Transforming Experiential Learning in Cocurricular Activities

Awesome. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us at Reaction today. I am Kelly Fitzgerald, and I’m looking forward to today’s presentation. Joe Kennedy, Megan Orcholski, and Adam Knowlton are joining us from Concordia College, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, and Midland University for this session called “Transforming Experiential Learning on Co-Curricular Activities.”

A few housekeeping items before we get started.

Go ahead and feel free to introduce yourself, share your thoughts or share resources in the chat window, and make sure that when you do, you change your message settings to show everyone so that you can share with the group.

If you have any questions for our presenters, use the Q&A window. And if you see a question there that you like and would like to have answered, go ahead and click the thumbs up button to vote for it.

We will answer as many as we can during our time today, but I will go ahead and pass the time along to our wonderful presenters. Thank you.

Hello, everyone. So happy for you to be here. We are thrilled to be here and so excited, one, to be working together–

we haven’t worked together in a few years–

and also to be talking about GoReact because all of us freak out about GoReact. So we’re very excited about that.

I’m going to start my name is Megan Orcholski, Dr. Megan Orcholski actually. I’m still getting used to that title.

I am currently teaching as a lecturer at University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee here. And I have a pretty long past. I’ve taught it many, many different institutions. I’ve coached at several institutions and finished my doctorate in fall of 2020 and then pushed a baby out a month later. And so I’ve been doing that.

My big brag is that I have brought GoReact to every institution I’ve ever taught at because I refuse to teach without it. That’s my big brag for the day.

Hi, everybody. My name is Adam Knowlton. I’m the director of forensics at Midland University. Also I’m the associate professor for communication studies.

I don’t have a whole lot to brag about, though Joe and Megan both told me that I have to.

So I’ve been doing intercollegiate forensics for the better part of the last 22 years. It has been an absolute riot, and I’ve had wonderful success, wonderful friends, and wouldn’t change it for anything in the entire world.

I’m Joe Kennedy. And like Adam and Megan, I’ve coached speech and debate competitors at the highest level of competition.

Adam won’t brag about it, but Adam has coached over 100 college competitors to top 24 in just about every event that’s offered in college.

I’ve worked from Virginia high schools in the mid ’90s to Minnesota colleges in the ’20s. I’ve witnessed the evolution of forensics from something that really truly honestly belonged in the 1950s when I first started, coaching in the 1990s to a telepresent instant feedback activity where modern media techniques get taught, and students have been able to claim greater and greater agency.

I’m also National Board certified teacher, and I’m Concordia College’s only instructional designer. So I get to work with faculty from over five dozen different departments as they implement ed tech into their teaching and learning. And I have to tell you, I found GoReact to be one of only a handful of truly transformative tools in the 15 years that I’ve been working with ed tech.

I’d like to give you a quick overview. Bear in mind that all of us in addition to being instructors in multiple departments are speech coaches. And as speech coaches, we strive to guide students powerfully communicate the messages about which they’re passionate. And this means a lot of times, they have to challenge norms.

They have to challenge norms of presentation, of audience interaction. They have to redefine the very events in which they compete to be successful.

So a tool like GoReact, which can be used just as a substitution for paper feedback, can allow students from multiple places to present together. But it can change the way students see themselves. And it has altered the way in which we coach speech and debate. That was an easy tool to embrace there.

All right. Is it me now, Joe? Do I get to talk about current day and age? All right.

So I have been, like I said, lucky enough to be participating in intercollegiate forensics for the last 22 years. And in some ways, the activity has grown leaps and bounds. And in some ways, there were aspects of the activity that needed to grow just due to the situations that we were in, predominantly with the rise of COVID. I was one of the many professors across the country that were frantically trying to install video cameras and poorly constructed studios in their team spaces.

And I found one of the most important things that was difficult for our students to begin to understand and to begin to work with was having an opportunity to work with a completely different media that they haven’t been able to utilize in the past. So in the past it was all in person. And you really didn’t have an opportunity to experiment and play around with some of the innovative things that we can do with communication technologies.

