Teaching Skills: Peer Support course - Day 2

Day 2 started with the teaching activity audit, (see the introduction ), followed by a useful session on creating handouts. This was definitely something that I thought I need to work on in future.  Ryan informed us that handouts are the "lasting manifestation of our teaching" and part of the students overall learning, particularly in the case of the theorist learner.  Handy tips given were:

• plan your handouts in advance
• don't just print out your slides - this is one I know I can be guilty of!
• ensure your handout reflects your presentation
• make sure your handout can stand alone
• know when to distribute your handout

We were pointed to the key principles of Edward Tufte for designing documents: the design should be invisible, content counts most of all and maximize your users recognition time. We were therefore advised to use plain language and not library jargon, ie. OPAC, etc.

The main section of day 2 focused on reflective practice, peer review and constructive feedback, as we really wanted to emphasize the peer support element of the course moving forward. Time for reflection is extremely valuable in our daily activities and enables us to think about how things went or whether something needs changing.  Reflective practice was therefore introduced as a useful technique which went alongside delivering teaching sessions allowing individuals to evaluate their performance:

• What went well?
• What went wrong?
• Why?
• What could be done to make improvements

Best practice informs us that reflective practice should be a continuous cycle and not just a one time thing, so plan, do and review.  

Isla talked participants through peer review and giving constructive feedback. Our aim being to build confidence and improve support of both peers and students.  The underlying principles were to be constructive, developmental (not judgmental), formative  (not summative) and most importantly confidential to both parties.  Isla stressed the importance to comment on people's behaviours, such as, "I liked it when you did...." and "what I liked was when you said...." rather than " it was nice" or "your competent".

Participants were then given the opportunity to think about comments that had made them change their behaviours. After this exercise they were invited to watch and comment on a presentation given by myself, where I had deliberately included good and bad elements into the 5 minute demonstration. (I found this demonstration more difficult than giving usual presentations due to remembering to include the bad bits!) Participants were given a feedback form upon which they were asked to write down 3 positive points, 3 developmental points and 3 aspects to take away from the session.  The feedback from the participants was excellent, and demonstrated that they had taken on board a lot of points raised over the previous talks and picked up on all my mistakes. Feedback after day 2,

"it was a great idea to ask one of the trainers to give a wrong presentation, to teach us how to give constructive feedback",

showed that participants felt this was a useful exercise which would stand them in good stead for commenting on the individual nanoteach's during day 3 of the course.

Afterwards we moved on to what to do when it all goes wrong!  One of the other experienced guest speakers led this talk which went down very well.  This was broken down into two elements: technology and people.

The speaker asked for contributions and participants experiences throughout the talk to highlight those dreaded moments during a teaching session, when the computers don't work, the projector has broken or websites have changed overnight.  Tips for smooth sailing were as follows:

• practice in the classroom beforehand
• have the phone number of the IT department
• bring an extra memory stick
• put a copy of the presentation in the cloud
• be able to do the class without a presentation

People issues included, students grandstanding, texting or using the internet.  Above all we were advised to keep calm and take charge.

Participants were then giving a briefing about the "nanoteach" and what was expected of them for their individual presentations on day 3.

From my own perspective, day 2 seemed quite rushed.  We had listened feedback from the previous day and had included the "teaching activity audit".  This was a very worthwhile thing to do as it gave the participants and myself a more holistic view of the teaching going on in Cambridge libraries.  I hope it also allowed participants to think about the possibility of working together and sharing resources or collaborating with teaching.  This inclusion  meant that we cut down some of other aspects of the course, which was easy enough to do on the spur of the moment.  Hopefully this demonstrated the ability to be flexible. If we run this course again, we won't have this problem so we will be able to stick to the original lesson plan for that day.

The participants evaluation showed that they appreciated that we had listened to their feedback and had moved the projectors position and included the activity audit.  There was also a sense that the activity audit, Isla's teaching style and the what to do when it all goes wrong presentation allowed more discussion and made participants feel that everyone was in the same boat;

"Wednesday involved a lot more discussion from the group and I really enjoyed hearing from my colleagues/peers about what they were doing, ideas that they had, etc",

"it was reassuring to hear that even people with lots of teaching experience face difficulties and fears sometimes."

However there was also a sense of wanting more discussion time and a longer break in order to reflect on teaching:

"I know discussion can/and hopefully will continue beyond the sessions but it's often harder to take time out once you leave the classroom. Incorporating that time into the sessions would mean we would have a captive audience and dedicated time to discuss things further".

From a personal point of view I think this would be difficult to incorporate fully into the day and I think we were hoping that the peer support element would continue beyond the course, although I readily take the point that once you leave a course it can be difficult to find time to reflect on teaching.  Also if we do want time to discuss teaching as a whole in Cambridge and possibly collaborate, that might be better in a different event, as there are lots of librarians teaching within Cambridge who wouldn't be able to participate in that conversation, were it held as part of our course. However there would be no harm in organising a bit of both.

References

Edward Tufte, 2006, Beautiful evidence, Graphics Press.