how would you say over the years, these twelve years now, where you've transitioned from moving through the tracks that we use to develop new faculty in SITS, to assuming an increasingly important teaching role in SITS? How has SITS influenced your own views on teaching and learning?

[11:09] Derrick: Well, I could really just give you one word answer. I won't, but incalculable would be my one-word answer. I really can say I don't know how people do without SITS. I don't know what I would have done without the SITS philosophy, the SITS tools, just the interaction with other faculty. And it's all I know. I can definitely say that there's lots of misconceptions out there about how people learn. Of course, we tend to maybe imitate what we have seen the most. If it worked at all, that would have been me, I would imagine. I would have just picked some of the things I liked about old teachers that I had and even if there wasn't a reason, probably just would have done some imitation there. So I think as far as just the influence, just even a little bit of insight into how people learn. How the brain works is really schema changing —it changes everything. If you really solidify this in your mind, it makes sense of your good and bad past learning experiences. It also every time I teach in a way that doesn't measure up to that, it's very dissatisfying. So in some ways you could say, well, you're almost hyper aware of your own shortcomings as a teacher and it does turn into, yeah, I want to be better, I can be better. So there is definitely some excitement, there some hope. So yeah, again, just in one word, I'd say, I don't even have anything to compare. I don't have a time frame. My life without SITS and I wouldn't want one.

[13:14] Mike: Well, in the last episode, last podcast, we represented SITS as a three-legged stool to emphasize that there are three different but interwoven and interdependent aspects of effective teaching that lead to lasting learning. So I think maybe it would help to make the connection there if you just give a brief characterization of each of those three legs because that's the basis for the three tracks that we're going to be talking about today.

[13:54] Derrick: Yeah. So the first leg is basically clear thinking. It's all about really clarifying your own thinking about your discipline. That combined with foundational ideas about how the brain works, how people learn. And so really, I guess you could say that the first leg is about getting things right in your mind, which of course you need to eventually translate into the classroom. But yeah, the second leg is clear communication. This is all about your interaction with students. Student engagement really starts with some aspects, of course design, but definitely what are you doing in the classroom? To not only show your or better explain complex ideas, how do you get students engaged in that? And a major part of their own learning process, I guess you could say. Very heavy emphasis on the central role of questioning in the classroom. So all of those things go together in the second leg. The third one, substantive assessment. And really, I think of this one as just closing the loop. If you are thinking more clearly, communicating more clearly, your students are thinking at a higher level, well, then you need to be testing in a way that will encourage that, reinforce it and measure that. So you don't really have the complete package until you have all three of those legs.

[15:33] Mike: So those three legs translate into three tracks in SITS. But fortunately, or unfortunately, each track is taught in a separate summer, which makes it a little bit more challenging to connect everything together. We do that because the development of each of those legs really takes a substantial part of the ten weeks that SITS operates every summer. And in those ten weeks we've got reading for our faculty to do. We've got classroom instruction by veterans who are not just telling, but modeling what effective classroom environments look like and engaging participants in that track. And we've got projects for them to work on. We've got workshops that they participate in, and all the while in the background, they're developing a target course curriculum. So in some ways, it would be ideal if we could move seamlessly from one track to the next, but that's physically impossible. You got the semester coming up just a few weeks after SITS ends every summer. Let's start with the first summer, which would be track one. What are the goals for that first summer? As faculty come in, and often when they come in, we've got more than one faculty member. That's typical. We have a cohort of new faculty who are coming in. So what are the goals for them this first ten week summer?

[17:23] Derrick: Well, I think first and foremost, part of it is just buy in. If they're not already convinced, you need to convince them that just basically straight lectures are ineffective, and there's, of course, a lot of evidence to back that up. And it takes some time, right? Especially since we have the issue that we mostly learned via the lecture format, and we did pretty well. So that's something that we grapple with. We try to unpackage the need for metacognition, really trying to get them to think through their own disciplines in a system more systematic way than what they have before. It's very helpful, I think, to think out loud a lot all throughout SITS, but definitely track one. You're trying to articulate what is the logic of my discipline. You're talking to people from other departments. You're talking people from your own department. And really, I think that the end goal of this is at least at the end of the summer, they're going to have a very heightened awareness. They're going to have at least the framework for a course that they feel like they own. And that really is a product of this.

[18:45] Mike: Most faculty have experienced, and maybe, as you say, experienced some success in an environment that's characterized by what we would call teaching as telling. Besides studying research on the topic of that as an approach to teaching, which, as you say, pretty consistently shows it doesn't work real well, what other ways might there be to help faculty to not do what they maybe experienced a level of success with, in spite of the fact that it might have not been pretty at the time? It worked because here I am, and I have a PhD, and I'm ready to start teaching. Getting buy in probably uniformly means arriving at a state of mind that you might not be real comfortable initially. What does that look like? Evidently you came, you said, as a blank slate, but some people would come more of, I have an expectation. I was hired to teach, and this is what teaching looks like. And now, in the very first summer, you're telling, no, that's not what teaching looks like. So how do we make this transition for somebody who's not a blank slate like you were?

