Tag: library instruction

Ready, Set, Teach: You in the Classroom

We’re introducing a new feature here at ACRLog for the new academic year. We know there are lots of great academic librarian bloggers out there who don’t often get as much attention as they should. They’re the bloggers who don’t show up on those publisher “best librarian blog” lists — and hey, why should we let a publisher or scam site dictate who’s a blogger that you should be giving your attention?

Our first guest academic librarian blogger is Sarah Faye Cohen, Assistant Director of the Miller Information Commons at Champlain College in Burlington, VT. She blogs regularly at The Sheck Spot, and we’re pleased to share her post about preparing for library instruction.

As Maura pointed out in her last post, back to school means back to instruction. There are many ways that each of us prepares to walk into the classroom: speaking with a professor about the students or about the assignment, making sure the technology in the room is working, making copies of handouts, etc. But those are logistical considerations. Getting ready for instruction is not just about putting things together. It’s about putting yourself together to go out and introduce students to new ways of thinking and new tools. Sometimes that feels easy. But sometimes, it doesn’t. Sometimes, it’s the hardest work we are faced with as librarians. So, let’s look at it on a more personal side for a moment:

– What do you do to get ready to teach?
– What are the ways that you prepare yourself for the hard work of teaching?
– What are the ways you fortify yourself and nurture yourself through a teaching load?

Here are some ways I prepare myself for instruction:

Take it as it comes:
There is a part of teaching where the truth of a phrase like “Don’t take it personally” comes into play. That being said, one of the challenges of being a teaching librarian, especially if your interactions are based on one-shots, is that you never know when the “lightbulb” moment happens for the students. A session that you thought was mediocre at best, might have been pivotal for a student. Perhaps this will be one of those sessions! Conversely, this might be one of those “dead” sessions: no one talks, they look bored out of their minds, and you could stand on your head and it wouldn’t matter. In both instances, there is probably something you could have done differently. Especially when sessions don’t go well, remember that there is a big difference between learning from your mistakes in order to make future sessions better and beating yourself up. No matter how it turns out, take the session as it comes.

What Makes You Feel Effective in the Classroom?
Part of what makes instruction so much fun is that we each get to make it our own, even when you are part of a coordinated instruction program like we have at Champlain. That is why it is so important to look in the mirror and ask yourself: what makes me feel effective in the classroom? In my own cohort of teaching librarians, some of us feel effective by walking around during small group work while others stand at the front of the room. Some of us feel effective by tweaking the lesson each time while others like to keep the rhythm of what works for them. It helps to hear about what works for your colleagues so that you can find ways to make yourself more effective. Remember, there is not one, sure fire answer about what makes each of us effective in a classroom. We are individuals with individual styles. But it’s important to give thought to what makes you feel effective.

Know your CI:
Over the summer, the teaching librarians at Champlain read Chip and Dan Heath’s book, Made to Stick. There’s a lot in this book that pertains to teaching and I would recommend it to anyone. The very first chapter of the book presented an idea that really “stuck” to me—knowing your CI. As the chapter explains, this is known in military circles as the “Commander’s Intent”:

“CI is a crisp, plain-talk statement that appears at the top of every order, specifying the plan’s goal, the desired end-state of an operation…the CI never specifies so much detail that it risks being rendered obsolete by unpredictable events” (p. 26).

Another way to think of the CI is your Core Intent. What is it that your students must walk out of your session knowing? Is it a skill? Is it a specific resource? Or, what must your students walk out of your session thinking about? Is it a concept? Or is it a mindset? Is it to be curious? Or to never give up? Whatever “it” is, you need to know it so that no matter what happens in that class, you have a CI as your map. You know where that class is going. And you can express it to the professor, the students, your colleagues, but most importantly, to yourself.

The Back-Pocket Plan:
No matter how well prepared you are, no matter how much you’ve put into your lesson plan or activity design, sometimes it falls flat. This is when you need to pull out Plan B: the “Back-Pocket” Plan. This is absolutely vital when working with technology in the classroom. What is something else, something different you can do with the class to get your same message across but in a new way? Having a strong second option in your back pocket means that you are adaptable in the classroom and that you have a strong grasp on your CI.

Take Good Care:
This last one is one that we don’t talk very much about as a profession but I think is vital to instruction. Instruction is hard work. It demands a great deal of bravery and vulnerability, as Parker Palmer tells us in his transformative book, The Courage to Teach. To walk into session after session, we need to take good care of ourselves. For some of us, that might mean some quiet time before or after a session. Or, sharing (or venting) how the session went. Or, going for a walk. These are a few examples of what works for me. Whatever it is that you need, I hope you take the time to figure out what it is and that you make the time to take it.

Best of luck in the new semester!

