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• [RE]Boot Camp: Share Some. Learn More. Teach Better.

  by Ellie Collier

  October 28, 2009
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  Wor­dle cloud of par­tic­i­pants’ goals

  Set­ting the Stage

  Last fall, as a part of the Texas Library Association’s “Trans­form­ing” ini­tia­tive, my library held its own trans­form­ing retreat. Austin Com­mu­nity Col­lege (ACC) Library Ser­vices has gone through a hir­ing spurt recently, adding 10 new full time librar­i­ans in just the last three years. This retreat brought together all 23 of us from across our seven cam­puses. We were told to bring any and all wild cre­ative ideas. As is so often the case, we also brought some fairly prac­ti­cal ones. One of these was a request for train­ing on how to teach. This came both from new librar­i­ans with no for­mal train­ing in instruc­tion and from vet­eran librar­i­ans who were inter­ested in learn­ing the cur­rent the­o­ries and best practices.

  As a result, dur­ing the Spring semes­ter of this year our dean, Dr. Julie Todaro, called a group of us together to begin plan­ning an immer­sive teach­ing train­ing pro­gram, aimed pri­mar­ily at the newer librar­i­ans to get them com­fort­able and up to speed. After the ini­tial brain­storm­ing ses­sion (which was com­prised mostly of the newest hires), a smaller group (with a higher ratio of more sea­soned librar­i­ans) was des­ig­nated as the plan­ning team. This included three mem­bers of our Teach­ing Team, our Pub­lic Rela­tions Facil­i­ta­tor and myself (as the rep­re­sen­ta­tive from the Staff Devel­op­ment Team).

  This post will walk you through our process in the hopes that you will find both inspi­ra­tion and infor­ma­tion to help you cre­ate your own train­ing programs.

  Get­ting the Team Together

  The first step was assem­bling the plan­ning team. While I wasn’t a part of this process, I can tell you some of the obvi­ous considerations.

  Do you have staff with rel­e­vant expe­ri­ence or exper­tise? Two mem­bers of our plan­ning team had been through ACRL’s Immer­sion Program.

  Does your library already have teams or com­mit­tees that focus on cer­tain areas? At ACC we are one library spread across seven cam­puses and (with a few excep­tions) all of us hold the title Ref­er­ence Librar­ian. Rather than hav­ing titled posi­tions in charge of the var­i­ous aspects of daily library life, each librar­ian is a mem­ber of at least one cross cam­pus team. I am co-chair of the Staff Devel­op­ment Team, which is charged with iden­ti­fy­ing pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment needs and pro­vid­ing access to appro­pri­ate train­ing. Our Teach­ing Team focuses on infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy instruc­tion. In addi­tion to coor­di­nat­ing study guides and inter­ac­tion with fac­ulty, one of its many charges is to iden­tify rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy train­ing and devel­op­ment cur­ricu­lum and coor­di­nate librar­i­ans’ par­tic­i­pa­tion in these oppor­tu­ni­ties. Our PR Facil­i­ta­tor was also included in the plan­ning team. Her ini­tial inclu­sion was based on her past par­tic­i­pa­tion in the ACRL Immer­sion pro­gram, but as I’ll dis­cuss later, it was incred­i­bly ben­e­fi­cial to have some­one who was able to con­tribute expe­ri­ence in mar­ket­ing and event planning.

  Plan­ning and Deci­sion Making

  We started with some of the basics already assigned to us. For exam­ple, you will need to con­sider what you want your focus to be. We con­cen­trated on ped­a­gogy and the­ory. This was to be a ground­ing in the cur­rent under­stand­ing of teach­ing and learn­ing and accom­pa­ny­ing best prac­tices. This was not the place for dis­cussing our library’s pro­grams and prac­tices (although we did design a fol­low up forum for exactly that pur­pose). You will need to deter­mine who should par­tic­i­pate. Ideas that floated around in our dis­cus­sions included: mak­ing it com­pletely vol­un­tary, requir­ing appli­ca­tions, and mak­ing it manda­tory for every­one. Ours was open to all librar­i­ans but manda­tory for the librar­i­ans who had been with the col­lege for less than 5 years. For us, that turned out to be 12 par­tic­i­pants plus two facil­i­ta­tors whose pro­fes­sional expe­ri­ence var­ied by decades – a good mix!

