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Designing Learning Environments for Gen Z
208 Plays6 years ago
From the classroom to conferences and staff development and training sessions, Generation Z learners are everywhere. This episode explores ways to engage Generation Z in learning environments. Dr. Jim Downey shares some strategies he has used to create a course experience that is in tune with Generation Z's learning preferences.
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Transcript
Introduction and Excitement for Episode 17
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to hashtag Gen Z. I'm your host, Megan Grace. Welcome back. This is episode 17 of hashtag Gen Z. As a lover of learning, I've been looking for this episode for a while now.
00:00:27
Speaker
And at the end of this episode, I have an exciting announcement that I'm thrilled to share with you.
00:00:32
Speaker
In
Evolving Learning Environments for Gen Z
00:00:33
Speaker
this episode, we're discussing ways to engage Generation Z students and learners and create meaningful learning environments. As a current student, former instructor, and professional, I've been able to learn in a variety of learning environments, from formal classrooms to conference sessions and beyond. But how Generation Z prefers to learn and engage with information is different than previous generations and will necessitate that learning environments evolve. From our research, we've found that Generation Z loves to learn through intra-personal methods such as
00:01:02
Speaker
learning on their own, doing reflective work, pacing their own work, and being able to really learn alone, which is very counter to a lot of times is mindset of group activities or group projects. We've also found that they prefer experiential hands-on methods of learning. So the ability to go out and actually apply what they're doing in a practical setting is critically important. So whether that is having a discussion in class after they've had the ability to dive into information on their own,
00:01:31
Speaker
or possibly practice in a lab or do some sort of hands-on practical application is another way that they enjoy learning. We also have to make note of the fact that they are video-based learners. We've actually found that in our research, they prefer to utilize things like YouTube and other video-based platforms to take in and learn new information, whether that's watching a tutorial
00:01:53
Speaker
of some sort or looking at some video that overviews a concept, this is something that they're apt to and they enjoy doing. So weaving this all together can be really helpful in thinking about creating learning environments that are conducive to generations' interests. For this
Introducing Dr. James Downey
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episode, I wanted to feature a guest that works with students day in and day out in the classroom and thinking about constructing those learning environments. My guest's episode is Dr. James Downie, Vice President for Planning and Institutional Effectiveness
00:02:20
Speaker
at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Dr. Downey provides oversight and guidance for all aspects of the continuous improvement efforts for the seminary, including outcomes assessment, strategic and facilities planning and accreditation. Outside of the seminary, Dr. Downey consults with colleges and universities and teaches online courses in math and physics. He holds a graduate degree in nuclear physics from the Air Force Institute of Technology and a doctorate in aerospace engineering from the University of Illinois.
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Speaker
He's also a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He's a broad background in national security policy, system syncing, strategic planning, higher education administration, institutional effectiveness.
Connecting and Teaching Gen Z Students
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I connected with Dr. Downey after a conference session I was presenting at, and we have stayed in contact over the last year or so, as he's actually gone back into the classroom to start teaching, and he recognized that his students were different than 15 years ago. As he's teaching Generation Z college students, he's put in great effort to design learning environments for students
00:03:18
Speaker
they'll be engaging and impactful. I'm excited to share his insights and experiences.
00:03:28
Speaker
I'm excited to welcome my guest for this episode, Jim Downey, who I was connected with a while back after he attended one of my sessions about Generation Z that I was speaking at a conference about. And so we've actually been able to keep in touch and kind of talk about how he's utilized some of those topics and concepts that I spoke about in his classes. So he's a professor that teaches physics classes at a college. And I'm actually going to turn it over to Jim to tell you a little bit more about himself. So welcome, Jim. Thank you for being here.
00:03:58
Speaker
Thanks, Megan. Yes, I know that the first time I heard you speak was actually here in Pittsburgh and I found myself very intrigued by the things that you were doing around Generation Z students.
00:04:12
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And I kept that kind of running in my head, and I'll come back to where that comes into the class I did. But where I work is actually at a seminary. It's a Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and I'm an administrator there. But for many years, I taught physics.
