Emerging from the Interim

I always found something comforting about the rhythms of the academic year. After each semester, there’s time to pause, reflect, and think about what’s next. As we make our way through June, heading towards a new fiscal year, I’m doing a lot of reflection.

Since July 1, 2024, I’ve been in an Interim Associate Dean role. I took on this interim work alongside my day-to-day responsibilities as a teaching and learning department head. The interim role appealed to me for many reasons; the type of work, the ability to work alongside an Interim Dean I had a strong working relationship with, and my own career desires. While it felt daunting to be doing two jobs, I knew my department was in a strong spot; we were successfully onboarding two new colleagues and had a clear vision of the work ahead of us. It also felt slightly less daunting because the interim was a one-year appointment, so I had a clear end in sight.

As I think about the last year, “difficult” comes to mind, but not necessarily in a negative way. I felt stretched and pulled and challenged in new ways. I felt like I was learning and growing constantly, my brain shifting and changing as I got further into the administrative headspace. I had to be more honest about my bandwidth, capacity, and time available during the day. Simply put, I just couldn’t do it all. I was more honest with my department, trying to let them into my workload while also still trying to be present and available for what they needed from me to be successful. There were days when I felt overwhelmed and underwater and other days where I felt like everything was clicking.

As the interim appointment went on, I started to find my footing. I started to build the infrastructure, the processes, and the buy-in. I got chances to work with folks across the library, to support their work and also help to showcase it to campus colleagues and other audiences.

The spring semester felt most stressful. It was a semester where I had to dig in and just get through. This semester, of course, was happening within the larger context of a new federal administration, a state legislative session, and all the uncertainty we faced each day. I’m appreciative of the many great blog posts from ACRLog colleagues who spoke about book bans and book removals, how to continue moving forward when things are not normal, balancing the forest and the trees, and how to center community now, more than ever. Throughout the spring, I went day by day. I would ask myself what work needed to get done and how could I ensure I had enough energy and bandwidth outside of work to commit to my relationship, my friendships, and myself. Ultimately, this meant things fell off my plate of work. I had to recognize what I could do in the time I had and let everything else be on pause.

Upon entering May, I started to feel like I was emerging from this interim space. I felt like I had time to read, think, and engage more deeply in projects, instead of just punching through a to-do list. I got new chances to connect with colleagues, like when two co-workers and I drove down to the University of Kentucky for a Scholarly Communications workshop. The end of the interim appointment was in sight and the next steps about the possibility of being in the permanent role became clear.

On July 1, I will permanently move into the Associate Dean role. A colleague within the unit will become the new department head, and I know the department is in good hands. I am grateful for the last four years of being department head. This role was my first major management role, and I was able to bring my student-centered, community-based, collaborative, participatory approach to this work. Together, we built infrastructure, expanded our capacity, and cultivated a caring collaborative community. We laughed together, discussed big ideas, and helped one another be better librarians and educators. I can’t put into words how proud I am of the department and how thankful I am I got a chance to lead this group.

I’m really excited about this next chapter. I’m excited to spend the next year focusing just on one role and really digging into it. I’m excited to keep working with our amazing department heads and supporting them and their teams. I’m excited to work with our Dean. I’m looking forward to learning and stretching.

As I wrap this post up, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention and thank my incredible support system. I couldn’t have done this interim role without them. I feel fortunate to have so many big friendships, near and far. They cheered me on throughout the whole interim appointment. They talked me through stressful times, provided advice, and gave me space to relax and unwind. This work isn’t done alone and I’m so glad to have such a good support network around me.

Okay, now I’ll wrap up with a bit of a shameless plug…did you enjoy this post and want to hear more about interim leadership? If yes, considering joining us on July 10 from 2-3 PM ET for an ACRL LDG webinar about navigating interim leadership. Hear from myself, Jen Jarson, Brianna Marshall and Ariana Santiago. We’ll talk about interim leadership and provide a space for some small group discussions. This presentation won’t be recorded, so don’t miss it. Register today!

I would love to hear from you; have you been in an interim role? What did you learn? How did you grow?

