Teaching Strategies

Today’s session was on the scholarship of teaching and learning. I really wanted to make sure to include it because this is something we’re all capable of doing right now and is nice to address after covering most of the content. I’m also saving the last class for wrap up and synthesis.

So, here are the slides:

If you have any questions, a lot of us have published and presented in this area. Feel free to ask for advice or collaboration!!

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!!

So we’ve done a lot lately! On day 6, Roz talked about teaching styles. Day 7 was a swap and share. Last week was spring break, which brings us to Day 8!

I’m about to post all the standard class posts, but wanted to give space for sharing the case study ideas you might have come up with when reading through the exercise and talking in pairs. So, if you had an idea… this is where to put it!

Thanks!

The meta from today:

• I wanted to do one variation on the group work from last time to show how the same type of activities can be changed to keep it interesting enough that students have to follow directions and pay attention to what is going on in the room. You can also modify any exercise in a number of ways, so this was one example. The first one focused on the abstract and the group work was a way to draw similarities across topics. The second group activity focused on each group learning about one model and understanding it enough to teach others. It was much less about trends.
• The reason that there was a focus on how each taxonomy could inform your teaching is because they were all fairly abstract. This was to help the learners who need concrete examples and reasons why.
• I’m not sure that I’ll do this or not since we tend to be in paper saving mode, but with students I might print out the collaborative handout and pass it out at the beginning of the next class as a quick refresher before moving on.
• We’ll do something different in the next class. I don’t want anyone to get too settled in.

Each class, I’ll post something to let you know about the ID process on my end. This is the first of these posts. Since this was the first day, my main objective was to set the stage for the class and get to know the dynamics of the group:

• Make the goals and intentions of this “course” clear
• Give a broad overview of the topic
• Get a sense of what you hope to get from the “class”
• Note group dynamics
• Preliminarily redrafting the rest of the “course”

This information will inform how we adapt the “course” even at this early stage in the game.