PSEC Instruction Forum: Rifle, not Buckshot: The Art of the One Shot Session

December 8, 2006

Olin 106

Session began with introductions and ideas for future sessions:

• Moving beyond the one-shot session
• Outreach to high school groups
• Clickers
• E-books (including international platform compatibility)
• Assessment and evaluation
• Technology
• Peer evaluation of teaching and team teaching

Martha Walker introduced Karen Brummund as the new half-time Digital Image Instruction Assistant for the Fine Arts Library and the Knight Visual Resources Facility of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning and distributed a flyer on the help she is able to provide. Karen will be helping faculty and staff (including library staff) with help in locating, creating, presenting, and managing images from CUL's many digital image resources and in using various image projection tools in the classroom (such as ArtSTOR and any of the collection run by LunaInsight). Karen's number at work (a cell phone) is 229-4033 and her e-mail address is kmb222@cornell.edu.

Roundtable discussion:

• Make sure if they leave with nothing else that they know your name, e-mail and phone number for personal help later.
• Collaboration with faculty: important to interview faculty member beforehand to find out what they want their students to know, nature of assignment, etc. Students listen to professors when they recommend resources so getting involvement and support of faculty to focus students’ attention on library resources is critical.
• Timing of session should be as close to assignment as possible (rather than the beginning of the semester by default) and make sure to follow up near assignment date if that is not possible
• Can’t pack everything in one session (and even if you do they won’t remember it). What are important or core concepts--selecting a research topic; research strategy (possible teach this is new ways since ways students approach research is changing)? Does anybody have tips for teaching things like where to search to find articles (difference between databases and catalog)? How to teach new Find it! and do we need to teach it?
• Take into account the level of your students (though even graduate students often need the basics)
• Preparation: even sessions you have done before can take hours to prepare
• Exploit teachable moments
• How to expand contact beyond the one-shot session (participation in Blackboard course, tutorials and web guides (for before and after), multiple sessions) and other models besides one-shot sessions for faculty and staff (for workshops—marketing or getting people to come to voluntary workshops—Open house at Fine Arts (staff scheduled time when faculty could drop in for instruction); on-demand, in office teaching for Lab of O).

Some useful strategies (from roundtable discussion and think-pair-share exercise on techniques that have worked well (or not) and things and resources people would like to try):

• Questioning not lecturing (i.e. multiple choice quiz on where you go to find certain information; use of clickers for questions and interactivity(see more below))
• Demo and/or have students search Google, Google Scholar, and a database and compare results (understanding the difference in type of material available (scholarly vs. non-scholarly, evaluation of results)
• Tell students to write notes to themselves during class lectures or reading when they note something that interests them (choosing research topic)
• Tell students that library resources are a customized product for them which would cost them thousands otherwise and that they won’t have access to outside of Cornell (motivation and engagement)
• Use “scare tactics”—how will they know how to navigate all of these 7 million resources without this session? (motivation and engagement)
• Clickers: Olin and Uris have been using clickers with some Freshmen Writing Seminars and getting good engagement from the students because of the interactivity. Asks general icebreaking questions (how many books in the library? Journals?) and task-based questions (identifying citation parts, etc).
  Use web surveys to measure effectiveness of one shot sessions: Olin and Uris are using Websurveyor to conduct assessment at the end of one-shot sessions (asking students to measure competence on questions such as I learned how to find journal or newspaper articles and to gauge effectiveness of presentation (whether web guides are useful or not (consensus for Olin and Uris seems to be yes))
• Use web surveys to measure effectiveness of one shot sessions: Olin is using Websurveyor to conduct assessment at the end of one-shot sessions (asking students to measure competence on questions such as “I learned how to find journal or newspaper articles” and to gauge effectiveness of presentation (whether web guides are useful or not (consensus for Olin seems to be yes))
• Find out what students know before class (through questions during workshop signups at Lab of O or Mann’s pre-instruction survey on citation identification and finding full-text for AEM 101). For the latter, survey has been used as part of pre-test/post-test or quickly tabulated as class begins to guide instruction choices. Online tutorials could also serve this purpose.
• Team students up to find articles (or other materials) and then have them e-mail results to a special general e-mail box created for that purpose. Instructor will then give feedback on results (allows students to be anonymous and also offers just-in-time feedback and method of outcomes-based assessment)

Other Resources and Ideas:

For more on clickers at Cornell see http://www.cit.cornell.edu/projects/polling/

From ILI-I list:   Wed, 29 Nov 2006 12:16:40 -0500
Garrett, I sympathize with your dilemma concerning the one-hour instruction sessions. Brief sessions like this are the bread and butter of many library instruction programs, but they are hard. The suggestions given by other list members are excellent (focus, don't try to cover everything, encourage the students to meet with you one-on-one, etc.). I'd like to add one other suggestion: create a "library instruction menu" for the faculty, and let them choose. The library instruction menu is a list of possible instruction topics and how long each will take. This allows professors (with some guidance from you, of course) to decide which topics will be most important for their students. This also helps them realize that they can't fit everything into 50 minutes. If they want to cover more topics, they may have to give you more time.

