Disparate Expectations

Sometimes (oftentimes) I pose questions for which I do not have "the answer." This blog post is just a whole cluster of that, so if you came here for answers, you might want to mozy on. (Plus, as you can see, it gets a bit long.)

How do librarians, instruction librarians specifically, navigate situations in which their expectations for student achievement, classroom behavior, success, etc. are higher than the expectations of the course instructor? I have encountered a wide range of instructors during my time as a librarian (also from my time as an educator in the public schools and as I sat the other side of the desk as a library science student).  Many have high expectations for their students, but there are always a few each semester that make me scratch my head--I can only imagine how students in their classroom feel.

While I understand that oftentimes librarians are guests in the classroom, I also know that we are most definitely there for a reason (whether it is that the faculty member has asked for us to work with their students or whether it is required of them to have IL sessions with their classes to fulfill a core requirement).  We are incorporated into their class to help their students be successful in their assignments and further research/information endeavors, and help the teachers who are looking for a better end product with both the assignments students submit and with the education students receive.  With that said, there are instructors who may say one thing, but their educational actions show me something different.

Below are three main areas that come to mind.

Contact time:

My philosophy as an educator (no matter what I teach--whether it be library & information literacy skills or music, as was the case in my previous profession) is that every moment of contact time with the students is so very valuable. I respect students' time and do my best to release them on time; I also expect them to be attentive and engaged the entire duration of the class (and I know it's my job to engage them that whole time).

Lately I have found other instructors releasing their students early from class, though there is much left to be taught, reviewed, reinforced, evaluated, and reevaluated.  As a student I was occasionally pleasantly surprised with an extra 5 or 10 minutes to travel between classes (which, as an educator now, I prefer to keep as dedicated class/work time).  The occasional 5-10 minutes I could possibly see (i.e. if you know your students have "hit the wall," or when you are conferencing with students and they are to use the non-conference time for research, but have already completed much of their work), but in the instances I've seen lately involve professors releasing students an extra 20-30 minutes early from class.  I assisted with a class earlier this week wherein the instructor and I were visiting before we began (as I was there in a support capacity, rather than leading the class myself) and was told that the professor planned on releasing the students 30 minutes early because the content wouldn't take the whole time. I suggested that, instead of dismissing class early, the professor could have them work on the first draft of their homework (due for the next class) and post that to Blackboard. Now, not only are the students going to receive input on their assignment earlier, they also have a head-start on their final draft.  Simply put, if you have that time, use it--Break up the time, diversify your class activities, but use it.

Classroom behavior:

The instructor cultivates the classroom environment--Part of that is to establish clear expectations for student behavior in the classroom.  I understand that different professors have different expectations for the way they prefer to be addressed (Dr., Ms., first name, last name, etc.), lecture vs. discussion, and how long students are allowed to veer off topic before being brought back on task.  With one-shot sessions we, as librarians, come in and work with the established culture--but when classroom policies are so lax where it reaches a point of distraction, how are we (as classroom guests) expected to improve the situation so all students can reach the session's learning objectives?

I do what I can to convey my expectations from the start by demonstrating, by catching distracting or off-task behavior from the start and casually addressing it (without making students feel targeted or on display for their actions).  I try to give students the benefit of the doubt--If I am leading a demonstration and one person is not on task, I first try to make a class announcement to either 1) turn off monitors and just follow on the projector, or 2) remind them of where we are working.  I will walk around the room to monitor how on-task the group is, ask questions of different students or groups to measure their comprehension, etc.

I expect students to put away their cell phones unless they are using them for class-related activities, be on task, remove ear buds from their ears during class, and not chew tobacco & spit out the juices into empty bottles in class (this has happened multiple times and I have addressed it with each student.  I inform them that tobacco of any kind has no place in my classroom--I don't care what their professor's policy is; whenever they are in a class where I am present, they are not to be chewing).

I understand students' attachments to technology, but I also expect them to be focused during library sessions.  Other teachers allow texting and Facebooking during class--Having recently graduated from library school, though we were supposed to be more mature and focused than undergraduate students, I know the Facebooking and texting that happened in class (and almost all cell phone use in class) was not for educational purposes. I don't have students put their phones away until I see it is a distraction; then I will ask the whole class to put away their devices.  If I want students to use their cell phones can always ask them to take them out later, but I prefer to not have them sitting out, distracting not only the owners of the cell phones, but also those around them.