  With our focus and audi­ence selected, the team met to begin brain­storm­ing, break­ing down top­ics and cre­at­ing time­lines. We con­tacted col­leagues at other insti­tu­tions to find out if they had done any­thing sim­i­lar and what their process had been. We read through syl­labi and hand­outs from work­shops, sem­i­nars and new fac­ulty orientations.

  We debated how much time we should devote to the pro­gram and set­tled on two days. We felt one day wasn’t enough time to cover every­thing we wanted to, but more than two days would be dif­fi­cult for staffing and sched­ul­ing. We also strug­gled with when to hold the train­ing. We had orig­i­nally thought early August would be a good and rel­a­tively slow time, but real­ized some librar­i­ans would be off con­tract. How­ever, if we post­poned until the fall semes­ter it would have a large effect on ref­er­ence desk cov­er­age. My cam­pus, for exam­ple, had all three of our full time librar­i­ans in the required atten­dance cat­e­gory. Based on those two fac­tors, we decided that the first week of the librar­i­ans’ return from sum­mer ses­sion, which is also the week before classes start for the fall semes­ter, although not per­fect, would be the best pos­si­ble time avail­able to us and allow the most librar­i­ans the chance to participate.

  Our next deci­sion point was where to hold the camp. We con­sid­ered our state library association’s facil­i­ties, our busi­ness center’s train­ing rooms, and cam­pus activ­ity rooms. A high pri­or­ity was that the atmos­phere should evoke a feel­ing of being ‘away from the library’ so as to encour­age the immer­sion expe­ri­ence. My vote went to my favorite fac­ulty lounge, the one with the wood panel walls, comfy chairs and great views. As a much more wel­com­ing place to spend our time, this is where we ended up.

  

  Pre­sen­ter AJ Johnson

  Mov­ing from logis­tics into con­tent, one thing that emerged fairly early was the idea of a cul­mi­nat­ing activ­ity. We felt that it is impor­tant to pro­vide an oppor­tu­nity for the par­tic­i­pants to imme­di­ately prac­tice the skills they had learned. After var­i­ous iter­a­tions we set­tled on a five minute pre­sen­ta­tion with an assigned topic. We brain­stormed a list of typ­i­cal class assign­ments. At the first day’s lunch break, the librar­i­ans would select their assign­ment out of a hat and a num­ber from a sec­ond hat to pro­vide the pre­sen­ta­tion order. They were wel­come to draw again, trade, or mod­ify their assign­ment if they didn’t like it. We pre­pared more top­ics than there were atten­dees to facil­i­tate swap­ping. The idea was to give a start­ing point to make it eas­ier, not to tie them down. They would have two hours at the end of the first day to pre­pare their pre­sen­ta­tion. They could work alone or in groups and we would pro­vide com­put­ers. There would be an extended lunch/work ses­sion on the sec­ond day to incor­po­rate what they’d learned that morn­ing after which they would give a five minute pre­sen­ta­tion as though the rest of us were stu­dents and that was our assign­ment. They needed to address at least two learn­ing styles (one was writ­ten on the assign­ment, the other was their choice) and decide what assess­ment they would use (they didn’t have to actu­ally cre­ate or admin­is­ter the assess­ment). The idea was to give par­tic­i­pants a chance to prac­tice design­ing an active learn­ing exer­cise while con­sid­er­ing a vari­ety of learn­ing styles and then share that exer­cise with the group.

  We also knew we wanted to assign some read­ings for peo­ple to go through before camp in order to get every­one on the same page and to spark con­ver­sa­tion. We ended up select­ing a few chap­ters from What the Best Col­lege Teach­ers Do, a book that had been handed out at recent ACC fac­ulty ori­en­ta­tions, and one that I can­not rec­om­mend highly enough. We also agreed that it would be worth­while to have every­one read through the ACRL def­i­n­i­tion of infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy as well as an alter­nate def­i­n­i­tion, both of which were emailed to par­tic­i­pants prior to camp. We rec­om­mended par­tic­i­pants join ACRL’s infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy instruc­tion list serv [ili-l], but didn’t require it.

