In collaboration with an Advanced Placement (AP) Seminar teacher, my partner librarian and I created a lesson on databases as well as a bookmark for students to use at home. AP Seminar is a research-based class, and the teacher indicated that students were struggling with using databases because of the difference in searching compared to Google. They also had trouble designing their questions, selecting keywords, and knowing how to gather appropriate sources. The lesson was designed to provide both instruction and research time with two librarians and their teacher on hand to answer questions and provide guidance.

The lesson began with a Google Slides presentation that included a review of our county-wide research model (eWISE - Wonder, Investigate, Synthesize, and Express while evaluating at every step) and the table top activity asking students to match research problems with their potential source. Then students used sticky notes to come up with keywords related to their topic and to engage their neighbors for collaborative brainstorming if they wanted. After a guided exploration of the library's Research Zone as well as a few key features of databases, students engaged in powersearching, a strategy to locate a significant number of quality sources for later examination. Throughout the lesson, students were engaged and working hard, and many of them expressed that the session had been helpful for them. In fact, in the weeks since this lesson, many have come back for refreshers, to ask specific questions, and even to share their success stories. We also gave students a bookmark I designed that reminded them of the search strategies we'd shared and the passwords for using the databases at home (on the image presented here, the passwords have been blacked out because they cannot be shared digitally). The lesson covered issues such as citing sources appropriately, evaluating information, and identifying keywords, all of which are essential to ethical research.