lauren's library blog

On Monday and Tuesday I participated in the NCLA Library Instruction 2.0 Conference. I participated on a panel on instruction 2.0 strategies, and in a workshop on using Google Docs/products for teaching. Between that, and having a class (oh, the irony!) that I had to teach back at Wake, I didn’t have much time to attend other workshops. Here are the notes from the keynote:

Honing Our Craft, Developing our Art
Debra Gilchrist

• Talk about something inspiring
• Good teaching doesn’t just happen, it takes practice, and it’s an art
• quote from angela provitera mcglynn “successful beginnings for college teaching
• Intention
• Leaders in the field (instruction and faculty development)Parker Palmer “The Courage to Teach”
• Not necessarily about technique, what others are doing… adapt that to your own teaching style and philosophy.
• We often think that teaching is a public activity, but not so much: closed room, teachers don’t see what others teach to build meaning, etc. much more of a private endeavor than a public endeavor.
• “What are we doing when we are ‘connecting’ with our students or using techniques that reveal ‘personhood?’”
• Ken Bain “What the Best College Teachers Do”
• provide guidance over expertise
• engage students in higher order intellectual activities (Bloom’s taxonomy)
• help students answer questions themselves
• entice students to wonder what the next question is
• teaching as just as intellectually challenging as research and library work
• Maryellen Weimer “Learner-Centered Teaching”
• “Teaching Professor” newsletter editor
• her most recent book synthesizes the scholarship of teaching and learning
• urges us to look at the processes we use to teach
• what is the purposes of our teaching? that assignment isn’t for us.
• remember the balance of power
• letting students choose: the assignments they do, the point value and timing
• we can’t teach all the content, and if we tell it all to the students, it won’t stick anyway
• for librarians: teach that content that you know they won’t ask about on their own. can print out handouts for howto for some things (this is part of the thinking behind the toolkit)
• Al Guskin (change magazine article 2004)
• Stephen Brookfield “Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher”
• lenses: autobiography, students, colleagues, literature
• reflective teaching: how has the way you learned impact your teaching today
• look at assessment of learning as well as what the students say about teaching style
• Rita Smilkstein “Born to Learn”
• about the brain’s natural learning processes
• every group, from kindergarten through graduate school, had the same learning process:
• motivation, start to practice, advanced practice, skillfulness, refinement, mastery
• she argues that this is how the brain learns
• “see if you can figure it out and connect it” is the mating call of the brain
• Outcome: what do you want your student to be able to do?
• Outcomes should be rooted in info lit definition, the mission/values/goals of the institution
• ID process: Criteria “how will you know the student has done this well?”
• Curriculum: “what does the student need to know to do well?”
• Pedagogy: What’s the learning activity?”
• Assessment: “How will the student demonstrate the learning?”
• Criteria: “How will you know the student has done this well?” (let them have it in advance!)
• Asked us, “what would you like students to say about your teaching?” “What would this look like?” & “Insert that into your next class, what would that look like?”
• Relevancy: use relevant examples from their life
• Asked us, “what things do you do well outside of work, what are the two you do particularly well?” Anything that you can learn from that to bring to the practice of teaching
• Encouraged us to look at Scott Walter’s work
• Her dissertation/work around the idea that libraries should lead instructional change
• based on student learning and success, not the library
• teaching within our domain of expertise
• building a teaching and learning community
• design for culture, context, and faculty needs
• My favorite part was her emphasis on libraries as having a unique role and capability to support and lead the institution’s teaching efforts
• not about content: about setting dynamic for bigger learning
• establish problem at the beginning of the semester, and help work through it
• get students started, have them come back and check in
• process based pedagogies
• inquiry based
• resource
• research based
• problem based learning

It was a great kickoff to an instruction conference. That’s two NCLA successes in the past month. It’s good to be in North Carolina!

Related posts:

1. playing with library instruction
2. Does library instruction matters to students?
3. unc-tlt wrap-up
4. An Instruction Kindof Week
5. My Library Roots and Routes