Transformed by Touching the Third Rail

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Pedagogy is often viewed as a personal choice and untouchable—a kind of third rail, like social security or medicare that no politician in his right mind (a very rare species) would dare to touch. It is this very reluctance that keeps education at all levels preoccupied in safe peripheral discussions of methods, technology, and hot tips.

The transformative power of the Summer Institute in Teaching Science (SITS) lies in its willingness to challenge this privatized privileged view of pedagogy. When we look at learners and learning instead of just at teachers and teaching, there is no question that telling is not teaching, because learners don’t learn efficiently within that pedagogy. The average student “succeeds” in this standard environment through surface learning that evaporates quickly and has very little transfer to solving real world problems.

The SITS model aims to transform faculty into clear incisive thinkers who embrace transformed pedagogy in order to optimize deep learning in their students.

Three engineers: aerospace, electrical, and mechanical got together in the summer of 2023 to transform engineering curriculum.

No, this is not the beginning of a joke!

What all three have in common is their approach to constructing curriculum and learning environments in and out of the classroom. In short, they agree on pedagogy although their personalities are as different as can be. All three agree that they aim to teach their students “how to think like engineers.” The basis for this agreement is the persuasive power of logic and evidence that is encapsulated in the three-legged stool, a comprehensive model of teaching and learning that was discussed in episode 1 of this summer 2023 season..

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What follows is an approximate transcript of a podcast consisting of reflections by the Track 2 faculty cohort of 2023.

[00:05] Mike Gray: Welcome to the Deep and Durable Learning Podcast. I'm your host, Mike Gray. I have 45 years of teaching experience in higher education, and I've taught over 10,000 students. Many of my students would say that I taught them how to think. I've also been involved in faculty development for over 30 years and have trained over 100 university faculty how to teach their courses as a way of thinking. Join me and my guests today as we talk about the structure and rationale behind the transformative experience that is the Summer Institute in Teaching Science.

I'm joined on the podcast today by the summer of 2023 Track 2 faculty cohort. These are faculty who are now seven weeks into their second summer of the Summer Institute of Teaching Science, or SITS.

So let's get to know these men, and they are all men. So I'm going to ask four questions, if you keep that much in mind. It's right at the limit of working memory! I may prompt you if you leave one out and just ask you the question directly. But here are the four questions. First of all, where are you from most recently, and maybe where you spent most of your life? What advanced degrees do you have, in what area and from what school or schools? Do you have previous university teaching experience and what courses are you currently teaching?

So let's start with James. James Collins. Where are you from, James?

[01:58] James Collins: I'm from South Africa. So on the east coast.

[02:03] Mike Gray: And a delightful South African accent, for sure. Definitely not from the US South.

[02:10] James Collins: No.

[02:12] Mike Gray: So you were born and raised there?

[02:16] James Collins: Born and raised there. I have traveled a lot, so I've been in the States, lived in the States for about nine years, in the middle somewhere. Lived in West Africa for a while, lived on ships for a couple of years and then went back to South Africa for the last 15 or so years.

[02:32] Mike Gray: So what advanced degrees do you have?

[02:34] James Collins: So, I just have my master's in mechanical engineering and I'm currently pursuing my PhD. So hopefully that'll happen in the next year or two. There'll be a load off my back.

[02:43] Mike Gray: We hope so. And what schools?

[02:46] James Collins: So University of KwaZulu-Natal is the university so. It's called UK Zn for short. And it's back in Durban, South Africa. So all my education is from there.

[02:58] Mike Gray: So is teaching part of what you've been doing?

[03:02] James Collins: Well, before coming to Bob Jones, I taught as a mechanical engineering lecturer, so in a very different setting. Big classrooms, huge class sizes, and not very much interaction with students at all.

[03:15] Mike Gray: What's huge?

[03:17] James Collins: 150.

[03:19] Mike Gray: Substantial, yeah. So what are you currently teaching?

[03:24] James Collins: So, currently I'm teaching a lot of senior level classes, so design classes and control systems, things like that. So upper-level classes.

[03:35] Mike Gray: And you were recently involved in the robotics competition up in Michigan, were you not?

[03:41] James Collins: Yes, I took a team.

[03:42] Mike Gray: So that comes under your jurisdiction also. Okay, well, let's get to know Jeff King. Where are you from, Jeff?

[03:51] Jeff King: So that's always been a hard one for me to answer. I grew up in California. I was a son of a missionary. We served in Brazil when I was zero to six years old.

