Building a Professional Learning Community to Improve Technical Services Librarians’ Teaching Preparedness: Assess, Act and Reflect

This action research was conducted to address the gap between having all librarians prepared to teach and technical services librarians’ unpreparedness to teach in a university library system. The implemented intervention was developing a professional learning community among technical services librarians with a variety of teaching experiences to improve teaching preparedness by sharing, discussing, and reflecting. The learning topics covered library teaching basics, motivating students, self-assessment, planning to teach, using Wikipedia for critical thinking, embedded librarianship and credit-bearing courses, teaching and research, and building a teaching portfolio and librarianship portfolio. A qualitative approach, including the implementation journal, reflective writing, and interviews, was employed to assess the learning process and outcomes. Process analysis showed good attendance, a challenge in scheduling due to time conflicts, and practical knowledge transfer. Outcome analysis demonstrated that the professional learning community had a positive impact on participants’ teaching attitudes, motivation, and self-efficacy. The action research offered two implications for professional practice for academic libraries, including valuing gap analysis to identify organizational problems and valuing internal librarians’ talents to promote organizational learning. This action research added to the literature on the effectiveness of a collaborative, bottom-up, democratic, professional development approach to improve the quality of technical services librarians’ professional lives.