Academic column: Leveraging Substitutes to Teach Information Literacy Skills

Dr. Robin Cicchetti is the Librarian at Concord-Carlisle Regional High School.

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One of my big takeaways from the MSLA 2018 Conference came from the session with Jennifer Jones (St. John’s Preparatory School, Danvers) titled "Strategies and Tools for future ready researchers". In this session the one idea that really caught my attention was utilizing teacher absences as an opportunity to teach information literacy skills.

In my school we have kept library statistics for the past ten years and there has definitely been a decline in classes visits. With the annual calendar increasingly squeezed by testing, the addition of an advisory program, and other activities that chip away at instructional time, research has taken a hit.

Another part of this story is our recent work on conducting a K-12 audit of the MA Digital Literacy and Computer Science (DLCS) Framework. We were able to identify the gaps in instruction, and this is where an opportunity appeared. Taking advantage of substitute requests, we could develop lesson plans that would address the identified gaps. While collaboratively developed lessons built around specific curricular goals is always preferable, this was at least a way to provide important exposure for all students to key skills. Working with our IT Specialist, Terry Smolka, we developed a proposal for developing lessons that could be delivered either through direct instruction during class time, or as flipped curriculum with digital content pushed out to students via Google Classroom.

Based on the gaps we identified, we developed the following list of potential mini lessons:

In our planning we identified grades 9 and 10 for the pilot year (2018-19) for skills delivery. A total of five lessons will be developed per grade level. We created a department-based rotation which will allow us to track content delivery and avoid students being given the same lesson multiple times. The outline of our proposal is below:

• Leveraging SUBSTITUTE requests as an opportunity to deliver information literacy skills
  • Lesson 1 - World Languages
  • Lesson 2 - Social Studies
  • Lesson 3 - English
  • Lesson 4 - Mathematics
  • Lesson 5 - Science
• Matched to gaps in Tech Committee DLCS audit
• Matched to K-12 Research frameworks (Social Studies and ELA)
• T. Smolka and R. Cicchetti will maintain a list of grade 9&10 departments with sub requests in order to track sequence and gather data on the effectiveness of the model. Content is delivered digitally.
• Sub coverage lessons must be scheduled in advance or teacher can assign a flipped lessons via Google Classroom and EdPuzzle.

Course material development:

• Develop flipped lesson bank that can be assigned by teacher (details of how lessons will be managed still need to be worked out)
• Develop 5 lessons for grades 9 and 10 to be delivered for sub coverage

Potential Snow Bag Activities:
Questions: How will they be assigned? By department/grade level?

• Grades 9-10 TRAILS post test (February forward) to check for skills development
  
• Grade 11-12 TRAILS pretest to check for skills development
  
• Grade 9 Copyright and Fair Use
  
  • Aligns with Academic Integrity policy
    
• Graphics and infographics
  
• Screencastify?
  
• Blogging - basics?​

Our administrative team was thrilled with this proposal, and we look forward to developing this new approach for our students. If it goes well there may be a presentation at a future MSLA conference! Thanks to Jennifer Jones for the inspiration.