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Spring Training Reports – Final Installment
Here are the last reports from the 2019 LILAC Spring Training. Looking forward to a great new school year with everyone!
Culturally Responsive Teaching through the Intersectionality of Collection Development and Information Literacy
Presented by Madeline Ruggiero, Queensborough Community College
Blog post by Linda Miles (Hostos Community College)
Madeline Ruggiero discussed the rationale and strategies for including exploration of materials from the library’s print collection within information literacy instruction. Over time, Madeline has been augmenting the library’s collection with student assignments and common topics in mind, topics that often reflect students’ own cultural identities. She has built print collection exploration activities into her lesson plans, including searching for, retrieving, and navigating within books to identify additional sources or related lines of inquiry. These materials enrich students’ research exploration, heighten engagement, and highlight the excellent print collection of the library.
Google Forms: Differentiating Instruction, Condensing Feedback
Presented by Danielle Apfelbaum (Farmingdale State College)
Blog post by Linda Miles
Danielle Apfelbaum presented a novel method for using Google Forms to accomplish two goals: to differentiate instruction and to manage instruction feedback data from classroom faculty. First, she takes advantage of the branching function of Google Forms, initially asking students to self-assess their knowledge or preparedness for the assignment at hand. Depending on how an individual student responds, the form then asks them to complete a developmentally appropriate hands-on task and enter a response. Student who indicate that they are totally confused by search interfaces would be given a different set of instructions than that given to students reporting a great deal of prior success using library search engines, with each set tailored to their respective level of experience.
Danielle asks students to provide their names to motivate compliance, and, as their answers are submitted via the form, she displays a spreadsheet with those responses (without names) to the class. Since many activities require students to provide URLs to resources they have found or even permalinks to search results, Danielle is able to use these to help guide class discussion.
To manage faculty feedback data, Danielle uses the “use existing spreadsheet” function in Google Forms to collate into one spreadsheet the responses to separate forms, which are each specific to a given faculty member/course section. This keeps all the data together in one place, and allows her to do some cross-section or cross-departmental analysis.
Spring Training reports – part III
Today we present the third installment of reports from the 2019 LILAC Spring Training.
MoneyBoss Workshops – Financial Literacy for Community College Students Through Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Presented by M. Anne O’Reilly (LaGuardia Community College)
Blog post by Susan Wengler (Queensborough Community College)
Building credit. Managing student debt. Preventing identity theft. These are just a few of the many financial challenges facing college students today. During this detailed and engaging training session, Prof. O’Reilly described how LaGuardia’s Library Media Resources Center helps its students meet and master these challenges through MoneyBoss, a popular workshop series designed to strengthen financial competencies and knowledge.
LaGuardia typically offers six MoneyBoss workshops per calendar year; their 2018-2019 topics included:
• Starting a Home-Based Business
• Getting Control of Your Credit
• Tax Reform – New Tax Law Changes
• What You Need to Know to Start Your Own Business: First Steps
• What I Wish I Knew About Student Loans
• Identity Theft
Prof. O’Reilly shared specific tips and tricks for librarians and libraries interested in launching financial literacy programming:
• Partner: At LaGuardia, MoneyBoss is co-presented by the Library Workshop Committee, the Business and Technology Department, and the Social Science Department. Cross-campus collaborations have resulted in increased institutional support and visibility.
• Partner Some More: These one-hour workshops are taught by library faculty as well as classroom faculty and community partners. Prof. O’Reilly sends a call for proposals out to all LaGuardia faculty, thereby expanding both topic ideas and perspective; she has also brought in presenters from the Small Business Development Center and the Municipal Credit Union.
• Brand: She recommends branding your workshop series with a catchy name, e.g., MoneyBoss; she also suggests creating a program logo and flier template to be used in all promotional activities.
• Find Built-in Audiences: At LaGuardia, all Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) students are required to attend two campus events each semester; therefore she works closely with her ASAP office to ensure those students are aware of the library’s offerings. When feasible, MoneyBoss workshops are scheduled during the participating faculty’s class time; participating faculty can require their students to attend workshops as a classroom activity.
