Yoga breaths & observing your own thoughts

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Young woman practicing yoga–Getty Images

I am in my third year as division chair, which at my community college means I supervise nine disciplines ranging from child development to sociology and social work.  Division chairs are on full release from teaching and attend meetings with our academic leadership, ranging from deans to our academic vice president.  We are encouraged to develop an “administrative lens,” words that do not roll easily from an academic tongue.

I have found that my administrative lens often leaves me feeling Machiavellian, although I still prefer to be loved rather than feared.  While I better understand the dilemmas facing higher ed administration, at times I still struggle with the assumptions and terms of administrative discussions.

At a recent difficult discussion in a meeting of academic leadership, I found myself using skills I have cultivated outside of my official “chair professional development.”  I try to attend a group yoga class once a week in order to stay grounded and balanced.  I also listen to a meditation podcast and practice brief breathing exercises on bad days at work.  Another speaker on a podcast I listened to recently recommended stepping back from your thoughts, especially in times of stress, and observing them.  What are the thoughts?  Where are they leading?  Why do you think they are leading that direction?

During the difficult discussion in this meeting, I first practiced deep yoga breaths to calm my parasympathetic response to the stress generated by the discussion.  Then I moved into equal parts breathing (deep breath in for three counts, then out one count, pause, out one count, pause, out the rest of the way, pause) to focus inward rather than outward on the discussion.  Lastly, I separated myself from the conversation and watched my thoughts.  This separation allowed me to see how I was responding to the triggers around me, to think about why I was responding in this way, and to evaluate my options for further response.  This entire exercise took less than a minute and a half, but it had a huge impact on my experience of the rest of the meeting and my effectiveness within the meeting.

These actions, breathing exercises and observing my thoughts, allowed me to calm my stress response and consider my role in the discussion in a measured and rational rather than emotional way.  I moved my response from the amygdala (fight or flight decisions) to the prefrontal cortex (logic and reason).   Applying these lessons has made the difference between surviving in the chair position and running screaming from that position.  What strategies have you used to deal with difficult discussions or stressful work situations?

Recommended Listens:

The Daily Meditation Podcast

Don Miguel Ruiz: Find Freedom, Happiness and Love

We Have #AHA17 Covered!

If you are a historian you will want to keep an eye on The Way of Improvement Leads Home this weekend.  We will be covering the 2017 Annual Meeting (January 5-8) of the American Historical Associat…

Source: We Have #AHA17 Covered!

Professional Development Days Kickoffs

Face-time is the most precious commodity in today’s First World society.  Need to communicate with a group?  Send an email–no one reads it.  Post to the internal newsletter–no one reads it.  Tweet about it–no one reads it.  Recognize the trend?  You may also recognize the scenario below as you head off to or come back from similar kickoffs on your own campuses.

Imagine yourself a leadership team brimming with strategic plans, action items, and mission, vision, and values.  Imagine an employee base that is burned out, that complains about their own low morale, and that is too distracted by internal fighting to accomplish any of your amazing and worthy plans.  Imagine you have a whole day of mandatory, college-wide meeting time to accomplish something important.  Let’s tackle the morale issue, you say.  But how?  No one inside the organization can lead such a discussion.  This and that group won’t listen to so-and-so because of x and y events that happened at some point in the past.  Et cetera.

Aha, the college president says, I heard a great speaker at my presidents’ group meeting.  They do consulting and sound perfect for leading this type of discussion.  The cost is high, but well worth it to move this organization forward.

Conference calls ensue.  Hopes are high.  Promises are lofty. Plans are made.

But what happens when you take a solution designed for small executive teams in corporations and try to adapt it for a few hundred people seated at tables of eight even if this means they are not all on the same team and are in higher education rather than a corporation?

Misalignment and some missed opportunities. Alongside some important revelations that may bear fruit in the longer term.

A PSA for any consultant wishing to move into the higher education market. Although administrators may be enthusiastic about adopting corporate management models and solutions, faculty is very suspicious of such relationships.  Please monitor your audience’s reactions to the use of examples from corporate clients or charts that talk about shipping costs.  Please watch the faces of the faculty members in your audiences when you mention for the fifth time how successful you were in meeting the needs of a CEO/CFO.  Please do not gloss over an audience member who tries to tell you that the organization’s promotion and compensation process do not reward being a good team member. Faculty are often rewarded for individual accomplishments over that of any team in which they participate.   Incentive structures matter when you are trying to change behaviors.  They probably matter more than the motivational quotes on your slides.  Perhaps research those structures prior to your visit.

Because faculty members spend their lives teaching, coaching, and leading others to grow and improve, we have critical eyes.  This does not mean we are negative and resistant to change as a matter of course.  This does mean we may be happy to tell you what you could do better before we explain what you did well.

The corporate world, with its current focus on teams, must have lessons that would be useful for higher education.  Faculty members are often individualistic by nature.  Although we make our livings talking in front of groups, we likely began as introverts and carry some of those traits with us still.  We are accustomed to being our own bosses within our classrooms and we bridle at the discipline required of a team unless we can discern a clear goal or task.  We speak in ideals and may struggle to bring our goals down to concrete, achievable outcomes.  We may see our profession as a noble calling, a sacred trust between professor and student, and so may struggle to understand the value of working together for goals such as increasing enrollment and retention.  Such goals we may see as too mercenary to belong to a calling.

