pedagogy

What does open pedagogy for information literacy look like?

We’re launching Domain of One’s Own at my institution this year. If you haven’t heard of Domains, it’s a program that helps institutions offer students, faculty, and staff online spaces that they control. Domains grew out of a project at the University of Mary Washington (UMW). Co-founders Jim Groom and Tim Owens have since spun it into a venture all its own. Their company, Reclaim Hosting, has so far launched Domains programs at over 40 institutions. At my institution, our Domains initiative will enable members of our campus community to publish, curate, and share their work online. They will be able to register their own domain names, associate them with a hosted web space, and easily install a variety of applications in order to experiment with both digital tools and digital literacy practices. Digital identity and data ownership are at the core of Domains; it’s about understanding the data that makes up your digital presence, developing facility with digital tools and spaces, and defining who you are online.

We’re launching a few key initiatives as part of our Domains kickoff, most notably a faculty learning community and a cohort of students training to become digital learning assistants. As part of our Domains launch, co-founder Jim Groom came to campus for a series of kickoff events last week. (My colleague Lora Taub-Pervizpour, who has spearheaded Domains on our campus, wrote a great post about Jim’s visit that you might find interesting.) While on campus, Jim talked about how his work at UMW grew into Domains and was, at least in part, motivated by the frustrations of learning management systems. In restricted spaces like Blackboard, Moodle, and Canvas, student learning and work products are locked down and immobile. In “The Web We Need to Give Students,” Audrey Watters wrote about how Domains, by contrast, permits students to work in their own spaces. “And then—contrary to what happens at most schools, where a student’s work exists only inside a learning management system and cannot be accessed once the semester is over—the domain and all its content are the student’s to take with them. It is, after all, their education, their intellectual development, their work.” (For some more good reading on Domains, see “A Domain of One’s Own in a Post-Ownership Society” again by Audrey Watters, as well as “Do I Own My Domain If You Grade It?” by Andrew Rikard.)

But this is not (meant to be) a post about Domains really. Instead, all this Domains talk has me thinking about pedagogy and learning. Because Domains is also about openness and transparency.

The success of Domains, Jim said in his keynote, is not about technology. Instead, its success is the openness it facilitates: thinking out loud, engaging in reflective practice with a community of peers. As part of the Domains story, Jim shared his experiences creating ds106, an open, online course on digital storytelling. As described on the site, the course was “part storytelling workshop, part technology training, and, most importantly, part critical interrogation of the digital landscape that is ever increasingly mediating how we communicate with one another.” The course embodied openness in many ways. UMW students enrolled in the semester-long course and served as its core community, but the course was open to anyone who wanted to participate alongside the UMW students. But the part that piqued my interest most was its open pedagogy; Jim talked about how he did the assignments with the students and also described how students created the assignments. “The only reason it worked,” Jim said, “was because we built an open ecosystem for it to thrive.”

This prompted me to reflect on what open pedagogy means, what potential it holds. (Check out “‘Open’ for the Public: Using Open Education to Build a Case for Public Higher Ed”, “Open Pedagogy: Connection, Community, and Transparency”, and “Eight Qualities of Open Pedagogy” for some quick, getting-started readings on open pedagogy.) To me, open pedagogy is an invitation for learning. What grabs me most are the qualities of transparency, community, and responsiveness at its core.

In information literacy teaching and learning, for example, fostering transparency in the classroom might happen when we simply articulate the learning goals for a class or uncover research strategies to expose the what, how, and why of our processes. Open pedagogy means helping students think metacognitively about the strategy of their work to make learning more meaningful and transferable. It also means making the method and purpose of our teaching transparent to students.

Open pedagogy is also about community, inviting students to co-construct learning experiences. Whether asking students to design their own assignments as in Jim’s ds106 case or developing activities grounded in constructivist and self-regulated learning theories or even just asking students about their habits, perspectives, and approaches before telling them what they should do, co-constructed learning increases student agency and investment.

Open pedagogy is about being flexible and responsive. It means meeting learners where they are, rather than where we think they are or should be.

