Information literacy lies at the heart of library instruction, yet the term encompasses a huge range of skills and abilities. Realizing that as first year students your views may change over time, I would like you to begin to think about what you think are the most important aspects of information to instill in library patrons/students/clients by outlining a brief statement of teaching philosophy (8-10 sentences minimum, though you may write more if you like). You should think about: what are the most important skills you think library patrons need in the 21st century as it relates to information literacy? Evaluating Sources? Conducting research? Proper Citation and Plagiarism Avoidance? How would you go about cultivating or instilling those skills in your teaching (with examples, preferably). Are different skills required of different library users (e.g. public library patrons vs. college students)? Write an approximately one-page teaching statement laying out your approach.

Prologue Lacking the formal training and the teaching knowledge of a trained teacher and lacking familiarity with the practices outlined in the articles by Grassian and McGuinness, I would keep their conceptual frameworks in mind for developing effective practices of engaging the attention of potential “students” while seeking to impart knowledge. Obviously, effective institutional instruction involves a body of craft and theory that takes time to master and put into effective usage. As an outsider to traditional methods of instructional teaching, I would also import concepts for problem identification and problem-solving from my corporate experience – notably, Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints from management theory. This is a powerful, practical framework for efficient and targeted process improvement in many contexts.

My Teaching Statement I think of teaching as a way of giving people mindsets and tools that can help them achieve tasks as efficiently and competently as possible. It’s also important to impart enthusiasm in using the tools and practices. Teaching should go beyond the focus on the individual learner to improving the context of the learning environment. It is not enough to communicate knowledge; a good teacher needs to build tools on their own or encourage others to development better tools. To that end, I would develop documents that act as memory aids and provide the scaffolding for learning practice – as well as, reference aids to enlarge the base of knowledge a person seeking information can start from. A good teacher will modify oneself as they engage in the teaching practice. Looking for tools, knowledge, and methods like those found in Grassian and McGuinness as well as training materials with a teaching emphasis.

Working Definition of Information Literacy Per the “Information literacy” article on Wikipedia, “The United States National Forum on Information Literacy defines information literacy as ‘… the ability to know when there is a need for information, to be able to identify, locate, evaluate, and effectively use that information for the issue or problem at hand.’” The Instructional Librarian is most heavily involved in assisting with identification, location, and evaluation. The information need is centered around the problem-context of the person seeking information but the librarian can aid in helping shaping an inchoate expression of need into channels that are searchable. I also think the instructional librarian should be able to assist in making found information more useful to the seeker by presenting resources that can reduce large volumes of found information into useful formats.

To effectively teach information literacy skills in a library context, I would focus on the following areas of intervention:

  1. I would teach what sources of information are available and how to access them. To this end, I would create a catalog of sources to teach where information resides. This would mean showing a seeker indexes, databases, web sites, interlibrary loan and other sources of information that might not occur to the seeker. It is the practice of a good librarian to have these resources compiled for quick reference. This could be a LibGuide, Wiki, printed catalog, or searchable tool. Essentially a catalog of catalogs. Go beyond Googling on the fly. Each source should document the process for finding and accessing it.
  2. I would teach searching strategies. Pre-search, keywording, Boolean search, search refinement, and ampliation techniques for furthering search knowledge while seeking. There is a large body of literature on this topic, but I would digest the best of it making it available in a poster or easy to access primer.
  3. I would teach selection strategies and behaviors for evaluating returned search items for fit with the needs of the search goal. It’s easy to find a lot of stuff with tools like Google and Amazon, but selecting the best material from this abundance is one of the frustrating areas of search and selection. Explaining how to read abstracts, refine keyword searches, and sharpening the boundaries of the information need all come into play here.
  4. I would advocate for improvements in the tools in use in the library search context. Librarians should demand better for their patrons - moving beyond search engines to selection engines. Faceted interfaces and better contextual presentation would help move the seeker beyond search to selection. The tool should help the seeker make selections relevant to their information need.
  5. I would teach techniques and practices for capturing the particulars of a search. Search documentation to recapitulate a search at a future date and as a method for encoding good search sources and practices into “memory”. Remembering how you got the information is nearly as important as getting the information. Teaching patrons about keeping “search logs” should be standard practice.
  6. I would teach skills for extracting information-knowledge from resources to document, cite and increase their use value. Presenting techniques to summarize information into usable chunks is an area where the librarian can add value. Information literacy also means learning how to dissect documents and resources into readily useable forms. In this context, I would also teach techniques for copying information found in one source format into other more useful formats – pdf to word, text-to-speech, automatic transcription, foreign language translation, etc. And where warranted, I would teach seekers how to build a knowledge collection using a knowledge management system like a wiki or personal information manager. (This is also related to item 5.) This is also where the librarian can impart knowledge of copyright, fair use, and plagiarism as well as offering tools on how to properly cite resources.
  7. I would teach methods of problem-solving based around ideas and practices derived from the Theory of Constraints to encode a powerful approach to optimal problem identification and process improvement. This is more of an information behavior mindset change than a collection of tools and involves approaching problems in a very targeted and rational practice. I think this is an area that could be developed into a new teaching practice but that is a topic for more thought and development. I would use it to help refine information needs and also as a heuristic for highlighting where current library practice can be improved.
  8. Finally, I would stay up-to-date on the developments in artificial intelligence systems. Given the rapid development and deployment of artificial intelligence systems - driverless cars, Siri, Alexa, IBM’s Watson among a few prominent examples, the day is quickly approaching when information literacy will mean accessing one of these systems via a voice interface on a smartphone or information appliance like the Amazon Echo. Information tools from the fertile minds of librarians – bibliometric analysis, metadata, faceted classification, and classification of knowledge - have been joined to the powerful processing power of algorithms, computer-based learning mechanisms, and extended sensor grids with the result that the future promised by science fiction and overly-optimistic futurists should be arriving in full-force by 2020. This is potentially more disruptive than the internet because it will be even more pervasive. What this will mean in the library and university context will begin playing out over the next decade.

