Our third and final project is to identify something global that we wanted to change about our teaching or our professional environment. To a certain extent, I share the same environment as the rest of my colleagues across the university, but I suspect I have slightly less control over my teaching environment given my limited time in a classroom that is not really my own and with a group of students that I do not have an ongoing relationship with throughout the semester.
That said, I had an interesting thing happen to me this year, that got me thinking about possibly changing the environment in which I teach my library classes and whether my typical choice of a computer lab “for hands-on time” is really the most effective.
Most librarians prefer to teach in a computer lab whenever possible. Certainly, this is the case at Mount Royal and at other institutions I’ve been at (often, this is why libraries are now equipped with lab classrooms). The thought is, if the students are each signed on to a computer, they can follow along with the research techniques (they search along with me) I am presenting and glean some valuable information literacy competencies. Of course, my favourite part of any class is when I usually give the students time to go and work on searching for information on their own topics and I can circulate, see how they are doing, answer questions and give them some tips. One thing I’ve noticed is that often, even when it gets to the hands-on time, the students don’t seem to have really absorbed what I’ve demonstrated – even though they’ve been playing along. Since I’ve had classroom observers checking to see if they are on task or on Facebook, I know that the majority of them have followed along and completed the searches with me – so why can’t they complete the searches later, during hands-on work time?
I’d been thinking about this for awhile now, when an interesting thing happened to me. I was booked to teach a 2nd-year Political Science research class in a lab on campus, but when I arrived, it turned out that a misbooking meant that I was without a lab. With no labs available, my only choice was to go with the students to their regular non-lab classroom and try to cover what I had intended to cover with what was available. Interestingly, as I demonstrated various searches and techniques, I found that the students seemed to be paying very close attention to how the searches worked, how the results were being presented and they were asking very astute questions. In fact, I can’t remember the last time a class asked so many excellent questions or made so many interesting observations!
So this got me thinking; maybe I don’t always need a lab? Maybe students don’t really take in what’s going on when their focus is diluted by having to follow along and type in keywords? So, I thought about the possibility of taking my library classes out of the lab setting entirely next semester to see if there is a noticeable difference. After chatting about it with other members of the group, I got some great suggestions as to how I could test my theory about “playing along” without compromising the time that I like to give the students to work on their own topics. It was suggested that for some classes, I book a lab and allow the students to log into the computers, but at various points, while I am demonstrating searches and techniques I could ask them to simply turn their monitors off and watch the screen at the front of the room. That way, I could give them the opportunity to turn the monitors back on and practice with their own topics. At the end of the class, I could run an anonymous survey, using TooFast to get feedback on this new approach and compare it to classes where the students “play along” on their own computers.
I think this is a fabulous idea; I am designing the questions for the survey (to be posted here soon) and I will try this out in the Fall Semester!
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