Today I had the opportunity to collaborate with my esteemed colleague on a library orientation for students from Centennial Collegiate who are participating in the Science Academy program. The 16 students will spend two mornings with librarians from the University of Saskatchewan, this week. This post will summarize the activities of the first morning.
Our agenda for our allotted time was spent discussing the concepts of academic libraries and librarianship; primary vs. secondary sources; scholarly vs. popular publications and finally a brief discussion of how the library is organized. Students were then taken on a tour of the facility and returned to us for the wrap up exercise.
We made use of several active learning techniques with varying degrees of success. First, I learned a valuable lesson about high school students. They are incredibly reluctant to share their thoughts in a group setting. I had planned on asking for their feedback on how an academic library differed from their library and what they thought librarians did. I waited the seven seconds to solicit a response and still nothing. I did have one person give me an answer finally and her answer was awesome (I even learned something from it)! So at least that is something. Pair shares on the other hand were very successful. The students were very happy to converse with their own peer group. We asked them to share challenges with the research process and how they overcame those obstacles. We identified the four main steps in the research process and asked them to work on each step for at least 2 minutes. The students were very engaged with this activities and the quality of their responses was exceptional. At the end of the pair-shares, I once again ventured into another group share activity. The students were much more willing to share the thoughts of their group with the larger class.
Our best activity was the brain child of my colleague. I will include details of that activity in a separate post.
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