Preparing to Teach

What?

At the end of last year I completed a 12 week City & Guilds course at a local college in Preparing to Teach in the Lifelong Learning Sector. This was recommended by my Chartership mentor because one of my main areas for development on my PPDP is to get more teaching experience. My current job doesn’t involve any teaching but this is something hope to move into in the future. I currently work in an academic library, staffing the library enquiry desk for a large chunk of my time, and I’d like to progress in this area of library work in the future. The course is perhaps more appropriate to those wanting to go into a teaching role, rather than a role that involves a teaching element like many teaching librarian jobs, but I still found many aspects of it very useful.

This course can be the first stage of 3 leading to a diploma in teaching in lifelong learning. Doing this first part provided a good introduction to teaching which was sufficient for my needs, offering a good grounding in how to plan a teaching session and to build a short programme of sessions within the context of my particular subject area. Over the 12 weeks we considered all aspects of teaching including assessment, equality and diversity, and differentiation of teaching activities. I also got an opportunity to have a go at actually delivering a teaching session in a 30 minute ‘microteach’. Although purely theoretical at this stage we all linked the work to our own specific subject area – which meant the microteach sessions were interesting as I learnt some new skills (mainly how to paint my nails properly!).

So What?

As I’d had no prior experience of developing and delivering teaching sessions this course was really useful for giving me an overview of the key elements needed when developing a teaching session and for enabling me to consider my own approaches to teaching information literacy and library skills. It’s easy to continue to re-use the same materials without looking for new ways of doing the same session so I tried to come up with my own ideas rather than looking at how this is already done in my place of work.

The main learning points from the course for me were:

• Creating a teaching session is a holistic process where all of the elements are interconnected following a cycle from planning → delivery → assessment → feedback, and so on as the feedback given should inform the planning of the next session.
• Use of differentiation is essential in order to vary learning activities and cater for a range of learning styles and needs, accounting for equality and diversity
• It is important to engage learners through the use of varied, student-led activities
• Bloom’s taxonomy should be used to write targeted learning outcomes which build learners’ knowledge from lower to higher order thinking skills. This also allows for differing levels of ability among learners.

Although some of this seems quite prescriptive it is good way to give structure to a teaching session and ensure learning outcomes are realistic and guide what students will be doing in the session.

I’d be interested to know of innovative ways others have used to engage students in information literacy teaching…

One of the key things I learned about myself whilst doing this course was that I would need to build my confidence in delivering teaching sessions (apparently I’m very good on paper…) as I didn’t come across as confident in the microteach. This sounds like a huge barrier but it’s one that I’m still hoping to be able to overcome. I think the main reason I came across like this was more to do with me being very aware of the false nature of the microteach situation and that I was delivering a session to a mixed group of people who had no use for the information I was giving them. I hope that in a real life situation I would do much better.

I also learned that I am very target-driven and work better when I have set tasks to complete. I much prefer this way of working – perhaps the reason I am making Chartership much harder for myself than it really needs to be!

Now What?

I have been getting some experience of supporting a range of teaching sessions at work so the next step for me would be to have a go at actually planning and delivering a session myself. This might not be possible in my current role but at least now I’ve gained some valuable skills and knowledge (in theory anyway!) that would put me in a better position when going for new jobs. One thing to work on is my confidence and voice projection. Hopefully these things will come with time and experience.

Toon (Lib)TeachMeet – May the Fourth be with you!

On May 4^th I attended the first ever Toon (Lib) TeachMeet. I had seen a lot of discussion about this concept on Twitter, following the success of the very first Cam (Lib)TeachMeet in Cambridge, and I was really interested in going along to see how an ‘unconference’ works in practice. The flexible, unstructured style of the event, along with the small number of attendees, meant there was a fairly informal atmosphere, which allowed for easy networking; something which can seem quite daunting at a larger, more formal conference. The short presentations (at either 2 or 7 mins long) meant that the presenters really had to focus on getting the key points across, conveying their ideas concisely. I really liked this as we were given the most important snippets of information, going away some new ideas, but without your head too full of information.

Although I’m not currently working in a teaching role, this is an area that I’m really keen to get into in the future so I was mainly hoping to use this experience to gather some ideas and knowledge to take forward in my career, whilst also discovering some approaches to use in ad hoc information literacy training when dealing with enquiries at the library help desk.

It was also a great opportunity to meet other information professionals working in my region and to share ideas with those working in different sectors, such as school and FE libraries. The first presentation from Ann-Marie Laws, a school librarian in Northumberland, was a great opportunity to find out about an interesting initiative that is happening locally. Ann-Marie is working on a project with Jackie Dunn (from Newcastle University) – ‘Bridging the Divide: Information Literacy – the forgotten link’ – looking into information literacy skills of transitioning students and this will lead to the development of an online learning resource toolkit. I am really interested to see the findings and recommendations of this project.

A key theme discussed in a few of the presentations was how to encourage student participation in training sessions to maintain interest. Asking students to work in groups or pairs to discuss their ideas really helps to reduce their fear of speaking in front of the whole group. Lucy Keating (from Newcastle University) found a low-tech solution to liven up induction for first year undergraduates by using cards outlining examples of information to seek and asking students to discuss in pairs where they would look for that information. This would then lead into a discussion about using relevant academic resources for research. Julia Robinson, also from Newcastle University, demonstrated an effective method of teaching search strategies. Using an example essay question and asking students to work in groups to note down keywords on giant post-its; another low-tech solution to make a session more interactive, is a great way to highlight the range of potential alternative search terms and to demonstrate how terms then need to be combined using Boolean.  

The afternoon was rounded off with an ‘ideas clinic’ during which we discussed how to gain credibility and interest in a training session without patronising. This seems to be one of the main challenges when delivering a teaching session, as it is essential to get the group engaged and interested in learning what you have to say. The key tips were:

• make it relevant to the audience by appealing to what they are interested in;
• make the session interactive, and;
• be enthusiastic – if you’re not they won’t think it’s interesting enough to listen to!

Overall, this was a really enjoyable event which definitely gave me plenty of food for thought. And, speaking of food…any event that includes cake on the programme is always a winner in my book!