Doing the MINI:(Meaningful, Immediate, and Needed Instruction): Thinking Outside the One-Shot Instruction Session

Abstract

Academic librarians have been struggling for years to get away from the one-shot instruction session. When an opportunity to work with a classroom instructor presents itself, librarians should be prepared to discuss alternatives to this type of instruction. One possibility for avoiding one-shot instruction is the MINI: meaningful, immediate, and needed instruction. Rather than try to squeeze several information literacy concepts into a one-shot class or pack several hours of instruction into SOC130: Comparative Societies, an undergraduate course at the University of Kansas, five MINI sessions are scheduled to occur throughout the semester. The librarian and instructor work together to identify five critical points of need when students need library and research skill instruction. The MINI sessions are intensely focused and occur at the beginning of a class session lasting up to 25 minutes.

This poster session will describe the consultation process between librarian and instructor for SOC130: Comparative Societies. Working from the class research project, the librarian and instructor determined that students would benefit from instruction over 1)-searching techniques; 2)-information management; 3)-citation software; 4)-critical evaluation; and 5)-plagiarism and citation style review. The poster will include detailed descriptions of each MINI session and will describe how the MINI's fit within the broader course content. Additionally, information literacy standards, objectives, and expected outcomes will be applied to the MINI sessions’ content and the class research project. This instruction model could work well for librarians looking to collaborate more with classroom faculty or could spark ideas for thinking outside of the usual one-shot instruction session.