In this episode, Eric Mazur sits down with Jessamyn Neuhaus, director of the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence and professor in the School of Education at Syracuse University, to talk about her book, Snafu Edu: Teaching and Learning When Things Go Wrong in the College Classroom. Jessamyn unpacks the STIR framework (Stop, Think, Identify, Repair) for navigating classroom disruptions, explores how traditional grading fuels distrust and disconnection, and presents that the goal isn't fewer snafus — it's a healthier relationship with the fact that things can, and will, go wrong. Along the way, she and Eric dig into student-centered learning, power dynamics in the classroom, and why "the super teacher" is a myth worth letting go of.
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Eric: Thank you for joining us today for this episode on navigating unpredictability in the college classroom. In the Social Learning Amplified podcast series, I'm your host, Eric Mazur, and our guest on the episode today is Jessamyn Neuhaus. Jessamyn is a scholar of teaching and learning with over 20 years of classroom experience. She currently serves as the director of the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence, and as a professor in the School of Education at Syracuse University. You may know her as the author of the widely loved Geeky Pedagogy, or as the editor of Picture a Professor, a vital work on interrupting biases in the classroom. Throughout her career, including her time as a history professor at SUNY Plattsburgh, where she earned a SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching, Jessamyn has championed the idea that effective teaching is a skill we can all develop. She joins us today to discuss her latest book, Snafu Edu: Teaching and Learning When Things Go Wrong in the College Classroom. I should also mention that we just wrapped up a wonderful Perusall book event with Jessamyn earlier this month, where a group of educators annotated Snafu Edu and engaged in a deep, asynchronous conversation about these very topics. Jessamyn, thank you for being here.

Jessamyn: Thank you for having me.

Eric: Well, it's an honor and a pleasure. I love the title of this book because it acknowledges something we often try to hide. Teaching is inherently unpredictable. I mean, in my career, there's been unpredictable things in many different dimensions. What were the origins of this book, and why did you feel now was the time to write about things going wrong?

Jessamyn: When I was pursuing my doctorate in U.S. history and gender studies, I became utterly fascinated by 20th century prescriptive texts that reinforced sociocultural and especially domestic normative ideology. So I'm talking about stuff like cookbooks, etiquette guides, 1950s classroom mental hygiene films. As a scholar in the archives, I just loved examining that evidence of what people decided was the best, most ideal way to live and be, especially at school and at home. If you're fascinated by these things, please be sure to check out my first two books, which I wrote as a historian: one is on cookbooks and gender, and the other is on advertising representations of housewives. So, so anyway, why be a scholar of teaching and learning then? I've always had in the back of my mind a similar question: how does advice and research about college teaching reinforce certain norms and ideals? Not intentionally or consciously, but as discourse, as texts doing ideological work in our culture. And how could I write about teaching, give actual advice about teaching in real life, that interrupted some of those prescriptive ideals? I wanted to write a book, I've always wanted to write about teaching, and I wanted to write this book that would be useful in people's daily teaching work, drawing on the abundant research about effective teaching practices. But at the same time, I really wanted this book to emphasize that our daily teaching work is messy, and that it's not a matter of if, but when, something will go awry. 

The time was right because I'm fortunate to have, at this point in my career, a platform as a scholar of teaching and learning. I mean, I'm no James Lang or Kevin Gannon or Sarah Rose Cavanagh, but I have the ability, in the world of educational development and teaching scholarship, I have the power to publish my work and speak to people about things I think are important and that need more intention, attention, and discussion. And I am in a position to be able to articulate very clearly and loudly, in this case: OMG, things can really go wrong in teaching and learning.

Eric: What you just said actually triggered a thought. I often say that the chaos of students talking to each other in a classroom is where the learning actually happens. Do you think that our fear of snafus, because that's what people typically have, right, or things going wrong, actually prevents us from embracing more social, student-centered learning? Could that be part of some sort of people's resistance to giving up control in the classroom, which in a sense is what STIR does?

