Research Questions: Deconstructing to construct

Constructing a good research question is a challenging task for many students, and let's be honest, faculty and librarians. You need a good balance of broad concept and narrow focus. Of a question, whose question isn't immediately obvious and one you can actually answer. Depending on your research approach, either primary or secondary research, your question can vary widely. But when wielded deftly, it can be the key to unlocking research.

To help my students, especially those in intro-level courses, I've broken down the research question into its component pieces. My coworker and I identified 4 required parts, and 3 suggested extras or bonus features. The 4 pieces any basic research question needs? Question word, Action Verb, Topic, and Punctuation. The first and last of those are pretty self explanatory. Typically any research question that starts with how or why will be stronger and easier to create. Obviously your topic needs to go in the question somewhere. It seems like a no-brainer, but you'd be surprised how often students don't put their actual topic in the question anywhere.

The last piece is where some faculty and I differ. I want students writing research questions with action verbs. Too often I see students asking questions about how one thing "affects" another thing. Or "influences" or "changes" something. Impact is another of those. Those verbs mean very little outside the context of a question. They result in lazy questions. How did Hurricane Katrina impact the people of New Orleans? Um. Impact how? Politically? Psychologically? Economically? Physically? Using an action verb requires more thinking, but ultimately gets to a more complex question. How did Hurricane Katrina illuminate long standing racial issues in New Orleans and the nation at large? See, action verb with a stronger question. (I also get away with this because my liaison areas are in the social sciences where this structure works!)

But you don't have to stop there. You can add a sub-topic, or adjectives, or even a type of cause and effect. These aren't required, but the more of those you add, the narrower your focus becomes. I've worked with students by showing them a series of research questions and having them identify the parts. Or showing them a poor question and having them help me rewrite it using the chart above. So far, it's lead to much better research questions.

The next step is getting from your research question to a thesis. I like modeling this with students. It also illustrates the importance of these questions. A good question helps you decide what resources and research is important. It guides how you read those resources. And it also leads directly to your thesis. Your thesis ought to be the answer to your research question. That's why you can't ask a question about the future unless you're doing the experiment yourself. You have to be able to answer it using the research/resources available to you.

One last thing about thesis statements I like to tie into my research question lessons.

Becky's 3 Rules of Thesis Statements

1. It must be a declarative statement. No questions marks here.
2. It must answer your research question.
3. You must be able to prove it using evidence.

That's it. Three simple rules to help guide students toward efficient and productive research.  How do you teach research questions? Do you? Or do you focus topics in a different way?

Narrowing and tweaking topics: two strategies

Time to resurrect this instruction blog. You know the drill: time got away from us, we got busy actually doing the instruction, you have time to do it or write about it. Ok, now that we have that out of the way, let's get down to business.

Selecting and narrowing (or focusing) topics is one of those tricky skills for students. They often think that this is the easy part, but more and more I see students really struggle to accomplish this task.

In many of our upper-level classes, our institution uses construction of a research question to help students narrow a topic. But if you haven't done it before, research questions can be a tough concept to grasp.

I started bringing concept maps back into my teaching in the last year. But I realized once I attempted it in a few classes that concept maps are only really helpful when the student has a good grasp of the topic. This isn't usually true in many intro level classes. They haven't done the research yet, so they know very little about their topic, or they end up with really generic concept maps.

What do you do with students who know little about their topic? Or have instructor assigned topics? Or just picked a topic out of the textbook? I tried a technique using everyone's favorite question words. I had students write at least 2 questions that started with each of the 5 W's & an H. Even if they don't know much, it forces them to approach the topic from a few different angles. After doing this once, I adapted the directions to allow for questions that didn't start with the question word, but answered it. For example, "Who reads?" is not a terribly helpful question, but "Do men or women read more?" gets at the same Who question without actually starting with the word.

What I really liked about this activity was that the Why and How questions can quite easily be turned into research questions. Those get at the connecting of ideas instead of just reporting back findings. In the class I did both these activities with the whole class. Afterwards I had each student pick a topic to put on a piece of paper, crumple it up and throw it to the front of the room. Then I had them pick up one, uncrumple it and then add 2 items to it. If they knew the topic well, add 2 spokes of the concept map. If they were less familiar, add two "question word questions." Then crumple it back up and throw it back to the front. The next round was the same, only they could build off of what the previous person had written too. We did this 3 times. By the end, they had a fairly complex concept map or quite a few questions to build off.

