Welcome to Episode 159 of the Think UDL podcast: Playful Pedagogy with Lindsey Hamilton. Lindsey Hamilton is the Director of the Center for Inclusive Teaching and Learning at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. A Neuroscientist by training, she entered into the field of Teaching and Learning and has been bringing not just the research and proven methods to teaching and learning to her faculty, but also the fun! In today’s episode we discuss how play, joy, and positive emotions can help us learn, and therefore can help our students learn if we employ a playful pedagogy. Play is serious business! And it can be seen as a little rebellious, too. And we know from UDL that the affective or emotional parts of learning are an important part of engagement. So please join us for a fun and engaging conversation where we talk about the benefits of a playful pedagogy!
Resources
Here’s Sarah Kuhn’s website. Shawn Achor’s talk is worth a watch: The Happy Secret to Better Work TED Talk
and here is Episode 67 of Think UDL where I interview Lisa Forbes and David Thomas of Professors at Play
Transcript
50:39
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Playful pedagogy, UDL, learner variability, neuroscientist, joy in learning, engagement, sustained effort, playfulness, classroom activities, student motivation, community building, improv games, manipulatives, learner agency, educational strategies.
SPEAKERS
Lindsey Hamilton, Lillian Nave
Lillian Nave 00:02
Welcome to Think UDL, the Universal Design for Learning podcast where we hear from the people who are designing and implementing strategies with learner variability in mind. I’m your host, Lillian Nave, and I’m interested in not just what you’re teaching, learning, guiding and facilitating, but how you design and implement it, and why it even matters. Welcome to Episode 159 of the think UDL podcast, playful pedagogy with Lindsey Hamilton. Lindsey Hamilton is the director of the Center for Inclusive Teaching and Learning at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. A neuroscientist by training, she entered into the field of teaching and learning, and has been bringing not just the research and proven methods to teaching and learning to her faculty, but also the fun. In today’s episode, we discuss how play, joy and positive emotions can help us learn, and therefore can help our students learn if we employ a playful pedagogy. Play is serious business, and it can be seen as a little rebellious too, and we know from UDL that the effective or emotional parts of learning are an important part of engagement. So please join us for a fun and engaging conversation where we talk about the benefits of a playful pedagogy, and we mentioned quite a few resources in this conversation, and you’ll find them in the resource section just before the transcript on think udl.org as always, thank you for listening to the think UDL podcast. I wanted to welcome my guest, Lindsey Hamilton, to the podcast today. Thank you so much for joining me. I’m so glad to be here. I have really enjoyed seeing how you teach and lead in many of the gatherings that we’ve been in, and we’re in somewhat similar roles, so we get to talk about that. But I wanted to talk to you today about really the thing that draws me to you, which is a lot of the playfulness that you use. But before we get into that, let me ask you, what makes you a different kind of learner.
Lindsey Hamilton 02:34
Well, I think it directly ties to that playfulness that you see in my own work. I am the type of learner that has to make it really personal and relevant for me and keep myself engaged. So I like to lean into things my brain finds interesting and will help myself remember. So I like to do things like make up songs to remember long lists of information, and that’s the type of learner I am that I have to make the connection to something else instead of just memorizing facts.
Lillian Nave 03:12
So it’s got to be interesting and engaging to your brain.
Lindsey Hamilton 03:16
And as someone who, like many of us, has gone through a higher ed journey, sometimes it’s not so interesting what we’re trying to learn
Lillian Nave 03:26
exactly those required things that are on the way to what we think is our goal. Not so fun. Okay, so tell me about how this is playing out in your teaching and in your profession as a director of a Center for Inclusive teaching and learning, how is that showing up for you?
Lindsey Hamilton 03:50
I’m a neuroscientist by training. That’s my background, and as a neuroscientist, I loved when I started learning a little bit about how play Joy emotions affect learning, because people often hear things like playful pedagogy, and they assume we’re talking about making learning easier. The dreaded not rigorous. It’s less serious. But I’m going to argue that I think play helps us make learning possible, especially when things get hard, and helps us when we’re at risk of burning out, which is a lot of higher ed right now, both for educators and also for students. So I think Joy helps us adapt, persist, resist, learn and play rarely exists without joy. So anything I can incorporate a little bit of playfulness into what I’m doing, the better.
Lillian Nave 04:47
Yeah, one of the major tenants of UDL is engagement, and one of those things that I end up talking about a lot is that sustaining effort. Effort and persistence, which is kind of the middle area of the engagement principle, and it’s really hard to sustain effort and persistence. If you are disinterested in something and you are having such a hard time thinking, how am I going to continue to do this for 15 weeks or whatever. Yeah, so how do you see that joy and playfulness helping to push our students forward?
