So, I admit I am a little skeptical about the Socratic Seminar process. I'm all for Socratic Method in pedagogy--but I'm always hesitant to buy into a teaching method that has this many rules involved. Good teaching is about flexibility and responding to the class--this method seems more like winding a key and letting the class go. It is open-ended, which I like, and relies on the students' responses--but still seems weirdly claustrophobic to me.
I also think that the point of a teacher in a seminar of any sort is to give input and act as a leader in a discussion, so stepping out of it entirely seems counter-intuitive. If the author of the article (whose name I cannot, unfortunately, remember) was asked to step out of the discussion by her students, maybe she just wasn't that good at teaching? Or, at least, choosing the wrong questions? I got the impression she was sticking to a list rather than responding to her students' discussion. But maybe I'm just remembering the bad stuff. I'm definitely looking forward to trying out this style of discussion today, since it's totally new to me.
On the books: Almost every single story in my book club is about death. And every one of them is hilarious, charming, sweet, or thought-provoking on the subject. Not one (in my opinion) is morbid or unnecessarily depressing. I started reading them on the way home from ASB, immediately after finishing a big fat book of Victorian Things... and at first it was so nice just to be reading fiction again that I was overcome with delight. And then the delight changed, and was actually at the stories themselves, rather than their genre. And then the headache from reading on a tiny screen in a dark car started, and I kept reading.
Note: This was written before the Book Club class, but is being posted afterwards.
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
05 March 2012
19 February 2012
Week 6: Reading Reflection
The two Library Journal articles assigned this week, by Barbara Hoffert and Beth Dempsey, both focus on the new types of book club culture that center around libraries. One of the key ideas is that libraries do well to provide some sort of book club kit, or being able to provide a selection of thematically/topically related books for a club that does not all want to read the same thing. The Ann Arbor District Library provides Book Club to Go kits, which include ten copies of a book, a copy of the DVD (if available), and some supplementary materials in relation to the author and material. They also include evaluation forms, which allow readers to give the library feedback on the kit. I haven't looked into these kits very closely, but now I'm intrigued--I haven't seen them circulate very much, but I bet they do, since Ann Arbor is exactly the sort of community the Dempsey article mentions as being enthusiastic about book clubs (educated, well-off, et cetera). The titles are predictable, Water for Elephants, The Kite Runner, and easy classics like The Great Gatsby. Good books, but ones that people are likely to have read before, either in school or picked up off a bestseller list. Most of the books mentioned in the two articles are more ambitious, or more obscure. I imagine this works best when there's one person, a librarian or other type of leader, selecting the material and giving a rationale for that selection.
I'm not particularly familiar with book clubs, but I imagine them (at their best) to be pretty much like all the literature classes I took in college. Without anyone actually trying to teach anything directly--since literature classes are always a combined effort to situate the historical fact of a given writer/text and further the critical reading and writing skills of students (literature studies is all about transfer)--but with pretty much the same result. At their worst, they would probably make me tear my hair out--but I've had classes like that too. It's all about the people who are there. I'm up for trying one.
I'm not particularly familiar with book clubs, but I imagine them (at their best) to be pretty much like all the literature classes I took in college. Without anyone actually trying to teach anything directly--since literature classes are always a combined effort to situate the historical fact of a given writer/text and further the critical reading and writing skills of students (literature studies is all about transfer)--but with pretty much the same result. At their worst, they would probably make me tear my hair out--but I've had classes like that too. It's all about the people who are there. I'm up for trying one.
Metzger, Margaret. "Teaching reading: beyond the plot." Phi Delta Kappan 80.3 (1998): 240. Academic OneFile. Web. 8 Jan. 2011.
"Reading is invisible," writes Metzger. There aren't drafts to check, and no ability to command a student, "show your work," like in a math class. As soon as I read that statement, I thought, "that's what's wrong with reading education! That's why it doesn't work!"