I don't always get that much time with students that early in the process so I created this infographic to work into my LibGuides for other classes. I'm excited to see how it goes.

Politics round up

Happy Election Day!! Or as I like to call it in Iowa, happy election campaigns reprieve day! As a former politics major, this day was always important to me. Being informed and being active in our own government is something I try to advocate for in all of my classes.

Today's post is going to look a bit different than my typical ones. I'm going to do a round up of some of my favorite government and political resources and tools. Knowing most of my students don't come in with much background in politics, government or civics, my favorites balance content with context.

General:

• iCivics.org--iCivics is a non-profit started by former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Conner to teach students about the political process, usually through games. It covers drafting bills, the Supreme Court arguments, the Bill of Rights, immigration, the race to the White House and more. Free accounts are easy to create and the games are both informative and fun to play. Teaching resources are also available.
• Constitution Center--If you can get to the Constitution Center in Philadelphia, go! It's amazing. In the meantime, check out the interactive Constitution on their website. Their educational resources are located here. They also have a goldmine of Constitution Day activities.
• Our Documents--An actual government site that hosts great quality scans of 100 milestone documents important to American history. They also have text transcripts for each document. 
• DocsTeach--Aimed more at history teachers, this site can also be useful when trying to find primary documents on political topics. It looks at how to engage students in historical documents.

Congress:

• OpenCongress--A non-partisan website that bring together information about bills in Congress and Congress members. It provides funding and spending data as well.
• GovTrack--Another non-partisan site that provides summaries of bills, tracks the likelihood of passage as well as provides rationale for why it may or may not succeed. Sometimes a little slow to update, the overall content makes up for that delay.
• Congress.gov--The legislative process videos cover the entire process and rational of how a bill becomes a law. Not quite as entertaining as "SchoolHouse Rock," it does a decent job of covering the content.
• Countable--Summarizes both sides of popular bills in Congress. It doesn't have search function if you're looking for a particular bill.

Supreme Court:

• ScotusBlog--SCOTUSblog does the best, accessible and easily readable coverage of Supreme Court cases I have seen. They not only link to all the relevant court documents for each case, but they include their own coverage like argument previews and recaps, as well as opinion recaps explaining the future implications of the decision. While many SCOTUS websites have a legalese tone, SCOTUSblog has an entire staff position dedicated to writing "In Plain English" articles for their site, breaking down important cases without all the legal jargon. Coverage goes back to 2007.
• Oyez--This site provides links to the Supreme Court audio in a much easier to find format than the Supreme Court website itself.
• CourtListener--This allows users to search ALL of the federal courts opinions and cases in one box. This is particularly helpful when trying to find the opinion of a case before it hits the Supreme Court. The highest state court decisions are also available.

Ask the Masses: No student left behind

Time for another Ask the Masses question. Looking back at some of the responses for my teaching evals last week, one comment in particular stood out.

A faculty member said that sometimes my instruction tends to "favor the folk who pick up on things quickly," but that I'm sure to try and not move on until everyone has caught up.

The comment has gotten me thinking. How do you go about doing IL instruction, which tends to be hands-on, with a group of users that has skill levels across the board? I realize I try to teach closer to middle and get students going on the project and try and pick up the stragglers one-on-one, but that doesn't always feel like the best way to go about it.

So I turn to the rest of you, ideas??

Bringing the flipped classroom to library instruction

I suppose I should start this post with the note that I am by no means an educational pedagogy expert. Nor do I have any hands on experience with 'flipped classrooms.' But then again, if you've read any of my other posts, you know that I've taken my instructional inspiration from way weirder places. So without further adieu, Becky's version of a flipped IL classroom.

The basics of a flipped classroom for those of you unfamiliar with the idea include having students read or listen to the lecture or traditional class content outside of class and spending in-class time working on problem sets or what would traditionally have been homework. In essence, content is introduced outside the classroom walls, and class time is used to reinforce the ideas and concepts learned.

