Learning from Lukewarm Library Instruction

I said in my November post that it wouldn’t be the only one I wrote about library instruction. As someone who is still new to teaching and class instruction, learning how to be an engaging, fun, and informative teacher is one of my biggest learning curves as a first-year academic librarian. So, a few months later, I’m returning to this topic – specifically to talk about a library instruction session that didn’t go as well as the one that I prepared in 24 hours.

Teaching graduate students

In my role as a liaison librarian, I work with a specific department at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College. Within that department, I manage everything library-related for nine programs – five master’s degree programs, three Ed.D. (doctorate of education) programs, and one Ph.D. program. One thing you might notice from that list is that I only work with graduate students, which is something that I was both nervous and excited about when I accepted this position.

I was excited because I knew I would be able to relate to the students, having just finished two years of being a grad student myself. A lot of the programs I support are aimed at students who are coming back to school for a career change, or who want to further their current career by completing a degree while they continue to work full-time. As someone who worked for seven years before going back to school for my MSLS, I felt when I accepted the job like I would understand these students’ experiences, and working with them has confirmed this.

However, I was also nervous because I hadn’t worked with graduate students much before. I was a Graduate Assistant at a library at the university where I did my MSLS, but worked almost entirely with undergrads in that role. The only experience I had with teaching graduate students was one co-teaching experience with my supervisor.

The good news is that a lot of my nerves about teaching and working with graduate students dissipated during the fall semester. Most of what I was teaching was similar to what I had taught undergrads – the basics of Boolean and how to look beyond Google Scholar – usually with just a few more details or advanced database skills included. Although I knew I still had a lot to learn, I felt more confident in the content of my instruction sessions for graduate classes after a semester.

Teaching Ph.D. students – how different could it be?

Late in the fall, a professor asked me to teach a Ph.D. class of hers. She requested that I come for 10-15 minutes for a brief library overview, and if it went well, I could come back in the spring and teach the class again for a full session. I agreed, the fall session went well, and in December we scheduled a day for me to teach for an hour in mid-January.

Unlike most other lessons I had taught, this was a lesson that I needed to create from scratch. I had also never taught Ph.D. students, and had only a few vague ideas of what the professor wanted me to teach. However, I had worked with a lot of Ed.D. students one-on-one in the fall, so I decided to base the lesson on what I taught those students – the basics of Boolean, how to navigate a database, and an overview of the research-specific AI tools that we have. Both groups were doctoral students, I reasoned, so their needs were probably fairly similar.

I knew I was in trouble within the first five minutes of arriving at the classroom. I had prepared slides at the beginning of my presentation to explain who I was and give an overview of Vanderbilt Libraries’ resources – essentially a condensed version of what I had done in the fall. To my surprise, as I set up my computer at the front of the room, I realized that the group of students I was about to teach were the exact same students I had taught in the fall. Since this was the same class, I had figured the students would be different, because groups of students don’t usually take the exact same class in back-to-back semesters (or ever). But this was definitely the same group.

This made my first few slides obsolete, so I breezed through them like this was the plan all along, saying things like “since we covered this last semester, we’ll go ahead and move on!” I quickly reached my slides on Boolean. I cheerfully explained how databases speak a specific language, and that to be able to use them effectively, we needed to speak that same language. Then I asked how many people had heard of Boolean before.

Every hand in the room went up, and my heart sank. If all the students already knew Boolean, most of the rest of my lesson was also obsolete.

I pivoted as best I could, asking the students to generate terms for the example topic on my slide instead of explaining the terms I had already thought about. Then I used their terms to run some searches in the databases and talked about filters and peer reviewed articles. I was hoping to be able to move on to AI research tools and spend more of the lesson time there.

However, before I could change gears, the professor asked me to talk about searching by subject headings within a database. I hadn’t prepared anything on this topic but gamely pulled up the ERIC thesaurus and showed students how to use it for a search. No surprise that since it wasn’t a search I had prepared in advance, it didn’t return any results. My attempts to change the search or look for different subject headings didn’t help.

