This week's readings were all about the teaching principle of using "formative assessment." What this means is that teachers evaluate students' learning during the lessons, and modify their teaching to better fit students' learning styles or focus on areas the students are not understanding. This method of teaching is in conflict with the traditional method of teaching, where teachers teach, students are expected to learn, and then they are assessed on what they have learned. The result is either that students learned what they needed to and do well on the assessment, or they did not learn what they were supposed to and do poorly on the assessment. The modern school of thought is more in favor of the former method of teaching. It emphasizes students' actual learning; it's more important that the students are understanding the material than that they score well at the end.
I come from a small state school here in Michigan, a university, I mean, and one of our most popular and most widely touted programs is our teaching program. We produce notably excellent teachers, who are generally praised all around for their readiness to teach in a real classroom post-graduation. I was never in the teaching program because I don't have the courage and fortitude to face a classroom full of young people day in and day out. But I did take Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) courses, and I know that my professor in all of those courses, who was also a professor in the normal teaching program, I believe, very highly stressed the value of formative assessment. In every class I had with him, he drilled into us that formative assessment is the only way to teach effectively. I am pretty certain that this was the case throughout the whole School of Education, and that our teaching graduates leave the college with a firm understanding of today's best practices in teaching. I would hope that, even though my school produces great teachers, this is the normal way that new teachers are taught, and that new teachers entering the workforce are putting these practices into use. The "problem" seems to be with getting veteran teachers on board with these new practices.
This is all well and good, but the question remains: what does this have to do with libraries? I think that part of it is the need to elicit feedback from users when we are doing instructional courses, or even during a simple reference question. Making sure that users are understanding what we are trying to show them is crucial in the service aspect of the profession. We are in the business of helping people help themselves, and if we show them time and time again without teaching them, we are doing them a disservice.
"We are in the business of helping people help themselves, and if we show them time and time again without teaching them, we are doing them a disservice."
ReplyDeleteI think this is a really great point and one that I think some librarians lose sight of. It was interesting to me when Kristin said in class that librarians are naturals at formative assessment because I definitely think she's right. We are a service-oriented profession, and we should be constantly helping people help themselves, while at the same time making sure they know we're always available. Like you said, it's a disservice to just yank the computer mouse away from a patron and search for something ourselves rather than show a patron who wants to learn how to use the catalog. Many people don't think of librarians as teachers, naturally, so I think for me it's important that I begin to really work on that in my future career.