Decorative

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Eva Sclippa, First Year Engagement Librarian at UNC Wilmington As a teaching librarian, I’m fortunate that the library’s Coordinator of Instructional Services organizes regular discussions about pedagogy and instructional design in our division’s weekly meetings.Our theme for this semester has been scaffolding in instructional design, and the blog team felt it might be beneficial to share an overview of scaffolding with the SIG. What is scaffolding? Scaffolding is what it sounds like: building support structures for your students to guide them through mastering a new concept, often by breaking that concept into smaller pieces and then withdrawing pieces of the scaffold as they become more confident with the material.Read More →

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In: Best Practices, Remote teaching tools

The Teaching SIG put out a call for best practices for supporting the research needs of faculty and students in a remote environment. Here’s what librarians had to say: 1 – ZOOM FOR ONE-ON-ONE RESEARCH SUPPORT Courtney Baron, Director of the Bridwell Art Library, University of Louisville: “I’ve been using Zoom for one-on-one research consultations. Students sign up for consultations via SpringShare’s LibCal scheduling system, just as they did for in-person consultations. I email them the link to Zoom along with tips on what to expect for a virtual appointment. When students enter the Zoom meeting, I tell them they do not have to beRead More →

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Hello and happy Halloween, fellow ARLISians! It’s the season for all that is eerie, unsettling, or even downright terrifying, so we thought for October’s blog post we’d address a topic that can send many instruction librarians into a cold sweat: assessment. We all know that assessing our teaching is vital so that we can improve both our instruction and our programs, but in a frequently difficult to control landscape of one shots, while we’re also working on designing and executing our sessions, putting together a workable, meaningful assessment plan can feel like sticking your hand in the mystery box at the end of a hauntedRead More →

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With September and the beginning of the school year rapidly approaching, we at the Teaching SIG blog wanted to dedicate a post to something we’ve all struggled with: teaching anxiety. Teaching anxiety can strike us in many different forms, but whether it hits you most in the hours or days before a class or when you’re in the middle of teaching, it’s that familiar feeling of fear and tension over having to get up in front of a class and present. Many of us, even the most seasoned teachers, have experienced teaching anxiety at some point in our careers, meaning that if you’re experiencing this,Read More →

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Cara Barker, Research & Instruction Librarian, Western Carolina University This post is a continuation of “Curriculum Maps: Building a Strong Foundation for Liaison Work.” One of the things I love best about data gathering for a specific purpose is that it sometimes helps in more ways than you anticipated. In academic libraries, you often see this with circulation, electronic resource stats, and building use data. Curriculum maps offer similar opportunities. In the first post on curriculum mapping, I walked through the information gathering portion of creating curriculum maps. In this post, I’ll show you how to transfer the information you’ve collected into the map. I’llRead More →

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As instruction librarians, we are always examining and evolving our practice. What we are often missing is a focused, structured way of looking at our instructional program. That’s where curriculum mapping can help. While curriculum mapping is defined as “a process for evaluating the various components of a curriculum for cohesiveness, proper sequencing, and goal achievement,” it has potential beyond this basic description.[1] Over two blog posts I’m going to walk you through the process of mapping, using examples from my curriculum map for the undergraduate programs in the School of Art & Design (SOAD) at Western Carolina University. I will discuss also discuss variousRead More →

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Though not all of us work in the context of academic libraries, a significant enough proportion do that at one point or another in our careers we’ll need to—or have the opportunity to!—collaborate with professors. In this week’s post, I’ll be sharing what I’ve learned about communicating and collaborating with professors in my career, and suggest a few best practices that have generally helped smooth my way. Some of the projects I’ve worked on with professor colleagues in the past have included jointly creating custom classroom sessions and activities surrounding the library’s medieval facsimile collection, an instruction project that culminated in a student curated exhibitRead More →