And so when COVID did hit, and we were forced to change on the fly, number one, there was a lot of unique specialized coaching that had to happen. There was a lot of new training that had to go along with things. I had to teach my students what a cowboy shot is and stuff like that. But most importantly, it opened up a brand new avenue for students to experiment with.

And I think one of my favorite narratives that came out of online competition was actually a duo that I saw at nationals last year. And because we were forced to go online, we had students that were interacting with the camera in ways that I have never seen, nor would I ever in a million years imagine. They were changing perspectives and angles and standing in certain ways to make themselves look smaller and bigger, and it was brilliant and beautiful.

And I think that’s one of the wonderful things that we’re going to talk about here with GoReact is GoReact gives you the opportunity to practice, to experiment, and to master some of these tools that students are being asked to utilize within their co-curricular activities.

Then I’m going to give a quick forecast. The way that we’ve organized this presentation follows a tool that is often used when we look at educational technology tools, and we look at their impact upon teaching and learning.

For those of you who have never seen, it is the SAMR model.

And the SAMR model stands for substitution, augmentation, modification, and redefinition. I’ve thrown a link. If you’d like a nice pretty graphic of it into the chat.

But it’s exactly what it is. If I adopt this tool, what does it help me as a teacher do for students? Does it substitute for something that we’ve already done, maybe gaining some efficiency along the way all the way up to redefinition?

We’ll start with substitution, and Adam’s going to lead off on that. And then Megan will talk about augmentation first, and then Adam will talk about modification, and I’ll lead off redefinition. But we’re all going to jump in at some time. If you have questions, please do post them in the chat or the Q&A. We might even be able to work them into what we’re saying.

But we’ll start as we talk about substitution, which is exactly what you think. Forensics is experiential learning. It requires a cycle of feedback, critique, improvement, performing again, feedback, critique, improvement, performing again.

So I think one of the ways that I saw this most predominantly was when we did that transition to online competition and coaching. So Midland, despite being a small Midwestern University, it’s kind of surprising that I have students from all over the country.

And so I found myself in a situation where I was coaching across time zones. We were competing across time zones.

And programs like GoReact gave us the opportunity and the ability to get real time feedback to students, so that they can see how things were going.

But most importantly, kind of as Megan also mentioned, one of the things that is enormous in my world, in my life is my little boy. And I think one of the best functions of GoReact is that I had the ability and the opportunity to do the two things I love to do the most. I got to be a dad, and I got to be a coach.

And programs like this gave me the opportunity to give feedback to all of my students whenever I had time. So sometimes I have time at 12:30 in the middle of the night. Sometimes I have 10, 15 minutes between classes. And the ability of a program like this to allow me to give feedback to my students throughout the course of the day allows me to have my cake and eat it, too.

It allows me to go home, allows me to be a dad.

And it allows me to try to be the best in both of my worlds, which is what I really, really want to do. And I think programs like this really contribute to helping coaches avoid burnout. And if there’s anything that modern co-curriculars can work on, it’s trying to fix the issue of coaching burnout.

I love that you just skipped over the fact that we all know you’re up at 6:00 AM doing comments. We all know that.

So when I think of augmentation, I think about what something gives me that typical tools or similar previous things have not given me. Like what am I able to do slightly differently?

We’ve been able to record for years, right? And that’s one of the biggest tools. If you can get someone–

if you can get your students to record themselves, right? I require all of my public speaking students to record themselves, even though they hate it. But traditional recording, you’re typing out or writing out something that they can read later and try to look and watch with the video.

And what GoReact does is it allows in time comments, so that I don’t have to try to contextualize and say OK, when you did this thing this one moment. And for college speech, that’s incredible because you are able to get light bulb moments so much faster. You’re able to get the students to get it, which allows you to teach at any level.

When you get a really talented student, they can look at something, remember something. If someone’s really trained, it’s a lot easier. But if someone’s not, having that in-time capability is life changing. And then I’m going to bring this just to my public speaking class really quick.

