We want to send a HUGE thank you to listener, Megan Ondricek, for volunteering to help us catch up and create transcripts for our past episodes (starting with episode 9 below) and provide this important resource to our community! Jessica: Welcome to episode number eleven of the Librarian’s Guide to Teaching podcast! I'm Jessica, Amanda: And I'm Amanda, Jessica: And on today's episode we're going to talk about teaching outside of the classroom through programming. But before we get started, how are you doing? Anything exciting happening this week? Amanda: Yeah, so this week is all about grading, um, I’m an honors librarian, and our honor students are currently in the process of getting ready to start writing their paper. So in theory they should be done with their research, and they have to submit annotated bibliographies, uh 25 sources each. So right now, all of our honors librarians are poring over at least ten or more each, um, annotated bibliographies and reviewing them and grading them. So it's a, it's a unique opportunity that I enjoy, but it's definitely something I'm not used to since we don't get an opportunity like this too often to grade papers and have the faculty just take our grades at face value, so I'm elbow deep in annotated bibs. Jessica: I do kind of miss doing those; it is so time intensive but it is a very unique experience and I did enjoy partnering with the faculty to really talk about these annotated bibliographies and their research projects and so, it's fun but I know what you're going through it is, it is a struggle too. Amanda: Oh yeah, the struggle is real man. Jessica: Yep, exactly. So this week, is we, everybody knows, like we are, we are impacted by the coronavirus officially at my university, so not that anyone has it, but we are in the full swing of our contingency plan of working from home officially as classes have been moved online so this week, it was all about, how do I prep to teach online if I have to and support students online. Thankfully I don't have any classes scheduled this week but I did have to teach myself some online tools like Blackboard Collaborate, Kaltura Capture, I've never used those tools before so I did get to learn um, something new, and we'll see if I have to use it. If there's going to be students who need it and so it's going to be an interesting couple of weeks coming up in terms of supporting our students in this new, new way. Amanda: Yeah definitely, um, not to go off on a tangent but, I definitely, I read an article today in the Chronicle that talked about how if this is the big experiment of all classes going on online because of emergency reasons, and you know there might not be enough um, time for the experiment to like, you know, evolve to get real, you know, interesting insights. But um, basically, the article just went on to say that students who take online classes don't do as well, um, since on site is their preferred method. So it can, it can be a challenge for sure. I mean, there's this list going around of how many schools are closing and I've looked at it this afternoon and it was like up to like 110 schools so, across the country, so it's definitely an interesting thing that I don't think we've ever had to deal with before so I would be curious to see like, if we learn anything from this, you know, forced decision. Jessica: Yeah, I heard, someone tweeted or said it and I was, I heard them say that, you know, get ready for all of the conference proposals and presentations and articles about both for how libraries prepare but also how higher education responded and I'm sure there will be a lot of what you just talked about, you know, how did we react to putting all the classes online, what did we learn what could we take away from it. So yeah, get ready for that coming up in the fall and next year. Amanda: I already saw someone on Twitter this morning saying, you know if they were interested in doing something for ACRL to DM them about it so... Jessica: Right. It begins. Amanda: I mean, it's practical for sure. Jessica: Yeah, true. Amanda: You know, but it's definitely, it'll be interesting to see what comes out of this whole thing. Jessica: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Jessica: All right, well, let's move on to our topic for this episode, as I said we're going to be talking about instructional programming. And so when we say programming is instructional, we're talking about events and activities in libraries that teach information literacy skills in some form. So these are programs that are more focused on bringing people together to teach them information literacy skills as opposed to just promoting the library and specific resources. So we're going to talk a little bit about some of our most successful programs. I'll start out with one that I did last year that was pretty successful. I collaborated with one of my colleagues at Berkeley College on this, and it was a Wikipedia edit-a-thon. We did it a little different than I think some other colleges have done it. Some colleges will do more of a timed event, and have students sign up to participate in a computer lab, but since we usually don't get that type of student response at Berkeley where I was when I did this, we actually partnered with faculty members and came to their classes. So we did two sessions in the class, spread apart two weeks apart from each other. The first session was teaching about Wikipedia, about representation as editors and why we needed to be more diverse, and the ways that editing can happen. And then in the second session, it was really the workshop where we demoed editing options and then students worked in pairs to find and edit articles. And Laurie, my colleague, did