Teaching

I love teaching, and teaching in spaces in-between or with folks from outside the library is where I’m most comfortable. The items below demonstrate my approach to teaching and course session preparation.


At Mount Holyoke College, we work with faculty and students on using eportfolios in a wide variety of courses and disciplines. I love learning how to teach about new-to-me concepts.

ePortfolio as a tool for curating a professional online persona in the 21st century

Note: This story originally appeared on the Mount Holyoke College LITS web site, in the Teaching with LITS showcase. I love seeing all the things my colleagues are doing with faculty and students. “What do you find when you Google yourself?” “What experiences are you most proud of?” “Who do you want to find you when they search for you online?” These are some of the questions students grappled with during an eportfolio creation sprint in fall 2016. Library, Information and Technology Services (LITS) staff Nick Baker, Megan Brooks, and Caro Pinto partnered with Nexus Director and Professor of Sociology Eleanor Townsley to offer aRead More →


While at Wellesley College, a colleague and I revamped how we approached teaching library instruction and statistical analysis for the same course, Econometrics. First, we both participated in workshopping our courses. Next, we taught our sessions using what we each learned in those individual workshopping sessions. Finally, we pitched this coordinated approach to instruction to other faculty members.

When tried and true doesn’t work any longer: workshopping library instruction

Note: This was originally published on my personal blog. I enjoy puzzling through tricky teaching conundrums in small groups. What may seem obvious to someone else can be a breath of fresh air to me. This session included 5 research & instruction librarians and an instructional technologist who had a high level of comfort and trust with one another. I remain thrilled with the outcome of this workshopping. There comes a time in many instruction librarians’ careers when all of a sudden, it’s really obvious that what they’ve been doing in a class just isn’t cutting it any longer. Maybe there’s a new faculty memberRead More →

Course workshopping: library instruction for econometrics

Note: This was originally published on my personal blog. What follows is my personal reflection on the course workshopping session I described in another post. We pitched this example of coordinated instruction to faculty as described in this post. Last week I wrote about the course workshopping my team did over the summer, to revamp how we teach particular library instruction sessions. In that post, I promised to write about how that course workshopping changed what I was doing with ECON 203: Econometrics, a mid-level, required course for all economics majors at Wellesley. Here’s what the old instruction session looked like: I went to each sectionRead More →

Coordinated instruction for econometrics

Note: This was originally published in the Research & Instruction Showcase on the Wellesley College LTS web site. This was what came out of 2014’s course workshopping. All students majoring in economics at Wellesley are required to take ECON 203: Econometrics, with 3 sections offered every semester. A research and instruction librarian and instructional technologist have long been involved in supporting this course. In Fall 2014, with enthusiastic agreement from the faculty, we changed in-class instruction to better prepare the students to tackle their semester-long group projects. In the library session, students would be asked to consider an existing study and figure out how andRead More →


When teaching first year writing students, I experimented with using physical library objects in order to lay a framework for students to understand a part of the online library environment. Included below are both a sample lesson plan and a post describing the method to faculty.

Learning to identify sources: a short lesson plan

Note: This was originally published on my blog, librarygrrrl.net. I repost it here as a companion to the post describing it for a faculty audience. A couple of days ago, on a list I follow, someone posted a link to “Just what am I looking at?” from the Distant Librarian. The person was wondering if anyone had any ideas about how to “unflatten” the online world for students. It reminded me of an article Barbara Fister wrote called Rebundling the Unbundled Article. A recent Project Information Literacy report – How Freshmen Conduct Research Once They Enter College – find that “many freshmen were unfamiliar with the formatsRead More →

Introducing first year writing students to scholarly, trade, & popular sources

Note: This was originally published in the Research & Instruction Showcase on the Wellesley College LTS web site. Students in this session reported feeling more confident about their ability to contextualize online sources after examining physical sources. First year students often do not know to differentiate between scholarly journal articles, popular magazine and news articles, and publications from trade journals or magazines when doing research. In an increasingly online research environment, this challenge is magnified because articles of all sorts are “unbundled” from their tables of contents and other articles in the same issue. Students in two first-year writing courses, Environmental Ethics in Christian TraditionsRead More →
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