Reflective Blog No. 2: Instructional Strategy

Determining the instructional strategy that will be tested in both the non-technology and technology enabled assignment was a lot more difficult than I imaged it would be. As I pondered why I was having so much trouble, I determined there were several factors making my task hard to do.

First of all, although I've "taught" many library instruction sessions, I'm realizing that I have never approached these sessions with any sort of formal lesson plan. Rather, I've always approached these sessions as outreach where my primary task was promoting the library, its services, and vast number of resources. Having never put together a formal lesson plan has proved to be more daunting than I'd like to admit.

Secondly, after completing my Theory of Action diagram for my previous blog, I realized that the scale of my action plan was more appropriate for an entire course as opposed to a single lesson. So even before beginning to piece together my plan, I've learned that its scope is important. But this really shouldn't have been a surprise. The first step to doing action research as outlined in Action Research: An Educational Leader's Guide to School Improvement (Glanz, 2003) is "select a focus" (p. 24).

So what will my focus be? This question must be answered before I can attempt to address my instructional strategy. As someone who has approached teaching in a  much less formal manner, I am not accustomed to this amount of planning. But as planning is just as important as focus as stated by the Heath brothers, authors of Made to Stick, "The planning process forces people to think through the right issues" (Heath & Heath, 2007).

Based on the need to focus, I've changed the direction of my lesson plan. Instead of the following learning objective: To find scholarly articles on an education-related topic by constructing a successful search strategy in ERIC using controlled vocabulary, truncation, and Boolean operators; I am going to design lesson plans with this new objective in mind: Students should be able to (1) identify scholarly journal articles based on their characteristics, (2) differentiate between scholarly and poplar journals, and (3) locate scholarly journals using an online research databases.

Now that I've selected a focus, I can determine the instructional strategy that I plan to use. For the non-technology based assignment, students will be presented with approximately twelve characteristics of scholarly journal articles. They will also be presented with the characteristics of trade and professional journals as well as popular periodicals. Finally, they will be shown how to locate these types of journal articles using online journal article databases. Their assignment will be to select a research topic and to find one scholarly journal article, one article from a trade journal, and one article from a magazine on their chosen topic. They must identify the similarities and, most importantly, the differences between the scholarly journal article and the articles from the trade journal and the popular periodical by simply marking/highlighting the printed articles themselves.

For the technology enabled assignment, I will also have the students select a research topic and find one scholarly journal article, one article from a trade journal, and one article from a magazine on their chosen topic. But instead of simply marking the printed articles, I plan to use one of the data collection tools highlighted in Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works. The second technology I plan to incorporate is summarizing/note taking using organizing and braining storming software also highlighted in the text. At first glance, the example that seems most fitting is the character trait note-taking template created in Inspiration which could easily be adapted to capture the characteristics of each journal article type.

Why did I chose these two instructional strategies? For two reasons: (1) Because they have the largest average effect size on student achievement as reported in Figure 3 (Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn & Malenoski, 2007); and (2) because they complement the lesson plan and desired learning outcome. I was excited to learn more about guided note taking and the affect have on students' achievement. According to Konrad, Joseph, & Itoi, guided notes "[have] been found to improve the accuracy of students' notes, increase the frequency of student responses, and improve students' quiz and test performance" (p. 131).


Konrad, M., Joseph, L. M., & Itoi, M. (2011). Using Guided Notes to Enhance Instruction for All Students.  Intervention in School and Clinic, 46, 3, 131-140.

Pitler, H., Hubbell, E. R., Kuhn, M., Malenoski, K. (2007). Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works. Denver, CO: Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning.

*****