Lindsey Hamilton 05:31
Yeah, I think thinking about UDL lens that play is going to look different for different people, and even for the same person on different days, it’s going to look differently. And so I think playfulness is also different than sustained play. So a whole course or a whole program that we’re developing as an educator doesn’t have to be gamified, right work. It means we’re designing learning environments that have a little bit of flexibility, choice, humanity, creativity, so learners can find their own way into that engagement. So it’s not that I have to be on all the time manufacturing joy for everybody, but instead, maybe I can remove some of the barriers and make that joy and learning that maybe was harder to access before a little more engaged. So it doesn’t make learning less rigorous. What it does is, you know, when people are happy and laughing in the classroom or just super engaged in what they’re doing, it gives them that motivation to keep doing the serious work. And there is lots of serious work we have to be doing in the classroom, but if we can build those connections with each other, it keeps us going when it gets difficult.
Lillian Nave 06:57
You know, you make me think of a talk by Sean Achor the happy secret to better work. Are you familiar with that one?
Lindsey Hamilton 07:00
No, I’m not.
Lillian Nave 07:02
Oh, he’s a great funny speaker, and I have my students listen to it, because he talks about the success that comes from happiness. So if we can increase our happiness quotient, then we are much better able to learn because our brain is more receptive. We are more successful in business and in education. If we start at a positive like brain space, like if you’re in a happy mood, then you’re much more likely to accept and be creative, like, accept new ideas and be creative about those ideas. And if we really inverse the idea of work really hard in order to get to a place of success, and then you can be happy to then put that, well, why don’t I start at the happiness part, and then it makes the work more fun, and it brings success that way. So it’s inverting those two things, of put off the joy in order to attain, right, some sort of success. Because then he says, well, once you attain that success, you move those goal posts and now it’s the next thing, all right, well, it’s the next quiz and it’s the next promotion or whatever, but if you invert it and work on things that make you happier, which he includes, things like a gratitude journal, random acts of kindness, exercise, meditation, all of Those things will increase just your mental health and your general happiness, that then makes you much more susceptible, I guess, to learning. Does that make sense?
Lindsey Hamilton 08:51
No, it does. I mean, I think about play as persistence, right? That it keeps us going. It’s same in our careers. I would love to hear that talk you were just referencing, because it gives us that kind of relief from cognitive overload or something. I see a lot with students sometimes is this perfectionism that they are in our classes, because they’ve done really well, and they’re trying to get into med school, grad school careers, they have all these next steps. Are stressed, super stressed, and they’re in 8000 extracurriculars and internships and all these activities. They are stressed. They are burnt out, and they’re a little afraid to make mistakes along the way. And if I’m as a neuroscientist trying to convince them that the brain is plastic and continuing to grow and change, and that you can do that too, and it’s really learning is about this growth mindset, and we want to be on that path. Play is a chance to make mistakes for free. It’s not a big deal if you mess up in a playful activity in class, no one’s going to judge you. Or think you’re not smart because of that, but it’s a way to say I’m grappling with this information. I’m processing it in a different way. So play isn’t removing the rigor of learning. It’s just keeping that rigor from becoming soul crushing.
Lillian Nave 10:16
Yeah, you make me think of Ken Bain’s work. He talks about failure, right? And that’s such a good thing. What can we learn from failure? And if we don’t create a place where failure is okay, then those students are going to be super stressed, and they’re going to be thinking, well, if I get this wrong, I’m not going to make it into med school, grad school, whatever, graduate whatever. All these pressures, a lot of them are also self imposed pressures, right? But if we can create or design a space or a curriculum or a class that says, hey, I’m encouraging you to fail, because that failure is actually going to teach you more than if you tried to walk a tightrope the way you’re trying to walk and get the answers right all the time. I mean, this sounds blasphemous, doesn’t it? Well as higher ed folks talking about this, but it’s the way I like the way you’re talking about the plasticity of the brain, like you’ve got to try these things. And I’m not a neuroscientist, so I have no, no clue at all, but it seems like you’ve got to try these things. You’re seeing what works, and you will never know what works unless you try something completely different. And I never in my schooling would have thought that that was an appropriate thing until one of my professors had us play with, not Lincoln Log tinker toys. And it was a, it was an art history course. And then he said, I can’t, we’re not doing this within the class, but you could show up on a Saturday, which geeks we did, you know, and learn about it was an American architecture class, and he set us up. I still remember this, this 30 years ago, set us up in groups and gave us like a personality, one of those Myers, Briggs kind of thing, and set us up into groups where we were with similar people, and told us to build an ideal city. Didn’t give us any other instructions. And so we got to play with ticker toys and a couple other things I can’t remember, because our city had a beltway around it, like a 495 or something like that. And when he came to talk about each one of the groups, we didn’t realize how we’d been grouped. But it turns out that me, that that I and all of the people I was working with were people that like containment, and here we’d made this beltway around the city, and I was like, Oh, I feel really called out, but it was that playfulness of just seeing where our creativity would go and how we would design something. And then we learned a lot about ourselves. And I mean, there wasn’t anything wrong with the beltway, but I was like, that’s interesting. Nobody else built a beltway. Have had that in their city? Absolutely.
