The Desk Set

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Academic Library Instruction

Jan 07

KatyFrom Our Guest Bloggers 2 Comments

Hello and Happy New Year, Desksetters! My name is Katherine Boss, Reference and Instruction Librarian at Long Island University Brooklyn, and I will be your guest blogger for January.

So let’s talk about academic library instruction. It seems that instruction is becoming more of a focus for both public and academic libraries, which makes sense, as databases continue to be intimidating megamalls of information that few of our students can navigate. Yet a lot of undergraduates approach library instruction as a waste of their time, since obviously they plan on Googling the answers to all of their research questions on their smartphones one day before their assignment is due.

I assume you are all properly horrified. As librarians, we strive to turn this ship around – there is so much information in the world that is not available on Google! Information that students are already paying for, via their tuition. Yet engaging a group of unresponsive Business Management 101 freshmen can be a daunting challenge – especially when most of them are vastly more interested in liking things on Instagram than learning about the (many!) ways to create company lists and sort them by sales in LexisNexis. So how do we get the attention of our students, and stuff them full of as much information literacy as possible?

Well, I do not pretend to have all the answers, since I have not been teaching all that long, but I am very, very interested in this question, and have some thoughts. First off, I advise lecturing as little as possible. “Wait- WHAT?” you are perhaps saying. “Don’t most students straight-up love lectures?”

Evidence suggests the answer is: no. I say this based on failed instruction sessions that I will refrain from re-living here, and also, studies. This report on NPR, summarizing a study by a pair of physicists at Arizona State, confirms what many teachers have known for a long time: active and engaging teaching styles result in higher information retention. Lectures reinforce passive learning, and while a bit of lecturing is usually necessary at some point during a 50-min instruction session, I try to avoid it.

Instead, I like to consider ways to get students to implement the research methods I want them to learn. Often this requires a good bit of advance planning, group activities, games, and what not, but once you’ve done enough preparation and have a general structure, the sessions themselves can be very unstructured, since so much of it is up to the students. And here I will plug my favorite, FAVORITE podcast, “Adventures in Library Instruction,” available for free on the web and through iTunes.

I have gotten so many great ideas from this podcast, which is produced by the very talented and hilarious librarians Rachel Borchardt, Jason Puckett, and Anna Van Scoyoc. One workshop in particular I like to use is a version of MythBusters, wherein each student or pair of students pulls a statement or question from a hat, and spends 15 minutes on Academic Search Premier or some such database determining whether the statement is confirmed, plausible, or busted. It’s usually a good idea to gather your myths or questions from the same database, to keep the focus narrow, and also to demo a myth in front of the class first, to give them an idea of how they might approach it. Then, toward the end of the class, each group of students can talk briefly about their findings, how they got there, what worked, what didn’t, and so on. This format can easily be adapted to any academic discipline – business, history, science, etc.

So if you’re interested in instruction I highly recommend the Adventures in Library Instruction podcast, you will come away with so many great ideas and a renewed enthusiasm for teaching. Also, Anna Van Scoyoc if you ever come across this blog post – thank you forever for your stories about the senior center. Those seniors will appreciate Twitter someday!!