it a little differently in the first session she had them do for homework, research on what articles needed editing so that they came to the second session with an article prepped and ready to go. But we also had different class levels, mine was a 101 sociology class, hers was like a 300-level, gender and class, class, so there was a little bit more prior knowledge for her class, so I kept it really simple and just had them work to do basic edits. And the takeaways were still there and were still valuable, they still learned about representation about how easy it is to make a link edit or type into Wikipedia, they learned about the bots that can go in afterwards and remove their edits if they're inaccurate so they still learned a lot of stuff. And it was really successful because we got the buy-in from the faculty to do it in class over those sessions. What I would have liked, probably was more sessions to maybe come in and do three or four sessions, but I think that's something Laurie might be trying, eventually, to do it again. And she made a really great LibGuide about it that we can share in the show notes, it was definitely one of the more successful things I've done in terms of faculty response and student response. So, it's something that I'd like to do again, and I know other colleges have done it where they partner with student clubs, because the clubs have a specific theme that they're focused on, and so it's easy to tie it into a Wikipedia theme. So like I said I'm still new at Pace but it might be something I want to try in the future. Amanda: Yeah, I never had a chance to participate in the Wikipedia edit-a-thons but I definitely heard a lot about it from you and Laurie. I think it would make a great assignment, like a long-term, you know, like you said you would have loved to have gone back in so I think it has potential to be that kind of capacity for sure. Obviously, then it's not a program, but it's still, it's it's exciting because there are multiple steps involved because you do have to kind of teach them how to do it and teach them the basics and, but that's definitely an interesting, I think somewhat exciting project. How did the students react to it, were they interested in editing Wikipedia pages? Jessica: Yeah, surprisingly, they were! I was a little nervous that they were going to see it as too much of like an instruction session workshop feel, but you know walking around and especially because they got to work with a partner, and I let them find pages of things that they were interested in. It was for Hispanic Heritage Month, so there was that theme around it, but they, they then were able to find at least things that they were interested in whether it was a musician or a neighborhood or something like that. So they were interested in it and they were asking engaging questions and at the end we kind of did a little wrap up with the faculty member and a lot of them were saying you know I'm so surprised at how easy it was to edit things and I didn't know that it was that easy. So there was a great discussion at the end about a lot of actually things that are touched upon in the ACRL framework, so it does touch on a lot of the frames and you can teach a lot of it, even in the two sessions that we did so, it was popular with students. Amanda: Oh yeah, were they nervous at all to edit the pages? Jessica: Yeah, that's, it's true. Some of them were, some of them were like, “Wait what do I hit, I'm a little nervous about messing something up” and you know I had to remind them it's editable: A) It's okay. And also there is this whole culture and of people and bots that are there to kind of, you know keep things in check as well so it's not the end of the world if you know, you put in the wrong thing, you just have to check yourself. You check your work the same way you check all your other work. Amanda: Yeah, oh that’s interesting. Yeah, definitely sounds like an exciting project. So one of my successful programs is a series of symposiums that we did, that we still do. So every spring the library decides to offer some type of symposium about something that's going on and relevant in society, we try to keep it broad, so that we can invite a range of classes to participate. So, one that we recently did last year, which I think was one of the most successful ones was a panel on blockchain. And Jessica happened to be representing the library on that panel but it was such a diverse panel we had a professor who was really into data science. She was offering a course on blockchain so like, the timing was perfect. We had someone from career services who talked about you know, what it's, the job market, future job market looks like. We had someone from IS, our IT department, come and talk about it because like that was like his thing, he was interested in it. We had another professor talk about it from like the business aspect of it, um, am I missing anybody? I think that was everybody right? Jessica: Yeah, I think there was, uh, there was two professors, there was also the one that Zoomed in. Amanda: Yeah, yeah, I got him. And so it was really engaging so we got to invite business faculty, legal students, liberal arts students. There were so many different levels that we were able to invite, and they all talked about different things and I think what's exciting about the panel is that it's different perspectives, and they all have different perspectives, even, even though we asked the same question they all kind of answered the question differently. And the students were really engaged. The faculty were really engaged too, the ones that, that decided to bring their classes to participate. They were really engaged in it and the students