I’m interested to recognize the small ways I’m practicing open pedagogy, but I’m still more interested to identify the opportunities–big and small–that I haven’t yet grabbed hold of. What does open pedagogy for information literacy look like for you? I’m eager to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Asking questions to create opportunities for conversation and learning

I was chatting with one of my colleagues the other day about challenges he’s been experiencing recently in some of his one-shot information literacy classes. He regularly makes time in class for students to work on their own research and to consult with them individually. Yet he described difficulty engaging students in one-on-one conversation about their progress. He described how he typically circulates the room, asking students “How’s it going?” hoping they might share their progress or pose a problem which would provide him a point of entry into conversation or an opportunity to advise the student. Instead, he said, students typically reply “I’m doing fine” or “I’m good.” Hopefully, such responses mean students really are progressing in their research, successfully applying the concepts from the session to their own work. Yet their polite reply to my colleague’s opening line shuts him out of even the possibility of conversation.

I knew exactly what my colleague meant. I’ve felt frustrated by the same scenario, too. I have often asked the same question and often gotten the same reply, essentially “no thanks.” My colleague wondered how he might create space for conversation without uncomfortably forcing the issue. While some students might indeed really be doing fine and not need assistance with research, plenty do. And even if their research is progressing well, that doesn’t mean a conversation about their work couldn’t be useful. I shared with my colleague some of the ways I’ve tried to open conversation with students during this kind of working time. Essentially, I’ve stopped asking “How are you doing?” and instead ask “What are you working on?,” “What topic or question are you researching?,” or “What have you been trying so far?” This slight variation has helped me open the door to conversation with even reticent students.

I’ve seen a variety of both cognitive and affective advantages via this small, but significant, shift. This type of question gives students fewer outs. It doesn’t require students to make a judgment of their progress (or lack thereof), either. Instead, it’s a low-stakes, low-judgment question that just asks them to account for what they’re doing so far. And once they’ve articulated what they’re doing, I can ask follow-up questions that help them probe their own steps and thinking and even identify problems or opportunities on their own. The conversation serves as a kind of formative assessment, too, helping me check in with students about their level of understanding and application of the concepts, practices, and tools we’ve been focusing on in class. I can then meet them where they are, clarifying or redirecting where needed or helping them advance further when appropriate.

This exchange with my colleague prompted me to reflect on my questioning practices in other ways and settings. I recognized this same shift across my pedagogy, in fact. Where I used to tell, I see that I now ask. Instead of first telling students how to construct a search or pick a source, for example, I instead start by asking how they would approach a search or select a source: “What steps would you take?,” “What choices would you make?,” and most importantly “Why?” When I meet with students in individual research consultations, I don’t just ask “What are you working on?,” but also “What are you hoping to accomplish in our meeting today?” These questions again help me meet students where they are and then scaffold instruction to help them develop progressively. Significantly, they also help give students a chance to construct their own learning, puzzle over their intentions and rationales, and make meaning for themselves. These questions help us (students and myself alike) recognize students’ agency in their research.

Much like I’m trying to help students develop an attitude of inquiry for their own research and learning, these questions help me cultivate my own attitude of inquiry for teaching. I don’t want to ask only the kind of questions that require students to parrot rote, meaningless responses at me. I want to foster meaningful and impactful learning moments where students construct their understanding and develop frameworks for their future use. These questions help me learn from and listen to my students.

The Best Work I Do is at the Intersections

November was a whirlwind. I felt both overwhelmed and enlightened after #OpenEd15 in Vancouver last week. The conference empowered me to see a different side of the Open Education movement, which helped me realize just how much I still have to learn. Still, I found myself yearning for more critical, strategic conversations about openness. Both Robin DeRosa and Adam Heidebrink-Bruno have written brilliant reflections about this that echo my feelings.

I also just completed the interview process to become a curriculum designer/ presenter for ACRL’s Intersections initiative. While I didn’t end up getting the position, the interview process made me seriously reflect on how my work engages information literacy, scholarly communication, and rich and important intersections of both. After visiting an Anthropology of Social Movements course last week to talk about Open Access and activism, I knew that I needed to reflect on just how important these intersections are.

I have extensive experience with teaching information literacy sessions and concepts. I have created workshops, programming, and grant opportunities that engage altmetrics, OA, and other scholarly communication issues. I have talked to LIS classes and international librarians about how to not only find and evaluate OER but also how to share their own learning objects openly. Yet, I still struggle with articulating how exactly the intersections of these two areas are present in my work. I wholeheartedly believe that the intersections are integral and—dare I say it—the most important component of what I do. But that doesn’t mean that they are always tangible or even visible.

I think that this is explained, in part, by how ingrained they are in how I teach and engage.

