College and Career Ready?

As librarians, we all want desperately to get students doing real research. We long for someone to truly collaborate with us, rather than just schedule the room and give us a few courtesy minutes to help direct students to good resources. There are a few brave teachers out there (thank you!) who are doing just that. I would like to encourage more of it, especially in light of what it can teach students. When students do real research, they learn to be persistent, an important characteristic of successful people. When students do real research, they learn to consult multiple sources and analyze them, not just copy and paste. When students do real research, they actually learn about their topic, and they also learn how to find information and evaluate that information. All these skills are part of the 21st Century Skills set as well as many other lists of things that students need to know to be successful post high school. Read this article from Inside Higher Ed, to see how one professor discovered something that librarians have always known. Here's hoping that more and more teachers are willing to do the same. However, unless librarians are advertising they may not even know what is possible, so keep working on building relationahships and branding to keep the library on teachers' minds.