learned a lot so they learned about something that was kind of, like super relevant to them. They learned about information, um, it was just really engaging. To be honest, our career services person, when we reached out to her to invite her she said, “You know, I really don't know a lot about this topic, but I'd be happy to be on the panel,” and she learned a lot herself so I think that was it also a great learning opportunity for her to kind of stay on top of certain things as well. So we've done the panel thing in the past, and that's been successful, and we're actually in the midst of planning our next symposium but knows with the coronavirus if that's going to happen, whether it's going to be April or May, but this year we're going to do it on big data and algorithms. So it's gonna be a wide range so again we're going to ask, we're going to ask a range of faculty to come, career services again. And then a few other people to be on the panel, and really like, talk about privacy and data sharing, oh we're gonna invite a marketing professor to get the perspective of how is your data being sold, do people care that their data is being sold. So it's really going to be like this interesting panel so, um, you know, again, it touches on a lot of frames, and it's, it's not just a lecture, you know, so because we've done a lecture style presentations, too. Um, but it’s more than one person talking. Jessica: Yeah, exactly. And I remember a lot of students got up and asked the panelists very specific questions related to their major. So they were definitely really interested in the topic which was great. And I think in that regard, they're both learning something about their discipline but it also just: A) gets the already interested students more curious and develops that kind of lifelong learning, interest in the topic and then for students who may have not known about it as much, then they'll get even more interested in it, by listening to the panel. So I think those panel discussions are really interesting. They’re a lot to plan, as opposed to just like a tabling event or like a one class session, but they're rewarding for everybody involved. I definitely learned a lot too. I didn't know a lot about blockchain. I knew little snippets about how it impacted libraries but I learned a lot in my own preparing and also from everybody else it was, it was interesting. [14:32] Amanda: Yeah, yeah. And the symposium also, I guess in a way, evolved from another program that we used to do every year which was Information Literacy Month programs. So, back in 2009, President Obama made this declaration that October was National Information Literacy Month, so we jumped on that bandwagon so hard. We did programming, like specifically around, you know, information, information literacy and like we didn't - we started at one campus. So, Berkeley, we have multiple campuses. We did it at one campus and I remember we were able to pick whatever topic we wanted so someone did something about Wikipedia, where he did a debate with the professor about Wikipedia. You know, so 2009, you know, to use it. I did something on - what did I do mine on? Privacy, maybe? Then, another librarian did hers on Google. So hers was like Google like a guru or something, and it was all information literacy, information seeking, types of like presentations, and it was really exciting and then the next year we blew it up even bigger. And what was really interesting and I think kind of was the demise of it was that after that first year it wasn't a declaration anymore, and nobody talked about it, I mean, and ALA didn't even jump on that bandwagon like nobody nationally was talking about it. But we kept it going, and it evolved over time where, at first it was like, you do your own thing. And then it became, okay, let's pick a theme, and go around the theme. And then, you know, we, it was kind of complicated to coordinate ten locations, with the same program. So we then voted on the themes, and I thought that was kind of interesting where we all kind of decided together collectively, what we wanted to kind of focus on. But I think, like I said eventually because nobody was really doing it outside of us, it kind of petered out, but I did like that that we said okay, October is when we're going to push, and we're going to really promote information literacy and really promote these skills outside of the classroom and like we have this declaration so we have a platform but because it was like, from 2009, it's not like we could put that in our documentation and say, you know, oh, according to this proclamation, you know. Yeah, that was kind of like, you know, it was good while it lasted, but then we kind of evolved, which is fine though because we evolved to the symposiums anyway so it worked out for us. Jessica: Yeah, that’s true, it evolved into something that, it's working out, even better, you know, we have to evolve with our students and the times and kind of what works for our um, our infrastructure, so. Amanda: Yeah, yeah, and I think we'll definitely talk about that a little bit more later when we talk about failures and tips about you know just like trying to just, you know, you have to grow and evolve when it comes to your instructional programming. [17:51] Jessica: Yeah, I guess that leads into, leads in well to my next one is kind of trial and error. One thing that I did so many times at Berkeley was tabling events, because a lot of my students were commuters and a lot of my students in general, both the commuters and the resident students, worked full time. So coming to a scheduled event at two o'clock or even five o'clock and then staying around for a half hour or an hour for a full