ACRL’s Intersections of Scholarly Communication and Information Literacy document identifies three important intersections that librarians should strategically pursue:

1) economics of the distribution of scholarship (including access to scholarship, the changing nature of scholarly publishing, and the education of students to be knowledgeable content consumers and content creators);

2) digital literacies (including teaching new technologies and rights issues, and the emergence of multiple types of non-textual content);

3) our changing roles (including the imperative to contribute to the building of new infrastructures for scholarship, and deep involvement with creative approaches to teaching).

The document and responses to it hold that while scholarly communication outreach is traditionally focused on collections/faculty and information literacy work is traditionally focused on students/pedagogy, this dichotomy is continually blurring (pg. 20). Students are blogging, publishing in undergraduate journals, and deciding how to share their honors theses and other publications. Further, many experiential learning opportunities ask students to delve into digital content creation, which often intersects with librarians’ expertise in data literacy, intellectual property issues, and copyright. All librarians, particularly information literacy librarians that work closely with students, need to be knowledgeable about scholarly communication topics and think critically about how it redefines their work.

I find the ways that scholarly communication is being infused with information literacy even more interesting and exciting, partly because I believe that IL can make scholarly communication outreach more holistic and approachable. One of the best examples of this is librarians’ outreach on altmetrics and impact factor. Asking faculty and graduate students to think critically about how we evaluate scholarship and what impact really means to them as scholars and information consumers is information literacy. When I taught an altmetrics workshop, I didn’t just teach tools like the ISI’s JCR, Google Scholar, and Impact Story. I taught participants how to interrogate what impact is and the role it has in academia. I asked them to consider why the academy should value public discourse and impact. I pushed them to find a combination of metrics would give others a holistic view of their own impact. In my mind, this is “Scholarship as a Conversation” at its best. This is information literacy at its best.

The ACRL Intersections document built a valuable foundation for me to understand these intersections. But I’d like to use this space to push the boundaries. Are there intersections that are even more unique and, thus, less visible? Are there intersections that are pushing our job descriptions and our conceptions of our work even further? I’ll list a few that have been on my mind a lot lately. These are, of course, up for debate.

As I present Open Access issues to students, I have a slide that asks “how can libraries keep buying these journals? How can faculty keep publishing in them?” I usually talk about the faculty reward system and how faculty are incentivized to publish in high impact journals, regardless of their cost. But then Emily Drabinski tweeted something that made me reconsider my explanation:

Since then, I’ve been thinking about discovery a lot. Scholarship is about more than tenure. Faculty want to share their life’s work with others that care about their niche too. What if, instead of using my watered down explanation, I asked students the question “why even publish in a journal? What is the benefit of doing so?” I think the result would be a much more rich conversation about indexing, how databases organize information, which journals are in each database, how information flows within the academy, and why we search the way that we do. It would bring “Searching as Strategic Exploration” to the next level. Instead of just teaching them Boolean, I would be teaching them all of the connecting dots for why Boolean is a useful searching mechanism within databases. Further, I would be connecting IL and SC in a rich and nuanced way.

I know what you’re thinking! Isn’t that too complicated for undergraduates? Don’t they just need a two minute explanation about AND/ OR/ NOT? In their recent book chapter about the intersections of IL and SC, Kim Duckett and Scott Warren provide an explanation for why they think complexity is both valuable and necessary:

True enculturation takes time, but if students must find, read, understand, and use peer-reviewed literature in a rhetorical style mimicking scholars, they deserve to have these concepts, tools, and values explained to them in order to facilitated the process of becoming more academically information literature and hence better students (29)

The second intersection I see is what I personally regard as the most interesting aspect of my work and the most valuable intersection of these areas that I live in. I attempted to articulate it in a recent Twitter debate:

I believe that the most integral statement in the Framework for Information Literacy is “Experts understand that value may be wielded by powerful interests in ways that marginalize certain voices” (para 16). Information production is an undeniable intersection that has value in the IL classroom just as much as it does in a SC consultation with a faculty member.

Last semester, my team started exploring how the concept of information privilege might be incorporated into our information literacy goals. In doing so, we want to make students aware of the great amount of information privilege and access they have while they are at Davidson. We also hope to make them aware of how they will lose that access. We frame this conversation around their opportunity to change the system as knowledge creators. We hold that they too are authors and can decide how they’d like to share and disseminate their own work.

