As with the Micro teaching session that I ran last year, the verbal feedback and general feel was very positive. Both tutors in the room and Library colleague thought that the session went well.
Staff comments at the time and following the event:
“I loved your presentation”.
“That went well!”
“Students really seemed to engage with the LEGO “
“The session was simple but very easy to understand how references works, and it was very informative. Thank you very much”
Observations (Field Notes)
Most students were engaged with the activity. There was a definite buzz in the room. Especially in the morning session which was a smaller group of 12 students.
Students seemed to engage throughout the session, and all seemed to be enjoying playing with the LEGO. So much so, that it was difficult to get one student to stop playing with the LEGO and focus on the other tasks!
Most other students seemed to be fully engaged with the 2nd and third tasks too.
The afternoon session started off with 12 students, but there were a few late comers (4) who missed the first 5-10 minutes, arriving at the end of the first task, (LEGO building session). I did notice at one point, one of these student on their phone, however, I believe, (it looked like), the other students were busy and engaged with the tasks 2 & 3. There was lively discussion about the ordering of the parts of the citations.
Student’s comments at the end of the session:
“It was a fun way to think about referencing.”
“It makes more sense, now.”
When asked if students were familiar with Harvard Referencing, most replied that they had used it before, but found the session a useful refresher.
One student stated that they had not used Harvard before, and found the workshop fun and informative.
Another student said that they liked the comparison between building LEGO and writing assignments.
I have found Lindsay’s Action Plan Blog outline useful in reminding me what I needed to do. There are unfortunately some elements that just got left behind because of the timings, See the Process Blog!
One of the things that I am really upset that I did not do was to get to feed back to the students who took part in the workshop. I think that this is a really important aspect of research,
and as Leavy, P (2017) states,
“it is Ethical Practice to share research findings.”p42.
It is not too late to do so, once I have analysed and drawn my conclusions!
Following on from some reading about Participatory Research, I began to develop the idea that I should do more to collect more data and involve the students more, and one of the reasons that I started to think about a post workshop focus group and possible interviews. Unfortunately, my attempts to contact students through the course tutors and directly were unfruitful, and I got no response. So the feedback on the work shop is based solely on the feedback and observation of the day. No further interviews or contact with the students took place, other than my requests for volunteers to take part in a group discussion or individual interviews. This leads me to believe that the workshops, may not have been so well attended had they not been timetabled. This also makes me believe that I am justified in believing that there will be no parity in student experience when it comes to information skills unless it is built into the curriculum and timetabled. Having information skills as ‘Add-Ons’, through Academic support, are great, but they only reach a small number of keen students, and perhaps, not even the students who need the help most.
The Resources for the workshop were designed for the BA Photography Students but could equally work with other students in my cohort. However, I believe that it is important to ensure that the resources are relevant to each group. I know from the time I have worked at LCF and Chelsea Libraries, that my colleagues are aware of this need and work hard to adapt teaching materials to the groups that they are working with. What is a crying shame, is after hours of research and updating materials, only 4 students turn up to a workshop, a workshop that the tutor has instigated and asked for!