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Wednesday 18 February 2015

Teaching Skills: Peer Support Course - Introduction

The idea for the Teaching Skills: Peer Support course came about after I attended LILAC 2012.  I remember listening to one presentation about the teaching identity and how their library staff had a support group, where they read and discussed articles on teaching to help their development as teachers.  I realised that whilst we do have a support group for librarians within Cambridge through our Brown Bag lunches, where articles on a variety of topics are discussed, we didn't specifically have anything for teaching.  As more and more librarians are now being asked to teach information literacy sessions to students, teaching is quickly becoming associated with a librarians role, especially for subject librarians and departmental staff who demonstrate electronic resources to students.  Even inductions and library tours need a certain degree of confidence and teaching or public speaking ability in order to impart information on your library to students and visitors, etc.  However it's fair to say that although some librarians undertake brief teaching skills course organised by libraries, CILIP and CPD groups, teaching is not taught in depth at library school.  More and more librarians are undertaking a postgraduate diploma or MA course in Teaching and Learning, have a PGCE or B.Ed degree or undertake a teaching qualification at regional colleges.  There are also a number of librarians who do not have teaching qualifications. Therefore Librarians can find themselves adrift when faced with delivering inductions and teaching sessions on a variety of subjects, such as, information skills, search techniques or referencing software.

Being the Chair of the Librarians in Training Group at Cambridge also gave me an insight into what training our librarians requested.  Top of the list was always teaching skills, how to teach and presentation skills.  I thought that with all the expertise and experience in Cambridge we could put on a teaching skills course in-house.  The planning team was formed of both college and departmental librarians (Ryan Cronin, St Johns College; Isla Kuhn, Medical Library; Catherine Reid, Lucy Cavendish College (now Clare College) and myself, Kirstie Preest, Murray Edwards College), with some assistance from 3 guest speakers, also from within Cambridge libraries.

The course itself took a lot of organising and planning but this didn't seem too onerous with four team members.  The team members all had something different to contribute in light of their experience; academic, NHS, & schools and in the different skills we had, for example, advertising, writing, presenting, etc.  We envisaged the course as a pilot project upon which we could build further after the first year, so were keen to ensure that the course was fully evaluated by ourselves and the participants.  We also demonstrated this aspect in practice by evaluating each day ourselves and by asking participants to do the same. This enabled us to change the course as we went along, taking into account any feedback received.  We felt it was important to demonstrate the fluidity, flexibility and a requirement "to think on your feet" which is sometimes required during a teaching session, when things don't always go to plan.

Activity Audit of Information Literacy Sessions
Another example of this flexibility is that we had not planned on discovering what teaching already existed in Cambridge libraries, rather just concentrate on the teaching skills itself.  However our first day's feedback showed that participants wanted this information to see if any overlap occurred.  So armed with this knowledge Isla and I changed the format of day two and included a "teaching activity audit".  Not only did this allow us to show that changing your session with limited time was feasible, it also allowed us to gain some useful data on what teaching already existed.  The image shown, details some of the data collected.



The main aims of the program were to:
  • Build confidence and skills for librarians involved in teaching
  • Cover the whole process of a teaching session from planning through to evaluation and reflection
  • Establish teaching peer support within Cambridge for librarians 

For a reflection on each day of the course please see the other blog posts in the series. 

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