I teach hundreds of 100 level public speaking students. And even though they hate recording themselves, they kind of grit their teeth at the end, and they go you were right, it really helped, because I can say something, and they can watch themselves in the moment. It’s amazing, amazing.

Yeah. And to that point, Megan, I think one of the things that I’ve loved the most about it is in the past, I would say, oh, your warrant statement in your first point doesn’t really effectively link your grounds to your claim. Now, when they make that mistake or it’s not 100% clear, and I type that in, it is time stamped to it, so they’re able to see directly where that comment was.

There’s also the timing issue. When you’re working with students in a traditional coaching session, you really have only two choices. Talk to them about something right now or let them read it on a piece of paper at their own convenience.

But with GoReact, even if you’re doing a traditional coaching session, where you’re like, all right, I want to focus on this one thing, you can still send the student away and say now, go watch the video and critique yourself. And you as the coach or instructor can keep your own comments that you’ve already typed in hidden from the student until after they have critiqued themselves. And this really augments that ability of a student to see where they are in terms of critiquing and evaluating performance once they get out of the side of themselves.

Yeah, Pete, you’re absolutely right. It completely eliminates that competing memories concept.

And it goes straight to what–

they see what you’re seeing, and if they see it through a different lens, it creates a conversation where the student is like, but I thought I was portraying the beginnings of dementia. And I thought that’s what I was portraying. But you as the coach said I just sounded like I don’t know what an old man sounds like. That’s really important for that.

And after augmenting, then there’s the idea–

Hey, Joe, super quick.

I also think that feature touches our humanity as teachers and coaches. So every once in a while, I get really into commenting. And one time, I must have gotten really into commenting, and this student replied to my comment and said, OK, I get it. I get what I need to do better, but did I do anything well? And I was like, oh, no, I forgot to put positive comments.

And then I like quickly–

you know, but that’s not easy to respond to. That’s not easy to catch. But in-time commenting when they can reply, it’s so much easier to say that and to catch my human mistake.

And then I was able to fix it. So another thing I wanted to add quick.

It also means that because students can scroll through and look for good moments, you as a coach or an instructor don’t have to worry about that, oh, say a good thing, say a critical thing, say a good thing, and always sandwich the critique in between the good things.

The sandwich.

Yeah, the sandwich. And there is some value to that. But the reality is, especially when you are working with students who want to get better fast, whether it’s in a class or in coaching, that doesn’t always help. Sometimes you have to say seven critical things.

You can lead with a really good overarching thing, and that’s another thing about GoReact. If you do realize that you pulled a Megan, you can go back and look at that video and add a holistic comment at the very beginning that simply says, all right, I’m going to pick on nine things that you could do better, but really, they’re all little things. You’re doing this one big thing totally great, and that sets the tone.

But now I’m going to turn it back to Adam to talk about modification.

So I think one of the things that I did mention a little bit before was the need for us to rapidly change our delivery mechanisms within competitive forensics and whether–

we were lucky here at Midland, we had iPads everywhere on campus, so that we were kind of somewhat as ready as we could be to deal with it. But I think one of the things that our students rapidly learned was there is an art that goes into capturing someone on camera effectively, and we had to learn and teach that.

And I think that was one of the big areas that we found within modification. And I really have found it actually to be somewhat pleasant and helpful and healthy as an activity has grown over the last couple of years because even as we start to get into some in-person tournaments again, I have found that what we’re doing is instead of the traditional swing, where we’re spending all weekend and ridiculous hours and driving late into the night, we’ll have an asynchronous swing at the beginning of it. And then we’ll just do a Saturday.

And then we can be home and spend time with our families on Sunday, which, oh my God, is wonderful. And so it’s really teaching things wonderful, teaching us opportunities to be helpful and work well together with technology.

When it comes to redefinition, we could talk all day about that. I’m going to let Megan start because she has a couple of sentences to really sum up everything we feel.

