As you acknowledge, time constraints and faculty expectations for real deliverables in library instruction sessions make it difficult to get away from the “click here, then here, then here” model. But I imagine there are ways to incorporate learning cycles even in smaller chunks: perhaps just approaching each learning objective from the problem-based learning approach instead of the “tell them” approach. Thanks again for the food for thought!

I actually have never been asked to cover plagiarism and am only asked to cover peer review maybe 1/3 of the time. Most of my sessions are an introduction to databases or library basics.

Thanks for the great explanation and food for thought. I’ll be looking for more ways to make it their idea more often.

Fiona: I went to that presentation and really enjoyed it! I think that the Learning Cycle of lesson planning provides us with a practical approach to helping our students accomodate threshold concepts into their world view. Identifying them for information literacy topics (as the LOEX presenters did) is a great way to identify topics to develop Learning Cycles for!

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I was wondering how this might affect my teaching in a medical school, where complicated searches with not so user-friendly search interfaces (yes, I’m talking about OVID’s Medline interface) take the most of our teaching time. I can spend an hour teaching a group of students where to click, how to look for applicable MeSH terms, and how to create Boolean searches– but I fear that the opportunity to engage in learning cycles in this environment is really limited– much less trying to get more time integrated into the rigorous medial and nursing school curricula.

I’m going to have to seriously sit down and think about what are the goals of my instruction sessions, and flesh out how to make it a learning cycle…