91´«Ã½

This edition of Keeping Up With… was written by Piper Cumbo.

Piper Cumbo is Instruction Coordinator and Instruction Librarian at the Auburn University Libraries, email: plc0022@auburn.edu.

Exploring Small Teaching Strategies for Meaningful Enhancements in Information Literacy Instruction

In the evolving educational landscape, the demand for information literacy instruction is becoming increasingly important. Librarians, responsible for this training, often face challenges due to insufficient preparation in teaching methods. While professional development can help, many librarians need targeted expertise to effectively support student learning, particularly in one-shot sessions where they have limited control over the curriculum.

James Lang's book Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning[1] highlights the value of brief interventions in classrooms to enhance student learning. He parallels small teaching strategies with the concept of "small ball" in baseball, offering practical techniques for improving engagement and outcomes through minor classroom adjustments.

It's essential to differentiate small teaching from microlearning. The latter involves breaking content into shorter segments, commonly used in mini courses,[2] while small teaching focuses on specific methods and strategies. These incremental pedagogical strategies are intended as easy-to-implement interventions that enhance student learning, performance, and retention. To ensure a positive impact, the strategies align with a principle or theory within teaching and learning research.

These practical strategies are scalable and accessible for all instructors, both online and in-person, at liberal arts colleges, commuter campuses, and traditional lecture halls. Instructors can implement them in their classrooms as soon as the next day. Lang argued that to include a strategy in his book or workshops, he must either observe it directly or implement it himself. Ideally, small teaching practices could be incorporated entirely in microlessons.

Implementing Small Teaching in the Information Literacy Classroom (One-shots and Credit-Bearing)

In his book, Lang's small teaching strategies align with research-based principles in higher education pedagogy, structured into three sections: knowledge, understanding, and inspiration, with three chapters for each. The key learning principles of small teaching, revised in Lang's 2021 edition, along with their applications in both information literacy one-shot sessions and credit-bearing courses, are presented below.

Key Learning Principles of Small Teaching and Intervention Considerations for Teaching Librarians:

• Predicting: Encourage students to predict the lesson by making educated guesses based on prior knowledge and context. This approach activates existing knowledge, engages curiosity, and fosters critical thinking, leading to a more interactive and meaningful learning experience. Prediction-exposure-feedback is the formula Lang suggests here. One-shot: Opening the class with a poll or a pre-test will help students make predictions before the material is presented. Credit-Bearing: Start of the semester, assess students’ state of knowledge. Continue to ask students what they already know and build on their prior knowledge at the beginning of class with a pre-quiz or short answer discussion question in LMS that asks students to think about why they made their prediction.
• Retrieving: To effectively access knowledge from your memory, it is essential to actively practice retrieval. One-shot: One-minute papers with questions such as What is one thing you learned from today’s class? What are you unclear about? How will you apply what you learned today in this class so far? Credit-Bearing: A living syllabus allows students to fill in each week’s content and learning in the syllabus as the course continues. Quizzing: pre-and post-test.
• Interleaving: This strategy involves learning and practicing different skill components in a mixed order, effectively interleaving practice. One-shot: Open the discussion by posing a question about previous course content that would relate to the discussion you are about to have. Close the session by asking them to develop a test question based on today’s discussion and what they learned. Credit-Bearing: Conclude class sessions by asking students to create one test question based on the material covered during that class or week. This method could also incorporate annotation software into the online course, encouraging students to engage with annotated feedback using previously covered course materials.
• Connecting: As an expert in your field, you have an extensive network of connections. As a teacher, your role is to help your students build a denser and more interconnected network of knowledge and skills within the subject matter you are teaching. For the connections to happen for our students, we must provide them with the framework. One-shot: Concept maps help students visualize the organization of key ideas in your course. Credit-Bearing: Connection notebooks that could become research journals. How does something you learned today connect to something you have learned or discussed in another class? Provide students with a framework of discussion- this could be an actual ACRL Frame, such as Authority is Constructed and Contextual when exploring the level of expertise needed to consider a source credible.
• Practicing: Students should have frequent opportunities to practice in class whatever cognitive skills you want them to master. One-shot: Think-pair-share: Put students in groups and have them create one PowerPoint slide on one of their sources using the BEAM method. They will use the slide to teach their classmates and also practice presentation skills. Credit-Bearing: A practice literature review with one source found previously. This would work in a one-shot if students had researched before the visit.
• Explaining: Explaining your newly learned skills or content aloud, to yourself or your instructor, helps your learning. One-shot: Why are we doing this? Incorporate peer instruction. Have students explain when a source or database is more reliable in context and content. Create a template for them to follow and include database info on slides, highlighting why this database is useful for their information needs. Credit-Bearing: Consider experiential learning location outside of the classroom as a presentation explaining space.
• Belonging: Promote cognitive belonging in class. One-shot: Value student assets: ask them what they excel at, what they care about academically, and if they are good leaders in group projects. Assign roles in the group once you put them there. Asset-spotlighting activities: ask them something they learned about themselves in the last year that they would like to build upon. Credit-Bearing: Provide high structure, such as clear instructions written on a slide so everyone in the class can read them. Utilize peer instruction, as it allows every student the chance to contemplate their answer, respond to a poll, and discuss their reasoning with a peer. Normalize help-seeking behaviors.
• Motivating: One-shot and Credit-Bearing: Emotions guide our students' learning process, specifically curiosity and purpose. Motivate learning in education by conveying a sense of purpose and self-transcendent purpose, which is a desire to help other people, to change the world in some positive way, and to make a difference. Open with wonder. Open with stories. Invoke purpose. Share your enthusiasm. Pay attention to every student with name plates in class beforehand. Warm up your language.
• Learning: Continue learning by focusing on how to teach today's students, not those from 5 or 10 years ago. In the age of AI literacy, consider what essential skills our students need and how AI can assist. Encourage librarians to experiment with these techniques and explore the Revisited Bloom's Taxonomy from Oregon State University.[3]

For the potential use of small teaching strategies in the context of the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy and information literacy instruction, Jane Hammons focuses on four of these principles and their application to teaching the Framework.[4]

Conclusion

Teaching librarians can effectively implement small teaching approaches to enhance student engagement and learning outcomes by incorporating simple, yet impactful strategies into their instruction.

• Start Small: Integrate one or two small teaching techniques, such as mini-lessons or quick assessments, into your sessions.
• Encourage Active Participation: Utilize strategies like think-pair-share or brief discussions to promote student collaboration and participation.
• Incorporate Retrieval Practice: Regularly use low stakes quizzing or quick reviews to help students reinforce their understanding of the material.
• Solicit Feedback: After implementing new strategies, gather student feedback to assess effectiveness and areas for improvement.
• Collaborate with Peers: Join or form a book group focusing on small teaching to share insights and develop new practices collectively.[5]

By starting with small changes, librarians can create a more interactive and meaningful educational experience.

Notes

[1] Lang, James M. 2021. Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning. 2nd ed. San Francisco, Calif.: Jossey-Bass.

[2] Alqurashi, Emtinan. "Microlearning: A pedagogical approach for technology integration." The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology 16 (2017): 942-947.

[3] Oregon State University. “Bloom’s Taxonomy Revisited” Oregon State University, Ecampus, 2024. .

[4] Hammons, Jane. "No need to go big: Teaching Framework concepts with small teaching." College & Research Libraries News 82, no. 1 (2021): 20. .

[5] Jane Hammons, “Interested in Joining a Small Teaching Book Group?” post to ACRL University Libraries Section, August 01, 2024, 11:06 a.m., .