Library Instruction West 2018

533 students. 32 class sections. 32 different topics, assignments, syllabi, and instructors. 8 instruction librarians. 1 assessment. How do you make sense of this much variety in a first year experience course?

The presenters, librarians at a small liberal arts college, chose to focus on first-year students’ ability to select appropriate resources for research. They launched a pilot program with only a few weeks’ notice, driven by a university assessment mandate, department goals, and librarian curiosity. Using a three-pronged approach, they juggled data from each class section to investigate the correlative effect of library exposure on first year experience student success across these sometimes dramatically different class landscapes (from “writing for social justice” to “fear” to “superheroes” to “digital stories”). The librarians administered a baseline survey during fall library instruction and assessed student research assignments, then collected student and faculty feedback in the spring semester.

Join us for discussion of preliminary results and insight into moving a research project from concept to action to refinement; we will also discuss organizing, question creation, beta testing, IRB process, requesting student assignments and papers from faculty, and the many other variables that found their way into the research process.

Assignment-design consultations with librarians can be an easy sell for faculty members who have struggled to get the results they want out of student research assignments. But how do you convince first-time instructors to collaborate with librarians on research-based writing assignments before they’ve tested the waters on their own? In my university’s college writing program, graduate teaching assistants develop their own syllabi and assignments rather than teaching from a standardized syllabus. However, new GTAs are typically first-time instructors of college writing with limited experience in designing, teaching, and assessing research assignments for first-year students. While some new GTAs design appropriate assignments for novice researchers, others create assignments that are inadvertently designed in a way that sets students up for failure in meeting the instructor's expectations. In these situations, it is difficult to figure out how we as librarians can help students be as successful as possible in satisfying misaligned assignment parameters while also encouraging them to engage in critical information literacy concepts, all in a single one-shot session.

With these concerns in mind, I surveyed new GTAs at our institution as well as in other institutions’ college writing programs about their experiences with “teaching research” for the first time. Survey results were collected at the end of the Fall 2017, and GTAs were invited to participate in follow-up interviews in Spring 2018. In this session, I will share the preliminary results of my research and discuss how I am using what we learned about new GTAs’ experiences as first-time instructors to redesign a library instruction orientation session for new graduate teaching assistants in the Fall 2018 semester.

After participating in an Engaging with the ACRL Framework workshop, two new instruction librarians were inspired to rework their library instruction in two distinct paths: one embedded in health education with a scaffolded curriculum, the other coordinating one-shot instruction within the social sciences and English composition. Armed with learner-centered pedagogy and backward design principles, the librarians navigated sometimes-bumpy roads to collaborate with faculty, integrate new activities, and ensure meaningful concept-based learning with students across a universe of disciplines. During this interactive session, the presenters will share their own experiences and discipline-specific approaches and coach attendees through breaking down key concepts of the Framework into manageable ideas that can be covered in a single instruction session or over multiple sessions, depending on participants’ instructional context.

The session will be structured as follows: Participants will identify a Frame they are interested in incorporating into their instruction. First, they will articulate desired results or learning outcomes of the instruction session(s) and the big ideas behind those outcomes. Next, participants will define acceptable evidence of students learning those outcomes and identify techniques by which that evidence can be gathered and assessed. The final step will ask participants to create learning activities and experiences that will facilitate student learning of the identified outcomes and integrate assessment. The end product will be a draft lesson plan which engages with the Framework in a meaningful way, from developing outcomes to designing activities.

What are we asking of students when we challenge them to create digital projects from archival or special collections? This paper investigates the rewards reaped and lessons learned from a semester-long course asking students to create a public-facing digital project around an under-researched and underrepresented archive or collection in order to confront issues of power and privilege. The course made use of hands on activities in collections, exposed students to issues of copyright and the postcustodial responsibilities collections have, as well as the biases we can pass along through metadata creation.
The practical outcome of this intensive partnership between faculty and librarian was the collection of deliberate approaches to teaching students in special collections, the incorporation of librarian and archivist expertise when partnering with faculty, and the purposeful approach taken when choosing and teaching a digital tool in the humanities.

