Video Transcript: Equity of Voice, Empowering Students to Ask Questions

Dr. Eileen Cashman, Environmental Resources Engineering

I will actually talk about kind of the impact of Escala and how it changed because I have been thinking — Beth and I have been working together for a long time — on teaching, since I first got here.

And we've been doing different things like just-in-time teaching and studio teaching for 20 plus years now. But so I felt like a lot of, you know, that a lot of the faculty development that we've gone through over the past five, six, seven years, it's like, ok, I thought I got all this. I've seen a lot of this.

But I did the equity index and I found that even though I don't have the equity gap that shows up on the bottom lines in terms of Ds and Fs and Ws — it was stark the equity gap between my A, B, and Cs.

So my students of color are not the A students, not even the B students. They're the lower B in the C students. It was it was really surprising to me and I guess I don't know why I was so surprised. I just don't pay attention to it, which just was such a huge shift for me in terms of thinking about why I never noticed that before. Because I felt like students are passing in my classes. I feel like they're doing well but when they went and actually looked at the breakdown between A, B and C, which is what they had us do at Escala in a little more detail, it was shocking and it happened two
semesters in a row. Which because I think I'm doing all of these things: the active learning, think-pair-share, you know, just in time, having them do quizzes online before class — that they're engaged — but it's obviously a different experience between my underrepresented students and the white males in an engineering classroom.

So how did you approach that?

After I got over being so bummed out about it? Yeah, I was just, well, that's what really made me think. I am missing something here and Escala was really opening my eyes about that in terms of thinking about things, like, so like, the student voice and you know. So they had all these ideas about popsicle sticks and we've been in those conversations about pulling a stick and trying to share student questions.

And what I started doing one thing, I've started doing because the classroom has flipped a lot of the times and so I'm walking around, I started actually just tracking — just check mark — who I talked to in a class and how many questions I answered. And at first I was just tracking it without trying to do anything different and again it was shocking. It was, I was spending 80% of my time on four students who were asking lots of questions without even having any kind of real awareness of that.

And students — there were students I never talk to — so I tracked that for about two lab sessions/two sessions and then I said okay. And I told the classes — I try to be really transparent — I said okay I am keeping track of who I'm talking to and I am going to talk to every single person in the class. And so if you've already asked me two questions and you even if you have your hand up you're gonna have to wait until I've checked in with other people.

And it was just amazing to me, how it I mean I — and I've kept that up — like I just keep track and I check in with every single person, even if it's a 50-minute period or three-hour period, and I'm always amazed.

People that will never ask me questions always have great questions. You go up and even when you first say, How you doing? Like, do you have any questions? They'll be like, no, I think I'm okay. And then I might push it and say, well, tell me what you're doing? What are you doing here? And then they'll go, um, they'll say, oh well I'm doing this but actually I don't really understand what's going on here. You know?

They have some very well-thought out questions that they just won't offer up unless they're asked and more on an individual basis. And so I felt really good about that. I feel like it's changed the whole the whole equity of voice in the classroom.

I'm talking to students that I didn't talk to before and that would not ask questions. They will they and they have great questions. They have better questions than the students that are always asking questions.