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.

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.

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.