Taxonomy of Collaboration

Back to school means back to library instruction, and while gearing up for the busy fall season I’ve found myself mulling over a few instruction issues. Outreach to faculty is something I think about often, especially outreach to those who either don’t know about or don’t seem interested in library instruction. Most of these faculty we just don’t see in the library because they don’t bring their classes in. But many of our institutions have one or more courses that require library instruction, often the freshman seminar or introductory Composition course. While some faculty are eager to collaborate with librarians on research and library instruction for their classes, others, unfortunately, are not.

I’ve encountered a wide range of faculty attitudes towards the required library session:

Enthusiastic Partners: These faculty members sincerely appreciate research and library instruction, and definitely seem to enjoy collaborating with librarians. They discuss their assignments and student learning goals with us before the session, and actively work with us during the session. These sessions usually seem most successful — the importance of library research clearly resonates with students more when their professors reinforce what librarians teach.

Quiet but Satisfied: Faculty members in this category do find value in library instruction (at least I think they do). However, they often don’t discuss their course with librarians before the research session, and generally don’t participate in the session itself. Some of these faculty might think that they aren’t as familiar with the research resources as librarians are, and feel hesitant to add their voices to the session. Others are probably satisfied with the content and activities of the library session and see no need to discuss any changes.

Possibly Unconvinced: What about the faculty who sit at the back of the room during the library session, checking their email, grading papers, or searching the databases for their own research? They might be like the Quiet but Satisfied folks and feel that the library session already meets their course goals well. But maybe they don’t — maybe these faculty see library instruction as dull and uninspiring, a chore to be gotten through so they can move on to the more important work of their courses.

Missing Out: Then there’s the (thankfully, very small) group of faculty who simply skip out on library instruction altogether. Sometimes these faculty are receptive to rescheduling the session they’ve missed, though not always. Clearly they don’t think that research instruction is at all useful for their students.

Luckily most faculty who teach the course with required library instruction at my college fall into these first two categories, and my colleagues and I enjoy collaborating with them. But finding ways to reach the faculty who are Possibly Unconvinced or Missing Out is a continuous challenge. They may not respond to email or spend much time on campus. Some are adjuncts, with office arrangements that aren’t ideal. On our end, it can be difficult to find the time to contact each faculty member individually (and multiple times) in a course with many sections. And it’s easy to become discouraged when our overtures go unacknowledged.

How can we convince these faculty that required library instruction has value for their students, and that collaborating with librarians is worth their time? Or should we focus on the positives — the faculty who are enthusiastic and satisfied — while we continue to try to replicate successful strategies across the board, regardless of faculty attitude?

A Guide, or a Crutch?

We’re moving the subject guides on our library website from HTML pages into a wiki, which we hope will make them easier for us to update and customize. It’s been a nice opportunity to freshen the content, weed out the dead links, etc. We plan to encourage faculty across the college to contribute to the subject guides as well as collaborate on custom research guides for their courses.

I’m finding myself with a couple of nagging concerns as I start the conversion project. Are we making it too easy for our students when we create subject or research guides for them? If they start with a subject guide, are they fully learning how to do research–how to find, select and evaluate information? Are we missing an opportunity for information literacy instruction, or even intentionally removing that opportunity? Or, do subject guides help us take advantage of technology to extend our instructional efforts?

Subject guides can definitely be useful to students, especially those in the early years of their college careers who may not be familiar with college-level research. Instructors can encourage students to use the subject guide as a starting point (and require them to incorporate resources beyond those included in the guide). Since students often take courses in disciplines that are entirely new to them, getting a research foothold is a challenge that a subject guide can facilitate.

However, when we give students a subject guide for them to use to start their research, we’re not exposing them to an actual, real-world research situation. It’s true that it’s more difficult to do research on a topic that’s unfamiliar, but throughout their lives our students will likely need to find information about lots of topics with which they have no prior knowledge. It’s much more challenging to start researching from scratch, but it is difficult to develop the ability to create and iterate search strategies when research resources are provided in a subject guide.

Subject guides can also benefit students in courses that, for whatever reason, can’t accommodate library instruction. I prefer the opportunity to incorporate information literacy into a course in the classroom, but surely some subject-specific research assistance is better than none, right? But I also wonder whether instructors who make use of subject or research guides in their classes will be less likely to bring their students for library instruction or collaborate with librarians to incorporate information literacy into their curriculum.

Either way, it will be interesting to see how our subject guides develop once they’re on the wiki. If your library creates collaborative subject or research guides with faculty, what have your experiences been?

A Full Day of Information Literacy

Last week I went to the ACRL New England chapter’s Library Instruction Group (NELIG) annual program Meeting Digital Natives Where They Are: New Standards for the New Student. This was my first conference entirely devoted to library instruction, and it was great to have the opportunity to think and talk about information literacy all day.