program just wasn't feasible. So we kind of had to meet them where they are, and the tabling events were a great way to do that. So I, most of the time, picked a theme and used LibWizard to just make quizzes that they could take on the fly. Um, in terms of, a lot of times it was just promoting resources to them but in terms of the instructional programming, quizzes worked well because I could tell them like, “Here's a five minute multiple choice quiz about this topic, you know, let's learn something new.” And, you know, they could take a snack, afterwards, and food was always a great motivator. So I've done like Women's History Month, um, information overload, disinformation, and the LibWizard quizzes are so easy to make and you can make them simple or hard with logic or not so students love to take those. Although before we had LibWizard I even made an old school poster, like a trifold with the flaps, and it had trivia questions, and I think I did that one about voting and information literacy around voting, so it was really low tech but students could just stop, have a conversation, learn something new and then go to class. And we could feed them, which always felt great. So the tabling events were always my favorite because, you know, students have a short attention span, but I could still have, they’re very low stakes, and I could still build relationships with students. I could give them short mini lessons, I could even see how they're doing in their classes, and then that eventually led to, you know, scheduling, research appointments with them that would eventually lead to more teaching, or maybe they would tell me that they have a paper coming up, and their professor hadn't reached out to us about doing an information literacy session so I could reach out to their professor. So the tabling events were great for making more connections on top of teaching, because a lot of times you can't do that in the classroom events or the big panel events or scheduled events like that so I think those were always my favorite. I kind of want to find a way to get back to doing those. I actually saw a tweet the other day, this is not teaching students related but it was a tweet about someone who did a faculty lounge tabling. It was just like, hey, ask me questions about the library. So I've been asking around about how I can try to make that happen into one of the faculty buildings, so maybe that'll be a triumph coming up soon. Amanda: Oh yeah, that, that sounds like a great idea. I think, you know, it's important to be where they are. Just like our students we need to be where they are, we definitely to be where our faculty are. Jessica: Yeah they’re busy, so, might as well. Amanda: Exactly. Uh, another program that was successful and fun is a board game, it was a take on Candy Land, but a colleague of mine and I, we renamed it “Library Land.” It was, the students had to, they picked a game piece, And we created our own Candy Land board using Power Point, and we blew it up like huge poster size, and it was like four or five tasks that they had to do to demonstrate their information literacy skills. And we didn't teach them how to do it, but we like, these were skills that we thought that they should probably, like, know how to do. They were like basic things like search the catalog, find a database, you know, find something in one of the textbooks or something, and they, so they learned about our textbooks on reserve. And it was, it was so much fun. And we also, it got a little complicated, um, we actually also paired it with videos, that would give them additional clues. So that got fun as well and we found a lot of success I mean I'd say like a decent amount of students, I was in one location and he was in another, a decent amount of students actually participated in it. We were able to offer prizes so there was incentive, and then the fact that the big board was up there in the library and they watch their game pieces move every time they completed a task like they found it really interesting so it was, I think what was one thing that was successful about it was that it was self paced, they can do it at a time that was convenient for them. And then if they struggled or they got something wrong, we would of course help them and make it a teachable moment. So that was good too, um, and then I actually took this a step further and converted it for a class, and I did it as a lab activity, I still use the game pieces. But I switched up the activities to be specific to the class. And that was really successful too, the students were engaged and they were really engaged because they had half of the class period to do it and quote-unquote “beat their classmates” and get to the finish line. So that was like you know the whole gaming element was what was like super fun about it for them, and that you know like, information level skills that they needed to complete the task so that was pretty successful. Jessica: Yeah, that sounds super fun I'm kind of sad that I wasn't around for that but I remember seeing some pictures (chuckling). And it's true, it's kind of like we talked about in a bunch of episodes about Kahoots and how students love competing with their classmates even for the multiple choice questions, so it's a great way to get them to want to do your program and the self pacing thing definitely makes sense because they can kind of come and go and do it as they please. How did they watch the videos? Amanda: Um, they would get emails from us about it. They signed up, they'd have to put their name and their Berkeley email, and we'd send them emails like to...it was a nudge, and it was also a clue. So, I think two-in-one kind of thing to kind of like help them