What can we learn from drag kings and drag queens to help us grab student’s attention, deepen student engagement, and share our strong emotions towards information literacy? This session covers how drag in all its forms uses surprise, novelty, entertainment, and emotion to engage. Using “the six Ps of drag” as a framework for instruction you’ll find your instruction is more fun, more interactive, and more effective in getting your ideas heard and understood. Persona – everyone is interesting, but when instructing you need to amplify your awesome traits. Practice – drag queens and kings don’t just get up on stage without practicing their performance. Same with library instruction, to hone your craft, to work on making it better. Polish –you need to polish your performance to in an inch of its life, to be ready for anything unpredictable, to be able to handle students that are asleep, texting, and may even be actively rude. Performance – drag is performance, and aspects of instruction are performance. You get up in front of people, say things you want them to listen to, and enjoy themselves. Payoff – drag queens and kings get paid for performing. Your payoff is effective instruction, showing a passion. Passion – drag queens and kings have a passion for performing, for entertaining, for shocking. You should to for your library instruction. Personable – drag queens and kings can seem outsized, over the top, so glamorous, so frightening. But within all that there is their humanity.

In 2016 SLCC Library Services was able to develop a new information literacy assessment rubric to replace the AAC&U VALUE rubric for student ePortfolio assessment. This presentation will briefly review the creation process, results from the implementation of the new rubric, and opportunities resulting from this process. The newly created rubric is based upon the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.

Dixie State University has had a standalone, required, credit based information literacy class for more than ten years. Faculty librarians and departmental faculty have noticed that students are not learning the research process and evaluation of information techniques at the time of need, therefore the students are not retaining the information. While working with the General Education (GE) Taskforce, tasked with the goal of campus wide GE reform, it was concluded that creating modules of information in both the Canvas (learning management software) and LibGuides would be an ideal way to provide ready to go lessons for faculty across disciplines. We will provide information about our planning process, methods for successfully working with faculty throughout the campus community, and the results of our spring 2018 beta test of this method. Resources are intended to be supplemented by librarian instruction or as standalone learning modules for faculty that are more experienced in teaching research skills. As development progresses, we will scaffold the research process and searching techniques to range from general education to senior capstone.

Do you want to be a better teacher? Do you want help improving your instruction, but fear letting a colleague see what happens in your classes? Are you required to have your instruction sessions evaluated by a colleague or a supervisor? This poster shows how to use two nationally calibrated tools, modified for information literacy instruction, to make your lessons more engaging. These tools, the Teaching Practices Inventory-Information Literacy Instruction (TPI-ILI) and the Classroom Observation Tool for Information Literacy (COPIL), are based on the best pedagogical evidence we have about how we learn. The original tools – Teaching Practices Inventory (TPI) and Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (COPUS) – were developed to improve teaching through high impact evidence-based practices. 
 
This poster will give you a short background about the importance of active learning for helping all students, especially minorities, succeed in a classroom. We will consider how to apply COPIL and the TPI-ILI to our one-off information literacy sessions, and how to adopt techniques developed from an inventory of effective teaching to improve our own instruction.  
 
The TPI-ILI in combination with the classroom observation model COPIL creates two legs of a peer coaching program. The process results in a mix of qualitative and quantitative data about what you and your students are doing. Armed with this information you can see what currently takes place in the classroom, what is working, and where you have room for improvement. More significantly, the data we collected with these tools helps demonstrate our value to education.  

Academic librarians face an ongoing challenge – introducing students to the vast amount of information available through research databases without forcing them to sit through boring, old-school lectures and demonstrations. So, how do we captivate our Millennial and Plural (post-Millennial) students’ interest, especially in short one-shot instruction sessions? Our answer – Speed Databasing.

A cross between online dating apps and speed dating events, Speed Databasing gives students a chance to “meet” multiple databases during one class session. Librarians act as matchmakers by creating clever personal-ad style profiles for each database, and by reminding students that connecting with a database requires going beyond “first impressions” (i.e. the basic search page). Whether students find the “perfect match” for a current assignment or their “soulmate” in a database they will use throughout their academic career, Speed Databasing is an engaging and memorable approach to library resource instruction.