Jessamyn: I think so. I think that's a good way to think about it. I don't think that's everything that's going on, but for sure part of the reason snafus are so daunting and can be so overwhelming is the idea of being able to perfectly control everything, which goes hand in hand with instructor-centered classrooms, when you are the full center of attention and the impetus is on you to deliver content. Yes, like that sense of, it's all up to me. It's interesting, I hadn't thought about it this way, but as you were talking, I was remembering how in my work consulting with faculty, when they ask me about challenges or things that are going kind of amiss in the classroom, I do often recommend bringing in the students to work together, to try to figure it out, to try to make it better. And part of that conversation is always about: this isn't all on you. This is the whole class together, you, the students, and you and the students together, and the students with other students. This is a challenge, an issue that we all in that classroom have a responsibility to try to figure out and try to make better.

Eric: Absolutely. In that respect, I recently read a book, Students as Partners in Education, which I think is a great example. I must say, when I saw the title, I was initially skeptical, but I've wholeheartedly adopted it, and I think, yeah, it should not all come from the instructors — we need to meet our students somewhere.

Jessamyn: Partners is one of our signature programs here at the CTL at Syracuse University. So students as partners are definitely on my radar here.

Eric: Now, in your book, returning to your book. You suggest a general approach to addressing the inevitable disruptions and failures in the classroom, and you summarize that approach with the acronym STIR. Can you walk our listeners through what that acronym stands for, and why it serves as a better framework for faculty than just, let's say, damage control when a snafu occurs?

Jessamyn: Yeah, yeah, thank you. So STIR stands for Stop, Think, Identify, Repair. We in educational development do love those acronyms, this is a variation on similar types of conflict resolution strategies, such as SOAR, which is Stop, Observe, Assess, React. It's just a way of framing some of the preparation we can do for when the snafus hit the fan. A reminder that in situations that pose problems, when things start to go wrong, we can usually exercise some agency in the classroom and during interactions with students. We're always influenced by our institutional context, our intersectional positionality, but we do usually have some kind of agency to take a beat, use our big brains to think about what all might be going on, and then approach with curiosity and try to identify the factors in what all is going wrong, and the extent to which it's possible to repair. 

I just have to make a note here that my book doesn't address the very worst-case scenario for a classroom, like an active shooter situation or physical threat, that's 911, that's not STIR. I think it's a good approach for faculty teaching college because, like my first book, in Snafu Edu I'm really writing directly to nerds like me. So what up, fellow nerds, people who love their scholarly subjects and who may not always, but may not be quite as socially skilled as they are academically skilled. And the framework, for productively navigating professorial face-plants, is for those of us with the highly trained brains who excel at pondering and thinking. So when we stop, you call a timeout, halt class business as usual, and pause. And this, I will say this is the hardest step. We were talking before about the instructor-centered classroom, it is often the hardest step for instructors who feel this pressure to always be on and always be managing. But pausing allows us to gather our thoughts and silence our knee-jerk internal, or worse, external, commentary. Some of us are very good at the snark and the sarcasm, which is never helpful in difficult situations. 

So, pausing, and then thinking, that's using our big awesome brains, examining the situation with as much clear-eyed intellectual and emotional curiosity as you can summon: what's really going on here. And then identify, describe, define, explain exactly what's gone sideways, even if it's just to yourself. And then repair, in whatever way is in your power as an individual educator in your unique teaching context, applying short-term patches or implementing long-term changes needed to mitigate and reduce that snafu. And I did choose "repair" very deliberately, because the word implies patching up, fixing as much as you can, because, contrary to this ginormous streak of perfectionism that runs through academia, there is no perfect, snafu-proof way to teach and learn.

Eric: I can imagine that if a teacher is completely stuck in a more traditional faculty teaching approach, it's very hard to implement any of that, because, you know, when you're standing in front of the class, you don't feel you can stop and think, because you're constantly in delivery mode. So do you feel what you wrote in your book applies mostly to a student-centered audience?

Jessamyn: It's true that I am allergic to pomposity generally, and would like to see more student-centered approaches, but the first section of my book is about inequity. When I give the advice, hey, we should have more student-centered classrooms, that's with a big asterisk, that not all of us enjoy the same kind of privileges. We are all embedded in what Roxanna Harlow called teaching disparities in higher education. So I'm not going to glibly say, everybody, you should give up all the power that you have in the classroom, because power, academic authority, is gendered and racialized in ways, so if you don't meet those criteria, then me saying, hey, try to create more collaborative learning environments has a different cost, a different toll. 

