LOEX-a-palooza
Wow–14 hours of library instruction and information literacy today. But first things first…here is a picture of a cute wood duck (did I mention the exotic bird aviary here and the duck pond area?)
No, his head isn’t on backwards and, yes, he has both of his legs–he’s just hiding one in this picture. I caught him in mid-preen.
And while I’m at it, here are some shots of the seals that live over at the conference hotel. They are rescue seals that were found stranded:
This one has learned the fine art of relaxation.
Check out his flipper nails:
Looks like he’s ready to get a manicure.
And look at how happy this seal is:
OK, enough with the animal side show here (although, one more thing related to animals and then I’ll get back to info lit…I got to pet a baby alligator at dinner tonight! I just had to mention that.)
The plenary speaker this morning was so interesting–Dr. Pat Wolfe spoke about brain research and what it means for how we think about instruction. Basically, it has only been in the last thirty years or so that the technology has developed so that we can actually see what live brains do in response to various tasks. Now that we know the brain responds in certain ways, she emphasized that we need to teach to the brain and it behooves anyone in education to know about how the brain works. “We’ve been working with brains that we don’t understand.” She said that if we don’t, then it’s like going to a doctor who says “Yeah, I know kind of where the gallbladder is and I think you may have a problem with that–here’s a prescription. Try it and if it doesn’t work, come back and I’ll give you a new prescription. If that doesn’t work, we’ll try it again.” In the case of education, educators have known approximately where the brain is and it has been policy makers writing the bad prescriptions.
Traditionally, education has been about content manipulation–rote memorization and regurgitation of subjects studied in isolation from one another (“put away your math book, it’s time for health. put away your science book, it’s time for history”). If you can do well on the test, then you’ve “learned.” Dr. Wolfe referred to this as educational bulimia.
Our job as educators is not to help students do well in school but to do well in life, but most students can’t apply what they’ve learned. Dr. Wolfe highlighted four areas of brain research that can apply in the classroom:
“We don’t just teach, we shape brains.” Neurons that aren’t fired and “reinforced” wither away–experience shapes everyone’s brains.
The brain seeks meaningful patterns and we can only make sense based on what we already know–if we can’t connect to it, the info is dropped quickly. A student might be able to cram for a test and remember enough to pass that day, but unless a meaningful experience is hooked to the new information (through metaphor, analogy or simile) or unless you create the experience with them, then the time spent is not effective. Dr. Wolfe gave an example of a paragraph of gibberish to illustrate this.
There are two kinds of memory: Procedural (habits, things we do unconsciously because they have become automatic) is 98% of our memory. Declarative (anything we have to relate [or declare]–from our name, to our phone number to how to search a database) is only 2%. Dr. Wolfe said that reciprocal teaching is key to increasing retention–have the students show each other what they’ve learned. Have an exercise where they tell a partner what just went on in class–go around and listen to make sure they are getting it. “Practice doesn’t make perfect–it makes permanent connections.” If someone isn’t getting it, it will only be reinforced unless it’s corrected quickly.
Two useless questions to ask your class–Do you understand? and Any questions? Dr. Wolfe said that this only confirms whether or not their neck muscles are working.
If you’re concerned with Procedural memory then rote rehearsal works best–repeat things over and over. But for everything else, elaborative rehearsal works best. This includes reciprocal (or peer) teaching, metaphor and analogy, problem-based learning, visuals and graphics, simulations, hands-on activities and rhythm, rhyme and rap.
Finally, emotions are a part of the learning process. Learning is enhanced if the emotion generated by a learning experience is pleasant. Otherwise, fight or flight kicks in and learning shuts down–think test anxiety.
Dr. Wolfe had so many great examples and exercises for us to do while she taught us about the brain–she really put her theories into practice. You can check out her web site at www.patwolfe.com I’m also going to check out her book call Brain Matters: Translating Research Into Classroom Practice when I get back.
That was just the first hour and a half today! I heard about a lot of other cool projects and other ideas but I will write more about those later so that this doesn’t turn into a blog post/dissertation.
Safari vs. zoo
While on the dessert extravaganza boat tour outing tonight, I met a Canadian librarian who had an interesting analogy/metaphor about what we do as librarians these days, given the changing technological environment. She said that we used to be more like zoo keepers–everything had it’s place and we gave tours and followed a simple map. Now we’re more like safari guides out in the wilderness–we’re there to guide, but we’re not always sure the path. She articulated it in a clearer way, but you get the idea. Her powerpoint slides (which were a little too large for me to download here) can be found on her site here: http://www2.mtroyal.ca/~mmacmillan/ (click on conferences/workshops).
She also had a neat exercise where she worked with some history students–she broke them into groups and gave each of them a selection of web site print outs, book sections, encyclopedia entries and journal articles (scholarly and trade and popular) and had each group rank the usefulness of each source (all of the material was geared towards a particular topic). She plotted the results on the board and drew a line to show that the resource they considered most useful peaked above books, followed by journal articles. Then she asked them where they thought they should be spending the majority of their research time and they could immediately see.
I also heard some people talking about the teaching resources section of the LOEX site which offers additional exercises…can’t wait to go through it more thoroughly once I’m back: http://www.emich.edu/public/loex/teaching_resources.html
