LOEX 2016: Teaching How to Teach and Communities of Practice

I just got back from LOEX in Pittsburgh. The following blog posts are from my conference report that I write for my colleagues, but I feel like they sum up some of the best sessions that I attended at the conference. I will roll out a few in the coming days. Enjoy!

Session Title:  Becoming Legit: Reimagining Instructor Support Through Communities of Practice

Presenters: McMichaels and Dimmit

If there was one session that made LOEX for me, I would say that this was it. This presentation was done by someone known to me from NC-LITe, Jonathan McMichaels (see my Design Thinking blog post). He works at UNC-Chapel Hill. The presentation was the culmination of a graduate student’s master’s thesis.  They described a high-demand one-shot instructional model much like the one we have at ECU. Unlike at ECU, McMichaels is tasked to train a large cadre of graduate students (from SILS) how to do library instruction in a short amount of time and then get them instructing undergrads. His prior way of training them was a page directly out of my playbook: people are given a whole lot of information at once, then they do shadowing, then they plan their first class and co-teach it, and then they are on their own to conduct future instruction. They found that they were limiting the new teacher’s potential by sending them in an isolated pursuit of a “teaching voice.” Quantity was valued over quality and this stagnated instructor development. He wanted to make good instruction and building on instructional design concepts achievable for these novices. Instead of this model, with the help of Dimmit, they have created a Community of Practice, which asks many of the students to rely on each other. They created a rubric that shows the different stages of instructor development and then asks the students to work through the rubric at their own pace. This has resulted in the student teachers becoming more fully engaged in the process and informal collaboration between the initiates was incredibly helpful. It also took the onus off of him to be the sole contact for the new instructors. This idea of a Community of Practice was incredibly intriguing to me, having just trained two new librarians in instruction. I also felt that this was a way to improve instruction in the RIS department for instructors of all levels. I plan to include this in our departmental goals for this year.

They have an Omeka site that I hope to look at, as well. McMichaels recommended the book Understanding by Design by Wiggins and McTighe. He also mentioned books about apprenticeships by Lave and Wenger.