When determining what to teach students, a teacher must evaluate the skills related the topic. When a teacher comes to a librarian for help, it is important to know what skills the students need to learn, what skills you can teach, what skills the teacher will teach, and what can be taught together.

The following is scenario from Chameleon High School. The teacher English teacher approached me, the librarian, a few days before break asking for help in teaching the skill of how to evaluate information and resources. He had recently given them a pre-test to determine how fluent they were in evaluating sources and information, and had dismal results.

The class of twelve high school seniors, including two ESL and two SPED students, needs help to know what good resources look like and how to tell if information is reliable. It is just after Thanksgiving. We have four weeks until winter break and not only do the students have an early case of senioritis, but they also do not think that these weeks should be filled with anything too complicated because it’s dead week times four, right?

The English teacher and I spend the work day before Thanksgiving break working through what lessons need to be taught and who is teaching which lesson. I block off the time in the library for the four weeks, and buckle down to figure out where to start. The first thing I do is look at the pre-assessment that he gave the students in Monday. Form there, I can come up with a game-plan for improving the student's information skills and maybe even teach them a few new tricks in the process. (Who says you can't teach Seniors new tricks?)