To bring in our discussions about data-retention and test-based teaching (and employ some of Metzger's conclusions along with my own speculation): those "bad" methods aren't the greatest way to teach most things, but they're also better than nothing. When it comes to reading, though... reading is purely skill, not factual knowledge (you can argue that knowing the alphabet and having some command of phonetics works this way, but knowing those things doesn't necessarily mean you can read in a meaningful sense). The institution of reading comprehension tests is a way to gauge whether people can read, but they don't (unless they're really, really craftily written) reveal anything about how they read--so unless a teacher is particularly intuitive, how are they supposed to know where things have gone wrong?
The description of the Socratic Seminar seems clever to me, and like something that would work really well to engage a group of non-proficient readers... but like something that would have people already comfortable with literature chomping at the bit (well, that's my feeling, anyway), and so should be not be used as a panacea teaching method. So I'll leave this article with one hysterically true fact: "Cinderella is not about foot fetishes or love throughout the universe."
The other article on Socratic Seminars, by Lynda Tredway, seems to focus on using them to compare different texts, rather than to excavate a single excerpt (Can I add here that I hate when teachers use excerpts instead of whole novels or stories? Sure, you can learn analytic skills from them, but you're cheating the text out of true criticism and the students out of a comprehensive understanding of what they're reading. What works for nonfiction does not always apply to fiction.), which starts off in a good place by assuming that making connections between two texts is the point of the lesson, rather than something to be done later once one has honed one's skills on a single piece of writing. I'm not sure that being able to solve ethical quandaries is what I'd list as the main goal of education, but I'm willing to consider it as a serious aim.
Last but not least... Mark Prensky's proposition that a school lead the wave of the future by getting rid of all its paper books, and forcing students to do likewise. This is the third or fourth time I've read it, and it still makes me want to laugh myself sick. Not just because he very deliberately misunderstands both the idea of hypertext and the complications of producing digital texts, but because he is just so. darn. proud. of. himself. So I'll save my snark for class.
12 February 2012
Week 5: Reading Reflection
In the article "Put Understanding First," Wiggins and McTighe argue (correctly, I believe) that high schools teach skills too much "in isolation," and without providing a context either for using the skills or for appreciating that they are important. As I read, I was thinking about the (many, many, many) instances of this facts-without-application problem that I've encountered, as well as situations where a teacher managed to circumvent it, whether intentionally or by accident. The one that most stuck in my mind is actually a case where I don't think the authors of the article would have, at first glance, thought anything good was happening--but to me it suggests that there are more factors to be considered than just changing the way we give tests.
The article uses history classes as examples several times, and the subject seems to present an unusually thorny issue for educators. I think much of the problem comes from teachers and schools not wanting to appear to be pushing an agenda. The examples Wiggins and McTighe give of how to be a better history teacher would have to be followed very carefully, with lots of emphasis on the students forming their own conclusions, or run the risk of biasing the lesson. I'm not for censoring teachers, really (the teacher I describe below definitely had an agenda, even if it was mostly just to poke fun at any historical personage who took his or her own ideology too seriously), but there's enough of a battle going to keep creationism out of science classrooms that I don't fancy giving prejudiced or highly religious teachers an open license to revise history. We have required curricula for a reason. We just need to figure out a better way to teach them.
More than once, the article references the history class scene from Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I only vaguely remember the film (despite having seen it about fifteen times--why did all my high school teachers think that was the one movie they should show the day before Christmas or after AP exams? Did they think it made them seem edgy to show a movie about skipping school?), but I get the reference: monotone teacher drones on and on, answering his own questions.
Weirdly enough, I had a history teacher like that, but he was anything but dull. He was such an odd man (he'd come back from Vietnam a bit shell-shocked, looked like a cross between between Lurch from The Addams Family and Henry Blake on M*A*S*H, and was known for spending any time he wasn't teaching napping in his hard wooden desk chair), and his teaching method--a detailed outline of the day's material on the board, with blanks where names, dates, and figures would be filled in as he lectured--was so clever (the need to know what went into the blanks was irresistible), nobody ever zoned out in his class. He'd been using the same outlines and the same exams for decades. When the Emperor of Japan died in 1989, he simply crossed out 'Hirohito' and wrote in 'Akihito' on the typescript of the test (I hope nobody got that question wrong)... and was still handing it out with the Scantron sheets in 2001. He rarely asked questions of the class, and when he did they were more or less rhetorical. But it worked. He told stories as he lectured, some of them about his own (absurdly-exciting-for-a-suburban-teacher) life, some quirky, non-textbook side notes to the historical data (I distinctly remember him raising his eyebrows and making a crack about the dubious paternity of Genghis Khan's oldest child), and some that I'm pretty sure were just made up. It was riveting. And by being so clearly fascinated with his subject, and so unapologetically confident that it was of utmost importance to living in the real world, he made us believe it too.