Better yet, what do we do when the instructors are disengaged from the class, checking email, not paying attention to 1) what we are sharing with their students (which will better help them know what to expect from their students' research) and, 2) what their students are doing? (Occasionally checking email is fine, but but not knowing when I ask them a direct question about their assignments because they are so unattached from the class doesn't convey respect for the information they felt was so important for their students to learn--and, of course, loud keyboard clicks are distracting for all.)

Whenever I am in the back of the computer classroom (which is where we encourage instructors to sit while we instruct), waiting to deliver my part of the lesson, I scan the computer monitors to see if students are on task or lost and listen to the instructor to see if there are additional pieces I should include in my lesson plan for that day (or for future sessions).  I also try to assist lost students or encourage students to pay better attention (asking a student to stop texting, put away their headphones, etc.).

Where I work, we have a policy where instructors must be present in the classroom when librarians are teaching because, if professors use our sessions as a "baby sitter" during conference or sick days, what message does that convey to students? On the same note, what message does it convey to students when professors mentally check out for the day?   

Quality work:

My goal is to give students the tools to be successful in the long run.  I want students to learn something and learn it well, to the point where they are automatically able to incorporate IL skills into their schoolwork, future employment, and personal life.  First, students need clear expectations from the start.  This not only sets students up for success, but also professors when they go to assess learning artifacts.  This means being organized with your materials, with your syllabus, having a plan before you assign something, and knowing your structure before you build your online course material (we use Blackboard--if you plan to use a resource or technology, you must first instruct students on how to use it--do not assume they have experience with the technology). This also means, as a professor, you need to pull out the time machine and transport yourself back to your years as a college student when you are designing your syllabus, assignments, group activities, and other course materials. Have others read through your materials to see if there is language you could clarify.  Are you being specific enough or too specific with your guidelines? Have you tried researching those topics--In doing so, were you able to find the types and numbers of resources you are restricting your students to? If you can't fulfill those requirements, how can you expect students to? (This is something we see a lot.)  Sometimes what sounds like a good idea or a completely doable topic is very unreasonable once you place your restrictions or try to track down the information.  On the flip side, sometimes an assignment is unreasonable because there aren't enough restrictions.

I have also found some professors who have fallen victim to a "good enough" mentality. While I agree that there is little a professor can do once an assignment has been submitted, I think by building skills as you go, students will submit higher-quality learning artifacts and perform better on summative assessments.  But I have seen professors touch on topics which their students are obviously not grasping.  Instead of deviating from their scripted lesson plans to clarify materials, they stick to their plan and the students lose out and remain confused.  I think it is important for students to learn some things on their own, but it is also important for professors to clarify (and modify), as necessary. 

Making sure students produce quality work also means instructors lead by example.  By modeling good research habits and distributing quality resources to your students you show them the importance of quality information and a quality product.  If you are going to have students read articles, please be sure they are reliable & well-respected--not something you found on About.com, Wikipedia, or WebMD (all real-life examples...). Also, be sure you are not accepting those types of resources from students.  Essentially, when you accept those materials for their assignments, you are reinforcing that "good enough" is acceptable and even preferred.

Additional comments & conclusions: 

Are these lax professor expectations a result of inexperience or lack of teacher training? Perhaps. Many terminal degrees don't require much (if any) training for their students to prepare them to be educators.  The emphasis is on research and publishing rather than effective education practices at the higher level. This leaves students without true leaders in the classroom.  Instead of teachers, they are given subject specialists who know amazing things within their discipline, but cannot convey those ideas in such a manner that students are able to understand and apply the concepts.

But what about those veteran professors who have many years of experience in the classroom? Are those cases of "this is how I've always done it" or "I already know this stuff" or other situations where the classroom culture doesn't just permit off-task, disrespectful, or distracting behaviors, it even goes so far as encouraging these things?  I know there are many excellent educators teaching at the college level.  I have had them as professors and mentors, and have worked with them as colleagues.  But, as is human nature, I sometimes get stuck on (and frustrated by) those who aren't teaching to the level I would expect of myself.  The question comes back to this:

How do we, as librarians, resolve within ourselves (first) and within the classroom the difference between (lower) professor expectations and the (higher) expectations we hold?

