Formative and Summative Assessment of Library Instruction (LI): Encouraging and supporting reflective teaching practices through peer observation

This presentation will discuss how reviews that include “reflective teaching” peer recommendations in library instruction classroom observations can be an effective way to encourage and support excellence in teaching and learning. Encouraging such practices serves as a productive and positive way to coach instructor-librarians into monitoring their own teaching strategies and re-tooling lesson design for more creative, effective, and engaging IL sessions. Thus, integrating reflective teaching practices in IL peer observations can gently direct and guide instructor-librarians in becoming more cognizant of the their mediocrities, strengths, weaknesses, and failures. There are two types of peer classroom assessments conducted in education: formative and summative classroom observations. Understanding the difference between these two types of observations is crucially important in providing valid data to the instructor-librarian as well as those who review the applications for tenure and/or promotion. Formative assessment provides feedback to instructor-librarians on how to re-tool teaching and learning methodologies, materials/activities, lesson design, and classroom management techniques. When formative assessment is conducted, the observee can generally request that the observer pay attention to a particular activity, classroom management issue, or a specific concept to be presented in the lesson. Such feedback can provide ways to adjust teaching strategies, tweak learning materials/activities, or employ a different classroom management approach more strategically. Formative assessment can be a series of casual observations or merely an isolated informal visit from a colleague. On the other hand, summative assessment presents challenging requirements such as scheduling multiple reviewers to observe the same classes together, occurs over an extended period of time, includes a variety of lessons (e.g., lecture and demonstration, activity-based workshop, mixed lecture-discussion, etc.) involves observing different academic disciplines and levels, and other specifics depending on the institution. Avoiding bias in summative assessment of teaching is important and may demand that more than multiple observers be assigned to review particular lessons. If more than one lesson is to be observed, the same team of observers should review subsequent lessons. Since this type of assessment requires an objective review of an individual’s teaching dossier, the library must solicit feedback from several librarians and, perhaps, even assessment specialists, teaching faculty, instructional designers, and/or others to develop an “unbiased” departmental policy regarding summative classroom observations. This presentation will speak to how reflective teaching practices can be incorporated into formative and summative peer recommendations to help instructor-librarians develop an awareness and mindfulness toward their teaching styles. Peer observers will be able to guide instructor-librarians in developing these practices through formative and summative assessments. Following the suggestions given in these reviews, instructor-librarians will be able to develop more mindfulness toward their own pedagogies. Once they recognize different teaching issues, they will be able to organically orchestrate fluid active learning environments