Here’s one more post drawing from the experience of the Ready for Success Summit held at Stony Brook University on March 15, 2024. The afternoon session of the day was devoted to a workshop where tables of librarians, teachers, and administrators talked over a number of different prompts. We discussed the challenges of creating engaging research activities, of finding ways to communicate within school buildings, and brainstormed other methods of getting information literacy into the classroom.
Library plan with a food station.
As a bonus prompt, we gave each table a large sheet of paper and markers and asked them to draw their dream library. A number of tables took up the challenge and we present their results here. Some groups took a more conceptual approach, drawing the library as the hub of a variety of activities that included research, project-based learning, and teacher support.
You can never have too many outlets.
Others included practical elements, from adding electrical outlets, moveable bookshelves and comfortable seating, or ensuring dedicated staff. Three drawings set aside designated space for teaching/instructional activities. This echoed stories we heard throughout the day of the need for teaching spaces separate from the hustle and bustle of other library uses.
A library isn’t a library if it isn’t properly staffed.
And one team took an affirmational approach, drawing on shared experiences of school libraries being closed or restricted at times for outside uses such as testing, interviews, or meetings. Their dream signage: “We are open today for students!”
The Ready for Success Project started in 2021 and the plan was always to culminate in some form of regional conference day to share our experiences and to provide a forum for discussing research skills at the high school level. In the early days, all of the grant team’s efforts were so focused on designing our approach, recruiting a cohort, coordinating through many on-site visits and Zoom meetings that the idea of the Summit seemed part of a very distant future.
Well, the day finally came and went, with the Ready for Success Summit taking place on Friday, March 15th at Stony Brook University. By the numbers, over 100 people attended from over 40 school districts on Long Island. We convened not only high school librarians, teachers, and administrators but colleagues from higher education, public libraries, and one professional genealogist. It was a full day and a fruitful day, with many ideas (and bags of library swag) shared among educators.
Attendees were asked to define research/research skills.
Dr. Brenda Boyer’s keynote set a strong foundation, highlighting her research with colleagues from Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information no first-year college students and their preparedness for academic-level research. She also shared her experiences with and strategies for engaging students in the classroom as a high school librarian.
Dr. Brenda Boyer delivering her keynote “Empowering Minds & Bridging Gaps: The Crucial Role of Information Literacy in High School.”
Over two panel sessions, the grant team laid out the steps of the Ready for Success Project and how a cross-disciplinary cohort of teachers and librarians can learn and work together. The goal was never to implement a strict, top-down curriculum but to let each teacher find the areas in their lessons that could be strengthened with information literacy concepts and activities. Themes that emerged included slowing down, avoiding the “dreaded research paper,” and finding smaller-stake, distributed exercises that could be practiced throughout a student’s career. Research, in short, is not just for English class.
Dr. Janet Clarke & Dr. Christine Fena (SBU Libraries) and Maureen Ryan (Brentwood HS Librarian)
Kimberly Williams, Patricia Orechovsky, Laura Pombonyo, Jessica Ullrich, and Sydney Bryan (Brentwood HS teachers)
The afternoon was spent in workshop mode as tables of attendees tackled a number of discussion prompts geared towards generating practical ideas. How do we embed research skills into more classes? How do we make research more engaging? Where can teachers, librarians and administrators talk about these things? We’ll leave for another blog post the “draw your ideal school library” prompt but suffice it to say, the conversations were thoughtful and wide ranging.
Summit attendees in the afternoon workshop session.
We want to thank everyone who attended and added their energy and enthusiasm to the day. It was truly beyond the reception that we would have anticipated back in 2021. There is without a doubt an interest across the Island in figuring out how to strengthen student research skills. Right now the grant team is deep in assessment mode, compiling the last of our data and writing up results for eventual publication but we’re committed to furthering the goals of the grant. You can subscribe to this blog for future updates and we look forward to future collaborations!
L to R: Diane Longo (Brentwood HS librarian), Dr. Dasahana Dulin (Brentwood HS principal), Angel Perez (Brentwood Coordinator of Performing and Fine Arts), Maureen Ryan (Brentwood HS librarian).
As we put the finishing touches on the Ready for Success Summit for March 15th, we’re looking back over the work we did during the full grant period. Working with the teachers and librarians at Brentwood High School has been a great experience. Early on, however, we did engage with our Stony Brook University faculty as we worked to understand the questions we were addressing.
And that meant examining our own work as academic librarians and the faculty with whom we collaborate. They were happy to talk with us about how they integrate research and library instruction into their classes and the challenges they see their students facing when doing research. What we appreciated even more was that they agreed to talk about it on video!