My version grew out of two different places. First, I had an instructor who gave me two full periods with his first-year students concerning his Journal Article Review assignment. He originally thought I'd spend the first hour doing a "basic library overview" and then the second date teaching them more specifically about the assignment. I agreed to the 2-date setup, but I politely reminded the instructor we don't really do a overview tour of the website, but I would find a way to use those class periods productively.

Secondly, I'd been playing around with an idea for while. Just trying to find a place to put it into practice. What if we had the students do the searching outside of class and did the rest of the assignment in class? Because let's be honest, the students are coming in more and more capable of typing words into a search box. Getting them to that point...and beyond that point. That's the issue. Why take precious time in class letting them search?

This assignment was perfect for this approach. It required the students to find a scholarly article and write a critique and review of it. Simple on the surface, but SO many skills and topics incoming students would need help with. After talking with the instructor and my backup in the class (Both sections of this class have approx 30 students.), we decided to split up the instruction this way.

Day 1

We started the day breaking the assignment down and figuring out just what we needed to find. Along the way we realized this 'journal' article might not be the kind of article we were used to, as the assignment talked about study participants, methodology and future implications. So we spent the next portion of the period talking about scholarly articles: what, why, who, and how.  Once we figured out what we needed, we moved on to how we searched for it. This class is a 100-level introduction to a major that has 3 distinct tracts: Sports Marketing, Pre-Professional Health, and Athletic Training. So to both take advantage of and explore that, we brainstormed topics about football. We created a topic web on a piece of paper all branching off the basic topic. Each tract was represented and we talked about how many different ideas and research studies might exist out there. And before we were done...we had a bunch of different keywords ready to dump into SPORTDiscus. This left us with about 10 minutes to demo the database and how to request the full-text.

The Homework

The students' job was to come to the next library session (about 3 weeks away) with a print or digital copy of a scholarly article that fit the criteria of the assignment. That's it. Do the searching. Read the abstract. Request the full-text. And bring it with them.

Day 2

The second day is all about using the article and assisting the students with whatever part of the process they need help on. The class activity to start is the "parts of a scholarly article" activity I've talked about previously. After that, we'll set up 3 "Ask-The-Experts" stations in the classroom. One will be staffed by a library staff worker (who is an MLS student). She'll cover APA citations and formatting as well as any searching as we expect a student or two to come in without an article. I will staff another on how to read a scholarly article and where we will find each piece the assignment requires. And the instructor will cover questions about sports terminology, statistics and graphs, as well as any specific questions about the assignments.

A few of the students in this class are upperclassmen. Part of the goal of this instruction is to meet the students wherever they are at skill and experience-wise. If the students are comfortable or have done this type of assignment before, then they basically have work time. Other students will have the opportunity to ask questions in a less intimidating arena than the reference desk or office hours. And it also empowers the students to recognize the skills they already have and hopefully legitimizes the process of asking questions.

We did the first library session already and it seemed to go pretty well. I've seen a few of the students since asking if they had to do anything now that they had their article. I told them they had 2 choices, just bring it with them to the next library date. Or get ambitious and start reading it to see if they can figure it out before they see me again. The next library date will be Oct 14. I'm excited to see how it goes. 

Faculty-Librarian collaboration: co-hosting the class

Faculty/librarian collaboration too often is code for what librarians may see as 'faculty acquiescence' and what faculty may see as 'librarian takeover.' Yes, the librarian is helping the faculty by teaching valuable skills, and yes, faculty provide access to the students that the librarian lacks otherwise. But that's not true collaboration. That's substitution.

What we really need to do is co-host the class. Think of it as a balancing of expertise. Or two experts for the price of one. In small college settings, librarians can easily find themselves helping in classes or areas in which they aren't experts (or even have much content experience). Instead of seeing this as a weakness, use this to your advantage. Ask the professor to stay with you at the front of the classroom instead of escaping to the back. Have them interact with you. Ask them clarifying questions or let them introduce the assignment with you in class. Have them introduce you as another resource to take advantage of. And return the favor by praising their expertise in the field. (This works particularly well when discussing scholarly articles and just what kinds of people are authoring those studies!)

I'll be the first to admit this probably won't work with every professor, but I think for a few types of professors it will. Try it with that faculty member you know well and has seen you teach before. The one who knows how you roll. Or start with that faculty member who just can't help but interject in class. Take the interruption and make it part of the instruction. Or that professor who insists on talking with students during class. Make them have that conversation with you so you can guide it toward your instruction.