00:04:28
Speaker
at a college and I've done some online teaching and I actually have three Generation Z kids, three daughters. And so those girls have been a real life, everyday example of what it's like to be around Generation Z. And I have done a number of different jobs. I've lived in different places, but I've always in one form or another tried to stay in the area of teaching.
00:04:53
Speaker
So it's great that you have Gen Z at home because I feel like you've got like study subjects that you can just observe and see kind of some of this come to light. But you also have great sounding board too with them and being be like, is this cool? Would this be interesting to some of the students of your age? So it's awesome that you've got them in.
00:05:11
Speaker
not only in the classroom, but at home. And I love being able to hear about that. So really after we were connected at a conference, which is, it's great to always be able to follow up with those people that you make these connections with, but you kind of got back into teaching courses again and you took some time off, correct? Well, I didn't exactly take time off, but what happened was the school that I had taught at for a number of years, which is called Grove City College and it's north of Pittsburgh.
00:05:41
Speaker
always approached me last summer with an opportunity to teach a class. They had what often happens as a staffing shortage, and these were people I knew and had worked with. And they just asked me, would you be
00:05:56
Speaker
interested at all in taking on a class. And I thought about it for a while and we had some dialogue back and forth and I finally agreed to do it. And it turned
Adapting Physics for Non-Majors
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out that it was a class that I had actually taught previously when I worked at the school, but that was 16 years prior. So immediately I knew or I thought that I ought to ask myself whether I would want to even start trying to teach the class the same way I did literally nearly a generation ago.
00:06:26
Speaker
Yeah, your students 16 years ago were probably very different than those that you interacted with this fall. I can only imagine, I mean, I think about how much the world has changed in 16 years. So when you were deciding, I'm going to redesign this course, what were some of the things that you were considering most?
00:06:43
Speaker
I did not want to do a straight up lecture class, which is still commonly used in physics. I wanted to have more interaction between myself and the students, but particularly between the students with each other. The other thing about this particular course that I wanted to pay attention to is this was not a physics course for physics majors or math majors or engineering majors. Most of the students in there were anything but that.
00:07:13
Speaker
business majors, education, philosophy, you name it. And so, so just teaching physics for the sake of teaching physics, even though I love it, would not have worked well. So those were some things that were kind of floating around in my head. And then as you alluded to, I have three millennial aged or sorry, generation Z age kids. And one of the things I know they do a lot is they do a lot of watching a video and particularly YouTube and some others and so
00:07:42
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that became something I thought I'd like to try to use as an example. And then probably the thing I would not have thought as much about 16 years ago, and I think it's just a progression of career opportunities or pondering how I might teach anything now versus in the past, was to ask myself, how can I make
00:08:05
Speaker
connections with the physics in other areas that link things together in almost like a systematic way, where you would ask, okay, what are the economic implications of something, the political, or can we talk about a policy issue that may be coming up for which there is some underlying physics, and how might you do that with this particular generation of students?
00:08:27
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Yeah, I remember our first phone call and you're like, I teach physics. And I was like, I don't know that much about physics. It's been many, many moons since we have done physics in my educational setting. And so I always appreciated, I think first and foremost, when we started these conversations about how you're making it very important and recognizing that the majority of the students that you were teaching
00:08:53
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were very likely not even science majors, let alone majoring in physics. And so I appreciated the dedication you put to making the topics and the elements of the course relevant to those students. Because I think, regardless of generation, there's always this kind of conversation around, I'm required to take this course, but it doesn't apply to my major. And I might not even be that interested in it. And that's always an uphill battle and a challenge for instructors. So I commend you on doing that. And I think that.
00:09:23
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With
Interactive and Relevant Learning Methods
00:09:24
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what you've been, you know, kind of focusing on what are some of the things that the tangible things that you've done to redesign this course experience and have 16 years is definitely a long time to go.