• Streamline Registration: LaGuardia students pre-register for MoneyBoss workshops through the workshops’ research guide: https://guides.laguardia.edu/moneyboss
• Incentivize: LaGuardia provides snacks to MoneyBoss attendees; a financial literacy-related book is also raffled off at the end of each workshop session.
• Assess: After the workshop presentation and before the book raffle, O’Reilly asks attendees to complete a satisfaction survey, which is distributed in paper format. Since 2017, 565 students have attended MoneyBoss sessions; of those students completing a survey, 85% rated the sessions as very good or excellent.
For more information on financial literacy programming, please contact Prof. O’Reilly or visit LaGuardia’s MoneyBoss research guide.
Mindful Movement and Breath Work for Everybody & Every Body
Presented by Anne Leonard (City Tech)
Blog post by Meagan Lacey (Guttman Community College)
For a variety of reasons—repetition of lessons, disinterested students—teaching librarians often report burn-out. Burn-out, resulting from chronic workplace stress, creates feelings of exhaustion that can negatively affect job satisfaction and performance. For this reason, Anne Leonard, Associate Professor at City Tech and certified yoga-instructor, led a class full of teaching librarians (many of whom were burned-out) through a 40-minute sequence of gentle stretching and breathing in order to help them calm and refocus their attention and energy on the present.
All exercises were performed while seated in a chair or by using a chair for stability so that librarians could practice these movements in their office and make time for mindfulness in the midst of a workday. During the discussion that followed, one participant suggested using some of these techniques with students as well, perhaps as a way of opening a one-shot session. For more about burn-out, mindfulness, and embodied practice, see Prof. Leonard’s Padlet of resources.
Presented by Jessica Wagner Webster (Baruch College)
Blog post by Alexandra Hamlett (Guttman Community College)
Jessica Wagner-Webster described her undergraduate course “Digital Traces: Memory in an Online World” and how she used active learning techniques to help students grasp archival concepts. She spoke about her syllabus and course content and the initial challenges of introducing students to the notion of an archive, as students are especially unfamiliar with the concept of a digital archive and often had not considered the lasting impact that a digital archive has on the historical record.
In her course, she used active learning techniques so that students could more directly interact with the course materials. For example, one activity had students probe questions about archiving a CD-ROM. Students analyzed the content, decided what content they would archive, and considered how to archive the materials in an ever-changing technological environment, mirroring real-world problems that digital archivists face. In another activity, students participated in a multi-week debate on the topic of police body-cams. Students were productively engaged in the debate, while simultaneously exploring the complications that technology and privacy present in the process of archiving digital materials.
Finally, Prof. Wagner-Webster employed a jigsaw reading strategy so that students would be engaged in peer-to-peer learning and teaching. Unfortunately, she found it was still a challenge to get students to complete their assigned readings, and so this active learning strategy did not go as planned. Part of the reflective process of teaching! By the end of the semester, it was clear that active learning had helped students better understand key concepts of digital archiving.
Spring Training reports – part II
Today we share the second installment of reports on the 2019 LILAC Spring Training sessions.
Wikipedia Redux: Using Wikipedia in One-Shots and Credit Courses
Presented by Monica Berger (City Tech)
Blog post by Julie Turley (Kingsborough Community College)
Professor Berger’s presentation was an opportunity to ask the audience how they have used Wikipedia in an active learning style in library instruction. Given her deep interest in Wikipedia as a pedagogical tool, she noted that Wikipedia is under-used, and when included has primarily served only as a passive “show and discuss” tool, as many librarians say they have no time for any kind of active learning in one-shots.
Dissatisfied with typical Wikipedia “show and tell,” Prof. Berger pointed out that there was much that could be done in respect to Wikipedia engagement, even in a one-shot, ranging from discussions about keyword and topic development to issues of attribution and citation. In her own classes, she noted that students are particularly fascinated with the “Talk” tab on every entry–the place where public discussion about an entry take place.