[04:01] Jeff King: And then for the most part, I grew up in California until I joined the Navy. Joined the Navy in ‘89. And we've lived everywhere in the US. Both coasts primarily. And most recently, before coming down to Bob Jones, I was up at Annapolis, Maryland. We lived up there for about seven years. In terms of my advanced degrees, I got a bachelor's degree from the Naval Academy in Aerospace Engineering. My master's degree and my PhD were both from the Naval Postgraduate School in Astronautical Engineering or the space side of aerospace engineering, and I was a permanent military professor assigned to the Naval Academy. That was my last seven years of service.

So I know the courses that I teach here are the Aerospace track. We just started a new concentration within the engineering curriculum. So there are specific aerospace courses that we teach aerodynamics, astrodynamics, propulsion systems, and then operating in the space environment. And then I also teach both Engineering 101, which is the freshman level class, and then some of the mid mechanical engineering courses like Dynamics or Statics.

And my educational experience in terms of education, I already mentioned it, but I taught for seven years at the Naval Academy in the Aerospace Engineering department, so I taught 13 different courses over that time. The upper-level attitude dynamics, space kind of courses to the engineering leadership, to some of the basic programming.

[05:42] Mike Gray: Kind of tempted to talk about attitude dynamics—it's not a psychology course.

[05:48] Jeff King: Definitely not a psychology course!

[05:52] Mike Gray: What about you, Tim? Tim Anglea?

[05:55] Tim Anglea: Yes. So I graduated from Bob Jones with my undergrad in engineering, and then I went on to Clemson University. I got my master’s in electrical engineering. I then stayed on to get my PhD when I finally realized that I actually want to be an engineering professor. So I stayed at Clemson and got my PhD. As soon as I graduated from Clemson, I came straight back to Bob Jones and started teaching, which is another story which we don't need to get into right now.

Where I'm from is not quite as long as Jeff's story. I was born in North Carolina. My dad is a pastor, so we moved up to Pennsylvania when I was four. So if people ask where I'm from, I'm from Pennsylvania. I grew up there. Once I started coming to school in South Carolina, my parents moved up to New Hampshire. My dad started pastoring a church up there. So I'm also technically from New Hampshire, but never really lived up in New Hampshire. Almost have lived longer in South Carolina now, so almost from the south. But while I was at Clemson, I was teaching as a graduate assistant. So I taught several engineering courses. I taught some labs on computer programming and assembly and then taught a lecture-based course for five years in kind of a basic circuits level kind of course for non-electrical engineering students. So very low-level basic stuff of electrical engineering for them. But while I was there, I also did lead some creative inquiries in robotics. A lot of my research interests and study has been in the kind of border of electrical and computer engineering with application to robotics.

[07:42] Mike Gray: So what's that look like here and what courses you're teaching?

[07:45] Tim Anglea: So here at Bob Jones I teach several different courses. The first one is the freshman level digital electronics course that talks about logic gates and digital signals. But then I also teach some of the upper-level electrical and computer engineering courses on amps and transistors and microprocessor interfacing. So those are the main courses that I teach.

[08:10] Mike Gray: All three of you are now veterans of SITS Track One, which emphasizes clear thinking teachers. There's a real sense in which a faculty member's pedagogy is often felt to be untouchable. I've heard it said that university faculty are the ultimate outside contractors. (This was at a conference I spoke at that was all deans and administrators.) That's the way they viewed faculty. Like, if you start pushing them, if you have something that's top down, they will just tell you that I'm not going along with that, and you can't do anything about it. (That's at least if you're not adjunct.)

There's a sense in which maybe you've all heard, probably of something being a third rail, okay, like Social Security, which I'm now collecting. So don't mess with it! However, I submit that the third rail in a rail system is literally where the power comes from. And similarly, power or lack of power in teaching comes from faculty pedagogy. Pedagogy should be intentional based on how the human mind learns. But most pedagogy is mired in tradition. So in retrospect, do you feel that Track One actually served to clarify your thinking since that was the goal, your goal in particular, about how your expertise becomes real in the classroom?

[09:51] James Collins: I think for me, for sure, it did. I'm just kind of going back to the place of being a student and forgetting about all the assumptions that you take for granted and thinking about, okay, well, I actually assume those, but the students don't assume them, and how do I get them to the place of knowing them as assumptions? So I think breaking that down was very helpful for me at least.