  

  Wor­dle cloud of par­tic­i­pants’ teach­ing strengths

  The ReBoot sched­ule that we set­tled on included sev­eral oppor­tu­ni­ties for shar­ing per­spec­tives, get­ting to know each other, and defin­ing our con­text. To facil­i­tate this we designed a pre-camp sur­vey with a vari­ety of ends in mind: to help us in plan­ning, to get the par­tic­i­pants think­ing about teach­ing and learn­ing and to cre­ate our ice­breaker activ­ity. To help in our plan­ning we asked the par­tic­i­pants about their prior teach­ing expe­ri­ence. To help get them geared up for camp we asked the par­tic­i­pants  to describe their teach­ing phi­los­o­phy and to set a camp goal for them­selves. We also asked them to describe their strengths and weak­nesses as a teacher and to share some of their favorite analo­gies to use when teach­ing. To cre­ate our ice­break­ers we turned the strengths and weak­nesses into Wor­dle clouds and posted the analo­gies around the room on large pads of paper for com­ment. After the ice­breaker the facil­i­ta­tors (Melinda Townsel and Red Wassenich, with 18 and 25 years at ACC, respec­tively) wel­comed every­one, went over the sched­ule, the def­i­n­i­tions of infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy and the pre-survey responses.

  

  Ellie Col­lier leads a dis­cus­sion on cam­pus differences

  We felt it was impor­tant to begin by focus­ing on what we know about the stu­dents we would be teach­ing. Our dean, Dr. Julie Todaro, pre­sented an overview of ACC’s stu­dent pop­u­la­tion. We also watched some quick infor­mal videos cre­ated by one of our facil­i­ta­tors, Melinda Townsel, ask­ing ACC stu­dents about their own research meth­ods and a short doc­u­men­tary, Pri­vate Uni­verse, which deals with the con­cepts we (wrong­fully) assume stu­dents already know and explains how teach­ing meth­ods can cre­ate those mis­con­cep­tions. Red Wassenich, our other facil­i­ta­tor went over some recent ACC infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy assess­ment results and I led a dis­cus­sion about cam­pus dif­fer­ences with par­tic­i­pants giv­ing a sum­mary of their cam­pus pop­u­la­tion. For exam­ple, my cam­pus has a higher pro­por­tion of stu­dents in Eng­lish as a Sec­ond Lan­guage and devel­op­men­tal courses com­ing in to the library as well as a notice­able num­ber of stu­dents who don’t have com­put­ers at home.

  The bulk of the camp focused on cog­ni­tive devel­op­ment, active learn­ing, learn­ing the­ory, learn­ing styles, and assess­ment. We con­sid­ered hav­ing the par­tic­i­pants break up into groups, research the top­ics ahead of time and present to each other. We also brain­stormed peo­ple and groups we thought might be will­ing and able to present on these top­ics. This included psy­chol­ogy and edu­ca­tion fac­ulty, train­ers in the college’s pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment depart­ment as well as fel­low librar­i­ans at neigh­bor­ing insti­tu­tions. In the end, we were lucky enough to have a great num­ber of incred­i­bly tal­ented librar­i­ans in the Austin area that were highly knowl­edge­able in the top­ics we wanted to cover and specif­i­cally how they apply to aca­d­e­mic libraries. We also invited Dorothy Mar­tinez, an ACC fac­ulty mem­ber who teaches devel­op­men­tal read­ing and teacher training.

