"I give them what they need."

I was reading The Librarian as Bibliotherapist today and really found that I liked some of the ideas in this article. The most difficult part of doing this sort of technique I believe, is that it makes it difficult to create a standards based lesson plan where you ensure that students at a certain level have the opportunity to truly learn and practise certain information literacy standards.

That doesn't mean that I disapprove of the idea of asking students what they want and working with more personalization. I actually love the idea of a discussion based library class room and have done something similar in the honors classroom. The problem certainly comes down to one of time and how best to ensure that the basics are presented, but students still have the opportunity to ask for specifics to their research.

The hardest part of setting certain standards for a class, is that in a general research writing class there is such a variety of topics, it can be difficult to hit the important aspects of research for each student. Some standard must be given to make the assignments uniform, but for some students a book will not be nearly so useful as a journal article or vice versa.

Relevance is hugely important, but can be extremely time consuming, so the challenge then is to somehow create relevance, and teach standards while doing so. That is no easy challenge really.