[10:15] Mike Gray: Anybody feel like setting that out as the goal for Track One was in some way, I don't know, offensive, a rebuke, an assumption that you weren't where you needed to be? There's a natural pushback. Anybody feel any of that?

[10:34] Tim Anglea: I mean, I think for me since at least among the three of us, I'm the most new faculty. I was really helped by the fact that I needed to take a summer to figure out how do I actually teach this course, since it was the first time I'd been in that situation. I’d been teaching in grad school, but that was a different scenario, different kind.

[10:57] Mike Gray: That somebody else made basic decisions about.

[11:01] Tim Anglea: Someone else was choosing, okay, here's exactly what you're teaching here's why do you teach that? I didn't have as much experience then. It's like, oh, I've got to teach all of this new content. And so kind of getting to the essence of, okay, well, what do I actually need the students to learn and how am I best going to do that? How do I clarify in my own thinking, okay, how do I make that concept clear so that they are able to understand it the same way that I do at the level that I do? How do I not necessarily transmit that knowledge, but help them understand that way of thinking? And that was helpful to me to like, okay, no, we did take a summer and really think about that and clarify that before you jump in, just in the first day of class.

[11:47] Mike Gray: So, Jeff, you have the most experience, so you’re the most likely to think. I'm not sure that I need to start at that basic level.

[11:55] Jeff King: You know, it's funny because I would have reacted very differently. I knew I'm not the best teacher in the world, even with some experience. I had mentors at the Naval Academy that I looked up to that were excellent teachers, and I was not nearly as good as they were. So trying to figure out how they connected with the students and the information they were trying to get across at the same time in ways that I just couldn't quite figure out.

That was very helpful for me in two real ways. The first one is it caused me or gave me the opportunity to stop and think big, deep thoughts about what I teach and why I teach it. At the Naval Academy, that was never an option because you were so busy during the summer, and then you were so busy during the school year, you were just happy to get through and make some minor changes as you went along. You made minor changes along the edge, and you never really sat down and looked at the program as a whole, your course as a whole, you just sort of like, well, I've got 80%, so I can change 10%, and the last 10% is just flexible anyway, so that was really helpful for me.

The second thing is we started a brand-new curriculum here at Bob Jones. So the aerospace concentration is brand new, and it's not like it's an aerospace major where I have the ability to choose 150 credits. So we had to figure out a way to take the aerospace knowledge base and fit it inside of a general engineering degree, which is inside of a liberal arts education that values things that other universities may not value. And so the ability to stop and think about what's really important, not all the little facts and all the equations and all the different variations on those facts and equations, but what's really important. And it was what Tim said, getting back to not the knowledge that you have as an expert, but the thinking that you do as an expert, because there's lots of things that I know that I've forgotten that I know, but I think in a certain way that allows me to come right back to that.

[14:14] Mike Gray: Reconstruct those when you need them. Yeah, so we started there [in Track 1] already. But maybe just ask the question specifically. So in what ways has your Track One experience impacted how you approach this summer, which is about course development?

[14:32] Tim Anglea: I think for me, it's when I'm looking at a new course that I'm going to be teaching, even if it's something that maybe I have already taught before, I want to focus on, okay, well, what's the main point of the course? What are the big questions of that course, and where do I want the students to go? It's not just that, okay, I'm going to teach this, I'm going to teach chapter one, then teach chapter two, and then we're just going to go on that sequence, and eventually we'll get to wherever we end up at the end of the semester when we run out of time. But where do I want them to go? Where do I want to actually end up? And thinking about that plan ahead of time and developing then the course from that perspective, okay, what questions will I need to ask? What topics do we need to discuss so that we can actually come to a good understanding before we hit maybe that larger question that we really need to address by the time you get to the end of the course. I'm thinking about those questions at the outset as opposed to as we hit them is probably a better approach than just winging it.

[15:34] Mike Gray: So not assuming that your pedagogy is wrapped up in what textbook you decide to use and what order those chapters come in and the decisions that the authors made, right? So why not? Why not? Don’t these guys have some clout or they wouldn't have been able to author a book, so why not just take what they had and run with it?