The forest and / or / versus the trees

I was chatting with a friend the other day when she made a comment about an administrator at her institution with whom she’d had a difficult exchange: he was a “trees person,” not a “forest person.” As in, he couldn’t see the forest for the trees. I’ve been thinking a lot about this comment — about what it means to be one or the other, about what it means to strike a balance between both.

Since the start of my library career, my work has centered around teaching and learning. In this domain, I can see many ways that a “trees” and / or / versus a “forest” vantage point might play out. In a one-shot library instruction session, for example, a trees orientation might mean laboring over each filter, each click in a database at the expense of more forest-like work conceptualizing a research question and operationalizing it with effective keywords. A trees perspective could mean strictly adhering to every component of the lesson plan at all costs whereas a forest perspective could mean veering off-script to take advantage of a student’s unexpected question and have a meaningful conversation about the research process. Yet ignoring the trees altogether could mean that students walk out of class without the practical means to apply the important concepts under discussion to their own next steps. A skilled instructor aims to strike a balance, no? And that balance is ever-shifting, requiring an instructor to zoom in on technical details and zoom out to big picture concepts, to be attuned to the needs of individual students while also moving the class as a whole forward, to be responsive in the moment yet not lose sight of the process and the larger goals.

In more recent years, my library work has included a healthy dose of middle-manager administrative responsibilities, too. In this domain, I can also see the trees and / or / versus forest metaphor playing out. We middle managers are at the intersection of our communities: providing direct service to our users while supervising, supporting, and advocating for our colleagues on the teams we lead while receiving, interpreting, and implementing directives from higher level leaders. Every day, in ways small and large, we need to zoom in and zoom out, be attuned to our users and our colleagues while moving our teams forward, be responsive in the moment yet not lose sight of larger organizational goals.

It’s no secret that my institution is going through some pretty serious turmoil, as are most higher ed institutions right now and for multiple reasons–maybe yours, too. I started this post with the hope of arriving at some larger realization to help me navigate this tumultuous moment, to guide me through these intersections and balance my thinking and my approach. Because, with significant change already underway at my institution and still more serious change expected in the near future, it feels like the stakes are higher than ever, that my ability to see both the forest and the trees at the same time is all the more important.

In many ways, I would say that I approach my day-to-day life with a trees perspective. My focus on getting through my to-do list can sometimes mean that I forget to look up, to widen my gaze, to think big. I work to make space for forest thinking but that vantage point sometimes doesn’t come easily. So I find myself wanting to try to articulate items I can add to my to-do list, steps I can practice — the trees, if you will — to cultivate my forest perspective in this uncertain landscape. It strikes me now that by reflecting on my work in the teaching and learning domain over all these years, I can indeed see how my ability to navigate between a trees and a forest mindset and praxis has grown, how I’ve been able to strike a careful balance, usually to good effect. And when I think about my daily practice, I recognize skills, habits, and attitudes that have been essential to that growth and the balance in and out of the classroom, especially those related to supporting communication, promoting transparency, and employing emotional intelligence. It’s not quite the lightning bolt, a-ha moment I was hoping for perhaps, but it is a reminder about the relevant skills and attitudes already available to me — to us — and the habits to practice. I feel bolstered by their broader relevance and their transferability to the here and now.

How do you cultivate a balance between “forest” and “trees” thinking? What does your experience in teaching and learning (or your domain of choice) teach you about middle management? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Lessons learned from onboarding new colleagues

Back in March, I wrote about my experiences chairing a double search committee. I ended that blog post with questions around onboarding and what happens after a hire is successful. I’m happy to report our two searches were successful and our new folks started this summer. Now that our new departmental colleagues are settled, I thought I would write a bit about how we approached onboarding and things I’ve learned in that process.

What influenced our onboarding?

My personal experience with onboarding and the department’s desire to successfully onboard our new colleagues really informed how we approached this work.

My personal experience with onboarding: When I think about onboarding, I think about my first professional library job at Penn State. In this first role, I had two supervisors, who both did a great job onboarding me. My immediate supervisor created a schedule for my first six weeks and was intentional about setting up meetings with colleagues across the organization. My dotted line supervisor found a campus committee for me to join almost immediately, and that committee also had a project I could tackle right away. Even though this role eventually had me working Sunday to Thursday, from 1-10 PM, I was onboarded in a way where I felt really connected to a lot of different people. This experience informed and influenced how I think about onboarding new colleagues, especially now that I am in a department head role.