She also noted that Wikipedia is a fruitful starting point for pop cultural topics, and that Wikipedia, as an introductory site or a bridge to library resources in a one-shot, has the benefit of being instantly familiar with students, whereas they might not be with the library’s own website. During her session, Prof. Berger proposed several ideas for using Wikipedia in library instruction, including: performing a resource analysis exercise with article references using a worksheet; exploring how articles are rated in the “talk” tab and exploring the quality scale; or having students flesh out “stub” articles.
Baptism by Call Number
Presented by Paul Sager (Lehman College/Hunter College)
Blog post by Julie Turley (Kingsborough Community College)
While many library orientations “skip the stacks,” Professor Sager wants to make sure Lehman College freshman interact with Lehman College Library’s book stacks as part of orientation activities. Noting anecdotally that students don’t use the library collection of print books enough and that other info literacy activities never ask them to find a book in the library–and that nationwide, overall book circulation statistics are down–Prof. Sager thought that bringing students to the stacks might do a little, at least, to rectify this trend and expose students to valuable library resources.
Because books come up as part of OneSearch results, Prof. Sager felt a book search activity would be highly relevant. He chooses the books that students must find in advance, spacing out the call numbers throughout one designated section of the Lehman Library. Some students run into a problem when a book that is in the catalog is missing from the collection. This difficulty, however, presents a pedagogical opportunity.
“How Can We Do All This in One Session?” The Advantages of Multi-Shot Library Instruction
Presented by Derek Stadler (LaGuardia Community College)
Blog post by Sheena Philogene (Brooklyn College)
Derek Stadler described his design of multi-shot instruction, in which he incorporates three 1-hour library sessions into a First Year Seminar class, for students intending to major in the Natural Sciences. The sessions are intended to introduce various aspects of the research process and build on one another: The first session includes explanations and activities that give students a chance to think critically about their topics, ideas, and the research process as a whole. Then, the second session involves choosing relevant databases and keywords developed in the first session to find appropriate sources to satisfy students’ information needs. Finally, later in the semester, he uses the third session to show students how their newly learned research skills can extend beyond the classroom, by helping students discover more about prospective careers using research methods.
During the group discussion, Prof. Stadler said that the gaps between sessions seemed to allow students to absorb and apply the skills they learned better over time, and made it easier to build rapport with students. The group also talked about how much the multi-shot approach requires faculty buy-in and a large time investment from librarians, so it may not be as practical in cases where librarians have many sessions to teach. But when organized correctly between the librarian and professor, this method can provide the kind of point-of-need instruction that students can really benefit from.
Socratic Method
Presented by Bill Blick (Queensborough Community College)
Blog post by Sheena Philogene (Brooklyn College)
Bill Blick explained how he uses Socratic questioning during his library sessions to enhance the single session format. He opened the conversation by raising the point that students often don’t know or understand why they are taking a library session, and this makes them less receptive to the information they are given. In response, Prof. Blick has started asking students open-ended questions during library sessions. He reasons that rather than having a librarian give all the answers, Socratic questions can encourage students to do their own critical thinking, create and articulate their own ideas, and draw conclusions (find the “why”).
In the ensuing discussion, Prof. Blick acknowledged that asking students questions can be hit or miss, leading to a silent room or a discussion that is monopolized by a few students. However, when it works, this method is a good way to build a comfortable environment with students where they can feel welcome to engage with their learning and share their ideas and perspectives. Since students will need these skills throughout their academic careers, it will only help them to practice early and often.
Spring Training reports – part I
After a rich experience at the 2019 LILAC Spring Training on 7, LILAC committee members and attendees are reporting back on the sessions they experienced that day. Today we share the first installment of those reports.
Using Instructional Scaffolding to Teach Scholarly and Popular Sources
Presented by Mark Aaron Polger (College of Staten Island)
Blog post by Yasmin Sokkar Harker (CUNY Law School)
Mark Aaron Polger started by defining and giving background on instructional scaffolding and how it has been used. He also explained how instructional scaffolding sometimes happens organically (and gave examples of scaffolding activities that we may already be doing, such as concept maps or supplemental Libguides).