  Which brings us to another issue: bud­get. We were not given an explicit bud­get, but were given some guide­lines. For exam­ple, we were told it would be very hard to jus­tify any food expenses, but we could pro­vide a copy of the “text­book” to all atten­dees. We wanted to keep the group together through the lunch break to ensure con­ti­nu­ity and allow for more shar­ing of ideas and strate­gies but didn’t feel com­fort­able ask­ing every­one to bring their own lunch both days. We debated a num­ber of options, includ­ing doing a pot luck or pro­vid­ing pizza and ask­ing every­one to chip in $5. In the end, our gen­er­ous dean per­son­ally cov­ered the lunch expenses as well as break­fast treats for the two days. A note from the PR Facil­i­ta­tor: Don’t under­es­ti­mate the time it will take to make lunch arrange­ments! Do a pre-event sur­vey two weeks out, giv­ing a few choices for box lunches (first day) and pizza top­pings the sec­ond day. Make deci­sions on the aggre­gate results for piz­zas with veg­gies only or some with meat. If at all pos­si­ble, find ven­dors that deliver.

  Speak­ers are another poten­tial expense. Our speak­ers were all able to attend as part of their reg­u­lar work duties, but fund­ing would have been a con­sid­er­a­tion if we had gone with our ini­tial learn­ing styles idea, which included the respected but pro­pri­etary Kolb inven­tory ($125 for 10 sur­veys plus the travel cost of a trained ana­lyst). By choos­ing a free learn­ing styles inven­tory we were able to invite our speak­ers to have lunch with us and pro­vide them with a small thank you gift (we chose travel mugs with a pos­i­tive teacher mes­sage from Pos­i­tive Pro­mo­tions). Using local pre­sen­ters pro­vided much more than bud­get relief. A num­ber of them stayed to see each other’s pre­sen­ta­tions and par­tic­i­pate in dis­cus­sion. It pro­vided a won­der­ful con­nec­tion between each of our insti­tu­tions and inspired plans to col­lab­o­rate more often.

  

  Par­tic­i­pants Bar­bara Jorge, Adrian Erb, Molly Dahlstrom, Linda Clement and Steve Self

  An issue that came up later in the process was that of par­tial par­tic­i­pa­tion. We had a few librar­i­ans that were inter­ested in attend­ing just for one or two top­ics, or wanted to come to all of it, but didn’t want to give the pre­sen­ta­tion at the end. We felt strongly that a fun­da­men­tal part of the camp was that it was an immer­sion, where par­tic­i­pants inter­act and col­lab­o­rate intensely. I also felt that it would send a neg­a­tive mes­sage to say that those who have been here longer get spe­cial treat­ment and don’t have to fully par­tic­i­pate. In pro­mot­ing the train­ing camp we had tried hard to com­mu­ni­cate that we truly wanted a mix of ‘new to ACC’ librar­i­ans and vet­er­ans and that the pre­sen­ta­tion would be a won­der­ful oppor­tu­nity for them to imme­di­ately prac­tice what they had learned. We reas­sured the reluc­tant pre­sen­ters that it would be a non-threatening envi­ron­ment with no grades or for­mal eval­u­a­tion. Ulti­mately, how­ever, every­one who expressed reser­va­tions about fully par­tic­i­pat­ing chose not to attend.

  What’s in a Name?

  One of the many impor­tant con­tri­bu­tions of our PR Facil­i­ta­tor was her expla­na­tion of the impor­tance of a name for the train­ing — in her words “a hook to hang every­thing from.” We threw out tons of options and debated their rel­a­tive mer­its. We were par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in mak­ing this a col­lab­o­ra­tive and par­tic­i­pa­tory endeavor that would be equally stim­u­lat­ing for expe­ri­enced and green librar­i­ans alike. Our final choice “[RE]BOOT CAMP: Share some. Learn more. Teach Bet­ter.” set the theme of learn­ing as a group for the rest of our pro­mo­tion. Our flyer, which included our dean’s face merged with a point­ing Uncle Sam, listed who had been drafted and encour­aged vet­er­ans to re-enlist. One of the facil­i­ta­tors even wore fatigues.

  Prac­tice What You Preach

  Actions speak louder than words. The fact that all of our pre­sen­ters used excel­lent ped­a­gogy, includ­ing start­ing their pre­sen­ta­tions by stat­ing their learn­ing objec­tives, speak­ing to dif­fer­ent learn­ing styles, and using active learn­ing, solid­i­fied those strate­gies far more than just hav­ing been instructed on their impor­tance. A num­ber of par­tic­i­pants men­tioned this aspect in par­tic­u­lar in their eval­u­a­tions. Not only was the con­tent valu­able, we had role mod­els for teach­ing excellence.

