Archives For Learning
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Michael Wesch and his students are planning a new video. Unlike his acclaimed video Visions of Students Today, this video will be from the perspective of the student. Wesch has a call up on Youtube asking for video submissions that he and his students will be able to remix. Looking forward to seeing what he develops. More importantly I am looking forward to seeing our students perspective on learning.
Death by Irony: How Librarians Killed the Academic Library – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout
The title Death by Irony: How Librarians Killed the Academic Library is so appropriate that I simply had to repeat the Chronicle of Higher Education commentary post. Brian T. Sullivan is an instructional librarian at Alfred University and suggests that the Academic library has died and the autopsy report reveals the following factors that contributed to its death:
- Book collections became obsolete
- Library instruction was no longer necessary.
- Information literacy was fully integrated into the curriculum.
- Libraries and librarians were subsumed by information-technology departments.
- Reference services disappeared.
- Economics trumped quality.
Sulivan expands on these 6 points in the article. He also offers the following summary statement which is a very hard pill to swallow and even though Sullivan is an instructional librarian I am sure he has angered many of his professional peers:
…it is entirely possible that the life of the academic library could have been spared if the last generation of librarians had spent more time plotting a realistic path to the future and less time chasing outdated trends while mindlessly spouting mantras like “There will always be books and libraries” and “People will always need librarians to show them how to use information.”
PLEASE remember I am simply repeating what this library professional has written about.
Carol Dweck, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, the author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
- Tend to view looking smart above all else;
- May sacrifice important opportunities to learn—even those that are important to their future academic success—if those opportunities require them to risk performing poorly or admitting deficiencies;
- Believe that if you have ability, everything should come naturally;
- Tell us that when they have to work hard, they feel dumb;
- Believe that setbacks call their intelligence into question, they become discouraged or defensive when they don’t succeed right away;
- May quickly withdraw their effort, blame others, lie about their scores, or consider cheating.
In contrast Dweck explains that students with a Growth Mindset believe that they can develop their intelligence over time and subsequently will:
- View challenging work as an opportunity to learn and grow;
- Meet difficult problems, ones they could not solve yet, with great relish;
- Say things like “I love a challenge,” “Mistakes are our friends,” and “I was hoping this would be informative!”
- Value effort; they realize that even geniuses have to work hard to develop their abilities and make their contributions;
- More likely to respond to initial obstacles by remaining involved, trying new strategies, and using all the resources at their disposal for learning.
To help motivate students to adopt the growth mindset Dweck recommends that teachers create a culture of risk taking and strive to design challenging and meaningful tasks. This will require teachers to learn to encourage and reward effort, persistence and improvement rather than simply reward results and test scores. It will also mean that instructors will need to educate student on the different mindsets. Dweck offers many key recommendations in the article that include:
- Emphasizing Challenge, Not “Success”
- Giving a Sense of Purpose;
- Grading for Growth.
To help teachers learn more about a growth mindset Dweck and her colleagues have developed growth mindset curriculum that can be accessed at www.brainology.us.
Part of my responsibility at the Adams Center for Teaching and Learning at ACU is the review of new course applications and syllabus. So I inevitably have a book or two on syllabus design or teaching and learning methodology on the go in addition to the many other books I am reading. I am only a few chapters into Linda Nilson’s The Graphic Syllabus and the Outcome Map: Communicating Your Course so I won’t be offering a full review of this book but wanted to share some extremely valuable insights I have discovered. Nilson is the founding director of the Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation at Clemson University and may be better known as the author of Teaching at its Best: A Research Based Resource for College Instructors so she does have some credibility to support her claims.
Nilson accurately points out the a course syllabus reveals much about an instructors theories of teaching and learning and whether an instructor sees oneself as a knowledge transmitter or on the other side of the spectrum an experience creator. But a syllabus can reveal much more:
If a syllabus contains enough detail, it can show how “honest” an instructor is in assessing his or her students. Instructors who claim their courses will help develop higher order thinking skills, but who assess students using test-bank multiple choice items are not being totally honest with the students and probably not themselves.
Nilson also reminds us that:
In order to develop genuinely high-order cognitive and affective abilities students must typically do considerable reflection, writing and sometimes out of class research. Objective quizzes and tests are seldom up to the task. More “personal” and student-choice assignments suggest that the instructor is interested in his or her students’ development as whole persons.
It is very easy to talk the talk in the outcomes section of the syllabus but the truth of what is really valued or significant in a course is revealed by the course assessments. An emphasis on assessment in a course also tells us that the priority in that course is the information and not the learning.
I am looking forward to working through the rest of this book.