He described a case study in which he compared two sections of LIB 102, one scaffolded and one control group, explaining how he created and worked with each of the groups. The scaffolded groups were student-led, with students evaluating various sources and generating discussion. The non-scaffolded groups were teacher-led and the teacher described characteristics of different kinds of sources. He discussed the differences between the groups, and the benefits of scaffolding, which include a deeper understanding of both scholarly and popular sources. Prof. Polger’s presentation was fascinating and generated much discussion on student learning.
All in Kahoot’s: Tools for Active Learning and Assessment
Presented by Jeffrey Delgado (Kingsborough Community College)
Blog post by Robin Brown (Borough of Manhattan Community College)
Professor Delgado advocated for Kahoot, an effective platform for designing games to enhance instruction. He reminded us that students are not always paying attention during one-shot instruction sessions, and that following up with a quiz or survey in an attractive format is a great way to reinforce instruction. Professor Delgado showed us how easy it is to offer a quiz, by offering us one. It’s relatively simple to use a phone, tablet or laptop to go to Kahoot and put in a pin number. This was an effective presentation of a tool that easy to try (basic registration is free).
Extending and Improving Your One-Shot with Google Forms
Presented by Neera Mohess (Queensborough Community College)
Blog post by Robin Brown (Borough of Manhattan Community College)
Professor Mohess showed how she is using a Google Form to pre-test and post-test library instruction classes. A link to a specific form is sent to the professor before the library instruction session, with a request that the professor forward it to the students. Professor Mohess then uses the students’ responses to respond to specific concerns during class. Just before the project is due, she sends a second survey for the professor to distribute to the class, and later sends a summary of the follow-up questions. This is an interesting way to extend the library instruction classroom.
Transferring skills from arts ed to info lit
The last job I held before becoming a librarian was as a facilitator of arts programs, working 11 years for ArtsConnection, a non-profit that brought professional visual and performing (music, dance, theater) artists into public schools pre-K-12 throughout the five boroughs of NYC.
Each time I’ve changed careers, I’ve tried to carry over whatever I managed to learn in one field to the next. Here are four aspects of teaching that I came to value in arts education that have proved useful guideposts for me as a teaching librarian at Hostos Community College. I hope they may be of some use to other teaching librarians as well.
(1) Collaborative teaching partnerships
Then: Although we provided a diverse range of in- and after-school instruction, the most common project was a 10-session residency of workshops held once a week, in class, with the classroom teacher present as the artist taught.
Classroom teachers often had limited or incorrect assumptions about what our teaching artists, as visiting instructors, could offer their students. They didn’t want their time wasted.
Given our brief stays in each school, it made a huge difference when teachers saw the worth of our programs. An engaged teacher helped students make connections between learning in the arts workshop and learning in the classroom, even if there was not a direct curricular connection, and their very engagement gave students the message that the work in the arts was an important part of the school day.
Deciding to be an at least watchful or even enthusiastic presence during the workshop also gave classroom teachers an opportunity to learn more about their own students. Teachers often told us how their perception of a given student’s ability (to concentrate, take risks, create, inspire others, work toward a goal) was transformed by watching the student learn in the arts.
Planning and goals
The first step to getting teacher buy-in was our planning meetings. The classroom teachers and the teaching artist often started out with different vocabularies regarding student learning, and my job as facilitator was neither to force the artist into edu-speak nor to force the classroom teacher into artist-speak, but to help bridge a common understanding and shared set of goals.
Some (certainly not all) teachers, under tremendous pressure to raise English and math test scores, were reluctant to “give up time” and assumed that the arts work would at most give students a chance to blow off steam and have fun. Planning meetings allowed us to show how learning in the arts would help students build both particular skills within the art form and broader skills such as problem-solving, empathy, collaboration with peers, public expression, and creative discovery.
It’s not that teachers didn’t want those things, but they weren’t (usually) artists, and we couldn’t assume that they would see or articulate such goals spontaneously before the workshops, or see exactly how the arts could bring such learning to their students.