00:09:38
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from teaching but what were some of the elements that you infused into your course last semester that helped make this a Gen Z friendly course or some of the concepts that you applied to make this more engaging for this new generation of learners? So I tried a number of different things throughout the course and I even told the students that to some extent they were a little bit of an experiment and they seemed to be actually
00:10:05
Speaker
Generally okay with that kind of thing as long as I didn't take them too far down a crazy path But right away at the beginning one of the things that I did was I showed them a TED talk by an anthropologist It caught my attention because the title I don't remember the title exactly, but it was something along the lines of Why is it that poor people have ended up on the east side of the tracks? which I thought was interesting and so I watched the TED talk and I
00:10:35
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the author started initially talking about physics. He talked about the rotation of the earth and the fact that the predominant direction of wind is from west to east. And then he started to link together the economics and the political and social reality that when people started to congregate in urban areas and when the rail system started to develop,
00:11:00
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You had steam engines, which put on a lot of smoke. And because the wind generally goes from west to east, that smoke traveled in that direction. And so essentially, in the most simplistic form, the wealthy people told the poor people, go live on the other side of the tracks, the east side of the tracks.
00:11:17
Speaker
So that was one of the ways that I tried to think about how to link together things that were about physics, but also about, in this case, some history and some economics and really social policy, if you will, that had real impact on real lives. And that particularly was fun because then later in the course, we actually got to a section of physics where we talked in a little more depth about
00:11:41
Speaker
the physics of why it would be from west to east. So I was able to revisit that particular thing. Another thing I did a lot was to put the students in small groups. And I think this wasn't, this isn't necessarily something that hasn't been done, but just getting out of the way, if you will, or if nothing else, just facilitating them and having dialogue. I would have them count off and I would have them in groups of maybe four or five. They might do a homework problem. They might do a concept problem.
00:12:12
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or something of that nature. And then they would essentially be teaching each other. And I was out of the way.
00:12:20
Speaker
I think that even just those two examples that you provided of connecting these concepts to a real world and settings outside of like what could be on a test goes so far for Generation Z learners. They think about what is the real life application? How can I utilize it in other ways? And I think that the way that you discussed the physics of the wind patterns is
00:12:45
Speaker
fascinating i think that your connection to the the political and the the social policy components definitely probably had a connection to the students that might not again identify as a science students per se but they might be sociology students i think that's a great way that you were being inclusive of the fact of the varying different interests in
00:13:06
Speaker
in the students in your class. Yes, and one of my favorite anecdotes in terms of how I think this all fit together in an interesting sort of way is we had done kind of what physicists would call basic kinematics, things like distance and velocity and acceleration and motion in general sense. And then I came in in an evening and
00:13:34
Speaker
teed up a conversation around the future of self-driving cars and whether those students or really in the US or anywhere in the world, people would get to a point where they would say, yep, I'm going to let that car drive me and I'm going to completely give up my control. So one of the ways we started to play around with that to link the
00:13:54
Speaker
The physics that we had just done to the self-driving car was I drew a little circle on the whiteboard and I said, that's the self-driving car. And then I drew a little dot a distance away and I said, that's a person. Now what do I need to know? And that conversation back and forth was pretty interesting because eventually they were able to tease out that they probably needed to know how far away is the person.
00:14:17
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Are they moving or not? And if they are moving, what direction are they moving? And if they're moving in some direction, are they speeding up or slowing down? And of course it can become pretty complex.
00:14:28
Speaker
But then the other thing that I wove into that dialogue was I showed them a short video from a neuroscientist that talked about how human beings make decisions and particularly how data influences their thinking around decision making. And of course, when we were talking about the self-driving car and all the data that the
00:14:51
Speaker
that the computers and the sensors would be receiving, that's real data. But yet when people know things, the neuroscience tells us that it can really cause us to do some things that are somewhat unexpected. And at the end of all of that, a political science student came up to me and she literally said, you have made a mess of my future.
00:15:13
Speaker
And it was a really fun conversation
Using Video Content in Education
00:15:15
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because she realized that what she thought would be very straightforward policymaking that she could go to Washington, D.C. and help solve the world's problems was actually going to be a whole lot more complex than she had maybe even imagined before that. And that all came from just talking about basic kinematics and self-driving cars. There you are just earth shattering to these students. But I mean, in a good way, you're exposing them to different perspectives. And I think that
00:15:41
Speaker
this student that was studying political science and had this policy feature probably would have ever imagined. And she'll remember those because those were those moments that were kind of like the bright lights where the light bulb just went off. And she's like, wow, this is illuminating for me. And I love the way that you've discussed and brought in more video into the learning environment.
