Teaching Strategies

Today’s class focused on the practical, down and dirty, aspects of classroom management. Since I knew this was a topic of interest for several people, and that we had already covered IGI and Conversation Theory a bit in another session, I decided to focus our attention on the classroom aspects of teaching. If anyone’s particularly interested in that, though, I’m happy to chat.

A reminder: Roz and I are meeting next week to discuss this project and next steps. If anyone has feedback, questions, ideas for future teaching initiatives, please let one of us know!!

I also mentioned Central Michigan’s FaCIT Take 5 For Teaching website. It’s a great resource for practical tips if you have a spare five minutes and an area you’re interested in learning more about.

Okay! The things we discussed:

First Day

• Student Tours
• Discussion of how students currently use the library (perhaps followed with student led tour)
• Students fill out card about what they want to get from the class (to be used in refining the syllabus)
• Showing the library website and how to do useful things (place a hold, reserve a study room, etc)
• Clickers to get demographic information and introduce the tool
• Learning style inventory

Getting Students To Talk

• Room and layout makes a difference. Giz volunteered to help rearrange for a few hours this summer to see if there are any good solutions. I’m in. Anyone else?
• Worksheets and in class assignments in lieu of discussion
• Pair work

Group Word

• No one currently lets students choose if they want to work alone or in a group
• Students might resist group work, but it’s good for them (they’ll have to do it for the rest of their life)
• Service learning as a way to do group work with one large class group

Getting Comfortable with Speaking

• Practice with an audience
• The shift between the reference librarian’s role as a helper/expert to a teacher’s role as the one in charge is a hard one
• Praise in public, chastise in private
• Set ground rules

Multitasking Students

• Ignore it
• Ask how what they’re doing is applicable (if blatant)
• Teach from in front of the multitasking student, wherever they’re sitting

Attendance and Tardiness

• Quiz grades: that they count towards attendance, that they start when the class starts so their grades reflect tardiness
• Tick off each comment as class participation
• In class graded exercises
• Shut door when class starts
• Stop and comment when people come in late

Learning Names

• Name table tent by each student
• Assigned seats

Establishing Class Rules

• As a class
• List that is modified each semester based on previous experiences

So, those are the comments I managed to record during our discussion. If I missed something or you think of something else, please add it! If you have any other Q&A, please leave them here!!

This is just a space in case you have questions or comments on active learning! Do you do anything interesting with your classes that you would like to share? (We’d like to hear it!)

So I didn’t do too much in class on Friday. This was because I felt that if we were taking a day to do active learning, it should be as active as possible, with as little from me as possible. I tried to slip entirely into a facilitator role.

Some noted that physical things are easy to make active, because people can do them. That’s true. But you can take different approaches to how to make them active, and you can still get ideas from how people teach things that are physical. For example, the knit-and-pass exercise could work just as well for translating in a group, teaching synonyms for search, or any brainstorming activity. The yoga-poses teaching demonstrated how to teach something kinesthetically that could have been taught with flashcards. You could have people pose as a painting is drawn, or act out scenes of literature to learn them.

My plan, for this class, was also to show how once you’re thinking from an active learning perspective you incorporate several types of techniques easily, iwthout necessarily thinking “theory X would recommend teaching method Y.”

Our tenth day focused on active learning, something several people had requested to know more about. Active learning is an umbrella term that includes many different schools of thought within education, and I’ve tried to incorporate some level of it into each class we’ve had.

Since you’ve been in a class that’s been lead by Roz and me, you’ve learned our active learning styles. My goal for this class session was to see other approaches. To do this, I turned it around for different groups to come up with active learning exercises and to do them for the class. This was so that you could see how quickly you can come up with an exercise, and that you oculd see different interpretations of incorporating active learning into the classroom.

Four groups came up with something to teach, and an active way to teach it. We had:

1. Knitting: demoed knitting with video, and in person; taught one person who then had to knit a stitch on their own; that person passed it to the next and taught the next person; continued down the chain. This was an excellent example of how to incorporate motivation (you know it’s coming to you at some point) and the student-as-teacher model.
2. Yoga: group demonstrated three poses and named them; had the class do the three poses as named them; group did poses and asked class to recall the name. This exercise was a great way to engage kinesthetic learners. Though you might agree easily that doing yoga poses is an obvious way to teach yoga, the same concept could be applied to any case where a student has to memorize a form/image and a name.
3. Cooking Salmon: pairs had to find a salmon recipe, then come up with reasons their recipe was best; each group made their case; the class voted on their favorite. This exercise helped participants learn various ways of cooking salmon and weigh the relevant benefits and drawbacks of each. In this case, the teacher didn’t have to teach anything, but facilitate the class discussion to guide them to relevant points.
4. Differences in classical composers: this group divided the class into three groups and assigned areas to listen for: melody, harmony, and rhythm; we then listened to two clips of music; then filled out a chart as a group of the characteristics of both composers. This was an excellent way of getting students to realize the answers on their own and document the answers you want to make sure they remember. It also brought up several other areas of discussion, where people were really interested in the answers, rather than just listening to a lecture.

I, personally, had a great time seeing what people chose to teach and how they taught it! Thanks for sharing!