Teacher Librarian as Inquiry Facilitator
The future employers of today’s students are no longer looking for employees with information skills. They are looking for employees who know how to find and use information effectively to solve information-based problems (Wolf, S., Brush, T., & Saye, J. 2003). As the information specialist of the school, it is the teacher-librarian’s job to ensure that their students are given the tools to tackle the jobs they will be expected to complete in their future employment.
I began this degree confident in my own information literacy skills, but with very few ideas about how to successfully teach these skills to students. During my studies in ETL401 and ETL501 I became quite familiar with the inquiry process, and have since become an advocate for its deployment in schools. My passion for this approach stems from the understanding I have of Kulthau’s Information Search Process (ISP) and Herring’s PLUS model. These models guide students through the inquiry process in a way that teaches students to understand their feelings at each stage of the process, and what steps need to be taken in order to complete the task successfully.
I began this degree confident in my own information literacy skills, but with very few ideas about how to successfully teach these skills to students. During my studies in ETL401 and ETL501 I became quite familiar with the inquiry process, and have since become an advocate for its deployment in schools. My passion for this approach stems from the understanding I have of Kulthau’s Information Search Process (ISP) and Herring’s PLUS model. These models guide students through the inquiry process in a way that teaches students to understand their feelings at each stage of the process, and what steps need to be taken in order to complete the task successfully.
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Kuhlthau’s ISP looks at information literacy from the student’s perspective, focusing on their emotions as they progress through the ISP. Kuhlthau subdivides this process into seven stages: task initiation, selection, exploration, focus formulation, collection, presentation and assessing (Kuhlthau & Maniotes, 2010). The first four stages concentrate on developing a topic question or personal focus by encouraging students to think deeply about the subject area. Focus formulation is the pivotal point in this process as it compels students to think reflectively about their reading and provides direction for the completion of the search (Kuhlthau, 2013). At each stage, she recognises three realms of experience; the affective, the cognitive, and the physical. Breaking the process down in this way provides staff with an understanding of what their students are going through at each step of the inquiry and the type of help students will require.
View Kulthau's Powerpoint to the left for more information. Although sharing certain elements with Kuhlthau’s ISP, Herring’s PLUS model differs in that it aims to provide a framework for staff and students that explicitly identifies specific skills for mastery. The model is broken into four parts; Purpose, Location, Use and Self-Evaluation, creating a positive acronym to encourage success. |
Across all stages, Herring (1996) aims to get students thinking about both their own learning (in a fashion akin to Kuhlthau) and the skills they should be using at each stage of research (p.xiii). Herring’s book ‘Teaching Information Skills in Schools’ (1996) breaks down each of these stages into a set of different skills and explains how they should be approached and mastered. Teachers that choose to teach information literacy in this style should notice increased student confidence in relation to research tasks.
At my placement school I was able to watch Stage 3 inquiry projects in progress, and discuss past projects with the teacher-librarian. Seeing the difficulty many students were having with the process further emphasised to me the importance of teaching guided inquiry to students in primary school to prepare them for the expectations of high school. I also noticed that a lot of the problems were stemming from online resources being too difficult for students to understand. This further emphasised to me the need for information pathfinders for younger students that guide them to texts at their reading and comprehension level.
At my placement school I was able to watch Stage 3 inquiry projects in progress, and discuss past projects with the teacher-librarian. Seeing the difficulty many students were having with the process further emphasised to me the importance of teaching guided inquiry to students in primary school to prepare them for the expectations of high school. I also noticed that a lot of the problems were stemming from online resources being too difficult for students to understand. This further emphasised to me the need for information pathfinders for younger students that guide them to texts at their reading and comprehension level.
Kulthau recommends guided inquiry projects be run by team-teaching groups of ideally 3 teachers of varying expertise. The teacher-librarian at my placement school agreed that the students achieved more highly this year when she was able to negotiate team-teaching time for Stage 3 than last year when she taught it solo. This further emphasised to me the need for teacher-librarians to be leaders within their school, and advocate for the importance of information literacy skills within their school.