For more information on library instruction menus, see:

• Benjes-Small, Candice, and Blair Brainard. "And today we'll be
  serving... An instruction a la carte menu." College & Research Libraries
  News 67.2 (2006):80-82,96.
• University of Alaska Southeast: http://www.uas.alaska.edu/library/departments/instruction-info/info-lit-menu.html
• Lake Forest College: http://library.lakeforest.edu/help/instruct.html
• Doane Library: http://www.denison.edu/library/services/instruc_research.html

Veldof, Jerilyn R. (2006) Creating the one-shot library workshop : a step-by-step guide. Chicago : American Library Association. Table of contents: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip064/2005033222.html. She is also presenting one of  the upcoming ALA Midwinter preconferences on one-shot instruction: http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlevents/creatingtheoneshot.htm

From Library Community in Learning Times: Digital NativesDATE:       Dec 6, 2006 3:31 PM FROM: Camilla Baker

I missed the "Question of Relevance" event last week, but I listened to the recording earlier this week. The mention of Marc Prensky's column, "The Train That Won't Stop," intrigued me enough that I looked it up and read it. What initially hooked me was his idea of having students teach themselves how applications work in the classroom, rather than try to teach it to them. It hooked me because that's very close to what I do in my library classroom. Most of my very brief instruction has to do with where a resource is located in our site, and why you might want to use one over the other. I might spend 10 minutes on this, usually less. Most of the class activity centers on groups of students answering groups of questions that require use of particular resources to find the answers. If they really can't figure out how to find an answer, I'll help them, but I tell them to ask each other first. I sometimes have trouble explaining to other librarians why this works so well in a library classroom, but it does. I often get thanks at the end of class, and students will sometimes even volunteer that they learned something new. One thing I don't see a lot of is college students playing solitaire in my class. Now, I have a better handle on the why. For those who may be interested in following up on Prensky's views, I found two more articles by him -- interestingly enough, none of these were indexed in ERIC:

·         "Engage Me or Enrage Me: What Today's Learners Demand." Educause Review, Vol. 40, #5, Sept/Oct 2005, p. 60-64. (available free online)

·         "Listen to the Natives." Educational Leadership. Vol. 63, #4, Dec 05/Jan 06, p. 8-13. (widely available in fulltext; check your subscriptions)

Prensky is the one who coined the term "digital natives." Both of these articles, and the column in Educational Technology, make for thought-provoking reading. One of his recommendations in "Listen to the Natives" is having one-to-one instruction available when- and wherever you can. Certainly rings a bell if you still have a job where you work a desk. I've been a reference librarian for almost 30 years; my heart glowed when I read that.

From 2005 ALA Information Literacy Immersion program:

• Write objectives using Bloom’s taxonomy (and keep it to only a few objectives)

·         Principles for Good Practice in Teaching in 50 minute sessions* [main principles (Chickering 1987); all examples from Immersion group discussion board report outs on how to implement for three main concepts (attribution—“activities related to citing, plagiarism and annotation/abstract writing”; scholarly research process; and effective keyword searching)). All notes in brackets by Camille

·        Encourages Student-Faculty Contact

o       Attribution: students e-mail a one-minute essay to librarian at end of class, and librarian e-mails them back

o       Scholarly Processes: Discuss scholarly acceptance (beyond the session-invite students to meet with faculty [library instructor])

·         Encourages Cooperation Among Students

o        Attribution: paired activity either writing citations given an article, book, etc., or correcting errors in given citations

o        Scholarly Processes: [Discuss] peer review process (beyond the session-- Discussing a professor's first paper, What is a professor's job, Informal soda and popcorn) OR Group communications among students--Establish chat room outside class for students to discuss their paper topics OR A team builds a topic for research from individually contributed blocks

o        Effective keyword searching: [Think] pair-share groups brainstorm for keywords [tried this for class in general: good for example provided by librarian]

·         Encourages Active Learning

o        Attribution: "Puzzle pieces" activity where students put the parts of a citation back together, or arrange themselves, holding the pieces, into proper order.[too basic?]

o        Scholarly Processes: Groups need to come up with a definition of "scholarly discourse". Can use web, dictionaries, whatever. Post their definitions to a website [Ask students to define peer review, review article, etc]

o        Effective keyword searching: pairs use terms to search databases [tried this. Useful exercise but how to manage when all have different topics? Comparison and “peer review” of search?]

·         Gives Prompt Feedback

o        Librarian provides verbal feedback in class; replies to student e-mail essays (see 1 above) promptly

o        Scholarly Process: Present good and bad abstracts, Voice voting on good and bad, address elements, then show them "my answer". (beyond the session: Web address of good abstract)

o        Effective keyword searching: Librarian on the loose! Roaming, checks in with pairs

·         Emphasizes Time on Task

o        Spend less time talking about citations, plagiarism, etc. and allow students more time to practice with proper citations, exploring cases of plagiarism, etc.

o        Scholarly process: Lectures on 4 ways of knowing (beyond the session: Assign optional 5 min interview of prof." How do they know?" Primary way they gain information)

o        Effective keyword searching: pairs go back to try different search terms (broader/narrower terms)

·         Communicates High Expectations

o        Talk about the importance of academic integrity both at your institution and in the world at large

o        Scholarly Process: Assign them individually to create a research hypothesis (beyond the session: Group vote on best hypothesis to explore in the next class [perhaps suggestion to offer to TAs/instructors rather than for librarian])

o        Effective keyword searching: public reporting to class about keyword and/or completed database searches

·         Respects Diverse Talents and Ways of Learning

o        Provide a variety of ways for students to respond to questions in class (write, speak, draw, e-mail, etc.)

o        Scholarly Process: List the types of publications you use for research for your research topic (beyond the session: Evaluate someone else's list [of] research sources if you used them)

From Chickering, AW and Gamson, ZF. (1987) “The Seven Principles for Good Practice in undergraduate Education.” AAHE Bulletin. 39(7):3-7.