[20:16] Derrick: Well, we put them in some interesting situations. So one of the things that we do in track one is it's called teach outside Your discipline. And we give them a topic that they know supposedly nothing about, and they have about 24 hours until they teach it to the rest of the faculty, which, of course, brutal. Yes, it's of course a terrifying experience, but it it puts them in the mind of a fresh learner, and they really have to boil it down to the big ideas. And that's, I guess, not the standard way of doing things as a teacher.

[21:00] Mike: So they're kind of put in a situation not exactly sink or swim, but where they're going to have to take the role of a teacher, but before they can get there, they're actually in the role of a learner. And what are the needs of a learner who's going to get enough competence that they can teach with some effectiveness the next day about a topic that I'm just starting to learn about? What do learners go looking for? Is basically the lesson.

[21:32] Derrick: Yeah, just about putting yourself in their shoes. So in some ways, different things that we do in track one. That's why it's helpful to have faculty from outside your immediate discipline that are hearing your ideas.

[21:49] Mike: Because they're not experts.

[21:50] Derrick: Yes, they're not experts. I guess they're the closest to your students that you have in the summer. And if it's making no sense to them whatsoever, then yeah, I mean, that's the kind of good feedback that I think is very formative for new faculty because it makes sense up here. Right. But it's not obviously not coming through how I thought it was. So that's eye opening.

[22:21] Mike: Do you think the first summer is the most difficult of the three?

[22:26] Derrick: Definitely. Because I don't think anybody ever leaves the first summer feeling like they have it together. In fact, they shouldn't leave the first summer that way. Clarifying your thinking never ends. The tools that we use to develop thinking in SITS, those are ones that you're going to have to and should be using constantly. So it's okay, and I think probably a good thing that you have some dissatisfaction with. Okay. I've been clarifying my own thinking. How do I make this clear to my students? I know for sure I wanted eagerly to see what the next step in this was. It's just hard making concept maps, that kind of stuff that we do. Almost everything that we do looks easy from the outside, from the surface, until you actually do it. So it's tough.

[23:22] Mike: You mentioned one of the two power tools that we use all the way through, but especially get used to it as a way of opening up our own understanding of our thinking. That being concept mapping. There's one other tool, so you want to talk about that tool and then how these two tools are deployed in that first summer. And of course, that's not abandoned as we move into tracks two and three.

[23:57] Derrick: Sure. So the very first tangible thing that they work on, track one are called logic wheels. So it's basically trying to articulate the different elements of thought in your own discipline, things that we don't normally even think about. So anything from motivations to the core assumptions in your field, we bring those to the surface. Then we try to figure out what kinds of questions are really discipline specific, what really is unique about the approach of a biologist, for example, what kind of explanations can biologists produce? That kind of stuff. So again, it would probably sound easy if you haven't done it before, but that's something that we actually take a good deal of time thinking through and that ends up becoming a very foundational tool for your course design and moving forward to even doing something like concept mapping. So concept mapping then would be it's a product, but it's also a tool to really force yourself to think through connections to concepts in your field, make some hierarchical decisions about them, their relationship to each other, really just discipline thought in a way that you can see if it's messy. So that's another thing that goes right along with the logic wheels. Those are tools that we're constantly coming back to, and those are ways to refine your own thinking. And I would say that some of the in-house rules that we have about concept mapping make it in some ways even more difficult in a good way, that we're really forcing systematic thinking in a way that even experts come in right. You come in with a PhD and your thinking is not as organized as you probably think it was.

[26:08] Mike: Imagine that. And if it's not really as organized as you think it is, it's going to be even worse when we go through the degradation associated with trying to communicate my ideas with some degree of clarity to my students. So how many sessions to do this would be teaching sessions, workshops? How many sessions overall are we going to involve track one people in?

[26:41] Derrick: Well, there's about 36 sessions this summer, and many of those are workshops and anything from workshops like interdisciplinary. So we all talk about it to one-on-one with a mentor in your department. So the size and scope really varies.