Department’s desire to successfully onboard new colleagues: The department has known for a long time that we would be bringing on new colleagues in 2024. In January, as we developed our departmental goals for the year, we decided to have an onboarding specific goal. This meant everyone had a vested interest in creating this experience and we all wanted to ensure the people we brought onto the team would feel the sense of community we value in our unit (see my past post about the ways I appreciate the laughter on our team). It was really great to see the department come together around this and personally, it helped me to feel that this onboarding would be less daunting because I wouldn’t do it alone.

How did we prepare to onboard?

As we did Zoom interviews and on-campus interviews with our finalists, I found that I got clarity on where these two roles needed to go, once a successful candidate was hired. I am so appreciative of all the questions our candidates asked, because it helped me think through some elements of the roles I hadn’t gotten to quite yet. Over the course of the interviews, I accumulated dozens of sticky notes with ideas and questions and potential projects. Once the hires were made and start dates were set, I could turn my focus to preparing onboarding materials. I ended up drafting four documents for each role:

Drafted goals for the new employee to work on during their first six months (after which their annual performance review would occur and they would then draft their own goals for 2025)
Scoped project work (connected to their drafted goals and job description) providing a series of big and small projects that would allow them to collaborate with department colleagues and learn more about the library and campus
First day schedule where most meetings (such as getting their ID card, getting their computer setup, meeting with their supervisor, etc.) are set up by our library’s admin team to ensure consistency for all our new colleagues
First four weeks schedule, which ended with a one-month check-in meeting with me as their supervisor

I shared these drafted documents with the department in May, right before we had a departmental “Mega Meeting” which focused on onboarding preparation. We met for most of the day (10 AM – 4 PM) and about three hours of this meeting was dedicated to onboarding discussions. Two goals helped to scope these conversations:

Determine how members of Education & Outreach Services will support the on-boarding of our two new departmental colleagues.
Discuss the values and expectations we have for each other in the department.

In the Mega Meeting, the department had the opportunity to reflect on and share with the group their positive and negative onboarding experiences, provide feedback on the drafted goals and project work to ensure alignment across the department, and helped brainstorm the various meetings and connections we might want to facilitate for our incoming colleagues. We also did some collaborative work around co-creating expectations for the department, something we had discussed when I started three years ago but nothing we had formally documented or returned to. We talked about how it was important to make implicit things explicit in order to create an environment that was welcoming and accessible. By the end of the meeting, I had enough information and insight from the department to finalize our documentation.

How did onboarding go?

I’m obviously biased, but I felt like onboarding was smooth. Because the department reviewed and provided feedback on the onboarding documentation, everyone knew the priorities for the new colleagues and how everyone played a role in supporting this process. It felt like we all had ownership in the work and we all cared about onboarding being successful. Our new colleagues could jump right in and I think they felt supported by the whole department.

As a supervisor, it was great to have drafted goals and scoped projects that I could immediately give our two new colleagues. Throughout their first month, we regularly checked in about their goals and projects, and adjusted as needed. I heard from both new colleagues that having this direction was beneficial because they knew where to focus their energies as they got settled. And the scoped project template was so useful, our library adopted it as a standard for onboarding colleagues!

What did I learn about onboarding?

As I reflect on this onboarding work, there are a few things I’m taking away from the whole experience:

Involving the whole department in onboarding is a worthwhile endeavor. It allows you as a supervisor not to do it all alone and ensures that your team understands the priorities of the role. It was also a way for everyone on the team to find ways to collaborate with our new colleagues, which helped to bring them into the departmental fold.
Even if you think you’ve done enough to make the implicit explicit, there’s still more you can do! Joining a new organization (and new dictionary of acronyms) is daunting and as you onboard, you’re going to miss things. Having a department support onboarding means your new colleagues have lots of folks to go to and ask questions when they need that insight/translation/context.
Onboarding is labor! As the department head, I spent many hours thinking about job descriptions, developing scoped projects, identifying role priorities, setting up introductory meetings, and reflecting on what success could look like in year one. Onboarding that is full of care and intention is not something you can whip up in a few hours. It takes time, reflection, and revision. It’s worthwhile labor but you have to account for it.

