Reclassifying

Historic Monterey

It was raining in yoga class this morning. Literally. Our instructor named the downpour, “the sacred fountain.” I like that: reclassifying a leaking, rain-soaked roof into a source of joy.

Later this morning, in “Research is Not a Straight Line: Effectively Teaching Search” we learned to reclassify our instructional disasters. When your keyword search turns up something unexpected during an instructional demonstration, cheerfully remark, “How fascinating!” This provides two opportunities: first, it buys you more time to think – how can I turn this disaster into a teachable moment? And second, when you do come up with an explanation of the results, it allows your audience to see that making mistakes is a valuable part of the process of researching. When we move away from framing our results as mistakes, we are catapulted into a discovery process that improves our search skills.  (Thank you to Tasha Bergson-Michelson for the “how fascinating!” strategy).

The first day of Internet Librarian 2013 is drawing to a close. My sessions were all engaging and worthy of further discussion. About nine hundred librarians are registered for the conference, representing 45 states and 6 countries, flooding Monterey with our presence. It’s nice to be here.

-Mrs. Eldridge