LIS 568: Information Literacy for Teaching and Learning

Course Introduction

We hear about the information age and the wonders of Internet access at every turn. Political candidates promise access to the Internet for all students. Communications companies compete to offer more information faster. But what good is all this information without meaning?

In this course you will learn how all of us, including our students, make sense out of new information. You will use that knowledge to create a unit of study for your students. This unit, based on curriculum already in place in your school, will help students develop important skills—not only skills in finding information, but what is more essential: skills in understanding it and learning from it. In the process, they will become engaged in what they are learning about and understand it more thoroughly than they might with lecture-textbook approaches.

There is much folklore in the field about what happens in the library media center and what students do when they "research" a topic. This folklore perpetuates the belief that "finding information" is "learning" whether or not the information has meaning for the learner. Traditional "report" or "research paper" writing puts great emphasis on formats and conventions, and little on learning and understanding. What we do in this course will be all about learning and understanding.

Course Objectives

After successfully completing this course you will be able to

• teach K-12 students a process for using new information in a variety of formats to expand their understanding;
• develop a plan of action for implementing a teaching unit which demonstrates your understanding of how a collaborative relationship between teacher, library media specialist and the community best supports resource-based learning and positive student learning outcomes;
• participate knowledgeably in long-term curriculum building and instructional planning including assessment related to learning information literacy skills and concepts to support School Improvement Plans (SIP); and
• apply knowledge of the current and historical variations of the concept of information literacy to situations requiring a rationale or justification of its essential place in K-12 curriculum and its alignment with state standards.

How This Course Fits Into The Overall Certificate Program

Library media specialists are first and foremost teachers. Up to now your courses have given you a program context and philosophy that underlie the teaching role, a set of tools for expanding student opportunities through technology, and skill in using the reference tools that are an important part of the information resources for learning.

Now we will look at what and how you will actually be teaching in collaboration with classroom teachers. In this course we will examine the processes students go through in learning from new information and how we can ensure this learning will occur. We will construct a collaborative, resource-based unit of study.

During the winter and spring quarters, while you take other distance learning courses, you will actually implement the unit you write in this course in the school where you work. After you have done so, you will share your evaluation of how well the unit worked and begin work on revising the unit and its assessment tools. The evaluation and revision of your unit will take place in the Directed Fieldwork class. The two parts of this course will give you the foundation you need for your teaching role in the library media program.

About These Online Course Materials

These online course materials include all instructions for completing the ten lessons that comprise this course. Each lesson includes the following:

• assigned readings;
• objectives you should meet to successfully complete the lesson;
• a list of key terms and concepts;
• my commentary on the central concept of the lesson;
• detailed instructions for completing written assignments; and
• an agenda for the weekly discussion forum.

These online materials also include instructions for completing the final revision and evaluation of your unit in the spring. The revision and evaluation of your unit will take place in the Directed Fieldwork course.

In addition, the online materials include

• an overview of the content and structure of the course;
• a list and descriptions of the textbooks and other materials you will need;
• instructions for contacting your instructor;
• guidelines for participating in audio conferences;
• an explanation of how your work in this course will be evaluated;
• general instructions and criteria for assignments;
• guidelines and suggestions for good study practices; and
• a brief autobiography of your instructor.

Required Materials

Text

• Carol C. Kuhlthau, Leslie K. Maniotes, and Ann K. Caspari, Guided Inquiry: Learning in the 21st Century, (Libraries Unlimited, 2007.)
  ISBN-13: 9781591584353

Carol Kuhlthau joins forces with a curriculum expert and a museum professional to propose a solid initiative for teachers, teacher librarians, and administrators. What is that initiative? It is a constant stream of collaborative, constructivist, and information-centered learning experiences. They propose that a teacher librarian and two complementary subject area teachers join forces to build a learning experience using the best of curricular topics with a simple but powerful information literacy model: Locate; evaluate; Use. This is to be one in a rich learning environment ranging from the traditional library resources and beyond to the community of museums and other public information spaces. The trio proposes assessments along the way that look at student motivation, responsibility, and learning all along the way. They see student sharing and collaborative learning as the building blocks to lifelong learning and forming the bedrock of what 21st century learning is all about. Of course, the book sits squarely in the center of constructivism, but we believe that many of its recommendations could be valuable in a school where direct teaching is the center of attention.