So it's not so much that student-centered is the only way you might implement STIR. It's more about trying to empower readers with whatever agency they have available to them, in whatever teaching context, in ways that empower them. That's always been my goal as a scholar of teaching and learning, to empower teaching self-efficacy, a sense that, yes, things will go wrong, but I have some tools, in the book I call it your go-bag for when things go wrong, I have some tools to navigate that productively, that will, in the end, mean I won't be up at night worrying and lamenting and wondering what did I do wrong, but moving forward as much as possible.

Eric: It's kind of ironic, because as instructors we all know that there's no innovation, no success without failures, right? I mean, the road to success is littered with failures, and here we are avoiding failures in education, which are probably the road to better education. Anyway, you said something interesting about power and power dynamics, and I think this is a great connection to the point I want to raise next, because you've done fascinating research on the history and discourse of traditional grading approaches. And in the book, you discuss distrust as a major hurdle. So how much of the distrust is actually a byproduct of the way we grade, which has to do with the power dynamic between the instructor and the students, and how can we unsnap, so to speak, that relationship to prioritize actual learning?

Jessamyn: I do have to give a major shout-out to all the other scholars who have been reading, writing, talking about grading reform, it has made a real impression on me. And just as I've gotten older, and continued in my career, I have noticed more the way that traditional grades contribute to distrust in the classroom. And, like you mentioned, the issue of failure — failure in school settings is almost universally learned as something to be avoided at all costs. It's not folded into most traditional schooling structures, and that does a real disservice to teachers and to learners. 

One of the things I wanted to really emphasize in this book is that these things that go wrong — and I have five big groups: inequity, disconnection, distrust, failure, and fear — they snafu learning for students, and they snafu teaching for us. Most books about teaching, including my first book, Geeky Pedagogy, focus mainly on the learner's experience and strategies for addressing and reducing obstacles to student success. And in Snafu Edu, I wanted to make sure that when we talk about things going wrong in the college classroom, we're talking about everyone in the college classroom, including us, the instructors. 

On that point, traditional grading is such a bummer for us too, not just the students, nobody got a PhD so they could grade. Everybody hates it, and we're addicted to it in this weird way, it's just so hard to imagine anything else. But the proactive strategy I recommend for increasing trust and student success is to reduce the harms of grading. It doesn't take a full-on grading revolution to reduce some of the harms. There are some small changes people can make, like offering ways to drop the lowest grade of a set of assignments, to increase opportunities for practice in the classroom. There's ways to mitigate that particular harm and build some of that trust we're talking about.

Eric: You're preaching completely to the choir here. I don't know about our listeners, but with me, I've long argued that traditional grading is often the enemy of social learning, certainly because it creates competition in many cases, but of learning in general. I mean, it pushes students towards surface learning rather than deep learning, it takes away the intrinsic motivation to learn. Six years ago, at the beginning of the pandemic, actually, I switched to specifications grading, and then this year I took the plunge and adopted an ungrading approach. I mean, ideally I would like to go to narrative evaluation, because, I mean, we know how meaningless grades are, they don't correlate to what we really want to know. But in your view, does moving, and especially since the first part of the book is focused on equity: does moving towards more equitable grading practices reduce the number of snafus we face, or does it just change the nature of them?

Jessamyn: The class I'm currently teaching right now here at Syracuse is a seminar called Problems with Grades, and students are reading and talking about different grading systems. One thing that's really emerged as an insight for me, in talking with them and hearing their discussions and hearing their responses to the reading, is that traditional grading does do a lot of harm, but in well-designed classes it significantly reduces those harms — and vice versa.