This idea comes from a colleague of mine who actually responded to my comment about him answering my question instead of the students with..."I was just helping out. We've got this thing going. It's like we're co-hosting this...like the Emmys." It made me and the students chuckle. Later, while the students were helping me brainstorm topics we had the following exchange.

"That's a great topic. I know someone, a friend, that writes about that topic."

"To be fair, you know someone who researches each of these topics. You know everyone."

"What can I say? I go to a lot of conferences and make friends."

Have fun with it. If the students are engaged they'll absorb the lesson better. Bring them into the research conversation by modeling a conversation. No one is expecting teaching (or comedy) gold.  But may we all aspire to be the library version of that Neil Patrick Harris/Hugh Jackman duet on the Tonys a few years ago.

Ask the Masses: Encouraging reading and it's domino effect

This week I'm asking my own question!

Our campus is encouraging and promoting a "culture of reading" this year. Some of the faculty have jumped on the reading train and are assigning particular books for class. Others have allowed their students to pick a title themselves (relevant to their course) and read and write about it. Even the traditionally non-reading courses have gotten in on the act: computer graphics students are illustrating short stories they're reading.

I'm really excited about people jumping in to this. My question is what other ways can we encourage professors to add reading elements to assignments? And how do we do so without simply turning our information literacy sessions into "how to find a book on the shelf" ones?

How to design instruction: break it down

As some of you may know or remember, I have very little training in instructional pedagogy, but I'm a liberal arts grad who had some amazingly inventive teachers who has since surrounded herself with some really smart friends. That said, one of my favorite parts of my job is brainstorming and planning instruction whether that be my own, or helping other professors develop research (or non-library) assignments.

Last week I found myself helping a friend adapt college-level content about sports marketing to make it appropriate for 1st graders attending a college for kids program on campus. At first I was excited about the challenge, but quickly realized that while I knew how to build creative assignments for college students, first graders were a bit out of my league!

So I turn to one of those really smart friends of mine who works with kids that age. Her suggestion? Break it down to its component parts and relate those to something they already know, or are familiar with and make it active. As soon as she told me that, I felt a bit like I'd been hit with a brick. Obviously that's what you do. That's what I do to attack an assignment for my college students. I'd been doing that without framing it that way, but that was the basic progression. Take the goal of the project and the method to getting there. Break it down into manageable steps, ideas, processes, concepts, etc. Basically find its component parts, whatever form that may take. And then you relate it to what they've done or known before. You want to teach them about subject headings and authority control? Relate it to Facebook photo tagging. Annotating a text? That's a bit like live tweeting in the book. Find something that makes sense to them and build on that prior knowledge. And then?? Then you make it active. You teach the concepts or theories or ideas or whatever, and then you let them practice it. You have them apply it. Have them put it to use right away.

So when we left our heroes, they were grappling with sports marketing for kids. My friend brought in the content broken down with some idea of how to make it a project. I added a bit of the active appeal and the link to the familiar. And suddenly we've got a week long project of creating a team, pieces of marketing plans including price structure and promotion, all wrapped up in a book to take home to their parents. Ta da! But that wasn't really the ta da moment.

That moment? It came later. When the faculty member realized he could use this same project with his college students. We built it to be active for 7 year old because that is how you make things "fun" and also how you cope with 7 year olds when you don't make a habit of dealing with them on a regular basis. :) But the active piece with college students? That is that the chance to do some "real world" application. That's the buy in. It's where the rubber meets the road. You teach them the theory and then they put it to use, reinforcing it right away.

And my takeaway from this endeavor? That translating process can go either way. I'm not usually in the habit of building things for little kids, but I love the idea of break it down to component parts, relate to what they know, and make it active. We're all kids at heart, right? If it works for them, why not for us?

Teaching philosophy: participate, contribute, and lead

Sorry for the lateness of this post. I got swept up in graduation and faculty development days. It was while I was helping run the faculty development portion of the week that the inspiration for this post hit me. As faculty members, the librarians at our university will be participating in professional portolios for the first time. I won't get into the requirements and pieces and such here, but one of the artifacts that I will have to develop is a "Philosophy of Teaching" statement.