Laying the abstract groundwork of goals was always important, but the real buy-in came when teachers saw their students learning in the moment. When teachers saw students engaged with something worthwhile, they were won over to working with the teaching artist as partners.
Now: Although academic librarians provide a diverse range of instruction, through workshops, reference interactions, consulations, online guides, and semester-long courses, our most common method of instruction is the one-shot workshop to support a course’s research assigment.
Professors in the disciplines often have limited or incorrect assumptions about what we librarians, as visiting instructors, can offer their students. They don’t want their time wasted.
I’ve found that professors who aren’t just grading papers in the back but actively observing and engaging in the research workshops (such as circulating as I do as students work in small groups or on their own) help students make connections between what they’re learning in the workshop and their classroom learning. Professors’ engagement sends the message that the library workshop is an important part of the course.
I have also seen observant professors change their understanding—not as much about their students’ abilities, but about the reality of how students grapple with their research assignment, or still have questions that the professor thought had been made clear in class. These observations help us in our discussions as we evolve our teaching partnership in subsequent semesters.
Planning and goals
In initial planning conversations, we often start with different perspectives and ways to assess student learning. Some professors may be reluctant to “give up time” and assume that all a library workshop could do is introduce students to the existence of EBSCO. Well-meaning professors who start conversations with a request to “teach them how to cite” or “how to use the databases” or even “how to research” as if that were a 75-minute task, remind me of those K-12 teachers who hoped that dance might somehow improve math scores. What they’re really saying is: please do something with my class that will be of use to them, and here’s what I assume that help might look like.
Just as we librarians shouldn’t always take a student’s opening query at a reference desk at face value, but instead use a patient, listening, probing reference interview to see what it is they really want and what might help them more, I believe that these opening queries from professors offer us a similar opportunity to start a real planning dialogue.
Communicating goals in advance helps lay the groundwork. As teaching librarians, we know it’s not just being able to navigate a proprietary interface that counts, it’s a myriad of understandings, whether captured by the abstract intellectual concepts of the Framework or the liberating perspectives offered by critical information literacy; it’s also learning concrete skills and habits such as developing a focused inquiry as a more propulsive start to research in place of an overly broad topic, or distinguishing between kinds of available sources and learning how to use them strategically instead of haphazardly; it’s acquiring habits such as browsing the stacks because it turns out that books are organized by subject, or questioning every website they come across by asking, okay, who wrote that, what’s their agenda, and why should I believe them?
It’s not that professors don’t want these things, but they often aren’t thinking about all the particular elements of research that students confront. We can’t assume that most would articulate such goals spontaneously before the workshops, or see exactly how engaging in a research workshop could bring such learning to their students.
The real buy-in comes when professors see their students learning in action. The more they see students engaged with something worthwhile, the more they are won over to working with us librarians as partners.
(2) Learning through authentic experiences in the discipline & student voice
Then: I learned that students’ being active in class is necessary but not sufficient for learning. When students had an authentic experience in the arts, going through real steps of experimentation, making choices, stepping back to assess, revising, and innovating further—rather than following pre-ordained steps to creating a product–their learning was much more meaningful. Those residencies that most allowed for students’ original vision to guide the project and for their voices to shine through were inevitably more powerful than a slick, more teacher-directed project.
Now: What are the authentic experiences in research? If we show students the library’s discovery layer or a database and indicate how to click a couple filters, but the student just prints out the first five articles whose titles happen to echo their keywords, we know that’s not engagement in an authentic research process.
As Anne Leonard said here in an earlier blog post, the complex and iterative process of research is something learned over time, and often students are still growing out of a conception of “research” as a quick looking up of set answers to imposed questions. Authentic research processes of defining their own inquiry, searching, selecting, reading, discovering new ideas and developing new questions, reframing their inquiry, and so on, are new to many of them.
The extent to which we can influence the structure of a research assignment varies wildly and we of course can’t force students to engage deeply. I’m also aware that our students at Hostos are often juggling work, family, and other obligations, and understand that not every single research project will pull in 100% of their effort.
