1) Number of participants?

This lesson is ideal for classes that can be divided into four groups. Each group should consist of no more than five students, though it works fine with as few as two students per group.

2) Who was the audience for the class/workshop/activity?

This lesson is designed to work in English 2 or English 4. The first part of the session can be considered a review for students who have already had instruction in English 1 but also functions as a completely independent session for students who have not yet had library instruction.

3) Describe your experience planning with the instructor.

I contacted each instructor in advance and received the assignments that students were working on. However, in a couple of cases instructor expectations (of the same old/same old session) had to be re-set to accommodate this method. Because students do not work on their own assignments during the session, one instructor, in particular, was concerned about student abilities to work independently on their assignments without a librarian present. Thus a follow-up session was scheduled in which I dropped into the next class session for the last half hour to answer any questions students had about their individual research. The instructor was impressed to discover that students needed very little follow-up help. I had explained to the instructor that the new session was meant to teach students strategies for approaching their research, which should be transferable to any class (or other setting) for which they needed to locate reliable sources of information. These strategies are outlined below and focus on teaching students to ask the right questions in order to solve their information problems.

4) What were your goals for the class/workshop/activity?

This class is designed to build on the learning outcomes for English 1, reinforcing some of the more basic outcomes while introducing more sophisticated evaluative criteria. Learning outcomes for English 2 & 4 are currently in development and will be based, in part, on this lesson plan.

5) Describe the session(s) and the logistics of any hands-on activities.

Session outline: This session consists of three parts: 1) Introducing search and evaluation (30 minutes); 2) Problem-based group activity (30 minutes); and 3) Group discussion (15 minutes) Following is an overview of each section of this session:

• Introducing search and evaluation – The teaching librarian has 30 minutes to introduce/reinforce important concepts, focusing especially on evaluating information. Students are re/introduced to the library’s website, with the librarian asking who has used the library’s website/JumboSearch, etc. Students should not be asked if they’ve had library instruction before. Instead, they are asked if they’ve used basic resources. So far, every student in every section has responded affirmatively to having used the library’s website. Thus not too much time has to be spent pointing out its aspects. In this case, I tend to focus on the Use and Get Help tabs and point out the research guides, explaining why they’ll be a really useful resource for students going forward.
• Once we’re done with the basics, I describe my information problem and then use the white board to write it down. I then outline the steps we’re going to take in order to “solve” my problem. Since students in first-year writing tend to latch onto extremely large topics, I start with an extremely large topic and then model how to learn more about it, develop keywords, focus a topic, and employ strategic searching in order to find a variety of information sources.
• I then ask students how they start their research and do they usually start with Google. I raise my own hand, which generally prompts them to raise theirs as well. I thus begin the lesson by searching Google, explaining how Google’s search algorithms work (page vs. relevancy ranking/personalization, etc.). I also explain that social media algorithms work the same way, which can tend to end up putting us in bubbles of our own bias. Then I teach them how to interpret their Google search results, starting with the basics of domains, authorship, advertising, etc. Once we’ve gone through that part of the lesson, we always reach the conclusion that Google search is deceptively simple and not really meant for in-depth research, especially on controversial topics.
• From there I move on to library resources, using them to identify keywords and background information, then taking that language into JumboSearch to find books/scholarly articles. (Doing a quick concept map of keywords is good to include at this point so that students can start to understand all of the many intersecting issues one topic may include and begin to focus their topics.) At each point, I explain how to interpret search results and evaluate the information within those results. This class spends much more time on evaluating the information we find, since they already have some basic search skills.
• After 30 minutes of the librarian talking (including asking questions and soliciting student participation), students are asked to break up into four groups. In this case, I use flavor profiles and students move to the table with the sign that best corresponds to their favorite flavor. It’s not necessary to use flavor profiles to divide up the groups, but it helps to lighten the atmosphere. Students sometimes have to be encouraged to join a table with their second-favorite flavor profile if there are too many at one table (I’m looking at you Sweet). Each table also includes a container of gel pens so students know they’re going to have to write things down.
• Once students are divided up, I hand out one worksheet for each table. Each group will solve the same information problem, assigning one member to write down their answers and another (or the same) group member who will be reporting out on what they found.  They will spend approximately 30 minutes working through the problem. During that time, I roam the room to answer questions and share interesting/useful info with the groups. Note that the handout I linked to earlier includes a handy road map for students to use if they get stuck.
• At the end of 30 minutes, each group reports out on the information they found (not just what they found but the actual information about the topic). In this case, students learn both subject content and library content, making the impact of the lesson far more visible to them.
• The group reporting is facilitated by the librarian, prompting students to answer questions about authorship and authority as well as about who is left out of the conversation and why. Each member of the group is encouraged to participate in the reporting but they are not required to. As long as they’ve contributed to the report itself, each person doesn’t necessarily have to speak.

6) What went well? What might you do differently next time?

So far all of the sessions in which I’ve implemented problem-based learning have been very successful. The most crucial aspect of the lesson actually takes place during the group reporting. In each class, each group has reported different information they found from different sources, which reinforces the idea that broad-based topics can be complex and intersectional. (It also presents a really good opportunity for students who have already had library instruction to demonstrate their knowledge and share what they’ve learned with the other students in the class without having to identify themselves as such.)

As each group reports, the contours of the topic start to come into view, suggesting a variety of ways in which it could be focused into an argument. (The instructors have noted that focusing on how to build and refine topics in this way is very useful.) It’s also really important to have each group work on the same problem, which reinforces how search strategies have an impact on the information that students find. Importantly, though each group generally adds a different bit or piece of information that helps us to construct a more complete picture of the topic at hand, given that they have only 30 minutes there is always at least one voice missing. This is the part of the lesson that reinforces how critical it is to interrogate sources for who/what/how/why information gets to us.

For example, in the class that had to solve the information problem around the rights of the Inuit people, the groups found information from legal, political, anthropological, and animal rights sources but not one group found a source that included the voices of the Inuit themselves. This missing piece prompted a discussion about who we hear from, how information gets to us, what kind of argument can we construct when important voices are missing, and where would we go to find that missing voice.

So far, the only real challenge in implementing this lesson is to develop two relevant information problems for each class–one for the librarian to demonstrate and one for the students to solve. Since English 2 sections have specific themes, I developed the information problems around the instructor’s assignment. For example, for a Family Ties section I demonstrated gender-discrimination in families and had them solve a problem around corporal punishment. For a Love and Sexuality section I demonstrated utopian communities and had students solve a problem around The Shakers. For a Differences section I demonstrated utopian communities again and had them solve the rights of the Inuit people problem. In each case, depending on your comfort-level with the subject matter, you may have to do a little research ahead of the class in order to determine what the key issues are in the problem that students are solving as well as to identify any missing voices from the information they find. While I do not teach directly to the assignments, I do want the information problem to be relevant to topics they might develop or be working on so that they can see how the strategies connect to the information need they have.

This method can be adapted to work with large or small classes. While this is the first time I’ve used it in first-year writing, I have used problem-based learning with classes of as many as 60 students, and it is especially effective if students need to find/evaluate very specific types of information. For example, for a large introduction to nursing research class I demonstrated how to tell the difference between types of research articles (primary research/reviews of the research, etc.) and then had students work in groups to evaluate a specific article and report out on the type of research it contained and how they could tell. Once the groups reported out on the sample articles, they re-grouped to search CINAHL for a specific type of research article and then report back again on what they found and how.

Interestingly, most of the literature on problem-based learning within information literacy instruction focuses on disciplines such as business, the health sciences, etc., since their information problems are often far more concrete. However, in this case I found that this method really solved a dilemma for me with English 2, since it reinforces some of what students may already have learned, provides an introduction to students who haven’t had instruction before, re-frames but doesn’t simply repeat English 1, and demonstrates far more vividly how search strategies impact the nature of the information found and the construction of an argument from that information.