Frameworks for Fostering Student Engagement

Characteristics of Best Practices.... Category 9: Outreach

(http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlstandards/characteristics.htm )

Outreach activities for an information literacy program:

• communicate a clear message defining and describing the program and its value to targeted audiences;
• provide targeted marketing and publicity to stakeholders, support groups and media channels;
• target a wide variety of groups;
• use a variety of outreach channels and media, both formal and informal;
• include participation in campus professional development training by offering or co-sponsoring workshops and programs that relate to information literacy for faculty and staff;
• advance information literacy by sharing information, methods and plans with peers from other institutions; and
• are the responsibility of all members of the institution, not simply the librarians.

Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education

(http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/7princip.htm )

• encourages contact between students and faculty,
• develops reciprocity and cooperation among students,
• encourages active learning,
• gives prompt feedback,
• emphasizes time on task,
• communicates high expectations, and
• respects diverse talents and ways of learning.

Learning Styles

Design your workshops/activities to incorporate material that will appeal to several different learning styles. Consider your own learning style – often your teaching will emphasize your own ways of learning, and you need to compensate for that in your teaching

• Active – learn by doing, problem solving
• Sensing – prefer memorization and routine, very linear
• Sequential – linear, must learn step by step – these are the people who read computer manuals
• Visual – need visual cues or stimulation (most people need this)
• Verbal – can learn from lectures, reading etc
• Kinetic - need to move around
• Intuitive – prefer abstract and theoretical
• Reflective – need a focus on "why" we do things the way we do, need time to think
• Holistic – need to see the big picture before they can learn the sequential steps

Active Learning Techniques

"Students must engage in such higher-order thinking tasks as analysis, synthesis, and evation.... strategies promoting active learning be defined as instructional activities involving students in doing things and thinking about what they are doing." (Bonwell & Eison, 1991, Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom, ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report #1)

• workbook exercises -- try to move beyond mechanics into critical thinking. For instance, exercises which ask students to compare different finding tools, sources
• human database example
• 2 min papers -- say reflecting on the tool they just used, or an issue you've raised
• free-writes
• blogs
• tagging exercises -- in Flickr, or in social bookmarking sites (FURL, del.icio.us

Cooperative Learning

Cooperative learning is the kind of learning context in which “group members work together to accomplish a shared goal” (Putnam, 1997). Good cooperative learning activities should encourage positive interdependence amongst group members, individual accountability, cooperative skills, face to face interaction and group reflection and goal setting (Cooperative learning is the kind of learning context in which “group members work together to accomplish a shared goal” (Putnam, 1997).

• think/pair share
• group work - jigsaw (students are put into groups to accomplish a task, each group has a different task. once the task is complete, each student in the group joins another group and explains/teaches the members of the new group what s/he has learned in doing the task)
• games -- library hunts, boolean search string game
• wiki's --pathfinders, course wiki's

Critical Pedagogy

• personal liberation through the development of critical consciousness
• to create a more egalitarian society
• reconfiguring the student/teacher relationship -- dialogical vs banking method
• liberatory education: enables learners to recognize connections between their individual problems and experiences and the social contexts in which they are embedded. (Friere)
• asking questions of power, questioning authority