The No-Demonstration Class, Or, Not

Wow, it’s been pretty quiet around here.  I’m sorry about that; the semester got kind of busy.

So what have I been working on this semester?  Well, to begin with, I made a real effort to move toward fewer database demonstrations in my instruction sessions. A lot of the one-shot instruction sessions that I do, after I consult with the faculty member about what their students need in order to succeed on their assignments, end up with the same basic pattern:

  1. Practice turning a topic phrase (e.g., “reducing juvenile delinquency through after-school sports programs”) into a Boolean1 search string (e.g., “juvenile delinquency AND (sports OR athletics)”).
  2. Basics of the user interface for whatever the relevant database is for the class. Because of the way our database subscriptions are configured, 9.5 times out of ten, it’s an EBSCO database.
  3. Locating the full text of an article, whether online, in print, or via Interlibrary Loan. Our link resolver, she does not have the most intuitive UI design in the world.

Now, in the corners of Information Literacy Instruction Land where I hang out, the conventional wisdom is:

  • Students learn better by doing than by being told.
  • Today’s 18-22-year-old college student is pretty darned good at figuring out online interfaces.
  • Therefore, they can, and should, do better by figuring out how to search a database on their own.

And thus was born the Holy Grail of database instruction: The No-Demonstration Class. No more standing in front of the class and futilely waving your hands at the projector screen! No more “click here, type here, and don’t forget this radio button!”  Student-directed, active learning!  Hands-on practical practice!  Social learning, because they do this in groups!

Different librarian instructors handle this differently: some turn the students loose from the get-go and gradually move them from their inevitable initial Googling into more and more specialized resources, while others give them a head start by pointing them to the library databases to start with. Some have the students present what they’ve found to the class after a certain amount of time spent fumbling around, and have the rest of the class critique the search strategies that  are presented, moving towards more and more sophisticated strategies.  Some provide more structure; some less; and some none at all.  All of them report dynamic, engaged, actively-learning classrooms, instead of classrooms full of snoozing, texting, Facebooking students.

Sounds great, right?  Of course it does! So I had to try it out for myself, and since so many of my classes seem to devolve into “how to search EBSCO databases,” and since I’m relatively comfortable with completely unstructured chaos in the classroom, I figured, what better opportunity to try it out?

Now, I should start by saying that I didn’t exactly jump in with both feet.  We still started the class with a brief discussion and exercise (in pairs) on constructing keyword searches.  I have enough experience with my students to know that, if we didn’t cover this ground first, I’d be turning students loose who would just do this to the poor unsuspecting database:

using an entire phrase as a keyword search

Or this:

single keyword search with a far too general keyword

Or, heaven help them, this:

What would this search retrieve, exactly? I don't even know.

So we went through the Boolean part of the lesson plan, and then I got them into pairs or groups, sent them to Academic Search Premier, and turned them loose with one of the two search strings we worked on in class — which were derived from their own topics, not “canned” topics that I had brought into class. And…

…it kind of bombed.

What did they do? Well, they dutifully went to the database, input the search more or less as one would expect, got some results, and were promptly done.

What did I expect them to do, based on what I’d heard from other librarians was happening in their classrooms? Well, for one thing, I’d expect them to look at their search results a little more carefully than just long enough to say, “oh, there’s an article that looks good.”  Maybe notice that a lot of their results were from, say, the New York Times and think twice about why that might have happened.  I’d hope that they’d explore the interface a little, poke around, try some options, discover the limiters (limit to peer-reviewed articles, limit by date, etc.).  Heck, even making a gonzo mistake like searching by subject heading right off the bat would be good, if only because it would make a useful example to talk about with the rest of the class.

But instead, they did what they were told: no less, certainly, but also no more.

Why didn’t it work as well for me as it clearly does for many other librarians?  I really don’t know.  It’s absolutely possible — even probable — that it’s something in the way I’m presenting the task that constrains them.  Either I need to give them more direction, or less, or different directions.  It’s convenient (and plausible) to blame the existing classroom dynamics that have developed between the faculty member and the students over the course of the semester.2  It’s also convenient to blame a campus culture that is not especially hands-on, experimental, techy, or DIY (our campus is kind of the opposite of MIT). Some of the campuses where, anecdotally, I hear about the No-Demonstration Class working very well, have more of those hands-on qualities as part of their campus cultures.

So what can I do to improve on the situation?  I can’t really change the existing classroom dynamic between students and the teaching faculty member, nor can I change the campus culture.  The only thing I can change is how I approach the lesson: how I frame the activity, what I tell the students as I turn them loose, what specific prompts and questions I direct them to answer (or not).  That’s clearly where I’m falling down, and where I could use some help.  Ideally, I’d go visit a bunch of campuses where librarians are teaching this way and see how they do it, but that’s clearly not practical (hellooooo, sabbatical project!).

In the absence of a grand cross-continent tour, then, I’ll have to ask for suggestions: How do you make this work in your classroom?  What has worked for you — and not worked?  How do I get my charmingly dutiful students to break out of their constraints and experiment a little bit?


  1. I never use the word “Boolean” in class. Ever.
  2. We know that whatever dynamic and form of instruction the faculty member has established for a class will be the form of instruction that, when the students arrive in the library, they are most comfortable with. If the faculty member lectures, they’ll be most comfortable with a librarian lecturing at them, and uncomfortable with active group work.  And vice versa.

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