Putting SoTL into Practice

I attended a presentation the other day by David DiBattista, a professor a Brock University and 3M Teaching Fellow. David was invited to McMaster as part of a campus-wide reading group on pedagogy (who needs ‘one campus, one book’ when you can read about this stuff? ) sponsored by Dr. Joe Kim. David’s presentation was actually about a different kind of multiple choice test, called the Immediate Feedback Assessment Technique, which I will write more about later, but he also talked briefly about Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL).

According to David, putting the SoTL into practice means:

• attending T&L workshops
• reading the T&L literature
• reflecting on and evaluating your teaching practice
• sharing your knowledge with others

This statement made me feel pretty good because I realized that all of these are things in which I have been trying to engage our librarians. Members of the campus T&L support unit have helped me put together T&L workshops for the librarians, and I have tried to encourage participation in T&L events on and off campus. I am working on creating RSS feeds to discipline-specific T&L journals so that I can ‘push’ articles of interest with the librarians, or so they can consult these on their own (I’m hung up on trying to get the feeds to populate a page, instead of having people login to a reader to see them). Our Teaching Squares (TS) project encourages reflective practice, and this year, everyone is expected to participate either in TS or in a peer feedback initiative. Finally, I have been trying to share knowledge through this blog, and through the “Teaching and Learning @ Mac Libraries” blog we are using to communicate internally (feel free to take a look; thanks to my colleague Nora, it’s a lot more developed than this one!). We are also working to build community though the workshops and the Teaching Squares project, but in addition, this year, we will be experimenting with cross-disciplinary “team teaching” in some of our large classes. The idea is that, under the lead of the appropriate liaison librarian, we will get together as team to review the objectives for a class, brainstorm about how it could be taught in the hopes of sharing knowledge and getting some innovative ideas and then we will either team teach it or members will be responsible for teaching some sections or building the online support. No more, “here’s the slides, let me know how it goes”; this is all about building the class from the bottom up and “blowing it up” (as my colleague Jeannie An says)!

That’s not to say that it’s all going swimmingly or that there’s no room for improvement, but at least it’s reassuring to hear that we’re heading in the right direction.

Using lesson plans to design effective classes

This was our latest workshop for liaison librarians. Thanks to Donna, one of our liaisons, and Erika, from McMaster’s Centre for Leadership in Learning, for helping to put it together and facilitate it.

We looked at learning styles (based on Kolb’s Learning Styles Inventory) and how they impact teaching, determining “essential” content, active learning and lesson plans as a pedagogical and organizational tool. Overall, the workshop went well, although we misjudged our time more than a little (the teaching librarian’s Achilles’ heel!)

We are going to continue to investigate active learning (both the theory behind it and potential methods), and some participants suggested they would like to see different ways to address the different sections of the class such as “motivation” and “pre-assessment”, which I think would be a nice tie-in between workshops.

I am hoping we can archive and share our lesson plans, and then have some kind of discussion/activity to share best practices, successes, and lessons learned.

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.

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.

Peer professsional learning

As a follow up to my earlier post on roundtables, our professional development program is starting to take shape, although not necessarily in any structured way. Instead, topics have been chosen as need and opportunity arise. In terms of opportunities, we have discovered we have loads of “experts” among our peers and colleagues and I think we are doing a pretty good job of sharing in order to improve our common institutional knowledgebase. So far, we have roundtables scheduled on SAILS, problem-based learning, and creative commons licensing and its applications in T&L. We have also started using our (almost) weekly liaison meetings in part to learn about teaching and learning spaces and technologies of interest to liaisons, such as the newly designed Inquiry and Health Sciences Library classrooms, Articulate Presenter, SMART Boards, presentation and conferencing software such as Elluminate (we currently have a campus-wide site license as a trial) and PowerPoint. The last four sessions have been or will be given by our partners in campus A/V, the Learning Technologies Resource Centre (LTRC), and an assistant professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences who is responsible for faculty development (among other things). I met a lot of these people at a brown bag lunch series organized by LTRC for various groups on campus who are interested in teaching and learning technologies, so there is a whole lot of sharing going on! Another session of interest was a presentation to the liaisons and the Learning Commons Steering Group by Dr. Phil Wood, the Associate Vice-President, Student Affairs, and Dean of Students, who spoke to liaisons about NSSE and student engagement at McMaster.

All of these sessions have provided us with an opportunity to meet campus partners, and to demonstrate our interest in supporting, and participating in, teaching and learning at McMaster. Oh, and I should mention that the library will be presenting at the Centre for Leadership in Learning’s Learning Technology Symposium, coming up December 7th. Tom Haffie, the “clicker guy” from Western, will be presenting on classroom response systems. How timely!

Instruction à la carte

I attended at TLT webinar (hate that word!) the other day. One thing that some libraries mentioned they are doing that I thought was very cool was to list a “menu” of instruction items on the web site, and the minimum amount of time required to effectively teach each. It allows profs and others to see what the library can offer (and to suggest things that aren’t listed), and to work with the librarian to create a “customized” class to meet learning outcomes and to select appropriate instructional strategies. It also helps them to understand that it is not possible to “cover” how to find books, articles, Web searching, evaluating information, citing information, etc., etc. etc., in 50 minutes and, as a result, encourages them to integrate IL throughout the curriculum. I wondered if it would also be helpful in identifying prerequisite skills and knowledge.