IDE Final Post

Teaching Scenario

My teaching scenario is a one-shot, 75-minute instruction session for a sophomore level course called Introduction to Political Inquiry. The course is a pre-requisite for all upper division Political Science courses, and it is also a requirement for students pursuing an International Relations major or concentration.

Many of the students have received library instruction in a freshman-level College Writing course, but for some it may be their first time in the library in an instructional setting. The course is offered almost every semester, and enrollment is anywhere between 12 and 24 students. The class size is small enough to be accommodated in our library computer lab, so each student will have a computer in front of them.  The students are working on a research project (topic of their choosing with a Political Science focus), and their final assignment is a literature review.

Learning Outcomes

As a result of the in-class group activity,  students will be able to identify different information types commonly used in Political Science research. Students will also be able to analyze and select the resources most appropriate for their chosen topic.

Assessments 

In groups, students will analyze a given information type to see the role it plays in researching a sample topic provided by the librarian. Groups will work with worksheets or Google Docs to answer questions about their assigned resource, and the group work will be collected by the librarian for assessment.

Further, after exchanging information with other groups, students could be given a quick forward-looking assessment where they are given a "real world scenario" that relates to Political Science. Then, they'll be shown a list of five possible resources and asked to select those which are most relevant to the scenario.  Students will be evaluated on their selection of resources and the completeness of their rationale for selecting them.  More on the potential criteria and standards for this assessment can be found in this post.

Learning Theories

By leaving the group activity as open-ended as possible, I hope to incorporate constructivism into the single class period I have with these students. I want students to feel in charge of their learning, and while the worksheets will be a guide, they will also leave room for the students to form their own ideas about the relative merits of the information type they are exploring. Constructivism also informs my approach to groups sharing their work: Each group will "teach" others in the class about their information type so that they can create meaning/understanding through the act of teaching others.

Teaching Tools

In order to facilitate a longer, more robust in-class activity, I hope to move some of the "overview of the library and its website" content that I would typically include in a Intro to Political Inquiry session to a YouTube video created with Camtasia. My goal is to make this available in their Course Management System prior to the library session.

Another teaching tool I hope to incorporate is Google Docs. If the class had access to the worksheets as Google Docs, they could collaborate easily and have something that to which they could readily refer at a later date.

Course reflection

Instructional Design Essentials has definitely helped me to more thoroughly examine my instructional scenario and my goals. Week 2 was particularly eye-opening because it forced me to see how my outcomes should match my assessments, which should match my learning activities, etc. In past library instruction planning, I've usually been intentional about one or two of those aspects, but I've probably never put all three into alignment!  Week 2 was hard work, but it was definitely worth it.

Coursemates' blogs

Reading the blogs of others was extremely helpful. It was especially useful to read blogs that covered different library settings than my own to see what similarities and differences there might be between my setting (a small-ish Master's-granting university) and people working elsewhere. Specifically, I learned a lot from reading about an academic law library,  community college English classes, and a library serving the students of more than one college/university.

Critical Pedagogy

One of the things that the critical pedagogy readings helped to clarify for me was the way in which library instruction can so easily become a passive experience for the learner, where she or he is simply the recipient of the librarian's knowledge. I like the idea of giving students more agency in the classroom and of seeing where there might be flaws or problems in the content we're asked to teach. The sticking point of implementing critical pedagogy can be the tension between wanting students to examine these issues more critically and the constraints placed on us (in my situation, anyway) by faculty desires to make things clear for their students and to be succinct (a single class session). Integration of information literacy in a structured or sequenced way throughout  the curriculum would make it easier to adopt a critical lens in the library instruction session, and that's where I am ultimately hoping to go with my overall library instruction.