I’m pleased that our new departmental colleagues are moving and grooving. I’m proud that our department made onboarding a goal and priority for the year and I’m happy that we could deliver on that goal. I would love to hear from you about onboarding practices you either experienced or do that show care and intention to bring someone into your organization!

Achilles’ Heel?, or Coping Strategies Turned Strengths

I stumbled across this article the other day. The gist is that leaders can and should embrace their confusion when confronted with illogical situations. Whereas some might see confusion as a liability to be concealed or let confusion debilitate them, strong leaders embrace their confusion as a productive tool. The author suggests that the Reflective Inquiry and Action (RIA) framework can help folks negotiate and use confusion effectively. The five steps outlined in the RIA framework — “embrace your confusion,” “assert your need to make sense,” “structure the conversation,” “listen reflectively and learn,” and “process your response aloud” — feel like common sense really. Looking back, I can recognize some of my own attempts to navigate these steps and can see how productive they were for not only overcoming confusion, but for building relationships with colleagues, too.

It makes me think about other techniques I’ve embraced — the organizational approaches I use, for example, to help me grab hold and make sense of the thoughts buzzing around in my brain. The reflective techniques I practice when I feel muddled. They’re coping strategies, really, that I’ve adopted to help navigate my work, my thinking, my overwhelm. They’re born out of a need to manage what have definitely felt like long-time weaknesses. But I can also see now that using and refining these organizational and metacognitive techniques over the years has actually turned them into strengths. These have become ways of working, ways of thinking that are powerful and constructive.

I’ve often heard colleagues both in and out of the library describe how little formal education or training they had to prepare them for their teaching responsibilities. While I had the benefit of a bit of educational theory as an undergrad and a grad school class that gave a nod to teaching, I would largely characterize my own teaching preparation the same way — it’s been a learn-as-you-go situation. I can see how the organizational and metacognitive skills I’ve been developing have also served me well here, giving me a lens through which to examine and reflect on the why, how, and what of teaching and a foundation from which to develop pedagogical approaches. What started as experimentation with personal note taking techniques, for example, has evolved into strategies for working with students to grow their own brainstorming and organizational techniques as they develop topics, consider the different angles embedded in their questions, and manage the sources they’re using to explore those perspectives. The reflective techniques I use to process my own work have helped me introduce metacognitive practices into my teaching — to talk with students about why and how to use those brainstorming and organizational techniques, for example, or as a tool to direct students’ attention and reflection.

I came to administrative and supervisory positions with little formal training either. And here, too, I’ve been able to translate and further grow these coping strategies turned skills, whether for facilitating collaborative decision-making processes or mentoring a colleague or setting priorities. It turns out these skills — skills for sense-making, really — can be cultivated to be a productive foundation across domains.

I’m about to take on some additional administrative responsibilities so it’s no surprise that my thoughts are lingering around questions of weakness and strength, questions of preparedness. I’ve reflected before on how truly powerful these kinds of “soft” skills are. It strikes me anew how important perception and attitude are in making good use of those soft skills. I feel I’m venturing into Pollyanna, let’s-make-lemonade-out-of-our-lemons territory here and that’s not my intention or not exactly. I just mean that frame of mind and point of view can make all the difference in setting the tone for how we approach a problem or a weakness, how we make use of what we’ve got.

This all made me think of that statistic I’ve seen cited so often — the one about how women are less likely to apply for jobs than men if they feel they don’t meet 100% of the qualifications. Looking for that source just now, I came across this Harvard Business Review article. While the author doesn’t deny that women may need to build more confidence, which is how I’ve often heard that statistic interpreted, she layers on some additional dimensions. She contends that it’s not just a lack of confidence, but also too strict an adherence to what women see as the rules of hiring. “They thought that the required qualifications were…well, required qualifications. They didn’t see the hiring process as one where advocacy, relationships, or a creative approach to framing one’s expertise could overcome not having the skills and experiences outlined in the job qualifications.” I think it’s that “creative approach to framing one’s expertise” bit that really applies here. We might already be cultivating the skills we need. We might be more ready than we think we are. We just have to recognize our strengths and put them to use.

