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Teaching Teachers How to become Learners

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Posted on Monday, August 1, 2016

This week, Westminster College faculty members took a step off campus to offer best-practice teaching insights at the PA Forward Information Literacy Summit.

Eloise Stevens, assistant professor and instruction & outreach librarian, and Diana Reed, lecturer of education, presented “What Kind of Teacher Do You Want to Be? Professional Information Literacy in the First-Year College Classroom.”

“Many students are career oriented and begin college thinking about their life after they leave,” said Stevens. “We want to ensure students are learning in that process.”

At the summit, the pair answered the question, “How can students’ experiences in the library help them to develop professional learning skills that future teachers need?”

“Our goal is for Westminster College education students to begin to think of themselves as teachers and as life-long learners in their initial foundations courses,” said Reed. “We take that opportunity to foster the collaboration between the instructor and librarian – to teach the necessary tools for foundational information literacy skills.”

In their research, Stevens and Reed found that a strong foundation in information literacy means that students entering the field of teaching are prepared to use those skills to conduct required action research in their own classrooms, to foster those skills with their students, and to adopt a lifelong learning mindset to become an innovative educator.

The summit was administered by the PA Department of Education and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Tom Wolf, governor through the College Research Division of PaLA.

For more information about the research, contact Stevens at stevente@westminster.edu or Reed at reedd@westminster.edu. Visit www.westminster.edu/education to learn more about the education program.