Twice a year the Libraries of The Claremont Colleges and the Colleges offer an excellent workshop on “Designing & Implementing Student Research Projects for Maximum Learning.” The workshop is organized by Gale Burrow from the Libraries of The Claremont Colleges and Laurie Richlin from the PFF & Learning Communities Programs at CGU.
Read more about this workshop in the last issue of Connections.
Time is such a precious commodity, especially right before the semester starts. We often ask ourselves why it would be worthwhile to attend a workshop when everything else is so hectic. Having now attended two of these workshops, I can give at least four good reasons why you should attend.
1) The workshop works as advertised! It actually does help you refine your projects and their descriptions. The keys to this success are the well-trained librarians who specialize in your area of teaching and research. They can function as your teaching aids, because not only do they have great knowledge for where to find information both in the library and online, but they also help students figure out how to conceptualize the questions they are to research as answerable questions.
In addition, these librarians provide “inside” knowledge regarding what problems students have encountered from previously assigned research projects. Students come to them with their frustrations and misunderstandings. Hearing about these problems helped me reconstruct my research assignments to try to pre-empt these issues. Also, they had good ideas about how to re-state and re-formulate the projects so that students could better understand what I want them to do.
2) For new faculty, this workshop is an easy, painless way to find out what resources and databases the library system offers. Also, it connects you directly with “your” librarian, the one who specializes in in your area of expertise. These are the people the students go to for help when they are working on their research projects. It is a great way to establish an interactive relationship that leads to better projects. The librarians are happy to provide classes at the library to help students find materials or to even come to the classroom to help students learn to use the databases.
3) The workshop provides some good pedagogical information. It includes a presentation by Laurie Richlan on ways to be more specific describing project and course expectations. Each time I hear this talk, I find it newly informative. I use it to think about how I can fine tune and improve my current syllabi and lectures.
4) It’s great to hear what other faculty are doing. Despite being at a college surrounded by academic colleagues, faculty rarely sit down and share ideas about what works and doesn’t work in the classroom. The final portion of the workshop provides such an opportunity. Listening to the other faculty discuss their research projects gave me new ideas about what I could do in current and future courses.
These workshops will be offered again in August 2008. Watch for information from the Libraries about dates and registration.
Finally, the workshop is pretty fun. It is enjoyable to meet the librarians and other faculty. The pace of the activities keeps things moving. And breakfast and lunch are included.
