This final blog entry once again relates to a peer review context.; this time I invited a new member of our team to watch one of my sessions delivered to third year students ahead of the final major project planning. In this case it is a problematic session, which I felt didn’t work as well as it could, and which I felt I’d benefit from a fresh pair of eyes looking at.
One of the most challenging aspects of librarian teaching is not always having control of your brief. In this case, and in good faith, I’d been asked to deliver what was obviously too much material in too short a time: one hour to revise the basic scoping strategy for a research area, followed by an intro to 7 specialist databases. It is true students need this information, and it can be done in the time frame, but it comes at a cost where student interaction drops and the activity of showing becomes dominant.
In this case I could feel students attention waning and as a result the information being shared only being partially absorbed. The tutor at the end of the session said thank you, this is what they had wanted from me – so you would think everything was ok. Asking the students how they felt, resulted in a wall of non-comital silence. Having a colleague in the class I could check in with confirmed my suspicions, with them providing details as to where and when I lost them. Importantly they noticed their body language and rising boredom; in peer review observation of these non-verbal cues, especially when directly related to negative emotional states, provide important evidence as to when and how teaching goes wrong (Darling, et al, 2010)
Moving forward I knew I had to take this evidence back to the session tutor. Despite their perception of success, I felt the noted emotional response of the students spoke otherwise. To carry out the learning the students needed whilst keeping their attention would need more time – this is always hard for a librarian to negotiate when tutors who traditionally have a limited amount of the timetable to teaching support skills such as librarians offer.
References
- Darling, L., Orcutt, S., Strobel, K., Kirsch, E., Lit, I. and Martin, D. (2010) The Learning Classroom: Emotion and Learning. California: Stanford University School of Education, pp.90-104.
- Tackle, O. (2014) Untitled Available at: Vortrag | Oliver Tacke | Flickr (Accessed: 20/03/2024)