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?”

So today I took the like thirty seconds necessary to align the SmartBoard so I could take a research topic and pull out the keywords, circling them with that bright red pen, reducing Do women get paid less for their work in the United States? to women OR gender AND pay OR salary OR income AND work OR labor OR job AND United States. And then I opened up the catalog so I could do a little demo, show how you combine the keywords using Boolean search terms to find books relevant to your topic. I asked the class to construct the search, throwing out terms and combining them on the fly.

And they didn’t work. There was just something funny in the keywords we were trying, I was pulling nothing relevant at all. Now, this is pretty normal–I usually need to try and then try again and then again to shake useful stuff out of the catalog. I’m unfazed by that. Research works that way. But I was totally fazed by my broken example in front of the class. I blush, like turn-into-a-tomato blush, and could feel myself doing that in front of this group of expectant students.

What’s your strategy for turning moments like this into teaching moments? How could I have righted my plane?

So my classes this semester are taking on a more or less standard format. I want to be creative and new each time, but I also want to eat well and watch the latest episode of Fringe. Can’t do it all. I’m introducing the catalog, a database, and then our reference database, Gale Virtual Reference Library. Please don’t yawn. I’m also asking more questions and doing more student demonstrations than ever before. But, there’s a place for direct instruction.

In today’s class, the students were writing papers on the history of the Belgian atrocities in the Congo. So, we looked up the word “colonialism” in GVRL and came up with a bunch of articles. Then we talked about why there were so many, and what might be different about the article in the Encyclopedia of U.S. National Security and the article in the Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender. It was a sort of off-the-cuff idea that percolated in my office ten minutes before the session and then made sense as an amplification of a student demo of GVRL in the session.

But I think this might end up being a fruitful kind of library exercise that would encourage taking a minute to think about the source you’re using and what its potential point of view, scope, and relevance might be.

Thoughts?

I had the same professor, same class, back to back this week. Two groups of English 14 students. Our coordinator of instruction worked with the director of the writing program to develop a very narrow instruction outcome: Teach students to move from the citation to the full text of the article.

This is an important skill that nobody has. It’s concrete, and should be fairly easy to teach and then practice. In the first session, only a few students found the assigned article, no trouble, and the rest had to be walked through it one by one, even after my extend-o demo. In the second session, everybody found the article on the first try, and I was left with half an hour of empty time to fill talking about our library Facebook page and hey, how great does Mark Sanchez look. So, what was the difference?

I think it had to do with teaching a very small thing, and nothing else. In the first session, I did what I always do–I opened up the catalog and looked at the database pages and discussed briefly what wonders lay in store and only after that introduction did I go to our “find journals by title” page and start talking about the difference between a journal title and an article title. While teaching the difference between catalogs and databases is part of my goal in most classrooms, it isn’t part of the goal in English 14. Introducing those parts of the library website outside of any context that required their use seemed to just make things more confusing. Students tried searching in the catalog and the databases, I guess because they’d seen them. In the second class, I told the students that while there are many wonderful things on the website that I was itching to talk about with them because the library is just so exciting. But all that excitement has to wait until they come back next time. Instead, we were going to learn only about a single link on the library homepage. When we broke for the exercise, everybody clicked that link and found the article in no time.

Of course, I’m still not sure what I think about the exercise itself. I continue to be suspicious of tool-based instruction that’s de-linked from actual research scenarios. (Sure, the students need the article to bring to class next Tuesday, but I’m sure they can tell that the mandate is an artificial one.) I wonder how I’d find out if the students ever use this skill again. But next time I want to teach one and only one skill, I’ll focus my teaching on the picture, and leave out the rest of the frame.

*These are mostly first year students whose diagnostics place them just under English 16, the standard freshman comp. They have to produce portfolios in 14 that will be assessed by outside readers before being placed into 16. They must pass 16 to graduate.

I had a class no-show yesterday. It was just a mix-up, the growing pains of a new collaboration, I think, lack of contact information, quick skimming and failure to read key things like dates and times. Not a big deal, we’ll just reschedule for next week, these things happen.

Except that it felt like a big deal, I guess because I’d been working so hard on class prep and then had nowhere to go with it. I had two different exercises! Ready to go! Depending on the mood of the room! So flexible, so reflective! And then getting stood up, which no matter how much therapy I have always feels like it’s about me and how I don’t matter.

But does library instruction matter? As I sat in my cloffice brooding over my discarded lesson plans, I wondered if it would have mattered to student learning if the class had shown up after all. If they’d spent fifty minutes watching me search databases, then searching databases themselves, then showing the class how they searched the databases and then maybe never searching a database ever again for the rest of their whole lives.

So this isn’t meant to be an Eeyore post as much as an honest question: does library instruction matter when it happens in one fifty minute pop? What do you tell yourself on those thistle-eating afternoons when it only seems to matter to you?

I’m stumped. How do we get students to do the brainstorming necessary to generate enough stuff to eventually pick out and develop a research question? As the librarians drafted our set of learning outcomes for this new collaboration with the writing program, we all agreed that teaching students to develop library researchable topics was a primary goal. So often students will come to the desk wanting help finding resources for their six page paper on abortion, or the history of lotion (true story). These are topics that need to be narrowed, but they need to be expanded first. What about lotion? Its ingredients? Its uses? Kinds of lotions used in different geographic locations, historical contexts? Before we can narrow, we have to fill in and flesh out, and that can be hard to do when students struggle to articulate any idea at all. I’m so well-trained at generating ideas and paper topics that I forget how I learned to do it at all–I could write twelve papers about this stapler, probably, and at least two of them would likely be interesting. How do I know how to do that?

So! Yesterday I worked with a group of Core Seminar students. (Core Seminar is our writing-intensive mandatory humanities class.) I pulled up a blank Google doc and asked the class to toss out ideas from their reading that interested them. Blank stares. I prompted with a few ideas I found interesting from the reading list. I asked again. The class repeated what I’d typed into the Google doc. So, yeah, that didn’t work.

What does work, or does anything? Or is this outside the scope of library instruction? Sometimes I think this should not be our bailiwick, but without topics, how do I explain research steps like defining your information need, choosing an appropriate library resource, generating and using keywords? Any ideas?