A second goal of addressing information privilege focuses on who can enter the scholarly conversation. In almost every IL session I do, I find that students have a very shallow understanding of credibility and expertise. Scholarly communication through blogs, social media, and other informal channels is deemed illegitimate or untrustworthy, which often creates a barrier for many voices. Credentials are equated with PhDs, so a person’s lived experience isn’t even considered. Format is an oversimplified indicator of quality and a crutch for students really interrogating a publication’s vetting process. We should push our students to consider how they privilege specific information formats, voices, or vetting systems in their research and how this replicates privilege.

The second-most valuable intersection I’ve found is Open Educational Resources (OER). In my opinion, OER combine the most interesting aspects of SC and IL. OER outreach is focused on access and licensing but also instructional design and pedagogy. This brings me back to #OpenEd15 and the reflections that Robin and Adam wrote. Interestingly, Robin and Adam both use information production and social justice as a lens for understanding open education.

The most powerful portion of Adam’s post:

Yet the amount of information produced needs to be measured in relation to its quality. Empirical studies suggest that, while it isn’t the industry-standard double-blind peer-review, the information on Wikipedia is fairly accurate. We’ve reiterated this finding for nearly a decade and still Wikipedia has not and will not become a widely accepted location for academic knowledge. Something else is going on. And I think it has to do with the grossly simplified definitions of “reliability” and “credibility” used in such studies. Researchers often assume that quality is a measure of error.

In an open context, however, I argue that quality is a measure of inclusion.

Robin adds that engaging and involving learners must be at the forefront “so that knowledge becomes a community endeavor rather than a commodity that needs to be made accessible” and that open licenses are much more valuable than open textbooks because the license “enables us to do more with the ideas that we ourselves as learners, teachers, scholars are generating.”

The OER movement, at its best, is about doing the important work of making knowledge creation both accessible and inclusive. It’s about moving beyond linear information presentation and instead asking students to have ownership and autonomy over their learning. It’s the same work that I try to do with my students in the information literacy classroom. The intersections enable us to go beyond increasing access; they give us a space to consider how we can foster increased participation and inclusivity through that access.

I started this post with recognizing how much November resembled a whirlwind for me. I wholeheartedly recognize that my writing here mirrors one as well. It is disjointed and maybe even scattered. But sometimes our best work comes as a blur. This is how many of my thoughts develop, how much of my work is shaped and improved. It’s an uncomfortable, confusing process. But as much as it is confusing, it is rewarding. Being intentional and honest about where I find value in my work, where I don’t, and how I need to improve is worth it.

Where do you do your best work? How is that place changing?

Note: This post does not represent ACRL or the ACRL Intersections Professional Development Working Group.

Tales of the Undead…Learning Theories: The Learning Pyramid

ACRLog welcomes a guest post from Candice Benjes-Small, Head of Information Literacy and Outreach, and Alyssa Archer, Instruction Librarian at Radford University.

“If I have to sit through YET ANOTHER freaking ‘professional development’ session based on these cockamamie theories, I am going to pluck my eyeballs out and throw them at whatever charlatan the administration hired to conduct said session.”- professor on an online academic forum discussing learning myths, including the pyramid.

Some educational myths just can’t be killed. Case in point: the learning pyramid.

If you’re involved with student learning, you are probably familiar with the Learning Pyramid. This diagram breaks down different modes of learning and argues that more active modalities are better for long-term learning: we remember10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, 30% of what we see, and so on, all the way up to 90% of what we do.

learningpyramid1

Just in the last few weeks, we have witnessed two experts in separate presentations (one in librarianship, the other in education) refer earnestly to the pyramid. And while we didn’t gouge our eyeballs out, it made us both wince. This is a zombie learning theory that refuses to die. Whether it’s called the Cone of Learning or the Learning Pyramid, or demonstrates retention rates by another graphic, it keeps getting its head methodically removed by a dedicated cadre of researchers, yet rises up again in search of more brains. In this post, we’ll review the history of the pyramid, why it’s wrong, and why it never dies.

History of the Learning Pyramid

Edgar Dale, an expert in audiovisual education, created a model in his 1946 book Audio-Visual Methods in Teaching that he named the Cone of Experience to discuss various modalities/channels of imparting information. His cone did not refer to learning or retention at all, instead modelling levels of abstraction: words being the most abstract in his model, at the top of the cone, and real-life experiences the most concrete, and at the base of the cone (Lalley & Miller, 2007, p. 68). Take a look at the image below left: note that there are no percentages listed, this is purely a theoretical model. Dale did not value one mode over another, but argued for a wide variety of modes depending on context (Molenda, 2004, p. 161). Researchers speculate that Dale based the Cone on an earlier theoretical graph (below right) from 1937’s Visualizing the Curriculum, by Charles F. Hoban, Charles F. Hoban, Jr., and Samuel B Zisman.


