I was just googleychatting Maria from my desk shift in Brooklyn to her desk shift in Indiana. And guess what? With drafts of your research paper due right around the corner, we find ourselves repeating ourselves and saying a lot of the same things. Are you a similarly broken record? What do you tell students over and over again?

1. You will have to actually read it to see if it applies to your thesis. There’s no way around that, and I can’t do that for you.

2. You don’t have to read the *whole* book. You can read relevant *chapters* in the book.

3. Sometimes electronic sources aren’t faster. We’ve been sitting here together for twenty minutes. Does that feel faster to you?

4. The article won’t prove your point for you. You have to argue your point, using the article as evidence.

5. Research is hard, and it takes awhile.

Just a dashed off note on a day with too much in it: It is a real pleasure to teach a tool to a group of students working on a very specific research assignment that gets eleventymillion times easier if you know how to use the tool. This group needed primary media sources related to a range of historical events. I showed them our History Resource Center and Historical Newspapers.  They turned around and used History Resource Center and Historical Newspapers to get the primary sources they needed for their assignment. Ta-da! We all left happy!

I watched a student in my class yesterday struggle so hard with what to do with what she found in the library. She had a big broad topic, something along the lines of “How media affects the self-image of teenagers.” I worked with her until we found an edited book that addressed a number of narrower issues in that big broad topic. (I love an edited volume, though my publisher says they don’t tend to sell all that well.) She went and grabbed it from the stacks and brought it back and held it up and waved it at me, saying “So, is this related to my topic? Is it relevant? I don’t think this is useful!” I tried to explain that only she could tell me the answer to that, and that it would require both some reading and some thinking. I wonder if her reading skills aren’t very strong, if that’s what her resistance is about. By the end of our hour together in the classroom, she was thinking of jettisoning her topic (“There’s nothing on it”) and switching to another big broad topic that would present the same problems. Lots of frustration, lots of confusion.

I also watched her help another frustrated and confused student link from one of our citation databases to the full text of an article using our link resolver.

What’s the relationship between these two skill sets? If I’m succeeding at what I call “tool instruction,” maybe that’s as much as I could hope for as an instruction librarian. Is the rest simply beyond the scope of the library classroom? Is the reading, synthesizing, and writing in fact the domain of, well, a four year undergraduate education in the liberal arts?

I have a class coming in today for their second library session. I talked with the (wonderfully communicative!) professor earlier in the week about what these students need at this point. First, they need targeted database practice and one on one help with pulling out relevant materials. They need some technical help. Second, she said, they need help thinking about their research projects as organic, fluid, and with the potential to change the way they think about their topics. They’re mechanistically plugging in two articles, one book, and one web resource into the thesis statements they came up with a month ago. When they find something that challenges their opinion or presents a nuanced argument, they put it to the side and get back to the hunt, for something that confirms what they knew at the beginning of the research process.

This is going to sound silly, I know. But listen: I’ve discovered this great new instructional tool called… POWERPOINT! I made one of my first ones for a class where I knew I’d be reviewed by my Dean. Not wanting to look like I was ‘winging it,’ I thought I’d do what the Others do and whip up a ten-slide presentation, pass around handouts, and go from there. And for as much as people (including me) are down on powerpoint, I actually found it very useful in part for the way it forced me off my game and into something new.

My academic training in education and teaching dates from my MA in English.  I remember in one class learning various techniques for encouraging and fostering classroom discussion.  This is where I learned about wait time, or having a class sit in a circle and going around that circle and making each person say at least one thing once.  There was some other thing involving Starburst.  I think it involved passing out candies to each person in class, and when asking a question, saying, “Only people with yellow Starburst can answer the question.”  The idea was that it would prevent the same students from dominating the discussion day after day.   I tried out these (and other ones I don’t remember now) techniques in my classroom when I taught first year composition, but I don’t remember with what degree of success.

I didn’t get any real training in library instruction in library school, so it was this training from my MA that I bring to my experience as an instruction librarian.  And some of these classroom discussion techniques don’t really work.  My library classroom is not arranged  in a way that encourages the Round Robin set up, and there’s really not a whole lot I can do about that.  I could try the Starburst thing, though, although the nature of the library instruction class period is not conducive to letting each person talk once, which I think was part of the point of that strategy.

What are your techniques for promoting, enhancing, and fostering interactive discussion in the library instruction classroom?  What do you do when your wait time simply leads to an awkward pause and blank stares?  Please share your tips and tricks!

Bottom of the ninth, game seven. Two outs. Down one run, there’s a guy on third. Do you want to be the guy at bat? That’s always my question as I sit with a beer and a bowl of popcorn as the minutes tick down on the NCAA basketball title game, the Super Bowl, post-season baseball. And I never want to be that guy. Too much pressure!

I was on a panel representing the young folks this past Friday at the CUNY Grad Center for this year’s LACUNY Institute. I shared the dais with the wonderful Jason Kucsma and Erin Dorney, both able and affable tablemates who made the use of my research day inside a conference room feel useful and productive. My colleague/pal Jenna Freedman, a member of the morning panel, has written up her report of the day here.

The primary instruction effort on my campus involves a two-session sequence in a core seminar course that addresses the broad topic of ‘the idea of the human.’ In the first of these two sessions, I’ve been introducing the concepts of keywording and Boolean searching, and then turning students loose to explore the library catalog and one of our databases. The second session is always a mystery to me. Should I talk about citation? How much should I repeat what we last talked about? Is it an open lab time for students to search while getting help from the librarian wandering around the room?

Those of you who do stepped instruction–how do you break up your skills instruction? And what do you do when the faculty member tells you that after all these weeks, they’re still just at the point of developing research questions?

So I’m in this MA program in writing and rhetoric at my university. It’s an English department MA in composition that essentially trains us to be freshman comp teachers. I’m taking some literature classes, sure (I’m looking at you, Derek Walcott), but the core of the program is concerned with how we teach people to write. It’s a natural fit for an instruction librarian, I think, and I’ve been amazed at how much all the comp theory I’m reading meshes with my things I experience in the library classroom. I expect that in a dozen more credits and a thesis, I will be a pretty all-around helpful person for a student with a research paper due next week.

That said, my expertise is in my making databases regurgitate resources. That’s my skill. And yet, the minute I start trying to talk about how to determine authority and relevance of a particular source (“Can I use this for my paper?”) I’m in the weeds of the writing process. The two–researching and writing–are like the two strands of the double-helix. They make each other. Separating them is artificial.

But I’m the librarian, not the writing teacher. How do you define your limits when you’re working with students? When do you say, “I can help you with this but not that, for that you need to go to the writing center”? When I drew that line yesterday, the student looked at me confused and in disbelief. “Really? You can’t just help me with that?”