Task Force on Teaching and Learning

I have been invited to be a member of the Provost’s Task Force on Teaching and Learning, chaired by the University Librarian, Jeff Trzeciak, and Dr. Carolyn Eyles. How cool is that? I’m sure there will be lots to say about the work of the Task Force in the months ahead (we have a broad mandate and an ambitious timeline) but suffice to say for the moment that I think it’s a very positive sign for our libraries that the University Librarian has been asked to be a co-chair. The members are incredibly enthusiastic and bring a wide variety of expertise to the table; we had a great brainstorming session at our first meeting. This is an amazing opportunity for us to highlight the role of the Library as a partner in teaching and learning on campus, and to bring attention to the need to integrate information literacy and other 21st c. fluencies into the curriculum.

Teaching Squares

McMaster University Library launched a library liaison program this Fall. Our Director of Library Liaison created guidelines for liaisons to help us achieve our key goals of

Building partnerships between liaison librarians and their assigned departments, schools or programs

Partnering to teach 21st century fluencies

Managing access to scholarly literature

Providing research consultations for faculty, graduate students and research assistants

In terms of teaching and learning, the guidelines encourage liaisons to engage in peer assessment of their teaching. I debated about implementing a peer coaching program, but in the end, we are going to experiment with Teaching Squares. I got the idea from Erika Kustra, one of our educational consultants at McMaster’s Centre for Leadership in Learning. Erika also put me in touch with two educational consultants from UVic and UBC Okanagan who have been extremely helpful in providing information about Teaching Squares and how to run the program. We have 8 librarians, including me, who will participate in the Squares. The purpose of this activity is for instructors to reflect on their own teaching and share these observations with their partners. I hope will also be an important teambuilding exercise that will help us to identify core competencies (more on this in another post) and common goals for librarians as teachers.

Problem-based learning

I attended a session on problem-based learning and information literacy as part of the Blended Librarians Online Community yesterday, and today we had a Teaching and Learning Roundtable on PBL given by one of our colleagues in the Health Sciences Library. Last week, I sat in on a session on authentic inquiry and information literacy last week offered by the Partnership’s Education Institute. It’s been an eventful week for innovative learning! PBL and inquiry-based learning are both examples of innovative learning at McMaster; it’s interesting to see how librarians are using them to approach information literacy.

Instructional Design

We held a workshop for liaison librarians today on instructional design. It was loosely based on a number of different workshops I have attended and presentations that I have given in the past, but with a few important changes, including the format and new activities related to developing instructional strategies. The workshop was organized by a team of librarians and a member of the campus Teaching and Learning Services unit and was designed to provide the librarians with a common framework to think about teaching and learning, and to use in working toward our goal of integrating information literacy into the curriculum. We looked at instructional design, talked about strategies for managing content, how to develop learning outcomes, and instructional strategies. (We *briefly* touched on assessment, but really only to say what it is and how it fits into the instructional design process.)

The workshop was a success (so far, all participants agree or strongly agree that the workshop was effective), although parts of it were a little rushed. I loved the active learning exercises we tried, including debates and collaborative learning. We all had a lot of fun and I think it was an important team-building exercise.

I think our next step will be to identify a number of skills students need and experiment with different strategies to teach these.