Problem-Based Learning Fellows Program

My institution offers a Problem-Based Learning (PBL) Fellows Program for faculty members.  After attending a presentation by one of the participants in which he discussed what PBL is and how he used it in his courses, I decided that PBL could be a useful way to do library instruction as well. 

Consequently, last spring, I applied for and was accepted into the program.  One of the questions on the application asked which course we would considering adapting for PBL.  Since I don't teach any semester-long courses, I had to come up with an alternative idea.  Each year, I work with a professor in his general education course to provide library instruction.  More so than any other faculty member, he has always asked me for new ideas for improvements and changes to the assignment that involves library research.  He takes those into consideration and also alters the assignment every time he teaches the course.  Knowing his enthusiasm for improvement and change, I asked if he'd be willing to experiment with PBL in the course, and he readily agreed. 

The PBL Fellows met for two days over the summer to train on the basics.  During day 1, we completed a PBL exercise where we were the students.  On day 2, we co-lead a group of physician assistant students through a day-long PBL exercise.  We paused every-so-often to separate from the students for a while so that we could evaluate ourselves and each other on our performance in the PBL session.  This was definitely very helpful, although my evaluation took place during a time in which the leaders of the PBL Fellows program were not available.  However, many common mistakes were made by the fellows, so it was easy to take away ideas for ways to modify my actions to best fit PBL techniques.

More recently the fellows met to discuss how we planned to implement PBL in our courses.  We were given the fall to prepare and come up with ideas with the expectation that implementation would take place this spring.  Over the winter holiday, I worked with the professor of the general education course to create an outline for the assignment.  Because he is the content specialist, he did most of the assignment creation, and I made suggestions/modifications based on what I know of PBL.  At this point, we have a working outline that probably needs to be fleshed out a bit more.  The PBL sessions will take place over five 75 minute class periods, and I will be participating beyond my role as a librarian. 

I think PBL has a lot of useful applications to library instruction, and I am currently planning to do a series of posts to explain what PBL is, how librarians can use it, common errors made by those employing PBL techniques, and of course, my experiences implementing PBL in a general education course.  Hopefully, this will be both helpful to me as I sort out my ideas and of interest to anyone who thinks PBL might be useful in library instruction.

Lots of Instruction

I always forget how crazy the weather gets in winter in my neck of the woods. I have always lived in the same general vicinity (give or take 150 miles), and still I forget every winter. Today it is 60 and absolutely pouring. Thursday they are calling for snow. Gotta love it.

I have been pretty busy lately with instruction. I had 7 sessions in 2 weeks. While that may not seem like a huge amount, it is when considering it's all the sessions I had lined up (last one is today). They just all came at once, and with it being a new job and needing to prove to a new set of professors that I can help their students, it's been a little stressful. Additionally, I am now responsible for business-related instruction, which is pretty new to me, so I have had to do a lot of research for a few of the sessions.

But I do love teaching. And I love working one on one with the students. I actually visited one class twice. The first time was for a standard instruction session, the second time was just to answer questions while the students were searching the databases. I think it's great that this professor wants his students to become so familiar with the databases that he schedules several days of class time to do it. The class is a research class, actually, so it makes sense.

I also really liked that he made sure to emphasize both times that one of the major reasons I came to the class was so everyone would get to know me and could feel comfortable coming to me with questions in the future. To me, that's a very important component, so it's great when profs think so too.

While I have probably written about it before, I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to give students time to do some searching on their own during the session. They need time to apply what they learn and also to assimilate new information into their already existing knowledge base. In most cases, I prefer to have them search first so I can see what they already know and what techniques will be most useful to point out. However, with a recent class, I went over everything first because there were two specific limiters that gave them exactly the type of articles they needed. It seemed silly to make them struggle on their own before showing them the two things they really needed to know.

Library Arcade

Carnegie Mellon has created two games for research - one deals more with research questions, the other with organizing books by call number. I played the research game - not bad! Definitely worth a look! Read about the games here.

Fairfield Beach

I like this idea: using a movie to teach students some basics about the library. I also like that Fairfield Beach is a choose your own adventure type thing. Librarians wrote the script and had a student cast and film it.

I only wish I could see more of it. Watch a clip of Fairfield Beach on YouTube.