Registration now open: 3Ts conference

3Ts: Exploring New Frontiers in Teaching, Technology and Transliteracy
Fulton-Montgomery Community College, Johnstown, NY
March 25, 2011

As budgets continue to shrink and the number of online or blended classes continues to grow, the need for instructors who are comfortable with the wide array of digital learning tools becomes of paramount importance. From the writings of Donald E. Hanna and associates1, we are reminded that “the challenge is not simply to incorporate learning technologies into current institutional approaches, but rather to change our fundamental views about effective teaching and learning and to use technology to do so.” Keeping this in mind, the 3 T’s conference aims to explore issues surrounding the intersections between teaching, instructional technologies and the growing number of literacies all students need for learning and succeeding in today’s information-rich academic and professional worlds.

1. Hanna, Donald E. Associates, Higher Education in an Era of Digital Competition: Choices and Challenges, Atwood Publishing, 2000, p.61.

As one of the primary goals of the 3Ts planning committee, we are offering a discounted “buddy” registration fee to encourage cross-disciplinary discussion among our participants.

What constitutes a “buddy”? Buddies are created by a pair of attendees (registering at the same time) who are complementary and/or collaborating professionals (i.e., teaching faculty and a librarian, a librarian and an instructional designer, two teaching faculty from different disciplines).

SUNY Registration Fee $20.00; Non-SUNY Registration Fee $30.00
SUNY Buddy Registration Fee $15.00; Non-SUNY Buddy Registration Fee $25.00

What is Transliteracy? For conference information visit:
http://threetees.weebly.com

Co-Sponsored by SUNY Librarians Association Working Group for Information Literacy (SUNYLA WGIL)
SUNY Center for Professional Development
SUNY Faculty Advisory Council on Teaching & Technology (FACT2)

 

Call for Proposals: Exploring New Frontiers in Teaching, Technology, and Transliteracy

Are you interested in teaching, technology and transliteracy?

Do you use your students’ fluency across media, modes, and disciplines to their and your advantage?

Are you using technology to extend learning in the classroom (physical or virtual)?

Are you experienced in successfully blending technology into your teaching?

If you’ve answered yes to any of these questions, the conference planning committee for The 3 T’s: Exploring New Frontiers in Teaching, Technology, and Transliteracy wants YOU to consider submitting a proposal (now closed).

Co-sponsored by SUNY FACT² and the SUNY Librarians Association Working Group for Information Literacy (SUNYLA WGIL), The 3 T’s: Exploring New Frontiers in Teaching, Technology, and Transliteracy is a one-day conference focused on placing pedagogical theory at the foundation of seamless, engaging and productive teaching practice when infusing various technologies into the classroom experience. Educators, Faculty, Instructional Designers, and Librarians hailing from K-12 and higher education institutions will gather in Johnstown, NY at Fulton-Montgomery Community College on March 25, 2011 to share their successes, challenges and overall understanding of the theory to practice connection.

Don’t miss out on your chance to spotlight your classroom ingenuity and achievements!

Proposals should address the following questions:

• How have you drawn upon student transliteracy to support learning?
• How have underlying principles and theories guided your inclusion of a specific technology or technologies in the classroom?
• How did teaching and technology work collaboratively to improve both technological literacy and learning?

As proposals undergo a peer-reviewed process, emphasis on the following are highly encouraged:

• Connecting theory to practice as discussed and modeled through your presentation delivery
• Collaborative projects/lesson plans that could include (but are not limited to) cross-disciplinary teaching, faculty/librarian partnerships, K-12/college experiences

Proposals can include any meaningful integration of technology and teaching used to support the growing number of literacies students need for learning and succeeding in today’s information-rich academic and professional worlds.  Possible tracks and technologies might include:

Literacies	Technologies
Information literacy Visual literacy Digital literacy Media literacy Cultural literacy Critical literacy	Open Source Technologies Web 2.0 Technology Social Networking (Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Ning) Mobile Technology (Mobile apps, texting) Classroom Technologies (Smartboards) Collaborative Technology (Wikis) Multimedia (Podcasts, Vcasts)

Conference sessions will consist of 30 minutes speaking/workshop time with 15 minutes allocated for Q&A.

