Some brief thoughts on classroom management, techniques, and future lesson plans

I started off writing this post reflecting on the negatives of a difficult instruction session that I had and although it's really helpful to examine failure, I think it's even better to look at what has gone well and what does work. The difficult class I taught was a student success course for (mostly) athletes in their freshman year. It's extremely remedial to ensure they get the right footing before entering into more advanced classes. On one hand, from what I observed, it seems like it is a necessary thing for some students, and at the same time, it seemed like they were frustrated and perhaps felt the class was beneath their skill level. So, with that situation (and numerous classroom management issues) and a last minute request for instruction, it was an uphill battle.

The ERIAL Project has highlighted the issue of students with the lowest skill level in library research being the most confident about their abilities. I definitely notice this in the classes I teach, and particularly in this student success course. They seemed to feel very confident and like they didn't need me to show them anything (not the whole class, but the majority). In contrast, the students who were excelling and were doing more advanced research were the only ones asking questions and putting effort into the activity. I think an effective method in this case is to set them up for some struggle first and then show them that they could really use instruction. For example, have them search the database without direction, and then when they see they haven't found very useful results or too many results, demonstrating tactics and tricks can better capture their attention. That way when we say knowing how to do research effectively will actually save them time in the long run, they will believe it.

On the flipside, I went back to teach another session to freshmen football during their study table hours (this is part of my work in student retention), and it went amazingly well. The lead tutor who oversees their study table hours said my colleague and I are great at engaging a very difficult population (hooray!) and asked me to come back next month even though now we've covered all the sessions we agreed upon for the academic year (orientation, basic searching, evaluating sources, and citing/avoiding plagiarism).

With this group, I have been planning game-like activities to engage their competitive nature. Anytime they can go up against one another, they seem to get really into it. We planned a BINGO-style orientation session for them over the summer and they were hardcore about enforcing no answer sharing or explaining answers until the competition is over because they all wanted to win. At this latest session, we did plagiarism court and offered candy for answering correctly. I'm already plotting out our next session and think now that they have the basics, I'd love to teach them "research as conversation," and framing it that way should really help them understand the process better. I'm working on developing some things to illustrate this in a fun way and will share what I create along with the results. This is an exciting group to work with because I can try out a lot of different things and can make it fun.

Workshop for Faculty: Designing Effective Research Assignments

Designing Effective Research Assignments from Nicole Pagowsky

Today, myself and a colleague presented a workshop to faculty on designing effective research assignments for student success. Since we consult with faculty often and see good/bad assignment design in action through library instruction and feedback from the reference desk, we were proactive and offered this session as part of the Office of Instruction and Assessment teaching academy offered each semester. We thought this would be a great opportunity to work more closely with faculty who might not know about library services or best practices / pitfalls.

If you download the PPT instead of just viewing it on SlideShare, you can see our presenter notes, detailing what was covered in each slide. We started off talking about issues students have with research and research assignments through looking at the ERIAL Project, Project Information Literacy, and Kuhlthau's Information Search Process. We discussed how faculty and librarians overestimate students' skills in research (ERIAL), how students overestimate their own skills as well but are anxious about research (and even dread it, PIL), and then how to understand this affective learning and when/how to intervene (Kuhlthau). Applying this knowledge to ACRL Info Lit standards, we had faculty start to think about current assignments they are using, or assignments they would hope to use, in this new context.

Next, we covered specific design pitfalls and best practices, breaking best practices down into: scaffolding, transparency, context, critical thinking, process over perfection, and embedding academic integrity.

As part of hands-on activities, we, as I mentioned, had instructors use a worksheet to think about their own assignments and evaluating their effectiveness, then we also had them evaluate a sample assignment using criteria related to being specific, transparent, and encouraging critical thinking.

The session went very well, we even received applause at the end with many thank yous. There is really nothing I can think of to modify at this time, other than spending more time hearing about what kinds of assignments instructors are using. We will be getting formal assessment back soon from the Office of Instruction and Assessment, who hosted the workshop series. We will be offering this workshop again in a month or two and am looking forward to working with more faculty.

Library Skills for Academic Integrity

In an effort to improve retention rates and let students learn from their mistakes, the university now issues sanctions for students to attend mandatory, multi-part workshops when caught plagiarizing, instead of immediate expulsion. This is really great, because a lot of the time plagiarism is not intentional. Students may have procrastinated and just sloppily put a paper together at the last minute. This way, they can learn better study skills and what plagiarism really is instead of just being kicked out. It's really up to the faculty member and how s/he wants to handle it, but the Dean of Students Office has a general outline to follow.