Lindsey Hamilton 13:10
I mean, I think manipulatives of any kind are kind of like the gateway playfulness pedagogy that we can have. We see this. I mean, even if you think about like a chemistry class with the little sets to build the molecules like students get really excited to pull those out and start working with them. So Sarah Kuhn has been really influential on my thinking about manipulatives and how important it is for us as humans to use our hands and engage make meaning in different ways, and that opens up these different neural pathways for this creativity and engagement in this way.
Lillian Nave 13:52
Yeah, so some people are going to learn a lot better that way. And just like the UDL idea is choice and flexibility, you can use these manipulatives, you can draw it on your iPad or something like that, or, yeah, whatever works for your brain.
Lindsey Hamilton 14:08
I sometimes will do a class where I’ll bring in mini Play Doh containers, and each student gets one, and we’re taking notes on paper, which is another skill I’m trying to teach them about taking notes on paper instead of their computer. And I’ll say you can use the Play Doh to incorporate into your notes or not, and they get really some of them don’t want to use it. That’s okay. Some of them are using the Play Doh and using it to make these graphs or these images explaining phenomenon, and it’s incorporated into it, and then can I keep this play?
Lillian Nave 14:44
Doh, yeah. Little side note here too, for our neurodivergent students, having something to play with, having something to keep their fingers moving or bodies moving, is going to allow the brain to. Open up to really listen, and so it can be used like directly or indirectly, right? Absolutely.
Lindsey Hamilton 15:08
And I think more people benefit from that than just any neurodiverse thinking. We’ve bought a bunch of quiet manipulatives, fidgets and things for our faculty, for our Center for Teaching and Learning, events and programs. And you would not believe these. You know, full professors coming in and going, This is amazing. Can I keep this? They all want to keep them. We have these little sensory pebbles that you can just play with and feel in your hands. I was recommended them from Tolu Noah, and so immediately, if Tolu recommend something, I go out and buy it the next day. So using those manipulatives helps a lot of people in thinking about that. Another person that’s really kind of challenged my own thinking on this playfulness and rigor and opening it up for more learners. Is Lisa Forbes. She’s an educator out in Colorado, but she talks about play being rebellious, that it’s challenging what we think about as the typical and the norm. So play is actually a challenge. It’s intellectual, it’s emotional, it’s relational, it’s not trivial. And hearing her talk about that was really eye opening of, Oh, this isn’t just something fun for fun’s sake. This is really a little subversive that we’re incorporating this into our classrooms and into our pedagogies.
Lillian Nave 16:42
Yeah, and it’s essential for learning because, like we started out talking, if you are bored, if you are not interested in something, then it’s killing your desire to learn. And the whole universal design for learning guidelines started where engagement was like the third column, and in one of the revisits of the UDL guidelines, that column went all the way to the front. So the first column we look at is now engagement. So if ever you’re looking at the UDL guidelines and you’re wondering why the first column starts with seven, eight and nine. It’s because originally they were the last three, but now they’re the first three. And it’s, I mean, the UDL guidelines cast decided that you really can’t have learning without that motivation, without that interest, without something that grabs your attention. It’s the why of learning. It’s the most essential part. If you have no interest in something, even if the resources are perfect, they’re all accessible. You’ve got well designed assignments, but you have no interest or can’t see the connection to why it’s going to be useful to you, why you have any interest, then it’s, it’s really, I won’t say it’s a lost cause, but it’s really difficult to actually get in the learning Right? Absolutely.
