Research Guides: College Writing Information Literacy Toolkit: Lesson Plans and Activities

Lesson Plans

These are sample lesson plans you and your partner may wish to use to plan your visits. Please feel free to adapt to your needs, mix and match, or create new lesson plans and activities. These are not perfect and could definitely use some tweaking. Please share how you adapted these to your own instruction!

Lesson Plan Template
Blank lesson plan template. Click to open.
Two-Visit Lesson Plan
Click to open. This lesson plan outlines two visits - one 15-20 minute initial visit; one 50 minute visit.
Three-Visit Lesson Plan
Click to open. This lesson plan outlines three visits - one 15-20 minute; and two 50 minute visits.
Four-Visit Lesson Plan
Click to open. This lesson plan outlines four visits - one 15-20 minute visit; and three 50 minute visits.

Teaching Methods

Warm Up Session Ideas
Ideas to warm up the semester, gaining better understanding of and building relationships with the assigned CW1 section. 5-20 minute sessions.
Lightning Rounds
Short 5-7 minute explanations or discussions about a library service or resource. Invite the librarian to your class anytime and multiple times a semester for quick lightning round talks that will be useful to their current assignment.
Process Cards
Here is the link to the activity explanation: http://kevinseeber.com/processcards.pdf
I added a process here - authority. You can add or delete as you'd like!

150 Teaching Methods (opens in a new window)
List of teaching methods from UNC Charlotte.
Best Practices Teaching College (opens in a new window)
List of best practices from UNC Charlotte.

Pro tip: These worksheets could also be used as formative assessments. Collect them after the class is over to gage student learning, see what you need to follow up on in the next session, or what the faculty member could reiterate for you after the session.

Search Strategies + Research Log
4 Square Search Log
Learning Situation Quiz
This is a sample worksheet (trust me the questions aren't very good). Use it to spark ideas as to how to get students thinking about possible solutions to problems that may arise in the course of their research project.
Research Exercise 1: Where to Search, Finding Sources
Kris' notes: Pre-assignment to illustrate the differences among databases. This document is also an instructor’s adaptation and augmentation to the assignment.
Search Source Comparison
Kris' Notes: Another pre-assignment to illustrate the differences among databases
Previewing an Article #1
Shorter version.
Previewing an Article #2
More in depth questions.
Previewing a Source Book

Pro tip: Adapt these real-life lesson plans to your needs. Reach out to the instructor/librarian to see what worked and what didn't. Most importantly, share your own! Write up how to conduct the lesson and send it to helbling@wustl.edu.

Library Search Strategies
Amanda Albert + Rachel Adams
This lesson plan is from the 3rd class Amanda spent with Rachel's section. It involves interactive search strategies and a worksheet you can adapt to your needs
Scholarly Party Lesson Plan
Amanda Albert + Rachel Adams
This lesson plan engages students in small groups as they talk about an article and its place in the scholarly conversation. The handout guides students to think about how to do research so that they engage with multiple facets of a scholarly convo.
Citation Mapping Lite
Amanda Albert + Nathaniel Farrell
This lesson took place on the second visit to Nathaniel's class. Students engaged in discussion about what makes an article important within the scholarly conversation, then used a worksheet to guide them through citation mapping/linking. This showed them a new way of thinking about the scholarly conversation and research.
Evaluating Information
Amanda Albert + Lawrence Revard
This lesson plan engages students in small groups, asking them to describe the creation process of specific types of information (wikis, scholarly articles, blogs, etc). Then, students talk about the information they've found already and why they chose it or what criteria they used to evaluate it.
Day 1) Primary and Secondary sources/ working with primary sources
Karen Robinson + Megan Allen
Notes from Karen:
Listening to a music example, talking about the landscape it evokes, the political context in which it was composed, etc. Since we were outdoors, I had them write down their ideas on post-its, discuss in small groups, and decide on a group answer to stick on a poster board with the discussion question on it.
Day 2) Scholarly & non-scholarly sources
Karen Olson + Megan Allen
Notes from Karen:
Defined scholarly and non-scholarly in terms of peer review; asked students to define peer review (some did it in high school, so they were familiar with the concept). Divided into groups, gave each group an article, asked them to decide scholarly or non-scholarly and why: one article was from a popular magazine, one from a
scholarly journal, one from Wikipedia, and one from a trade journal.
For the regular writing I class, the articles were about the 1904 World’s Fair; for the Environment class, they were about Wendell Berry, one of their authors for that day
Passed out a handout from UC-Davis libraries about scholarly vs non-scholarly periodicals highlighting the points they mentioned in discussion.
Day 3) Intro to searching the libraries’ webpage and catalogs; keywords vs. subject searches
Karen Olson + Megan Allen
*Document includes lesson plan and worksheet
Notes from Karen:
Took them to the library’s homepage and Ran a keyword search on a topic relevant to that day’s readings in the catalog
Discussed useful things about the catalog
Divided into pairs; each pair had a quick worksheet to fill-out searching a given topic (see attached)
Topics included: 1904 World’s Fair, zombie movies, chocolate as medicine, music in cartoons, and tourism in Antarctica

Library-Related Activities

Pro tip: A librarian doesn't have to be present to talk about information literacy in your classroom. Take a look at some sample activities and adapt these to your everyday classes.

Source Comparison: Students identify how information is effected by the different formats in which it is presented.
- Locate various source types about the same topic: a popular magazine article, a scholarly article, a newspaper article, and/or blog post on the same subject. Compare the sources for content, style, bias, audience, etc.
Source Comparison: Students explore how various scholars or authors discuss the same topic.
- Select a topic and compare how that topic is treated in two to five different scholarly sources, or two to five different popular sources.
Disciplinary Topic Analysis: Students discuss how a discipline treats a specific topic.
- Based on the disciplines represented by students' topics, have the students analyze the content, style, and audience of three journals in a given discipline.
Authority Analysis: Students delve into one scholar's work identifying evolution of thought and contribution to the field.
- Select a scholar/researcher in a field of study and explore that person's career and ideas. Besides locating biographical information, students prepare a bibliography of writings and analyze the reaction of the scholarly community to the researcher's work.
Website Analysis: Students use their existing knowledge to identify criteria in which they judge information credible or not. They apply this knowledge to their own academic work.
- Evaluate a website based on specific criteria. Work with students to identify evaluative criteria. Then have them evaluate websites based on this criteria.
Reading a Bibliography: Students use a bibliography to expand on their research processes and find information more efficiently.
- Show students how to read a bibliography, and explain why it is useful.
  - Can they decipher a citation? How do you know if it’s a book or an article?
  - If it is an article, how would you track it down? By pointing out a book, chapter, or article’s bibliography, the instructor models how finding one useful source can lead to others.

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