The deadline for proposals has passed.

Presenters will be notified by November 15, 2010 if their proposal has been accepted.

Presenters will receive free registration for the conference and will have the opportunity to publish their work in the conference’s online proceedings.

For further questions, contact:

Kim Davies-Hoffman
Reference/Instruction Librarian
SUNY Geneseo
kdhoffman@geneseo.edu
(585) 245-5046 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              (585) 245-5046      end_of_the_skype_highlighting begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              (585) 245-5046      end_of_the_skype_highlighting

 

Back on the blog

It’s interesting (and sad) how I seem to post entries on this blog about once a year.  I can hardly call myself a blogger.    But once again, I will try to spur myself on to remain committed to posting.

The writers group meeting that I just attended will hopefully help toward keeping myself disciplined.  A small group of like-minded and equally busy librarians will try to build in some accountability among us so that we can all achieve our goals of slowly but surely producing good pieces of writing – for professional purposes mainly, but perhaps some creative writing will seep into our efforts.  That would be a big plus for me!

So, one of my three goals before next week’s meeting is to publish a blog post (after almost a year’s hiatus).  Here I am!

I can’t explain why I don’t add to this blog more frequently.  The original goal was to write short pieces that track my daily/weekly activities working collaboratively with classroom faculty, mostly in terms of teaching.  That should be an easy and enjoyable task.  And I certainly have lots that I can add.  But as usual, I think I build these tasks up in my mind so that they soon become so insurmountable, that I give up entirely rather than contributing just a little.  Such is the story of my life!

As I have done in the past, here are a few topics on my mind that I hope to write about in the near future.

• The disappointment over an Anthropology course that E.K. and I had big plans for that was recently cancelled due to low enrollment
• A growing working relationship with the new chair of our ANTH Dept, including course and assignment development, teaching and the purchase of new books
• Helping the ANTH Dept with assessment endeavors related to information literacy which has lead to new faculty interest in greater teaching collaborations
• Working with J.A. toward his plans for an interdisciplinary food project
• A recent conference presentation that highlighted the teaching collaboration between C.R. and me
• With C.R. moving to a new institution, plans to continue our collaboration for future presentations and publications
• Forging new relationships and collaborative projects with faculty in the Foreign Languages
• Working with E.K. to finally write articles on our work over the past few years
• The newest RYSAG camp – preparations for and implementation during the last two weeks of July
• Plans toward a COCID/SUNY CPD sponsored conference that will encourage collaborative presentations between classroom faculty and librarians
• Participation on and activities toward our library’s new Scholarly Communications Team

And the list goes on . . . Wow, I guess I better start writing! 

 

Gaining Faculty Support

It is amazing how my mind bounces around to so many different ideas, all somewhat related however.  I will try and make some kind of sense and congruence to my thoughts . . .

Thanks to my director, I am able to stay home today and catch up on the professional literature and spend some time writing on my blog.  My major goals for today have been somewhat shifted but I try to remain as focused as possible.  The first article I have read comes as a nice surprise.  “Faculty-Librarian Collaboration,” written by Hollander, Herbert, and Stieglitz DePalma (APS Observer, March 2004, 17(3)), comes from the perspective of a Psychology professor; not a librarian.  What a refreshing change!  The article was written in first person by Sharon Hollander (last documented as working at Georgian Court University), who states being initially weary of what the Library could provide her and her students.  From the very first library instruction session, she was reacquainted with all that librarians have to offer and she was sold from that moment on.  As she mentions, I think it’s important that professors see, with their own eyes, the real lack of information/research skills that today’s college students possess.  In many cases, like anything else that comes easy to us, professors rely on the idea that since they know how to conduct sound research (and that it’s relatively easy to do), their students must already know this too.  But as we know, the Library of today is much different than the Library of just 10-15 years ago.  As Hollander puts it, the Library has “morphed into a more comprehensive institution, the ‘teaching library’.”  With so many choices for where to find information these days, and having to sift out the reliable from the unreliable, it’s no wonder students get lost in the sea of information.  It’s always gratifying when professors tell us that even they learned something new in a library instruction session geared to their students.