along if we saw them getting stuck or if they're struggling, and they, you know, they weren't doing anything after a while. Jessica: Oh that's cool. It reminds me of some of the really interesting stuff I've seen on the Facebook page for the Library Marketing and Outreach Group, I always shout them out because everybody on there is just so freakin talented, and I'm always stealing ideas from there and then reposting what I did and saying like hey you guys inspired me, and everybody's so supportive and that way so if you're not a part of that, I'm going to post it in the show notes, the link to it so everybody can join, ‘cause everybody there is super cool. Amanda: Yeah definitely. [24:59] Jessica: And another one I wanted to highlight, partially because it was good for online students too was um, Celebrate Berkeley Libraries month, our online LibGuide that we had. The uh, the month was a brainchild of our library marketing and outreach committee, and it was kind of that, the basis behind it was that April was always a bad month for us for National Library Week, we always had our break in between our semesters during that time, so we were never really able to take full advantage of that whole celebrate your library kind of thing. So we took it, and made January our month to celebrate our libraries. So, the first year we did information superpowers, that was kind of like your information literacy skills were your superpowers. And then last year we did the magic of libraries and being an information wizard, and last year's LibGuide had a lot of cool interactive stuff on it, and it was good because we could push this theme, and make it instructional, but for both on-site and online students, so we could really, we pushed it out I think via email to the online students and people put it in their emails to students when they supported them, and the guide had informational videos, it had links to some of our tutorials, and all of our Harry Potter books and wizarding books so it pushed our resources and IL skills, but it also had activities. So, I had created a “What's your Research House?” quiz. So that was fun to create because I am a Harry Potter fan, so it sorted them based on their answers to research questions into different houses. So I think like Slytherin was like, fake news, the fake news house. The Gryffindors were like, the researchers. I'm trying to think of how I framed it. I think I based it on each one off of one of the ACRL frames or something. That was really fun to come up with and again I'll link it in the show notes because it is public. And there were also weekly research questions. So those were just kind of like multiple choice research questions, and in the library we had them at the reference desk so when we checked out a book or an item to them, we would ask them if they wanted to answer the question, and then be entered to win a prize. So, it helped with our interacting with them at the reference desk, and it was a fun little way to get them to talk to us about research because then if they got the question wrong, it was a great little mini teachable moment. And I'm sure that could even be expanded, you know outside of a monthly themed event, it might just be fun to do at reference desks too. Yeah, so we, we also hoped that, having the educational videos on there that the quizzes would eventually lead to them watching that content. So, I don't remember the stats from that, but that would definitely be something interesting to look at. Amanda: Hmm. Yeah, I wasn't really a part of those programs but I was definitely always aware of them, and I did hear successful things about them so they do sound engaging and they don't, I mean it sounds like a lot of work putting it together but you had a lot of people helping with that, organizing it, right? Jessica: Yeah, we had like six of us on the committee, but it wasn't too, too much I mean especially if you split it up between three even three or four people and one person building the guide because that's a lot of work, one person creating the quizzes. Maybe someone else kind of being the Harry Potter expert, we had one librarian who was really the Harry Potter expert even more than me, so that was helpful. Yeah, but it was fun to be creative, and also do instruction at the same time and I think that's a lot of what's fun about instructional programming in general, is you get to be creative and pull in these themes and ideas and activities that maybe wouldn't always work in the classroom in the same way. Amanda: Yeah, I definitely agree with that, I think it allows you to, like you said, be creative, and also teach to some of the frames that you don't necessarily get to teach to in the classroom. Sometimes there’s just no space for it like we know at Berkeley, at least from our data that we rarely get to teach scholarship as conversation, it's just so rare for us. So programming gives us that opportunity. I think another good thing about programming is that you, as the librarian and instructor, you get to hone in on your teaching skills as you're presenting because you're still providing instruction in some capacity. So it's great practice, and you're also really enthusiastic and passionate about it because a lot of the times when it comes to this programming, you're picking the ideas of what programs you want to provide so it's not just something that's like a request came in or you were kind of thrown into it, it was something that you, you're personally interested in so you know you know how that goes. When you're personally interested in something you're really gonna throw yourself into it and get super involved with the planning process. So, I mean it always ends up being a