Sticky_Info_Literacy

=A Succinct Big6=

At the beginning of this year, I resolved to put a renewed effort into teaching research and information literacy skills. Last year my emphasis was on guiding and promoting reading, but I had tried to dust off my [|Big6 materials] when some of the 4th and 5th grade teachers brought kids to the library and computer lab for research projects in the spring.

This year, I wanted to be more intentional about how I taught information literacy skills and to make sure that most (if not all) of our intermediate students had an opportunity to learn the Big6. I'm a strong believer in [|Eisenberg & Berkowitz's approach], but I had to admit that I was having trouble remembering the 12 sub-stages in their problem-solving/research model, and was really struggling with how to make those steps memorable and meaningful for kids. I opted to keep Mike & Bob's Big6 language near my desk in small print to remind //me// of the details as a taught and coached kids through the process, but I wanted to more succinct way to communicate the steps to students. Wanting them to have more detail than the Super3 (Plan, Do, Review), but not so much that it would be difficult for kids to remember, I settled on the version below:


 * **What info?** -- What information do I need?
 * **Which sources? --** Which sources might have the information?
 * **Where?** -- Where can I find those sources? (& Where will I look within the source?)
 * **Learn.**
 * **Create.**
 * **Evaluate.**

When one of the 5th grade teachers came to talk about collaborating on a project about elections, I jumped on the opportunity to start using the succinct Big6 with her kids. A few week's later, another 5th grade teacher came to show me a Florida Everglades project she was preparing to do with her students. To my surprise, at the top of the assignment, she had copied the three questions that she had seen written on the library whiteboard: What information do I need? / Which sources might have the information? / Where can I find those sources?

In //The Tipping Point//, Malcolm Gladwell talks about the "stickiness factor" of certain ideas. We'll see how the research projects go this year, but I'm hoping that maybe we've increased the chances that these information literacy skills might stick.

--Sean