The morning started off with keynote speaker John Palfrey, Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School and author (with Urs Gasser) of Born Digital. The book reports on the results of their interviews, focus groups and surveys with the oft-discussed millennial generation, exploring the way these kids relate to information, one another and institutions. I won’t recap the book (or transcribe the piles of notes I took), but here are a couple of takeaways I found most relevant for academic libraries:

  • Credibility is a huge issue for us adults: we fear that kids are highly susceptible to misinformation on the internet. But Palfrey’s research found that most kids don’t use information from Wikipedia verbatim or uncritically. Most use it to get an overview of a topic, and then head to the references at the bottom of the page to find more information. I use Wikipedia like this all the time in my teaching so I found this to be quite encouraging.

  • The digital generation has an incomplete understanding of intellectual property. It’s true that many of them do download and share music illegally (and they realize that it’s illegal). But they don’t know that there are legal ways to use copyrighted materials–fair use–so they hesitate to use them to remix or mashup content. This is a great opportunity for librarians to help students learn about ethical use of information.

I haven’t read the book yet, but after seeing Palfrey speak I’ve added it to my summer reading list. There’s some innovative supplemental material too: they asked kids to create podcasts interpreting each chapter of the book. The video he shared with us was fascinating and well worth a watch.

Next there were two breakout sessions, each with multiple presentations. Full disclosure: I was a presenter in the first session, where I discussed a classroom game I’m developing to teach students how to evaluate information. Many thanks to all who attended my session and contributed to our lively discussion. The one down side is that I missed the other presentations, though I caught up with them on the program website and NELIG blog.

During the second session I went to The Big Picture: Visual Storytelling in Library Instruction, presented by Nicole E. Brown and Erica Schattle of Emerson College. They shared an innovative approach for library instruction that uses images to tell a story to introduce students to research. They present information to students in three ways:

1. their slides contain images (only!): first a few slides to introduce a metaphor for research (in this case, learning to swim), and then several that illustrate the process of research
2. their spoken narrative describes the steps taken while doing research
3. their handout provides details on information sources students can use for their research during the library session

By modeling the process of research they were able to inspire students into action, and after this short introduction students spent the remainder of the session actively searching for information on their topics.

The final session featured Clarence Maybee and Charlotte Droll from Colgate University who presented The Crossroads of Learning: Librarians and IT Professionals Banding Together to Embed Information and Technology Literacies into Undergraduate Courses. They described two student projects–a podcast and a poster session–in which librarians and instructional technologists collaborated with course professors. Both the podcasts and the poster session encouraged students to step out of their comfort zone and added a public dimension to their work. Students were more engaged with these projects than with a typical research paper, and seemed to work harder, too.

By the end of the day I was fading fast, since I had to wake up at 5:30am to get the train up from NYC. But I was glad I went: it was a fantastic program (kudos to the organizers!), and I really enjoyed spending the day geeking out on information literacy. I came away with lots of ideas for my own instruction, too, and I can’t wait to try them out.

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Winter Break

Finals end today at the college where I work, and the semester is coming to a close. I really value the stretch of slower days in the library during the intersession; it’s a great time to take stock of what we’re doing and where we’re headed. This semester was incredibly busy, with a big increase in enrollment and much more instruction than last fall, so I’m even more grateful for the temporary slowdown. This winter break I’ve got three big projects to I’m hoping to tackle:

1. Planning for Next Semester
The core of our library instruction program is a mandatory one-shot for all English Composition classes, and our instruction librarians met last week for a debrief and planning session. For next semester our focus is on increasing both student and faculty participation in these sessions. We brainstormed a number of strategies at our meeting and will start to implement them over the next few weeks. I’m looking forward to teaching the revised sessions next semester — it’ll be interesting to see how these changes impact student engagement.

2. Long-term Program Ideas
In addition to prepping for our Spring instruction sessions, I’m hoping to take some time this intersession to think more about the future of our information literacy and library instruction program. I’m especially interested in learning more about programs that feature intensive, one-on-one collaboration between librarians and faculty in other departments. I’m excited to dig into research on faculty development programs like the Undergraduate Information Competency Initiative at Cornell University, the information literacy workshops at James Madison University, and the Information Literacy Quality Enhancement Plan at Trinity University.

3. Research and Scholarly Work
I’ll have a few research leave days in January, so I’m planning to catch up on some research and writing. I’m working on a research project with a colleague this year and we’ve got a pile of data from interviews with faculty and students to start to analyze; I’m also beginning a study with another colleague. And, despite my best efforts at keeping up, I still have a stack of articles that I haven’t found time to get through this semester. If I can shrink that tower of paper by the end of the winter break, it will definitely feel like an accomplishment!