Week 6 Reading and Class Reflection

I enjoyed all of the readings this week, but they were easier for me to digest individually than all in one big bite.

Metzger

Two things in this passage really stood out to me. First, when she mentioned that before the Socratic Seminars, students who discussed a piece of writing would then understand it—but wouldn’t be able to apply those strategies to a later piece of writing. I immediately thought, “Aha! They’re not able to transfer the knowledge!” And then I thought, “The way that I am transferring my knowledge about transfer!” And then it got a little too meta, and felt kind of like when you face two mirrors toward each other and they reflect back and forth into infinity. So I dropped that train of thought.

Second, I appreciated the point she made about how sometimes the teacher’s presence in a discussion derails it. I was noticing the same thing in another class last week; we were ostensibly having a discussion, but in reality, it was just a series of comments directed at the teacher. Few people were responding to one another, and when they did, they didn’t seem very self-assured about it. It felt like no one knew how to build on other students’ comments, and instead could only respond to them with a contrary statement, if they acknowledged them at all. I think that good group discussion is a skill that’s not much more developed in many grad students than it is in freshmen; I could use some work on it myself.

Hoffert

Some of the suggestions in here were great; I definitely liked the idea of having a book club based on a theme, instead of on a single book. I think there’s more potential for a variety of viewpoints that way. However, one part of this piece has NOT aged well: the discussion of bringing authors in to speak via videoconferencing. Even five years ago, when this was written, videoconferencing was apparently a big hassle that required cumbersome equipment. Basically, Skype has rendered that entire section of the article pointless. Also, the talk of conference calls seemed dated, since there’s rarely any reason to use conferencing technology that doesn’t include video anymore.

Tredway

I had a friend visiting last week; she was considering SI, and she wanted to tag along to my classes. Like me, she has a JD, but she graduated more recently than I did. Her immediate reaction to hearing that I had a 3-hour class was horror. She asked, “How can you stand three hours of lecture and questions?” I responded by reminding her that, “We don’t use the Socratic Method here.” That was basically the equivalent of me telling someone who thought she was about to witness an execution that, “We don’t use capital punishment here.”

To a law student, the Socratic Method is generally seen as a weapon used to force compliance with reading assignments and terrorize the unwary. There are a few professors who approach it the way that this article describes—at least, pretty close—but the Socratic Seminar described in this article would work best in a small class, not in a massive lecture. In the legal world, the Socratic Method usually means picking people (either at random or according to an unarticulated system) to answer specific questions about a case. It’s more of a spot-check to be sure people have done the reading than an actual give-and-take. Have you ever seen The Paper Chase? It’s pretty close to that. Seriously. I had a Torts professor during my first year of law school who seemed to think that it was actually supposed to be called “Socratic Hazing.” It didn’t really feel like a Thursday morning unless someone left the lecture hall in tears.

All of which is to say: the Socratic Seminar sounds like a lovely idea, but based just on the name, I was terrified of it. Now I’m looking forward to seeing how some of my classmates choose to put it into action.

Last week’s class

I wasn’t sure how useful it would really be to discuss the evaluations of McGonagal, but that ended up being my favorite part. In the process, I reached some conclusions that I just hadn’t seen before about the role of various questions for different evaluators; questions that tested comprehension would probably be of little use to the event organizer, but they would be a goldmine to McGonagal. Likewise, McGonagal is unlikely to care about the crowd’s feelings on temperature and sound quality, but to someone at the library who is tasked with maintaining the infrastructure of the presentation, that information would be valuable. I know these aren’t ground-breaking ideas, but I hadn’t considered them before.

Also, I just wanted to mention that I’m super-excited to be learning more about book clubs this week, because in another class, I’m part of a group that’s evaluating book clubs at a public library. It’s time for some CROSS-POLLINATION IN MY HEAD-GARDEN. (…um. Yeah. Midterms have got me a little loopy.)

Darnton

Since this is for the Socratic Seminar demo, I don’t know if I should say much about this article or not. But I do have three thoughts to share:

1. 1. Finally a piece that really delves into an issue facing academic libraries! Exciting!

2. 2. Any day on which I learn a new word (jeremiad) is per se a good day.

3. 3. Having that many books easily available in digital format, for FREE, would be unbelievably cool. Copyright issues be damned.

Week 5 Reading and Class Reflection

The thing that stood out to me about class on 2/7 was watching and assessing the video about gaming providing a way to save the world. Based purely on the speaker's presentation, I'm skeptical; it seems like the kind of research claim that's great for getting grants but not really that practical in reality. I don't know much of anything about gaming, though, or saving the world, so maybe her ideas are actually both brilliant and accurate. But the group assessments of the video were interesting (as well as being, you know, the point of the whole thing), especially because that activity really demonstrated to me how differently people can see the same topic. The variety of organizations for the questions kind of blew me away; it never even occurred to me to use any organizational structure other than the one we had, but other groups went in very different directions.