When Joe introduced this model, I thought that only one of them applied. I didn’t realize you applied all four steps. And I was like, oh, obviously, it’s redefinition because GoReact has redefined how I teach public speaking and how I coach. So clearly, that’s the one we’re just going to talk about.

And when I find out people teach public speaking or try to coach without this tool, I’m always like shocked I’m always like, you do? I refuse.

I absolutely refuse.

This has saved me so much time and energy. And it makes my quality of teaching and coaching better. And so that’s where I stand on it, and it has redefined how I do public speaking. And I really believe we can change the world 22 public speaking students and a speech team at a time. So that’s what I’m doing, and GoReact is helping.

Adam, you want to jump in on that?

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that we’ve been able to find with competitive forensics these days is there’s changing aspects of what it means to be excellent. I mentioned that duo from Alabama that was being innovative and creative with cameras in ways that I could have never imagined. I think that’s one of the strengths of the activity. I think it’s a strength of experiential learning and giving students the opportunity to practice with and master the kind of skills that they’re going to be expected to be experts at when they enter whatever career choice of their choosing might be is really, I think, one of the wonderful things that programs like this give us the opportunity to do.

And also in terms of redefining, there are four audiences whenever someone gives a public presentation. There’s the putative audience they think they’re speaking to, the actual audience that shows up, the extended audience, which isn’t just social media. But at an event like this, that’s everyone is going to watch this video recording of the session because they have finals next week. And then there’s the historical audience.

And trying to get a student to think about all four different audiences and how do you adapt to those audiences because three of them, you might not even be able to see, that’s a whole new world. And without being able to record, it’s hard. This tool allows a student to think about all four audiences so that it does become something they’re thinking about while they’re speaking.

And in many ways allows them to become those audiences.

All right, hit us with questions. We want to answer them.

We’re excited.

Jessica asks, “How do you translate what you’ve learned as coaches into the classroom?” Can I start with that? Because I’m a math teacher so that might not even occur to people.

In the math classroom, there are some students who really get a concept, and they get stuck on the symbology of math. So asking them to complete a problem may not demonstrate what they understand about the underlying concept because the symbols get in the way. With GoReact, they can talk through it. They can explain what they would do even if the symbols are wrong.

And you can also use it for students who want to talk through a problem that they’re having, but they can’t come to office hours. They can record three minutes of them literally aiming the camera at the work they’re doing and talking through it, and then they just drop it there for the professor to get to when they have a chance to reply.

Really quick, I was leery to do a lot of coaching in my public speaking classrooms because I’m an intense coach, and I just wasn’t sure that was the time and space. And the more I have done coaching aspects where I take something the student has actually done and use it as a teaching moment, the better I do a lot of consent, and I think having them recorded helps. Like it makes it beyond the one moment.

And so once I have recorded them, they’re able to see what I’m talking about. And then when I bring it into class as an example. I really think that I have like up to the level of how I’m able to teach by using individual students’ speeches and things they do in their speeches as an example.

I will say if you’re going to do that as a teaching technique, you have to be really up on consent. And just the aspect of recording helps that, I think, because it takes it out of, oh, I did it, and it’s mine, right? But it’s like, OK, everybody can see it and we’re learning.

JD asks, “What features do your students most like and use? And on the other side, what do they resist or dislike?”

Comments from peers, they love it, and they hate it.

And so on one end, it’s a task that they get to go do after every assignment. I think it’s one of the ways–

it’s one of the key ways that I assess student ability to understand core concepts if they’re able to critique a peer, demonstrating higher levels of understanding. And so being able to look at what students are critiquing each other on goes a very, very long way. Students love to address some of those issues, and they hate also getting critique back. But I think it’s good for them across the board.

One thing that students dislike originally is they think that this is going to make them more afraid.

They’re like, oh my God, all my classmates can comment on me.

