The purpose of this toolkit is to provide commonly-used learning activities to facilitate meeting your class's learning outcomes.
Included in this guide are examples of lesson plans, or learning activities, to can be modified depending on your learning outcomes. What's included in this guide is not intended to be mandates for how to teach, but instead examples or guidelines for active-learning approaches to our Habits of Mind.
What's included:
If you make substantial revisions to any of these, please upload the revision with a description of why you made the revision and what's different.
If you'd like to add a totally new learning activity, please feel free to do so and follow the template of the other activities (or email it to Rebecca Halpern).
All lesson plans are comprised of three essential components:
1) Learning outcomes: what do you want students to learn or be able to do?
2) Evidence of learning: how will you know students are meeting your outcomes?
3) Teaching strategies: what teaching strategies will you use to meet those outcomes and produce that evidence?
This toolkit serves as one repository for learning activities during information literacy instruction sessions. Each lesson gives you the context for the lesson, how it can be assessed, and the time it takes to complete.
For assessment, I refer to an "assessment artifact." An assessment artifact is a physical or digital object, produced by students through the course of your lesson, that can be used to assess student learning. If the activity produces an artifact, that will be identified. If the activity does not produce an artifact, but can be used for formative (or in-the-moment) assessment of student learning, that will be identified. If the activity does not provide any kind of assessment information, but is instead an activity to demonstrate a concept, that will be identified.
Formative assessments are in-the-moment techniques used to gage student learning. Formative assessments generally use qualitative methods, like the results of a discussion following a think-pair-share, instead of scores.
Summative assessments evaluate student learning at the end of an instructional unit by comparing it against a standard or benchmark. Common ways to conduct summative assessments for IL are by looking at a final assignments, or collecting several assessment artifacts to ensure shared learning outcomes are met. Most one-shot sessions will not include summative assessment.
Giving time for students to reflect on their learning is an important part of pedagogy. Please use any of the following prompts for a one-minute paper or a think-pair-share activity:
