I’m putting together a professional development workshop for my teaching librarian colleagues on creating learning outcomes. It’s part of a larger summer prof dev series on teaching and learning in libraries that really focuses on foundational aspects of teaching IL. We’re essentially walking through the process of initiating, prepping, implementing, and following up on a class. It’s really just me externalizing my internal instructional planning process, which is why I think I am struggling with learning outcomes.

I write learning outcomes when I teach. They help shape and offer a scope to my classes. That said, sometimes those learning outcomes fly out the window when I actually get to class. I write outcomes with the best information I have at the time: assignment details, course syllabus, comments from the course instructor, previous experience working with students in this course, etc. But sometimes even the best planned class doesn’t turn out as planned, and I’ve learned to just go with it. Sometimes my written outcomes become obsolete or silly once I actually meet the students I’m going to be teaching for the next 1 to 2 hours. I’ll admit that in my early teaching years I just powered through my lesson plan, not wanting to deviate from my carefully crafted script. It would have been too scary, too messy, and too out of my control.

Now, I still put a lot of effort into crafting outcomes and lesson plans, but I tend to start every class by asking students if there are things they really want to learn today, questions they want answered, or things they want to get out of our time together. I’ve been reading Learner-Centered Pedagogy by Kevin Michael Klipfel and Dani Brecher Cook and am loving their emphasis on learner motivation, narrative, connection, and meaning making in information literacy education. Their central question is “What is it like to be a person learning something?” which I just want to have printed on a giant poster and up on my office wall. That should be first and foremost on our minds as teachers. One of the first answers that came to mind when I read that question was that as a person learning something, I want to care about what I am learning, and I want my teacher to care about what I want to learn. Yes, I know that’s a terribly constructed sentence, but you get the sentiment. I want to care about what my students want to learn, and sometimes that means my predetermined learning outcomes don’t have a place in my classroom. And that’s ok.

So where does that leave me as I plan this workshop? I’m teaching the standard Zald and Gilchrist model of learning outcome construction, while acknowledging that it’s not the only way to write an outcome. I’m introducing affective outcomes, not just cognitive and behavioral ones. I’m acknowledging that sometimes classes don’t follow our carefully crafted learning outcomes and lesson plans. In short, I’m teaching learning outcomes so that people feel free to disregard, reimagine, remix, or dismantle them later. But should I teach them at all? I know they are an important framework within higher education and our culture of assessment and value. I acknowledge their connection to learner-centered teaching and their ability to help provide structure for new instructors. But I also have first hand experience with their rigidity and constraints. Does bringing this up in a workshop try to do too much? Or does it bring up conversations we should be having as teaching librarians?

Feel free to discuss as I revise my workshop lesson plan yet again…(but do I even need to do so?)