I don't know about most of you, but I don't have an education background. My teaching and instruction qualifications stem from a semester long course on IL instruction. That's it. I've never written a philosophy of teaching before. And I'm not sure I've ever really consciously thought about what mine might include. Will mine be fundamentally different from someone who teaches a for-credit course? Or someone who sees the same students every day? I wonder if mine will be shaped by the fact that I fall into what one of my colleagues called a "practice discipline." One where a students' development and progress in the area are measured more in skills and proficiency honed via practice than in innovation, new thinking, or crafting a product. But my role in this eduction is that latter piece. I strive to think differently about education (partly because I don't have that classical grounding to fall back on) and teaching. It isn't the rote practice for me that it might require of my students. I know that philosophies of many great teachers are not bounded by the walls of a classroom, but I wonder how to address the significance that not only does learning happen outside the library classroom, but so too does the teaching.

As I got overwhelmed with these ideas yesterday, I was grounded by the language in the section I was leading. In the arena of scholarship, we are asking our faculty to think of their engagement in their disciplines and professional arenas in the following ways: participation, contribution, and leadership. I like that idea for my own scholarship, but as I took that idea one step further, I wonder if it wouldn't work for students and IL skills too. Can we think of our instruction not in the language of "introduce, reinforce, and master" but in something like participate, contribute and lead? And not just in skills. Don't we want to use scaffolding and building up of skills just in one session? Can we ask students to lead some of the instruction for lower-level skills we think they ought to have, but ask them only to participate in activities in areas unfamiliar to them. I really like the flip-flopping of this language because it changes the subject of those sentences. It is not the librarians who are participating and contributing in the instruction, it is the students. We write our Student Learning Outcomes as "The student will..." but when asked to talk about instruction, we begin our sentences with "I will..." Why? Does simply reframing the way we describe and think about IL change how we teach? What about the expectations for students?

It's something to think about. And I would love to hear about your philosophy of teaching? Have you written one? Where do you start? Has it changed throughout your career?

Professional development for instruction

Beth asks:
I am in the process of developing instruction-related professional development for library colleagues who will be taking on new or expanded teaching roles next Fall. I would love to hear suggestions for activities, readings, experiences, etc. to incorporate into this professional development work. What helped (or is currently helping) you in your ongoing growth as an instruction librarian? What have you used in similar types of training that has been successful for you? Do you have a mental checklist of things that Every Instruction Librarian Should Know/Do? If so what's on the list? 
Truthfully, I am not very far along in my planning for this and so far I have just some basic ideas about areas to cover: adult learning styles, developing student learning outcomes, incorporating reflection, formative assessment, and some nuts & bolts things that just specific to our institution. I look forward to any ideas or recommendations you may have and I will be happy to share more details as they come into focus. Thanks!

What a great question Beth! What do you think? What advice would you give? How do you encourage your own professional growth?

Extended metaphors: useful or too much?

During my undergraduate library internship I was required to read and review articles about academic librarianship. It's been 7 years, but one of those articles has stuck with me.

The article described the utility of using metaphors to teach research skills. The metaphor this author used was that of making a salad. It went into great detail about each type of thing you might put in a salad and what its research counterpart would be. While reading it, all I could think was...how does that help? The students have two things to remember now the actual process and the metaphor. I simply couldn't understand how those two processes were related. After writing my review/critique of the article, I put the idea of using such an extended metaphor out of my mind and proceeded to get my MLS, not really expecting to teach.

Fast forward almost five years teaching undergraduates the ins and outs of information literacy, and I might just be changing my mind about that extended metaphor idea. I'm not sure I'm ready to jump into that salad metaphor, but I have employed a few of my own in the past few semesters.

While watching Castle one night (see this post for more about my tv viewing habits and IL) I figured out how I was going to explain what being a historian meant to my undergrads in a gen ed course. Being a historian is like being a detective and a story-teller. First you need to look at your primary source and figure out what is going on. Then, you need to figure out what kind of story that artifact can help you tell. What is the broader narrative that the artifact fits into? (For those of you who haven't seen the show, Castle is about a dectective in the NYPD who is shadowed by an award-winning mystery writer!) I used the metaphor in class the following week. I'm not sure the students embraced it entirely, but it did seem to resonate or at least make sense to them.

