Using Textwall in the classroom

Happy New Year! This post is a little overdue but the latter part of 2014 was absolutely manic, with the busiest Autumn Term I’ve ever experienced, and finishing off my Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice (PgCAP) on top of that. However lots of us will still be teaching this term so hopefully it’s not too late in the academic year to be talking about classroom tools.

My institution has had access to Textwall for a little while, and last term I decided to give it a go myself.  It’s a tool which allows students to text in answers to or comments on a question that the teacher poses on the screen. Numbers are not stored and it’s anonymous, so students can comment without it being attributed to them, which I thought might be an advantage in getting students to “speak up” in sessions.

I first tried it in some seminars that I ran for one of my first year cohorts, kicking off the session by putting a question up about what concerned them about the topics we were looking at that day (using library resources, referencing and plagiarism), and asking them to text in their answers. I had no idea what kind of response I would get, but actually in every session I received lots of answers (with referencing and avoiding plagiarism being the main concern!), more than I have in the past when I’ve tried asking a similar thing verbally. The students seemed surprised at being asked to get out their phones and text, but I think that element of surprise encouraged engagement. It was really useful for me to get an overview of what the class was thinking too, and it provided a reference point for me to return to at the end of the session, to check with the students that we had covered everything.  I could see how Textwall could potentially be a great tool for gauging student understanding in a similar way; asking a question and being able to see the general response from the class – if a large number were misunderstanding something, for example, that would be a sign for me to go back over that thing.

I therefore tried it again with a different first year group, asking questions about what we had covered during the session. I had reservations about whether to go ahead with it as the group had been difficult, with a few disruptive students, but decided to try it anyway; it didn’t really work. After several questions along the lines of “Miss, is this your phone number?”, when I eventually persuaded them to text responses, I got mostly silly ones.  I learnt from this that it’s really important to gauge a group before using it mid-session (not so easy to do so if you’re using it at the start though). 

I think Textwall can be really useful in the classroom, but it is important to remember that there may be inclusivity issues i.e. students who don’t have a phone, or who have pay-as-you-go and will have to pay for the text message, so it’s not the only way we should be attempting to check understanding. And then there’s the problem of students using it to be “funny” or disruptive - you need to think in advance how you will deal with offensive or silly comments.  I will definitely be continuing to explore the potential uses of Textwall though.

Teaching first-year undergraduates about plagiarism

At the beginning of this term I was asked to take over the seminar slots for the first year Sport and PE students during the third week of teaching; two hours in which I would teach the students how to use the library resources, how to reference, and how to avoid academic offences such as plagiarism and collusion. I did something similar last year, and had found it difficult to keep the students engaged over the two hours on what can quite honestly be dry topics. So this year I decided to try some new things to add some more interactivity and liven the session up a bit, and I remembered a plagiarism exercise I had heard about at a Library Camp. This came from a school librarian and I'm afraid I didn't write down her name - if you're reading this, please contact me so I can credit you! - and I adapted it slightly for use with first year undergraduates.

About halfway through the seminar I handed out pieces of scrap paper and asked the students to write down the best thing that had happened since they'd been at university so far. After some looks of bemusement they all managed to write down something (I emphasised that neither I or their tutor would read it!) and I asked them to swap their piece of paper with someone else, then to write their name at the top of the paper they'd received, and to count up the words on it. I then asked for the highest word count, and gave the holder of the piece of paper with it a chocolate. Each time, this person looked baffled and said "but I didn't write it", to which I replied "but it's got your name at the top!" - and then the students realised what I was getting at!

I was worried that it wouldn't work; that either the students would twig straight away and would see the whole exercise as childish, or the opposite, that they wouldn’t realise what I was getting at, but it actually worked pretty much perfectly in each seminar – the students appeared a bit taken aback by it and then realised what I was doing at exactly the right point in the exercise. I think it also worked really well at that halfway point in the session; after the “finding books and journals” bit that they would be expecting, doing this exercise shook the session up, got the students doing something different, and added an element of unpredictability which was also humorous too; the students gently laughing at the rightful owner of the chocolate missing out (I did actually give them one too eventually!), and also much hilarity ensuing when they read each others’ answers to the question I had set!

I will definitely use this exercise again with first-years (hopefully their by-then second-year peers won’t spoil the surprise before I get to do it!).

My "Big Thinker" - Mary Wollstonecraft

Since last September, I have been studying for a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice at UoB; a teaching qualification for HE which will also allow me to apply for accreditation by the Higher Education Academy (HEA). I have been meaning to write some blog posts about it but I have found studying part-time on top of working full-time, keeping up with my writing, continuing to make and maintain friendships in Bedford, and dealing with everything else that life entails quite demanding! I have completed the first unit and found out this week that, subject to ratification at the exam board in July, I have passed it (hooray!) and this week was also the first session for the second and final unit.

We talked about “Big Thinkers” – people who have influenced the way we think about and carry out our practice in teaching – and some of the course staff shared theirs. I couldn’t help notice that they were all men – Lacan, Heidegger et al. – and, whilst these figures were undeniably significant, I couldn’t help but wonder about which women we could come up with. I suspect it’s because of my ignorance of theorists, but I could only think of one – Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary was in many ways the “mother of feminism” – her text A Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1792, is, as far as I’m aware, the first text arguing for sexual equality, and in it her argument was that women needed to gain equality with men for a happy society, and that the way to achieve this was to educate girls.  Education is a hugely powerful thing operating in a context that goes way, way beyond the classroom. Even now, recent events – the shooting of Malala, the abduction of hundreds of girls from a school in Nigeria – demonstrate the power of education and how it is feared by those in this world who wish to continue to oppress women. As a teacher I am part of something much bigger than helping students find journal articles for their coursework.

