Skip to main content

Supporting Colleagues With Instructional Programming Ideas

In our respective law schools, we don't always have control over the amount of mandatory research instruction our students receive and who is doing that instruction. As such, to ensure that our students have the research skills they need for practice, librarians must use their creativity to come up with instructional opportunities for our students. There are so many iterations of non-credit legal research programs out there. Law librarians run certificate programs for students on legal research, run lunchtime brown bags on how to conduct topical research, partner with vendors to provide programming to benefit their students, hold quick Peanut Butter & Jelly and a Demo sessions highlighting a single resource, and much more.

Sometimes it takes multiple iterations of an idea to work. This means that we need to hesitate before discouraging a colleague who wants to try something, even if we've tried something similar before. It often takes the right team and spark of energy for educational programming to work. And there is nothing more demoralizing than wanting to try "new" things and to constantly be told that they won't work because your library has tried something similar before. We need to give our colleagues with these ideas guidance on what stumbling blocks they may encounter, but while supporting them in their initiatives, so they say energetic and excited about our profession. We want to embrace those librarians and encourage their innovation and enthusiasm. We deal with many challenges in our chosen profession, and feeling a lack of support from our colleagues shouldn't be one of them. As our libraries change and resources and staff are potentially reduced, we will need their creativity. While we must be realistic about the amount of programming that our libraries can sustain, considering educational programming with an open mind and expressing encouragement towards our colleagues' ideas is critical to the morale of the library.

Those wanting to try new programming would do well to listen to their colleagues by asking questions to try to get a sense of what didn't work well with the last educational programming that "failed." At what time of day did they offer the programming and were there a lot of conflicting events? How long was the program? What kind of marketing did they do for the programming? Did they get any formalized feedback on the programming from those who did attend and, if they did, was their any constructive feedback? Building off of past programs and making incremental changes will often result in finding your law library's instructional programming "sweet spot." Even one small change in the program can be the catalyst for a program to succeed when it didn't last time--and having energized librarians running these programs can go a very long way in an instructional opportunity being a success. Let's nurture that excitement.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Why Experts Can Struggle to Teach Novices

This week in our Slack group on teaching , there was an interesting discussion about expertise and the amount of time needed to prep for instruction. I mentioned something that I recalled reading: that experts can be less effective in teaching novices because often the expert skips cognitive steps that the novice learner needs to understand.  I thought I'd dig into this a little more today on the blog. The fact is novices and experts learn very differently.  The major reason for this is that experts not only know a lot about their chosen discipline, but they understand how that discipline is organized. As such, what has a clear structure to the expert is a jumbled set of unorganized information to the novice.  The information presented to novices "are more or less random data points."[1]  In contrast, when the expert learns something new in her area of expertise, she just plugs it into the knowledge structure that already exists in her long-term memory. Because the...
Read more

Helping With Student Focus & Motivation in the Remote Classroom, Part 3: Limiting New Technologies to Reduce Extrinsic Cognitive Load

A librarian colleague used to say to me, "Technology is great until it's not." This couldn't be more true in the classroom.  As many of us prepare for a fall entirely or partially online, there's a rush to familiarize ourselves with lots of new educational technology to teach our classes. There's this sense that if you're not using the best and newest ed tech in your class, you're doing something wrong. Fortunately, the science doesn't back this up.  Using too many different types of technology can be a contributing factor to cognitive overload in students . Cognitive load is a term cognitive psychologists use to describe the mental challenge that the limitations of working memory puts on a student's learning.[1] Basically, working memory is extremely limited in both time and duration. Humans can only hold on to between four and nine "chunks" of information at any given time,[2] and can only hold on to new information in their worki...
Read more

Research Conferences as a Practice Skill

Many first year legal research and writing include a conferencing component. Most of these conferences, however, focus primarily on the writing process. Conferences are held after students have struggled through the research process and have drafted at least some part of a memo or brief. There are many pedagogical reasons for the importance of research conferences (e.g. students are provided with individualized feedback), but one that is often overlooked is that research conferences help prepare students for practice by giving them opportunities to collaborate with other legal professionals and to orally communicate about the legal issues they are facing. Through research conferences, students learn how to discuss the authorities they have located effectively and to communicate how they are relevant to the legal issues they are facing. This practice collaborating is key. As Susan Azyndar noted in her article " Work with Me Here: Collaborative Learning in the Legal Research Class...
Read more

The Experiential Simulation Course Checklist, Part 1

When developing courses to meet the requirements for experiential simulation courses, there are three ABA standards that come into play: Standard 303(a)(3), Standard 302, and Standard 304. When combined, there are eight bullet points that one must meet to comply with the standards for experiential simulation courses**: " Primarily experiential in nature " (Standard 303(a)(3)):  To meet this bullet point, an ABA Guidance Memo provides additional help. It notes that the "primarily" suggests "more than simply inserting an experiential component into an existing class." Furthermore, the "primarily" "indicates the main purpose of something." It is clear that the experiential nature of the course should be central to the course's design and should be prevalent across the entire length of the course. In fact, the ABA notes that the "experiential nature of the course should . . . be the organizing principle of the course, and th...
Read more

Cultivating Trust in the Classroom

Cultivating trust is one of the keys to effective collaboration. This is especially true in the classroom. The relationship between instructor and student can have a huge effect on how much the student learns. But how do we cultivate trust? Here are just a few ways: 1) Creating " psychological safety ." In a study by Google of what helps teams collaborate well, Google found that psychological safety, as measured by taking turns in discussions and team members demonstrating high degrees of social sensitivity. In the classroom context, this means students need to feel free to ask questions and speak up without fear of rejection by those sharing their classroom space. Instructors can foster this by making it clear that there are no "stupid" questions, by cultivating a supportive classroom atmosphere, and by encouraging students who ask questions or make comments with positive reinforcement. 2) Listening actively . When students feel that instructors and classm...
Read more