LibGuides: Library Toolbox for Faculty: Teaching Ideas

Resources and assignments are organized by categories below. Choose a tab to see the items in a given category. Frames addressed by each resource are listed at the end of the descriptions.

Quick Ideas

Encourage students to shift their thinking.

Instead of seeing research as simply finding information, ask them to think of research as a process by which communities solve problems.

Research as Inquiry

Tutorials

Good Research Starts with Questions
Created by Becky Helbling, adapting materials from rightquestion.org. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

An interactive tutorial designed to get students thinking about how to ask good questions for research. Students' work can be collected and sent to instructors. Contact Becky at rhelbling@stlcc.edu for more information.

Research as Inquiry

Pedagogical Resources

Resources from the Right Question Institute
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Provides a simple, easy to learn and implement method for getting students to ask better questions. Requires a free registration.

Research as Inquiry

Quick Ideas

Encourage students to shift their thinking.

Explain that research is never finished with just one search. Suggest that research is iterative. One search provides words and ideas to employ in the next search. Your first or fifth search may cause you to change your research question or start to look in new places.

Searching as Strategic Exploration

Tutorials

Searching Should Be Strategic
Created by Becky Helbling and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

An interactive tutorial designed to get students thinking about a set of strategies they can use to find information. Students' work can be collected and sent to instructors. Contact Becky at rhelbling@stlcc.edu for more information.

Searching as Strategic Exploration

Activities

Using Book Reviews to See the Field
Created by Becky Helbling and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Ask students to find book reviews to mine for new clues about their search. A book review can provide a quick window into a field, providing context that may otherwise be unavailable to a novice in the field.

Searching as Strategic Exploration

Authority is Constructed and Contextual

Quick Ideas

Encourage students to shift their thinking.

Instead of thinking that some types of information are good for college-level research and some types of information are bad for college-level research, ask students to think about whether the information they are considering can help them solve the information problem that they have.

Ask them to think about the purpose and the author of information rather than the format in determining the value of information in their research.

Information has Value
Information Creation as Process
Authority is Constructed and Contextual

Tutorials

Thinking about the Value of Information
Created by Becky Helbling and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

An interactive tutorial designed to get students thinking about evaluating information for college-level work. Students' work can be collected and sent to instructors. Contact Becky at rhelbling@stlcc.edu for more information.

Information Creation as Process
Information has Value

Videos

Evaluating Sources to Find Quality Research
Created by PCC Library and licensed by Portland Community College under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This short video describes three questions to ask about any source found during the research process.

Authority is Constructed and Contextual
Scholarship as Conversation

Activities

Process Cards
Created by Kevin Seeber, Library Instruction Coordinator at Colorado State University-Pueblo, and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Asks students to consider many forms of information and how different facets of their creation may differ. Includes cards for teacher to cut out and organize into a deck. Each deck should include one formative process, along with six different types of information. Decks are then distributed to small groups of students with instructions to discuss and arrange the six types of information by whatever the process card says. So, for example, “rank these cards by which format involves the least amount of research up to the one which involves the most.” Afterwards, each group should state their ranking to the full class and explain why they decided to order things the way they did. Hopefully doing so will spark a discussion of how different processes contribute to the “value” of information in different contexts, and how there is no one “correct” order.

Information Creation as a Process
Information has Value

Preview a Book
Created by Kristine Helbling and Peter Monahan at Washington University in St. Louis, shared with permission.

Asks students to find a book that seems relevant to their project and check it out from the library. Ask them to physically go into the stacks to find it. Remind them that sometimes you find great sources just from scanning the books around the one you think you want. Teaches students that books are cataloged strategically.

Authority is Constructed and Contextual
Searching as Strategic Exploration

Preview an Article
Created by Kristine Helbling and Peter Monahan at Washington University in St. Louis, shared with permission.

Asks students to find an article that seems relevant to their project. You might either ask students to bring the article to class and work on this during class, or ask them to complete it at home. They may not have time to finish, but they can get started and their conversation may be richer if they are all previewing articles at once.

Authority is Constructed and Contextual
Searching as Strategic Exploration

Quick Ideas

Encourage students to shift their thinking.

Instead of conceiving of themselves as consumers of information who only produce assignments for grading, ask them to think of themselves as producers of information who can add their voices to ongoing conversations.

Scholarship as Conversation
Information has Value

Encourage students to shift their thinking again.

Instead of seeing documentation only as a means to avoid plagiarism, ask them to look at documentation as a way of entering into the conversations going on in a particular field or debate. Suggest that learning the language and conventions of documentation gives authority to their own writing.

Scholarship as Conversation
Authority is Constructed and Contextual

Explain Why

If you ask students to use or consult a particular source that is important for your field, explain why it is a reliable, trusted source for experts who are working in your discipline.

Authority is Constructed and Contextual

Information has Value

Tutorials

Why Cite?
Created by Becky Helbling and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

An interactive tutorial designed to get students thinking about why we use citation in academic work. Students' work can be collected and sent to instructors. Contact Becky at rhelbling@stlcc.edu for more information.

Scholarship as Conversation

Videos

Creative Commons for Coursework
Created by Seminole State Library and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.

A short video describing the use of Creative Commons licenses for coursework. Provides a helpful acronym for attributing a Creative Commons licensed work: TALL (Title, Author, License, Links).

Scholarship as Conversation
Information has Value

Activities

Introducing the Idea of Creative Commons Licenses
Created by Becky Helbling and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

By asking students to find and use Creative Commons licensed images, this activity opens an environment for discussing why copyright exists and why other options have been created for licensing work.

Scholarship as Conversation
Information has Value

Being Fooled by the Gorilla Channel
A blog post by John Warner discussing the importance of teaching web literacy first.
Teaching that Sticks
Article written by Dan Heath and Chip Heath. Describes the "Curse of Knowledge," a condition that causes us to forget to teach students about how information works in our disciplines because we don't remember what it's like not to know how to recognize, find and use good information.