Since this falls under student retention, it's my area, and although we have worked with the Dean of Students Office in the past to deliver a standalone library component workshop for the series, I am working with Student Affairs and the tutoring center to revamp this model. The Dean of Students Office presents their own workshop on what academic integrity is and the UA's honor code. Then, the tutoring center has hired a Graduate Assistant (GA) from Education to teach the three hour workshop on study skills and putting knowledge of what plagiarism is into practice. So my portion will be embedded within improving study skills and how to write a paper. We're using the train-the-trainer approach here once again though to keep it scalable since there are about 10-15 workshops per semester. So I will be training the GA, and delivering the first session or two, then he will deliver the library portion along with what he is already covering while I observe, and then he takes it from there. We will be checking in throughout the semester and plan to re-assess before summer.

The Dean of Students is also hoping to offer this to the campus community at large for anyone interested, caught plagiarizing or not. So, I will be working with the tutoring center to market this workshop to a wider audience. I am also hoping to tie this into the Libraries' badging system in the works. This workshop, or a component of it, could be a challenge or a badge in itself.

As far as the instruction goes, the last thing these students want, I'm sure, after feeling irritated, uncomfortable, and probably embarrassed about attending these sessions, is someone standing up there scolding them and making them memorize searching skills, library jargon, and dos and don'ts. I'm trying to make my portion for library skills fun and relatable, showing them it's actually pretty easy to not plagiarize. My thoughts are most have procrastinated, slopped a paper together at the last minute, and then thought having a list of references at the end would suffice. I don't believe the majority of these students intentionally plagiarized with the hope that others' work would be passed off as their own. I really do think they just wanted to get their assignment done for a class they might not think will affect them in the long run. I was not the best student during most of undergrad, so I can certainly relate to those feelings.

Here is my pretty-close-to-final draft of the Libraries' portion of instruction for these workshops. The presenters' notes, which you probably can't see through SlideShare, have more detail on what I'll be covering in each slide.

Library skills for academic integrity from Nicole Pagowsky

Library research expertise, collect them all

From Purdue Passport

Student motivation can be problematic in college courses, and particularly with auxiliary college work where skills are encouraged, but aren't necessarily required to be learned (ahem, library research skills). Some instructors are serious about students building a knowledge base in using the library and developing critical thinking in regards to information, but it's not across the board. As we know from the ERIAL Project, student perceptions are heavily influenced by their instructors' relationships with the library. When the library has a good relationship with an instructor, research assignment design tends to be strong and students get a better grounding in using library resources. As great as this is and as much as we'd hope to advertise this fact to faculty, we can't exactly force every instructor on campus to work with us and especially to incorporate a research-related or info lit-type of assignment if they either don't want to, or it doesn't fit with the course.

So, we wonder, how can we help students develop these skills even if we can't work with them through a class, or if we haven't yet become embedded where they are. I've been thinking about this a lot over the past year in relation to student retention and also gaming and motivation, and became very interested in Mozilla's Open Badges, which I discussed here back in January when exploring badge systems. These badges are tied to certain skills that can be earned through reading and completing certain tasks, which can then be displayed in a portfolio or on social networking sites.

Thinking about how this can be tied to education has been apparent in MOOCs, and just recently, Purdue has developed Passport to offer badges in a university setting. I have been approved to be a beta tester, which I am really excited about. We have been talking about incorporating gamification and a badge system here at the University of Arizona Libraries since I started and was particularly enthusiastic about it, but we run into issues with the programming side of the system since we have limited staff in that regard. We are hoping to develop a gamification layer over our existing tutorials and guides and will have badges tied to the ACRL Information Literacy Standards (as a very basic explanation of these ideas).

Now, let's be realistic, I think we all get it that most students aren't going to be persuaded to do extra work in learning library research skills just because they might get a PNG image after completing tutorials and quizzes (I certainly know I wouldn't have been convinced as an undergrad). However, I am hoping we are able to work with the career center, tutoring, and other areas on campus that might help give the badges more value so students feel they are meaningful. If only one unit on campus is offering these badges, what exactly do they even mean? However, if students can include a suite of them in an eportfolio or on a resume, that does have more value. On the flipside, from our analytics, we do see that students, and even non-students, complete our tutorials regularly without them being assigned, and for the ones offering a certificate upon completion, we have a large number of people submitting their information to receive one. So, there is clearly intrinsic motivation present, but we hope to use a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic to find the right balance in helping students build these skills.

I wrote a literature review on motivation in gamified learning scenarios for a gaming in education course I took this semester, which you can read here if you're interested. Applying these ideas to a badge system in libraries is more tricky than a classroom since we typically do one-shot sessions, and like I mentioned these skills are often treated as auxiliary to a class.

Anyhow, I will keep this blog more updated than usual as I beta test and incorporate badges into our resources! More next time...