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Category: Teaching and Learning

"Training" Does Not Equal Teaching or Learning

Published by Iris on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

I hate being trained. I hate training people. I’m not good at either one. And yet I love teaching and learning, and I’m decently good at both of those. Don’t get me wrong. I recognize the value and often even the necessity of training. I just wish I didn’t have to have any part in it. Ever.

Here’s what I think of when I think of “training.”

  • Massive lists of “things you’ll need to know”
  • Boredom covered under a veneer of note-taking
  • Confused faces and no notion of whether those looks mean “I don’t get it,” or “I hope they think that this face means that I’m paying attention, because I’m not but I don’t want to be rude.”
  • Necessary evil. After all, I want to be able to do what-ever-it-is I’m being trained on.
  • Did I mention the massive lists of things to know? Simply the act of making a longer and longer list does not, in fact, mean that you’re a more thorough trainer.

I’m lucky that I’m not in a job that requires constant training of this sort, or that requires me to inflict it on other innocent people who really haven’t done anything to deserve such treatment. And yes, I can say this even though I do library instruction, and even though I used to conduct instruction sessions as if they were library training sessions, and even though there are bits and pieces of training in any given interaction with a student.

I guess that little by little, my whole approach to and concept of teaching has changed. I’ve thought a lot about the power of story, about solving one key problem rather than all the possible problems, and about the relative luxury of having a safety net for my more minimalist instruction built right into my environment. Unlike many other people, the nature of my job removes the pressure to teach “everything they’ll need to know because this is your one shot and you’d better not leave anything out or they’ll be completely lost.” Thanks in a large part to the Subversive Handout and our consultation model, students come and talk to me about specifics they need to know when they need to know it, or they can come to the reference desk, or they can (and do) email me at all hours of the day or night, or they’ll get some other little tidbit of “stuff they need to know” from another librarian in another class. All in all, I almost never feel like I have to cover all the bases anymore.

Unfortunately, this makes me resent having to participate in training (either giving or receiving) even more than I used to. Massive lists of things to know kill my soul.

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Learning about Instruction from Subject Librarians

Published by Iris on Thursday, July 17th, 2008

The past week has served as a clear and present reminder of the value of having subject librarians who are committed to helping students in their disciplines engage with and even contribute to the scholarly work of their chosen areas of study. Partially prompted by a desire to train our new librarian, and partially driven by our constant refrain of “wouldn’t it be nice if we could meet and tell each other about what we each do with our students,” my department met three times between last Thursday and today to do a little show and tell. Over the course of those 6 hours, we showed each other key resources in our areas, walked through pieces of lessons that we’ve developed, talked about common challenges and triumphs, and even did mock instruction sessions for each other. I learned so much.

I had never considered the value of surgical videos in the life of a materials scientist. I love the idea that when you read anything from a record in an index to an article or a book, you have to think about reading instrumentally as well as reading for comprehension. There are always clues to new research topics or subtopics, new search terms, and even information about how the search tool or topic or disciplinary discourse is structured. Reading instrumentally involves paying attention to all these things. I had no idea that we’d just acquired an archive of opera videos and another of dance videos, each of which let you search through rich metadata, create playlists of clips, and turn on a variety of subtitles. I learned a metric brainload about ICPSR, WDI (both online and off), and other key data sources, and how these get used in our curriculum. For example, did you know that Earth Trends is useful for way more than environmental research? I didn’t. But it turns out that in order to study the environment you have to study a bunch of other things, too, so Earth Trends ends up being a kind of statistical compendium. And it cites its sources, so you can figure out who’s publishing data on your topic. And I learned a lot by listening to our History librarian talk about the role of book reviews in research, and how teaching book reviews is a great way to introduce students to concepts like scholarly disagreement or how individual works fit into the broader universe of disciplinary conversation.

I showed a few things, too. I showed my “subversive handout” and my work on teaching scholarly attribution, the problem of controlled vocabulary for my students (since they have to work with the MLA International Bibliography, which relies so heavily on it’s thesaurus), and my lower-level work with students who need to learn about combining terms when performing searches.