                                                         Book review by David Loertcher

Reading assignments will be longer at the beginning of the course (when you are learning the theoretical basis for the work you will be doing in the course) than later on when you are heavily involved with writing your unit.

Assignments

During autumn quarter, in addition to the first four assignments described in the following list, you are expected to participate in the weekly Class Discussion Forum activities.

Assignment 1 (Week 3): Select a unit theme for a resource-based unit of study.

Since you will need to complete a unit plan within the three month duration of this course, it is important you select a specific unit theme early in the course. If you wish to change the unit theme after you begin working in more detail, I will be open to negotiation. This assignment requires you to identify specific state and/or local curriculum goals to incorporate as new content and learning to be specifically taught within this unit. In identifying these information skills you will need to know what prerequisite skills and knowledge most of your students already have.

Assignment 2 (Week 5): Create a rough draft of a rubric for assessing student learning.

To plan students' learning experiences effectively, you must identify clearly what you expect them to know and be able to do at the end of the unit. For the most part they will demonstrate their learning through their final product; but you may need to assess intermediate products as well. In this assignment you will focus on assessing only the final product. You will base your rubric on models you will receive in the course; it should account for the learning of the new concepts and knowledge in the area your students are studying as well as the skills they have demonstrated in making sense out of new information.

Any rubric should be considered a draft until you use it once as an anchor performance for subsequent assessments.

Assignment 3 (Week 7): Create a rough timeline of unit with specific outcomes/standards and description of learning activities.

This is the bare outline of the unit; it does not include specific lesson plans, materials lists, or rubrics. It may change as you develop the plan further. You should certainly consider the timeline flexible during and after your first implementation of the unit. Even experienced teachers and library media specialists cannot always accurately predict how long it will take students to perform certain tasks in a new unit. This is especially true if the learners have had little previous experience with this type of unit.

In addition include an outline of whom you are going to work with and when. Briefly describe any prerequisite skills you will enable student learn before you introduce the unit. You should list any special resources including people or equipment you will need to prepare in advance. Your plan may be brief, but it should describe the actual steps you will need to accomplish to implement the unit effectively.

Assignment 4 (Week 10): Final Unit Plan with assessment rubrics.

Everything comes together with this assignment. It is the main product of the course: the unit you will implement. This document must be clear and complete. Any teacher or LMS should be able to use it to effectively teach your unit without coaching. You will augment your unit plan (Assignment 3) with

• a brief description of the nature of the unit and why it was chosen (Use the content from Assignment 1);
• the latest draft of your final rubric (Assignment 2) and any intermediate assessments you will use while the unit is underway;
• brief plans of lessons or activities that will be primarily your personal responsibility as either teacher or library media specialist; and your action plan for implementing the unit (Assignment 3) including a list of any specific resources, including people, which you will make special preparations to make available (Don't try to list what students will find in the library, on the Internet, or through any other regularly available channels) .

Assignment Submission Guidelines

You will submit your completed assignments via the "Submissions" link on your online course syllabus. If you have problems with this for any reason, contact me for assistance. I will provide individual feedback on the written assignments via return e-mail to your UW account or another email account you ask me to use. You can choose to have e-mail arriving in your UW account forwarded automatically to any e-mail account..

• Save a copy of each assignment as a precaution; this will also make it easier to combine all three assignments into the final project at the end of the course.
• Include your name and page number on every page (use the “Footer” tool).

You should compose the assignments offline in MS Word.

For you and others to receive the most benefit from the audio conferences and Discussion Forums you will need to keep up with the time schedule of the course. You will be exchanging information with other students to help you all with unit development. So please post your responses to the activities or assignment by Sunday evening of the relevant week.

Please make arrangements with me in advance if you must turn in any assignment late. Failure to do so may result in the loss of credit.

Successful Assignments

An assignment on time which is not perfect is better than a perfect assignment no one gets to share with you. You will have time for revisions later—even on the final product.

Practice brevity. When you are sharing with other teachers and library media specialists on the job, they'll appreciate the shortest message that gets all of the essential points across. Don't write paragraphs when an outline or chart will do the job better. Most or all of your classmates are working full time and will appreciate your consideration.

Be sure your assignment demonstrates what you are learning in the course, not what you already knew before you started. This unit should involve some new elements in your professional repertoire.

An assessment of less than "3" (see below) is not a failure. It's an opportunity to do a better job than you would have had you received a grade with no chance to improve. This is the same system you will be using with your students. Develop in yourself the attitudes you want them to have when you ask them to improve a performance that lacks in some significant way.

Criteria for Grading

LIS 568 is a numerically graded graduate level credit course. You will receive a grade on the 0.0 to 4.0 scale used by the University of Washington for all such courses.

The general rubric explained in the next paragraph will be the basis for each of the assignments. Unlike grades, you will be allowed through revision to upgrade your work to the 4 level on the rubric if your initial effort falls short of that. Your grade for the course will be based on the average of your final rubric scores for each assignment, combined with a grade for the overall quality of your unit design and implementation. The average of your final rubric scores will count as two-thirds of the course grade. Your participation in the online discussion forums will make up the final one-third of your grade.

To ensure full participation credit you will need to post quality comments at least twice per week. Students' participation grade will be based on one or more of the following:

• comments or questions that promote discussion;
• clarifications of other students' questions, ideas, or postings;
• responses to assigned questions and prompts;
• indications that students have read the course readings;
• applications of course readings to other issues;
• reference to other sources of information.

Note: Postings of less than two sentences will not be counted for the participation grade.

General Rubric

The values by which I will assess your assignments have the following meanings:

4+	Work is exceptional, beyond expectations for students in this course.
4	Work meets all of the criteria of the assignment.
3	Work meets most essential criteria, but some revision is needed.
2	Work meets some essential criteria; however, it fails to satisfy one or more essential criteria.
1	Work does not meet most of the essential criteria.
0	Works met none of the essential criteria.

Evaluations of "3", "4", or "4+" indicate I have accepted the assignment as complete. You need not resubmit revisions I suggest with an assessment of "3".

Assessments of "2", "1" or "0" indicate I have not accepted the assignment as complete. You must submit revisions to me so the assignment can be recorded as complete and you can receive credit for the course.

Assignment-Specific Rubrics

The rubric for each assignment will list qualities unique to the assignment at each level.

Audio Conferences

I will set up two optional Audio Conferences for this course. They will be scheduled during the beginning and end of the course. You can think of them as "Open Office Hours" and dial in if you want to. The purpose of the audio conferences is to provide live group support and reduce confusion related to course requirements. They will also provide practice participating in Audio conferences which will be an important component of the Winter Cataloging course.

Here are some guidelines for preparing for and participating in an audio conference.

Study Hints

• Look for the big ideas. Read a chapter all the way through and then write down briefly the important ideas you found.
• Be responsive to ideas that "ring a bell"—things that correspond to your experiences which perhaps you have never verbalized.
• Watch for things that go against what you thought you knew or against conventional wisdom and practice. These represent important new information that will cause you to change your conceptual frameworks about how students learn. They will also change how you teach. Give them special attention and a chance to prove themselves to you.
• Be sure to take especially good notes from the things you read on the Internet. They will be used later in the course and will be useful to you in your professional work.

Why We Are Using a Class Discussion Forum

The Class Discussion Forum will give us an opportunity to replicate a feature of most face-to-face classes—the chance to see each other's work and to share our questions and ideas. We will make extensive use of two features of the forum: threaded discussions and document sharing.

The threaded discussions will give us a chance to ask questions of the whole group, share similar experiences, and air viewpoints on issues related to the course. Participation is required and may be initiated by anyone in the class at any time. The instructor will throw out questions and ideas from time to time as well. You may either respond to these or just observe them passively but remember, the Discussion Forums and Audio Conferences count for 1/3 of your grade. The threaded online discussion takes the place of open-ended discussions and question-answer sessions in the classroom. Post your ideas to the week's Discussion Forum by Sunday night so that your peers have time to read and respond to your thoughts.

Document sharing will be our way of publishing your assignments for the group to look at. By seeing the work of others we not only add to our total understanding of unit development work, but we also simulate some of the aspects of collaborative planning so essential to the resource-based approach to teaching.

To make it easier for your instructor and classmates to view everyone's responses to a Forum Activity or Assignment, these postings should be done by either of two methods:

• direct entry while logged onto the Forum (good for short responses), or
• copy and paste from your word processor.

Using these methods rather than attaching a file eliminates several steps for anyone viewing multiple postings. However, there will be times when you will want to share something in a threaded discussion which is best handled as an attachment.

For help with Discussion Forums, see these help files.

Making Your First Contact

You should have received an e-mail from me introducing myself and the course. If you have not, please contact me as soon as possible via e-mail (see the "About Your Instructor" page on your online course syllabus).

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