Later in the semester I was struggling to explain the process of writing an evidence-based argument in a research paper. As a class we were working with a research question, 4 articles and trying to figure out what kinds of things we're looking for in the articles. And what the difference between the factors we were finding and the facts. And then it hit me mid-discussion, it's basically a murder mystery.

I'd previously used the idea of quoting something from a literature review as being "academic hearsay." But expanding the metaphor worked well. Your reference question essentially becomes a "who done it?" You find evidence (i.e. just the facts, ma'am) from the articles. You combine all the evidence to come to a conclusion about who the culprit is. That culprit (the factors to college student success--our research question) becomes your thesis. And then you spend the paper trying to prove that your guy (thesis) actually did it using the evidence. The intro and conclusion of your paper can be a bit more theatrical, like the opening and closing statements you see on legal shows. As a metaphor it works decently well. And it relates something the students understand to a new process without the huge disconnect.

What do you think? Do you use metaphor in your instruction? What's your favorite? Does it work or do you get the blank stares of disconnect from your students?

What is iLove and why go to the IPAL interest group?

What is iLove? I could rehash it here, but I'll let you check out our About Us tab at the top. We outline our Mission, Objectives, and who were are right there. More importantly, I'm here today to talk to you about the face-to-face manifestation of iLove.


What: "Beg, Borrow, and Steal"-- the IPAL Information Literacy Interest Group session

When: April 4, 2013, 1:30-3:30pm

Where: Drake University

Who: YOU!! What does that actually mean? Instruction librarians from Iowa private colleges

Why: Because it will be awesome. Ok, really, why should you show up to this? Because we as instruction librarians are coming together to talk about what we do on a daily basis. Something most of us rarely get to do. Are you the only instruction person at your institution? We can help! Would you like to hear what other people are doing? We can help! Do you have an assignment you just don't know what to do with? We can help! Would you just like to know you're not the only one out there in this lonely instruction librarian world? You aren't! And we can help!

We'll break down the session into 3 parts that mirror what we're doing here on the the iLove blog. We'll do a session of "Instruction Ideas." This will basically be a lightning round of IL sessions, lessons, tips, tricks, or even flops! Have an idea you want to share?? Let us know at iloveinstruction@gmail.com

Then we'll flip it around and put the rest of us in the hot seat for "Ask the Masses." It's your chance to pose that question, problematic assignment, or instruction quandary to a group of people who might actually be able to help. Have a question you'd like to pose? Check out our "Ask the Masses" tab at the top of this page for more details.

And then we'll do some "Librarian Snark." Yep, you know what we're talking about. Those funny videos, comics, blog posts, memes that just make you giggle. Or laugh out loud. Or those ones where you really wish you'd not opened that link at the reference desk because oh my goodness are you getting weird looks for snorting.

Before all that begins we want to take some time to get to know each other and all our crazy hidden instruction talents and expertises (expertise just doesn't do it justice!).

Sounds like a blast, right? Good. You should come. No extra fees, just make sure to sign up for the Interest Group on the IPAL Conference Registration Form. Cannot wait to see (or meet) you all.

 -Becky

Inspiration: Be open to the possibilities

Looking for instructional design inspiration in all the wrong places?? Let me tell you about my experience.

I've been asked a few times about where I get my ideas for my instruction. I honestly wish I had a simple answer, but the truth is it's a messy, weird, and entirely unpredictable process. I think the best answer for me is: in the most unexpected and odd places. Sure I get some from my high school and college teachers, blogs, twitter, etc, but I've listed just a few of the less traditional places below.