Lindsey Hamilton 18:12
I think play is reshaping how students are thinking about learning. We’re moving from maybe some fear or anxiety to more curiosity. Oh, what are we doing today? What is this thing? Why did my professor just bring in this play? Doh, we’re moving from this idea of like compliance as a student, that I have to do it in this one way, to more of that agency, which is right in line with those UDL guidelines. We want to give students multiple entry points and support this idea of there’s variability in how we’re going to engage, and that gives them those options. And I think playfulness moves students a little further from performance to more exploration. So I find in my own classes and with faculty that I’m working with all the time, when we incorporate a little bit of playfulness, the learners start to feel safer, psychologically safer, and so we’re going to take more risks intellectually. So I can have very high expectations for my students and give them honest, critical feedback, but they have this connection with me already, and now they feel a little safer entering that space.
Lillian Nave 19:31
Yeah, and learning should be that exploration, not this trepidatious kind of tightrope walking where they’re waiting. Do I have the right answer, and it’s a lot of unlearning that we have to do in higher ed. I think our students are coming to higher ed thinking they’ve had to get the right answer, and they’ve had to be compliant in the system in order to really get them the scholarships or get them to take the test. Well. And all those things, but a lot of times I’m seeing in higher ed, we’re trying to unlearn some of those bad habits, which were surface learning to get the high grade, but not deep learning, or trying to figure out what the professor wants, not necessarily what they’re trying to get out or learn deeply in that particular area. And I think playfulness and that looseness a little bit in the classroom is what a lot of students have never seen they really need, and they’re also a little bit afraid, like, am I, am I supposed to be doing this? How do you get your students to let go of all of those things they’ve learned and shed that skin and be playful in your classrooms? I think
Lindsey Hamilton 20:56
it’s a it’s a little challenging to get over that fear barrier of am I supposed to be doing this? I don’t want to look stupid in front of my peers. But I think if I find, if I incorporate it from the beginning, from the jumping in class, first day of class, I always am telling people, I think we should use our first day of class to model what we’re going to be doing the entire semester, get engagement, not just read the syllabus to everybody, right? So I’ll bring in a manipulative, some kind play dough. It’s a great one, but Legos are another one of my favorites. I have raided my Lego supplies from my parents house and have these little buckets, but give them something. When they’re doing introductions to each other, make a model that describes something about yourself you want to share with the class. And they have this. Some of them are building these incredible sculptures. Some of them are, you know, using one little brick. But then they get to talk about it, and that’s the real insight. And then they see that was safe. There was not a right or wrong answer. So the next time we do something like that, they’re a little more open to the idea of, oh, she’s not looking for one particular thing here. Yet, the way I am thinking about it isn’t wrong. It just might be different than how somebody else is thinking about it, right?
Lillian Nave 22:21
I’m also interested in like, other ways that the students are trying to explore that that space where it’s not always the right answer. In fact, you want to just get multiple answers. And I was wondering if what your relationship is with improv in a classroom?
Lindsey Hamilton 22:45
Yes. And that’s right, that’s right. I think you have to build in a little bit of that flexibility to go where the students need you to go. I want to model for them too, that I am improving a little bit that we’re thinking about things in different ways, and that they’re not thinking wrong. So when a student responds or contribute something in a discussion, and maybe it’s not exactly the answer I was looking for or hoping that the conversation might turn in that direction, I don’t need to shut it down. I can say that’s an interesting way. Can you tell me more about why you’re thinking that, or what evidence would you need to see to not to be convinced that isn’t true? Or where is that going? So it’s not a yes or no response. I had to work really hard at the beginning of my teaching career, I was very enthusiastic anytime any student raised their hand to say anything in class, yes, great question. Love that question, and I realized that I was inadvertently dampening other students from participating. Because when we enthusiastically Great question, students are might be thinking, well, is my question good? Or what if she didn’t say that when I responded? So instead, now I try and say things like, Oh, thank you so much for bringing that up. Let’s bring this out so that there’s a little less fear to ask those questions,
Lillian Nave 24:16
yeah, when you mentioned Yes, and that is something that I’ve used with my first year students. And again, it’s those students are the ones that are coming out of K 12, and they’re looking for the right answer. And so that’s really intimidating. And so it’s, what do you do when that first answer is maybe it’s not the best, right? Which often happens, and it’s usually the, you know, the student who might have a really fast processing speed and is raising their hand first is, is great, right? We’ve got somebody has broken the silence. That’s good, but it’s often not the most in depth or thorough answer. And so we’ve done things in my class where we play. Yes and, which is an improv game where you start with something positive and then nobody can shut that down. They just have to continue along with that, with that statement. So yes and, and we’ve done something where I have them read several chapters in a book we’ve been going through for the semester, and I’ll say, Okay, we’re just going to throw out everything we learned from that chapter and go around the room, and you know, some of them will be, well, I learned about this, be their theory or philosoph and some will be like, I learned it’s a really long chapter, or that I shouldn’t have waited until the last minute, right?