Sharon Hollander asks a few beginning questions in the article, ending most importantly with the question, “why is faculty-librarian collaboration worthwhile?”  I’d be interested in posing this question to our library blog to see if any professors answer, providing a bit of free PR for what we do at our library.

I would further like to pose the question that Hollander highlights about the obstacles faculty see facing them when using the library and/or collaborating with a librarian.  The reasons she cites sound way too familiar.

What follows in the article are some really key pieces of advice to professors on how to begin working closely and collaboratively with an instruction librarian.  Start small by incorporating a library-based assignment into the syllabus or requiring students to ask the reference librarian for something specific.  Think of librarians as teachers and realize that the BI sessions of yesterday (one-shot, general and unrelated to the actual work students are being asked to do) have become much more tailored to the discipline and specific subject(s) of a particular course.  Use librarians for independent research projects, for assistance with topic selection for research papers, in term paper clinics, for education on specialized databases and other information resources, for help with grant writing assignments and computer-based projects, and for their subject expertise, where applicable.

This last point reminds me (not that I’m a subject expert by any means in Anthropology) that I have been able to offer more of a multidisciplinary approach to the anthropology students I see in class.  When disciplines such as Anthropology and Sociology cover so many different subject areas, it comes natural to me to research topics within the discipline through many varying subject-specific databases.  Many research topics within either field can be found under the perspectives of psychology, medicine, geography, history, business, etc. keeping the theoretical basis, however, grounded in the original discipline (i.e., anthropology, sociology).

Hollander completes her words of wisdom by discussing the use of librarians on a grander scale – campus-wide collaborative teaching – and by recommending continuous assessment of how the faculty-librarian collaboration is working.  As she writes, and as I have illustrated in this blog, “not everything works the first time, and some things never work.”  “This is not an easy process” but certainly the benefits of faculty-librarian collaboration outweigh the fear of risk-taking, the continuous process of evaluating and tweaking, and the release of control or the idea that a professor must teach independently to be seen as fully competent and/or successful (especially for new or non-tenured teachers).

Although I gained no new information from this first article within a series of future summaries, I am pleased to have begun this project on such a high note.  Unless we are already working collaboratively with a professor/teacher, rarely would we hear the glowing comments and outright recommendation for collaboration to other teachers from a professor.  One thing that Ellen and I have realized is that we can no longer “preach to the choir” of instruction librarians of the tremendous benefits gained from a close working relationship.  It’s the faculty who need to begin to see the advantages and propel themselves into similar collaborations.  Without their motivation, buy-in and commitment, a collaborative initiative can fall flat.

 

Adding yet another stakeholder to the mix

Ellen Kintz was in town between her travels to Mexico and California and we were able to meet this morning to discuss possibilities of presenting at a Lilly Conference. We’re convinced these days that we must present where the faculty are. Librarians are already on board with collaborative endeavors. Finding willing and enthusiastic faculty to partner with always seems to be the toughest challenge. But we’re gaining some steam . . .

Along with the wonderful compliment given by Michelle at SUNY Oswego, I heard from a librarian at Suffolk County Community College today who has been collaborating with an ESL professor and presenting the partnership at conferences (the most recent at LOEX 2008) and through publications (look for a chapter from Bealle & Cash-McConnell titled “A Construcivist Approach to Instructional Technology and Assessment in ESL Course Design” in the upcoming Neal-Schuman publication, Using Technology to Teach Information Literacy (2008). In Bealle’s own words, “the presentation with your anthro students (regarding Mayan research – SUNYLA Cortland, May 2004 – I believe) helped me realize the potential of librarian-faculty collaborations.” So, successful collaborations are being formed whether by librarian or faculty initiation. The more faculty we can engage in very powerful teaching partnerships, the more effective student learning can be, especially within the context of our ever-increasing digital world.