*Edgar Dale’s Cone of Experience from the first edition of Audio-Visual Methods in Teaching, a model of abstract to concrete experiences.*	*The probable inspiration for the Cone of Experience, from Visualizing the Curriculum, Charles F. Hoban, Charles F. Hoban, Jr., and Samuel B Zisman (1937, p 23)*

Unfortunately, this conceptual model took on a life of its own. While Dale included caveats in the several editions of his work that the Cone was a theoretical model, and that multiple modes could apply to situations depending on the context, his work was ripe to be misused as a practical tool. As Michael Molenda notes, by the third edition of Audio-Visual Materials in Teaching in 1969, Dale had to include a full six pages of disclaimers regarding the cone, titled “Some Possible Misconceptions.”

Despite Dale’s warnings, the Cone of Experience was misapplied and renamed the Learning Pyramid. However, there is no conclusive evidence to back up these average retention rates. How did this happen?

Examples of what the Cone of Experience became. The links to the images above have been removed to protect the mistaken. They are just two examples of the hundreds found on a simple Web search.

Who first came up with the retention rates associated with the learning pyramid is murky, but researchers have theories. Molenda (working with several sources) believes the development involved Paul John Phillips, an instructor working at the Aberdeen Proving Ground’s Training Methods Branch during World War II. Phillips returned to work after the war to the University of Texas, where he trained members of the petroleum industry. The University of Texas records tie Phillips to the retention rates used in the pyramid. However, when Michael Molenda contacted both the University of Texas Division of Extension and the archivist at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, they could find no research regarding the percentages.

In Molenda’s history, the learning pyramid with retention rates was first published in a magazine article in 1967, by D. G. Treichler. The author included no citations or evidence to back up the retention rates, but Molenda suspects that they probably they came from Phillips, as he distributed training materials to the industry while at UT.

However, the current propagator of the learning pyramid is the unassociated NLT Institute for Applied Behavioral Science, which claims to have research from the early 1960s which supports the pyramid, but has lost the evidence. Will Thalheimer points out in an excellent post on the pyramid, that this lack of evidence negates all credibility. Even if research were conducted at one time, we cannot trust it. The context has been lost, as well as the ability to retest the method and examine it for errors.

Why the Learning Pyramid is False

Beyond its sketchy background, the learning pyramid should raise concerns:

What kind of research results end up in such tidy percentages, all multiples of 10?
How would one even develop a method for testing such broad claims?
Do we really believe a learner can remember 90% of anything?
Can an activity be separated from its content and be given credit for learning?

Many distinguished authors have gutted the pyramid’s claims. Educational expert Daniel Willingham provides excellent arguments against the pyramid related to oversimplification; providing an optimal learning experience does not boil down to the instruction method. There are many different variables that impact learning.

Our field has also tried to dispel the myth. In her book Reflective Teaching, Effective Learning, Char Booth explains another danger of the pyramid, that relying too heavily on the idea of mode strips away designing instruction for differences in context and content (2011, p. 41). Booth’s anecdote about how she embraced the pyramid because of its implications for student engagement illustrates another flaw with it. The pyramid is a visual sighting. If we only remember 30% of what we see, then a picture of the pyramid should not have such a dramatic memory impact on so many people.

What’s the Harm?

As the opening quotation exemplifies, many teaching faculty members know the learning pyramid is false. If you bring it up to them, you will greatly diminish your credibility. (Because the pyramid is so popular, though, we also suggest you tread carefully if a professor speaks of it in a positive way!)

The pyramid also leads one to believe that mental activities themselves produce set amounts of learning. But this mindset fails to address the quality of the mental activity. A librarian might decide to implement a peer coaching activity because the pyramid says teaching others is the best way to remember something, but if the students don’t have the appropriate knowledge, they will probably just end up confusing each other. You should never design a lesson just so students are “active.” As Bill Cerbin states in his essay on active learning research and its implications for college teaching, “Active learning is most effective when the experience supports students to interact with and reflect on the subject matter in substantive ways.”