But actually a whole bunch of studies, including some case studies that GoReact did, although ironically they’ve hidden their video on YouTube and made it private of that. But these studies show that when students are being recorded, and they can deal with the feedback in a moderated way, because, again, you as an instructor can see that nobody sees the feedback except the person typing it, and then the instructor can go in and remove something that may have not been well phrased or ask for clarification.

That actually decreases communication apprehension. And the students in the class are able to pay attention and be supportive audience members. They don’t feel they need to be taking notes and writing critiques right then because they can do it after class. And so one of the things that students resisted at first, it becomes clear to them, this actually helps decrease their CA.

Anna–

Anna asks, “How do you balance what you tell a student individually with what you want everyone to know?” I think my distinction there is that when I’m talking to a student individually I am really focused on their piece, their topic, their speech, their argument. And when I want everyone to know something, I’m using their topic or their argument or their piece to teach a concept.

I think about I don’t just want you to be able to eat the fish. I want you to go fish.

I want you I don’t just want you to know how to pick this topic, I want you to know how to pick any topic. Any time anywhere anyone tries to get you to pick a topic I want you to know how to do it.

I’m always about those larger concepts. And I’m often pulling out and saying out loud like this isn’t about this person individually. This is about you being able to go apply this to your life. So that’s how I distinguish those.

And then Dan really quick, one of the ways that I’ve gotten around–

because I have moved to several different universities in the last few years. And when I came to UWM, we’ve gone back and forth with the department paying for it, department not paying for it. And one of the things that I really appreciate is that GoReact offers a semester individual plan for students.

And if you are ever interested specifically in public speaking, I use an incredible OER, and I’m a little biased because I helped write part of it.

But because I don’t have them by a textbook, I’m able to say please pay $30 for this tool that is immeasurable. So that’s how I get around that right now. I don’t have a good answer in terms of larger speech team use and finances, but–

And then we’ll end with Cattura’s question. “What challenges have you experienced or hurdles and how did you overcome them?” So not talking about the pricing or students worry about performance anxiety.

I was speaking a little bit about how great it is and how it can reduce burnout, but I think one of the things I have experienced is the flip side of that equation, the expectation of students that I am constantly available, which is not always the case. I need to be home and be a dad a little bit sometimes, too.

So I think one of the things that I’ve had to do and be very, very mindful of is putting clear expectations out and limits of to when I’m going to do things and when I’m not going to do things so that people understand where the realities are, and I think the other thing that we’ve had difficulty with sometimes was just technology equity. Not everyone walks to the table with the same thing in terms of technology in the classroom.

One of the great advantages that I have here at Midland is when you enroll in class, they hand you an iPad. And so everybody has the same here, which really has been helpful. But before we had that, that was definitely a challenge.

Cattura, just getting the students to be on board watching their videos.

And I’m not talking performance anxiety. I’m talking trudgy, like we’ve been talking a lot about, oh, speech team, they want to be here. They want to watch their videos. Yeah, my 100–

and I got through it with brute force, man.

I require it, and I make you write a reflection afterwards. You have to watch your video, and you have to write a reflection. And then usually you say to me with gritted teeth, you’re right, it really helped.

So that’s how I get around it. And once they’re believers, they get it.

I think we’re at time. I think Kelly is going to take back over here and do some housekeeping things. And I know that I can stick around if there is a forum for that if anybody has questions. I know Adam has a class he has to get back to.

Thank you so much for joining our presenters and then, of course, all of our attendees, too. We appreciate the time that you’ve taken to kind of plan and prepare for this and all of the great knowledge that you shared with us today. I know it’s definitely helpful for me and then, of course, everyone else who’s attended as well.

We really appreciate everyone being here today. Please feel free to join us tomorrow for day two. It starts at 9:15 AM Mountain Daylight Time.

And we’ll have two more sessions tomorrow and then another keynote to wrap it up. Everything will be recorded, and you can receive recordings. And I believe at the end of the month, so next week to rewatch all of your favorite sessions or the sessions you couldn’t join.

But again, want to just say thank you to our panelists here today. We appreciate it. And hope everyone has a great rest of your day and good luck with finals coming up.