How They Learn/How You Teach: Building Library Instruction Sessions for Multiple Learners

This session will introduce participants to a variety of cognitive and learning styles and help identify practical strategies for appealing to the broadest range of student learning. Particular attention will be given to the challenges inherent to teaching hands-on workshops in wired classrooms. Strategies for coping with these challenges will be introduced and then discussed in small groups. Progressive educational reform movements that emphasize student-centered learning encourage librarians to challenge some of their instructional assumptions. Librarians are increasingly realizing both the importance of their teaching role and the imperative of undertaking a critical re-evaluation of their instructional practices. Simply providing information is not sufficient for satisfying the learning needs of users. Librarians must understand not only what students learn but also how students learn. This session bridges the two LOEX conference themes of Working with New Technologies and Environments and Changing Needs of Our Users by suggesting that an understanding of current research on multiple learning and cognitive styles facilitates a learner-centered focus to information literacy in changing technological environments. Participants will be introduced to the concepts of multiple learning and cognitive styles as well as current research in these fields as it relates to library instruction. A short demonstration will guide a group discussion of how these concepts can be applied to library instruction sessions. Finally, participants will receive tangible methods of how their new understandings of multiple learning and cognitive styles can be applied to their own instructional experiences