[15:58] Jeff King: So for me, that was easy because nobody has a book that covers all the things to address. And so I could either have three textbooks for my one course, or I could have one textbook that covered some but not all. The thing that Track One did for me in terms of course development, and I'm knee deep in it still is. It gave me the framework with which to answer the questions, but why? Right? Because normally I would have said three years ago you said, well, why are you teaching this in dynamics? Well, because they have to do it a little bit later, or they have to do a little bit later, or somebody else wants them to be able to do that. I'm like, but why does somebody else want them to be able to do it? Well, because they did it when they were in undergrad or because the ability to sort of pin down not the knowledge, but the reason for the knowledge or the reason for the experience was very helpful for me. Because at the end of the day, I have way too much information to try to cram into the courses that I have. And so this helped me answer the question, okay, well, what do you get rid of? Because inevitably, as professors, we're always left with, I would love to have a year and a half's worth of material in my one semester course, and you go, But I can't. So what do you get rid of and how do you emphasize the learning over the content? And thinking about that ahead of time helped me as I walked into the course development of okay, now I'm developing a course that is more interested in the thinking than it is in the content, which I'm still working on, but it helps a lot.

[17:47] Mike Gray: How, and why questions we observe throughout SITS are really pointing to cause-effect explanations, which are what we call principles, and delineating those principles and making those be the thing that powers the course is part of the challenge. We start to learn how to do that as individuals in Track One, but then we need to start doing it with somebody else in mind, with a novice in mind, in Track Two. So this summer, in Track Two, the emphasis is on developing what we call the optimal learning path for student learning; that is the goal is what author Ken Bain, who wrote what the Best College Teachers Do, has called a natural critical learning environment. How would you characterize a natural critical learning environment?

[18:55] James Collins: I think for me, it's kind of bringing the students on a journey of discovery with you rather than in the environment I was previously, the professor would come in and kind of splurge out his expertise or just tell the students, this is the way it is. But to me, this critical learning environment is much more about, let's discover this together. How can we solve the problems together? Where were the experts thinking of how to solve a problem and can we solve that problem together? That's my view of it, I guess.

[19:25] Mike Gray: So you're embedded in the problem solving, but you're not going to —you're a resource, but you're not the answer man.

[19:32] James Collins: Yeah.

[19:33] Mike Gray: You can point them to things that they know or that they have access to that will help them to be more efficient in solving the problem. But it's not for you to be the sage who always has a ready answer if you just ask me. Why do we need to go that direction where we're not— some people have called it the “sage on the stage” —where we're not taking that role. Is there a reason behind not taking that role? Are we just trying to be difficult? As one person observed, some of the students are probably thinking, well, you know the answer, just tell us!

[20:14] Tim Anglea: I've had several or at least one specific student evaluation: “He didn't really give us the answer to this.” And it's like that's because I wanted you to come up with the answer. You already had the intelligence and the knowledge to be able to come to the answer. You just needed to take the time to actually do it and not wait until the last minute. But I think that's part of it. You're wanting the students to be able to ask the questions and then to motivate themselves to actually come to the answer. They're answering the questions and they're coming to those answers themselves. Then they're going to remember that a lot more than if it's, oh, here's the answer that the teacher told me without any motivation, why I needed to even know that answer to that question to begin with.

If you're helping the students understand, okay, well, here's the underlying question. Why are we trying to do this? How are we trying to solve this problem? Why is this a problem? How do I go about solving that problem? If you guide them through that thinking and that set of questions, then that's going to help them know how to approach different problems in the future where it's a similar problem. But okay, now I've got to apply things a little bit differently or use different numbers. And now I've got to come to the solution again in this different scenario, as opposed to just saying, well, here's the answer to this problem, and not understanding why that's the answer, and motivating them by leading them with questions is the superior way of doing that.

[21:41] Jeff King: So I tend to answer that question from the perspective of what do they learn as maybe measured by what they remember from a while later. And my analogy is YouTube video, right? I can “learn” anything from YouTube videos, but sometimes I have to watch the video three or four times because I don't remember how to do what I'm doing because I didn't learn it. All I did is mimic what somebody's telling me to do. And that's the argument that I think Track Two is trying to say is get past the don't be a YouTube video that they can just get information from. Help them figure out how to figure it out for themselves. Because especially in the world of engineering that we live in, we're behind the cutting edge by definition. So there's no way we could teach our students everything they need to know to jump right into industry and start being impactful. So the only thing we can really do is teach them how to figure stuff out, how to think like an engineer, so that when they get into their engineering roles, whether it's grad school or directly into industry, they can be impactful on things that we didn't even talk about, because that's what's out there today, tomorrow, or the next year.