better program because of that, you know. Jessica: Yeah, and it's a little more low stakes because you're not necessarily teaching to objectives or nothing's going to be graded, they don't have an assignment coming up that's based around it, it's, it's just an added opportunity to get them interested in libraries and lifelong learning and being curious and information literacy so that's a good thing about it too that it's just this kind of added thing that we get to do and have all these benefits of it. Amanda: Yeah, so those were some of our successful programs so of course with our successes, you know, we, we’re going to talk a little bit about our failures. I have, I mean I've definitely had my fair share of failures when it comes to instructional programming, but one that sticks out to me that I did, like, a million years ago was a program called 10 and 10, and it was 10 things about something in 10 minutes, and the reason I came up with the idea is because one of my biggest struggles was getting people to attend my events. And I was like well maybe it's just not, maybe they just don't have time, you know, so it's like they have 10 minutes, you know, so I would develop these programs like I did 10 things you need to know about social reading, 10 things you need to know about Chrome versus Mozilla, like I tried to make them interesting but also in, you know, instructional and they were literally 10 minutes I mean I stuck to it. But it was, I guess it was a fail, and I don't know if it's my fail but it was a fail because attendance was always so low. You know, it was hard to get people to attend, even, even being a 10 minute program, it was still a challenge so that was unfortunate. Um, so I, I think it's something we all still struggle with when it comes to programming, wouldn’t you say? Jessica: Yeah, definitely. That was probably one of my biggest problems too. I didn't hone in on a particular program because it feels like all of my programs that were failures or at least 90% of them revolved around not getting faculty buy-in to go into the class to do the program or students just didn't want to attend the scheduled session, and a lot of that is out of our control. I mean, I guess programming is in a way related to, under the umbrella of marketing, so a lot of library marketers would say well you should be doing your marketing research before you're doing any type of outreach or programming, so that you know what your students want and how you're going to be able to reach them, but sometimes that's out of our control, too. I mean, we've been told that students have survey fatigue, so we may not be allowed to do a survey to students to find out, you know, when can you come to a program, what programming are you interested in, and sometimes even that data wasn't helpful for me. It still kind of led to failures, I would ask students at the end of events to fill out a survey and the survey would have questions about, you know, when's the best time that you would attend events, what was your favorite Berkeley events that you've ever been to library related or not, what do you want to see? And a lot of times the data just wasn't necessarily relevant to the question, or it didn't lend itself to instructional programming the way I was interested in, or all of them would put different times that they could come, so it was like what, do I just offer the event at every time of the day everybody wants it? So, and I usually had very small sample sets of people, it was probably like if I only had five people come to an event, and three of them filled out a survey, well, that's not really a big enough marketing research data set anyway. Some of it has to do with our institution too, I mean I had a very small campus so I think maybe if I tried to do that type of research at Pace with many, many more students, it might be, might be a different story. So, you know, maybe coming soon, I’ll have more information on that. [34:36] Amanda: Yeah I think that's a common problem that every person who's trying to do programming faces. Um, you know I think back to when I was a student, I never attended programs outside of school, because I was working two jobs and I was taking six classes I didn't have time. You know, I, I think I could maybe think back to maybe one or two programs but I think they were all driven by extra credit, or I was required, kinda sorta deals, which I don't think is necessarily bad. I think students don't sometimes appreciate those moments, but sometimes they do end up learning something that you know they walk away with something even though they wouldn't have themselves attended that program. But it's, it is definitely a challenge but I still think instructional programming outside of the traditional classroom, research based is is important. I think, like we talked about, like there's a lot of different things that you can do with those programs, you don't, there's no real room for them otherwise in, like in a traditional setting. So, you know... Jessica: Yeah it’s worth um, being creative with your formats, and trying different things that work. Amanda: Absolutely, and I think that kind of goes through a little bit, um, is the challenging part right? So what are some of the challenges that come from preparing and presenting instructional programming? Jessica: Yeah, so just a few that we came up with and maybe there's more but obviously they take a lot of time to plan, we talked about it a little bit with Celebrate Berkeley Libraries month. Those LibGuides and all the quizzes, they took time to come up with, I'm sure “Library Land” took a while to come up with, right? Amanda: Oh yeah. Um, one thing that I always feel like I do is I never plan