I'm not sure how to address the issue of "transfer" with Mr. Gillespie's classes--the teaching and testing were at first glance exactly what Wiggins and McTighe take issue with. But there's something to be said for being able to capture the unwavering attention of a two dozen fifteen-year-olds for an hour a day, five days a week, nine months a year. In some cases, really good, retention-building teaching is just about being a good teacher. And just because we've realized that we need some new methods of teaching doesn't mean the old ones never worked.
The article uses history classes as examples several times, and the subject seems to present an unusually thorny issue for educators. I think much of the problem comes from teachers and schools not wanting to appear to be pushing an agenda. The examples Wiggins and McTighe give of how to be a better history teacher would have to be followed very carefully, with lots of emphasis on the students forming their own conclusions, or run the risk of biasing the lesson. I'm not for censoring teachers, really (the teacher I describe below definitely had an agenda, even if it was mostly just to poke fun at any historical personage who took his or her own ideology too seriously), but there's enough of a battle going to keep creationism out of science classrooms that I don't fancy giving prejudiced or highly religious teachers an open license to revise history. We have required curricula for a reason. We just need to figure out a better way to teach them.
More than once, the article references the history class scene from Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I only vaguely remember the film (despite having seen it about fifteen times--why did all my high school teachers think that was the one movie they should show the day before Christmas or after AP exams? Did they think it made them seem edgy to show a movie about skipping school?), but I get the reference: monotone teacher drones on and on, answering his own questions.
Weirdly enough, I had a history teacher like that, but he was anything but dull. He was such an odd man (he'd come back from Vietnam a bit shell-shocked, looked like a cross between between Lurch from The Addams Family and Henry Blake on M*A*S*H, and was known for spending any time he wasn't teaching napping in his hard wooden desk chair), and his teaching method--a detailed outline of the day's material on the board, with blanks where names, dates, and figures would be filled in as he lectured--was so clever (the need to know what went into the blanks was irresistible), nobody ever zoned out in his class. He'd been using the same outlines and the same exams for decades. When the Emperor of Japan died in 1989, he simply crossed out 'Hirohito' and wrote in 'Akihito' on the typescript of the test (I hope nobody got that question wrong)... and was still handing it out with the Scantron sheets in 2001. He rarely asked questions of the class, and when he did they were more or less rhetorical. But it worked. He told stories as he lectured, some of them about his own (absurdly-exciting-for-a-suburban-teacher) life, some quirky, non-textbook side notes to the historical data (I distinctly remember him raising his eyebrows and making a crack about the dubious paternity of Genghis Khan's oldest child), and some that I'm pretty sure were just made up. It was riveting. And by being so clearly fascinated with his subject, and so unapologetically confident that it was of utmost importance to living in the real world, he made us believe it too.
I'm not sure how to address the issue of "transfer" with Mr. Gillespie's classes--the teaching and testing were at first glance exactly what Wiggins and McTighe take issue with. But there's something to be said for being able to capture the unwavering attention of a two dozen fifteen-year-olds for an hour a day, five days a week, nine months a year. In some cases, really good, retention-building teaching is just about being a good teacher. And just because we've realized that we need some new methods of teaching doesn't mean the old ones never worked.
04 February 2012
Week 4 Reading 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. This post deals with Chapter 6.
