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Thursday 5 March 2015

Teaching Skills: Peer Support course Day 3

Day 3, saw the arrival of the possibly dreaded nanoteach for the participants but we knew they could do it.  We felt it was important for them to have the opportunity to use the information given and deliver their own session for a number of reasons; firstly, so that we could assess their learning, secondly, so they could receive valuable practice in a supported environment and finally that they could receive confidential constructive feedback in order to make improvements to their performance.

The organisation of the nanoteach's was probably the most complicated aspect of the course, working out which planning team members were available when and how many nanoteach's we could fit into a morning or afternoon slot.  To facilitate this we emailed  the participants in advance of the course and asked whether they would prefer morning or afternoon slots.  We ended up with five groups in total during the day and one group on the following Monday morning, who were unable to make the Friday's sessions. Each group consisted of four participants and one planning team member who facilitated the proceedings.


The format for each group, was two nanoteach's, followed by a break and then the remaining two nanoteach's.  Each participant was given 30 minutes in total which broke down into:

  • 5 minutes set up and say who the audience was
  • 15 minutes for the nanoteach
  • 5 minutes to pack up while the audience filled in their constructive feedback sheets 
  • 5 minutes for the participant to evaluate and reflect on their own performance

My participants were quite concerned about running over time so we came up with signals to indicate that they had 2 minutes left and that they had gone over time, which helped them to stick to their time scales, although I don't think the other groups did this.  This could possibly be something to make sure we all do next year.  Running to time is extremely important for presentations, as I find the audience can have tendency to get fed up if you go over, especially if you can always see that one student clock watching - demonstrating they would rather be somewhere else!  This can be very off putting.  A good plan, practice and the use of a watch are ways to ensure you don't overrun.
In relation to the topic of the nanoteach, we left that up to the individuals and specified that we weren't necessarily interested in the content, more their teaching style and how they delivered the session.  To give people more confidence we suggested that they talked about something they were familiar with rather than library/information literacy topics if they preferred.  Some examples of the topics covered were map cataloguing, geocaching, understanding your reading list, knitting, over coming language barriers when dealing with international students, social activism, animal care and salsa dancing (with practical exercises)!

I also found that the participants in my group wanted my feedback, although this was something that we as a team had not envisaged, preferring that feedback was given by peer review not the facilitators.  In practice however I found that I did end up giving some constructive feedback which was appreciated and evaluation forms from the day showed that participants wanted that to be a feature.  I therefore think we should definitely include our own comments in the constructive feedback next time.


The final stage of the nanoteach for each participant was asking them to re-assess where their confidence lay after the course.  This was facilitated differently this time as we weren't together as a whole group.  Isla had produced certificates with their confidence level at the beginning of the course and we asked them to mark their confidence on a new line underneath, which would show whether they felt their confidence had improved, stayed the same or got worse.


I personally think that the nanoteach's gave the participants a chance to practice and hopefully showed them that they could give a brief training session with little notice.  I also loved the variety of topics that I listened to and definitely learned a lot from the different talks, such as re-discovering that I can knit one pearl one!



Looking at some of the comments from the course evaluation shows that the course was a success, which is brilliant news:

1.  I thought the content and encouragement from teaching staff first class.  It certainly filled a need for staff at Cambridge.

2.  Thank you for an inspiring week.  The format of 3 half days in one week worked really well for me as it made the business of thinking about and preparing for the nanoteach session more realistic since it was interspersed with other things.

3.  I feel much more confident about the mechanics of teaching. Would have been good too if as well as peer feedback on the practical sessions we got a bit of "expert" feedback from those running sessions. 

4.  Many thanks for my certificate. I did find the course quite useful, it was great to hear from a variety of people with their various teaching styles. It was also good fun as well as helpful.

5. Thank you all for the wonderful effort you put in to giving us such a useful and enjoyable course.  A lot of work went into the preparation and, of course, delivering it. I really appreciated it; I learned a lot and will definitely put it into practice.

6.   I took part in the Teaching Skills for Librarians course, organised by the Librarians in Training group. This was a new type of course, and an interesting experiment: after two days of lecture type sessions, we were asked to put together a ten minute long session, and present it to a group of fellow participants, in order to get immediate feedback on our teaching style. It sounded a bit daunting but, as we were in it all together, we accepted the challenge and enjoyed the peer support aspect of the course. For example, I learnt that handouts are very important, and they should provide additional information rather than just repeating what you said in your session. I also discovered that I am able to put a quick session together from scratch in a very short amount of time. And I finally learnt that I come across as confident (I must be a good actress then!), that my non-native English isn’t a problem at all (another thing that honestly surprised me), that I need to make sure I don’t laugh too much during my presentation as I might give the impression I don’t believe in what I’m saying, and that I need to slow down a lot when talking.

I applied what I learnt when delivering the Portfolio Building course last September, and I was really happy to hear that I spoke more slowly, and that attendees found the session clear and easy to follow. The course gave me the confidence to face classroom speaking in a calmer and more controlled way.


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