What they're telling me, in their responses, as I'm thinking about what we're talking about, is that a well-designed class, one that takes into account a lot of high-impact practices, that really works on creating opportunities for practice in the classroom, and is very, very clear and transparent, students are really able to succeed and thrive in those classes, even taking into account some of these traditional grading structures. Traditional grading interferes with learning when a class is poorly organized, when it's not transparent, when students don't know how they're doing, when students don't feel like they can trust the instructor,  that really amplifies and exacerbates the harm of traditional grading. Of course, course design really, really matters. Our communications with students really, really matter, and we can definitely point to the ways traditional grading interferes with learning. But in my work with these students, really delving into this topic, I've been heartened by the ways that small things we do to improve teaching and learning increase success. Scaffolding, normalizing mistakes, building trust, reaching out to students, that really makes an important difference, and helps significantly offset some of those harms.

Eric: You mentioned the five parts of your book: inequity, disconnection, distrust, failure, and fear, so these are all deeply social barriers. Could you give us an example of a snafu related to disconnection, and what kinds of proactive strategies you recommend for navigating it?

Jessamyn: Well, one big disconnection that is evergreen, and is really neither more nor less in the wake of AI, which is on everybody's minds, is disconnection from the relevance, the point and purpose of our subjects. And so many students can often feel really disconnected from the reason for, why am I in this class besides fulfilling a requirement. This is a painful snafu for scholars and teachers in higher education who have devoted, like, literally their whole professional lives to studying a subject that they found so interesting and fascinating that they chose the route of academia, which is not an easy career path, to spend their whole lives studying it, and then, semester after semester, to have class after class of students who are just like, man, why, what's the point, I'm never going to use this, etc., etc. 

So helping students connect to the point and purpose of the subjects we are teaching, one proactive strategy is creating opportunities for students themselves to identify what is the point and purpose. So finding ways to build into our classes opportunities for them to reflect on and identify: oh, this is why it's important, this is how I can use it, this is what it means to me in my life, I don't know why this might be relevant in your life, but you, the student, do, tell me. Working those kinds of moments, possibilities for reflection, help students build those connections.

Eric: Let me end here with two short questions, and let's accompany those with a short answer. So if there's one primary message you'd like a tired, stressed-out reader, who presumably is also an instructor, to take away from Snafu Edu, what would it be?

Jessamyn: Sure, it's three points, and I have to give a shout-out to Liz Norell, author of The Present Professor. She was an early reader of Snafu Edu and helped me articulate this. So it's these three things: humans mess up, inequities, systemic inequities, exist, but the super teacher doesn't. And I won't get on my super-teacher soapbox, people who know me have heard me talk about it elsewhere, I go on at length about it in the book, but there's this myth, this ideal, of a super teacher that does not exist, that is not how things work in real life. Get that guy out of your head so you can embrace your own teaching.

Eric: Is the goal to have fewer things go wrong, or is it to change your relationship with the fact that things will go wrong?

Jessamyn: Totally the latter. I mean, the book is full of proactive strategies for reducing inequity, reducing disconnection, increasing equity, increasing connection, increasing trust, reducing fear, increasing agency, but it's also just really about creating the space and opportunity for people to acknowledge, perfectionist, high-achieving, super-smart professors, to acknowledge things go sideways. Snafu, you know, situation normal, all fouled up, that is the way things are, sometimes, and we can acknowledge and talk about it and just gain some power, some agency, by understanding that sometimes things go sideways.

Eric: Jessamyn, thank you so much for this conversation.

Jessamyn: Thank you so much for having me.

Eric: It's so refreshing to hear someone talk so honestly about the reality of the classroom. I would like to conclude by thanking our audience for listening and inviting everyone to return for our next episode. On behalf of all of our listeners, Jessamyn, thank you again for joining us today.

Jessamyn: Thank you everyone. Teach long and prosper.

Eric: You can find Jessamyn's latest books now for adults through the University of Oklahoma Press, Amazon, and other major bookstores. To find our Social Learning Amplified podcast and more, go to perusall.com/sociallearningamplified, one word. Subscribe to find out about upcoming episodes, and I hope to welcome you back. Social Learning Amplified is sponsored by Perusall, the social learning platform that motivates students by increasing engagement, driving collaboration, and building community through your favorite course content. To learn more, join us at one of our introductory webinars, visit perusall to learn more and register.

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