Everything seems to come back to networks, everywhere I look. In this case, I really like the metaphor--teaching students to navigate interconnected systems is the baseline for all good education. This is true when we're talking about helping library patrons use databases, and it's true when it comes to teaching them how to make social connections that lead to a job. I find education models that emphasize this sort of learning really appealing, especially when they break down the barriers between subjects. Our current system puts so much space between different topics that they can seem utterly unconnected--chemistry and literature may not have all that much directly in common, but when they're connected by biology, history, and cultural studies they're part of a whole. By splitting up subjects (admittedly pragmatically), we divide them in the minds of students, and students who excel in one may be encouraged to focus on it to the exclusion of others, or to consider the one in which they succeed to be more important than others (fixed learning model!) With the connection of different subjects within school can also come an advantaged discussed later in the chapter--linking a student's daily life to their classroom experience.
Everything seems to come back to networks, everywhere I look. In this case, I really like the metaphor--teaching students to navigate interconnected systems is the baseline for all good education. This is true when we're talking about helping library patrons use databases, and it's true when it comes to teaching them how to make social connections that lead to a job. I find education models that emphasize this sort of learning really appealing, especially when they break down the barriers between subjects. Our current system puts so much space between different topics that they can seem utterly unconnected--chemistry and literature may not have all that much directly in common, but when they're connected by biology, history, and cultural studies they're part of a whole. By splitting up subjects (admittedly pragmatically), we divide them in the minds of students, and students who excel in one may be encouraged to focus on it to the exclusion of others, or to consider the one in which they succeed to be more important than others (fixed learning model!) With the connection of different subjects within school can also come an advantaged discussed later in the chapter--linking a student's daily life to their classroom experience.
29 January 2012
Week 3: Reading Reflection
This article caught my eye because it seemed like something that would be assigned for SI 500. It draws some interesting--if well-traveled--parallels between the current tech/data boom and other historical events like the invention of printing. It also suggests that many of the perceived problems with contemporary information practices are defined and exaggerated by those in the information profession, and asserts a need to verify the existence and importance of these problems before mounting efforts to repair them. I do not like the accusatory tone the article takes on this point, but I agree that in some cases we may tend to spot problems that are only momentary and will be resolved by the simple fact that humans are adaptable creatures. The authors seem to agree with this, tracing problems of information overload from antiquity through the present, not as an escalating problem but as an ongoing and ever-changing constant.
Buschman, John. "Information Literacy, 'New' Literacies, and Literacy." The Library Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 1 (January 2009), pp. 95-118.
This article takes a look at shifting approaches to information literacy among the academic community. In particular, this includes the exposure of privileged, academic forms of literacy and attention to emerging and marginalized texts and readers. There is also a strong emphasis on distancing the connotation of "information literacy" from what Buschman sees as the historic form--the actual ability to read text. I think this is a smart move, especially since both the old-fashioned and the new-fangled forms of literacy are facing plenty of problems right now. And the fact that a distressing number of Americans can't read at all is a separate problem from the fact that some other Americans can't successfully navigate a web search. By separating the two, there is a better chance that real problems can be isolated and addressed.
This article takes a look at shifting approaches to information literacy among the academic community. In particular, this includes the exposure of privileged, academic forms of literacy and attention to emerging and marginalized texts and readers. There is also a strong emphasis on distancing the connotation of "information literacy" from what Buschman sees as the historic form--the actual ability to read text. I think this is a smart move, especially since both the old-fashioned and the new-fangled forms of literacy are facing plenty of problems right now. And the fact that a distressing number of Americans can't read at all is a separate problem from the fact that some other Americans can't successfully navigate a web search. By separating the two, there is a better chance that real problems can be isolated and addressed.
Lorenzo, George, and Charles Dziuban. "Ensuring the Net Generation is Net Savvy." ELI PAPER 2: 2006. September 2006.
This paper is basically an explication of challenges in information literacy faced by people--namely college students--who are so accustomed to having web access that they don't think about how they make use of it. Most of it is familiar, and it's the sort of topic that gets thrown around at SI on a daily basis, but it's nice to have it all laid out in one place. Some of the ideas in the article definitely show the wear and tear of six years, but most of it seems relevant to the current situation.