I have already discussed Ellen’s and my vision of a triangular model of collaboration (student-librarian-faculty) in this blog, but I’d like to add a fourth stakeholder to the mix – a technology expert. Without the inclusion of Milne Library‘s Technology Instructor, Steve Dresbach, students’ mastery of research skills and content would sit flat on its own. Steve has been involved in Ellen’s classes from day one, although separated from the librarian’s participation in the learning process. Much like I teach a number of research-based sessions in Ellen’s classes, Steve leads at least one technology session per course, which is then followed up by one-on-one or group consultations. The final product that students create is impressive.

Although the philosophy of learning content through research skills that is then delivered via technological projects (Powerpoint slide shows and InDesign posters thus far) has always been key to Ellen Kintz’ courses, there has never been much direct collaboration between the technology expert and the librarian . . . until now. This morning , Steve joined Ellen’s and my meeting to discuss a proposal to Lilly. The goal is to share with a faculty audience the model of content-to-research-to-content-to-final presentation (content appears twice since students must start with a little knowledge on a topic before effectively expanding upon that content through the research process) with the students actively engaged throughout the entire process. It is through the partnership of three faculty/staff members and the students that we are able to transform our students into scholars who are highly capable of presenting on a professional level.

Since we cannot be sure if this fall’s version of ANTH 229: Ethnography and Film will be Ellen’s last course taught (post-retirement), the plan is to film as much of the semester’s classes as possible and develop a documentary that clearly highlights each stakeholder’s role in the educational process. If our proposal is accepted by Lilly, we can use clips from the documentary and direct comments from student interviews regarding their impressions of the learning experience. Rather than bringing just one student to present with us (which is always a big plus, but expensive), the video can illustrate multiple student perspectives on all that they have learned through the ANTH experience.

 

The best compliment of all

This will be a quick post since the clock is ticking before I head out into a new storm that has been wreaking havoc in Buffalo and Rochester.  But before I forget to share one of the best compliments I’ve ever received . . .

I was part of a panel presentation last Thursday at the SUNYLA Conference in Potsdam, NY focused on assessment of teaching and learning in the library classroom. As the last presenter on the panel, I quickly ran over my allotted 15 minutes and we moved into Q&A.  A librarian from SUNY Oswego wanted to tell me that a theater professor from her campus attended a talk that I presented with an Anthropology student back in March.  The professor returned to campus determined to get a similar collaborative teaching approach started.  I look forward to working with the Oswego librarian-faculty team, in conjunction with Ellen Kintz, before the fall semester begins.

Michelle encouraged me to continue sharing the positive results and benefits of my work with Anthropology (and other areas), especially to teaching faculty, because “it’s making a difference.”  Wow, four of the sweetest words a librarian can hear.  It’s making a difference.

It looks like I’ll need to seek out more faculty-heavy conferences and workshops to present at.  I know that there is a prominent Teaching and Learning Conference called Lilly.  I should start there first.  Any other ideas on where to reach faculty at their conferences?

 

Where would we be without 2.0?

So, this collaborative effort isn’t so much librarian to teaching faculty, but since we librarians in the SUNY system are considered faculty, I’m going to count this as librarian-faculty collaboration.

Yesterday, I returned from SUNY Potsdam where friends and colleagues within SUNY gather annually for drinks, dancing lessons, drumming circles, kayaking, lots of food, and . . . oh yeah . . . professional development. Despite resistance to attending the conference this year, I am so happy I did. I have forgotten how much I enjoy the SUNYLA conference, but even more, how much I enjoy my friends within SUNY. It’s interesting to me how close colleagues can get when we’re all pretty much doing the same thing (librarianship), but our relationships become so much closer than that. Hello’s and goodbye’s are met with hugs rather than handshakes or waves and conversation over good meals are focused on what’s happening in our personal lives more than what we’re doing professionally. That talk can happen during the presentations. Despite attending the conference without my closest compadres, I had an amazing time and was given the opportunity to get better acquainted with co-workers within my own library and new librarians joining SUNY all over the state. Nothing brings people together like a heated game of foosball.