Lindsey Hamilton 25:37
I should have budgeted more than 20 minutes to read this.
Lillian Nave 25:40
Yes, exactly something that. But then if we keep going and going and going and we say, everybody’s contribution is going to be helpful, we’re actually we get to a lot more meat, because we’ve kind of thrown out the first five things that are the immediate things. And that’s usually where people stop, like, like, I’m just trying to get these five points across, but if we keep going, we’re going to also see something I wasn’t expecting, which is their experience of reading it, the questions they had while they were reading it, the unfinished parts, like the things they’re wondering about. And I don’t think we would have gotten it, gotten there, if we hadn’t have done some sort of improv game where they were having fun, like they just knew they had to contribute, and it could go in any direction, and it’s the one who’s doing the work, is the one who’s doing the learning.
Lindsey Hamilton 26:35
Absolutely, I realized I do something similar, a little different twist of we play a game sometimes called no bad questions, and there’s no wrong questions. There’s never a bad question. So I’ll ask students, and we usually do this on paper, so they’re writing in groups every question they can think about related to that chapter, that content whatever we’re discussing that day, and they have to do a set number, and I put that number pretty high, usually. So then you start to get some crazy questions and coming out. And then we can start to narrow it down to what were the really interesting questions we want to tackle and go further. But it gets them beyond the initial, maybe superficial questions,
Lillian Nave 27:24
right, right? And that’s where that playfulness, I think, really comes in, is when you loosen up and we start to unlearn all of those really, I’m thinking of like a really buttoned up shirt, right? Like I’m going to get it right. I want the professor to be impressed by my intellect. I want to look good for the rest of the class, if we’re thinking about an in person class here, and that actually cuts down on that depth of where we can go with this topic or exploring these weird ideas that are actually worth pursuing in whatever we’re doing. And so I haven’t found a better way, other than playfulness in all of its forms, to actually get to this deep learning.
Lindsey Hamilton 28:18
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it also makes me think of another one of my common playful activities, and I think you’ve experienced this in one of my workshops, is anonymous reflections written down related to a topic, and then either airplane style or snowball style.
Lillian Nave 28:39
So fold it up into an airplane, or crush it into a ball, or crush
Lindsey Hamilton 28:43
it up into a crumpled ball, but then the key is, now throw it at me. Okay, the instructor, because there’s this like moment on students faces when they realize you’re asking them to throw paper at you. Yeah. And so there’s this visible shift in the energy in the room, like it goes to a little mischievous and, oh, are you even gonna, can you hit me? But I like the paper plane, because that’s really fun. If I have a few minutes, I’ll give them, like, a two or three minute constraint. So, like, no googling how to do this. Just fold your best paper airplane. It’s low stakes imperfection. It’s introducing that same concept. We can make mistakes. They get the fun of throwing it at me, but then we shuffle them up among the room. We don’t know whose was whose. As we go back, if it’s crumpled up snowballs, I can throw them back around the room at the students, and then I can ask students to take the reflection they now have in front of them. It might be theirs. They might have gotten their own one back, but no one knows. And so now I can ask for more share outs about what did this person write down? Why do you think they were thinking this way? And it can be that little further anonymous gives them more of that cycle. Logical safety. We get into more thoughtful conversations that way. And in an in person session, when sometimes the energy drops towards that midpoint of the class or the workshop, it can be a real energy boost for everybody.
Lillian Nave 30:18
Yeah, I have found that about 20 minutes into a class, I’ve got to switch it up and do something interesting or different than whatever we had just been doing, and oftentimes it does include something to do with your body. So Susan Rock has written about that embodied learning, and I’ve learned a lot from her and just thinking about even standing up and stretching or a breathing exercise. You can do this when your students are online and say, All right, we’re taking a little bit of a bathroom break or a stand up break, or a yoga break or something to reset, right? Because sitting in a lecture for 4550 minutes, 75 minutes is again that boring part, just no matter how much you think you are up there with a top hat and a cane, which is what I thought I was as an art history instructor, La da, look at Bernini. No, it’s just, it’s it’s not going to work for everybody the whole time, is it?
