Taking part in the Greenroom study

Most community college faculty never get to practice a hard conversation with a student before having it for real. There is no coach in the room, no observer, and usually no budget. Greenroom is an attempt to give faculty a place to rehearse. Whether it actually helps is an open question, and this study is how we find out honestly instead of assuming.

The results will be published so that other people who support faculty can use them, whatever they show.

Any instructional faculty member, full-time or part-time, at any college, who is 18 or older.

One exception: if you report directly to James Jarc, please do not enroll. That is a safeguard for you, not a judgment about you.

Answer a short set of questions now. Five questions about how certain you feel that you can handle specific kinds of conversations with students. About three minutes.

Use Greenroom however you want. As often or as rarely as you like. There is no required number of rehearsals, no schedule, and nothing happens if you use it once and stop. The study is as interested in that as in anything else.

Answer the same questions again later, either after your fifth rehearsal or when the study period ends, whichever comes first. This time there is one extra part: we will also ask you to think back and rate how certain you felt before you started. People's sense of what a good conversation requires often changes as they practice, so asking both ways gives a truer picture than asking once.

Optional, and separate: at the end of any rehearsal you may choose to share that one conversation, so a human can check whether the AI behaved the way it was designed to. This is a separate decision every single time. You can join the study and never share a single one. Saying no costs you nothing and we do not ask twice.

Optional: your dashboard shows what your own use looks like. If it does not match how the term actually felt to you, there is a box to say so. That mismatch is useful information, not a complaint.

Your answers to the question sets described above, and to any open-ended boxes you choose to fill in.

How you used Greenroom: how many rehearsals you completed, which kinds of conversations you practiced, how long sessions lasted, whether you finished or stopped partway, whether you used features like the do-over or the reflection box, and simple counts drawn from the conversation itself, such as how many times you spoke and whether you opened with a question. These are numbers, not words. No sentence you typed is stored in this record.

Whether the software behaved as designed in your sessions: whether the coaching cited its sources properly, whether a safety response was triggered, and similar checks. These are about our system, not about you.

Your rehearsal conversations and your written reflections are encrypted on your device before they are sent. The investigator cannot read them. Neither can the company hosting the data. There is no administrator override and no back door. The only way anyone reads one is if you specifically choose to share it, one conversation at a time.

Your name, email, and account details are never attached to study data. Study records carry a random code instead.

Nothing about your college, your department, or your employment goes anywhere. No college receives any information about you. There is no report to any administrator. There is no institutional dashboard. This is not something that exists and is turned off; it was never built.

No information about your actual students is wanted or kept. The system removes names and identifying details from anything you type, and the practice partner is designed to redirect you toward roles rather than real people.

Time. The questions take about ten minutes total.

Discomfort. Practicing hard conversations, and answering questions about how confident you feel, can bring up real situations that did not go well. Some people find that useful. Some find it uncomfortable. You can stop a rehearsal at any point, skip any question, and leave the study entirely.

Re-identification, honestly stated. Your study record carries a code rather than your name, and there is a list linking codes to accounts, held separately and restricted. That means your data is coded, not anonymous. Because this study is small, a determined person who already knew a lot about you might be able to make a guess from a published combination of details. To limit this, results are only ever reported in groups, no group smaller than ten is reported at all, and no individual is ever described in a way that could identify them.

The usual risks of anything online. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, but no system is perfect.

This study poses no physical risk and no risk to your employment.

You may find that practicing helps you. You may not. We honestly do not know yet, which is why the study exists, and nobody should join it expecting a guaranteed personal benefit.

The likelier benefit is to other people: faculty who come after you, and the people who design professional development for them, who currently have very little evidence to work from about this kind of tool.

What you tell us also shapes the next version of Greenroom, which everyone who uses it gets, including people who never joined the study.

Greenroom is free. It is free whether or not you join the study, and it stays free for the length of this research. If that ever changed, you would be told, and nothing you have already contributed would be affected.

There is no payment for taking part. This is a deliberate choice. Participation is light, the tool is free, and paying people to answer questions about a free tool can put quiet pressure on those who could use the money. If you would rather be compensated for your time, the right answer is to not join, and to use Greenroom anyway.

You do not have to join. You can use every part of Greenroom without joining, now and later.

Your decision has no effect on your employment, your evaluation, your contract or course assignments, your standing at any institution, or your relationship with anyone. No employer is told who joined, who declined, or who withdrew. No supervisor is involved in any way.

If you are contingent or part-time faculty, this paragraph is written for you in particular. Nothing about this study can reach your job.

You can withdraw at any time, from this page, with one click and no explanation.

When you withdraw, we stop collecting study data from you immediately, and we delete the study data we already hold from you, except for anything already included in a completed analysis or published result. Once a finding is in a journal, it cannot be pulled back out, and no consent form can honestly promise otherwise.

You are left out of every dataset created after that point.

Your Greenroom account and your own practice history are untouched. Withdrawing from the study does not delete your account or take anything away from you. If you want your whole account deleted, that is a separate request and you can make it at any time.

Study records are stored under a random code, not your name. The list connecting codes to accounts is kept separately with restricted access.

Your rehearsal conversations and reflections stay encrypted and unreadable, as described above.

When the investigator looks at study data, he sees it through a view that shows the coded records only and cannot connect them back to a person. Those views are logged.

Results are reported only in groups. Groups smaller than ten are not reported at all, and are left out rather than rounded off. There is no public statistics page, now or in the future.

He built Greenroom. He designed and developed it personally, on his own time, with his own resources, before bringing it into a research context. He wants it to work. That is a real bias, and the study is designed to limit it: what counts as success is registered publicly in advance, the measurements are automatic rather than chosen after the fact, and a result showing no benefit will be published as a result showing no benefit.

He holds a leadership role at Cuyahoga Community College. That means he may hold institutional standing relative to some participants. This is why direct reports are excluded, why no employer is ever told anything, and why participation is walled off from employment completely.

He does not make money from this. Greenroom is free and sells nothing. A paid version was explored earlier and was never launched; no subscription was ever sold and no money was ever collected. That option was set aside specifically so that nobody would be studied by someone profiting from them. This research is not expected to produce commercial profit. If that ever changed, participants would be informed, and you would have no obligation of any kind.

Findings will be presented at conferences and submitted for publication in journals that serve faculty development.

Everything reported is grouped and de-identified. No participant is named, quoted identifiably, or described in a way that could single them out. If a quotation from something you wrote would be used, it comes only from text you chose to share, and only in a form that cannot be traced to you.

The de-identified dataset may be kept and used for later analysis by this investigator, including future waves of this research. It will not be sold and will not be shared for marketing.

This study is about your teaching practice, not your wellbeing, and Greenroom is not a counseling service or a crisis resource. If any of this brings up something heavier and you would like support, your institution's employee assistance program is a good first call, and in the United States the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text at any hour. If you are worried about a student, your college's student support or care team is the right first call.