Wednesday, October 15, 2014

The U

[What part of the Understand phase do you feel most and least confident about?]

I feel like reference librarians at an academic library are [/should] always be looking for ways to improve their resources.  Their job is to aid in the research process--whether that means teaching, guiding, or providing online materials. 

The first part of "U" or the "Understanding Phase" is "Identifying the Problem."  Before you solve a problem, you need to have a clear understanding of what it is you're going to solve.  As Booth states, "Identifying instructional problems is rarely difficult--they tend to present themselves regularly" (104).  There's always something to do or fix in an academic library.  Even as a serials librarian I could tell you at least five different things our library needs to create or update--and that isn't because of inefficient staff. 

The text talks about different ways that needs come to the surface--needs can be found due to comparative studies, something that is "felt," expressed, or anticipated, just to name a few.  I think I am fairly good at recognizing comparative needs.  When I started in my position a few months ago, one of the first goals I created was to visit or talk to each of the other CLIC serialists and compare our procedure with theirs.

Something that I feel that I am not-so-good at with regards to this step is discovering needs that don't exist yet, or, being innovative.  This could probably fall into the "felt" or "anticipated" category.  I'm really good at seeing practical stuff.  Our library needs x or is doing poorly in x, so I'm going to interview or research about y & z to figure out why this is.  I struggle coming up with "the future of" this or what such-and-such will look like in 50 years.

As for the second part of the "U," I think the biggest struggle for "Analyzing the Scenario" would be figuring out how to "select fewer topics and examine them in more depth" in order to accommodate different learning styles.  I'm thinking specifically of one-shot sessions in an academic library. 

Is it really best to do the same thing in different ways, to accommodate different learning styles?  Or would students get annoyed by this, and you would be wasting golden teaching time?

Thoughts?

2 comments:

  1. I hate crossing blog platforms for commenting....just had a nice comment that was lost in the login process that I didn't think was necessary.....dumb!

    Anyway, here's a probably less elegant version of what I had written before.

    I agree that catering to every learning style is impractical in a one-shot session. In such a short amount of time students need to meet you halfway and adapt their own learning rather than you constantly adapting your teaching. In any good one-shot session you will leave your contact information and confused students can get in touch if they want. If they don't, that is pretty much their problem, not yours.

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  2. I agree with Amber: logging in cross-platform is no fun!

    I think I sort of said something like this in class when you brought it up (re: learning styles), but while I don't think we need to do a different activity for each learning style on each module, I think taking time to think about learning styles is useful. It challenges our assumptions and keeps us from only teaching to our own learning styles. For example, I hate loathe learning by video, but I know others who prefer it. I am hesitant to include videos in any sort of teaching, but I am probably doing a disservice to part of my class that way (especially if I were teaching more than a one-shot). Also, I think you can think creatively and find ways to include multiple learning styles in one activity--either in different parts of the task or giving people different options to complete an activity.

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