Please read the rules about posted assignments before reading onward.
Write a 1,000-1,500 word essay in which you reflect on what you have learned this semester.
You might start by thinking about the following questions. You are not required to answer any of these and you
certainly should not attempt to answer them all – these are merely offered to jumpstart self reflection.
• What did you hope to learn in this class? What did you learn? What do you now wish you had learned?
• How has your knowledge and understanding of higher education and academic libraries grown or changed
since the beginning of the semester?
• What are your career plans and how has this class informed or influenced those career plans?
• What is the most important thing you learned this semester?
• What is the most surprising thing you learned this semester?
• If you were advising a future student, what would you tell them to expect to learn?
Thinking about what I learned this past semester is a challenge, mostly because it seems common sense to me now. To write this learning response, I scrolled down the groups of articles assigned to us each week and tried to remember a time when this information was brand new. Was there a time when I would not think to make a handout for a library instruction session? Why would I not spend time in creating SLOs that reflect what the student will be able to do after the lesson, instead of during the lesson?
In fact, there was a time before I knew these things, or at least how to properly structure an instructional session. I never organized instruction sessions at a library, but I have given countless instruction sessions as a scouting counselor at summer camps. During the semester I frequently thought back to those lesson plans, or as I call them now, “Instructional Design Project for Cartography.” I created them three years ago, and still use them to this day. It might be hard for me to think about going over and rewriting each plan. The SLOs for the merit badges are handed to me, so I do not choose what the scouts have to learn. Despite that restriction, there is a lot of room for improvement in these “IDPs.”
Looking back at those plans, it surprised me how many different styles of learning I incorporated into the programs. For a lesson on how to figure out what direction you are facing, for example, I first explained the process (auditory), demonstrated the process on my compass (visual), and then had all of the scouts try it themselves (kinesthetic). I also tried to open each session with a short discussion on a topic that was relevant to the session’s SLOs. For the lesson mentioned earlier, I would ask the scouts how they would find what direction they were facing without a compass. The scouts always replied by saying that the sun would guide them, but when I asked what they would do on a cloudy day, few were able to respond. It made the scouts reflect on hypothetical situations, and give the topic relevance.
Something that my lesson plans need to include is a safety net. I tried to create IDPs that would facilitate in the scaffolding of their knowledge from one session to another, but time and time again my scouts would fail at learning the basics of cartography and orienteering. If the scout does not learn the new skill by the end of the lesson, any confidence I may have instilled in them would disappear. This makes it harder for the scout to come to the next session with any motivation at all.
How will these safety nets look like? I will probably ask a lot of leading questions, to figure out what the scouts do not understand. I will refuse to be annoyed that the scouts might not understand a concept because it seems simple to me, and explain ideas to them in different ways until they understand. I will also keep a close eye on how they demonstrate their skills in order to catch any bad habits that could hinder future application. For these safety nets to work, however, I need to remember one rule in designing IDPs: cut and cut again! Some of the IDPs are so full of information, I now fear that there is no room for questions without cutting out necessary activities. These IDPs have to be rewritten in a way that does not overload the scout with information, and provides opportunities to build their confidence.
All of these things that I reflected on will be passed down to future counselors through the counselor training camp I help run every few summers. One is scheduled for this June, and I plan to take all of these ideas and pass them on to the future counselors. The counselor in charge of this camp is in fact a teacher, which tells me she probably knows a lot about different learning styles, writing IDPs, and keeping motivation up in a classroom. I now wonder, why do fail to teach these future counselors the phrases, Student Learning Outcomes, Instructional Design Projects, or about the immense value of post assessment? It took me three years and a class on library instruction to realize how to accurately describe what was taught to me. I do not want to make future counselors wait that long.
When all of the counselors have a common vocabulary to work with, I think counselor quality will significantly improve. When one counselor has a problem, I will not have to grasp for words to advise someone to have a better attention grabber at the beginning, or to incorporate different learning styles. They will understand exactly what I am talking about and will be able to improve that section of their IDP. If they are told to create a post-assessment of their IDPs, they will have to reflect on the good and bad qualities of their sessions, and fix anything that needs to be fixed. Scouts will have a more enjoyable time learning different skills, and will have more merit badges to sew on their uniforms.
Perhaps it is weird that I wrote about being a scouting counselor, as an end of the semester learning reflection for library instruction, but I think it fits perfectly. I have never taught at a library, nor am I sure whether my future is in library instruction. My choice of classes for next semester are more technical, and I believe that is where my future career will take me. Scouting is the place where I will continue practicing the lessons I learned this semester, and pass it down to future counselors that I may have the opportunity to train.
If anything, the fact that I could write about my experiences with scouting in reaction to this semester points to one of the most important lessons I took away about learning. Early in the semester we talked about the Constructivist theory of learning, and how this theory states that prior knowledge helps to build the scaffolding required to learn. Scouting is indeed a powerful scaffold -- one that will shape any future knowledge I may come across for the rest of my life.
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