More on teaching

Teaching, Learning, and Leading: Key Roles for Librarians in the Academic Community
Speaker: Maryellen Weimer, author of Learner-Centered Teaching
Sunday, June 27, 1:30 pm - 3:30 pm

Saturday's session about teaching to adults had left me with a big question about how to teach college-age students. This session began to answer that for me, although I think I need to read her book--I just requested it from Mobius.

She attempted to bring her ideas to librarians, aware that we often teach one-shot sessions to classes that have a much longer history and future, that we usually have no influence on the grading, and that often our best teachable moments are one-on-one, hands-on opportunities. She wasn't completely successful at pulling herself into our realm, but a number of the ideas are helpful anyway.

A lot of her ideas are mostly attitudes, ways for the teacher to be a guide, coach, or midwife rather than the center of attention:

• the teacher can't learn for the student
• the central activity in the classroom is not teaching, it's learning
• since we can't teach students everything about the content, we must teach them lifelong learning skills

We broke into small groups for a minute at one point to talk about how to establish credibility without hogging all the power in the classroom. The best idea that came from that was the same one my group partner told me--grant the subject mastery to the student and claim the resource mastery as the librarian. This will mean it takes both the student and librarian working together to fulfill the information need at hand.

She mentioned several times that our educational systems have created students that are after grades more than learning. This seems to put librarians at a huge disadvantage since we specialize in the learning, not the grades. Weimer has found that most students love to talk about the future--so discuss how the topic at hand will be useful in the career and life of the student. This seemed like it would work well in the library setting--perhaps bringing up the topic at those odd moments when the computer's chomping away at something or while walking a student over to a resource like the Encyclopedia of Educational Research. "Are you majoring in education? Do you intend to be a teacher?"     #

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