Month: May 2006

After reading two journal articles recently, I realized that our jobs are even harder than we thought they were. In 1999 Justin Kruger and David Dunning found out that people who are unskilled in certain types of domains (logic and grammar, for example) can’t tell that they’re unskilled and (and this is the real kicker) they can’t even tell they’ve done poorly when they’re shown the work of skilled people.* In their study, Kruger and Dunning found that people who scored in the bottom quartile of each of their skill sets suffered from five fatal misconceptions.

• They significantly overestimated their performances.
• They tended to feel that they performed at a higher level than their peers.
• They believed that they were above average in ability.
• They were unable to gain insight into their own performance from analyzing their peers’ performance. And they were unable to recognize competence in others.

Late last year Melissa Gross** took this research and applied it to research skills and information literacy. Her article posed many questions and called for quite a bit of research into how this “competence theory” intersects with things like library user anxiety and research habits. This is worth reading, especially if you realize from the outset that it doesn’t provide any answers to the questions it raises, and that it’s highly focused on interpreting competence theory, so it doesn’t address other factors that may play into incompetence.

What really resonated with me, though, is the notion that the less skilled people are, the less they will be able to make use of social comparison as a learning tool. They will be less able to see the difference between their performance and an expert’s, and therefore less able to learn to be more like the expert. The first time I read that, it didn’t really jump out at me. But then, as I started thinking how this applied to my job (training those who don’t know what they’re doing when it comes to research) I realized that instruction librarians rely heavily on their students’ ability to see that what the librarians are doing when they approach a research problem is different and more sophisticated than what the students have been doing and, as a result of realizing these differences, learn to search more like the librarians. This is the essence of the lecture/demo method of library instruction. And this is just not effective for the least skilled of our students.

So here’s my pledge. I will find a way to break my habit of demonstrating techniques and then having students recreate my strategies using their own search topics. I will find a way to provide the feedback (negative as well as positive) that Kruger and Dunning say is required for advancement without making library instruction any more of an odious chore than it is for my students. By hook or by crook, I will find a way to increase the skills of my lowest quartile of library searchers to the point where they can begin to avail themselves of social comparison without sabotaging the learning efforts of the highest quartile.

My next class is scheduled for Tuesday afternoon. It’s only for three students, and I’ve got an hour and a half. This is the perfect opportunity to experiment with a different teaching style. Wish me luck.

*Kruger, Justin and David Dunning. “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 77 (Dec 1999): 1121-1134.
**Gross, Melissa. “The Impact of Low-Level Skills on Information-Seeking Behavior: Implications of Competency Theory for Research and Practice.” Reference & User Services Quarterly. 45.2 (2005): 155-163.

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Our campus has a very active Learning and Teaching Center which hosts educational opportunities on a weekly basis for those involved in learning and teaching. Some weeks it’s faculty presenting ideas or strategies that worked well or didn’t, and sometimes they bring in outside speakers to talk to us. Today, they brought in Lee Shulman, President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to talk to us on the topic “Signature Pedagogies: Lessons from the Professions.” This session rocked. Mr. Shulman didn’t know that he was talking to librarians, and he certainly didn’t mention information literacy, but he had a lot to say that resonated with me and inspired me to think differently about my teaching.

First the background. Shulman and his group are studying the learning and teaching that happens in five professions: Clergy, Law, Engineering, Nursing, and Medicine. So far they’ve completed and published the study on educating the clergy. Law and Engineering are coming in a year, and Nursing and Medicine are coming after that.

In doing so, they’ve found that the learning that happens in each of these professions is quite distinctive (in fact, “signature”) and yet have quite a lot of common ground. It is distinctive in that the method each takes to go from reading and assimilating facts to actually doing something with what you’ve learned looks very different. There’s the signature law school classroom with professors cold-calling, students sweating, and much debate. There’s the medical “rounds” method of learning. Engineers model things in groups. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

But it’s what’s the SAME about this type of learning that really struck me. With what he called “uncommon dogmatism” Shulman listed seven things that happen in this type of preparatory training that make it particularly effective.

• The structure of the learning and teaching are routine. You go into a torts class and you absolutely KNOW, probabilities notwithstanding, that you’ll be called on to argue a point.
• Students are visible. They are active participants in the learning that happens, and they must publicly perform for the group. Shulman says, “You show me a class of kids who think they’re invisible and I’ll show you a class that isn’t learning.”
• Student performances are interrelated. They build on each other and refer to each other directly. Any student may be called upon to critique or build on a comment another student made an hour ago, or a week ago. Students are therefore held accountable for their performances.
• Because the class content is driven by student input, this is a pedagogy of uncertainty. The structure is routine, but you can never be completely prepared for what you’ll encounter during the day.
• Because there is this element of uncertainty, there is emotional investment. Students are worried about what might happen in class, or they are excited, or a little of both, or something else entirely. I don’t think it matters what kind of emotions are invested; what matters is that the students CARE about their performances.
• These are pedagogies of formation. They help students build a sense of themselves and their knowledge and their purpose.
• And finally, there is a sense of responsibility. I had to leave before he was done explaining this point (committee meetings…), but I wrote down “sense of responsibility” anyway because that’s what he was saying as I left.

In the training grounds of these five professions, students learn habits of mind, habits of action, and habits of the heart so that they can access the theory and knowledge of their professions, act on that knowledge, and deploy it correctly in society. One of my favorite quotes from Shulman: “You can’t be injected with a habit. You can’t be inspired with a habit. You have to develop habits by doing things over and over again.”

So how does this jive with information literacy (and can we please come up with a term for info lit that people outside of libraries can understand)? Well, it got me thinking that we’re not consistently doing any of the things he listed to train our students to be adept information consumers. Or rather, we’re really good at the “routine” part, but we’ve got the wrong routine. We’ve got the “come sit and be bored” routine down absolutely pat. But we need to change that and SOON. We need to get students off their behinds, producing knowledge for and with their classmates, trying, failing, trying again, succeeding, and really getting some transferable skills out of our classes.

I don’t care if we only get 50 minutes or 15 minutes. Let’s face it, a full semester probably wouldn’t even cover it. Stop whining about lack of time and focus on maximizing that time to help develop habits of mind, habits of action, and habits of the heart. Wouldn’t it be great if Carnegie researchers could step into our classrooms and be able to tell that research instruction was happening as easily as they can tell that law or medicine instruction is happening? Wouldn’t it be great if we were consistent enough that students would come into our classrooms knowing that being invisible wouldn’t cut it? Wouldn’t it be great if we could take Darlene Fichter’s concept of Radical Trust and apply it to instruction, recognizing that instruction wouldn’t proceed in an orderly fashion, but that we’d probably cover the important bits with student-driven instruction?

Now I realize I keep saying “we” need to change even though I fully realize that there are great instructors out there who are completely engaging and really get their students engaged. But what I mean is that the profession as a whole (and me, in particular) needs to let go, give students some credit, and shift from including “active learning components” in our instruction to having the whole session be active.

I’ll let you know if I figure out how to put all this great theory into practice. (Obviously, my professional training wasn’t built on a signature pedagogy that Carnegie will ever be studying…but maybe they should…) Don’t hold your breath. And please, if you’ve got tips for me as I jump into the strange unknown of structured “unstructured” teaching, shout them out. Be an active participant.

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