As for this week's reading from HPL, when I look at it broadly, there are some useful ideas that I could see having applicability in an academic or public library. For example, demonstrating a skill, explaining the rationale behind it, then having students practice that skill in various ways to improve transfer seems like it could be as helpful in a workshop as in a classroom. The book did a good job of explaining how the ideas of understanding and transfer work, particularly in the contexts of math and science. But because the examples tended to emphasize those disciplines, I had to do a little bit of extrapolating to apply the text to the kind of work I plan to do. This, though, was the idea that seemed most valuable to me:

Teachers can help students change their original conceptions by helping students make their thinking visible so that misconceptions can be corrected and so that students can be encouraged to think beyond the specific problem or to think about variations on the problem.

This is a great idea-- and one that we're clearly putting into practice in this class. We read the theories in the book, write about them to show how we're thinking about them, and then discuss them in class. The same approach could be modeled in a lot of different kinds of classes and workshops, and I think it would improve comprehension and the transfer of skills. Along those lines, the Wiggins and McTighe article presented a concrete example of how to put the ideas from HPL into action; the specifics are probably not useful for me, but the broad outlines of the implementation are good.

All in all, this week's readings were useful for someone in SLM or planning to work in an academic library, and if I ever have the freedom to influence the structure of lessons, I could see integrating these ideas into them.

Week 4 Reading and Class Reflection

Readings

This week’s readings addressed learning environments and formative assessments. While the learning environments reading was interesting (particularly the history of literacy standards) a lot of it wasn’t very relevant to what I’ll be doing in my career. Legal education has a lot of traditions, and I not only don’t think I could change the system in response to ideas about learner-centered environments, I don’t think I’d want to. However, the Sadler reading seemed very relevant in some respects, and I found some parts of it thought-provoking.

Reading about formative and summative assessment, and the merits of different kinds of assessment or evaluation in a learning environment, I struggled a little to reconcile some of the ideas to my own experiences in education and my future in academic law librarianship. There have been some situations, during my undergrad as an English major or in a couple of SI classes, in which I think the focus was truly on mastery learning. But the most formative educational experience I’ve had was law school, and that initially seems like the antithesis of mastery learning, at least on a class-by-class basis.

Most law school classes follow the same template: courses are taught by lecture, usually Socratic (with varying degrees of malice and schadenfreude, depending on the professor) and grades are decided by a single exam at the end of the semester. There is no feedback from the professor during the semester, and even among classmates, there isn’t much of an opportunity to gauge your mastery prior to the exam, because the mandatory curve creates a highly competitive atmosphere that doesn’t encourage collaboration in most cases. This approach to education is actually pretty consistent with legal practice as a whole; a professor once told me that, as lawyers, we had to develop a “bathtub memory” that we could fill with the relevant area of law when needed, and then just as quickly empty to make room for the next batch of knowledge. No one can hold everything that she’ll need to know in her head throughout her legal education and practice, so the goal is to learn quickly, have excellent short-term recall, and then let go of the information when it’s no longer necessary.

This would seem to facilitate the opposite of mastery learning, and that’s not an inaccurate way to view it, if you’re just talking about a single class in Torts or Property. But if you view law school as an entire educational experience, with the goal being information literacy (in terms of being able to research law effectively) and the development of that bathtub memory, then final exams (as well as the sample briefs and memos written in legal research classes) can be take on the characteristics of a formative assessment, with each one serving as a gauge of your progress in “thinking like a lawyer.” Successful law school graduates will have mastered that skill by the time they graduate.

What does this mean for me, as a future law librarian? My role in instruction will probably be minimal; at best, I’ll teach some legal research and writing classes, or assist students at the reference desk. But being able to view law school in the framework of a series of formative assessments does provide a wider perspective on the significance of those tasks, and I think that’s a perspective that a lot of law students could benefit from as well.

Last week’s class

I liked seeing other people’s podcasts, but what I liked even more was listening to my fellow students assess them. No one is actually as critical of other people’s work as they are of their own, and I think it’s easier to approach your own task with minimal anxiety when you know that you won’t be held to the same standards that your inner evaluator has.

The discussion of information literacy and its meaning was helpful in some ways, although trying to craft new definitions of it that didn’t use “use” felt more like an exercise in diplomacy and compromise than anything else. But I think being exposed to the ways that people in other sub-specialties—like public or k-12 librarians—view information literacy is valuable, because those are perspectives that might never occur to me alone.