UDL: The curb cut's cognitive cousin

At a session at AASL—which was, ostensibly, about creating resiliency in students—the presenter said the following:

“There’s very little we can do that supports students at risk that doesn’t take away from other students.”

I was already, at that point, pretty annoyed by almost everything in the session (Someone else in the session had said that a good way to teach positive classroom behavior was to threaten students to hold them in for recess, and the presenter agreed that this was an excellent way to teach positive behavior, which almost made me lose my mind. Here’s a classroom management tip: if you, as an adult, would find such treatment insulting, chances are it’s not going to have the desired impact with students. How does that teach anything? How does it address the root of the problem? If a student is genuinely struggling in the classroom due to a hidden or undiagnosed learning disability—or for any number of other reasons—and that struggle is manifesting as misbehavior, how does holding a child in for recess address the issue? And if you hold the entire class for the misbehavior of one, you’re further ostracizing that child. It’s just awful, all around. /overly-long parenthetical rant) and had been trying to make my escape (it was sparsely attended and we kept having to talk to our neighbor, which made it a little awkward).

I’m almost glad, however, that I did stay to hear that, as sometimes I forget what an unfortunately pervasive attitude that is. So many teachers believe that you can’t help the at-risk students in your classroom without somehow taking away time/attention/focus/etc. from the other students in your classroom.

(When I mentioned my frustration with that session/presenter, another colleague pointed out that, yes, if you put an at-risk student in a class of 37 (a number based, sadly, on the reality of a friend of hers), it is going to take away from the amount of attention you’re able to give the other students. Which is likely true, but if you already have 37 students in a room you likely already have high needs students, and it’s also likely that there are many students not getting the attention that they need. There is only so much good pedagogy and instructional design can address.)

Anyway, this all is a perhaps overly-wordy way to introduce the Learning Commons session I presented at AASL (and since, apparently, this blog post is all about the parenthetical aside, I'm going to use this one to give a HUGE thank you to Buffy Hamilton for all her work creating an amazing learning space).

UDL in the Library

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Universal Design for Learning is built on the idea that the students in our schools vary widely in their abilities, and we need to design our curriculum in order to meet the needs of those learners. It is up to us to fit the curriculum to our students, not the students to fit themselves to our curriculum. Curricula that are designed from the outset to meet the needs of a variety of learners will meet the needs of far more students than one designed for the mythical "average" student.

I think of UDL as the curb cut's cognitive cousin. The curb cuts that are in all sidewalks were originally put there in order to make them accessible for people in wheelchairs, but those curb cuts are also useful for those of us pushing strollers or dragging wheeled suitcases. Sometimes--and I think this is especially true in the library--we don't know the individual learning profiles of our students. But if we design our curricula to meet the needs of a variety of learners from the outset, we don't need to worry about retrofitting to individuals.

I am, by no means, a UDL expert, and I don't think my library curriculum is perfect in that regard. But they are principles I strive to implement as I design instruction and select material.

Aimee Mullins, who I refer to in my slide deck, has an amazing TED talk about the views of dis/ability, and how much perspective matters:

Our perspective on students, and what they're able to accomplish, is what sets the tone in our libraries and in our classrooms and in our schools. By designing our schools to meet all learners where they are, we make them places of possibility.

Why Do I Need to Find Multiple Sources?

When doing research, students will regularly ask me, "Why do I need to find multiple sources? I can get all the information I need from this [article, book, website]." I always explain that if you only use one source, you don't know what you're not getting from other sources in terms of information, ideas, viewpoints, etc. Students are, generally speaking, convinced by my line of argument, but I'd been looking for a good analogy to explain it (I love a good analogy).

And I think I may have come up with one. Technically, it's not my analogy, but I'm pretty happy with the presentation, so I thought I'd share! I took the story about the elephant and the blind men, used flickrcc.bluemountains.net (my favorite source for Creative Commons images) to find images to illustrate the story, and put together a quick slideshow:

Why do i need multiple sources?

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I'll be trying it out tomorrow with a class coming in to find sources for a persuasive essay--a perfect opportunity to talk about the importance of getting multiple viewpoints.

Struggling with citation

Last night I dreamt of citations. I spent my sleeping hours much as I did my waking hours--dragging students through the process of creating a citation in NoodleTools, and then begging, pleading, and cajoling them to use in-text citations. It’s not a traditional nightmare, but I would have much preferred to spend my sleeping time being chased by a bear. I feel like it would have been more restful.

I am struggling mightily with the teaching citation this year. I am amazed and a little appalled by the number of juniors and seniors I have who claim they have never had to create citations before (most of whom I know for a fact I’ve taught how to cite). Several want to just be able to print a list of URLs (the quality of some of the sources students insist on using--and their reluctance to even try a database--is a topic for another day). Even students who are on board with creating citations are either flummoxed by or giving me push back on creating in-text citations; several claim to “just know” very specific statistics, and have no source to cite.

To be fair, there have been a handful of new students who, upon going through the steps needed to create a citation in NoodleTools, have said, “Well, that was easy!” And even students who are getting a refresher (willingly or unwillingly) do well with the process when they actually start it, many of them needing very little guidance.

So what’s the stumbling block? I think there are several. I don’t think students are universally held accountable for the need to cite; they think of it as something you do for the research paper in History/English/Science class, but not something you have to do unless it’s part of the requirements. Or only for certain teachers or assignments. I think we need to have students cite regularly and consistently on assignments big and small, just so they get in the habit. And the consequences of not citing need to be clear and consistent; if a student is handing in a major research paper with no citations, that’s a big problem that needs to be addressed.

I know many students also simply struggle with the format of citation, even using NoodleTools. It can be hard to figure out what information is which and where it goes and why or even how to classify the source you’re citing.

I have really good analogies (usually involving food) to explain almost every part of the research process, but I have yet to come up with something for citation that clicks with most students. The biggest issue seems to be helping students understand WHY they need to cite. I’m less interested in having perfectly formatted citations (and can empathize with students who get frustrated with the details of creating a proper citation); there are tools that will help students with that. But getting students to really grasp when and why to cite? That’s the really important part, and harder to teach than what goes in which part of the NoodleTools form.

I also wonder how much of this difficulty with the concept of giving others’ credit for their work comes from a lack of students’ investment? pride? ownership? (some combination of those three words embodies the idea I’m trying to express) of their own work. If they don’t feel like they are authors (with a real, genuine audience, and pride in what they have written and created), why would they understand that another author might want credit for their own work?

Citation is, in a way, about empathy; it’s about understanding that someone would want credit for the work that they’ve done. And if you can’t imagine yourself as creating anything that someone would read and use, how can you put yourself in the shoes of someone who has? I think a big part of fixing the issue with citation is helping student come to see themselves as authors and creators of work that worth sharing and getting credit for.

How do you make students comfortable with failure?

Seriously. I'm asking how.

I'm working on an I-Search project with the 9th grade Thinking & Writing classes; kind of a "get your feet wet, learn the basics" project. We've talked about defining a topic, identifying key words and ideas, where and how to search, evaluating sources, and citations. It's a good way for me to get to know more about them as researchers (so future instruction can be better designed), and for them to both explore a topic of interest and get a bit more comfortable with the research process.

But many of them are struggling. And I'm struggling. Not necessarily with the process or the ideas or the few things about research that are nice and neat and linear--just the parts of research that aren't nice and neat and linear. Which is, you know, most of them.

Research, I think many of us would agree, is an iterative process. You search, there's new questions and dead ends and unexpected turns, so you regroup and refocus and re-search. And that's difficult and uncomfortable, especially when you're just starting out as a researcher, but you get better at it--and, if you're anything like me, you begin to enjoy the journey of research almost as much as the answer you find at the end (assuming you even get to the "end"). I know not everyone comes to enjoy the process of research, but my hope is that students at least become comfortable and confident with the ups and downs of the process.

Only that's really, really not happening for a number of my students, and a lot of their frustration is kind of heartbreaking for me.

For those of you who don't know, the school I work at serves students with learning disabilities--dyslexia, ADD/ADHD, executive functioning disorders, etc. These are kids who, oftentimes, have been really and truly beat up by the educational system. They have been made to feel stupid. They have been exhorted to "just try harder" when they really are trying their hardest. They have often been denied the supports they need to learn. And a big part of what we do here--particularly in the first couple years--is put in those supports and help them learn how to learn the way they learn best. We take what had been a messy, unknowable process--learning--and give it structure and sequence.

