Training Information Literacy and Research Skills: The Peer Coaching Model at Work
By Kim Mathey
How do we become information literate in an age of instant access to virtually unlimited and rapidly changing information? How do we learn and teach our students to be well-informed citizens with strong critical thinking skills?
The American Library Association defines information literacy as ithe set of skills needed to find, retrieve, analyze, and use information.i According to the ALA, iinformation literate teachers and students have learned how to learn. They know how to learn because they know how knowledge is organized, how to find pertinent information and how to use information in such a way that others can learn from them.
Our Library Media Program subscribes to the principles in the American Association of School Librarians (AASL)Information Power to ensure that Edmondsis students and staff become skillful producers and consumers of information.
In its joint publication with the Association for Educational Communication and Technology called Information Power: Building Partnerships for Learning (American Library Association, 1998), AASL provides guidelines and principles that schools can use to create a dynamic, student-centered information literacy program. Its underlying concepts guide educators to:
- Help students flourish in a learning community not limited by time, place, age, occupation, or disciplinary borders
- Design authentic learning tasks and assessments
- Define teacheris role in student learning.
At the Edmonds School District in Washington, we teach information literacy skills and Internet research skills, not in isolation, but in the context of helping our students meet standards in the content areas. Our Teaching + Technology Coaches (see the cover article, Peer Coaching in Edmonds, Washington) and our Library Media Specialists (LMS) are critical to this endeavor.
...we teach information literacy skills and Internet research skills, not in isolation, but in the context of helping our students meet standards in the content areas.
Edmondsis Library Media Specialists have developed an eight-step research process to help students understand and communicate information. We found that although our librarians have worked with students on this process and the process is integrated with the standards that must be taught, many teachers were not prepared to teach it themselves. So, we designed a professional development course to address this deficit, allowing teachers to work with LMSs and T2CI coaches to meet the following goals:
- Students will have authentic, engaging, and relevant ways to learn information.
- Students will work on real-world problems that involve higher order thinking skills.
- Students will make choices and be able to communicate those choices to authentic audiences.
Authentic, Relevant, Engaging Learning Experiences
Fortunately, we have examples across the district where students are already involved in such projects.
For example, at Spruce Primary, our first- and third-graders work with the Progressive Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) to find homes for hard-to-place pets. Each week, PAWS faxes notes about the animals and e-mails a short description and picture of a pet to the students.
The students examine all the information on the pet, discuss the important attributes to highlight, and enter into the concept mapping software tool, Kidspiration. They then work on creating a powerful description of the pet. The description is e-mailed back to PAWS to be posted on its Web site, where anyone can read it. Then they anxiously await news that their Pet of the Week has found a good home.
When you walk into this classroom during the PAWS activity, you can hear students asking each other such questions as: Is this the best choice of words? Does the lead sentence grab your attention? Is the description clear? Is the closing sentence powerful? Teachers do not have to spend much time getting students to construct clear and effective communication when there is so much at stake.
The project has become so meaningful to these students that they want to make sure the adopting families are good owners to itheiri pets. They even asked the teachers if they could create a brochure with guidelines for prospective pet owners. Their brochure is now distributed at PAWS.
Scaffolding Ensures Success
Naturally, while working with primary students, teachers must provide considerable scaffolding to ensure success. Much of the work on the Web is led by a teacher. The homepage that appears when students go to the Internet provides a ilauncheri page with sites for them to use. When more information is needed, the teacher projects the appropriate Web site on a screen, so the whole class can see it. As the teacher searches and navigates the Web, she thinks aloud, describing the choices she is making and why. She will read off some of the hits that have been retrieved by the search engine and think out loud, "Hmm... I wonder how I will know which site to visit... Letis read the description...Does that sound like what I am looking for...," thus modeling good research behavior.
As students move up through the grades, it becomes more important for them to begin to learn how to find resources for themselves. We begin this process in the primary grades by teaching students how to find appropriate print resources. It is critical for them to be able to identify the types and organization of materials available to them through their library. We do not expect students to begin to understand the structure and organization of the Web before they know the structure of a book and how books are organized in a library! Parents, teachers, and librarians all work with students to help them locate print resources and determine if the books answer their questions accurately.
Before allowing intermediate students to search the Web, teachers provide them with a research form to help them organize their search around key words, synonyms, and subjects. The research form can be a printed form or simply a sticky note on which the student has jotted down keywords and search terms that are checked by a teacher before the student uses the Internet for research. We also provide students access to quality online resources such as netTrekker, Worldbookonline, ProQuest, and eLibrary. In this way, we build success into the process and reduce the time it takes students to find relevant information.
Helping Students Become Effective Searchers
Research indicates that most Internet researchers using a typical search engine will click on the first five or six hits. By using a database of prescreened Web sites, such as that provided by netTrekker, we ensure that the first few hits the students get are likely to be relevant to our curriculum goals and aligned with our state standards.