That said, whether in workshops, at the reference desk, or in one-on-one consultations, we can ask them to do more than follow our examples of where to click on a screen, and can directly address the progressive nature of research and the idea of searching as strategic exploration.
Helping students follow their own paths through their research also means helping them understand good places to start, and showing them how to strategize their search, for instance knowing when they would be helped by first reading background texts to be able to confidently engage with more scholarly sources. We can to the best extent possible help students take as much ownership as a given assignment will allow.
(3) Big picture learning while planning the particulars
Then: The teaching artists we worked with were required to write out their plans for a residency, including learning goals. Some viewed this process as paperwork or as restrictive, but many came to value the reflection demanded by posing the questions: what do I want students to know and be able to do after this lesson? What are the larger understandings in the art form that they will start to build?
Writing out a lesson plan also helped artists determine the scope of what they could do, given the limited number of minutes and days in a residency.
Now: Although I don’t start out with the Framework as a base for workshops, I find that its larger understandings often slide organically into lessons. Here are just a few examples:
- Media literacy workshops offer obvious opportunities to address the idea of authority as constructed and contextual, although I also touch on this idea in workshops in which students engage with Library of Congress call numbers, noting that although it’s useful for students to be able to navigate this system, it was created by a specific institution in a specific historical context and certainly has flaws that we can critique.
- Any mention of needing to sign in with a CUNY ID in order to get access to database articles off-campus is an opportunity to show that information has value and that access is limited because of the way that publishers make money and that educational institutions comply.
- When students say they already know exactly what their paper will say before having read any “sources to cite”, we can raise the idea of research as inquiry and of discovering new ideas. Two informal writing prompts I use in many workshops are “what are some things you already know about your research topic?” and “what do you want to find out that you don’t know yet?” These are simple questions, but kick off discussion in which we address the idea that the research process is not just about looking up people who reiterate what you already think.
- Often in workshops, I’ll address the fact that they will encounter equally qualified and credible writers who sharply disagree on a subject, and that part of the students’ work as researchers and writers is to grapple with those arguments—understanding that scholarship is conversation, not just a canon of obvious, universally accepted, and unchanging facts.
Writing out lesson plans also helps me see what I can accomplish in one workshop. Sometimes I have heard librarians say they don’t have time for the bigger picture, but in writing down my exact plans, I have found not just things that need to be cut (I think a common librarian urge is to try to say too much), but also natural places for just raising questions and planting seeds; a lengthy exercise or discussion is not always necessary to integrate bigger-picture ideas.
(4) The importance of a teacher’s energy
Then: Although I had known this from many years of being a student, observing dozens of teaching artists each year and clocking literally thousands of hours of observation over the course of a decade showed me over and over that the energy you put out as an instructor is the energy you get back.
Now: I have seen some librarians and some professors who whether from shyness, self-consciousness, or perhaps a feeling that it is more authentic, teach with the same voice they might use in a one-on-one conversation, or in a small group meeting. In these cases, the energy and attention of students tend to untether and drift out of the room.
As for nerves, something I learned previous to my last job was that jumping in with gusto burns off much of the nervous energy, and the attentive response you get in return kills off the rest. As for the desire to remain authentic, I have found that after a while, your heightened “teacher voice” is just another equally authentic version of yourself.
Although I’m certainly not as skilled as a professional actor, I channel as best I can the kind of enthusiasm, responsiveness, and direct engagement that I loved in our most effective theater teaching artists, and I usually get great energy back from students. If I’m tired or if it’s the third workshop in a day, I can feel my lower level of energy and a corresponding drop in the room, so I know it’s not just the lesson plan that makes a difference.
Although my lesson plans focus on what I want students to learn and be able to do, right before every workshop I stop and ask myself (knowing I may be distracted or stressed with other worries), “How do you want the students to feel?”
This question forces me to remember that I want students to feel happy to be there, welcomed, excited about learning, and confident that they will be able to take charge of their research–and remembering that helps me to walk into the room with energy that reflects those aspirations.
