January 29, 2015 (Thursday)

Time: 7:45am-9am; 9:15am-1:45pm; 2pm-3pm; 3pm-5:30pm(9.25)
Hours completed (IST): 21.5/135
Hours completed (Kara Robinson): 8/15
Accumulated on-site hours: 29.5/150

This was a busy day and my longest so far. I observed four BIs (two of them very short), worked on the collection development project, and had a short meeting with Tammy.

My first two instruction sessions of the day were in English Composition courses. The professor wanted the briefest of introductions to the library and to the tools available for students. Each of the sessions were about fifteen minutes in length and, quite frankly, should be called an introduction session. Later, I was told this type of restricted BI can be fairly common as professors want librarians to present this information to maintain a relationship with the library, but not at the cost of losing class time. While part of me fully understands this, the other part realizes that this makes these situations make it impossible to teach students who to use library tools effectively or to even scratch the surface of information literacy skills.

Later in the day I observed a BI for a Human Development class. This was an upper-division course so the instruction was more advanced and specific than many that I have observed thus far. This session was taught directly to the students current assignment, which seems to produced much better results than generic instruction or, worse, teaching to an assignment that the students have yet to begin. The librarian used several different techniques including: having students write their topic on a dry erase board (to help direct instruction and examples), complete and discuss a short "find the mistake" assignment for APA, and a Q and A-style section on literature reviews. The students were also able to engage in some workshop time at the end where the librarian and I were available to answer questions. Aside from learning a lot of great techniques for formative assessment and student engagement, this session reaffirmed the importance of having sufficient time with students (the session was over two hours).

My final BI of the day had me observing two librarians co-teaching an upper-division Exercise Physiology course. This BI was very similar to the one I observed earlier in the day aside from the co-teaching aspect. To my surprise it worked very well. At times I still think of the instructor-student relationship more in the terms of my time in the history department where something like this would probably not work. The librarians did a great job of supporting each other as they taught. It was obvious that they "divvied up" the sections that they would discuss, but the transitions were fairly seamless and the often interjected into each others' lectures in a way them felt organic. This approached seemed to make the students more comfortable with engaging the material and the librarians, though a few students began to be disruptive.

I also spent a few hours working on the collection development project and had a short discussion with Tammy about co-teaching.