Bishop’s University
Information Literacy and Critical Thinking
(ILT)
 History of IL at Bishop’s
 Human Resources
 Course design and evaluation
 Classroom management
 Final thoughts
History of IL at Bishop’s
Specialized instruction sessions
IL 101: Information Literacy and Critical
thinking. (ILT)
Making it mandatory! Education and
Business
Growth since…history, modern languages,
sociology?
Human Resources
 Teaching 3 sections at 12 hours per
semester has been manageable.
 Support from management very important
as certain other duties needed to been given
lower priority
 Union issues.
 If the programme grows I foresee
 HR issues.
Course design and evaluation
Syllabus
Moodle
Things I try to bear in mind
 Am I teaching or demonstrating?
 Are these assignments helping them express to me how
much they know?
Are they learning anything? Are they
paying attention?
 Be careful in how I phrase a question. What do I want to know?

Is it too easy? If it can be misinterpreted, it will be.
 Try to engage the students (thanks WILU). Fact is, whether
we like it or not, students want to be entertained.
Try to avoid the hour-long lecture.
Classroom Management
 Day one: set tone. (review Syllabus)
 Know your “audience” – elective or
mandatory? First year?
 Try to avoid lecturing…
 Plagiarism (find any excuse to talk about
it and warn them about the consequences).
 E-classroom. The ugly truth about teaching
in an e-classrooms (LANschool).
 Ahhhh, the excuses…
Classroom Management
 It’s true what they say: Give them an inch….
Think before granting extensions, good news travels fast.
 Student comments (evaluations)
Content and/or teaching style not exciting enough (?)
Student participation
Too hard? too easy?
“I learned all this in CEGEP”
 In some ways, University is an extension of High School…peer
pressure, apathy, stress, idealism. In many ways, University is where
we learn important life lessons.
 Don’t be discouraged. Don’t ignore the silent majority.
Final thoughts…..
 Questions….
 Biggest challenges?
 Motivating students
 Striking healthy balance with my other duties
 Confronting students (plagiarism/cheating,
lateness (for class and assignments), goofing
off during class.
 Weaning them from their dependence on the
Web.
Good luck in September!!!
My philosophy on Information literacy?
An information literacy course is like high school sex ed. Class....
They’re going to be doing it anyway (research, that is) it’s nice
get in there and show them how to do it right, even though
they think they know it all.