28. attend a Chautauqua

How to Educate and Motivate the Dr. Carver Way!

Dr. George Washington Carver was known as a great teacher, one of the most admired at the Tuskegee Institute.

Here are three aspects of his teaching success:

• interest in his students as individuals


• excitement about his own work and sharing it with others


• combining theory with immediately applicable practicality

When Carver worked with groups of people, including in the classroom, he tried to identify shared goals so that the group could determine how to accomplish them together.

He believed in starting teaching from what the students and farmers knew and was always careful to ascertain their current level of knowledge before proceeding with a subject. In some cases, this meant "unteaching." A superstitious farmer thought that killing the chicken that had been born under the full moon would cure the problems in his hen house. Dr. Carver determined that re-orienting the coop so that it received some sunlight each day would work much better.

Carver found that it was often better to teach by showing rather than telling. He started experimental farms to demonstrate his techniques.

Since I expect to teach as an academic librarian, I was very much looking forward to this program and believe that some of these techniques would work quite well for information literacy instruction.