This book is short, but for me, it was a very dense read. There was so much information I found helpful.
Some schools have freshman writing programs in which librarians work with faculty to integrate research into the semester-long or year-long curriculum.
The "one-shot", when a librarian visits a class for 45 minutes or an hour to teach them how to find and use library resources is much more common. I suspect it serves some students adequately and is quite useless to others.
This book is about finding ways to improve and expand the usefulness of the "one-shot."
The book opens by considering the "one shot," the single instructional session many librarians give to classes (often freshman writing classes). I've done these, and suspected that their usefulness was limited, for a number of reasons. One of the pieces of the information I gained was confirmation of how ineffective the one-shot can be. I'd suspected this, and worried about it, and this book offers practical advice on how to improve the effectiveness of the "one-shot."
One very important aspect of this book for me was that it led me to view giving library instruction not as a presentation or a speech but as a special kind of teaching in which some of the same issues that instructors face need to be addressed. For instance, there needs to be some way of ensuring that students have learned what they need to learn. There needs to be a way to cope with issues that come up, such as interjections by the regular instructor or technology failure. Students need to be engaged, and the single most valuable suggestion in this book was giving students partners and having the partners take turns conducting each others' searches and having everyone report on their partner's work at the end of the session. It's easy to tune out an instructor for whatever reason (there are many; students are often tired, sometimes sick, unmotivated, etc.) but in my own experience as a student I felt I had to put my game face on when working with other students. Didn't want to lose face!
This is a short book. If you only have time to read one chapter, I'd actually recommend Chapter 9, Fine-Tuning the One-Shot. These tips are mostly about instructional and public speaking approaches to help a librarian be more effective in teaching. Here are the sections:
Building Rapport in Minutes
Use the time before class, as students arrive, to set a friendly and welcoming tone
Look for Hooks (items you have in common with the students)
Use Names .. Theirs, if possible and Yours
Be Authentic
Tell Stories
Facilitating Meaningful Discussion
Don't Blindside the Students
Be an Active Listener
Ask Specific but Open-Ended Questions
Ask Clarifying Questions
Ask Questions to Which You Already Have the Answers
Connect Student Contributions
Get Comfortable with Silence
When the Best-Laid Plans of Mice and Men Go Awry
Instructor answers questions meant for students
Instructor Derails the Lesson
Instructor Doesn't Show Up, or Leaves
Class is Unprepared
Concept Mapping
Working with a collection of "generic" research topics likely to apply to students
Topic shopping (students can try out topics they're considering for a research paper)
Working from required reading (use a required reading from the course to introduce students to the idea of citation chasing)
Reviewing preselected sources on a topic (a collection of online links to a pre-selected topic, including a variety of sources such as articles, ebooks and video)
Explore the physical reference collection
Technology Poses Challenges (sometimes the technology fails)
Let the Student Do the Driving (asking one student to demonstrate may help engage other students)
Use imposed grouping to your advantage (have students work together; perhaps you can ask the groups to defend their choice of database)
Keep a bank of short demonstration videos for backup
Keep a collection of print artifacts for teaching evaluation (have a supply of collections of resources, such as articles, that students can examine and evaluate in class - ideally on a number of topics so that it will be easy on short notice to find a topic relevant to that class)
Consider rescheduling
Be nimble with teaching spaces (do you have laptops or iPads you can offer students instead of PCs?)
Of course, there are some teaching strategies that can be used to improve the effectiveness of the one-shot. One that I've used is the after-lesson reflection. Students write briefly on what they think they've learned in the lesson. This book argues for more extension evaluation, such as asking students to report on sources that they found in an in-class search.)
Appeal to Audience (Chapter 6, Supplementing the One-Shot)
"While libraries have neither the budgets nor the staffing for the kind of marketing analysis done by commercial publishers of learning objects, it would be helpful to import some of their practices and processes .. even rudimentary attempts at audience analysis can be useful.
The authors go on to suggest student library workers as a kind of informal focus group for getting some answers to these questions, and also suggest that there may be funding or college credit for student/faculty collaboration that might provide another resource.
Supplemental resources
Audio-video resources
Mostly videos should be short. Ways to make them more easily is creating live videos, and videos using Camtasia and Prezi.
Some apps
Using Spotify and Scoop.it are helpful for making supplementary materials, including lessons that students can watch or use as preliminary learning before the class one-shot.
Faculty Buy-in/Adoption
Departmental chairs and other leaders can be helpful in promoting these tools, especially in the context of achieving teaching goals. But the most effective way of gaining buy-in is word-of-mouth among faculty.
Also, this book has an appendix containing materials used by these librarians in their teaching.
Some schools have freshman writing programs in which librarians work with faculty to integrate research into the semester-long or year-long curriculum.
The "one-shot", when a librarian visits a class for 45 minutes or an hour to teach them how to find and use library resources is much more common. I suspect it serves some students adequately and is quite useless to others.
This book is about finding ways to improve and expand the usefulness of the "one-shot."
The book opens by considering the "one shot," the single instructional session many librarians give to classes (often freshman writing classes). I've done these, and suspected that their usefulness was limited, for a number of reasons. One of the pieces of the information I gained was confirmation of how ineffective the one-shot can be. I'd suspected this, and worried about it, and this book offers practical advice on how to improve the effectiveness of the "one-shot."
This is a short book. If you only have time to read one chapter, I'd actually recommend Chapter 9, Fine-Tuning the One-Shot. These tips are mostly about instructional and public speaking approaches to help a librarian be more effective in teaching. Here are the sections:
Building Rapport in Minutes
Use the time before class, as students arrive, to set a friendly and welcoming tone
Look for Hooks (items you have in common with the students)
Use Names .. Theirs, if possible and Yours
Be Authentic
Tell Stories
Facilitating Meaningful Discussion
Don't Blindside the Students
Be an Active Listener
Ask Specific but Open-Ended Questions
Ask Clarifying Questions
Ask Questions to Which You Already Have the Answers
Connect Student Contributions
Get Comfortable with Silence
When the Best-Laid Plans of Mice and Men Go Awry
Instructor answers questions meant for students
Instructor Derails the Lesson
Instructor Doesn't Show Up, or Leaves
Class is Unprepared
Concept Mapping
Working with a collection of "generic" research topics likely to apply to students
Topic shopping (students can try out topics they're considering for a research paper)
Working from required reading (use a required reading from the course to introduce students to the idea of citation chasing)
Reviewing preselected sources on a topic (a collection of online links to a pre-selected topic, including a variety of sources such as articles, ebooks and video)
Explore the physical reference collection
Technology Poses Challenges (sometimes the technology fails)
Let the Student Do the Driving (asking one student to demonstrate may help engage other students)
Use imposed grouping to your advantage (have students work together; perhaps you can ask the groups to defend their choice of database)
Keep a bank of short demonstration videos for backup
Keep a collection of print artifacts for teaching evaluation (have a supply of collections of resources, such as articles, that students can examine and evaluate in class - ideally on a number of topics so that it will be easy on short notice to find a topic relevant to that class)
Consider rescheduling
Be nimble with teaching spaces (do you have laptops or iPads you can offer students instead of PCs?)
Of course, there are some teaching strategies that can be used to improve the effectiveness of the one-shot. One that I've used is the after-lesson reflection. Students write briefly on what they think they've learned in the lesson. This book argues for more extension evaluation, such as asking students to report on sources that they found in an in-class search.)
Appeal to Audience (Chapter 6, Supplementing the One-Shot)
"While libraries have neither the budgets nor the staffing for the kind of marketing analysis done by commercial publishers of learning objects, it would be helpful to import some of their practices and processes .. even rudimentary attempts at audience analysis can be useful.
- What other media do students partake in?
- What assumptions do they bring to the table?
- What topics and events resonate with them?
- What visual and textual rhetoric would they find insulting or juvenile?
- What level of intellectual challenge are they ready for?"
The authors go on to suggest student library workers as a kind of informal focus group for getting some answers to these questions, and also suggest that there may be funding or college credit for student/faculty collaboration that might provide another resource.
Supplemental resources
Audio-video resources
Mostly videos should be short. Ways to make them more easily is creating live videos, and videos using Camtasia and Prezi.
Some apps
Using Spotify and Scoop.it are helpful for making supplementary materials, including lessons that students can watch or use as preliminary learning before the class one-shot.
Faculty Buy-in/Adoption
Departmental chairs and other leaders can be helpful in promoting these tools, especially in the context of achieving teaching goals. But the most effective way of gaining buy-in is word-of-mouth among faculty.
Also, this book has an appendix containing materials used by these librarians in their teaching.
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