This post came from the Aestiva Solutions quarterly newsletter, the Campfire. To subscribe, click here.
As academic librarians, we all aspire to be excellent for our students. Some days we earn ourselves gold stars with knockout classroom visits that match professor’s goals and actively engage students. Other days we fall face first and want to hide in the restroom for a good cry. Then there’s those busy days in early September when we accomplish both by lunch. The team at Aestiva Solutions gets it, filled with years of good, bad, and simply real experience working with faculty and students.
Although Eric’s job titles have included ‘librarian’ for the past fifteen years, he views himself first and foremost as an educator seeking to work collaboratively with other teaching colleagues. In his work beyond “one shot” library instruction sessions Eric instructs and more recently oversees first year experience courses at Goshen College. In overseeing a course on career preparation and vocation for the 2025 spring semester, Eric prepares weekly materials for eight peer instructors, seeking to properly equip colleagues to best instruct students while also allowing them to adjust to the unique needs of their classroom. At weekly team meetings Eric guides peers for next week’s lesson, while also taking back lessons of successes and failings from the week before. Working collaboratively requires humility and quickly acknowledging when something could have been done differently. Yet it allows for a robust community of practice that strengthens instructor and student alike.
Ruth has been teaching online for the University of Maryland Global Campus (UMGC) for over a year. As part of the onboarding process, UMGC has all new faculty go through training about how to coach students, rather than just teaching them. The idea is that teachers are focused on communicating concepts to students, while coaches are focused on developing a growth mindset in students. For example: a traditional approach to plagiarism by a student from a teacher is to give a student a 0 on the assignment and or course, depending on the level of severity. UMGC, on the other hand, asks faculty members to treat this as a teachable moment. This means that we give students the benefit of the doubt and assume that they did not mean to plagiarize. Rather, we offer them constructive feedback to share what they did wrong and offer them the option to redo the assignment, with appropriate penalties included. This has been such a refreshing mindset for Ruth to have while grading student work.
Looking for good support and resources for the reality of contemporary academic library life? Aestiva Solutions will sit down with you to help outline a strategy for whatever challenge you may face. Contact us today!