Week 3: Class Reflection
A concept that really struck me in class last week was the separation between teaching people who are your students versus teaching people who are you peers. The former is a pretty well-explored subject, so I'll leave that out for the moment, but the latter is a situation that comes up a lot without necessarily being discussed, or at not least anywhere I can hear.
With a few exceptions (tutoring jobs), everyone I've ever formally or academically taught anything to has been either my peer or, in some cases, my superior. In the case of the latter it is usually a matter of showing a boss or professor how to use a piece of technology they haven't encountered before. This sort of instruction tends to be fairly quick and more or less informal--they look over my shoulder while I click through whatever it is they need to understand, and then I go back to whatever I was doing and they go on to use the tool I've just explained to them.
When it comes to teaching peers, though, I feel like I have a deeper experience. Being the sole English major in a social circle packed with engineers meant that I spent a good portion of undergrad helping people patch up papers and lab reports, often from scraps that could only very loosely be defined as coherent writing. I always demanded that we go over the piece together, rather than just fixing it myself, so that they could see why I made the changes I did, and maybe learn how to do it for next time. I don't mean to make my friends sound illiterate--they were all very intelligent people, and I needed their help just as often as they needed mine. They just weren't writers. We were peers, more or less alike in age and experience and status, but I had a skill set that most of them lacked completely.
Despite the lingering awe-of-the-reference desk that some library patrons seem to exhibit, it seems to me that most of them see librarians as some hybrid of teacher and peer. Especially in public libraries, our jobs are likely bounded by similar hours and similar wages to a great number of our patrons. Some classes have encouraged me to approach library customer service in an open, direct manner that suggests a peer-type relationship to the patron, while others have suggested a more directly teacher-like strategy. My personality is more suited to the former option, and so I am thinking about my college friends and their lab reports--when I helped them edit their papers, they helped me write code for my blog, or figure out the calculus for a particularly brutal astronomy class. We traded.
So what am I trading with library patrons when I help them? The only thing I can think of is that all experience of this type is helpful--the more people I help, the more resources I am familiar with and the more able I am to interpret the kinds of questions that patrons ask. Do you think there's something else, or is it mostly a one-way exchange?
With a few exceptions (tutoring jobs), everyone I've ever formally or academically taught anything to has been either my peer or, in some cases, my superior. In the case of the latter it is usually a matter of showing a boss or professor how to use a piece of technology they haven't encountered before. This sort of instruction tends to be fairly quick and more or less informal--they look over my shoulder while I click through whatever it is they need to understand, and then I go back to whatever I was doing and they go on to use the tool I've just explained to them.
When it comes to teaching peers, though, I feel like I have a deeper experience. Being the sole English major in a social circle packed with engineers meant that I spent a good portion of undergrad helping people patch up papers and lab reports, often from scraps that could only very loosely be defined as coherent writing. I always demanded that we go over the piece together, rather than just fixing it myself, so that they could see why I made the changes I did, and maybe learn how to do it for next time. I don't mean to make my friends sound illiterate--they were all very intelligent people, and I needed their help just as often as they needed mine. They just weren't writers. We were peers, more or less alike in age and experience and status, but I had a skill set that most of them lacked completely.
Despite the lingering awe-of-the-reference desk that some library patrons seem to exhibit, it seems to me that most of them see librarians as some hybrid of teacher and peer. Especially in public libraries, our jobs are likely bounded by similar hours and similar wages to a great number of our patrons. Some classes have encouraged me to approach library customer service in an open, direct manner that suggests a peer-type relationship to the patron, while others have suggested a more directly teacher-like strategy. My personality is more suited to the former option, and so I am thinking about my college friends and their lab reports--when I helped them edit their papers, they helped me write code for my blog, or figure out the calculus for a particularly brutal astronomy class. We traded.
So what am I trading with library patrons when I help them? The only thing I can think of is that all experience of this type is helpful--the more people I help, the more resources I am familiar with and the more able I am to interpret the kinds of questions that patrons ask. Do you think there's something else, or is it mostly a one-way exchange?
08 January 2012
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.
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.
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