ahead enough. [Jessica chuckles] I do! I don’t know why, like, I always feel like I'm not, like, we're like, just down to the wire, getting it done kind of sort of deal and that's always been one of my struggles is to plan it but I think another thing that goes along with that is sometimes it's out of your control when you're collaborating with other departments. Jessica: Mm-hmm yeah, exactly. When you, when you have other people involved that you're relying on it can be, it can be hard to coordinate all of that. And we already talked about our third challenge which is lack of student attendance. And lastly is marketing to them, how do you reach them to: A) find out why they're not attending or B) to let them know about your event. I just was thinking about the event that I've been trying to do at Pace is citation workshops, we've been working with the writing center, and it's like, those are directly related to what students need to accomplish for their class. And it's, we're helping them out, but even marketing on social media, marketing on flyers, um, we haven't been able to get too many to attend so but we're going to try to flip our format and try something different so you just have to try different ways. Amanda: Yeah, yeah I think something that's not on this list is buy-in from maybe your supervisors and the time to do it, right? I know something that I experienced was, um after a while, my supervisor was like, Are you sure you want to invest time into this program? No one came to the last one. You know what's the value of it, what's the purpose of this program? So I think get even getting that internal buy-in from your own department, you know, supervisors, might be a challenge sometime and I think, I think it's important for you to be prepared. You know, when you're getting ready to propose some type of instructional programming to, you know, state that this isn't just a program that's, you know, arts and crafts, it's, you know we're providing instruction. And I think that kind of lends itself to the next section, which is some types of, some tips when it comes to, you know, the process of instructional programming. So one of the tips we have is to know what topics and engagement methods are important to your students. Right? I think that makes sense, that makes sense. Jessica: Yeah, get to know your students, get to know what they want and how to reach them. Amanda: Yeah. Another one is to be sure to assess your programming. So for a long time we didn't really collect a lot of data on our programming. And I have read this really great article in In the Library with a Lead Pipe about how to actually assess your programming and then it inspired me and a colleague to come up with this whole form that we use in LibInsight, and then eventually you and Bonnie evolved into this, like, it was a really complicated form, but I think we were capturing really important data when it came to the programming process, and I think it allowed us to collect meaningful data that we could then use to make decisions about future programs. Jessica: Yeah definitely! Um and Bonnie and I just wrote an article about it that we shouted you out in. So, (chuckles) that’ll be coming out soon! That’ll be a triumph of mine once it gets published over the summer. Um...yeah and I think that's also related to our next tip is tying your programming to your mission or goals of your department and institution, and the next one: collecting meaningful data because in the form that you had originally designed, it did have a field for tracking what, uh, what library goal and what institution goal does this go with. So um, that was, that's definitely a good tip as well because you can present that to your stakeholders that your programming is instructional and it's engaging with students, but it's also meeting the goals of the department and the institution. Amanda: Yeah I think that's very helpful when it comes to looking for funding for maybe materials or refreshments, and it allows you to also look at your data and recognize when something isn't working, that's another, I think an important tip too, you know, not only collect the data but say okay well what programs we offer in the past year and how did they go. Should we offer them again, and then also kind of recognize, well, you know this program didn't work we've offered it three times, and we just haven't gotten buy-in, so maybe we should move on. I think that is important and the only way you're going to get to that point is, if you collect that data because there could be people in your institution where they're like, Oh, we've always done this program, you know, that's just what we do. And I think if you have the data to show them that you know that program isn't working anymore, perhaps they might be receptive to new programming ideas. And you know, switching it up a bit. Jessica: Yeah, exactly. And our last tip is to make sure that you tie your program back to the IL skills that you want to be taught because we are talking about instructional programming, so you want to make sure that you know exactly what IL skills you're gonna teach and try to track them so that you know what was taught, and then you can always use that as part of your meaningful data to demonstrate value. [42:30] Amanda: Yeah, I think when you, you look back if you do a year-end review, and you look back at well what skills did we touch in the class, what skills did we touch upon to the students in reference. And then, you know, maybe you do it twofold, maybe you do it either. You're doing it to report on it or maybe you're doing it to look for gaps. So if you were looking at your data and saying okay, we're not getting to the students for these