During this interactive workshop, participants will join in an energetic round of Speed Databasing to experience the activity for themselves. The presenters will discuss their experiences creating and implementing this active learning exercise at their institutions, and provide feedback from other librarians who have implemented this activity. The presenters will also discuss a community of practice that is developing around this activity that will help participants by providing ongoing support and collateral materials after the workshop is over.

Transfer learning is a critical concern within the library instruction classroom. As librarians, we want to do everything we can to make sure our students are taking something away from our learning environment, but what are some strategies that we can use to accomplish this? Taczak and Robertson (2016) suggest students can engage in transfer learning through reiterative reflection, stating “reflection encourages students to put what they are learning into practice while also serving as a way to set goals and move forward in their writing ability.” Librarians have the opportunity to practice reiterative reflection within their classrooms by adapting Writing Across Contexts practices (Yancey, Robertson, Taczak 2014). When implemented within the library instruction classroom, this pedagogical approach engages students in reflectively describing the process or skill they have learned, and then extending that skill into a new context. In this session the presenters will demonstrate the correlation between Writing Across Contexts and the library instruction classroom, specifically engaging with the idea of “teaching for transfer.” We will briefly discuss the theoretical implications of reflection and its interaction with metacognition and then offer some pragmatic examples of applying these concepts within the library instruction classroom. Session participants will have the opportunity to interactively practice reflection towards transfer through a short writing prompt, and discuss its application and implications in their own teaching contexts.

Instruction librarians want to know how effective their workshops and lessons are in order to show their value to the education process. We creatively use two inspirational instructional design approaches, combined with reflective teaching, to tell a compelling story of assessment that can demonstrate our value to our institutions. These practices help us focus our attention towards evaluation and learning. While there are many assessments that librarians and library programs can do, we can’t and shouldn’t be trying to do all of them in our one-shot classes. We will help participants construct adventurous lesson plans that capitalize on connecting outcomes, inventive learning activities and evaluation that works, and discuss how to innovate our programs by incorporating reflection into our process to quantify our work. After our presentation, participants will have practiced rewriting their learning outcomes into clear objectives that can be measured and created performance-based assessment to measure them.. With appropriate goals clearly stated, librarians can then gather data about student satisfaction, student learning and self evaluation that clearly illustrates our value to academic institutions. These methods help participants strengthen their case to their managers and administrators about reasonable returns on investments that a one-shot library instruction session can provide. This also helps instruction librarians focus their efforts on being effective and intentional.

Assessment: Necessary evil? The solution to prove libraries’ value? Tool of institutional oppression? In this session, two information literacy coordinators attempt to answer the question: How do we as critical educators approach student learning outcomes assessment in our daily practice? Assessment is an institutional reality for most of us, though we might be in tension with our institutions’ approaches and top-down mandates. We will provide background on critical pedagogy’s relationships to assessment and the neoliberalization of higher education. From there we will shift to how we can push back against compliance and embrace ownership of understanding how students learn. One presenter will describe an approach to building a culture of critical assessment at a liberal arts college, another will take us through a learning outcomes assessment project where librarians scored student work at a public comprehensive university, and ultimately both will reflect on the assessment process from a critical perspective. We will spend time in the presentation engaging participants in reflecting on their own experiences with assessment and what might be possible. How do we challenge our own expectations for information literacy instruction and student expectations of librarians while remaining critical practitioners? How do we also, somehow meet the mandates of the institution?

This presentation will highlight a mid-size land-grant university’s process for assessing changes made to their instruction program. Presenters will share their assessment process for a mixed methods exploration of students’ research skills with a focus on synthesis. This authentic assessment was designed in response to a previous large-scale rubric study that indicated a need for changes in the instruction program.

The presenters will discuss how 10 librarians and staff collaborated to score 79 student papers with two rubrics in addition to a citation analysis that included 678 citations. This involved learning to use a rubric, reaching inter-rater reliability, collaborative analysis, and working with IRB to ethically collect and use student works. Part of sharing the process will include giving participants the opportunity to engage with assessment tools and think about how to use findings to re-think, revise, or just better understand student research behaviors.