Lindsey Hamilton 31:30
It’s not. And actually, my colleague, who wells casting gay, started using a strategy for when they take the breaks in the middle of class to get every student up or moving around a little bit, because sometimes you say, Okay, we’re going to take a five minute break and come back at this time. And what do they do? They pull out their phones and just sit there for a few minutes. And that’s fine, but we know there’s a benefit to kind of moving around just a little bit. So they set up mason jars at the front of the room, and each student, every day, has a button, and so they put up a question. And sometimes the question is just for fun, sometimes it’s content related, but there’s no right or wrong answer. It’s not like a multiple choice. One of these answers is correct. There’s multiple points of entry, and so the ask is, at some point during this five minute break, you’re going to come out and put your button in one of these so that we can start back with, Oh, let’s see, where are we, or, you know, if it’s related to what? What’s the discussion question we should start back with after the break, giving back some of that agency of where should we go in this direction? So, and then it’s a physical, tangible, physical, tangible things, gets everybody, at least up a little bit, making some connection. And then we’re engaging right away. They kind of develop that activity as a sticking point, because they wanted, they had these mason jars and really wanted to use them. And I was like, What are you going to do with these? So it was a creative exercise for us to come up with a activity for them to use.
Lillian Nave 33:15
Yeah, and there are lots of ways, I mean, that’s making me think of all the ways one could do something like that, like a human continuum, where you like line up in the room based on how much you really like this versus dislike it. So move yourself to somewhere in the room, or a four corners exercise. You know, do you like mushrooms on pizza, pepperoni, just cheese. And go to whatever corner. And then you can talk about those but even in an online class, because I’ve been teaching online for quite a while, you can do stuff like that, like you can use a polling software. You can, like, people can point on the screen which corner they would be in or what part of the continuum, right? Absolutely.
Lindsey Hamilton 33:57
And I think that is a great way for them to see how much variability there is in their learning community and what that looks like. So there’s a lot of benefit beyond just getting people physically moving in an in person room, but in a online classroom, there’s lots of ways to incorporate this as well.
Lillian Nave 34:16
Yeah, you just brought up the community, really. You said the variability of the learners. And I think there’s a reason why we’re learning together, right? This is not we are not teaching classrooms where it’s a tutoring one on one situation, everybody in that classroom is learning together, and what this playfulness does is leverage that for good. And so I’m thinking about all the positives. The things that we’ve talked about is when you ask your students to sculpt something about themselves, everybody else is seeing the differences, like how somebody might even approach a problem differently than they would, right, even if. But they’re both trying to create a tennis ball because they played tennis in high school. It might it might look different, or we see how other people are solving the same problem. And you know, I never would have built a beltway around my city, but look at these fools over here that built their beltway. And so we’re learning so much about community and the positives, like the strengths that other people have while we’re doing that right, absolutely.
Lindsey Hamilton 35:27
And one thing I think that’s important here in that community is the instructor. We’re part of that community too. So whenever I’m doing these playful activities in class, I’m also participating. I’m not just the observer on high. If I’m asking them to sculpt with Play Doh, I’m sculpting too, because I am not an artist. So reduce that layer of vulnerability. It’s okay that I’m doing this too, or I’m participating in some way, and it gives them another avenue to talk to me, one I really like is having students submit what their walk up song would be, right, like, for sports or for if you were the big keynote speaker someday, what it’s going to be. And then I take those songs back out at the end of the semester, when they’re doing presentations, and I’ll play them for them, but I’ll do my own and that opens it. They’re like, you like that music? Yeah, we can talk about that too. So it can be little things. And I think that’s something I want to emphasize, is that having some of this playfulness and seeing the benefits for the variability in the community and everything, it doesn’t have to be big things. It can be smaller, quiet things as well, or little things, even as much as I’m a big proponent of having some structured group roles when we’re doing group activities or discussions, even just what you call those can make a big difference. Like, instead of having the person who’s going to be, you know, questioning or the devil’s advocate type of role. We sometimes call that person your captain CounterPoint today. So they get in this little role moment of, oh, I’m Captain counterpoint, or having a spy in the group. The students love having a spy faculty too, because, oh, I’m supposed to go out and see what the other groups are talking about and bring it back to my own group. So then they have this teaching moment, and they don’t realize how much they’re learning through that process. They just know I get to be the spy go around the room.
