10 Reflective Steps to Improve Training

On college campuses across the country, we’re wrapping up the Spring semester and getting ready for summer. It’s a busy time, whether you have assignments to grade, are working with students who are cramming to finish that last paper, are trying to spend out your book budget, or some other combination of year-end tasks.

One of the things that has always appealed to me about working on an academic schedule is the sense of rhythm of the year. There’s a clear start, and, well, the end isn’t so clear (there’s always something going on) but there is a period of time in the summer when it’s possible to accomplish some larger projects that you just can’t fit in between the student related work of the Fall and Spring semesters.

Before diving into those projects, I like to take some time to really reflect on the previous two semesters and think about what I learned as a teacher/trainer and what I can do to make the next year better. Of course, it doesn’t have to be in April, it can be whenever makes the most sense for your library and schedule. If you’re interested in taking some time annually to think through your training, here are 10 steps that have been really useful for me:

1. Reflect

It’s hard to find time to really reflect on things. Most of us have schedules that send us from one meeting or task to another. Taking a few moments to think about the sessions you taught gives you a chance to look back in retrospect and learn things that might be useful. What sessions had the highest attendance? What sessions had the most involved audiences? What active learning exercises seemed to be most effective? What would you really like to avoid doing again in the future? Some of these reflective sessions have helped me see changes that I should make, even when I wasn’t planning on making them.

2. Look at Feedback

Many of us make sure to collect feedback after teaching a group. Some of our organizations collect this feedback for us. In other cases, there might not be formal feedback, but rather follow up emails, nonverbal cues during the session, or some other source of information to help you learn about what worked and what didn’t. Sometimes this information matches what we remember, sometimes it might be different. Combining the feedback provided by the students with your own reflections can make for a powerful larger picture of what worked and didn’t.

3. Share with Others

Once you have a clear picture of what worked and didn’t for your training, it can be helpful to have conversations with other trainers. One of my favorite things to do at the end of the semester is to talk with other people teaching the same information literacy that class I teach. We can share the adaptations we made to the curriculum and our teaching methods and learn from each other. Often, we can get materials that make it possible to make changes without having to reinvent the wheel each time. Sometimes your training peers might not be within your own organization. I have a few people I chat with about technology training at my institution, but most of the sharing I participate in for that type of training is with peers on Twitter or Facebook.

4. Look at the Plan

So far, we’ve considered thinking about what has happened in our teaching. It’s also useful to think about where we need to take our training in the future. I try to take some time every year to re-familiarize myself with the university’s and library’s strategic plans. Knowing where we want to be, as an institution, can help me recenter the types of things I’m teaching to make sure people know what we (as a larger group) have agreed we need to know. It’s also a nice time to look at the mission statements of the organization/library to get a sense of how training sessions are fitting into that public statement of what the group is doing.

5. Consider Shifting Needs

Just as you might need to recenter your training to the strategic plan or mission statement of your library, it’s worth thinking about the shifting needs of the audience you train. Though many of the sessions I’ve offered training on in the past would still be useful in some library settings, hopefully our staff already are caught up on those issues. There might be topics that we haven’t offered training on that everyone else is getting. Or there might be new and emerging technologies that shift all of our needs into a new area. Thinking about these shifting needs can help you think about the topics to train on in the next year. Combining this with a good needs assessment can help for planning sessions that are really useful to your audience.

6. Get Topic Ideas

It’s never to early to be scouting for topics! Chatting with other trainers, reading blogs (like this one!), thinking about presentations you’ve seen, and participating in social media can all provide inspiration for training. I know many of us keep lists of potential topics so that we have a pool of things to choose from depending on the needs of the organization at any point in time. This is a good time of year to look at that list and clean it up a bit. What’s outdated and shouldn’t be included? What’s obviously missing?

7. Attend Training Sessions

Not only can you learn about a topic in a training session or presentation, but you can also learn about how other trainers train. I took a library instruction class in library school that was very good. But the best part of the class was the assignment to go out and observe a number of different librarians teach one-shot library instruction sessions. Seeing the variety of approaches, styles, and personality types helped me understand a lot about what I wanted to do in the classroom (and what I did and didn’t have the personality to do).

8. Plan to Stay Current

With the aid of the internet and social media, resources and groups come and go fairly quickly. It’s worth taking a little time every year or so to think through what organizations would support your training, what conferences would be nice to attend, and if there are any people you want to connect with in the training world. Even if you can’t afford to participate in the formal groups at a given time, there’s a good chance there’s an online option for following and participating in the discussions, and these groups can help you get new ideas for topics and training activities.

9. Spring Cleaning

I’m sure we’re all in a place now where it’s hard to keep up with our RSS readers. I’ve found it really useful to clean out my reader with regularity. I try to do it about once a quarter, but realistically I do it about once a year. Removing those feeds that you don’t read much anyway can save significant time and can make your reader a more productive space. Likewise, cleaning up other feeds, like your Twitter list, can make the time you spend on those sites more valuable. And once there’s less content there, you can feel better about adding new feeds for the sites that you’re just now discovering.

10. Make Notes!!

Throughout all of this, it’s helpful to document things. You might want to make notes of what worked for you this year and what didn’t. You might include new ideas for topics, training activities, groups you’d like to get involved with, or presentation ideas you come up with for conferences. I find these notes helpful because I do a lot less teaching and training in the summer, so the notes come in handy for the Fall. However, they continue to be useful throughout the year as well, so even if you don’t have a few months of a lag in your training sessions you might find yourself relying on them months into the future.

So with that, I hope you have a chance to spend a bit of time reflecting on your training sometime in the near future! I find it really rewarding and helpful, and hopefully these steps will be useful to you, too!

Image Credits:

Capture the Sky by tanjila

Planning Session by WorldIslandInfo.com

Something Different with Fowers by Balakov

What If by Libraryman

My Messy Moleskine by Adulau

Lauren Pressley is the Instructional Design Librarian at Wake Forest University. She also blogs at Lauren’s Library Blogs and spends a fair amount of time on Twitter, too.