Thank you to our 2015 breakout session presenters! Click on titles to view their presentations.
Bees, Butterflies, and Beetles: Using Threshold Concepts and Kits to Maximize Instruction Time: Elana Karshmer & Jacalyn E. Bryan
This presentation will describe an inventive activity to introduce biology students to library resources in their subject area. Prior to the beginning of the fall semester, the biology department at our university invited freshmen biology majors to participate in a one week “Biology Boot Camp.” The schedule included a 30 minute visit to the library for each of two groups of 24 students. During this library session students worked in groups of three and received a kit which included a plastic insect and step-by-step instructions on using three different resources (an e-book, a journal article, and an online encyclopedia). Each member of the group used one of the three resources to find information on the assigned insect. They then compared the information found and answered questions pertaining to the usefulness of their resources. The groups then shared their findings with the class. As a result of the session, the students were able to recognize that different types of resources are better suited to specific research needs. With only 30 minutes allotted for each of these library instruction sessions, we wanted to steer away from simply demonstrating searching techniques and maximize our time by moving quickly into active learning based on threshold concepts. The use of the kits was a creative way to engage students in a subject in which they were already interested and this idea can be easily applied to other subject areas. Overall, the students seemed to enjoy the session which served to reinforce their return visit to the library for a more general orientation as part our information literacy program. We will discuss ideas to improve this type of activity and revisions for future sessions. Session attendees will create their own instructional kits and share examples with the group for feedback.
Elana Karshmer is an Associate Professor/Instruction Program & Information Literacy librarian at Saint Leo University. She completed her M.A. (L.I.S.) at the University of South Florida, and has an M.A. in English from New Mexico State University. In 2009 Karshmer was named an American Library Association (ALA) Emerging Leader, and in 2014, she and Jacalyn Bryan won the ALA Library Instruction Roundtable’s Innovation in Instruction award for their work with first-year students. Karshmer was recently elected as vice-president/president elect of the Florida Library Association. In addition to her library work, Karshmer is working on a dissertation in postcolonial literature.
Jacalyn E. Bryan is an Associate Professor/Reference and Instruction Librarian at Saint Leo University and holds an M.A. (L.I.S.) from the University of South Florida and a M.A. in Dance Education from Columbia University. She has published in Library Review, Reference Services Review, The Journal of Academic Librarianship, and College & Research Libraries and has presented at international, national and state conferences on topics related to library instruction, assessment, and critical thinking. She and her colleague received the “Exemplary Learning Design” award from FLA in 2011 and the “Innovation in Instruction Award” from the ALA/Library Instruction Round Table in 2014.
Engaging the large (& quiet!) first-year class: Tricia Lantzy At California State University San Marcos, the librarian-taught two-week information literacy modules for first-year students have grown in both size and number. These classes generally average about 40 students each. Maintaining energy and cultivating meaningful group discussion increases in difficulty as class sizes grow, and planning activities that take students out of their seats and absorb them in the material is key. Over the past year and a half, I have tried, failed, and succeeded using a number of information literacy activities. This presentation will focus on one activity that has never let me down. The Internet Carousel is an activity I use to engage large (and often quiet) classes of first-year students. The Internet-Carousel Activity sends small groups around the classroom to different “stations” where they demonstrate their knowledge of the Internet by responding as a group to questions posed at each station. After one full rotation, groups return to their original places and choose the best answers provided by the class. There is then time for each group to report out and defend their reasoning for choosing the top answers. This activity is successful for a number of reasons. First, it allows students to participate in the conversation within their smaller, less intimidating groups. Second, students often feel like they have a strong understanding of the internet, and this activity allows them to teach one another new things and compare their knowledge. Finally, the instructor acts as a facilitator of learning rather than a lecturer, only adding to the discussion to correct misinformation or to add ideas that have not been brought forward. Attendees will experience a variation of this activity and discuss potential uses in their own classroom.