To make matters worse, by the time I moved on from subject headings, that conversation had taken up so much time that we only had 10 minutes left in the lesson to talk about AI tools – not nearly enough. Students had a lot of questions about the tools and there was no way I could answer them all. To finish off the fiasco, another event was taking place in the classroom right after the class ended, so as I wrapped up my presentation by telling everyone they could email me any time with questions, students were standing up and heading to the back of the room, where pizza was being set out in preparation for the event.

My hope from this lesson is that it will be one of the worst ones I’ll ever teach. If I only go up from here, I’ll be happy. I felt so awful about it all that when my friends and colleagues asked me how the class had gone, I mostly just said “It was okay” and left it at that. The only person I really talked to about it at the time was one of my former professors, S., who has become a mentor and friend over the last few years. I shared all the details with her and greatly appreciated how understanding she was. She didn’t try to sugarcoat it or to convince me that it probably hadn’t been so bad. Then, she gently moved the conversation to something even more helpful than empathizing with me – she started helping me think through what I could do differently to try to prevent a similar situation from happening in the future.

Lesson 1 – Ask the faculty member for details

S. asked how much I had known about the class and students before I walked into the classroom. When I said not much, she told me that it was okay to ask the professor for more details. I think one of the things I’ve struggled with this first year is not wanting to be a burden to professors. It’s often so hard to get them to invite us into their classrooms in the first place, that I haven’t wanted to ask them too many things or push too hard for information. S. helped me see that asking for clarification and details is actually a part of my job, and that I can’t worry (much) about frustrating professors with my questions.

Lesson 2 – Consider giving higher-level students a pre-test

One of S.’s suggestions that I liked the most was to give doctoral students a pre-test before I teach in their classes. While undergraduate or even master’s students might not be willing to take a pre-test, doctoral students might complete one. If the professor agreed to distribute it, the responses would help me understand what those students know and don’t know – and therefore would help me tailor my lesson to fit their needs.

Lesson 3 – It’s okay to be honest with professors

One of the things I said to S. was that I felt like I could do so much better with the lesson if I could do it a second time – but that I doubted the professor would ever invite me back. She encouraged me to be honest with the professor, reach out, and simply say that I know I could do much better and would appreciate another chance to come to the class next semester to prove it. I haven’t reached out yet, but plan to do so along with my other fall instruction outreach, and hope that being straightforward helps.

Lesson 4 – View professors as colleagues

Something that I thought about, and decided against, ahead of the lesson was sharing my slides with the professor and asking if what I was planning to teach was in line with expectations. Again, I chose not to do this because I didn’t want to burden the professor. I was also afraid that I would get edits at the last minute, and would have to scramble to make changes the morning of. However, viewing professors as colleagues instead of people that I’m working for changes the equation on this for me. The next time I create a lesson from scratch, I’ll definitely send it to the professor in advance and make sure it matches expectations.

Lesson 5 – Remember that I have colleagues and mentors who can (and want to) help me

I think this is actually the lesson that, in retrospect, makes me feel silliest. Librarians are some of the most helpful and giving people I’ve ever worked with, but I was so scared of looking dumb by admitting that I was unsure about how to approach a doctoral-level class that I forged ahead on my own and forgot how many times fellow librarians encouraged me to ask for help. During my entire conversation with S., I kept thinking how much better it would have been if I had reached out to her before I taught this class and asked for her advice – and if I had reached out to any of my other librarian friends, mentors, or colleagues as well. This is definitely one mistake that I’ll never make again.

Moving forward

As much as I wish I could, I can’t go back and change how the January class went. However, I can change what I do in the future, and hopefully I can even come back to this class in the fall and teach a successful lesson. After this experience, I also have a much better understanding of how much instruction is comprised of way more than just a lesson that’s taught in the classroom. It’s about working with the faculty and department, my colleagues, and the library system to make sure I’m setting students up for success. My hope is that a few years down the road, with a lot more instruction experience to rely on, I’ll be able to look back on this class not as a failure, but as a turning point in my library instruction journey.