The best experience, however, came before the conference. Against all odds, a group of four worked cross state on a 90-minute presentation to be given on Friday the 13th, not once meeting in person. The Membership Enthusiasm Outreach Workgroup (MEOW) did meet once in person last September, but I would say the bulk of the work completed by this group happened online between 4 dedicated librarians that I am fortunate to call friends (excluding myself as the 4th librarian, of course). How did we get the work accomplished? Via phone, e-mail, IM, and the miracle of 2.0. MEOW’s wiki, but more importantly Google Docs, helped us work “as if” we were in the same room. My favorite experience was probably when Nancy and I were simultaneously looking at a google doc, IMing each other as we examined our work, and making instant changes to the document. Nancy told me yesterday that she is now about 1.75 (not quite at the 2.0 level but close!) as a result of this collaborative work, and has even been using some of the tools for personal business.

The other helpful hint is that Gmail can send files of infinite size (or at least bigger than my campus e-mail account can send). That tidbit of info could have helped ease the process of loading my ppts to the LOEX 2008 conference page.

Other google docs allowed the MEOW 4 to maintain a running conversation of thoughts, questions, and suggestions helpful to finalizing our conference presentation. We plan to share these documents with the greater MEOW group, along with suggestions from our audience made during the brainstorming activity of yesterday’s session, before a second in-person meeting. In an effort to get as many of the MEOW members as possible “attending” this meeting, we’ll incorporate a conference call and IM so that those who cannot physically travel can still participate. If we could get Internet2 up and running (demonstrated fantastically during the keynote session of the SUNYLA conference . . . and Geneseo has access to Internet2!), that would be even better, but I’m not so sure we can move that quickly.

The other web 2.0 tool that I’m hooked on is Twitter, thanks to my run-in with Rudibrarian at Computers in Libraries. Being able to take conference notes and write them up later has been a great exercise in reflecting on what I learned at various conference sessions. I love being able to listen to a presentation, takes notes, discuss with Rudibrarian (if she happens to be attending the same session), ask questions of clarification, and even hear Rudy ask those questions aloud. Full circle.

My final thought on 2.0 for the day is that blogs, wikis, Google docs, etc. have been so instrumental in my work on the RYSAG summer camp. I have been so pleased to serve as the faculty member to lead the planning group in technological collaboration. We are all learning and growing together.

 

Faculty Collaboration at its Best

Yay, the LOEX powerpoints are finally online! Susan Norman and I presented “Summer Sleuths in the Library” (name eventually changed to “The Multicultural Classroom: Plan, Build, Renew – Librarian as Constructivist Architect”) at this year’s LOEX conference in Oak Brook, Illinois. We had a small audience but those who attended really seemed excited about our summer camp program. Here are the powerpoints – one that works better in Office 2007 (although the video doesn’t not seem to be loading, at least not on my slow laptop) and the other that’s better suited for Office 2003. The handout consists of acronyms used in our presentation and a bibliography. The slides obviously cannot represent all that we discussed in our presentation, but the video fills in a lot of gaps. If you are interested in learning more about our program, please don’t hesitate to comment or send me a message.

If you cannot easily get to the video, look for it at http://rysag.geneseo.edu.

I am thrilled to report that the entire ppt is playing in our library’s lobby on one of the large plasma screens. Hopefully, it will attract the attention of prospective students and their families while on campus tours and of the few students, staff, faculty, and community members using the library this summer. The adventure of the summer camp will begin again on July 14.

