Getting Wicked in the Classroom: Incorporating Complex, Real-World Skills into Library Instruction #lilac19

Pam McKinney continuing live blogging from this afternoon’s sessions at the LILAC conference: Karen Sobel and Lorrie Evans from the Auraria library in Colorado which serves the university of Colorado, metropolitan state university of Denver and the community college of Denver ran a workshop on using wicked problems to design IL teaching. They recommended a book “creating wicked students” by Paul Handstedt as a good introduction to using wicked problems in teaching. We discussed principles for turning big wicked learning objectives into learning objectives that could actually be accomplished in the classroom. They should involve relevant and obvious benefits, and they should involve collaboration and communication, it should involve challenge and creativity.

An idea explored in the book is to nest higher and lower order thinking skills within teaching, so making sure that lower order skill are built before higher order skills are addressed.  Ideas we had here were to use peer support in the classroom, to use images instead of text as a point of departure for discussion, giving instructions in a variety of formats and to use flipped learning to get students to understand key concepts before face to face sessions.

It can be valuable to ask students to engage with non-scholarly sources and to compare and contrast the scholarly and non scholarly source covering the same subject - this approach was used very successfully in the psychology department at the university of Sheffield.