Week 1 Reflection

This post (and others in the future) consists of reflections on sections of the book How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, which can be found here.

Chapter 1

The idea that teachers need to pay attention to the preexisting notions students bring to the classroom is extremely important, and not just in the case of small children who may or may not know that the Earth goes around the Sun. The (wonderful, beautiful, inspiring, irreplaceable, and potentially incredibly dangerous) advent of the internet means that all sorts of information is available to anyone with web access and a bit of curiosity. A well-educated person knows that not all the information is valid, and has a general idea of how to figure out what is fact (or at least useful opinion) and what is random raving, but young students and adults who haven't learned the kind of skepticism that comes as second nature to academics of all stripes can easily end up with information that is at best confusing and at worst dead wrong. When taking a student's preconceived notions into account, a teacher's job is not only to repair faulty ideas but to impart the methodology for evaluating ideas and their sources at all times. The ability to critique not only ideas suggested by texts or other people but one's own ideas is a critical skill for being a consumer of information in any context.

From my experience, I feel like schools focus on citing sources more than vetting them--I have sat through at least two anti-plagiarism lectures per year since I started college in 2004 (not to mention all the threats and stern faces they applied to the topic in high school), but only a handful of instructors have offered strategies for choosing and evaluating research materials. This aligns with the book's proposition that current educational methods are too focused on assignment performance rather than actual learning. A student who is writing a paper based on his or her own conclusions and gathered information is far less likely to plagiarize than one who is trying to construct a "perfect" answer to a pre-set question (producing the paper he or she thinks an instructor wants to see).

One of the most important roles that librarians can fill is picking up where teachers fail and presenting students with the means to perform thorough and effective research, both in academics and areas of personal interest. Unfortunately, limited time and resources mean that librarians often do not have time to impart this knowledge, even if students have time to hear it. In my high school experience, school librarians were mostly called in to reinforce the endless anti-plagiarism spiel and to point students at a small handful of resources that were quickly discarded by anyone writing something deeper than a ninth grade term paper. In college, they were so busy dealing with circulation issues and explaining MLA citations to confused undergrads that they didn't do much beyond answer specific questions. I'm not sure what the solution to this is, seeing as budgets and time aren't going to magically multiply any time soon, but I think increased communication between teachers/professors and librarians is probably the key.

My last thought on this chapter is that I must have had a much better (high school) education than it felt like I was getting, at least compared to the educational styles that this book is critiquing. It still bored the heck out of me on a regular basis, but at least I know they were trying?


Chapter 2

This chapter focuses on the way that experts in a given subject approach problems within their field, as opposed to the methods used by novices in the same field. The fact that expertise on a topic does not confer the ability to teach that subject is one of the most prominent points, and one that I think deserves further discussion. The last tech class I took was taught by a professor whose ability to clearly (and humorously) explain the very basic programming concepts he was teaching made a somewhat startling contrast to his seriously impressive CV. Part of his advantage, he explained, is that he is not a natural programmer--he is talented and has many years of experience, but he came to the field because it was fascinating, not because it was intuitive for him, so he learned it in a way that was probably much like the simple, systematic way he taught it to us. He wasn't trying to teach us to be experts, but to think like experts--using a set of basic tools and strategies to approach problems in context, rather than individually.

I've found throughout my education that the most important quality in an instructor is a somewhat unacademic enthusiasm for a subject--having an emotional response to a topic keeps people a bit off balance, causing them to constantly reevaluate their position. Being able to observe an instructor's shifting thought processes is one of the best learning tools I've ever found, because it allows me to mirror and to reform those processes in my own mind. Sometimes my conclusions are the same, and sometimes they're different, but an expert who can make his or her own cognition transparent has a much better chance of actually teaching a novice than one who cannot reveal the way that he or she comes to conclusions. For this reason, I have a particular love for lecture-style classes, but only with a teacher whose lecture has this sort of openness. It is similar to the function of a seminar class, where different people's thoughts and opinions combine to bring the group as a whole to a new perspective.

Where do librarians fit into this? Well, as librarians, our primary enthusiasm is for information (at least in theory). By drawing students/patrons into our methods for finding information, we can show them how to think like an information-gathering professional in a personal, tailored way. Like the programming professor above, we can show people how to approach research as a set of strategies and methods applicable to any situation, rather than a means for finding the quickest, simplest answer to one specific problem.