We are, however, susceptible to powerful arguments supported with strong logic and reputable evidence.  Please bring those with you to our professional development kickoff days.  Convincing the event organizers at the college to provide really good food and great coffee would not hurt, either.  And end the day earlier than planned.  Everyone likes “found time.”  And great coffee.  Did I mention that already?

I would be curious to see a chart of the topics of such professional development days kickoff events at colleges and universities around the country–perhaps even by region and institutional size and type.  And stats on what events faculty found most useful and why.

 

 

Students Entering the Discussion–Baby Steps in Wikipedia Editing

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This winter our History of Women and Gender in the West course was originally part of a learning community with the Women’s Lit course.  With falling enrollments, the two courses had to be unlinked and, while the history class went, the lit course did not.  This created an opportunity to incorporate some of the ideas the AHA Annual Meeting had spurred as my colleague, Amy French, and I quickly restructured the course and redesigned the assignments.  I teach the first half of the course, through the mid-sixteenth century, and Amy teaches the second half from that point to the late twentieth century.  Over the years we have offered the course by itself, we have learned that I often spend a great deal of the first half of the semester building basic historical concepts and skills on which Amy can then build.  This year’s design combined traditional assignments that asked students to use databases such as JSTOR and Project Muse with a larger digital history project in which they would edit (or submit the start of) a Wikipedia article on a person or topic in gender history.  In addition, students created individual blogs through which they shared their analyses of weekly reading assignments.  The blog assignment sounds elementary, but for several of our students it was a challenge and focusing on general gender history concepts as well as establishing a blog (with help from our Writing Reading Information Technology Center coordinator, Jennifer Niester-Mika), set the digital humanities tone from the first course meeting.

What were we able to accomplish in eight weeks?  Students created blogs, produced weekly entries, and commented on one another’s posts.  They accessed, analyzed, and used academic journal articles on a topic of their choosing within the parameters of gender history in the west from 3000BCE to 1550CE.  They used online resources to identify key books on their topics and then to access book reviews of those books (as the short time span did not allow them to read several books).  They performed Google and Google Scholar searches on their topics and compared the results with those from academic databases.  They created Pinterest boards to catalogue representative findings from these searches and these boards were the “springboards” for discussions about peer review, pay walls, and open access sources.  They completed Wikipedia’s training for editors, read and analyzed an existing Wikipedia article, analyzed how their research fit into the existing article, and composed and submitted additions to existing articles, most of which were accepted for inclusion (much too rapidly for their comfort).

What did they learn?  In their presentations, wonderful results revealed themselves.  Students began talking to each other about their processes.  They asked one another about research resources.  They revealed that they had sought out and spent significant time with our reference librarians (not a project requirement).  They revealed that they felt pressure to perform at a higher level than in other course projects because they knew the world was reading their work.  They learned that gender history often works with limited primary sources and that doing gender history requires a great deal of detective work and the courage to be speculative in a way that is supported by the sources.  They learned where the articles they rely on, as so many of us do, come from and they thought critically about their level of trust in that resource.  And they learned about their topic in a deeper way than superficial biographical information.

I am calling this a huge success for a pilot project.  I hoped for some of these outcomes.  I would never have asked for all of them.  What will I do differently in the second version?  From student suggestions:  ask them to choose topics by week two; to assist in this choice, offer a list of possible topics as well as the option to create a custom topic.  From my own observation:  use the blog entries to catalogue their project process rather than their reactions to and analyses of the group document assignments.

Diving in was worth the risk.

AHA 2014

This weekend I attended the annual AHA meeting (#AHA2014)  with the primary goal of getting a handle on digital history.  I attended Thursday’s Digital History Workshop, began live tweeting the sessions I attended, attending the live-tweeted conference, and attended various digital history sessions.  I learned about a number of tools, but the big lessons were those shared by others who have already made this journey–the biggest of which was start small.

Heady with all of this learning and thought provocation, I posted a Facebook status asking what friends thought of the idea of assigning live-tweeting of a class session.  Reactions were interesting.  Many faculty friends and former students responded negatively.  They were concerned about students avoiding real-life interaction, about losing the thoughtful and reflective nature of the humanities.  Some said give it a try.  Most interesting to me was that two younger friends, those closest to the age of my current students, liked my post, but did not comment.

I have been willing to try new teaching tools since my first semester of teaching.  Some flop, some survive to be tweaked, and a few are successes right out of the gate.  Part of what I discovered this weekend was that I have already dipped my toe in the digital history pool.  My Ren/Ref students this fall constructed semester projects based on contracts that they authored and which were, for the most part, created from and housed on digital media platforms.  One of my semester epiphanies was that, for my students,  if it’s not online, it doesn’t exist.

So we’re going online and become producers and, hopefully, more savvy consumers.