skills. Let's see if we can create programming around it because we know these skills are important, we know that they need them but our curriculum just doesn't lend itself to those skills. So I think, you know, constantly reminding yourself that these are instructional programs. It allows you to be mindful of what is or isn't being taught. Jessica: Yeah, definitely. And so we want to ask, or end, by asking you a question! We want to hear what your most and least successful instructional programming has been, we'd love to create a list and we can share it on Twitter so send us an email or a tweet or a direct message and we'll try to compile that. Amanda: Okay so we are going to move into our weekly segment of triumph and fail, Jessica, do you have a triumph and fail or one or the other? Jessica: I think I have both. So my, I think are both actually related to each other, so I had a peer observation this week that went well, it was all voluntary, it's not tied into my annual review or anything like that but we just decided as a department that if we wanted to be observed by someone within the department that we could voluntarily do that, and since I’m new I definitely wanted to get more feedback, and it went well! The person that I had observe me has been around at Pace for a very long time and has done teaching so I liked learning tips from someone who's been doing it much longer than I have, and has been teaching specifically the Pace resources but also just information literacy and searching in general. It was great to learn from her. And I guess my fail is a part of that was, I didn't realize that our quick search, our discovery system, automatically only included full text links out to all of our resources and so I think I said something to them about, oh, well, if you click this search-for icon it might direct you to interlibrary loan, which you would never do if all of the information was full text so I was like, oh duh, I shouldn't have said that and she told me that afterwards. But, you know, it's not like it messes with anything that students needed to know they'll just never find an interlibrary loan link but, so it was just a little bit of me still getting to know our extensive set of resources that we have and all those little tidbits about how it works. So oops. [chuckling] Amanda: Oh, I'm sure you're not the only person that's ever done that before so... Jessica: Right. So what about you? Amanda: So I have both. So my triumph is...no I’m going to start with my fail. My fail is that, once again, as per usual, I tried to do too many things in one semester. So part of my job is to lead our Instructional Services program, and move it forward. And that entails different types of projects, and I tried to coordinate too many projects at once and my fail is that I'm failing at doing this because I want to be involved in every single one. And I'm also struggling to get some of them off the ground because librarians are working on other projects, so I had to pull it back. And so it's a fail because I feel like I failed, that like you didn’t get to do the project, but then I also feel like this is just a chronic problem that like I stretched myself too thin. And I stretched my people too thin, so I'm trying to scale back but it's very hard for me because I like to juggle multiple projects at once but I don't think other people like to as much as I do so, that was definitely a fail this semester that I'm going to try to correct next semester, we'll see if I can do it. So my triumph is my nagging for librarians, my people, to confirm their LibCal appointments, finally paid off. I was asked by my supervisor last week to confirm like patterns in services and appointments to demonstrate where we need the most support for certain locations, and that's going to impact how we staff our locations. And you know, I feel like a constant nag always saying to people, make sure you confirm your appointment, make sure you, you know, provide accurate data, and it finally paid off because now I was able to, you know, provide her with that information, and it's being used to make real important decisions about staffing our libraries to be there for our students, when they need us the most, so I'm happy that that kind of worked out, finally. Jessica: That’s so cool! Amanda: Yeah I’m excited! I haven’t got to share it with my librarians yet, I'm gonna share it next week at our meeting so I'm excited that I get to kind of like, you know, share it and hopefully that'll also encourage them to continue to confirm those LibCal appointments. Jessica: Right. That’s awesome! Great triumph. Amanda: Yeah, yeah. So that wraps up episode eleven! Here's where you can find us: you can find the podcast at @Librarian_Guide, you can find Jessica at @LibraryGeek611, you can find me, Amanda at @HistoryBuff820. You can also email us at [email protected]. Be sure to rate and subscribe to our podcast wherever you listen, we love to hear from you in reviews as well. Jessica: Great! And send us an email or a tweet to share your questions, ideas for potential discussions, or your triumphs and fails in the classroom. We want your feedback, your questions, and encourage you to share anything to be read in an upcoming episode. Summary keywords: students | programming | faculty | quizzes | information literacy skills | events | panel | symposium
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About the podcast:The LGT podcast is hosted by two instruction librarians interested in sharing their experiences teaching information literacy, discussing current trends, and having meaningful conversations about librarianship. Archives
May 2021
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