00:16:03
Speaker
I think that we talked a lot about how sometimes it's difficult to almost relinquish being able to be the deliverer of that knowledge, if you will, that it's a concept that you as a credible expert in this field are very able to talk about it.
00:16:22
Speaker
The delivery method of that outcome can still be facilitated through different means and how important video is to students today. That's one of the things that our research is pointing to is that YouTube is not just a place where they're going to be entertained, but it's a place where they're also going to learn things and
00:16:39
Speaker
and to be educated on things. And whether or not those videos are credible or completely accurate, it's still a place that they're going and it's becoming more commonplace and more present in education as a tool, as a way that we can deliver that information, but also knowing that students are going to be in those settings. And I think you've done a really good job of curating almost a library of some of these resources. Would you be willing to kind of share how your process was with that and how you
00:17:09
Speaker
utilized that in your process of redesigning your course? So video is, I think, obviously something that has just exploded dramatically. But it isn't just Generation Z people using YouTube. I know I go to YouTube myself, especially for home improvement projects, because it doesn't take very long to find something good. But what
00:17:33
Speaker
I think is valuable in a setting like this class. I think there's two aspects that are good. First of all, as you alluded to, hopefully most instructors are reasonably expert in their discipline and the topic. And so they certainly could talk and lecture or present and do it quite credibly. But they also should be gifted at curating information. So if you pick almost any topic,
00:18:03
Speaker
and then do a search in YouTube, you might find 50 videos that are there. The question is, which one do you want to use that best represents what you're trying to talk about? And it might not necessarily just be about getting the physics exactly right, but it's also how it's presented, what the context in which it's presented. Is it entertaining or funny while still teaching? And so I think there's a bunch of things that an expert can curate and then use in the class in an effective way.
00:18:33
Speaker
The other thing that I think doing that benefits is it provides an opportunity to address what I would call kind of cultural or diversity issues. So for example, if I'm a white male, the majority of my students were white students. I did have some students of color and some international students. And so I used the opportunity of videos to be
00:19:00
Speaker
careful to be very representative. So even though every time I spoke I'm still going to be me, I was careful to think about which videos I would choose. And if it came down to two that seemed reasonably good, I would ask myself, all right, can this video also give me another opportunity for them to see a different kind of person? And particularly in science where there's a lot of fear amongst people
00:19:24
Speaker
around science and there's certain impressions about who can do science or should do science. And so I think that's actually another great opportunity that this kind of work presents.
00:19:36
Speaker
Yeah and that was one of those things when you shared that with me the first time like that including people of diverse backgrounds in those videos as a way of exposure for students who might not necessarily have those diverse social settings and in everyday sense and seeing people that are credible and role model type people in those videos I think is really important. I know that we see it often on college campuses of like the need for specialized social groups
00:20:02
Speaker
for say students of color in science or I know that there's always women in engineering groups and I think that that role modeling is so important and I think that the way that you actually did that with your videos is
00:20:15
Speaker
very valuable thing that you are able to provide to the students that you work with. Another thing that we've kind of discussed and I think would be of interest to maybe discuss a little bit more is how you incorporated student voice throughout and the way that you utilized polling and kind of these platforms to get to know your students and understand them a little bit better. Do you want to talk
Engaging Students with Polling and Feedback
00:20:37
Speaker
about how you incorporated some of that into your course this year and what have been some of the the outcomes of doing so?
00:20:44
Speaker
did a lot of work with live polling. Sometimes we did it more in a survey mode where they may get it before class, which actually gave me some insights that I could immediately respond to. But in the class, it was fun to pose questions and they could be on various topics that we were discussing, or I particularly liked to do it when we got around some of these policy issues too.