We compiled a series of interviews with various faculty members that we taped to show during our summer 2022 retreat. Our high school partners thus got to hear from their college counterparts about the value of research skills in the success of students beyond high school.
This is a shortened version of that video compilation and it serves as a good segue into our Summit where we will be expanding the conversation – and maybe making some more videos! Make sure you subscribe to this blog for updates.
When we were first contemplating the undertaking that became the Ready for Success project, we did what any academic librarian would do: a literature search.
Not surprisingly, there is no lack of published research on our chosen topic, namely the research skills that students take with them from high school into college. We had a lot of experience working with students at Stony Brook and we had seen what aspects of the research process they found most challenging. We wondered what their foundational knowledge. How had their high school teachers and librarians presented the range of skills and mindsets that go into what is often called “information literacy?” We were also looking for evidence of high school/college collaborations or partnerships across this “information literacy gap.”
What we found was varied and extensive. This post is not a full blown lit review but more a chance to point out a few highlights of the research we dipped into.
There are a number of studies that look at the research skills of first year college students as well as the types of research they encounter in college classes. One interesting approach to the problem looked at the assignments on class syllabi to see what professors expected of new students (Donham 2019).
Our keynote speaker, Brenda Boyer, is involved in a study out of Rutgers University looking at college students and the preparation they received in high school (Boyer & Dziedzic-Elliot 2023).
Since we knew we wanted to work with high school librarians and classroom teachers, we were interested in learning more about how they collaborated. Sarah Crary’s surveys of teachers and librarians looked at each group’s perception of the other when it came to research instruction (2019).
We also came across many case studies of successful high school teacher/librarian partnerships, ranging from librarians embedded in honors-level classes (Hamilton 2012) to shared professional development workshops (Montiel-Overal 2010).
All of this research helped inform the approach we took with our grant partners at Brentwood High School and the activities we designed over the span of the grant. We’ll be talking more in-depth about the experience and possible implications for high school research instruction at our March 15th summit at Stony Brook University (still time to register!).
And if you like research as much as we do, we thought we’d share the bibliography we compiled and continue to maintain. We’ve linked to the open source full text where available.
We are thrilled to announce that Dr. Brenda Boyer, Assistant Professor, School of Communication & Information, Rutgers University, will be the keynote speaker at the Ready for Success Summit! Her roles have included being a high school teacher librarian, consultant, instructional designer, researcher, and professor. Her most current research involves the study of first-year college students, their approach to doing research, and the impact of their exposure to information literacy skills in high school.
Dr. Brenda Boyer
The Ready for Success summit will be held Friday, March 15th at Stony Brook University. If you are a teacher, administrator, or librarian on Long Island looking to better prepare students to navigate the complex modern information landscape in college and in life, join us! Click here to register.
Misinformation. AI. Deep fakes. Paywalls. Copyright. Citation. Search algorithms. How well are your students prepared to navigate and understand the modern information landscape? Join us on Friday, March 15, 2024 at Stony Brook University for a day of presentations and discussions with teachers, librarians, and school administrators about how we prepare students with the research skills needed for high school, college, and beyond.
We are excited to spark conversations and collaborations about ensuring our students are able to thrive and succeed in an increasingly complex world of information. The Ready for Success project is a partnership between Stony Brook University Libraries and Brentwood High School designed to help embed academic research activities into the high school curriculum. This summit is funded by a generous grant from the William E. & Maude S. Pritchard Charitable Trust. Get more details.
We were honored to present on our Ready for Success project at this summer’s SUNY Librarians Association (SUNYLA) conference held on the stunning campus of SUNY Maritime College in the Bronx from June 14-16.
Speaking to a room full of college librarians, we walked them through the design of our program along with feedback from the teachers at Brentwood and our own assessments of how the project went. We even were able to include some video testimonials from cohort members that we recorded the week before.
In the discussion that followed, it was great to hear that other SUNY libraries have been addressing the high school-to-college transition in a variety of ways.
Beyond presenting, we’re also in the grand assessment phase of the project, looking back at everything that happened and sifting through all the feedback to write up a full report and plan next steps. We hope to bring that to a wider audience soon!
When Laura Pombonyo was arranging to bring her Social Work class to SBU Libraries as part of our grant program, she had a specific focus in mind. Attending our retreat over the summer had left her with a lot of research-related ideas and concepts that she thought would be of value to her students. But what she landed on for their January visit was the concept of misinformation and disinformation. She wanted to give the students a deeper understanding of where news and information comes from and how it can be manipulated, presented for specific purposes, or flat-out wrong for a variety of reasons.
Laura Pombonyo’s Social Work class.
