Sources to Determine what Ought to be Taught (and Learned)

Turner (Philip Turner, Helping Teachers to Teach 2nd ed. (Libraries Unlimited, 1993) suggests five sources that may help to determine what ought to be taught:

1. Use established standards -- the guidelines and standards that various associations promulgate -- like
   • ACRL Guidelines for Instruction Programs
   • ACRL's Model Statement of objectives for Academic Bibliographic Instruction
   • ACRL. Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education; Standards, Performance Indicators, and Outcomes
   • Competencies for Special Librarians of the 21st Century
   • The Nine Information Literacy Standards for Student Learning from AASL's Information Power

2. Use a model based on what is being taught somewhere else
   • Source can be either "how-to-do-it" articles, visits, or website documents

3. Develop a set of requirements based on what will be needed in the future
   • Use projections and long-range planning groups.

4. Ask the population to be taught what they need/want to learn
   • Rather than use a higher authority as in first three, involve actual or potential students via questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups.

5. Listen to requests from students.
   • Sometimes students feel strongly enough that they will approach someone in authority and request that certain content be taught.

The latter two involving the learner seem like good approaches although one potential drawback is that students may not know the range of possibilities and may choose items based on short-range or immediate goals rather than long-range goals with possibly greater benefits.

We could add to this list ask the next level of authority what knowledge, skills and attitudes (KSAs) those they are responsible for should know.

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Once a list of goals is generated using any of these sources above, the next step would be to rank the goals in order of importance, then to determine whether or not the goals may have been already met and to set some priorities based on any existing constraints.

Revised 10/1/2000.