 

Growing interest in Anthropology

As I drove into work this morning, I listened to an NPR story about the uranium mining that has been happening in the Navajo Nation, and how it has negatively effected the Nation’s people, for years now. What’s funny is that the name of the Chief/President interviewed instantly rang a bell, before I ever discovered that the report was related to the Navajo. The intro to the story was purely about uranium, in general, or perhaps I just wasn’t listening closely enough yet. Why was that name so familiar? Because I have gone through student-chosen website upon website as a regular assignment in Ellen Kintz’ ANTH 229: Film and Ethnography where his name has come up. The course schedule is divided by different cultural groups that students study by way of documentaries. The Navajo, of course, are one of these groups to be explored. It is a fascinating course (not that I have had much, if any, time to sit in on it when I’m not actually teaching in it) and one in which Ellen and I have been very successful at infusing scholarly research skills. Students are introduced to the Navajo during a time where we are simultaneously focusing on scholarly web skills – searching, evaluating, citing, and annotating. On the first or second day of class, I come in to provide a 75-minute session on web skills that move beyond the typical use of simple Google. After lots of hands-on time in class, students are given periodic assignments (as stated in the course syllabus) to produce short annotated bibliographies (3 sources) on the cultural group being studied, in the scholarly research format that we are practicing (in addition to the web, I teach students scholarly skills for finding books, journal articles, and sometimes multimedia platforms). The goal of these assignments is to have students practice and retain these lifelong search skills while learning more about the culture, beyond what can be taught with limited time in the classroom. The formula and balance of content to skills works extremely well! In a sense, students are learning the course content by using advanced research techniques as the vehicle. As I recently titled a faculty workshop at the University of Buffalo, “Broccoli, Headhunting and the Mayan Universe: Is There a Connection?” I make the analogy of sliding scholarly research skills into the course curriculum and learning goals to make “library stuff” seem more palatable much like parents hide broccoli and other greens under gooey, melty cheese or into sweets like brownies so that kids will eat the vegetables that we know are so good for them yet do not have the appeal of . . . let’s say . . . a hot fudge sundae.

Anyway, back to the Navajo stuff . . . In the past, I have compiled students’ web “picks” onto a website, but more recently, Ellen and I have developed a wiki where students can progressively post their chosen research sources and I can go in and make comments and suggestions on their annotated bibliographies (not done so well in Fall 2007 due to complete work overload, but a new wiki will begin when ANTH 229 is offered in Fall 2008). An additional benefit to the students’ wiki work is that they continue to learn, from each other in this case, as they tend to catch glimpses of what their classmates have written, with the annotated bibliographies but more so with the class readings and online discussion.

In brief and returning to the NPR story from this morning (boy, I do like to go on tangents!), I think it is amazing how much of the Anthropology taught by Dr. Ellen Kintz I’ve been able to absorb, merely by working with her and her students. I barely ever attend class sessions if I’m not teaching scholarly skills to the students (no time to do so. I wish there was more time for this.). So, all of my education in Anthropology has been gleaned from what work the students provide to me that I then assess and comment upon. Ellen and I have talked about plans for my graduate work in ANTH. I would LOVE to get a Master’s in Anthropology. It’s so funny how this discipline never came onto my radar screen in my undergraduate days (despite my studies in the French language, culture, linguistics, sociology, and international relations, all of which surround Cultural Anthropology). I do need to get serious about putting in an application for a Master’s program at Empire State College. Must look into this today since I know the most recent deadline is coming up.

 

LOEX 2008: Improving Teaching & Learning Through Instructional Partnerships: Building Librarian Relationships with One-on-One, In-depth Conversations

Rebecca Payne, Reference/Instruction Librarian, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Sheila Stoeckel, Associate Academic Librarian, Campus Library & Information Literacy Instruction Office, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Slides and handouts available at LOEX 2008

This was a session that attracted me from the get-go, especially at a time when I was considering applying for our Head of Instruction and Reference position. But just because I am not currently going through that hiring process doesn’t mean that I cannot positively influence the activities that go on between teaching librarians at Milne Library.

The premise of this LOEX session was to introduce a collaborative pilot project between instruction librarians at UW Madison. With so many different libraries on campus, librarians who do not immediately work with one another- due to geographical distance and/or priorities of the different libraries – were interested in working more collectively while enhancing their performance in the classroom. Prior instruction-related activities included monthly forums across the different libraries, an annual retreat, and an annual banquet. Due to a glaring absence of formal one-on-one instructor assessment, the partnership pilot became a successful means of gaining peer feedback in an unobtrusive and non-threatening way. The presenters made it clear that the results of any of the formed partnerships have not been used at a higher level (i.e., for term renewal, continuing appointment, or promotion). That was never the goal.