Week 12: Scholarly Article Dissection, LOEX Preparation, and Reference Work

For the most recent unit in English 101, the students learn to dissect scholarly articles, finding information to answer their research question and guide them in writing their thesis. The process is designed to introduce them to this type of writing and set them up for success in future classes. As this is likely the first time students have had to work with scholarly research, the approach for this unit may feel "backwards" to some. Anne Marie compiled resources that compliment each other. The topic the classes were examining was: student success in college. She compiled three scholarly articles, as well as chapters from their required text, The Naked Roommate, and an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education. Throughout the week the class examined the articles together, identifying the pieces that helped answer their research question, "How do various factors influence college student success?" Students were to have read each of the articles prior to class (and were to have printed them to bring to class, to annotate as we discussed the important factors and results). The first day, Anne Marie popped in at the end of class to give students an idea of what to expect for the next class. On Wednesday the entire class dissected the first scholarly article all together, extracting factors and measures of success. That Friday I helped facilitate small group discussions (we broke into two groups, each discussing a different article). I was impressed with my students' abilities to see past the "fancy-author-talk" and interpret the article to get to the meat of what we were looking for. The next week we discussed both break-out articles as a class.

In addition to teaching, I assisted patrons at the reference desk, and Anne Marie and I spent quite a bit of time preparing our paper for LOEX--It will be here before we know it!

Week Six: Assisting, Teaching, Shadowing, and Celebrating Scholarship & Creativity

I packed a lot in to this first full week of February. On Monday I did my first solo stint at the Reference Desk because one of the librarians wasn't feeling well, so I volunteered to slide in and man the station. While I only had a couple of reference questions, it was still nice to be able to be there and help. I also observed a sociology class where students answered questions based on their readings. They considered the various types of resources needed to answer the questions (articles, books, primary, secondary, etc.) and talked about keywords for searching. After an orientation to the catalog and Academic Search Premiere, they were off to answer their questions! There are a couple of quirks to the current library catalog to keep in mind when students are searching for books. Of course, the library catalog isn't intuitive when it comes to creative student spelling and won't anticipate or offer suggestions like Google might. Another thing to keep in mind is that when the catalog finds resources that match your search terms, it bumps the most recent item to the top of the list (and the catalog recently added new e-book titles). By returning e-books as the first search results, some students were ignoring those print resources they were seeking (for those unable or unwilling to download the e-books). We showed students how to limit by material type, which helped them be more successful.

Sprinkled throughout the week was prep work and various other ongoing projects. Tuesday was a day filled with teaching (both observing and assisting). I worked with two sections of a World History class preparing for an upcoming assignment that leads them to a larger paper (due in April). We searched for relevant articles concerning a student-chosen topic within a certain time range. Students would engage with the articles, providing commentary on the viewpoints presented for their assignment, and eventually bring the information together for a longer paper. Many of the students were able to find all of the articles they needed for the rest of the semester (though for this class day, they were only required to find their first article--but we encouraged them to get as much done as they could to be ready for their upcoming article discussions).

Wednesday I observed one section and was able to teach on my own (WOO HOO!)! I worked with two World View II (WV2) classes. The first was an 8 a.m. class who, though still a little sleepy, was able to engage with information about their local organization, St. Mark's. Following the templates provided for all WV2 sessions, I began by introducing myself and what we would be doing for class that day. We discussed the "big picture" and the impact individuals can have by simply doing and being involved. The students will eventually present about their community organization at the Service Learning Fair, sharing with their peers what the organization does. After talking about various sources that may be used, and bias that goes along with sources, the students broke off into groups to answer the questions about who is involved with and benefits from the services they provide, how the organization is structured, how it is funded, and they developed additional questions to be presented to the organization representative when they met later that week.

All of the students answered questions that were provided using Moodle forums (they added threads to the posted questions). With the last 10-15 minutes of class, students reported back to the entire group a few interesting things they found as they were searching. This process was repeated for an afternoon class researching Big Brothers, Big Sisters. I enjoyed helping the students work collaboratively to find the information they were looking for. There was definitely some redirecting students away from unreliable resources toward things that would more easily help them answer their questions. At one point I used the example of a Wikipedia article I saw (and took a screenshot of) that listed a town's nickname as "The Armpit of America," and it's motto as "Too lazy to commute. Let's go on title [sic] 19." The article also notes the population as "15,579 Smiling toothless methheads." While this example is extreme, and the above mentioned information was removed that same day, it was effective in driving home the point that while Wikipedia is a fine place to start to find out basic information to steer your search in the right direction, it should not be your only source.

