Having completed 4 hours of teaching to groups of varying sizes on Friday, of which only two of the sessions were repeat sessions, I thought a little reflection would not go amiss. This last week I have personally taught 3 grad sessions, given a lecture, and taught a guesstimate of 4 or 5 fresher sessions. Three other members of staff have, between them, done another 10-15 hours of teaching time, let alone the 30 odd induction tours of the Faculty Library in the previous week. This next week I am contemplating a mere 3 hours of teaching with 5 in the following week.
This year we have had fresher students going to their DoSs 'clamouring' for practical sessions. It could be that they were intrigued by the new IT Training suite with the computers that emerge out of the woodwork (so to speak) and then quietly disappear at the end of a session. It could be that our Induction Tours were so good that they were desperate to come back for more! We've had Part II's asking at the desk for more 'Quickstart for dissertation' sessions. I've had somewhere in the region of 40 grads signing up for Endnote courses. We've also had three academics booking our IT training suite for training their MPhil courses - no teaching for us but good ol' library promotion going on! It's fun. It's tiring. It's fascinating.
I'm looking forward to the evaluation results to see what we can change and tweak and do better next time. I'm looking forward to the Teaching for Librarians session in January run by Chris Powis so that we can think of different ways of communicating information to our users. I'm looking forward to our patrons becoming used to the fact that we are always offering options for helping them make better use of the resources and services that we have on offer.
If we can create a climate where students in Cambridge actively ask for and want to attend training from library staff.................then I will be a happy person.