Participants will also gain ideas and resources for conducting a rubric analysis of student works at their own institutions. More generally, they will leave with an understanding of how collaborative assessment can build community, serve as a professional development opportunity, and provide a mechanism for understanding how and when student learning is occurring, including the nuances of how learning and its barriers reveal themselves during authentic assessment. This deep immersion into student work, especially as an instructional team, provides valuable insight for changing practice, challenging our own teaching assumptions, and contributing to a culture of assessment.

As with many colleges and universities, academic program assessment has risen to the top of Auburn University's educational agenda. Departments across campus are adapting curricula to meet student learning outcomes, the first of which is information literacy (IL). To support this this learning outcome, subject specialist librarians are partnering with departments to scaffold IL instruction into each program. While the idea of systematically integrating IL into the curriculum is often met with enthusiasm by department administrators, the logistics of effecting such change can be challenging. Implementation requires buy-in and collaboration with course instructors, who may not be willing to sacrifice time normally devoted to content. As the Biological Sciences Librarian, I reviewed the revised curriculum and created a sample plan, which was approved by the program coordinator. Since then, I have successfully integrated IL into upper division classes, but the freshman core Biology course eluded me until recently. Freshman Biology is taught by two different instructors and differs in course content, so a “one-size-fits-all” approach was not an option. In this presentation, I will describe two successful strategies for getting a foot in the door, neither of which took away from class time. Though my IL sessions with students did not conform to my original plan and I violated several “rules of instruction” (e.g., instructors mush be present in class), this flexibility ultimately created an opening for more one-on-one interactions with students and more open, fruitful, and collaborative relationships with faculty.

Have you ever been curious about critical reflection or wondered what it was? Critical reflection is a process designed to promote the examination and interpretation of experience and the promotion of cognitive learning. It requires us to consider our practices, methods and selves. Research has shown how deliberate and critical reflection on teaching practices contributes to excellence in teaching, and improved educational outcomes for students. Critically reflective teaching practices encourage teaching librarians to regularly evaluate our approaches to teaching and learning and provides a place to improve and evaluate our practice. Through a deep examination of how our personal assumptions, values, beliefs, and biases may affect decisions we make inside, and outside, the classroom, critical reflection involves teachers making observations, asking questions, and putting facts, ideas, and experiences together to derive new meaning. Becoming a critically reflective teacher will allow you the opportunity to improve your teaching and promotes a deeper understanding of teaching and learning. This session will allow participants to practice hunting assumptions, spend time engaging in critically reflective practices through looking at ourselves, our colleagues and our students, and provide you with an opportunity to get on the road to being a critically reflective teacher.

Student learning assessment in library instruction has taken many as many forms as teaching itself in academic libraries. Library instructional services staff and faculty at one public four-year university had experienced top-down assessment approaches, including evaluations based on peer observations, summative quizzes testing students’ skills, and mandated universal tools for measuring student learning. When a new-to-academia librarian joined this team, tasked with a new position coordinating instructional assessment, they jumped at the opportunity to revamp colleagues’ perceptions of assessment and integrate evidence-based decision-making into their instruction. This presentation will outline the two-year project during which the reference department took a deep dive into assessment and instructional techniques to refresh and renew each instructor’s approaches to their teaching. Content will include updated findings from the project, including assessment results from instruction sessions, assessment techniques shared during mini-workshops, and insights shared by library faculty and staff about the process. Asking instructors to shift from an output to outcomes-focused approach to their instruction was a challenge, and the project included a mix of successes and failures. The presenter will highlight meaningful aha moments shared by library instructors as well as those efforts that were most definitely duds. Attendees will learn techniques and strategies for coaching colleagues, encouraging growth, and fostering an atmosphere of experimentation—all from a position without organizational authority. Along the way, attendees will gain insight into their own instructional assessment approaches and take away new ideas for how to integrate those efforts intentionally and meaningfully into their lesson plans.