Instructional Improvement: Building Capacity for the Professional Development of Librarians as Teachers

How do librarians become better teachers, and what can library leaders do to support the professional development of librarians as teachers? In an earlier column in this series, Bonnie Gratch Lindauer expressed her belief that many librarians are "passionate and disciplined about improving [their] teaching," but how much is really known about how to support librarians in that effort? (1) The purpose of this column is to review the state of instructional improvement programs in libraries and to draw on the broader literature of instructional improvement in higher education to identify issues to which the field must attend in order to foster the professional development of librarians as teachers. Although the examples discussed in this column focus on the academic library experience, the lessons one may learn from studying these programs can be applied to any library environment in which teaching is recognized as an essential feature of the organizational mission. If all libraries are now "teaching libraries," then all librarians can benefit from thinking about what research and practice has taught us about instructional improvement. What Is "Instructional Improvement"? "Instructional improvement" is a term found in the literature of higher education to describe professional development opportunities for college faculty aimed at helping them to improve their performance in the classroom. (2) For more than thirty years, students of college teaching and practitioners in the faculty development movement have led efforts to help faculty focus on their work as teachers and to identify organizational structures that motivate faculty to participate in instructional improvement programs and to "take teaching seriously." (3) While faculty development programs have provided support for a variety of activities (for example, financial support for travel to scholarly conferences), much of the practice in this field focuses on instructional improvement. (4) Instructional improvement activities are coordinated on many campuses through teaching centers, and may include: (1) workshops focused on developing specific teaching skills; (2) programs designed to provide useful feedback on one's work as a teacher; (3) instructional grants and financial incentives to encourage classroom innovation; and (4) opportunities to discuss issues in higher education related to teaching and learning. Examples include the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Kansas and the Center for Teaching and Scholarly Excellence at Hofstra University, which maintains a list of teaching and learning centers in the United States. (5) Although many academic librarians collaborate formally and informally with campus teaching centers to provide information literacy instruction, there is no evidence to suggest that any major studies of instructional improvement practice have included librarians in their role as college teachers. (6) In short, many teaching centers recognize that librarians have something to offer to campuswide instructional improvement programs, but fewer appear to recognize how much librarians might benefit from participation, as teachers, in such programs. This is unfortunate given the wide variety of venues (physical and digital) in which many librarians are now routinely called upon to teach, but it should not stop one from considering theory and practice in instructional improvement in order to identify approaches that can fruitfully be applied to the library context. Instructional Improvement in Higher Education The literature of instructional improvement in higher education is a rich one, and it cannot be effectively reviewed in an essay of this length. Even a brief review, however, may provide a framework for better understanding the instructional improvement programs currently emerging in libraries across the country. Weimer and Lenze, for example, identified five overarching types of "instructional intervention" commonly used on college campuses: (1) workshops and seminars; (2) consultation with instructional designers and campus teaching experts; (3) instructional grants (for example, funding for teaching materials); (4) distribution of resource materials (for example, synopses of effective teaching practices); and (5) programs that allow faculty to offer collegial review and support for each other's instructional activities. …