WELCOME
BACK
ISSUES
Envision this: a school library with a five-year-old standing next to a twelve-year-old, a seventeen-year-old on his other side and a twenty-seven-year-old graduate student waiting patiently behind…all needing help at the same time. Did I mean to say a public library? Nope. This is indeed a school library in Gainesville, Florida and this is a normal day. Mead Library at the University of Florida’s P. K. Yonge School, one of the four developmental research schools throughout the state, serves a K-12 student body AND the huge University of Florida student and faculty populations. Unique? You bet. Did I forget to mention that a botany professor is also waiting in line for help? Just another day for this librarian and a fun challenge is how I view it.
Now picture this: one hour later I am teaching a university online retrieval system to fourth graders. This state university computer system is what all our K-12th grade students must use to locate material in their school library, and they use it alongside university undergraduates and graduate students from many different departments who are in and out of Mead library all the time. These elementary students also use this same online catalog to search the Internet or, as is the case with our middle and high school students, they use it to electronically search the many other databases available through the University of Florida’s WebLUIS system. On this day the fourth graders need to find information about their assigned state. This permanently scheduled class of mine consists of 30 nine and ten-year-olds who meet with me weekly from September through May to receive organized bibliographic instruction. Today they have 45 minutes to locate a map of New Mexico, find a description of the Sleeping Bear Dunes of Michigan, the state flower of New York, a color photo of the state flag of Wyoming, etc. Fifteen minutes later an AP history class comes sauntering in to Mead Library, with about 28 sixteen-year-olds in various stages of wakefulness, needing instruction on how to locate relevant print and electronic sources, primary and secondary information, on the American Civil War period. And waiting patiently for my attention is a university English major whose professor refused to accept her topic for a paper she turned in yesterday: SHE HAS 24 HOURS TO DECIDE ON ANOTHER TOPIC, RESEARCH IT AND WRITE A 10 PAGE PAPER…WOULD I PLEASE HELP HER?
If you are at all familiar with school libraries, you must be wondering how does this happen? The “typical” school library serves either an elementary, middle, or high school. How does one successfully teach such an odd grouping? What about this weird scheduling: how is it possible to help more than one class simultaneously? Can they all fit? Just how many computers are available for such a diverse populace with such disparate skills? To begin with you must consider the number of public workstations with Internet access that are available for hands on use as you lead the younger students through the steps of your well organized highly structured assignment. Written in a vocabulary geared for that particular age group scheduled to be with you, you must remember to always introduce the material at a slower rate of speech. For a former New Yorker, used to speaking and moving 95 miles an hour, I learned this rather quickly: varying age groups mean that you must continually be mindful of exactly who you are working with as the ability levels vary greatly. You must be flexible.
Your rate of presentation of new concepts as well as your rate of speech, must be slower. If, as on this particular day, an upper division class is also scheduled to come in, a little over one third of the fourth graders can be on the seven computers designated for this class at the same time, and for a specified period of time. Since this is your class every week, you must keep track of which students have completed which assignment for you during any given week. You, not the classroom teacher, maintain a record of who has done which of your assignments, and you, not the classroom teacher, correct that written assignment. What about the other students? They are working on different written assignments at designated tables which hold related reference books that were introduced to the entire class a week or two earlier. This approach is similar to that of many an elementary teacher who frequently organize their class into centers with different students working on different activities in smaller groups.
What about that high school class on the other side? They, too, require instruction and close supervision when accessing the Internet. Usually they have received an overview and hands on instruction a few days earlier when I could give them my undivided attention. Similar to university level bibliographic instruction, these classes are subject specific. However, these students have limited class time to be in the library so they require several days of scheduled library instruction to research multiple sources. One effective approach is the introductory overview followed by one or more additional days to delve into the specialized reference books, electronic sites, etc. with me available, not as the lecturer I had been in a former session, but available to answer their individual questions, one on one or with smaller groups working as a team. If they arrive while I am teaching another class, in this case an elementary class, the high school students (or middle school students for that matter) then receive my concentrated attention. A fundamental rule is to keep the age groups somewhat separated. Utilizing a cluster of seven computers with the younger kids who work in pairs at a computer, they are given step by step instructions to locate their library’s materials just before the older group comes in and starts using the remaining twelve or so public workstations.
And what about those high energy, exasperating and lovable middle school students? Those classes of 33+ students, more than any other age group, need to be divided into smaller groups. Here is where I utilize other adults during bibliographic instruction. Almost always, I involve the teacher, one of my staff members and sometimes, if necessary, my university work study student. The mood swings of middle schoolers almost always means some disruption so you have to be prepared for it and not allow the instructional process to break down. These sweet kids have moments of sheer idiocy. Unlike the cool guy facade of high schoolers, the middle school student doesn’t hear how loud he/she is sounding, they are easily offended by unintentional slights, and they frequently seek confirmation that someone does like them, that they are okay.
The students in these classes need to have direct eye-contact, an activity or two that gets them up moving at some point, specific tasks to be completed and turned in to you by the end of the period. They need constant feedback, more than one pat on the back and continuous encouragement. More than any other age group they need your undivided attention and firmness. Keeping them in separate groups located in various areas helps to limit the inevitable squabbles, flirting, reigniting of yesterday’s cafeteria argument, etc. Each grouping had an adult overseeing the timely completion of a task I organized. For example, while covering periodicals and indexing, one group of eleven middle school students is with their teacher in the conference room. They are examining and evaluating verbally and in written form, those science journals I know they don’t look at frequently. They will eventually give a final presentation to each other regarding the content, organization, strengths and weaknesses of each publication. At the same time, my assistant is working with eleven other students from the same class in the other reading room, repeating and reinforcing the electronic searching for periodicals that I introduced them to on another day. The remaining eleven are with me examining in detail the monthly issues and bound cumulations of the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature (or the American Heritage Index, or SIRS, etc.). They, too, must use the index in their hands to locate and record specific information regarding a topic just assigned by their classroom teacher. I receive the results of their work and I then correct their efforts.
Meeting the instructional needs of these various age groups requires high energy, incredible organization and a genuine love of kids. And, no, bibliographic instruction is not all I do. It is, however, what I passionately believe in whether I am helping a seven-year-old, a seventeen-year-old or a thirty-seven-year-old. It is my passion for libraries and what they can offer everyone, free of charge, that carries me through the very challenging, but also very rewarding work day.
Iona Malanchuk is a librarian at the Mead Library of the P. K. Yonge School, University of Florida, Gainesville.
LIRT News,
March 2000. Volume 22, number 3.
To report problems, please contact the LIRT News
Production editor
at ronan@mail.uflib.ufl.edu