• reality television--I LOVE reality tv. Especially cooking shows. I've got an instruction session I designed off the show Chopped, and one based on the mise en place race from Top Chef named after The Amazing Race. Why reality tv? It's all about the competition. Finding a way to break the students up and give them a little friendly competition tends to get them engaged with the content. And besides, a lot of times it actually gets them up and moving around the room!
• game shows--Before my reality tv obsession, I was pretty into game shows. We've all done the Jeopardy thing right? Mine was the Criminology research edition. Plus I have multiple activities I've designed based on my fave Price Is Right games. No...not Plinko...but can you imagine?? Instead of putting items in order by price, my students put events or part of a scholarly article in order by chronology. Complete with the flip open reveal. I've also done some simple matching games reminiscent of the price matching games. Some day I would love to do something based on Family Feud. Maybe my next lesson on keywords. Or what about a searching exercise based on Minute to Win It. And can you imagine one based on Supermarket Sweep?? Oh man...now I really want to make that happen! 
• red carpet shows/sporting events--I'm not talking award shows or the competitions. I'm talking about the live commentary. That's the best part, right? I channeled that live blogging aspect to teach students how (NOT) to give presentations. What if we used the idea of fashion police to teach source evaluation or sports commentary/play-by-play to look at explaining the research process or a way to explain a research log?
• board games--I've played keyword Taboo in a few classes. And in another I've taken my love of that game a bit further. I need to lead with the fact that I've worked with this prof for 6 semesters now. For the past 3 semesters I've taken the Taboo buzzer into his class with me. The lesson is a 5-day unit on how to read and use scholarly articles. After seeing it twice, the instructor got very excited about the questions I would ask in class, get a bit impatient and answer for his students. I tried reminding him that I knew that he knew the answers, but needed to know if they did. Then he'd end up asking really leading questions. And that's when I brought in the buzzer. You know in Taboo when someone says a word they aren't supposed to use, you buzz them? Yeah, I do the same thing (playfully) to the instructor. The students love the interaction between us. And, they really love it when I screw up and end up answering my own question and I get to buzz myself! What if we didn't stop there? I've heard of Clue-based library orientations. What about Scattergories keywords, or cited reference Jenga or something with Cards Against Humanity??
• children's librarians--Who says that what works with preschoolers won't work with college students? What do you do with little kids? You engage them physically and mentally with whatever you're doing with them. Isn't that what we want from our students? One of my favorite lessons I adapted directly from the children's librarian staple: story time.  I tell the story of my "fake" arrest and follow this case all the way to the Supreme Court to illustrate that process and explain what documents are introduced along the way. I use a prezi as my picture book, and the story sounds a little something like this. It has all the tenants of a good story time: a narrative, a little bit of theatrics, interaction between the audience and the storyteller, and a moral to the story. I've also borrowed the iSpy pictures to do a summarizing exercise with my students. Their assignment involves writing a 2-page executive summary using 15 different scholarly sources.  The students don't always (i.e. rarely) realize the difficulty of summarizing that much into that little of space, so I warm them up by having them summarize one of the classic (non-themed) ISPY pictures into 2 sentences. Then we share them and talk about the different ways we grouped, classified, and organized the items. And that's when they start to get how difficult this will be.

I think the biggest thing about teaching inspiration is to keep your eyes open and be willing to see the possibilities. You never know what will strike you or what can be morphed into an instruction session. My favorite teaching metaphor for history came from watching "Castle" one night. So keep your eyes peeled and your ears open. Your next great IL session might be hiding anywhere!

Ask the Masses: Print Resources

Nicole asks: 

How do you handle instructors who require students to have at least 1/3 of their sources not from any electronic source - so no ebooks, even if the text is the same as a print book in the library? This drives me crazy.

Keywords: Strategies, tips and tricks

One of these days the field will realize that jargon terms our students don't understand just add one more layer of haze we have to dig through to simply get to the student. But until that day we must soldier on with what we have.

Let's talk about one of my favorite library jargon terms: keywords. Now it's a simple enough concept to get across to students, but getting them to develop a list or recognize that there is more than just the word they list as a topic is a totally different story.

Over the past few years I've developed a few different strategies to get students to engage with the idea of keywords. My favorite has to be playing Keyword Taboo. You can play this game with or without technology. I like to play it with technology to add that extra level of playfulness. I present the students with a research topic: college students and alcohol. I use this in particular because there are many options for keywords and it is also totally of interest to students. After I give them the topic I have them come up with keywords for that topic. The catch? Like the game Taboo, they can't use the words "college," "student," or "alcohol." I don't give them any other direction than that. I usually mediate this through Poll Everywhere using a free-text response option instead of the pre-determined polls. I have the students pull out their cell phones (or use the computers in front of them) to send in responses. Then as they show up live on the PPT slide or screen, I discuss what they come up with. Because of the nature of the topic, the students are forced to narrow the topic. I usually see terms like "beer," "binge drinking," "underage," "liquor," and "teenagers" pretty quickly. I point out how each of those terms narrows my topic in some way. And we talk about how the subsets of teenagers and underage don't necessarily hit all college students. Inevitably someone posts something they find funny or inappropriate, but usually only after the first round of terms come in. I have a pretty good idea of terms and ideas that I think might work so when I don't see those come up, I try and get the students to navigate themselves to them somehow. Undergraduate(s) is the one missed most often. This activity takes a little time, but it really helps the students understand that keywords are NOT just the words in the topic. That you can and should think outside the immediate phrases in front of your eyes. It also hits home the point that you need to narrow your research topic considerably for it to be really successful for those short papers.

