UC San Diego Library

Instruction librarians want to know how effective their workshops and lessons are in order to show their value to the education process. We creatively use two inspirational instructional design approaches, combined with reflective teaching, to tell a compelling story of assessment that can demonstrate our value to our institutions. These practices help us focus our attention towards evaluation and learning. While there are many assessments that librarians and library programs can do, we can’t and shouldn’t be trying to do all of them in our one-shot classes. We will help participants construct adventurous lesson plans that capitalize on connecting outcomes, inventive learning activities and evaluation that works, and discuss how to innovate our programs by incorporating reflection into our process to quantify our work. After our presentation, participants will have practiced rewriting their learning outcomes into clear objectives that can be measured and created performance-based assessment to measure them.. With appropriate goals clearly stated, librarians can then gather data about student satisfaction, student learning and self evaluation that clearly illustrates our value to academic institutions. These methods help participants strengthen their case to their managers and administrators about reasonable returns on investments that a one-shot library instruction session can provide. This also helps instruction librarians focus their efforts on being effective and intentional.