Our Health Sector representative Katie Smith, reflects on the recent webinar ‘Think like a teacher: Pedagogical skills for librarians’ with Neena Shukla Morris.
Have you ever delivered training and felt like an imposter? Or you love the teaching part of your job but you’ve not received any training in how to do it? The HLG (Health Libraries Group) hosted a webinar last month for librarians to learn from Neena Shukla Morris’s experiences as a former teacher trainee and offer practical changes we can make to our current teaching.
Neena provided a great session, sharing her personal experiences of training to be a teacher, and how that has impacted her teaching practice as a librarian. She took us through the teaching cycle, from advertising sessions, planning, delivering, to reflecting afterwards and demonstrating impact. She included examples at each stage from her own practice which gave me some ideas for how I could enhance my own teaching.
In the planning and preparation stage, I loved the idea of including training details in auto-replies and email signatures. This is a simple way of marketing your courses to your intended audience even when you’re not at work. I also agreed with linking the course to relevant strategies or criteria, to show the learners how this course will be beneficial to their clinical practice or study. Communication to the learners prior to the course is so important, to ensure that both the teacher and student have all the information they need before the course starts.
I also liked what Neena said about learning objectives. For her courses, she has a set of learning objectives which she goes through at the beginning, to show the students what they will learn and achieve in that session. However, Neena’s objectives at the start of the course use simple terms and avoid jargon terms that the students probably won’t know yet. She said that if students are faced with terms like ‘Boolean’ or ‘PICO’ before they have learnt what they are, they may feel intimidated and find it harder to engage with the session. At the end of the session, she reviews the objectives again but they now include specialist terminology.
| In this session you will learn: | You should now know how to: |
| How to formulate a medical research question. | Formulate a medical research question using PICO |
| How to search for relevant information for your studies and research. | Use * ? AND OR NOT “ ” ADJ for keyword searching |
When delivering training, Neena stressed the importance of building a rapport with your learners, setting the tone for the session and getting people chatting and engaged early on. She explained the four methods of teaching and the student responses that your session should include, and provide opportunities for learners to work independently, in a pair and as a group:
| Teacher | Student |
| Explains | Listens |
| Models | Thinks |
| Demonstrates | Practices |
| Questions | Evaluates |
There are lots of different ways you can informally assess learners, whether you are teaching in person or virtually. Asking questions and allowing time to think, asking for feedback after group or solo work, or providing a quiz are all simple and easy ways of checking understanding. There are also lots of opportunities to use technology, from chats, polls, products like Slido or Padlet, or just simple emojis (thumbs up, smileys) to check understanding or to check the pace of the session. Neena demonstrated ‘two stars and a wish’ where at the end of the session, learners say two things they enjoyed or learned (two stars) and one thing they want to explore further or need to work on (a wish). This is a great way of collecting instant feedback from the session and for the students to quickly reflect on the session.
Finally, Neena suggested reflecting after the session and noting what went well, what didn’t work, and how you could make changes for next time. She also stressed the importance of being kind to yourself, and that sometimes we will have sessions that didn’t go as we expected or have students that didn’t engage as we would have wanted.
This was a great session from Neena and HLG that gave some practical advice and a chance to reflect upon my own teaching.
Recommended reading:
- What Expert Teachers Do: enhancing professional knowledge for classroom practice, John Loughran
- Essential Teaching Skills, 5th ed, Chris Kyriacou
- Critical Library Pedagogy Handbook, volume 1, edited by Nicole Pagowsky and Kelly McElroy
- Evidence-Based Education in the Health Professions: promoting best practice in the learning and teaching of students, edited by Ted Brown and Brett Williams
- Reflective Teaching and Learning in the Health Professions, David Kember et al.