Hereis how our system works. When a third-grader is searching Google for information about the reptile, viper, he receives more than 2 million hits and none of the first five or six have anything to do with the snake. When the student searches for iviperi in netTrekker at the elementary level, he gets five hits, all having to do with the snake.
At netTrekker, teachers get information about the reading level of any Web site, how highly it is rated, how it ties to standards, and even the name of the educator who reviewed and approved that specific site. Standards-based, curriculum-aligned databases provide a great safe starting point for our unsuspecting students!
If students require more information than they can find in books or through netTrekker, they can find links to other online resources. The Edmonds School District provides access to online encyclopedias (both Britannica Online and World Book Online) as well as to online databases such as ProQuest and eLibrary. These resources were carefully selected by our school district to support student learning. They are easily accessible, since most of our school libraries include them on their launcher page. Using them, students can search through thousands of magazines, newspapers, and other periodicals.
Of course, it is our responsibility as educators to help students learn to evaluate sources for accuracy and relevancy. Teachers have done this for years, comparing textbooks, articles, and other print materials. But since most of those sources were selected by librarians and teachers, students could not go far astray. The Internet, on the other hand, permits access to a much broader field of information. Unfortunately, anyone can post information to support any agenda or dogma. Some of this information is good, but much is biased or intended to deceive. Students must learn to discriminate between authoritative and biased Internet content.
Decoding the Web
Gail Anderson, Edmondsis high school librarian, has posted a Web site to help students make the necessary discriminations. Based on Alan November's example of the "grammar of the Web," her site walks students through the process of decoding a URL to identify its source. They learn that a "~" in the Web address means that this information is on a personal Web site and not an institutionally recognized, authoritative source.
By studying the "grammar of the Web," students can identify the author of a Web site and decipher its underlying purpose. They learn that they can go to http://www.altavista.com, type in "link:" and the URL of a Web site, and find all the links that lead to that site. Discovering which other sites link to a site provides clues about the authoris point of view and purpose.
By studying the "grammar of the Web," students can identify the author of a Web site and decipher its underlying purpose.
At Who Is Datatbase, students can enter a domain name to find out who owns the Web site. This provides even more clues about possible motivation behind the information. For example, by going to the Who Is Database and typing in martinlutherking.org, students will find out that a group called Stormfront owns the site. The site attempts to defame Martin Luther King Jr. with all sorts of lewd and racially-bigoted assertions. This is shocking to stumble upon if students are not equipped with the tools to decode its URL.
Fortunately, many educators already understand the importance of teaching the skills needed to read the grammar of the Web. A search for sites that connect to martinlutherking.org will find a wealth of educational sites that connect to it to illustrate how deceptive Web sites can be.
Once students have some experience identifying relevant (and irrelevant) Web sites, they are ready to learn how to master search engines. Using Alan November's resource page about search engines, students can begin to understand how search engines work, which ones will serve them best, and how to ispeak the Boolean language of a search enginei to get the results they want.
To be successful online researchers, our students must be able to find trustworthy sites that they can read and understand. We must model critical thinking skills for our students and then let them practice. While they are using the Web, our information-literate students must be able to ask and answer questions such as: Who is responsible for the information? What are the credentials of the author? How current is the information? We are fortunate to have so many sites that help us teach these skills.
So far, weive been talking about skills and scaffolds for students. Teachers, as they begin to use the Internet with students, need their own support and safety nets. In Edmonds, we are providing that support through our coaching initiative. Using this professional development model, teachers new to technology or the Internet will not have to figure everything out on their own.
Teacher Training Makes a Difference
Our coaching initiative provides approximately 60 hours of instruction on coaching skills. This instruction includes assessing the level of teacher skills, setting goals, helping teachers prepare and implement standards-based lessons, and reflecting and debriefing on the activity. Teachers and coaches can meet during the school day with substitute release time or after school for extra pay using Education Technology funds (E2T2).
The flexibility of this structure permits each teacher to start at his or her own level and progress at his or her own pace with real support. The coach can go into the teacheris classroom and model teach or assist as the teacher tries it for him or herself. The coach is the safety net. At first, the coach may set up launcher pages for the teacher so the Web content is right there on the desktop. After the teacher becomes more comfortable using pre-selected sites with the class, the coach slowly and gently teaches the teacher how to find sites, as well as pointing out the potential pitfalls that must be overcome.
Our coaching model provides powerful and effective professional development, empowering teachers and students to become skilled producers and consumers of information. Our approach nurtures the growth and self-confidence of even those teachers who have been reluctant to start teaching with technology. These become the very teachers who rave about their coaches and about the quality of their student learning. Our peer coaching program has been the single most effective professional development model for making real changes in classroom best practices.
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