00:21:11
Speaker
take the opportunity to do something live in class. They're of course very gifted with smartphones. Pretty much everybody has a smartphone or they would have maybe a tablet or a laptop in the class. And so we would do things and then I would project it right up on the screen as we were talking. And one of the things I've learned about live polling that I think is fun and if you allow it to happen can be pretty interesting is
00:21:39
Speaker
As people are responding to whatever question you're asking, I find that they'll generally start talking about the responses. Sometimes it's funny. It's almost like a competition. But in other cases, they're seeing what's appearing on the screen, and that causes them to start having a dialogue.
00:21:58
Speaker
amongst themselves about what those answers mean. And so it's a really great opportunity to both weave in a technology that Gen Z kind of students are very comfortable with, but add value to the conversation. And I did a midterm check-in with the students. What do you like about the pace and the material that we're covering?
00:22:19
Speaker
At the very beginning of the course, I did some polling around what they were afraid of, what they hoped they'd get out of the class. And those gave me really good data to guide and direct what I was going to do as we went along. So I think there's no shortage of really good opportunities to work with that kind of technology. And in the past, it was common, I know in many places, to use an actual physical device, a clicker.
00:22:47
Speaker
And some places probably still use clickers, but I think in this day and age, you might as well leverage something that they already use if you can. And so that's what I did in this case. I think that's a great intervention that you put into your class this year. I think that I imagine that your students are really thankful because to have an ability to give their voice, even if they weren't the most extroverted or confident student in the class. So I think that you're also providing an inclusive manner for students to feel
00:23:15
Speaker
connected and that you wanted to hear their voice even if you weren't actually audibly hearing their voice. So I think it's great that you infused that and really took to that and made that a common practice in your courses. Another example that I could mention that I did in a couple of different ways, but the particular room that this class was held had very large whiteboards. So there were times when I would write a question on the whiteboard
00:23:43
Speaker
and then just allow them to come up and respond to it or give their own thought about that. And as you kind of alluded to, one of the things I've learned a lot about in my career and certainly even more recently is it's important to pay attention to different kind of learning styles, but also ways that people express themselves, you know, the classic introvert versus extrovert.
00:24:08
Speaker
And I think that you want to think about ways that tap into those differences. And so you can't always do it one way or another. And so the whiteboard was an opportunity for people who might not raise their hand and say anything.
00:24:23
Speaker
to be able to come up and write something down. And I also use some of those kind of techniques and what some people would call think, pair, share. So they would be working on something and I'd ask them to by themselves jot down a response or an answer, an intern to somebody else near them and talk about it. So yeah, I think paying attention to all those kinds of group dynamics and learning styles. And again, that's not
00:24:49
Speaker
Totally unique to Generation Z, but I think it's important to do everything you can to maximize the opportunity for them to learn. You've mentioned a few different kind of interventions that you've included. So we talked about incorporating more video. We've talked about the small groups we've talked about.
00:25:08
Speaker
including polling in different ways for students to give voice. And while those are not necessarily, you know, you've pointed out some of it's not necessarily completely specific to Gen Z, we've just evolved into knowing more about learning for students today, and it's kind of coalescing with this generation. But with this new generation of learners, if we're not cautious of it, we might
00:25:31
Speaker
be going back to practice of just doing things the same way. And I can imagine other instructors as they're listening are probably like, Megan, you're telling me I need to redesign my course. And it's not necessarily throwing everything out, but kind of making these small adaptations as you have discussed. However, I would never say that it's going to be an easy or seamless process. So do you want to talk about some of the challenges, if any, that you faced when you were redesigning
00:26:00
Speaker
components
Challenges in Course Redesign
00:26:01
Speaker
of your courses? I think anytime you take on the task of updating a course or trying to do things differently, especially if you've got a lot invested in it from years of work, it's just a fundamentally challenging thing to do. And so you have to be honest and recognize it'll take some work. I would say that
00:26:26
Speaker
taking the time to look at, say, 15 YouTube videos and deciding which one they're gonna use, well, if each of those videos is five or seven minutes, I mean, you may quickly work through some of them, but it'll take some time. But the outcome of that can be very satisfying when you see what happens in the class. I think the other challenge, and this could be as much just because of the trajectory of my career and when I started teaching and how people thought about teaching,
00:26:56
Speaker
There is a pull, there's always a natural pull to get drawn back into kind of a lecture delivery mode. And even though these are Generation Z students, they still have grown up through their K through 12 experience, largely having, or in many cases having that kind of style of learning. And I think particularly around some of the subjects that I'm more familiar with, like math or physics.
