Practical pedagogy fall quarter events

Practical Pedagogy is a graduate student colloquium that brings together teachers from the University of Washington community to discuss strategies for putting their pedagogical values into practice.

*Special faculty guest: Dr. Anne Beaufort, UW Tacoma
"They Don't Do The Reading: How to Get Students Engaged with Texts"
Thursday October 16, 3:30-5:00, CMU 202

Students come to college experts in reading Facebook, blogs, text messages, email. When students are assigned whole books, textbooks, or difficult articles, the skills they have don't serve them well. Nor do they feel motivated to read. What can we do? In this workshop, we'll look at ways to engage analytical reading skills and to motivate reading other than through the proverbial quiz. Bring a text that students will read this quarter, or one from past or future courses.

Dr. Anne Beaufort, of the Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences College at UW Tacoma, teaches writing and coaches graduate students in surviving the thesis/dissertation process. She holds a Ph.D. in Education, with a specialization in Language, Literacy, and Culture from Stanford University.

"Using Pocket Technology to Teach Interviewing Skills"
Thursday November 20, 3:30-5:00, CMU 226

The various technologies carried in the pockets of most of our undergraduates can be harnessed to teach interviewing skills or to incorporate interviewing into a class assignment. Through the use of file conversion web sites, the instructor may download and then listen to these interviews—later meeting with the student to review specific portions for praise and improvement. This technique of using digital recorders, cameras or phones for recording an interview eliminates the fear factor for most students. It also allows the instructor to easily access the file both for assessment and for review with the students. Facilitator: Peg Achterman (Communication).

Call us!

Dottie Smith shared this idea from the recent Reference Renaissance Conference. During your instruction sessions, when you're telling students how they can contact the Libraries when they have questions, have them pull out their cell phones and add the Info Desk number to their phonebook (206-543-0242). Great idea! [EK]

Lunch Discussion Notes: Assessment & Undergraduates

Here are the notes from one of the lunch discussion groups at our recent Putting Assessment into Practice: A Library Instruction Workshop. The topic of this discussion was: Assessment & Undergraduates

Thanks to John Holmes for moderating this discussion!

• We need to take a more systematic approach to UG assessment. Too much random and redundant instruction with no developmental arc. The role of the librarian as advocate is the key to articulating outcomes, both in general education curricula and within disciplines.


• Library outcomes need to be aligned with institutional curricula. And the vocabularies we use to discuss with faculty and administrators need to be customizable and built upon common goals.
• Scalability is the single biggest challenge to UG assessment.
• Undergrads seem to be more task-oriented than graduates, who are more career- and discipline-focused. Outcomes need to be more granular.
• Pre- and post-testing UGs seems to build higher motivation and confidence.
• Assessment is a strong marketing and advocacy tool. Faculty response to instruction by librarians can be used to broaden reach of programs.
• UGs should build a repertoire of approaches to solving information problems. Changes in technology change problem-solving strategies, which should, in turn, change our approaches to assessment.
• Perhaps the most important outcome, one that can be addressed both by librarians and course instructors, is increased metacognition in learners. The habit of reflecting on their own learning leads to better questions, better mental models, and more self-directed learning.

Ithaka's 2006 Studies of Key Stakeholders in Digital Transformation in Higher Education

Ithaka, a nonprofit organization that promotes the use of technology in higher education, has published an in-depth white paper with analysis and results from faculty and librarian surveys. The faculty survey focused on the relationship between faculty and their campus library, faculty dependence on electronic scholarly resources for research and teaching, the transition from print to electronic for scholarly journals, faculty publishing preferences, e-books, digital institutional repositories, and the preservation of scholarly journals. The librarian survey focused on the role of the library on the modern campus, impressions about electronic resources, digital institutional repositories, and the preservation of scholarly journals. Links to the raw data for both the faculty and librarian studies are also available. See http://www.ithaka.org/research/faculty-and-librarian-surveys