Transforming Your Teaching Toolkit

Course Description

Many seasoned instruction librarians often have extensive files containing countless lesson plans and classroom activities, but they don’t often have the opportunity to workshop these materials to tweak, troubleshoot, and otherwise get constructive feedback from peers. In addition, instruction librarians new to the field sometimes struggle to develop useful teaching materials in order to build their invaluable personal teaching toolkit. This 6-week course will provide participants with the chance to build and transform their teaching toolkit by submitting teaching materials—either tried and true teaching artifacts that have been recycled over the years, or new and untested ideas—to get expert, informed feedback from the instructor and other participants in the course.

This course will be highly interactive and will primarily involve online discussion forums to facilitate constructive conversation about improving instruction materials and teaching practices. Participants will engage in constructive peer review of teaching materials as well as reflection on their teaching strategies.

Collectively, the participants in the course will compile an electronic portfolio accessible after the conclusion of the course containing the workshopped teaching materials for everyone’s use and benefit.

At the conclusion of the course, participants will have:

• Fine-tuned personal instruction materials in order to improve their effectiveness and potential for successful student learning
• Read and discussed relevant professional literature that provides practical support on improving teaching materials
• Reflected upon his or her own teaching materials and goals for improvement
• Obtained expert and peer feedback on how to improve teaching materials
• Gained access to a collaborative toolkit containing peer-critiqued teaching materials
• Received emotional and practical support in transforming her or his teaching toolkit
• Reflected on peer critiques and how they might impact teaching strategies, philosophies, and habits

Weekly schedule:

• Week 1: Lesson Plans and Learning Outcomes
• Week 2: Topic Refining, Keyword Brainstorming, Database Searching
• Week 3: Peer Critique Reflections
• Week 4: Defining Credibility and Evaluating Sources
• Week 5: Classroom Assessment Techniques
• Week 6: Peer Critique and End of Course Reflections

This course can be taken as one of the courses in our eight-course Certificate in Library Instruction, but can be taken as a stand-alone course as well.