[23:09] Mike Gray: So the goal becomes less about a body of content and more about a way of thinking. So really, last summer, you took your thinking apart, and this summer you're trying to enable novices to think the way you've come to terms with your own thinking, to think like engineers. Since all three of you are engineers, we touched on this a little bit. But experts, and all three of you are experts in your own domain of engineering, are deathly afraid of oversimplification. They treasure nuance and complexity, and they revel in the fact that lay people misunderstand things because they've oversimplified. And yet students’ needs are for things to be concrete, straightforward, introduced in a logical sequence that builds eventually toward that kind of complexity, but does so with the needs of a novice in mind. So how has taking your expert thinking apart enabled you to meet the needs of your students without you being traumatized that you've dumbed down your course somehow?

[24:35] Jeff King: I will say it's always a struggle because we've spent enough time and we have enough knowledge about expert topics, whatever they are, that we want to impart all that knowledge to our students. And I think sometimes we lose—I say we—I would just put all of academia in that category. We tend to lose the fact that it took us X amount of years to get to that point where we have that knowledge. We want to impart all that knowledge to our undergraduate sophomores. For me, slowing that down a little bit is very helpful, but it's always a struggle because I go, well, but I want them to understand this, and I want them to understand it, because they're going to see this, and they're going to see this, and they're going to see this. And again, there's that constant teeter totter between what do they need to learn that they're not going to forget because they figured it out for themselves? And what do they need to learn that they're going to forget two years after they leave here? I would really like to minimize what they're going to forget in two years. And if I teach them a bunch of content that's really important, but they don't remember it two years from now, what's the point?

[25:51] Mike Gray: Right!

[25:53] Jeff King: But it completely flies in the face of everything that I'm wanting to accomplish in terms of the scope and the depth of content.

[26:02] Mike Gray: Our personal histories are really strong in shaping our default reaction to a learning situation. And there's a sense in which you never really get completely away from that. It's how you got to where you are. But I think potentially going forward as a faculty member who is embracing this idea of a lifelong learner who loves my discipline. And I'm approaching learning my discipline differently because I'm looking for something different other than just being enamored with the newest information, device, whatever. That I'm actually in a mode that asks questions rather than accepts answers, which basically is what content is about—somebody else's thinking that's eventuated in an answer that now maybe I'm in a position to work with because I know enough that I can understand what the answer is telling me.

Maybe we can pivot then, at the end here to the role of questions in thinking. Your thinking, in your teaching, and in student learning are really the three arenas I'd like to explore for a little bit. So is there a sense in which you're more inclined to ask a question, a why question or how question than before, than simply accepting things at face value?

[27:40] James Collins: Most definitely. For me, I think it's part of going back to last year, the questioning. And Tim sort of mentioned this earlier that all the answers to the questions that we're looking for and developing our thinking and, okay, what question am I actually trying to answer rather than, this is the textbook that I want to present to my students? What question are we trying to answer? What is the textbook trying to solve? And so I think the questioning thing for me in terms of getting my thinking clear was a very useful tool. And, okay, why do I actually think this? Where does that come from? Where does that thought originate? And what was I trying to solve in getting there? And I think, again, like Tim said, I found a very powerful tool in developing the students’ thinking and where they going to, okay, well, why am I actually doing this course? Where does this course fit into the Engineering degree? And it helps place even courses that they might think aren't important. Okay, this actually has value because I'll need it at this stage in my career. So questions are awfully important.

[28:39] Mike Gray: So what about the actual teaching process? What's the role of questions for you as you construct this natural, critical learning environment?

[28:49] Tim Anglea: I think for me, the role of questions gives a way for me to assess my own or my students’ knowledge. If I ask them a question that they should be able to answer and they don't, then that tells me, okay, here's the level of knowledge that they do have, and that then instructs me, okay, well, how am I going to lead them on from there? Let me figure out where they are, as opposed to maybe assuming, oh, you've already had this in high school, like, well, let's double check. Let's ask them questions to help understand where their level of knowledge is, what level of comfort they're at with a certain topic, before moving on again with that end goal in mind of, okay, here's where I want to get them eventually. So I'm going to use questions to help know where they are so that I can then, from that point, figure out how to get them to this level of understanding or this level of expertise or way of thinking that I'm trying to get them towards. So questions in my teaching is going to be allowing me to understand, okay, what are my students thinking? Because it's really hard to get your students to say what they're thinking without asking them questions.

