Jazzing It Up
I love library instruction. I love that feeling you get when you help a student interpret their research in a new way or to see a new angle on their search process they hadn’t considered. I love that sense of exploration and discovery that comes from the beginning of a search process, that sense of community I help people find when they find a new scholarly conversation they hadn’t found before.
And oh my god, does library instruction get monotonous sometimes.
My experience, like many librarians, is that there are times of year when I’m really busy and end up teaching the same topic on repeat throughout many weeks of the semester. When that happens, I find that I sometimes get stuck in a rut of teaching the same thing, in the same way, until the teaching season ends. I wanted to reflect on the ways I regain some momentum and joy in this process when I’m deeply into that instruction season grind, and this post captures some of them!
Use fun slides
I admit it - I spend a lot of time looking for cute slides online. The aesthetics of my presentation really matter to me, in particular when I’m going into a classroom to visit them once. I’d like for my slides to remind them of what we covered in class, or at least remind them of me. When I’m feeling that instruction slog, one of the ways I combat it is to put my lesson into a new slide template. Not feeling your spy theme anymore? Change it up; maybe repurpose it into a video game theme.
The places I go to look for cute slides are SlidesGo and Canva - I especially appreciate slides called colorful, fun, or aesthetic, but there are a ton of great themes on there. I’ve also been known to customize a template to fit the theme I’m going for, but I almost always start with slides from one of those two places.
Add a playlist
I am notorious for using a themed playlist to help set my preferred vibe in the classroom. I have a Halloween-themed activity I use every year in October to teach source synthesis, so when I teach that activity I always use my Halloween playlist. I use detective noir music to set the tone for a spy-themed lesson I’ve been working on, or I might play lofi if the vibe I want to set is a chilled-out, focused working session.
I change my playlists all the time - especially when I start my weeks where I’m teaching up to four sessions a day, all week. This mixes it up for me and still aligns with how I want to be as a teacher, which is approachable and fun.
Switch activities
I love an activity where students have the chance to express themselves and work through a problem together. That being said, there are weeks of the semester where I think to myself… “if I run one more think-pair-share I’m going to lose it.” That moment is where having a few different options for activities can come in!
Perhaps your lesson will work well as a jigsaw - as a bonus, jigsaws take a while to get through and the students will enjoy talking to each other throughout the class session and you’ll get a chance to catch your breath. Or maybe you can have students working on a scenario and you can float around to the different groups to see how it’s going.
During the part of the semester where library instructors are often extremely busy (see Peter Catlin’s excellent guest post on this subject, below), coming up with new activities might not be practical. However, this is a moment for some pre-planning in the summer or outside the busy season. Developing different options for an activity when you’re less busy will make it much easier to slot it in when you hit that lack of inspiration.
The first day of school, repeated
Ultimately, it’s important to remember that, in most cases, a library instruction session is the students’ first impression of you as as library instructor. Whether it’s your first session of the semester or your fourth of that day alone, the students themselves are coming to you with fresh eyes. By taking some steps to combat that uninspired feeling in the classroom, you have the chance to make that first impression count. It will be new and fresh for the students either way, so if it can feel a little bit new and fresh to you, you’ll have more fun and the students will be able to feel it too.
Want to connect? Find me on LinkedIn or at my website.
If you’re interested in writing a guest post for Info Literal or sharing an idea for a future post, you can propose it using our reader survey.
Subscribe below to get new posts from Info Literal delivered to your inbox.