00:27:24
Speaker
It's a pull because when you get challenged, we tend to default to either what we know or what is probably easier for us to do. So I found that happening sometimes. I also found the students themselves.
00:27:38
Speaker
because not everybody at any institution is thinking intentionally about all of these kinds of ways of teaching. And so they may come from a class right before your class that was strictly lecture. And now you're asking them to get into small groups. And some of them really appreciate that because it breaks up the monotony. But in other cases, it's like, why do you want me to learn this different way? Even though we know they actually do want to learn.
00:28:04
Speaker
that different kind of way. So I think those are a couple of things that come to mind as far as the challenges. And then of course, if you're going to be using things like YouTube or live polling, it's clearly important to make sure that all of the tech works and that you test it out and try it and be prepared and have contingencies in your mind. If that tends to not be the case or fails in like a particular night or
00:28:33
Speaker
whenever you're in class and you think you're gonna build you something and the internet goes down. So what are you gonna do if that happens? All of those are in play whenever you think about making these kind of changes.
00:28:45
Speaker
So we talked about some of the challenges, but I can imagine that as Gen Z continues to come to campus and with their different learning styles and their different perspectives, that we're gonna have more conversation around designing courses and designing these learning environments. And I say learning environments because we know that learning takes place outside the classroom as well in a variety of different extracurricular settings and different developmental opportunities. And so
Understanding Gen Z for Effective Teaching
00:29:10
Speaker
what advice would you give
00:29:12
Speaker
to anyone that's looking to redesign a learning environment for Gen Z or redesign a course or curriculum for Gen Z? I think if I were starting from scratch and wanted to think about redesigning a class or even a curriculum, but particularly a class to really work well with the Gen Z, it's worth the time to invest to understand what Gen Z actually means.
00:29:41
Speaker
I'm in the boomer generation and grew up hearing, of course, a lot about us and about millennials and Gen X. And then there's this Gen Z. And there's a certain tendency to think, well, that's just a numerical grouping by age of people, and it's a convenient way to carve them up.
00:30:01
Speaker
But it really is a different generation. And of course, as I mentioned earlier, I have three Generation Z daughters, and so I've been able to live that. But even having lived it day to day, it's helpful to actually study. I think the other thing is to engage with the Generation Z folks directly and even ask them, how do you think that there might be a good way
00:30:27
Speaker
for you to learn this material or be willing to adjust along the way. So building relationships with Generation Z students in ways that may be different even than in the past is another thing that I would be spending some time thinking about. That is fantastic. And I think that the relationship component is so important. And a lot of our research is pointing to the fact that while we're living in a more technologically focused world and an online world,
00:30:56
Speaker
The importance of relationships between humans is going nowhere. And so even in these student and instructor, student and facilitator type relationships, it's so important to take that time to get to know them and give them that voice that you've mentioned multiple times in our conversation today. So I thank you for that, for taking that time and putting that focus back on the students and how they are different. And they're changing these environments just purely by existing in them.
00:31:20
Speaker
I know that I get to nerd out about Gen Z all the time and think of all my favorite things about them and it seems like an endless list, but I like to ask this of every one of my guests. Jim, what is your favorite thing about working with and teaching and even raising members of Generation Z? Well, raising three Generation Z kids
00:31:43
Speaker
has been a lot of fun because I think this issue we've just been talking about with regard to relationships can truly come into play. I've been amazed at the kind of relationships
00:31:55
Speaker
that we've been able to have with our kids. And sometimes it's been funny to the point where they will ask you about things that you reflect upon when you were that age and think, I would have never asked my parents that question. Why are they asking me this? And then you start to think, okay, well, this is part of how Generation Z actually sees themselves in the relationship with older people. And so I think that's been a lot of fun. I know that
00:32:22
Speaker
students by and large still really actually do want to learn they they might in this case they might have not necessarily chosen to take a physics class but they they were interested in learning and they were particularly interested in learning how it would apply to them and not just in a purely i think straight up practical way like will this help me get a better job or not but but how does it mean something in my life and then
00:32:46
Speaker
Well, I think this may be true in general of younger people that just bring energy. They're just fun to be around. And I think if you're willing to invest time to get to know them and have some fun yourself with that, that it can be a great group of people to spend time with and to teach.
