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SCIL Works 2020
Disaster Planning: Bouncing Back From Instructional Fails
Southern California Instruction Librarians (SCIL) will be hosting SCIL Works on Friday,
January 17, 2020. This annual mini-conference offers librarians the opportunity to share their
best practices, innovative pedagogy, and creative solutions with colleagues. SCIL Works 2020 will
focus on the many ways in which instruction librarians have adapted and bounced back from
lesson plans that didn't quite work as expected.
Friday, January 17, 2020
9:00 am - 1:00 pm
California State University, Long Beach
CSU Long Beach Library - Room 305
1250 Bellflower Boulevard
Long Beach, California 90840
Directions to CSULB
CARL Members $30 | Non-Members $45 | Students $15
Non-members, did you know that it's only $40 to join CARL? SCIL and other CARL interest groups provide
great programming and opportunities to work with your fellow librarians.
Parking and Food
Parking on campus is $10 at the parking pay stations. The library is in the south west portion of the
campus map.
Visitors may park in lots designated as general parking and other structures according to the
visitor parking webpage. All parking permits from other CSU campuses will be honored.
Breakfast is provided, lunch is on your own, but the planning committee will provide some local
recommendations so you can continue networking.
CARL is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to people with disabilities at all CARL-
sponsored events. Please indicate your special needs or dietary requirements when registering or
RSVPing to events. Requests for special accommodations must be received at least two weeks prior to
the event.
Schedule
| 9:00 - 9:35: |
Registration, Networking, Breakfast |
| 9:35 - 9:45: |
Welcome |
| 9:45 - 10:15: |
Research and Practice I |
| 10:15 - 10:45: |
Research and Practice II |
| 10:45 - 11:05: |
Break |
| 11:05 - 11:30: |
Lightning Rounds |
| 11:30 - 12:00: |
Research and Practice III |
| 12:00 - 12:30: |
Closing remarks and evaluations |
SCIL would like to acknowledge California State University, Long Beach for hosting this
program.
Presentations
Research and Practice
(20 minutes followed by 5 minute Q&A)
Faith Bradham & Laura Luiz
(Bakersfield College)
Please, I can assure you that The Onion is not a trustworthy source: What to do
when active learning backfires
Join us for a discussion on active learning and the unpredictability of student behavior in
one-shot sessions and research skills workshops, especially those without the instructor of record
present. When the class is made up of students who have never met each other before, or whose
professor isn't present, the atmosphere in the room can be a little different from other
instruction sessions. With these types of sessions, you never know what kind of participation
you're going to get or how discussing sensitive issues in the classroom will go, particularly
when it comes to incorporating active learning strategies.
In this presentation, learn from 2 community college librarians' failures with active learning
strategies in the classroom. We will discuss difficult scenarios we've encountered during lessons
with active learning components, and will share the techniques we've developed to address these
issues. Learn strategies to recover from argumentative and/or de-railing students, lack of
participation, self-guided activity failures, and more.
Carolyn Caffrey Gardner
(CSU Dominguez Hills)
Remix the worksheet: Creative ideas for analog instruction
Campus wifi on the fritz? Students don't have computers? What's an instruction librarian to do?
Rather than replicate a drab computer-less information literacy session with a boring keyword
worksheet this session shares some tried and true analog activities that won't feel like you're
missing out on hands-on searching. The presenter will share three types of analog activities
(whiteboard walks, conceptual mapping, and source analysis activities) and their applications.
These activities aren't elaborate craft projects and allow for deep student engagement with a
variety of learning outcomes in mind. Even if you have a working-order computer classroom these
activities can be used to mix up your sessions with some tactile activities. Session participants
will receive some brief hands-on experience with the activities presented.
Kelli Hines & Ruth Harris
(Western University of Health Sciences)
Blackout: Surviving an instructional apocalypse
Most librarians have had issues with technology: databases changing the day before scheduled
instruction, the wifi not working, the PowerPoint not loading... but what happens when it all
happens at once? How? A campus-wide blackout! Learn from our successes and failures when we lost
power at the beginning of a day-long workshop to pharmacy students.
