This is a heavy presentations week and I figured it was a good time to write about training in a socially distant landscape in general. I am hoping some of the things I have learned and am planning with other organizations with also help you plan for the future. And while I will be using my programs as examples, many of the overriding issues I am discussing can be translated to CE, in this moment, in general.
And that is my first point: don't forget about continuing education as you reopen. When we all shut our doors for April and May, most libraries justified paying their staff by investing in continuing education. In many cases, and for many situations, this was long overdue. I provided some of that training to thousands of you through new webinars and with older ones that got recirculated.
But as staff went back to preparing to reopen and offer services, CE has been placed on the back burner once again. Now, I am not stupid. I know that this is a necessity. We need all of our energy and brain space to make safe re-openings happen; however, we are going to continue to be extremely focused on safety and logistics for some time. We still need to find a way to keep learning going over this prolonged time of uncertainty. Things are changing rapidly everywhere and libraries are particularly bad with any change. We need to keep finding ways to keep staff learning lest we all fall even further behind.
Which leads to my second point: RA is a top priority again after years of neglect in favor of making our libraries about "more than books." I summed up this argument less politely on Twitter last week here:
When we closed our doors, our patrons were most concerned about getting getting materials in their hands, and those materials were overwhelmingly books to read to pass the time.
As a result of demand for RA services, libraries are now investing in improving their RA skills in numbers that I have not seen before. I am currently working with one large public library system who employed a brand new RA team via phone and email this week, drawing on staff from across the system. They are making this huge change on the fly, but thankfully contacted me to help make the transition better for them and their patrons. We will be meeting next week to see how it is going and to have some formal training-- virtual, socially distant training, but also in an "all together," interactive format . Which leads to...
Third: Just because CE must be socially distant, that does not mean you lose the interactivity. Viewing a webinar on your own, after the fact is fine. It's a very good start, but in order to work better as a team, across you organization, you need to find ways to interact with each other and the training even when you cannot be together physically.
This week I am working with a library to turn our planned in person, in service day experience into a virtual one. Over 2 days, we will be recording the full day of planned programs. The library will use my programs and a few others to create a staff training day page of videos. I am providing exercises and we are going to encourage people to watch together and do the exercises. In fact there will be a few staff on the recording sessions to demonstrate the exercises. Staff can watch together in person or virtually. Different departments are also planning to have larger discussions about the programs after everyone has seen them. And, as always, I will be answering questions after the fact.
I like this idea that while they cannot all be in a room together for an entire day of training, nor can any library even think about closing for staff development any time in the next year just based on the fact that we were closed for months, they still can learn together in an interactive environment. And this isn't radical thinking. These are small shifts that will deliver better results to patrons.
Another popular type of training I have offered in person that I will be trying with another library next week is a train the trainer type event. These are programs where I meet with groups of 30 or less, staff identified as those who will be leading RA Service changes, upgrades, initiatives, etc.... We spend a day in a room together woking through exercises, talking about resources, and thinking about their library's needs and how the best practices can be best employed in their institutions.
The idea is that those staff members then go out into their libraries and use what they have learned to train others and implement their improved RA Service.
Train the trainer programs are more interactive and hands on than a standard all staff inservice training. Before the pandemic, I had only done them virtually when I was at home and there was a room full of staff at the home library. They were all together, I could see them, and they could see me. It was still easy to have them interact with each other and me. I did not prefer this, but it was an okay substitute for libraries who could not afford to fly me out.
However, first, flying me out and is not going to be possible for quite some time, and second, as I said above, libraries are struggling to quickly enhance their service to leisure readers and they need some kind of option beyond "flying by the seat of their pants." [That is a quote from a library I have worked with.] So enter a Zoom, train the trainer program with a limit of 25 people counting myself. Why 25? That is the number of faces zoom can feature on the screen at once. We will be trying this next week, but the idea is we can recreate the experience via Zoom. Some staff will be at the library, some will be at home. All of us will be on screen interacting and learning together. We still have a few tech issues to work out. I have sent the handouts in advance and have encouraged everyone to print them out. I am extremely excited about this option because I think it will work just as well virtually as it did in person [again with 25 people or less]. We can do the basic training, do the exercises, and have meaningful discussions about the specifics of their library.
Not only am I excited to see if this works because it I can help more people despite a pandemic, but also because it means more libraries could afford my services. It costs a lot more to get me to come to your library. I am still working out the pricing on this new training because it is more work than a straight up webinar, but it will be significantly less expensive since I don't have to calculate the cost of my time into the speaking fee.
If you want one of these train the trainer programs right now, I will be offering it for the price of a webinar [$300] to the first 4 who contact me after this post goes live. It will actually be 5, but one of those is already booked. I need to figure out the correct price point and having more opportunities to try it out will help me too.
For others, I know many of you have recommended me to your bosses [because as they contact me, they have been telling me that], and in the meantime you use the resources I post for free to train yourselves. Don't worry on that front. I will still have specifics about all of the programs I am referring to, including slide links, as they go live, but the overall point is, we need to learn from our pandemic closures. Many libraries were so glad to have the time to focus on staff training. Many Directors told me that they should have made staff development a priority years before, and that having some time this Spring to put it back on the front burner was eye opening and helpful to their entire organization. But, let's not get that far behind again. We are already rethinking everything else we do, let's also rethink staff development. If we stay on top of the best practices for library service all of the time, then we will be better equipped to adapt to change in the future-- even huge pandemic sized changes.
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