[27:03] Mike: So they're ending up having to talk with people sometimes outside their discipline about how thinking goes on in their discipline. And we're back into the other person is not an expert. So they're likely to be easily confused since this is not their discipline. Talking to a chemist or a physicist or an engineer, when you're not one of those challenges the other person to up their game in terms of communication to focus on not all of the peripheral stuff, but what's the main thing you're trying to get across here? So it's a good thing that the faculty are involved in trying to get their thinking out in the clearest manner possible, and they got other humans reacting. Not judgmentally, but helpfully, some more clarity still needed there. Maybe there's a missing piece that you haven't told me about, but right now I'm confused in this way by what you're trying to communicate to me besides our power tools. I would say one of the elements that makes this work effectively is the amount of human interaction there is with people who want to be helpful but are going to be truthful in a kind way with what they're hearing. The products of your thinking look like, whether that's a concept map or a logic wheel or a presentation on something you're trying to teach me that I don't know anything about.

[28:44] Derrick: Yeah, we just had a session yesterday where there was just biologists and chemists in the room, basically, and a biologist was presenting an explanation or something he thought would really be a nice statement of explanation, and the chemists weren't buying it, as in, I don't even see an explanation there. And really it went the other way, too. It's almost like in the ways that you can even explain certain things to other people and students. There's sometimes more packaged into your too much packaged into the way that you say it for it to even really be clear to someone outside. Those kinds of conversations are probably scary when you first have them as a newer faculty member, but they've always been very cordial, collegial. And really, I think most people end up really enjoying that aspect. One of the highlights, really?

[29:50] Mike: Yeah, the social aspect was something that when we started back in 2004, we didn't anticipate how powerful that would be. To have a community of people who are all invested in looking at trying to agree on what things will optimize teaching and to what extent are those discipline specific and to what extent are they, at least in science and engineering, apparently universals, that we can all agree on those things? We've got a learning community going on, and as the summers go by, the relationships are an important piece of what we're trying to accomplish. So how's the first summer form the basis for the second and third summers?

[30:43] Derrick: Well, the first summer is something that you never walk away from, you never graduate from. So when it comes to really being more disciplined about your own thinking, that is the basis for what we move on to next, which is, well, how to clearly communicate and how to interact and engage students in the classroom, how to assess them. All of those things run together. But that's the part that you always keep coming back to, are these foundational things that you did back in Track One.

[31:19] Mike: And it's important to realize that what we talk about, these metacognitive things that go on that seem to dominate the first summer are not some kind of mental gymnastics that we just put people through because we enjoy intellectual games. That we're actually talking about making our thinking clearer and less complicated. In the service of teaching people that are in our classroom, we cut through a lot of things that experts treasure—complexity. But beginning learners want to know, what's the core idea? What are you trying to get through to me? So we're trying to uncomplicate without oversimplification, so that we can then turn around and build more complex learning structures because we're all understanding some foundational ideas. And that goes on, of course, all the time in the classroom, outside the classroom. So what would you say the goals would be for Track Two?

[32:32] Derrick: Well, Track Two is all about really, I guess, making it practical in the classroom. There are things that we, of course, do in Track One that are very practical, but it's all about delivery. Take your clear thinking, make it clear to your students, bring your students. Create an environment where learning can happen in this way that we're trying to get it to happen. We're talking about an optimal learning environment here as far as communicating with your students and the kind of things that we are trying to do. I mean, it starts with anything from just developing a narrative for your course that is clearly communicated. We even talk about PowerPoint, visual aids. There's actually a philosophy to their use. And of course, as I mentioned before, really the central thing in Track Two would really just be the role of questioning in the classroom. Why you ask questions, how you ask questions, what kinds of questions do you ask? How many follow up questions should you ask, really, that's I would say, like, the heart of what Track Two is, because questions drive learning, especially if they're your own questions that you came up with. Right. That's in essence, what Track Two is about.

[33:55] Mike: There's a sense, I guess, in this classroom environment that's optimized for learning, that we're asking the students to do what the faculty members have done in Track One. That is, tell me about your thinking so I can make your thinking better. We create a space where it's expected that you put your thinking out there for somebody else to inspect and to help you develop into something that would be better than you could possibly come up with on your own. So there's a trust factor that has to be established there. Like, you could trust me not to jump on you when you have a misconception. I want to help you with your misconception. I want to help you unseat it and replace it with a proper understanding. So there's a sense of community, again, that we talked about with faculty that we're also trying to develop with students that you have a faculty member who has taken some significant trouble to try and uncomplicate their thinking so that they can help you to develop that kind of thinking in the most efficient way possible. So you can go further and deeper in your understanding that you could possibly go if you were using inefficient strategies for learning. The third summer is about what?

[35:28] Derrick: Again, I would say closing the loop on everything that you've been working towards. And the way you do that is through substantive assessment. So if you have principle based teaching, you're trying to engage students in higher order thinking, well, then you must, I would say with an underlying must assess that type of type of thinking. So we really start out with just what is a good philosophy of assessment in general, how to create assessments, and very importantly, how to assess your own assessments. So that's, again, a cycle that never ends without all of this. Ultimately, in the long run, a lot of what you might attempt to do is not going to be as fruitful. It's a very, very important part of the SITS.

