Thoughts on the readings for Week 1, Part II

How People Learn...

My initial reaction to this reading was honestly: "I'm not an education major and I don't plan on being the type of librarian (whatever that type is) that constantly teaches children so why on earth am I reading this?"
 However, upon continued reading I suppose that learning how people learn, for students come in all ages and sizes, as do patrons, is good for librarians. We are supposed to assess the needs of the community and we couldn't do that without being aware of what they want to learn. If we learn tools that help us determine what it is that our patrons want and need to learn, plus tools that can help us determine the the best way to teach them how to discover the knowledge or information they are seeking, then we will be very good librarians indeed.
As a  young student I cannot recall when I was instructed using a "meta-cognitive approach" until my undergraduate days, aside from 3 Advanced Placement classes in high school.   If this approach was introduced gradually from, say, 6th grade on across all subjects, I think today's schools would have a much higher rate of graduates attending college. The idea of monitoring your own thinking as you learn and experiment in school is taken for granted at the college level, but not elsewhere, which is a shame.
The last technology class I was enrolled in was, no surprise here, SI 502. The focus was definitely on novice-level growth; we were told several times we weren't expected to master Python or HTML but to have a basic grasp of the core concepts. Professor Chuck promoted expert-level growth by engaging our interest in all things computer-related, from the Internet to making computer programs look "pretty." His enthusiasm for his discipline can be infectious. Also, he shamelessly plugs his higher-level courses, which helps promote interest in attaining expert-level knowledge.
To connect the section on "Adaptive Expertise" with my experiences in SI 501, I shall have to put aside my negative reactions to the instruction I received in that class. In terms of working with clients, we were definitely novices and we accepted the problem as stated by the client, and, to an extent, even considered solutions recommended by the client. Approaching the class, confident that we were novices and definitely not experts allowed us the freedom to ask questions and challenge ourselves more than if we had assumed we would come up with the right answers directly at the beginning.
The best part of these readings was the concept stated at the end of Chapter 2: "In short, students need to develop the ability to teach themselves."  I wholeheartedly agree with that statement and think our role as librarians, ought to supplement what educators teach in all schools for all ages, and help those students discover the best methods of finding the information they are seeking.