Lillian Nave 37:30
Oh, it’s fantastic. I mean, there’s so much that we’re doing as we’re learning. So playfulness helps me to think a lot about all of those soft skills in learning, and it’s not just about the knowledge that you emerge from that lesson with, like the straight up, I could answer this question on a test, but yeah, it’s about how you learned. It how you can become an expert learner. The UDL loves to have an expert learner, or what we now call learner agency. You’re learning a lot about who you are as a student and how other people will have done things, and it’s we just don’t learn in a vacuum. And why not have a really playful, non vacuum.
Lindsey Hamilton 38:24
Absolutely and community so important, as you were saying that. And there’s ways to kind of address that and nudge the students towards thinking about learning as a community and not just as their own individual selves. And that takes down any competitive angles that might be in place, and sometimes in my classes, I’ll have in my grading scheme something called colleague points, and this is a way for students to say, How am I contributing to being a good colleague to the entire learning community? And it can be they keep track of it themselves, but it can be things like, you know, I peer reviewed a paper for another student in the class before we turned it in, or we had a study group, or I found this really cool article that made me think of the class, so I shared it with the class. I’m what am I bringing to the table? And it’s not just always raising your hand in class and participating that way. It can be students could document that they feel like they’re really leading there, but there’s other ways to contribute to the overall class learning, and that gives more students more options to display and engage in the way they want to that makes most sense for them.
Lillian Nave 39:43
Yeah, I think you’re bringing up to this other part of unlearning that we I think need to work on in higher ed, because students learn that they’re supposed to do things just for themselves and by themselves. You know, I. I’m that my GPA and don’t mess up the curve, and, you know, I’m not going to help other people or and also, it’s a big prohibition against cheating. But I think it’s misunderstood too, like there’s a lot of ways we can actually learn together and help each other that’s really positive, and it’s not cheating, it’s not any form of cheating, right? We’re we’re working together. That’s how we learn and doing these wonderful things. And there’s an unlearning that we have to do in, I think, our higher ed spaces, which is that there’s so much more that’s appropriate and okay and actually beneficial if you’re learning from other people, like, I would love to be the peer reviewer, right? Let me see how you answered that question too, and I’ll show you how I did. And we’re learning from each other
Lindsey Hamilton 40:49
Absolutely, and we kind of have to take down the barriers that might exist from, you know, whatever years of K through 12, education experiences or other forms of that cheating looms large. I think the fear of being accused of doing it inappropriately. So trying to have space in our courses for students to connect and see each other as learners and contributors that we all are bringing something to the table.
Lillian Nave 41:22
I think that so many of my really important or learning experiences, the things that I remember the most are because I saw something through somebody else’s eyes that I never would have seen by myself, for myself, and I think playfulness is the way that we we get to see that. And I’m thinking specifically about something that happened when I was in graduate school. Shout out to my colleague, Ashley West, who is art historian teaching still to this day, and I remember when she shared some of her writing, and I never would have written this way, because I’m very linear, and I will start with a subject and a verb and then a direct object, and it’s like it’s got to look a certain way. It was very organized. I thought anyway, the way that she started her art history paper started with adjectives and like, flowing drapery, incredible light, chiaroscuro. And I’m like, Who starts an essay like that? And I learned so much. I was like, That’s so much better than mine. I really like that. Yeah.
Lindsey Hamilton 42:37
And trying to build on that, I taught a first year seminar this year, which is a writing course at our institution. And I had students write a autobiographical literacy narrative so about their experience with writing and reading and where they’re thinking. And I really pushed them to be creative. And it was where they started sharing them with each other. And then they were asking in revision, can I try doing it in the style? They did? Yes, absolutely. Try push something. And in fact, we decided as a class, we were going to challenge each other on the revision, to pick somebody else’s in the class kind of voice and style and try and put your own few paragraphs in that voice, and see how it’s like, try it on, see what it’s like,
Lillian Nave 43:28
like, a different suit of clothes, and see how it feels
Lindsey Hamilton 43:31
absolutely it also helped them identify, like, Oh, I do have a voice. My voice might be different than so and so’s voice, but I do have one because a lot of students come in going, I don’t have a voice, right?
Lillian Nave 43:45
I’m just, like the cookie cutter. It’s just the way that you’re supposed to right? Yeah, no, it’s yours.
Lindsey Hamilton 43:50
Yeah, there’s only one way to write this. No, there’s actually a lot of ways we could go about that. Yeah.
Lillian Nave 43:57
So Lindsey, this has been a lot of great ideas, because every time I talk to you, it’s a million ideas a minute, and I love it. So let’s say somebody’s listening to this conversation and they’re like, Okay, I think I’ve been convinced that being playful in my pedagogy, in my classes, in what I do, even maybe as a Director of Teaching and Learning, because you introduced us to making the Taylor Swifty bracelets as a teaching and learning and everything you do, you insert this playfulness. What’s your advice then? To somebody who’s like, Okay, I think I’ll try something. Where can I start?
