Teaching the Teachers: Creating a Bespoke Solution to Library Educator Development

How often do you seek some level of teaching skills when recruiting for information professional roles? In many roles, teaching has become a core professional responsibility but most staff only learn the skills they need on the job. Although this is a valid method of developing experience it means that many staff lack formal grounding in pedagogy. This can impact the service they offer and lead to a less innovative approach as traditional practices are carried on without critical thought as to why certain methods do or don’t work. Although basic teaching instruction is offered by some library schools/institutions this is generic at best and lacks the nuance to cover particular sectors. This problem has been inherent in academic libraries for some time. Many institutions offer teaching qualifications to their staff but these are designed with academic lecturers in mind, not librarians. This underlying assumption means that library staff find it difficult to relate the concepts taught to their everyday practice. But what if it didn’t have to be this way? The University of Cambridge Libraries offers a bespoke six month online course designed to address the specific teaching needs of library staff. Designed and delivered in-house, the course offers not only an introduction to pedagogy but maps this directly to library practices, covering areas such as one-shot instruction and information literacy. Currently delivering to its third cohort, the course aims to build a local community of confident teacher librarians who understand educational theory and can translate this into effective support for their users. This session will outline the development of the course, changes made in response to learner feedback and lessons learnt. Attendees will leave with ideas on how they can adapt this model to their sector and develop their own community of practice of confident teacher librarians.