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.