Librarians teach Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) on the first day of the Foundations of Pharmacy
Practice and Self Care Therapeutics II in the Spring semester. EBM includes identifying questions,
searching for answers, and appraising articles. During this workshop, librarians guide students
through the process in a 6-hour workshop using examples and hands-on practice. During this all-day
lecture on the first day of this course, the power went off across campus. Students were told to
wait outside until the power was restored. After an hour without power, students began leaving,
despite faculty insistence that they stay on campus. Because many students left, the class was
canceled, and librarians had to scramble to deliver an entire 6-hour lecture's worth of content
asynchronously within two weeks. How does one prioritize a day's worth of content into 20 minutes
of screencasts? Join us to find out!
Lightning Rounds
(5 minutes each)
Lucy Bellamy
(Gnomon)
We don't have that...
As a librarian at a small visual arts college, our collection is geared towards supporting
coursework in specific industries (e.g., animation, visual effects, games). For students taking
general studies courses, faculty often do not require textbooks. However, they recommend titles for
students to reference for assignments. For students on a tight budget, purchasing additional books
to complete course assignments can be especially difficult. As a longtime patron of the public
library, I wanted to investigate whether a similar connection to the public library was possible
for our students. I found the solution when the "Library Extension" tool was launched.
The Library Extension (LE) tool helps users to "instantly see book and e-book availability"
from their local public library. LE works when Amazon or Barnes and Noble is used to shop for
books. LE search results display the availability of searched for titles at the user's designated
libraries. For small, specialized libraries like Gnomon, the "Library Extension" tool has not only
helped to create a bridge between our students and the public library, it offered a new, better
answer than "we don't have that."
Michelle DeMars
(CSU Long Beach)
Serious fail: How a fail led to a Title IX Talk
This lightning talk describes how my attempt to create an active learning activity for a
classroom of 150 students led to a situation that not only failed but also got a bit out of hand.
Additionally, I will discuss the presentation by the faculty that followed which included some
behavioral guidelines and a discussion about Title IX. I will show attendees the results from
the activity and some of the responses from attendees that resulted from the Title IX discussion.
Kelli Hines & Ruth Harris
(Western University of Health Sciences)
Grading déjà vu
Grading assignments is always stressful, and it takes up a lot of instructor time. What happens
when you must do it twice because of your own error? Learn how we overcame the struggles of grading
"the same" assignments twice.
At Western University of Health Sciences, grades are typically due within two weeks for all
assignments. Librarians teach Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) on the first day of the Foundations of
Pharmacy Practice and Self Care Therapeutics II in the Spring semester. EBM includes identifying
questions, searching for answers, and appraising articles. Students are given an assignment where
they generate a PICO question, conduct a search for articles to answer the question, and summarize
the results. The assignment takes time to grade, as some of it is subjective, despite the criteria
on the rubric. However, librarians successfully graded all assignments within two days.
Unfortunately, the assignments graded were those of the previous years' students! Even worse, this
was not realized until final grades had been sent to the students! Once the instructor notified the
librarians of the issue, there was an immediate scramble to grade the correct assignments within
days of the final. Were we successful?
Tessa Withorn
(CSU Dominguez Hills)
Spelling errors, broken links & frantic chats: Fixing library tutorials through feedback
If a student has to take a tutorial for an assignment and encounters an issue, they'll likely ask
the library for help, but we don't know always know how library tutorials fail if we don't ask for
more feedback. At CSUDH, we offer a suite of interactive tutorials using SpringShare's LibWizard
platform to introduce searching in various databases and course-integrated tutorials for signature
classes in a major. We've received positive feedback on these tutorials from students and
instructors, but they aren't always perfect in their first iteration. In Fall 2019, we piloted a
tutorial in a general education class that was taken by 346 students and prompted us to rethink how
we design and revise tutorials on a larger scale. We used student feedback on the tutorial itself
and reference interactions about the tutorial through our Research Help Desk to make changes to
tutorial questions and our design process for future semesters. I'll share common technical and
user errors to watch out for with this platform and strategies we've found helpful for closing the
feedback loop to improve our tutorials by communicating with students, instructors, SpringShare
developers, and other librarians.
