Week 9 Class Reflection

What will you do with your "one-shot"?

This week's class was extremely fun AND educational.  I REALLY like how Kristin has mixed-up the lecture format of this course.  We are effectively learning through the experience of "teaching" each other and being "taught" by each other- perfect for understanding how we might function on the job with our patrons.  What I like most about the workshop setting is that even though I already knew a bit about the ideas presented in each workshop- each group made me think about how I would deal with each issue on a day-to-day basis.

The workshop scenario works best when each participant comes to the table with some background knowledge on the topic being discussed.  The key to generating excitement around the discussion is providing new information that participants can consider and bounce off of each other.  This happened quite a bit during our group's workshops.  The topics presented were cultural sensitivity, ethical questions at the reference desk, library marketing through community partnerships, and ethical collection development. All of these topics generated unique questions and new ideas for our group to discuss. What I enjoyed most about the evening was the contributions of others. It helped that we all are familiar with each other, but in a real workshop situation the lack of group cohesiveness would affect the contributions individual workshop participants might actually make- especially with some of the more sensitive topics covered in our workshops. With more time given per workshop- ice breakers (as Kristin suggested) could go a long way in bridging the gap between strangers.

What I liked about our workshop:

• Having a powerpoint presentation
• Providing a handout that made it easy to take notes on

What I didn't like about our workshop:

• We intentionally provided a lot of individual "investigation" time for participants to gain new knowledge on our topic, but this also resulted in a lot of silent reading time. We still had good discussions, though a longer workshop time would have given us more time to generate more discussion.

What I would do differently next time:

• For the amount of time we had, I would have limited the amount of background knowledge that participants had to gather themselves and presented more of it to them so we could have jumped into the discussion sooner.