Another strategy I like to use is the "Think, Pair, Share." This works well when students already have individual topics picked for their project. I have the student brainstorm as many keywords as possible for their topic/research question/theme and write them down. Then I have them turn to the person next to them, explain and describe their topic and then have their partner come up with a few more keywords. Usually the partner cane come up with the few extra words they need to get them over the 10 keyword bar I set. Partnering them is usually enough to allow students to recognize there is more than one way to describe a topic, and that sometimes finding someone slightly removed from the topic can help broaden their horizons.

Every once in a while I end up with a class where everyone in the class is researching the same topic. Or similar topics. Instead of playing Taboo with those classes I've started going around the room and creating a class keyword list. Each student is required to come up with one keyword. The first 5 or 6 are easy. Then the students start trying to opt out. I keep pushing for synonyms and remind the students all they have to do is come up with one word. That's not so hard. So far I've just gone around the room back to front. But next time I do this, I think I'll have everyone stand up and when they say one they get to sit down. Level the playing field a bit. And when push comes to shove toward the end, I usually let the rest of the class help bail out those last few students. But at the end, we've got a nice long list of keywords. We've talked about synonyms, combining terms, and searching for phrases. For this last class I just took a picture of the whiteboard where I wrote them all and posted it on the course LibGuide so students could use the list to actually search later.

What do you do to get students to really engage with the idea of keywords?

Ask the Masses: LibGuides

Anne Marie asks: 

I'm wondering how librarians include LibGuides in instruction. We got them just this year & the feedback is GREAT, but I'm struggling with how to effectively incorporate them into my teaching. Do I teach off that AND the library website? I've tried that & students are left going "how did you get there again?" At the same time, I don't want to just skip the website alltogether because I want them to be able to navigate the library website even though we might put the catalog or database search boxes on the LibGuides. Help?

Unique instruction tool: hanging file folders

I could not decide what to call this post. Do I name it after the technique? Do I name it after the instructional strategy or content I'm trying to cover? And then I realized, no you need to name it after the unique part of it: the tool you use.

I am a queen of cheap. Chances are this won't be the last "Unique instruction tool" post I pen.Why pay for something fancy when you can use a free tool or repurpose something you've got lying around?. Enter the lowly hanging file folder. You know you have some extras in that file cabinet in the corner. Why not take them and re-envision them as a teaching tool?

This idea originated as a way to help students put a bunch of events from European history in chronological order. The inspiration? Those "Price Is Right" pricing games I watched as a kid! I printed out the events on pieces of paper and then stapled them to the front of the folder with the metal bar at the top. On the inside I stapled a piece of paper that had the event, the year it occurred, and the correct number it was in the sequence. I finished off the project by binder clipping the folders shut.

A simple activity, but the benefits were many. It got the students up out of their seats and moving around the classroom. It required the students to work together to figure out the sequence. It introduced quite a few different events (as possible paper topics). And it had the added element of being something the students hadn't seen before. Plus I paid absolutely nothing for it. Paper, a stapler, binder clips and hanging folders--that's it.

Since the initial introduction, I've used this technique to talk about characteristics of different regions of the world, and most recently to reinforce what students have already learned about the parts and purpose of a scholarly journal article. We teach this concept in a few intro level classes, but it's something a little reinforcement can't hurt. When I ask the students about this in class I usually get one student that answers all the questions, but with the folder activity I get at least 8 students involved usually leaving the traditionally quiet students in the "audience" to move the volunteers up front into the correct sequence.

What ways could use use this technique? It works well for sequencing and reinforcement of ideas already presented.