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 article 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”