Only that doesn't work for research. There's no way I can create an authentic research assignment that also proceeds in a linear fashion. Throw in website evaluation and citation and you have three often messy, confusing processes.

Frankly, sometimes I'm surprised that more students don't break down in tears or give up in frustration.

And I don't know what to do. I know that I need to create authentic research opportunities for my students. I know that they need to get comfortable with the ups and downs and ins and outs of the research process. But when they experience initial failure, they often shut down--and I get it. Years of being made to feel like you can't learn will wear a kid down. And it breaks my heart when I see a smart kid who assumes that they're struggle with research is a reflection on them, and not a reflection of the fact that it is a difficult process for everyone.

So how do we make students--particularly students who believe that failure means there is something wrong with them--comfortable with the idea of failure being part of the process?

What happens in the library

After making a quick escape from my first session in order to avoid someone I recognized but did not feel like reminiscing with (based on seeing her in action in the session, I could tell she was pretty much the same as she’d been in college, which was as much as I needed to know), I headed to Ballroom B for the AASL’s Presidents Program, which featured Allison Zmuda. She was a great speaker—lot to take in, and I’m glad she offered to share her PowerPoint slides, as there was a lot to read and take in and I know I missed a lot.

One of the ideas that really resonated with me, however, was the idea that while we may have limited sphere over which he have control, we need to do what we can to really exert our influence within that sphere—in fact, it’s imperative that we do everything we can to exert the influence that we can.

I spent a lot of time at ALA (and in the past ten years) thinking about and having discussions about the education system as a whole, battling the “it only matters if it’s tested” mindset (and that the only way to make something matter is to create a way to test it), the seeming decline in critical thinking, the “no one reads any more/death of print” storyline, etc., and the discussion always revolves around what we can do to change, you know, everything. Which we can’t do. As Zmuda spelled out, there are things we can’t control, things we can influence but not control, and things we can control.

And while I think it’s important to keep having the discussions and exerting the influence we do have on the “big picture” stuff, for me that idea really drives home the importance of being active on the local and state level, even more so than on the national level; that is where our influence is really felt, and that is where momentum builds.

But even more than that, it speaks to the control we have and must exert in our own libraries, particularly when it comes to instruction. You can’t say, “I had to do this project/assignment, because it’s what the teacher brought me.”

Often we do it with the best of intentions—it’s a way to make less willing teachers feel comfortable, it’s easier to coordinate when you don’t have to start from scratch. And oftentimes teachers will come with a fully formed unit plan and just want you to show students “the research part.” Even when the research assignment they’ve written looks nothing like something you would create in order to teach the skills students need to develop. Such unit plans also often keep the librarian out of the creation of the final project; and, as I wrote yesterday, we need to stay involved for the information integration part of the process.

But going along with a. . . not necessarily “bad” plan, but not necessarily a good one either, is a cop out. And I say this with full recognition of the fact that I’ve done this. A lot, particularly in my first year. When you’re new and someone comes to you with a project they’ve been doing for ten years (which, yikes) it’s more than a little awkward to try and tell them to change everything. But if we want to truly be collaborating with classroom teachers—and not just be a drop-in lesson on skills that seem disjointed from the lesson—it means taking ownership and having challenging and productive (if sometimes awkward) conversations with our colleagues about creating and teaching units that integrate information literacy skills.

We don’t want what happens in the library to just stay in the library; the skills we teach impact not only other academic areas, but areas outside the school walls. And if we want what we teach to have an impact beyond the library, we have to take full control of what happens in the library.

How do we teach students not to put tomatoes in fruit salad?

Now that I’ve been home for a week, and ALA has been over for even longer, I suppose it’s about time that I finally write about everything I saw there. I’m going to try to break it into multiple posts covering different sessions, both in order to pace myself and to avoid a post the size of a book.

Saturday morning I went to a session on sequencing instruction from kindergarten through college, which seems like a pretty difficult task. Even if you manage to keep students in one school district for K-12, ensuring they go through a complete information literacy curriculum, it seems that the channels of communication to post-secondary schools are not always great, never mind the different expectations different colleges have (or the disagreements between—or within—different departments at the same school).