Links to resources:

While I working on my final answer, I struggled a lot thinking about this topic. One idea that came to me was that looking for information is a lot like fishing. So for fun, I created a teaching philosophy built around the idea of information fishing. Hope you enjoy! Feel free to improve it with more fishing knowledge than I possess.

INFORMATION FISHING is a teachable survival skill that can be easily remembered and is a good template for information literacy practice.

  1. You’re hungry. You want something to eat. And there are fish out there.
  2. But what kind of fish? You need to know what kind of water to fish in. a pond, a river, a lake, an ocean? You need to learn which place holds the fish you want to catch. That’s where you should start fishing.
  3. Fish don’t come to you. You must have tools to find and catch them. First, you need bait. This will be a keyword or phrase. This will call the fish to you. You need the right kind of fishing pole or net or one supplied to you for that body of water.
  4. You may have to change your bait. Nothing may be biting, or you may be catching too many fish in your net.
  5. Once you’ve caught something, you’ll need to make a basic decision – is this a keeper or a throw-back?
  6. Once you’ve decided to keep what you’ve caught, you’ll need to decide if you want to keep fishing or you’ve caught what you’ve need. If you keep fishing, you’ll need to keep what you’ve already caught either on a string or in a bucket.
  7. Fishing is complete. You caught what you were looking for. Or didn’t catch anything. You could just eat the fish raw. But more likely you’ll need to clean it and dress it. Get rid of the inedible parts and keep the good nutritious stuff. (or you could taxidermy it.) But since you want to ingest I and have it become part of you, I recommend eating.
  8. Are you still hungry? Then it’s time to fish again. Repeat the step when you get hungry for more.

The information librarian can intervene in steps 2-7 most effectively. Hunger is up to the individual. But the library can recommend bodies of water and what types of fish you can find in them, they can recommend and document ways of using tools for fishing, they help customizing the bait – even Boole’s Complex Formula Bait, they can recommend evaluation standards to help determine if you want to keep a caught fish, how to organize kept fish, and they can offer advice on how to clean and dress them. The IL can bait the hook, pick the tool and fish, rebait the book and offer the fish they caught to you. But they can’t eat the fish or know if your hunger has been satisfied. But they can make you a more skilled fisher for information.

  1. It’s also the role of the IL to develop maps of the bodies of water, the fish, and contrast / comparison of resources. They should also be improving the tools available for fishing. Better search tools, better selection tools, better bait and building links between bodies of water to make it possible to fish in one place and catch every kind of fish. They can offer up better ways to store and organize the caught fish.

Constraints to good fishing

I am posting my own teaching statement to give you an example, though please understand that there are MANY ways to approach writing teaching statements, so don't feel compelled to model yours after mine (also, mine is written from the perspective of a college professor, so that informs much of my language and approach, which would differ markedly from a practitioner, whether a public, school, special collections or academic librarian). In addition to writing your statement, please comment on one fellow classmate's statement and offer some feedback on what you think they say well, what could be clearer, etc.

Brendan Fay, Statement of Teaching Philosophy

Given that the M.L.S. is a professional degree, I believe in creating assessments that seek to replicate, as close as possible, some of the real challenges that students are likely to face as school, public and academic librarians. As a practicing academic librarian, I routinely introduce dilemmas that I encounter in my professional work into the classroom to give students ‘real world’ examples of library work and opportunities to practically apply the knowledge they gain in their coursework. While I am a believer in assigning individual work, I also regularly have students complete group projects given the high degree of collaboration they are likely to face in their professional careers. In one research class, for example, I broke students up into small groups and had them come up with questions and interview scholars from a range of disciplines, including History, English, Anthropology and Sociology to better understand how data gathering, analysis and the dissemination of research works in these different fields. Students then reported back to the class with their findings and discussed how a librarian might best assist scholars working in each field.

Collection management and development, reference and user services, cataloguing—these are the foci traditionally emphasized in library graduate education, and for good reason. Yet librarians today are assuming the role of teachers in unprecedented ways, whether at the reference desk or in the form of one-shot instructional sessions. For this reason, I strongly support graduate courses devoted to effective classroom instruction. I have regularly taught a course titled “Teaching in the Information Professions” which equips students with the tools necessary to be successful in their teaching endeavors and assignments—a self-designed syllabus and teaching demonstration, among others—that they can include in their teaching portfolios to make them more competitive on the job market. In my experience, graduate student success crucially depends not only on mentoring students from an early point and exposing them to the myriad careers open to them as M.L.S. graduates but also engendering a culture of collegiality and support among the students themselves.

These considerations become all the more important in an online setting where student-teacher interactions are inherently less frequent and potentially artificial. I believe that face-to-face communication is crucial for facilitating the kind of empathy and communication central to graduate student success. For that reason, I host virtual office hours with video that, I believe, fosters greater understanding between students and teachers than email or chat. For an online course to be successful, I also feel it is crucial that students get to know and interact with each other as much as possible so as to create a learning environment where multiple perspectives are shared and active learning is achieved. Therefore I not only require thaà×ÕuhUà×ÕuhU—ÔuhUðŸGuhUHØÕuhUØÕuhU,ØÕuhUbservations. In sum, my own students offer the surest evidence of the enthusiasm, energy and passion I bring to teaching in the classroom: “he actually listens and helps well when someone doesn’t understand something”, “he knows intricate details and is always willing to help out on papers”, “one of the best professors I’ve had”. I look forward to bringing this degree of passion and enthusiasm in all of my future teaching endeavors.