  Since one of our focus areas was assess­ment, we made sure that we offered both the pre-camp sur­vey and an oppor­tu­nity for the par­tic­i­pants to assess the camp. The Teach­ing Team and Staff Devel­op­ment Team will use those results to help struc­ture future trainings.

  Pro­vide Recognition

  Another con­sid­er­a­tion stressed by our PR Facil­i­ta­tor is the impor­tance of thank­ing both your pre­sen­ters and your par­tic­i­pants for their con­tri­bu­tions and of pro­vid­ing a few moments to rec­og­nize each other. Each of our pre­sen­ters was thanked in front of the group and given a small gift. At the end of the camp we had a very casual grad­u­a­tion cer­e­mony. Each par­tic­i­pant had his or her name called and was given a small gift (the same travel mug that the pre­sen­ters were given) as well as their cer­tifi­cate signed by the plan­ning team and the dean. In keep­ing with the boot camp theme the cer­tifi­cates (with a ‘Stars and Stripes’ motif in a cover with embossed gold stars) were awarded to “Eagle Squad” and “Fal­con Squad” mem­bers depend­ing on whether they had been with ACC for more or less than five years.

  

  Facil­i­ta­tor Red Wassenich and par­tic­i­pant Steve Self

  Keep­ing the Momentum

  It was very impor­tant for me per­son­ally to ensure that the excite­ment we cre­ated at camp not quickly fade away as we dis­bursed back to our sep­a­rate cam­puses. On our eval­u­a­tion form we asked, “What can we do within ACC Library Ser­vices to fos­ter and main­tain the ideas/tips/techniques we learned at camp?” We received excel­lent feed­back and as a result we now have sched­uled monthly dis­cus­sion forums that pro­vide an oppor­tu­nity for our librar­i­ans as well as other library staff to come together to dis­cuss pro­ce­dures, best prac­tices, tips and tricks, etc. We have brain­stormed and voted on top­ics (not all teach­ing related) and I was thrilled to see our first forum, which focused on col­lec­tion devel­op­ment, was impres­sively well attended. Future forum top­ics include pre­sen­ta­tion skills, elec­tronic resources, and our college’s stu­dent suc­cess initiative.

  Loose Ends and Final Thoughts

  I’d like to close by shar­ing some over­all sug­ges­tions and reflections.

  Have a Plan B. You can’t plan for every pos­si­ble curve ball, but think­ing of as many as pos­si­ble ahead of time, and how you might address them, can alle­vi­ate a lot of stress. We had two last minute issues come up with our loca­tion. The first, a pre­vi­ously unan­nounced fire drill set to hap­pen about an hour into the pro­gram, ended up being resched­uled before we even decided how we would han­dle it. The sec­ond, the unfore­seen clos­ing of the library due to A/C main­te­nance, meant that we no longer had access to the com­put­ers and print­ers we had planned to use to have the par­tic­i­pants fill out and score their learn­ing styles ques­tion­naires. This news came after we had already sched­uled lunch arrange­ments with ven­dors close to our cho­sen loca­tion. After a minor panic, the plan­ning team decided we could work around this by using the fac­ulty com­puter cen­ter and the library lap­tops rather than move to a new location.

  Be sym­pa­thetic. Remem­ber to extend the same cour­tesy to your col­leagues that you do to your stu­dents. I am for­ever grate­ful to my ref­er­ence instruc­tor for ingrain­ing in me the cog­ni­tive, affec­tive, and behav­ioral aspects of the ref­er­ence inter­view. I hap­pen to be very com­fort­able speak­ing in pub­lic, to large groups or small, to friends or strangers, how­ever, the pre­sen­ta­tion aspect of the camp was a loom­ing issue for a num­ber of our librar­i­ans. The idea of teach­ing to their peers was quite unnerv­ing to some. I failed to give that issue due respect. It might have been bet­ter to pro­vide the librar­i­ans with the full details of the assign­ment ear­lier in the process, to lis­ten more sym­pa­thet­i­cally to their fears, and to respond with more empa­thy. Another approach might be to pro­vide a ses­sion on over­com­ing pre­sen­ta­tion anx­i­ety prior to the camp, or mak­ing that topic a part of the camp.