While I am working to prepare my students for college (and try to stay familiar with general info lit trends at the schools my students frequently attend), students arrive at my school from all sorts of different backgrounds. Some have had excellent research instruction; some have had almost none. Which is one of the challenges in writing and implementing curriculum; there’s no one I can coordinate with on K-8 instruction.

Rather than attempt a cohesive narrative (my brain’s half on vacation), I’m going to bullet point ideas that resonated with me, and explain why.

Dr. David Loertscher started the session with an overview of what we’re trying to do.

• Information literacy instruction used to just be about the research process; now, it’s more about critical thinking and content creation

Students need to be doing more than simply trying to absorb a lot of information; it’s getting to be a trite observation by now, but the ability to memorize and recall facts is simply not as useful or impressive a skill in the Google age. The skills students need are different—can you locate the information, can you assess it, can you make sense of it, can you integrate it into what you already know, can you build upon that knowledge and share it? It’s way more complicated than remembering a set of tasks in sequence

• “You only learn 21^st century skills in order to deepen your content understanding.”

I wrote “YES!” next to this when I was taking notes in the session. Too often I see people talking about “21^st century skills” (by which they usually mean the latest technology) as an end in and of itself. Sorry, but learning how to build a wiki, or record a podcast, or write a blog or use an e-reader are not ends in and of themselves. Unless they are coupled with real content, they’re just toys. Technology divorced from content (i.e. context) is just as meaningless as try to teach content without context.

• Understanding how Wikipedia happened will help us solve the dropout problem

Okay, I left out a few steps in his logic, but for me that was the basic point. We need to center our work around engaging with real problems and involving students in knowledge creation. Students who have a voice and an audience and see the real-world context and application for what they’re learning are students who stay engaged in what they’re learning. And engaged students stay in school.

• Knowing how to research does not mean you know how to think

Word.

So how do we change research so students have to know how to think in order to be successful? And how on earth do you teach someone to think?

• Once students find information, it’s now up to teachers to show them how to do something with it; we need to put ourselves back in that process.

This goes to the root of the whole “research is not thinking” issue; we need to be working with teachers on the WHOLE process, not just send them back to the classroom once they’ve gathered information.

• K-12 schools and colleges/universities need to work together; better trained teachers create better undergraduate students.

If nothing else, naked self-interest means that librarians in K-12 schools need to communicate with colleges about what new teachers (many of whom are not information literate themselves) need to know.

• You are no longer amazing just because you taught a kid how to use a database

Students can find information. That part of the process keeps getting easier, frankly. What they do with the information? That part will never be easy.

I also really liked several of the points Valerie Diggs of Chelmsford High School presented.

• It is very difficult to move teachers away from “information regurgitation” projects

So, so difficult. Part of that is because that’s how they’ve always done things, and part of it is, I think, because teachers think students need to master “the basics” before they can do more “advanced” research. Except a) students are bored to death by these projects, and so b) they don’t learn anything either basic or advanced. So we do another “information regurgitation” project. . .

• We need to focus less on finding and evaluating sources, more on how they use the information they find

This was reassuring to hear, and I think ties into the point Dr. Loertscher made about teaching kids to use a database. Finding an evaluating sources is important, but it can’t be the core of what we do.

The final presenter was Ellysa Stern Cahoy, a librarian at Penn State.

• We’re teaching skills students think they already know

Anybody who has ever tried to teach anybody anything can relate to this idea. No matter how little they actually know, students are convinced they know everything about the research process (and sometimes everything about the topic they’re researching). The challenge of over-confidence is particularly tricky, as researching requires resiliency, and you need some confidence in order to be resilient enough to make it through the research process—never mind sharing what you’ve learning with a larger audience.

• How does the research make it into the final product? Students find good information, but they don’t integrate it

I cannot tell you how many times a student has told me that it doesn’t really matter if the information is correct on the five other sources on their Works Cited, ‘cause they got all the information from one source. In order to get students to integrate information , we need to rethink the entire research process; right now each step is not clearly tied to what comes next in a causal way. It’s find your sources and then evaluate them and then take notes and then etc. In a way we need to take students to the final project and then show them how to scaffold back to where they need to start; they need to see how each part ties into every other part, rather than viewing each step as discrete and disjointed.