Beyond learning really interesting and cool things, though, I was struck by the fact that even though we spend so much time working together, talking together, and sharing strategies with each other, that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of our individual stores of subject expertise. We rely on this structure of shared general knowledge backed up by deep subject expertise all the time. For example, I can sit at the reference desk and know that I can help a student get started with research in an unfamiliar area, but that I can (and frequently do) refer that student to the subject librarian for more in-depth help if we have to go beyond my own ability to be of any use. And in instruction sessions, the librarian that deals primarily with upper level social science students relies on the fact that I tend to work with a lot of lower level students, and that I give those students a grounding in some of the basics. We absolutely rely on the fact that we don’t each have to know everything and teach everything, and that our colleagues will be there for us when we get in over our heads with unfamiliar research areas. So our differences really do serve the student population as a whole.

And I feel like I’ve become a better librarian simply by being surrounded by subject specialists. I know more about how to find data and statistics than I did before because I’ve been able to watch our data librarian at work. I’ve learned (and stolen shamelessly from) our History librarian and the way she guides students through the process of finding and using primary sources. And the similar things could be said about any one of the other librarians I work with.

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Seeing Patterns in Student Work

Published by Iris on Friday, June 20th, 2008

One of the aspects of expertise that fascinates me the most is the experts’ ability to look at a whole range of information and see useful patterns.* While reading the sophomore writing portfolios this week, I was constantly impressed by the way expert readers could, with incredible speed, read a student’s portfolio and say, “Well, this student has trouble framing quotations.” It was true, but it was a pattern that a novice reader might miss amidst all the details. The student had in various places also misused commas, or strung together paragraphs that didn’t seem entirely related, or had weak introductory sentences, or split infinitives, or had difficulty with tense or number agreement within sentences, or been uncomfortable choosing between primary pronouns (I/you/he/one… so many options!). And yet, an expert reader could take a broader view and say that over the course of all the papers submitted, this student had trouble framing quotations.

Musing on the facility with which these expert readers culled through details to find patterns, I realized that over the course of three years, I’ve begun to develop a similar capacity when faced with the student research experience. I could read a set of research papers and see that the student didn’t understand the concept of authoritative sources, or the conventions of scholarly disagreement, or how to deal with more than one or two secondary sources. And I know my colleagues and I often observe trends in the questions we get from students in specific classes. In fact, we often use these observations when we plan repeat support for a class or when we’re strategizing with the professors about how best to help the next batch of students.

Now I wish even more than I did before that I had time to comb back through all the notes I keep on all the appointments I have with students. I bet my instruction would improve dramatically if I had a better sense of the patterns of student confusion I see. And I bet the faculty I work with would appreciate it if I could communicate these trends to them in a less haphazard way than I am currently.

* For more on how experts differ from novices, see the chapter called “How Experts Differ from Novices” in How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. Eds. John D. Bransford, Ann L. Brown and Rodney R. Cocking. Washington D.C.: National Academy Press, 1999. 31-50.

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Learning About First Year Students

Published by Iris on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008

The dynamics of research in our various liaison areas dictate that most of my co-workers work primarily with upperclassmen, and that I work with more freshmen and sophomores than with juniors and seniors. I used to feel a little left out of the “fun stuff” because of this split — a little jealous that my coworkers had more call to develop highly specialized knowledge and skills while I worked on basic things (like the fact that interlibrary loan exists, and that scholars publish in journals as well as books). But that only lasted as long as my naive assumptions about the complexities of working with first year students. Fall Term two years ago, those naive assumptions vanished, and ever since, I’ve been fascinated by the challenge of getting freshmen up to speed as quickly as possible. And just recently, I’ve learned a whole lot about my the target demographic of my special project.

  • Focus groups on our campus suggest that freshmen here don’t see research skills as generalizable across disciplines. Maybe our liaison model feeds this. Maybe our model just caters to it. Either way, that’s my cue to figure out how to make the skills and strategies I teach more explicitly transferable to other classes and research problems.
  • Our FYILLAA results were pretty interesting, too, showing that incoming freshmen (prior to having any classes at Carleton) *think* that tasks like citation or determining the scholarly-ness of a source are easy, but that they actually have a great deal of difficulty identifying scholarly sources or distinguishing between book, article, and essay citations.
  • And now I learn that first year students have other things on their minds, that they have to adjust to “daily life management” before being able to spend time developing their intellectual muscles.

What a range! Just the new stuff I’ve learned this term spans “transferable skills awareness,” the nitty gritty of getting your hands on stuff and navigating the scholarly literature, and the developmental project of adjusting to life on a college campus.

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