  Make time for reflec­tive writ­ing through­out the process. Include guid­ing ques­tions such as, “How will you use this in your next instruc­tion ses­sion?” or “Why is this impor­tant?” Some of our pre­sen­ters did this, and my notes and reten­tion from their sec­tions are far supe­rior to the other sec­tions where I either chose to just lis­ten and rely on the hand­outs, or scrib­bled furi­ous notes which have since lost their context.

  Specif­i­cally focus on get­ting one-shot instruc­tion ses­sions right. Talk about work­ing with fac­ulty, espe­cially those with no assign­ment or bad assign­ments, to cre­ate a valu­able library expe­ri­ence. Spend time dis­cussing how much to real­is­ti­cally cover in one ses­sion. Empha­size strate­gies for help­ing stu­dents get the basics. Our cog­ni­tive devel­op­ment sec­tion touched on this when our pre­sen­ter pointed out that most of the ACRL infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy stan­dards are well above the devel­op­men­tal level of most of our enter­ing stu­dents and it was a real eye opener.

  Plan follow-up stand­alone work­shops open to all staff. Some exam­ples we thought of include: using LibGuides as teach­ing tools for indi­vid­ual classes, pro­files of com­mu­nity col­lege stu­dents, pre­sen­ta­tion skills, and sched­ul­ing video tap­ing or obser­va­tions of teach­ing sessions.

  Your turn

  Have you planned or par­tic­i­pated in some­thing sim­i­lar at your insti­tu­tion? What did you do dif­fer­ently? How did it work out? What would you like to get out of this kind of pro­gram? Share your suc­cesses and frus­tra­tions in the comments.

  [RE]Boot Camp Resources

  • Sched­ule (.doc)
  • Invi­ta­tion (Google Doc)
  • Pre Camp Sur­vey (Google Form)
  • Infor­ma­tion Lit­er­acy Def­i­n­i­tions (.doc)
  • Learn­ing Styles Inven­tory (website)
  • Pre­sen­ta­tion Prompt (.pptx)
  • Post Camp Eval­u­a­tion (Google Form)
  • Com­ple­tion Cer­tifi­cate (.png)
  • Text­book: Bain, Ken. What the Best Col­lege Teach­ers Do. Cam­bridge: Har­vard, 2004.

  ---

  Thanks to my col­league and co-planner Pam Spooner and to ItLwtLPer Hilary Davis for their feed­back and edits.

  Many of our par­tic­i­pants com­mented on how impressed they were with the pre­sen­ters, so I’d like to also give many thanks to: A.J. John­son (Uni­ver­sity of Texas at Austin), Bar­bara Jorge (Austin Com­mu­nity Col­lege), Liane Luck­man (Texas State Uni­ver­sity), Dorothy Mar­tinez (Austin Com­mu­nity Col­lege), Meghan Sitar (Uni­ver­sity of Texas at Austin), and Dr. Julie Todaro (Austin Com­mu­nity Col­lege) and to our plan­ning team: Bar­bara Jorge, Pam Spooner, Melinda Townsel and Red Wassenich.
  

  You might also be inter­ested in:

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  • Crit­i­cal Lit­er­acy? Information!
  • Nar­rat­ing the “Back Story” Through E-learning Resources in Libraries
  Tags: information literacy, instruction, instructional design, planning, teaching, training, workshop

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One Comment

• pligg.com says:

  February 4, 2010 at 3:21 pm

  [RE]Boot Camp: Share Some. Learn More. Teach Bet­ter. | In the Library with the Lead Pipe…

  Set­ting the Stage Last fall, as a part of the Texas Library Association’s Trans­form­ing ini­tia­tive, my library held its own trans­form­ing retreat. Austin…

  Reply