Supervising a Makerspace: Musings from the Fall

This semester, Stego Studio, our library’s makerspace, moved into the department I oversee. This makerspace opened up around the time I arrived at my institution (fall 2021) and I’ve watched, from a distance, as the studio has grown and evolved. I was excited but also slightly overwhelmed when I was asked to oversee this space (and supervise our makerspace coordinator). It has been a semester of learning and stretching and I’m excited for what’s to come. As we wrap up this year, I wanted to share some thoughts I’ve had this fall as the makerspace takes up more and more of my work brain.

My past experiences with makerspaces

Before Stego Studio, when I thought about makerspaces, I thought about my graduate work. During my first year in graduate school, I was part of a grant that focused on digital literacy in the local community. One of the partners on the grant was the local FabLab. I myself worked at a community space and would negotiate with the FabLab about technology the community space needed. As I got started on the grant, I spent some time in the FabLab, trying to learn more about their technologies and space. In particular, I had no knowledge of 3D printing and couldn’t quite wrap my mind around what you do with 3D printing. During those first visits, I felt excluded in the space. I didn’t have the expertise to join the conversations happening around me and I didn’t feel like my own making experience was valued. In the end, I stuck to more work around using the Cricut and using a laser cutter. This level of making ended up working best with the community center and students in that space.

Since that first experience with a FabLab, I’ve continued to make in my own way. I embroider and I make zines and I learned more about makerspaces that contained textile equipment like sewing machines and other paper crafts. I also learned more about 3D printing when I worked at Penn State and was working next to our Media Commons (which housed over 30 printers!). I still couldn’t quite see the use case for me, but I finally started to have a better sense of how the technology worked and the language I needed to be a part of the conversation.

I’m thinking so much about my past experiences because now I have a chance to help shape how our community interacts with our makerspace. I want to help folks understand the power of these spaces and be able to understand what they can do in this space. And I want to make sure the work of the makerspace is communicated in a way that resonates with folks. I think my past experiences help guide me in how to talk about this work and how to connect it to folks who might be new to this area.

Information Literacy & Maker Literacies

As we wrap up the semester, I’m thinking a lot about the intersections between makerspace instruction and one-shot information literacy instruction. How do we as a department weave these two instruction programs together? How do we collectively talk about teaching that spans from discussing Google’s algorithm, to slicing a 3D model before we print it, to using keywords to find peer-reviewed sources, to evaluating the worthiness of an article or even a design we might print or laser cut? And how does the team of educators in this department learn from our makerspace coordinator and vice versa? I see a long runway here and am itching to really dig into these conversations and connections and ideas.

Student Impact

Our makerspace has also had some great news coverage recently (story 1 and story 2). Stego Studio has been collaborating with an Honors class and a local community organization, Clovernook, to 3D print objects that help tell a story to blind and visually impaired students in Africa. For these stories, I was down in the makerspace, listening to our students talk about their work and their learning. Many students had wanted to learn about 3D printing but hadn’t had the chance to learn. This class not only provided them an opportunity to support a larger community, but also gain those skills through trial and error. As I watched one student explain, in-depth, how they took different models and modeled them together, I was reminded of the impact this space has. And the potential this space has if we are able to create more learning opportunities, both curricular and co-curricular.

What’s Ahead

It’s time for me to jump more fully into makerspaces in 2024. We’re building infrastructure, processes, and expanding our awareness across campus. Those things (infrastructure, process, and outreach) feel like skills I have and am good at. What I’m less confident in is my language around what happens inside makerspaces. I am grateful I’m entering a niche within the field where so much has been done and discussed. I’ve picked up Re-Making the Library Makerspace: Critical Theories, Reflections, & Practices and look forward to engaging with the ideas presented in the chapters and learning from folks across the field. I’m grateful for an enthusiastic and creative makerspace coordinator who I’m learning from each day. I’m also grateful for a supportive supervisor (whose work is featured in a Re-Making the Library Makerspace chapter) who has experience in this area and is coaching me on how to do this work. I’m excited to have gotten the chance to work with makerspaces again and look forward to what’s to come in the new year.