Lindsey Hamilton 44:40
I mean, I would say the classic educational developer or UDL talk is plus one, right? We’re gonna do yes, and we’re gonna pick one thing to try and find what works for you. You might be the person who goes, I could never be in front of the class being like, now we’re doing Play Doh, yeah. Okay, don’t pick that one. Yeah. Don’t start with that. You can start small. So think about where that is. One great one that I think is sustainable over the whole semester too, is providing name tents for your students. One helps with community building, if you know their names and they know each other’s names, but students can decorate, personalize the name tents, and it’s just a small, tiny, playful way their name tents become expressive. So I’ll bring in markers or stickers occasionally, and they can make them their own. And that’s just a very simple one. So there’s something unique about me. I’m not just another face in the crowd. Yeah, this is my name, 10, and I have chosen to decorate it in this way.
Lillian Nave 45:48
You know, I did a very similar thing for my completely online course. So this course is called, How’d you learn that? And I asked the students to show up for their very first zoom. We have one synchronous zoom a week. And I said I would like you to create your own zoom background that is your spirit animal, but it’s your spirit animal as a learner. Who are you? How do you see yourself as a learner? Mine was a distracted squirrel, so I created a zoom background. And the other thing that I did was I asked them, once we all got together, I was like, how did you figure out how to do that? Because I had given them no instructions on how to create a zoom background. And this is before they met me. And so we talked about failure and what to do when you don’t know what to do. What did you use? Did you look it up? Did you Google it? Did you find a YouTube How did you find out how to make a zoom, you know? And so we talked about the process as well, but it was and they were not. If you didn’t have it that first day, it was okay. So failure was, was an option, but I have these great screenshots of everybody, and we’ve got geckos, iguanas, a seal, several like Golden Retrievers or German Shepherds, like I will do what you and said, I will do what you tell me to do. That’s the kind of learner I am, and I learned so much about them.
Lindsey Hamilton 47:14
That’s I was as you were talking. I was going, what am I? What is my animal? And I think I came to the decision, I’m a Australian Shepherd puppy, like a million miles an hour, sort of directions, and very excited about the shiny thing that I want to be interested in in that moment.
Lillian Nave 47:33
Yes, but yeah, we had several owls. That’s a good one. Wise, yeah. And dolphins, playful. That was a playful jumping dolphin.
Lindsey Hamilton 47:42
So I love that we did a similar activity with faculty in our teaching center, where for a new faculty community of practice, we used AI to generate an image of we all went with dogs, but what dog we were and like related to our discipline. And it was so funny. And then we played, tried to match who was each one when we just submitted them. And it was so funny to see these examples of, oh, I’m a basset hound political professor. So yeah, they gave me a basset hound with a very bow tie. That’s what AI thinks a political basset hound might look like. Oh, I love it. It’s just an opening so fun. Yeah, just a little bit. Just find something small to shift into.
Lillian Nave 48:34
Yeah, I think it’s a small, right, small thing that can prove to be very large in the results Absolutely.
Lindsey Hamilton 48:43
And I think if I’ve convinced anybody of anything, it’s hopefully that UDL lens tells us joy is variable, and joy is important to consider, that it should be part of our consideration and play is not lowering expectations. We’re just helping more people reach our expectations, because we’re providing more entry points for engagement Exactly.
Lillian Nave 49:08
Oh, could have said it better myself. Thank you so much, Lindsey.
Lindsey Hamilton 49:12
Oh, of course, I’m so happy to be here. I always love chatting with you.
Lillian Nave 49:15
Oh, absolutely thanks so much for your time, and I look forward to more playfulness with you in the future, always play on Thank you for listening to this episode of The think UDL podcast. New episodes are posted on social media, on LinkedIn, Facebook, X and blue sky. You can find transcripts and resources pertaining to each episode on our website. Think u, d, l.org, the music in each episode is created by the Oddyssey quartet. Oddyssey is spelled with two D’s, by the way, comprised of Rex Sheperd, David Pate, Bill Folwell and Jose Cochez. I’m your host, Lillian Nave, and I want to thank Appalachian State University for helping to support this podcast. And if you call it App-a-lay-sun, I’ll throw an apple at you. Thank you for joining. I’m your host, Lillian Nave, thanks for listening to the think UDL podcast.