[30:02] Mike Gray: So this is kind of the difference between what's sometimes called strategy and tactics. So you're strategizing this summer; you’ve got no real students, or I guess you had some of us as guinea pigs when you taught us about a topic from engineering, which was interesting, but when you’ve got real students, sometimes the strategy isn't working quite as intended. And so what are the tactics you deploy? The idea here is that when a student is not answering my question in a way that I thought they were equipped to answer, that that feedback is going to shape the teaching that I do at that moment. And not that I'm just going to bull ahead and count this as a person who just obviously doesn't take class seriously, or they would have had the answer because it was so obvious, but that we're in this together and they're telling me something about their learning.

An example that pops in my head. Dentists have never been my favorite, but I didn't learn until the first year I was married and needed a little bit of dental work, that I don't actually respond like the average person to Novocaine; that it actually doesn't work very well for me, that I need, like, double or triple the normal dose. And I had a dentist who simply (feedback again) I was in the chair, and he injected the gum and all that good stuff and given me time and came in and started working on me. And my fingers were turning white on the arms of the dental chair. And he said, does that hurt? I said yeah. I expected it to. He said, It shouldn't be hurting. You shouldn't be feeling anything. He was the first dentist who ever modified his behavior based on feedback from me. Not that there's any parallel between Novocaine and root canals and learning, of course!

This idea that the game just goes on just like a television production, like, don't pay any attention to what's going on over here because the script says, we move on here. The sensitivity to students, I think, is a key ingredient of the learning environment.

[32:19] Jeff King: I would add that the learning environment shifts your focus from you to them. Yes, because now it's not about what you get across, it's about what they receive. And so now every student matters more than the “average” student. Now I mean, there are limits to that, right? If you have a class of 30, you can't do one-on-one tutoring with every single one of them in the middle of the class. But you can start to see and this is where as you get experience—I learned to read the classes and I learned early on that questions were important for interaction and interaction is important for people staying awake, which is a big problem with the Naval Academy because they run from sun up (before sun up) to sundown. But what I learned in Track Two was that my questions tended to be leading questions. Like I was helping the conversation go where I wanted it to go. So I was basically teaching my lecture via questions. And what I didn't realize is that that's the lowest level of interaction. What I really need to do is get them to wrestle with the material. And my response probably would have been three years ago would have been, well, they're just going to wrestle with that on their own. And now what I'm going to try to do is try to figure out how to get them to wrestle with that out loud in class. And that's a very messy, scary problem.

[33:47] Mike Gray: You don't know what they're going to say.

[33:49] Jeff King: You don't even know if you're going to have the answer to what they ask.

[33:52] Tim Anglea: That's very similar to how they're going to work in the disciplines. Like, okay, they've got a problem, how are they going to work it out? You'd rather them practice working it out when you're there rather than when they're—

[34:04] James Collins: Back in their dorm room working on it—

[34:05] Tim Anglea: The homework and they're spending 5 hours on something that should only take them 30 minutes to do because they're missing some key part of their thinking. So if you can get them to practice that and then you can model what good thinking is for them and say, oh, you should be thinking about this when you're looking at this problem, then getting them to commit to answers and then really say, okay, here's how I'm thinking about it. And then you can then evaluate their thinking. That's going to help them more than just here's how to do the problem.

[34:37] Mike Gray: We say, and it applies in all of these areas and to me as an individual learning in my approach to teaching and students learning that “questions are the engines of thought.” They're the propulsive force. If I'm not chewing on a question, then I'm simply trying to absorb information from somebody. The best learners will probably start to ask themselves some questions, which gets back to how am I transformed as a learner even within my own discipline? Because I'm much more likely to question things and the questions will move me in certain directions to find out the answers that will give me an explanation that is satisfying and useful in another area, not just in the area where I first encountered it and constructed it. Well, thanks for a great conversation, men, and I hope the rest of your summer is fruitful as you finish up, this second track of SITS. Thank you.

[35:52] James Collins: Thank you, Mike.

[35:58] Mike Gray: We've reached the end of our summer podcast season, which features the Summer Institute and Teaching science. I'm going to take some time off, and then I'll be back in the fall with a new season. I'll be interviewing faculty at different academic levels who teach in a variety of different subject matter areas, from business to history. What they all have in common is their implementation of the principles of teaching that empower deep and durable learning. Their success stories are inspiring. If you have questions or suggestions, you can reach me at DeepandDurable.com. See you on September 9.