Episode #124

Time-saving Teaching with Barbi Honeycutt

Do you ever feel like your teaching and/or students are taking the back burner to your own research and publishing? Do you feel the tension between being a great teacher or a great writer?

You don’t have to choose one or the other. Both can be done well if you learn how to strategically plan for both, but we all know it can be so hard to find a balance between both of these aspects of the academic’s job. While both of these are of equal importance, there are some definite tips, tricks, and strategies you can begin to implement that will save you time in your day-to-day teaching life. These tips will be good for you, and great for your students!

MORE DETAILS

Today’s guest is Barbi Honeycutt. Barbi is passionate about training professors to become better teachers. In doing so she founded a company called Lecture Breakers. Through her work with Lecture Breakers, she travels around and does speaking engagements with universities and works with centers for teaching and learning. She also does many online engagements as well.

Barbi has an online conference from June 7-9 that many of you would thoroughly enjoy and learn so much from! Sign up for her Lecture Breakers conference here! The registration deadline is May 31st, so don’t miss out on your opportunity to attend!

Barbi actually takes an episode that I did earlier in this podcast feed called ‘Time Saving Teaching’. She pulls out 3 important ideas and develops them and gives so many ideas for really effective and engaging but also time-saving teaching.

I hope that you’ll find that this episode helps you to corral your teaching and inspires you to try something new with your teaching.

Key points discussed:

Barbi’s background in education and how she created her own business out of that
3 recommendations out of Cathy’s 7 (from episode 11) for when teaching feels like it’s taking over
- 1. Do more participation and activities in class where you’re turning that work over to the students.
- 2. Use Templates and a process in your lesson planning
- 3. Think about active learning as assessment in action.

Unpacking the fear that active learning = more prep.
Validating the idea of not reinventing the wheel
Barbi’s 4 step lesson planning process: PLAN
- P: prior knowledge
- L: learning activity
- A: assessment
- N: next step

Creating ‘Evergreen’ content for your classroom- content that isn’t specific for a certain class, semester, etc. But one you can go back to every semester
How to rethink assessments from tiny things like quizzes, to assessments with a larger audience than just you as the teacher
Assessment as learning, not necessarily grading
Barbi’s yearly Lecture Breakers conference- online conference June 7-9
All conference videos are recorded and are available for 30 days
Community within the conference where you are learning and chatting with others alongside the sessions
Cathy’s webinar at the Lecture Breakers conference on writing
Cathy’s special webinar for the Lecture Breakers audience that is all about making time to publish even when you have a heavy teaching load. This special webinar is on June 29!

Key Quotes:

“The one who does the work does the learning.” Dr. Terry Doyle, Episode 112 of Barbi’s podcast
“Let go of some of that structure and control just a little bit, and see what happens.” – Barbi Honeycutt
“When you do active learning, your prep is not the content necessarily. It’s the structure of the activity.”- Barbi Honeycutt
“You’re moving from that lecture on the podium to being that coach or that guide or facilitator…there’s just something in that where your authentic self can show up and you can say, ‘Wow, I really do know, this stuff’.”- Barbi Honeycutt
“The more evergreen kinds of things that we can create, the better”- Cathy Mazak- [26:30]
“Active learning is actually assessment in action.” – Barbi Honeycutt [30:20]