New Instructional Experiences

Great news! I officially graduated library school in May and have started a full-time position as a reference & instruction librarian that I will leave unnamed (my opinions and statements in no way reflect the view of this unnamed university). My past experience at various universities left me adequately prepared for the reference part of my new position. However, I had never had instructional sessions with more than six students in any discipline.

Since starting my new position I've had three (four maybe) instructional sessions so far and feel somewhat positive about them. The first was introducing freshman engineer students to our catalog (Primo) along with journal databases like Academic Search Premier and ScienceDirect. The other two (maybe three) were all senior engineering design courses. The first class had only 12 students (Yay, much easier to teach small groups). The second class had 87 students split into two sessions (eeeep, a lot of students and not a lot of time). So I've done four instructional sessions with three classes.

The session with my freshman and the class of 12 students went pretty well. The students were able to complete activities that involved searching the databases. The seniors were shown IEEE Xplore and Ei Compendex instead of the other databases. These two are better resources for serious engineering searching. The seniors also had an activity that involved finding patents through the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and Google Patents. My entire experience with learning and then teach patent classification and searching has shown me it is messy, the databases could be better, and as when using journal databases -- you need to try more than one to find everything you need.

My large classes ended up having 48 students and 36 students in them. We covered patent classification, patent searching, IEEE Xplore, Ei Compendex, and Knovel. All in about 40 to 45 minutes; each group was in a different session (not with the library) before or after my session. If this sounds overwhelming that's because it was for the students. Each of the students had to complete an activity that involved locating patent classifications and actual patents, so I was able to have them actively learning through searching on their own. However, given the lack of time I devoted about 30 minutes to demonstrating the patent related searching and then when there was about 10 to 15 minutes lefts demonstrated the three databases.

My hope is that they remember where to locate the databases and how important appropriate keyword searches are for them. I would rather have 1 hour 30 minutes for these sessions in the future. In the feedback forms I was given for these sessions, instead of telling me what was least useful, quite a few students said they wished we had gone slower but understood we had time constraints that prevented this.