A new university job means new classes and new students. Working at a satellite campus focused on health sciences is different than a more traditional campus — we only have one building where everything is located. Our library is small, but because we’re only an elevator ride or flight of stairs away from classrooms, it’s much easier to mingle with faculty and to get to know students.
Thankfully, the graduate programs I’m assigned to are used to incorporating library instruction into their courses. I met with new physical therapy doctoral students as part of their orientation to the program, and had 2-hour sessions with students during their first week of class to introduce them to search skills for medical resources.
I’ve tried to make the search skills sessions my own, incorporating a pre-/post-test to measure their comfort with searching databases, and to see what they’ve gleaned from my sessions. And while the first sessions only had an outline handout to help students know what I’d cover, I developed slides to discuss how to build search strings, to help students learn the concepts before we started comparing searches in databases. Now that most of my instruction is done for the semester, I look forward to working with students on their assignments as they apply what we covered in our sessions.