Theme: "Body / Voice / Space"
Learning Outcomes: After today's session, librarians will be able to:
- Move comfortably in a classroom space in order to focus their attention on communicating effectively with students, and to capture and hold the students’ attention.
- Project and modulate their voices in order to communicate effectively with students and to hold students’ attention.
- Demonstrate enthusiasm for instruction through gestures, voice volume and inflection, use of breath, and body movement in order to capture and hold students’ attention and to make a connection so that students will contact librarians after the session for help.
Activities:
- In preparation for today's workshop, librarians were asked to prepare a 2-3 minute presentation on a comically simple topic.
- Each librarian gave her presentation to the rest of the group, while the members of the group noted one thing that worked well and one thing she could have done differently.
- For each presentation, one librarian in the "audience" was also secretly designated as a distractor, engaging in common student behaviors (texting, whispering to a neighbor, interrupting, etc.) that teachers often find distracting.
- The audience's feedback was collected and distributed to the librarians.
Suggested Readings: None, because reading about this is, as the saying goes, like dancing about architecture. :)
- Presentation skills workshop
"Summary of Themes" from January, 2011, Library Instruction Skills Workshop provided by Michelle Milne. For more information contact Michelle Milne at mmilne@gmail.com / 574.238.5788.