The Lure of the Pyramid

Despite the pyramid having been debunked in many venues for decades, it continues to show up in educational presentations and literature. How people learn is a complex topic, complicated by advances in neuroscience and cognitive psychology research. It’s natural that we should seek commonalities in learning. As the authors of the white paper “Multimodal learning through media” state, “The person(s) who added percentages to the cone of learning were looking for a silver bullet” (2008, p. 8). Shortcuts to ‘what works’ would be especially tempting to librarians who do not have extensive training in education.

In the library field, both of us have attended presentations where the speakers used the pyramid as a quick way to reinforce the importance of engaging students during class. “Remember, people learn better when they are doing!” we are exhorted, as the famous image appears in a slide. The “short cut” is not only a way to simplify complicated processes to ourselves, but to rapidly convince others that student activity is a worthy goal.

Finally, the pyramid speaks to us. When discussing the pyramid with other instructors, we often find ourselves agreeing to the “truthiness” of it: intuitively, it just feels right. Of course being active and participatory should lead to more learning than does more passive activities, like reading or listening. Who among us has not sat in an auditorium during a lecture (library or otherwise), surrounded by sleeping audience members? In fact, the research supports that lecture is of limited use when it comes to retention of material; people’s minds tend to wander after a short period of time. It seems common sense to conclude that methods alternative to lecturing would be better. And if we already believe that other methods are better, then when we view the learning pyramid, confirmation bias kicks in, prompting us to not question premises that support what we already believe.

Grains of Truth

So should we throw away the learning pyramid? Although we hope we have debunked the idea of that different methods of teaching will lead to set percentages of learning, we think this myth does address some valuable ideas:

1. Memory matters. One of the best ways to measure learning is to assess the retention of material covered. We should continue to survey the literature on memory and retention, such as the 2013 article, “Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology.”

2. Think multimodal. As has been mentioned, Dale did not intend to create a hierarchy of mental activities, but to suggest there was a continuum from which to choose. People’s attention spans are short, but they do tend to retain more when the instructor mixes it up: interspersing short lectures with peer collaboration, or after reading a passage, interacting with an online tutorial.

3. Student engagement. The literature strongly supports that active learning exercises promote students thinking and caring about the material. This greatly aids retention, but it also helps lessen library anxiety and gives students a more positive feeling about the library sessions.

Final Words

Since the 1960s, experts have been trying to convince people that the learning pyramid is bogus. But for every article written exposing its weaknesses, there seem to be dozens of instances where it is invoked as truth in presentations, websites, and trade publications. We hope that having read this post, you will join the forces of pyramid slaying and base your instructional choices on valid research, not educational myths.

Can We Flip the Library Classroom?

Recently there have been lots of articles in my feedreader about “flipping” the classroom. This pedagogical strategy aims to reverse the order of operations in traditional lecture-based classes. Instead of the professor lecturing during class and the students completing homework in between sessions, proponents of flipped classrooms move problem-solving into the classroom, and often assign video captures of lectures as homework. Students may be given the chance to work in groups as they complete their assignments, and the instructor can circulate throughout the class in “guide on the side” style, providing individual attention to each student and working through questions and uncertainties during class time.

As an instructor who is not a fan of teaching lecture classes, the flipped model sounds good to me. Much of the discussion I’ve seen lately has raised interesting points about the place of technology, pointing out that while lecture videos may be useful, they’re not necessarily a required component of a flipped pedagogy. I will admit to one big lingering question (also raised in the blog post mentioned above): how can the flipped model be applied to discussion classes? In those courses students are typically expected to have completed assigned readings before coming to class, and class time is used to discuss issues raised by the readings and to review any points of confusion. I’ve heard many faculty lament their difficulty in convincing students to do their readings, which is a challenge that I’m not sure flipping the class can solve.

Can we flip the library classroom? With the move toward active learning in library instruction classes and away from more traditional, lecture-like demonstrations of research tools and strategies, in some ways we already have. But what about asking students to do some work before they join us in the library classroom? I’m sure many of us ask students to come to their library instruction sessions with a research topic in mind, especially for one-shots. We could ask them to view or read tutorials or research guides about the library catalog and databases before their one-shot, so they can jump right in once they get to the library. But will they do it? And are there other ways that we can take advantage of the flipped model to help students get more out of library instruction?

With so much of our library instruction dependent on one-shots for a variety of reasons, it seems like anything we can do to help students get more out of that single session is worth a try. I’m interested to hear about what’s happening with the flipped classroom model at academic libraries — are you using any flipped techniques in your instruction?