00:33:05
Speaker
Absolutely. I love the ability to spend time with Gen Z when it does come up. And I agree they are really fun and they're full of this energy and positive energy. And I think about how lucky I as an older, a member of an older generation and you as a parent and instructor, we get to be a part of their, their growing up and construction of the world and how they're learning about it.
Appreciating Gen Z's Energy and Curiosity
00:33:26
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And I think that's a huge privilege that we all get to share and be a part of that energy. So I constantly think about how I can be a better advocate and foster
00:33:33
Speaker
that positive energy and that curiosity to learn.
00:33:37
Speaker
Jim, I want to thank you for coming on today and discussing how we've, you know, how you've redesigned some of your learning environments for the students that you're interacting with. I think that you've piloted some, some really great interventions and I know that you've shared that, you know, your students have appreciated that. So it's always awesome to hear some success in people taking the leap. And as you've said, making the investment in creating these environments for students. So thank you for, you know, creating those good environments and for sharing about them today.
00:34:07
Speaker
Well, Megan, thank you for inviting me on for this podcast. I know when I first heard you speak, the room was packed with people. And a lot of the people that were in that room were people that were from my generation or close to my generation. And I just thought that was pretty amazing. And then I had the opportunity to hear you
00:34:27
Speaker
last summer at a national conference again and the room was packed with people. So that's very encouraging to me and it suggests a couple things. One, you're working in an area that really matters and that
00:34:40
Speaker
can help education and people in general and that there's a lot of folks in the higher education world in particular or even I'm sure in the K through 12 world that are really trying to learn how to do the best they can to help people in this generation learn and grow and enter the world.
00:34:59
Speaker
I appreciate the work that you do and it's been an awful lot of fun to engage with you as I've worked my way through redesigning this class and even thinking about how it will play out in other ways in my life going forward. Man, you make me sound so cool. But thank you again for being here today and I really have appreciated our conversations and what you're doing for your students.
00:35:28
Speaker
Jim has done an incredible job of learning about his Gen Z students and incorporating their learning styles, preferences, and interests into the classroom to make learning experiences more personal and relevant. As he pointed out, it's no easy task to rethink curriculum or course structures, but when a group of students comes in with a new way of learning and a desire to do so, it is up to educators to rise to the occasion. I'm looking forward to seeing how Jim continues to refine his teaching practice to better engage students in learning.
00:35:54
Speaker
And speaking of
Announcement of 'Generation Z Learns' Guidebook
00:35:55
Speaker
better engaging students and learning, remember that exciting announcement I mentioned at the beginning of this episode? Well, I'm excited to share that Dr. Corey C. Miller and I have released a new guidebook discussing just that. Generation Z Learns is a guidebook that focuses on strategies
00:36:13
Speaker
influenced by our research that can help create more effective, engaging learning environments for Generation Z. If you teach Gen Z in any capacity, whether that's within a classroom, at a conference, a training, or any sort of development opportunity, this guidebook is a great resource for you.
00:36:27
Speaker
and it's available now on Amazon. I want to thank you for stopping by and listening to this episode. If you enjoyed this episode, please make sure that you rate review and subscribe wherever you prefer to listen to your podcasts. This will keep you in the know about upcoming episodes and your feedback is critical to helping me improve the show and help other listeners find the show. Speaking of other listeners, feel free to share this with a friend or colleague you think would be interested in learning more about Generation Z. I'm really excited to keep sketching out the second half of season two.
00:36:55
Speaker
I have some wonderful guests already lined up, but I'm always looking out for members of Generation Z to share their stories and experiences. If you have a topic you'd like to learn more about or know of a member of Generation Z that I need to connect with, head over to meganmgrace.com and send me a note. We can also connect on social media. You can find me on Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Thanks again for hanging out. Let's continue this conversation and we'll chat soon.