Adaptation in practice

I had done some revision to my lesson plan for today. The last three classes I had taught were workshops and the attendees were self selected and therefore (presumably) had a reason to be there. For today’s class, this was a assigned class period. In terms of teaching, this was a luxury. I had a full two hours and it was written into the syllabus.

The ambitious part came when I decided to roll some orientation concepts into a full Pubmed orientation. I had a series of six exercises each building on the previous concept. We covered known vs unknown searching, using boolean to construct, filters, and intro to MeSH, and intro to subheadings and features of Mesh.

I tried to always keep the framework of how these are designed to work together. I used plenty of the examples and exercises to demonstrate those points, with the goal of avoiding the “point and click” monkey-see approach that doesn’t really lead to learning.

All this material meant that exercises that I had originally intended to use as individual work, turned into collaborations. Sometimes I assigned individual questions to individuals; sometimes we went through them together one by one; sometimes they worked in a small group

There were parts that definitely were a success. In the beginning, they were reluctant to participate. But by the end, I had full participation. Everyone was answering questions and doing the work. At the end, one person came up and asked for more help.

Now that I have a chance to work with this group, I can see the longer aspect of liaisonship. I have the contacts, now I need to keep up with the pace of their program to see what comes next and how I  need to be there. I will have to devote some energy to keeping in contact.

I havent lost touch of getting into lab groups for instruction and providing “holistic” service. But this group doesn’t fit into that mold. And I see now how sessions like this are just stepping stones to issues like engagement and user perception of value.