Since my last post about co-teaching, I have helped co-teach three other library instruction classes. Slowly, I have built up to do more and more in the classroom. Originally just showing students how to use Scout to exploring other databases with them, walking them through assignments, explaining my own research process, and more. Overall, it has been a very beneficial experience for me. While co-teaching is not how I pictured it would be, I have enjoyed getting to interact with students. It is rewarding to see them engaged in a lesson or being able to find things they are looking for.

Additionally, while the library instruction classes are meant to help students learn and prepare for their classes, they have also helped me. I have always been pretty good at searching but now not only have I just been able to learn more about how to search effectively and efficiently, but I have also just learned a lot about the library and the resources offered in an academic library. There are so many things I did not know were offered to me as an undergraduate student that I am now aware of. It makes me excited to know I have the opportunity to help these students in ways that can make learning fun as well as just make their lives easier when it comes to school. I can help show them services the library offers them, which I know would have been really helpful to me when I was in undergrad.

The term Kairos seems to add a layer of practicality and equity when applied to library instruction. Placing instruction standards and other content into a broader context of time, place, and the individual students allows flexibility to deconstruct and recreate what is expected, what is ideal. More importantly it recognizes the context of standards and removes the guise of truth from them. This empowers both instructors and students to make classroom objectives more practical to their current Kairos. The shift in focus encourages creativity in instruction and relives pressure from students to conform to abstract ideals. Standard are useful and necessary, as Drabinski points out, but they can feel limiting. Adding the layer of Kairos keeps us from being held back, either trapped conforming to rigid standards or entangled in criticism and conflict against them. It is useful to think of in relation to library instruction and information literacy. I wonder if an even broader application to elementary and secondary education standard would also be beneficial?

While I did not observe anyone this week, I did have a few meetings about lesson planning for my upcoming teaching session. I also worked on a Boolean operators learning activity. For my activity, I decided to use Harry Potter themed search terms. I have 3 venn diagrams. To teach Boolean operators, I plan to demonstrate the operators in Scout with my 3 different search combinations. While I do this, I plan for the students to follow along and complete the search with me. Following that, I have a short activity for them to do with their own key words.  I have four questions:

1. What are your key terms?
2. Use some of these terms along with the Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT.
3. How are your search results changed when you use the different Boolean operators?
4. Try using more than one Boolean operator. How does this effect your results?

I hope that by using the operators along with me, and then by using the operators for their own search results, that the students will internalize what the operators mean.

While reading “On Reflection,” I kept thinking about my own process of reflecting especially the reflecting I’ve done on here about my co-teaching experiences and just sitting in on the library instruction classes. One thing I liked about the piece is how it broke down curriculum into three groups: lived curriculum (everything a student has learned up to that point), delivered curriculum (planned curriculum they learn in class), and experienced curriculum (how each student experiences the delivered curriculum). It was interesting to try and apply these ideas to my own reflection. Thinking about how this applies in the library instruction classroom not only for myself but also for the students in the class. Every student comes into those classes with different levels of each type of curriculum and how not every student is the same.

Additionally, I just enjoyed thinking about how people learn to write and connecting that with the process of reflection. The piece points out that if you are confused and wondering about how someone got to a conclusion in their writing just to ask them. Many writing subjects can often be up to interpretation (which is given as an example later in the piece. The author mentions how when talking to students about their answers on a writing assignment, many students interpreted the writing prompt differently than how the teacher meant it or expected for it to be interpreted). Students can come at a subject with many different ways of thinking or with more than one point of view. Connecting this with reflection and the idea that articulating what we have learned for ourselves (reflection) is a vital part of learning. Moreover, through this process we learn to better understand subjects and ideas when we spend time reflecting on them.

My first experience co-teaching was last week when I helped James teach two EN 101 classes. One notable part of the experience was that I was far less nervous about co-teaching than I thought I would be. This summer I spent a lot of time helping with the journalism school’s orientation, and being in the library instruction classes felt very similar. Another notable aspect of the class was that the teacher whose class it was was very hands on and interactive with myself and James, which made the students more at ease. They participated and spoke a lot more than James or I anticipated, which helped make the classroom more comfortable for myself as well.

