Teaching a for-credit information literacy course can be viewed as hitting “prime time” for some librarians, but the courses can be as disjointed and problematic for the instructors as one-shot sessions. Projects are a hodgepodge of student-chosen or instructor-assigned “info lit” topics that fail to underscore the biggest problems for students in research: Developing a research question and writing a paper are difficult without enough background knowledge to understand the topic. At semester’s end, instructors may be feeling discouraged and wondering what students actually learned. Solution: Start the semester analyzing one topic to build a knowledge base for discussion and research, before allowing the students to pursue individual topics related to the central theme. Suggestions for how to select a successful theme to re-energize your teaching will be discussed.