In planning the lesson, I found The News Literacy Project to be of great help. In particular, I used parts of their “Easiest Quiz of All Time” to get students thinking about facts, fact checking, and how you know something to be true. In real time they were allowed to use any resource to answer questions like filling in the blank for Darth Vader’s famous line: “______, I am your father.” There was some consternation when many of their preconceived notions turned out to be false, but the exercise reinforced how false information is easily disseminated and how it stubbornly persists in the general consciousness.
Contemplating deep fakes.
We moved on to a discussion of lateral reading and the value of looking for context and other information outside of the source itself. Another great planning resource, the Stanford History Education Group’s Civic Online Reasoning site provided an easy-to-understand video introduction to lateral reading. After that we dove into a number of pre-chosen scenarios taken from recent headlines and the students looked for sources to help confirm, deny, or find the latest information on a given story.
Another interesting layer I was able to introduce was that of deep fakes – videos and images manipulated so seamlessly that the damaging or absurd events they depict seem authentic. Examples from current news stories were not hard to find and while you always wish you had more time, I was able to introduce the concept and get some discussion going on not believing everything that you see online.
Serendipitously, Chat-GPT had just become a topic of debate in the world as I was planning for this class. Together, we looked at some of the early reactions to Chat-GPT and its potential impact on writing and education. Showing the students a Twitter thread from an academic who had found that the software would produce authentic looking yet fictitious article citations gave us a good segue into practicing looking up citations (some of which I faked) in library databases to find corroborating full text.
In the end, this turned out to be an engaging experience all around. The students got to grapple with some concepts that are not always covered in the high school curriculum (at least not yet!). The use of real world, current examples – some of which incorporated parody accounts as well – helped make the presentation more engaging and fun. And the fact that Laura had a clear subject matter in mind yet allowed us to design the day without binding it to a specific classroom assignment provided an opportunity to try a fresh approach on a current and vital issue.
We had fun with Tracy Kohl’s 12th grade AP English Literature class on Wednesday, January 18! They are working on a project that involves choosing a well-known fairy tale, such as Cinderella or The Little Mermaid, and analyzing it by considering a variety of theoretical perspectives. Students used SBU’s databases that index scholarly articles on literary analysis, which was challenging! It was easy to find sources about the fairy tales themselves, but it became tricky when students wanted to find sources applying a particular / exact theoretical framework to the fairy tale they were interested in. They used some new searching techniques to give them more control over their search results. Students also learned that they might not find the “perfect” article, but they can learn from specific paragraphs or sections of partially relevant articles to help them better understand their topic, and also to find new sources and new perspectives.
Here are some student thoughts on what they took away from the experience:
“Though I was familiar with the databases that our school provides us, I was very intimidated about having to work with a University’s database. I came in feeling as if this would be too overwhelming to understand but realized that it really isn’t hard, especially if you have an expert there to help you. I enjoyed Christine’s encouragement to always ask for help and feel better prepared for the day I have to do my own research.”
“On the SBU trip I enjoyed learning about the different databases that were used. There was so many and they were fun to explore and mess around with to see what I was able to find. I also loved how the campus looked and it felt really nice to get a feel of how college will be like.”
“After SBU’s trip I felt like I was more informed about how to use a database, and the techniques and tricks to get the best results. Although I struggled in the beginning trying to get the results I desired, when I asked for help they were eager to assist. Now I’m aware of how influential an asterisk can be!”
As part of our Ready for Success project, we had Brentwood High School classes visit the SBU Libraries over our Winter Session for some on-site activities. Not every class was the same, though. Some had specific research projects to tackle while others were more open-ended and focused on exposing the students to research in general. An added bonus was giving them a chance to observe and experience a college campus first hand.
The open-ended classes tended to be more fun but presented an interesting challenge in the planning stage. How do you engage students for an hour and a half outside of their regular classrooms? One example was Kristi Muller’s English class. For these students, we incorporated a series of activities built around a breakout box game. We have a set of locks and boxes and various do-dads from Breakout.edu that we’ve used in various settings at SBU Libraries.
With the Brentwood class, we broke them up into groups of four, each team given a research scenario to work through. Some were given a campus map and challenged to map out a virtual itinerary featuring people and academic departments. Some had to decipher clues left in a study room in order to track down academic research in a specific subject area. And some had to assemble puzzles made out of the movable tables in our main event space.
In the end, this was a fun and engaging activity that got the students up and moving. They were able to apply research and critical thinking skills in a practical yet low-stakes setting. The feedbback we received was overwhelming positive and by planning this class, we actually picked up some ideas that we can use with our undergraduate population.
