Learning and Student Success Strategic Steering Team

Current Members

  • @Caitlin Shanley (Unlicensed), Team Lead

  • @Nicole DeSarno

  • @Courtney Eger (Unlicensed)

  • @Andrea Goldstein

  • @Darla Himeles

  • @Josue L Hurtado

  • @tom.ipri (Unlicensed)

  • @Sarah Jones

  • @Adam Shambaugh

  • @Kimberly Tully

  • @Lizzie Yazvac

Former Members

  • @Vitalina Nova (Unlicensed)

Charge

Background

The Learning and Student Success Strategic Steering Team (LSSSST) was formed in Fall 2018 to address the Temple University Libraries and University Press (TULUP) Strategic Action #2:

Enriching the environment for learning and student success.
The libraries will be a rich ecosystem for learning, providing services, instruction, tools and materials in light of diverse and evolving student needs, interests and predilections, in dialog with faculty and administrators, with an emphasis on curricular integration of information literacy, personalization and personal contact.

Our work is informed by the assumption that TULUP has a role to play in supporting students to achieve success, but that that measure is defined by the students themselves, could take on many different forms, and changes over time.

Because TULUP is just one facet in the prism of student support at Temple, this team includes members from both within TULUP and from other student support units across Temple’s campuses.

Values

  • Information literacy is a life skill that is necessary for full participation in democratic society.

  • Teaching and learning work is labor, and TULUP staff require support to do it well.
    Effective teaching practice requires continuous reflection.

  • As our colleagues at the Student Success Center write in their mission statement, “The process of learning is always individual; learners require flexible and responsive learning environments.” It is our responsibility as library educators to not only respond to student needs, but also to learn independently about our students and how they learn, in order to develop teaching strategies that benefit all learners.

  • Collaboration and building our collective knowledge make us better educators. TULUP exists within an ecosystem of student support at Temple University. Rather than attempting to carve out a unique niche of student support services, we strive to foster collaborative work within our organization and the university at large.

Vision

Guided by our values, LSSSST provides guidance on how we can support learning and students through our professional practice. Our responsibilities as a team can be distilled into five areas:

  1. We design shared programmatic goals and outcomes that align with our values and move library instructional services forward.

  2. We provide guidance to TULUP staff as they balance instruction work with their other job responsibilities, acknowledging that labor both inside and outside the classroom contributes to our success.

  3. We foster innovative, reflective teaching practice through the development of professional development activities, peer-to-peer support systems, and shared instructional materials.

  4. We explore new ways to determine our success as educators, designing assessments that help us continuously improve and demonstrate our impact without compromising student privacy or reducing students only to measurements like numerical grades or GPAs.

  5. We enhance collaboration by building connections within the organization, across campus, and by continuously seeking student input.

FY20-21 Goals

  1. Curate an online repository of teaching artifacts (slide decks, worksheets, lesson plans, etc.) for staff to share/reuse.

  2. Write a standard statement on the Libraries to be included in course syllabi, both a short version and a longer version. Place these statements in an online area accessible to all. Create a plan/way for librarians to share these statements with their liaison faculty.

  3. Explore methods for improving our teaching, such as structured self reflection, or peer observation.

  4. Gather existing assessment instruments in order to implement a standard post-instruction survey that librarians can use or adapt to assess student learning.

  5. Continue Learning and Student Success Forum series to engage staff in conversations on teaching and learning topics.

  6. Explore theoretical frameworks that can guide the future of teaching at TULUP, starting with trauma-informed pedagogy.