I’ve been thinking about this over the past few days, and also the fact that I can’t think of any other female “Big Thinkers “ in education right now, and I’ve decided I want to explore more about educational theory, and in particular feminist educational theory. There’s quite a bit of literature out there on it, and a new book about feministpedagogy in info lit teaching has been on my radar for a while, so I’m going to make the time to learn more, and maybe make this my kind of focus for the remainder of my course.

Oh, and Mary? Well she sadly died shortly after giving birth to her second daughter, another Mary, but her husband William Godwin shared her beliefs, and the girls were educated and exposed to writers and philosophers of the time from an early age. Young Mary went on to, at 19 years of age, pretty much invent science fiction…

Reflections on my first solo teaching session

Last week, I had my first chance to do a teaching session by myself. I have taught before – during my graduate traineeship, many of the librarians kindly involved me in their classes, giving me the opportunity to demonstrate search techniques, databases, the library catalogue etc. to groups of students, and to help out in hands-on sessions, and since I have been in my current role I have observed classes and taught jointly with a colleague. This, however, was the first time I would be standing up in front of a class and giving a whole session by myself; two sessions actually (the same one twice in a row to two different seminar groups). To make it all even more new, one of my colleagues was coming in to observe the first session; I have never been observed before (I’ve never done enough in a session to be worth observing before now!). While I was excited – the teaching aspect was one of the things that first attracted me to academic librarianship way back in my undergraduate days, so it’s been a long wait to get to this point! - I was also extremely nervous. What if the students got bored and started talking to each other over me? What if the tutor accompanying them was totally unimpressed with what I was demonstrating? What if I got something wrong, or one of the searches didn’t work as it should? What if they ask me to demonstrate a database I’d not used before, or to perform a search that I hadn’t tested? What if I talked too fast or gabbled, as I usually do when I’m nervous and there are a load of people looking at me? What if they all said “the librarian was rubbish” (or worse) on the evaluation forms they filled out in the end?

As it turns out, the sessions went absolutely fine – I’d even go so far as to say that they went well! Here is what I learnt about the aforementioned things that were making me nervous:

• Most students will pay attention in a session directly related to their assignments, even if they’re not particularly interested in learning how to refine their searches, or even in the assignment itself! They are paying a lot of money to go to university and most of them want to do well. Library sessions are teaching very practical things – in this case, demonstrating a list of databases that the students had been asked to gather primary sources from for an assignment – and, while you can make the session more engaging by doing things like showing the students the most clever and helpful bits of the databases , and inviting them to ask questions or start a discussion, it does really come down to a) how interested they are in doing well and b) whether they can see how what you are showing them will help them achieve this. I very much subscribe to the theory that library sessions relevant to what students are studying at that time are the best kind, and I made sure that I emphasised at the start of the session that the reason they were here was so that I could show them how to use the specific databases that their tutors wanted them to use for their forthcoming assignment, not just so I could show them general search techniques.

• It’s OK to talk slowly! Knowing that I am prone to gabbling, I made a conscious effort in the first session to slow down and think about what I was saying. As the session progressed, I realised that this was fine! Yes, the students were sitting there, looking at me expectantly. But they weren’t about to start heckling me if I let a couple of seconds go by without speaking; what they were expecting was an informative and helpful session, however I chose to deliver that. By speaking slowly and thinking about things, I was able to give them clear explanations of what I was demonstrating. It also made me feel considerably more relaxed, and by the second session I was feeling completely happy and comfortable with what I was doing.

• Don’t panic if you’re asked to perform a search that you haven’t practised! Yes, the reason we plan searches before teaching sessions is to enable us to demonstrate certain features of databases, or how to refine searches. But as I mentioned earlier, it is generally agreed that sessions that are relevant to what is being studied are the most effective and successful in engaging the students. This is also a chance to be really helpful; one student had tried a search for her topic in one of the databases already, and had found nothing. I was able to show her how she could use different keywords and refine the dates of her search, and we found some useful material. Also, most students understand that not every database will yield something for every search, and that you sometimes have to spend quite a bit of time refining or changing a search to find anything (this can even be the case with Google!), and so they won’t think you’re useless if you can’t produce a list of perfect, full-text search results, straightaway!

• Analysing feedback can be really helpful. We ask students to fill out short evaluation forms at the end of every session. I was tasked with analysing the forms from my sessions and the other sessions that week. Although it can be time-consuming, I do think it’s worth sitting down and doing a content analysis of the feedback (even if it brings back memories of analysing dissertation data!), to work out how many people said what. Flicking through the forms, you might see lots of mentions of how useful learning search techniques was, but if you do a proper analysis, you might, for example, find out that the most commonly made comment within that was that they found learning about wildcards and truncation the most useful aspect of the class, which can inform future sessions. 

The feedback from my sessions was overwhelmingly positive, with many students saying that the databases had been clearly and effectively explained and demonstrated, which I was really pleased about due to my efforts to speak more slowly and not to gabble nervously. The students appeared to have found the session helpful for their work, which was really rewarding. I’m sure I will continue to learn more about teaching the more that I do it, and I really am looking forward to the next time.