[36:25] Mike: So philosophically, this is the answer to that perennial student question “will this be on the test?” Right? It certainly will be in some form that's not trivial, that's going to expect you to show that you understand and are not just repeating something you heard me say or that was in the textbook.

[36:46] Derrick: Exactly. I was going to say, yes, it's going to be on the test, but it's not going to be like I said it in class. That's something. And of course, if you do have an understanding of whatever concepts that you're talking about, that shouldn't be a problem. So that's part of what you have to communicate to students is that making the jump to application and new situations is a natural jump once you reach the level, I guess you could say, of really understanding something.

[37:20] Mike: The faculty member then has to create buy in again with the students every semester about why I'm not assessing you in the trivial manner that you might be accustomed to. That rewards rote memorization; that you're going to have to move to a level higher. Some students may feel like you've changed the rules of the game academically. I've been successful at this point because I'm good at memorization and now you're telling me you're not rewarding memorization. So there's some sales that have to go on in changing their perspective and helping them to recognize that they're actually capable of operating at a higher level. And unless that's way we assess, then they will, in fact, their sin nature will take over and they'll take the path of least resistance. And that actually for the most part in our courses we have majors and that your proficiency within your major is largely your ability to use the ideas to do something with, not to recall the ideas themselves. Specifics associated with the data, but the ability to apply is what employers hire people to do. So we're actually doing you a favor by not allowing you to get by with the kind of assessment you might be used to. And students who actually do buy in, actually, somebody might say, we're making this up, but we're not. I've had students thank me for that level of assessment—that I know a test in your class is going to be challenging because I'm going to have to apply. But afterward, I had this satisfaction that I never got in a memory-oriented test. Almost like I'm playing a sport and our team won and I performed well. I was ready for the game. The coaching has all paid off in a winning performance. Like this was a significant task, and you helped me to do it. So I have grown as a learner, and I applaud that fact. That's why I'm here in college. Imagine that.

[39:44] Derrick: Yeah. So I deal with that. A lot of that burden to convince students of these things falls on me. In our department, teaching General Biology one. So mostly incoming freshmen. Yeah. Many do appreciate it, of course. Many are resistant. But when you do well on the test, like we're talking about, it's obvious that you have learned something. Like, you know that you've learned something that's not just going to escape you immediately, something that you memorized overnight. You're really seeing the fruits —real fruits of your labor. The sooner you can get students to buy into that, the better. Which is why we start it in our introductory classes here.

[40:32] Mike: We don't want to sell them something that's different from what they're going to be consuming in courses after that first course.

[40:40] Derrick: Yes. Or if I knew that that was not happening in future courses, for them, it would really be a pointless effort. So that's one thing I'm very glad about as far as the influence of SITS, the fact that it's everybody in our program, our division, that are on board with this.

[41:03] Mike: Yeah. So we're setting an expectation that's fulfilled as they move up in their competence. Developing expert like thinking. It's not an anomaly in the freshman year that we've got this professor who's just intent on weeding out students. And so he's raised this artificial bar about what you need to do to be successful here. That actually this actually works. And we have students then from the upper level who help students negotiate the gauntlet, if you want to call it that, for the freshman year. So we have a peer tutoring program, which initially when I created it years ago, I thought it may be hard to get students, upper level students to participate in this. And for a little while it was like, well, I'm busy. I'd like to help, but dot, dot, dot. But we really have much less of that going on now because because our upper-level students have been helped by being mentored by upper level students themselves. And what's the other piece of this that motivates these upper-level students to participate? What, in fact, is in it for them?

[42:23] Derrick: Well, I mean, among other things, they realize that teaching others helps them to understand better and solidify their own thinking. Intellectually satisfying. And really, I think it's why do a lot of people continue to teach? It's really a great experience to see someone get it. And you had a part in that. Yeah. So I think they probably have some of the same motivations in that way that even I do as the professor in the course, just seeing that kind of thing happen.

[43:02] Derrick: Well, thanks, Derrick.

[43:04] Mike: I appreciate your conversation and your contributions over the years.

[43:10] Derrick: All right, well, thanks for having me.

[43:17] Mike: You've heard us talk about what the tracks of SITS are designed to do. Join me in two weeks as I interview this summer's cohort of faculty who are currently participating in track one. We'll have a freewheeling conversation about the challenges and the benefits of the SITS experience. They'll talk candidly about how the tools of metacognition are helping them to clarify their thinking. As always, if you have questions or comments, you can reach me at deepanddurable.com. See you soon.