Veronica Arellano Douglas and Natalia Kapacinskas from the University of Houston shared a "teaching story" from their own practice blogs Pam McKinney, from day 2 of the LILAC conference. They designed a collaborative activity to support students to write a technical report for the fantasy scene in the movie "Up", where the house flies away connected to a cloud of balloons. The session first focused on a questioning approach to create a curiosity-driven session. Although they really enjoyed teaching this session and students seemed to get a lot out of it, ultimately, the only "measure" of the session was quantitative - a set of numbers that were reported to a library association. They gave a brief overview of learning assessment in academic libraries in the USA, moving from 2010 when the ACRL and other authors tried to establish how to assess the value of information literacy teaching. from 2013-2016, there were several attempts to link information literacy teaching to higher grades in students, but it was quite tricky to prove a causal relationship, and it was perceived to be correlational only. A lot of quantitative data is easy to collect, e.g. gate statistics, numbers in sessions, etc, but it does a poor job of illustrating the value of the library. From 2019 onwards, there was a lot more interest in qualitative measures of student satisfaction and how they perceived the value of the instruction they had received.
At the university, they wanted to delve a lot more deeply into their own teaching and how it could be assessed or measured. They wanted to introduce a value-based approaoch. The University of Houston is a large, publically funded university with high research activity. Within the library, there is a teaching and learning department with 7 librarians who provide information literacy teaching across the university. They are dedicated to the learning and growth of both themselves and their students. They played a recording from Mae Warren, who spoke about the department values - inclusivity, collaboration, authentic assessment, a critical approach, a reflective approach, experimentation and empathy. There is a culture of development and reflection for the staff, with lots of activity centred around professional development, collaborative development and peer support for teaching. Critical reflection is at the heart of all they do. A project started to look at critical approaches to assessment, and this led to the development of a reflective toolkit, which consists of a set of resources to support the teaching of information literacy. It encourages teachers to reflect on their teaching assumptions and think about how students learn. It encourages teachers to reflect on the different perspectives on their teaching, and draws on a broad variety of previous research and literature to create a thought-provoking resource.
A student learning section provides resources to support the evaluation of student learning. It includes lots of ideas to encourage student reflection that can be applied in teaching sessions, for example, using reflective polls throughout a session. Another section of the resource focuses on supporting a process of evaluation of teaching. This toolkit is intended to be used over 2 years by teachers to develop themselves and their teaching. They shared some examples of how the toolkit had supported their professional development as teachers in a number of ways, for example, supporting reflection, addressing imposter syndrome, and developing their self-efficacy, being more mindful about teaching. It supports small improvements in teaching - noting that "it doesn't have to be big", but continuous improvement is something to aspire to.
At the end of the year, they applied some evaluation of the toolkit and discussed a number of questions in their team, e.g. what have you learnt this year, what worked or didn't work, and what have you changed in your teaching practice. This was a great opportunity to share successful activities they had tried, for example, "sticky note plaudits", which encourages attendees at a session to write positive feedback about other people's comments at the end of a teaching session. There was a creative flavour to their reflection with one colleague writing a poem about the value of feedback.
Year 2 of the toolkit focuses on student learning and how to encourage reflective approaches in various ways in classes. They noted that not all sessions were suitable for reflective approaches, but they are always thinking about ways to support them.
Sheila and I include a reflective assignment in the information literacy module that we teach, and this presentation made me reflect (again!) on the value of reflection as a teacher, and that this assessment is a very useful way to build reflective skills in our student-librarians.
Photo by Pam McKinney: covid-era pavement sign to encourage social distancing in Cardiff