• How do you keep the fun of technology from interfering with the critical thinking process?

I’ve seen students spend more time selecting images for the cover page of a report (a cover page that is rarely if ever required) than doing the research for that report. I’ve seen them spend more time on backgrounds and text effects for a PowerPoint than creating actual content for the slides. Add in the possibility of video clips or sound effects and critical thinking goes right out the window.

The title of this post is a reference to a quote I recently discovered (and have been unable to find authoritative attribution for): "Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad." This, as I see it, is the big shift in information literacy instruction at every level of schooling. Finding out that a tomato is a fruit is no longer the point; knowing what to do (and what not to do) with the tomato is the point.

Apparently, a lack of planning on your part does constitute an emergency on my part

I know it's been a while since I've written a post with much substance--there are many reasons for that, of varying levels of validity. It's been "research season" at school, which means I'm busier than usual (and more brain dead than usual when I do have down time). I've also been putting together a presentation for a grant proposal I wrote about increasing the availability of assistive tech on campus; that happened on Tuesday, and I should know the final decision on it in mid-June. And I've been working on the Summer Reading program (which I will write more about later). So it's not that I haven't had anything to say; it's just that--as anyone who's talked to me in real life in the past few weeks can tell you--sentence formation has not been my strong suit.

There is one significant issue I've been grappling with, and it's one I'm regularly confronted with, particularly when there are a lot of research papers and projects going on; I've resisted writing about it for many reasons, but mostly because not only do I not have a sense of what the right answer is, I'm not sure I know what my right answer is.

One of my guiding principles is that I won't do research for students. I will show students where to search. I will help students devise search terms. I will guide them in effective database usage. I will try--and mostly fail--to clearly explain the difference between keywords and subject headings. I will resist the urge to wail and gnash my teeth (at least openly) when a student refuses to believe me when I tell them that search engines and databases don't understand natural language (and remain patient when a student asks why I just don't invent one that does, as it would make life easier). I will sit next to a student as long as necessary to help them find the sources they need and cite them properly. I will keep my hand off the damn mouse and let them do the work.

But I will not do the research for the student.

Unless.

All of my principles and beliefs work just fine when students start the research process when they're supposed to, and come for help (for which I am readily and frequently available, and routinely rearrange my schedule to provide), and ask for help once they're run into a dead end. None of my principles and beliefs work at all when a student (or, a couple times this semester, their parent) comes to me less than 24 hours before a paper is due, hopelessly lost about what they need or where to find it.

I want to do exactly what I do with other students--sit them down at a computer, put their hand on the mouse, and walk them through the research process. But that whole process takes time. And when a student is in the middle of a full-scale-freakout, the last thing they have is the time or patience needed to do research. And so that is the point at which I often end up taking over the mouse and finding resources for (or, I like to delude myself, with) a student. I say "click here, click here, print this, here's the source you need." I try and throw in some incidental instruction, but I know none of that sticks. And it drives me crazy.

In those moments I want to be able to say, with a clear conscience, "I'm sorry, but you've waited too long." It hardly seems right that the students who didn't plan and didn't make the effort get the most research "help." And I know, in the long term, that the students who plan properly and start early and actually learn research skills will be better off, academically, in the long run. And I know, in the long term, that students who don't develop these skills in high school will reap the consequences of poor planning and researching skills. Or they won't. 'Cause chances are there will always be someone like me who is willing to compromise their principles in order to help students find information. Because that is, after all, another core principle of librarianship.

Trying to hold the line between teaching students and doing the research for them becomes infinitely more difficult any time the process involves a) tears b) irate parents or c) both. And anything I can do to neutralize tears or parents is, in that moment, the right choice. Because as much as I would like to be able to tell students that they've waited too long and will need to throw themselves at the mercy of their teachers, that is not a viable option.

But here's the thing that I think rankles most about this whole issue. The students who wait to the last minute and come to me in a panic? The students who demand resources--usually late at night--immediately if not sooner? The students who, by some measures, get the most help? Also the students least likely to say thank you.

If I'm going to compromise my principles for you, the least you could do is show a little gratitude.