Tricia Lantzy is the Health Sciences & Human Services Librarian at California State University San Marcos. In both her current and previous positions, Tricia has worked extensively with first-year students. Her research interests include pedagogical techniques for increasing student engagement in the library classroom and reaching distance learners with synchronous online library instruction.
Step Over the Threshold with Us: Susan Smith & Debbie Abilock (note: presentation is not available to share currently as the authors plan to write a paper on this topic for publication.)
In every discipline there are threshold concepts; that is, ideas that are central to mastery of a subject which, once understood, transform how one understands and thinks within a discipline (Meyer & Land, 2003). These key ideas and practices are “so ingrained that they often go unspoken or unrecognized by practitioners” (Townsend, Brunetti & Hoffer, 2011, p. 3). The ACRL, a division of college and research libraries within the American Library Association, has drafted six anchoring threshold concepts that frame an academic research process (Gibson & Jacobson, 2014). Since these concepts will permeate academic research, we believe that it is essential for pre-collegiate educators to think about how to ground them in our schools. One such concept, “Scholarship is a Conversation,” involves mastering disciplinary ways of thinking and communicating including using nuances in syntax, specialized vocabulary and subject-appropriate evidence to convey ideas in an appropriate medium or genre, shaped for a particular audience and context. We asked ourselves: What developmentally appropriate sequence could we craft to teach this concept that might serve as a model for other teaching librarians? How could students learn a rhetorically-nuanced inquiry process that would enable them to weigh and weave source ideas into a multicolored tapestry in their own voices? We will share our initial work to introduce “Scholarship is a Conversation” in the context of the humanities, the sciences, and the social sciences and invite you to think about ways to translate this to your own teaching.
Susan Smith is the Library Director at The Harker School, a PS-12 private school in San Jose, CA. With four campuses and eight professional librarians, Harker has one of the largest independent school library programs in the Western U.S. Her chapter “Professional Learning Communities in an Information Literacy Odyssey” is featured in Growing Schools: Librarians as Professional Developers; ABC-CLIO, 2012. She is a frequent speaker on information literacy curriculum and instruction at regional and national conferences.
Debbie Abilock leads the education vision at NoodleTools, an online platform that enables teachers and librarians to provide targeted feedback and support to upper-elementary through university-level students as they work on academic research assignments. Her LMC column “Adding Friction” http://www.librarymediaconnection.com/lmc/?page=featured_articles> discusses practical interventions during information literacy instruction that can correct misconceptions about the research process while helping students understand threshold concepts and disciplinary literacies. She has been honored as a Library Journal “Mover and Shaker” and has worked on numerous local, state, and national boards.
When Active Learning Goes Flat: Using Gamification to Motivate Student Learners: Lindsey McLean & Elisa Slater Acosta (above links to slides; descriptive version also available here.)What happens when an active learning activity goes flat? You rapidly transform your lackluster exercise into an engaging activity midway through the semester! In this presentation we will discuss our instructional design efforts for a required in-person library instruction session for 73 Rhetorical Arts classes (1,273 freshmen). We used elements from both the hybrid approach and gamification techniques. Hybrid, or blended learning is a method of instruction in which students learn through a combination of face-to-face instruction and computer-mediated activities. The paper-based, active learning exercise the students completed in class was “gamified” and transformed into a digital learning object (The RADAR Game) to increase student engagement and learning. RADAR (Rationale, Authority, Date, Accuracy, Relevance) is a framework that the students are taught to use when evaluating their sources for an annotated bibliography assignment. Gamification is the process of transforming a non-game instructional activity using game design thinking to increase motivation and engagement. We will discuss the game design components used in the redesign of this active learning exercise to meet the goal of increased student engagement. Some of the gamification techniques to be discussed include motivational feedback, collaboration, and competition. The results from two assessment surveys will also be discussed. The first survey was given to a stratified random sample of 300 students to measure their perceived learning and satisfaction with the library instruction session. The second survey was administered to all instruction librarians who taught three or more of these in-person instruction sessions to measure the perceived student engagement. Preliminary results indicate high levels of student engagement and learning.