For my part, I helped teach the students Scout as well as helped them determine what reliable sources are when it comes to research and writing papers. At the end of the class, the students worked on an assignment their professor gave them, which meant I got to help the students navigate Scout themselves and identify trustworthy sources. It was cool to not only be about to teach them about these things, but then be apply to help them practically apply it themselves. Because they were doing an assignment, the things they were learning in the library instruction class were more meaningful, which caused them to be more attentive and ready to learn.

Reading this chapter, I found the discussion in  “Posing Problems” to be extremely interesting. I find the idea and implementation of Universal Design to be extremely useful and beneficial, so long as we are constantly critical of the actions we are taking. I think of the class that Dolamage discussion where the teacher was praised for her syllabus that no one felt the need to seek accommodation, and think to my own experiences. At my time at the University I have been constantly told “even if you do not think you will need accommodations, please get them sorted because you never know what will come up.” I feel it was a failure of the teacher in this situation to allow her students to feel like they did not need accommodations- so then when they do they feel pressured and excluded. It is these kinds of oversights that we need to remain hyper critical of.

Brookfield’s “A Process of Learning and Change” brings up the role of educational theory in recognizing the results of outside forces on student responses in the classroom. Reading and participating in the theoretical discussions surrounding education can help instructors understand hostile responses when students encounter concepts that challenge their own deep-set beliefs or ideals or run counter to their reality. Participating in theoretical analysis also keeps instructors questioning curriculum creation and outside influence on what is being taught in the classroom. Just like self-reflection and comparing experiences with those of colleagues helps instructors understand their own influences and biases in the classroom. Brookfield’s discussion of the problems with educational theory and research is refreshing. Brookfield reflects on teacher complaints that theoretical writing is out of touch and overly formal. However, the academic discussion is important to help instructors and the educational discipline has a whole increase their awareness of power dynamics, and external influences within the classroom and curriculum.

This week I continued in my path of observing, and I got the chance to watch another librarian. Off the bat I noticed that the approaches and styles of the two librarians that I have observed so far were very different. Both librarians were teaching similar material but when about it in very different ways, even the information covered varied. I was interested to see that one librarian glossed quite quickly over one subject while the other spent the majority of the class time on it. It seemed that maybe this was because of the Professor of the class, and that they wanted to focus on different material. I also noticed the librarians using the techniques that we have discussed in class such as “pair and share” which I found interesting.

As I began to read the Brookfield chapter, I will admit that I was extremely skeptical of the article. I felt the language to be very pompous, and failed to see how this would be of any use to me. I felt a very strong disconnect from the writing, and that the author and I felt extremely differently about teaching and that there was no chance we could land on the same page. I felt that all of what he was discussing was great for an educational scholar who has chances to reflect on all of this, but as someone was has been in an elementary school classroom, there is hardly any time for reflection on this level.

I found myself to be quite surprised when the chapter then discussed this exact belief and how it is difficult to get teachers to read educational literature. The review of the teacher he quoted still rings true to me “their research did not speak the truth to me.” I absolutely agree with the authors statement that the language used is usually formal and academic as a means to impress the members of academia rather than those who could use the research. I was happy to see this discussion being had, but I felt that he discussed it for a second before falling back on uppity vocabulary and creating that disconnect again. I still feel that a lot of what he was discussing is in the abstract and theoretical and doesn’t do a much for teachers in their day to day lives.

This article was very powerful in its description of Universal Access. I enjoyed the example about the professor who allows his students to write down questions on note cards during class. While this may seem like a simple idea on the surface, it stood out as a very thoughtful gesture for me that would help those in class with any kind of anxiety surrounding asking questions. The main point of the article seemed to be that one should keep in mind the multitude of perspectives and needs in a room at any given point in time and the necessary different approaches and methods to help those people. The five levels of access is something that I will try to keep in mind for my classroom in the future. I agree with its statement that Universal design is a matter of social justice.