The program itself consists of librarian volunteers who share the goal of enhanced performance in the classroom, whether that be in the form of lesson planning, pacing of a library session, creation of hands-on activities including assessment tools, public speaking, or encouragement of student discussion. The program is flexible, self-directed (any one pair of teaching librarians can design a unique partnership that work specifically for them), supportive, self-reflective, and a system of equals (no “mentoring” is involved). Pairs are formed based on common interests or by pure motivation of wanting to get to know other librarians on campus. Based on the desired outcomes of each pair, activities can include self-reflection of the teaching process, peer observation and discussion. Specific observation methods to be used include scripting, verbatim logs, and a checklist of behaviors (created collaboratively by the pair or by the instructor to be observed – encompassing such things as the number of “um’s” spoken, addressing students’ questions directly, providing eye contact, etc.). Throughout the pilot project, participants would flip flop from the role of instructor and the role of facilitator (who would encourage reflection, observe his/her partner’s teaching, and provide constructive feedback). The number of times partners met was determined by their schedules and workload. If in-person meetings could not established, partners were free to call, e-mail, text, etc. but the preferred method of “meeting,” as stated by participants, is definitely face-to-face. Audience members were shown two versions of a videotaped “meeting” and were asked what they thought “worked” and what didn’t work.

What works:

* Deciding on behaviors to observe (or other goals laid out by the instructor) before the instruction takes place
* A planned meeting, soon after the instruction has taken place, where each partner has devoted time to talk and listen
* Equal partners sitting down and sharing an objective and productive conversation
* The observer begins conversation by asking the instructor how he/she thought the library session went
* Focus only on the aspects that the instructor has asked the observer to witness and provide feedback on
* Sharing student comments made in the classroom that the instructor would never hear while in the midst of teaching (student praise, student “a-ha” moments, student confusion, etc.)
* Combine positive comments with aspects that could be improved upon
* Quantifiable evidence as marked down on behavior worksheet (e.g. a checkmark for every time “um” was uttered)
* Support constructive criticism or praise with observed evidence

What doesn’t work:

* Having one person standing while the other sits – creates a model of hierarchy
* Coming across as the expert rather than an equal – the project was not intended to be a mentorship no matter what the difference in age or level of experience shared between two participants in a pair
* Not allowing for shared conversation
* Not addressing the specific requests of the instructor to be observed
* Criticism (not necessarily constructive) provided without any observable evidence to back it up

Benefits to Librarian Instructional Partnerships:

* Written reports by instructor and observer allows for accountability, self-reflection, and a sharing & learning tool for other librarians on campus
* Only 10 hours of a librarian’s time was spent during the semester. This included the initial orientation to the pilot project and meetings between partners. Classroom time was not factored in since the instructor would be teaching the class in question regardless of the assessment project.
* Participants stated that the program was “fun,” allowed for time and discussion focused on teaching, provided each librarian with specific and directed feedback, built rapport among colleagues, and encouraged an exchange of ideas and teaching techniques
* Allowed librarians to set goals for themselves and targets upon which they could improve
* The project can extend itself to other departments in the library – i.e., Reference, Circulation, Student Assistants
* The positive outcomes of the program is spreading across campus (KDH – perhaps academic depts can use this approach, but even more pertinent to the instruction program at Milne Library, maybe librarians and their faculty partners can work out a similar approach)

Drawbacks (and advice) to Librarian Instructional Partnerships:

* Coordination of schedules was sometimes difficult, mainly due to unavoidable circumstances
* Potential for those who would most benefit from the constructive criticism to not participate
* Pairs work better because more time and attention can be focused in a one-to-one partnership
* Videotaping of instruction sessions (see Argentieri, Davies, Farrell, Liles) can help enhance the program, if participants are receptive to the idea (KDH – videotaping along with web 2.0 could allow such a program to expand to campus-to-campus library partnerships)