My transition to being a teacher started in LIS 560, although it certainly didn't end there, since my memories of that class are a bit dim. I do know that I chose to give my final presentation online rather than in class, which shows (to me, anyway) that I still thought of myself as a non-teacher.
But for that presentation, I "taught" bibliographic skills to college freshmen -- something I was soon assisting with, in real life, at Odegaard. Even though it was only assisting, this experience chipped away significantly at my long-held prejudice that freshmen, while being taught library skills, would either: a) be silly, b) be combative, or c) be asleep. In these classes I saw at least SOME serious students, good questions, and attentive faces. While I am not destined to be an academic librarian, I learned through this experience to appreciate the patrons at my library a little more.
While it was frightening to run a class at first, I always had an experienced teacher assisting me, and so the aspect I was most concerned about -- timing -- was easy to keep track of. There is a standard syllabus, there are few opportunities for digression when you're teaching things like "Let's fill out this web form together", and there's always 15 minutes at the end for the students to practice on their own. Therefore, my fears about talking too much (or too little; I'm equally likely to mess up in both directions) have little opportunity to come to pass. The most important thing is, they really seem to get it -- to various degrees -- even the elderly Chinese woman with Parkinson's and the electrical engineer from Africa who has never used a computer before. I have learned a lot about speaking with concision and clarity, something I haven't ever focused on before. I've become more of a gestural speaker, since expressive body language definitely seems to help get the point across. And I've definitely learned to slow down, breathe, and teach at the pace of the students. I get a lot of handshakes and even some hugs, and I always leave class happy.
For the scavenger hunt, I chose several tasks that are important for students to know how to do right away. In addition, these tasks are rather complex and are best learned by doing it oneself. They are:
- Paging books from the stacks
- Shelving books (using Library of Congress classification)
- Checking books in / processing
- Handling Summit requests
- Distinguishing regular patron hold requests from those books requested by library staff to be put on reserve for classes
Another challenge was to have one task lead to another. FIG (Freshman Interest Group) students at UW have to do a scavenger hunt, but it's just checking tasks off a list. They have to have a librarian stamp it at the end to turn into their instructor, to prove they've done it. I thought this method could be much improved upon, and decided that if our students did not finish the first task, they wouldn't find clues for the second, and so on -- until, ultimately, if they didn't finish the hunt, they would not find their reward.
For the first task, students were each given one book to shelve. At the spot where that book belongs in the stacks was an envelope with the name of their group on it, each containing one Scrabble tile. They were instructed to reconvene with their group and unscramble the collected tiles to form the name of an Odegaard location code (such as "ugesl" for Odegaard ESL, or "ugaud" for Odegaard Audiobooks). Finding "ESL," a group would have to find the sign labeling the physical ESL section out in the library stacks and look behind it for their next clue, which might be part of a paging slip or a Summit request. Other tasks were introduced in the same way, until finally at the very end, the last envelope contained a candy reward.
This method of construction made the scavenger hunt quite successful. Right away, we could be sure that everyone had at least a very basic grasp of LC classification, since if they didn't shelve their book, they wouldn't find the next clue. From then on, the students worked in their groups, which each contained one Student Specialist, who are like student managers. We could then ask the Specialists later if any members in their group seemed to need extra help. Also, they would have to use Millennium software to check in books and find out where they needed to be placed. We encouraged students to use a bank of staff computers where we (the staff instructors) would be available to answer questions. As I mentioned in the Leadership section, the scavenger hunt was of an appropriate difficulty level and took exactly the right amount of time -- which I attribute to pure luck in addition to the extensive testing I did while creating it.
My next teaching challenge will be to take my own data and improve upon it for next year. We'll have four hours instead of three for the workshop, so knowing that another scavenger hunt task will take about 10 minutes to accomplish will be useful. I will be removing the Mail section of the lecture and adding a Shelving section, among other changes. I expect that learning from my own experience and implementing improvements will be an even more satisfying endeavor than it was the first time around.