I returned to campus again on Friday for a shadowing session with Jon Helmke, Assistant Director for Library Systems and Technical Services. Jon teaches instruction sessions and performs liaison duties to various departments on campus (as do all of the librarians at UD), is responsible for maintaining the library systems (including Horizon and ILLiad), vendor correspondences for electronic resources, Gold Rush Electronic Resource Management System, and the Data Central Project. He supervises Meris, Sue, and Meghann (who I talked about in week five). Jon works with the University webmaster to keep a uniform look for the library's website while adding content. We discussed eventually moving from Horizon to a cloud-based system (similar to the new World Cat), or possibly even going Open Source, but at this point that just an idea they are keeping in mind but not actively pursuing.

After spending time learning more about Jon's duties, I worked on a project to learn more about the Report on the geological survey of the state of Iowa (and another from the state of Wisconsin) that had been donated. After exploring the online Library of Congress National Union Catalog, I went down to the basement archives to check out the print version (just to be sure, and to say I'd actually used the print version) and found that even though the item says it's Volume 1 (part 1 and 2 for the Iowa survey, and just one part for the Wisconsin) only one volume was ever published (we wanted to be sure it was complete before adding it to the collection).

The afternoon was filled with scholarship and creativity as the library held their annual Scholarship and Creativity Celebration which displayed scholarly works, and artistic/musical talents of those who work at UD. The reception included food (of course), music, and spoken word. It was quite the event, and wonderful to see that so many are active within their disciplines! Friday was also UD night at the Dubuque Fighting Saints game (and it was a close one too--overtime leading to a sudden death shootout, but ultimately a home team loss)!

Teaching = Wonderful!

Though my internship hasn't *technically* started, today's teaching session was just too wonderful not to write about! I had the privilege of working with a group of attentive, respectful, enthusiastic, high school AP English composition students from BHS North (68 of them, to be exact). Beforehand I prepared a half-page handout, a "Helpful Hints" guide to Wells Library. During my instruction session I gave that to the students to take notes on and later use throughout their day of research. I cannot emphasize how positive of an experience this session was for me! What a wonderful reminder of why I love being in the classroom!

We began by herding the masses into one of our largest media preview rooms (our regular information clusters are not large enough for this group). We had as many of them as we could sit in chairs and the rest pulled up a spot on the carpet. As they were getting arranged I was playing Carrie Donovan's YouTube Video emphasizing ASKing librarians for help. After that, folks were pretty well settled in and the "formal" instruction session began with a question: Where do you search?
The students were fantastic about offering up their ideas: Google, Bing, Wikipedia, and one student (in the front row, bless him) said EBSCO. I found out one thing I can certainly work on from conducting this interactive part of the lesson: my throwing arm. The kids soon learned why softball was never my sport because I missed the mark several times when tossing "prizes" (Wells Library Post-Its) to participating students.

We practiced a few sample searches in IUCat using some of their terms, and a few of mine as well (to keep them headed in the right direction), and then we moved on to using databases to find articles. A modified "Simon Says" helped the students understand how the different terms can expand or restrict your search results, and I also introduced the magic of truncation. After practicing in EBSCO (using Academic Search Premier and MLA), JSTOR, Literature Resource Center (making sure to talk about how they needed to save their information AND citations for each), discussing check-out policies and a brief introduction to the importance of scholarly research, we were off on a quick tour of the main level of the library.

We made a sweep past the East Tower's circulation counter, moved over to the reference desk, looked at the doors to the reading room (where their teacher would be camping out for the day, should they need something) and then moseyed over to the West Tower, where the nitty-gritty searching would begin. I walked them by a majority of the computers, pointed out where the reference desk was on this side, passed out log-in information and they were off! There were a few lost souls, as there always are, so I wandered around and helped anyone who looked like they needed some assistance.

I made a couple of loops around the West Tower computers and bumped into a gal having problems locating a book up in the stacks. We headed up to the 10th floor, together, to see if we could find the book she was looking for. After a little bit of searching, and some rereading of the call number we were able to successfully locate what she was looking for AND other resources grouped nearby (the wonder of LC classification!). I also bumped into other students successfully wandering the stacks and locating their materials. This was one of my favorite parts of the teaching day--seeing them find what they were looking for, and seeing them get excited about it!

I just had to return to the reading room after the students were pretty well settled and thank the teacher for bringing such a great group of high schoolers in! What a great Wednesday! I can't wait to start my internship so I can have even more rewarding experiences like this one!