Summer Slowdown

I realize I never posted about the second day of the colloquium, but time got away from me. It was great, and I learned about some interesting approaches faculty are taking in their classes.

On another instruction topic, I'm kind of kicking myself for not going to LOEX of the West. I thought it would be too much to try to travel right after starting the new position, but from all reports from current and former colleagues who attended it, the conference was excellent and well worth the time. Vegas in 2008 is already on my calendar. I heard the O.G. LOEX was good, too. I just looked through the links to the conference presentations and handouts and I can see that I would have had plenty of great sessions to choose from.

There hasn't been much instruction for me to do this summer, so I've been taking advantage of the time to read as much as I can on the subject. Two new books on my desk right now are Information Literacy Assessment: Standards-Based Tools and Assignments (Neely, 2006) and the new edition of A Research Guide for Undergraduate Students: English and American Literature, 6th ed. (Baker & Huling, 2006). I'm familiar with the latter from previous editions, and I'm sure it will come in handy now that I'm an English librarian.

I've had more time to delve into Neely's book, and I'm really impressed. She's the first author I've encountered who shows such detailed links between assignments and the ACRL IL standards. The assessment queries include skills/understanding testing and questions about how students feel about IL concepts, both of which are important measurements about how they're going to internalize what they're learning. It will be interesting to see to what extent I can incorporate these ideas into my classes this fall.

Colloquium day 1

I spent the day at the spring teaching colloquium offered by my university's teaching and learning center. The program concludes tomorrow, so there's more in store. This year's events are centered around our keynote speaker Ken Bain's book, What the Best College Teachers Do. The book is a good and fast read that brings up lots of best-practice ideas, but isn't a how-to guide. I'm glad the ctl folks included book discussion time in the program because I think I got more out of that session than the other sessions (which were also quite good) because it was less structured and more of a conversation. It's not often that I get to talk to faculty across several disciplines, and it was also a great chance for me to introduce myself to the English and first-year folks and foist my card on them.

As library faculty, I always like to be at the table for university-wide discussions about teaching and learning, but my experiences and opportunities in instruction are quite different than those of classroom faculty. A lot of the practices we discussed are really closely tied to the ongoing teaching/learning that happens in a semester-long course, rather than a one or two hour IL session. I kept thinking how great it was to be kind of embedded in a program core course at my last institution because I got to develop a relationship with the students throughout the quarter and they started to trust me. They asked me more questions and shared more with me about their research (and sometimes themselves) than students in my one or two-shot sessions seemed to be comfortable doing.

The small group session was a rare opportunity for me to hear what, for example, botany or math faculty are doing in class because I never get a chance to see that in action. The session was also a chance for me to reiterate that while I have teaching and learning goals (aka information literacy), they aren't separate from the wider goals for the class.

I haven't had time to think deeply about how I can apply what I've heard and learned in the colloquium to my own teaching; that will come soon.