>> JERILYN VELDOF: Hi, everyone, this is Jerilyn Veldof.
Thanks, Jennifer.
That was a lot of work.
Thanks for explaining all of that.
I'm so happy to be here.
Half of my family is at home with the stomach flu and I woke up this morning and crossed my fingers and thought, I will be fine.
I will get sick after the symposium.
I'm super glad to be here.
I want to say something about the Learning Roundtable.
They are sponsoring this event and then I will go ahead and introduce myself, the symposium and the session.
But the Learning Roundtable is an organization within the American Library Association and it's a terrific place for learning professionals within libraries to learn from each other.
You can see about the mission of the group, promoting continuing ed, being a source for staff training and development activities and thirdly, being an advocate for continuing ed.
If you are not involved go check them out at that link.
Let's see, the other thing I want to say about -- let me see -- oh, yes, I got it forwarded.
The other thing I want to say about the Learning Roundtable is that we have a couple of events coming up at ALA.
We hope to see you there.
The first is a preconference, and the other is just a regular program.
And you can read about them here.
You can go check out the link, Jennifer is putting them up in the chat window.
So thank you.
To if you are going to be at ALA, we really hope to see you there.
So that's about the Learning Roundtable.
Let me say a little bit about this symposium and the session.
And first, I forgot to say hello everybody and I would love to hear who you are, where you are from, and if you can just start putting that in the chat box, that would be really fun to kind of just see where everybody is distributed.
We've got over 100 people here today.
It's so awesome.
So go ahead and introduce yourself, just kind of where you are from, maybe your library and then as you do that, I will talk a little bit about myself.
So let's fast forward on.
So I'm a librarian from way back.
It feels like way back.
I started testify University of Arizona library in the mid'90s and then I came up here to University of Minnesota, where I have had sift a series of rolls, all involved in teaching and learning and training.
I started here as the distance learning instruction librarian and then the user education coordinator and then the director of coordinated educational services and now my focus is on staff.
Staff are groups and organizational development work.
So training and development continues to be a key part of my work but now it's more geared towards staff.
I'm also the author of this book "Creating the One-Shot Library Workshop" and I trained all over the country on how to apply instructional design principles and techniques to libraries of all types.
So that's a little bit about me and I'm watching all of this cool chat go by with introductions.
That's great.
Maryland, Washington, North Carolina.
This is great.
Thank you.
Wow!
We are really all over the place.
Pittsburgh.
Indianapolis.
All right!
All right.
So let's -- let me say something -- let me say something about this symposium next.
Why are we doing the symposium?
It came from -- it was kind of a rub for me.
It started where in my library, and maybe in your library, your organization, this is true for you too, but in my library, historically, we've had traditionally -- we had this experience that is -- I would call an endemic of under management, and you may be able to relate to this.
Under management is when we end up promoting people in a management, basically as a recognition of their subject matter expertise.
So in other words, you know, they might be a great eresource management specialist or they have handled their ILL duties very well.
We promote them into management because it's a way to recognize them for their competence and skills and it's also usually the only way to give them increases in their salary, but for a lot of them, they do not necessarily -- they are not necessarily aspiring to be in management positions.
They don't necessarily feel comfortable managing their friends and other peers, and often they want to continue to do what they are really good at, their subject matter expertise.
So all of these things mean sometimes that the management aspect of their job can get downplayed and, you know, too much of this kind of thing ends up resulting in a culture of under management across the libraries and across our institutions.
So years ago we decided to address this head on and we started offering a lot of supervisory and leadership training.
And since I really made a difference here in our library around under management.
But, you know, I have been doing this kind of work in isolation, putting them on, partnering with outside experts, and I have been doing it on my own.
I thought, gosh, this have to be a lot of people out there in my situation who are working to create training and development, pretty much on their own with no colleagues doing the same work that they have access to.
I created this survey.
I have this up on the slide and I asked folks in the Learning Roundtable list if they would be interested in attending this kind of an event and some people said, sure, yeah.
So several of the responders to the survey, they volunteered to help out, and so here we have today's symposium, and there are three of us who are pretty much the core volunteers and you will get to meet the other two a little later in the symposium, Heather Sostrom and Sandra Smith.
And then we had a few other very lovely people who volunteered to help deliver some of the sessions and you will get to hear from them later -- later this afternoon.
So thank you, everybody, who has been able to work on this.
All right.
So that's a little bit about the symposium.
This session that I will be doing -- oops this slide -- you get it, session 1.
The first one that I will be doing, addresses the how of supervisor development.
So we will look at what are the approaches, tools, the techniques that you might use to help you create a program in such a way that works for your target learners.
And then in the second session, we'll focus on the what of supervisor development, and in this session, you will learn about actual real life supervisor development programs that have worked, that you can borrow from, and you can adapt.
And then in our third session today, we are going to be covering the why of supervisor development, and you will learn how you could position supervisor development so that it is an easy sell, both at the organizational level and at the individual level.
So that's kind of what's in store for us this afternoon.
And during all of these sessions, we encourage you to use the learner g guide there.
Was a link to that here in the chat.
You also got it in your E email.
The learner guide is a way to keep focused on what we are talking about during the sessions.
So do take some time to jot down some of your answers so you have something really tangible to take away with you after this symposium is over.
Thank you, Jennifer.
She just put a link to the guide there.
We also have some other handouts too that I want to just mention.
The big one that we have is our experts guide.
So during the symposium, we didn't just want you to have to hear from our own individual experiences, and our own advice.
We wanted to bring multiple voices to the symposium.
So we went out and asked just a slew of what we consider experts in supervisor development in libraries to contribute their thoughts.
So these folks are consultants.
They are regular trainers on supervisor development and libraries.
They are kind of their experts in the field and so you will see in this handout, I guess it was about seven or eight people whom we tapped.
And if you go to the end of the handout, think it's page 7 or 8, towards the end, you will see all the experts we tapped, all of their comments to go on one -- on one page.
So you will see people like DeEtta Jones, and Kimberly Sweetman and Linda Bruno and a number of people there.
And I just want -- if you have got that handout open, just take a look at that.
Flip down through to the end of it where we have all the individual people listed.
I'm curious if you could chat in the chat box here, has anyone out, there have you contracted or worked with any of these folks and do you have anyone else you would recommend?
Because, you know, if we do have enough sort of collective advice and collective wisdom here on this webinar, it would be really awesome to be able to come back to this chat and find those names.
So if you have worked with them or you would recommend somebody else with whom you have partnered to provide supervisor development programs, cool.
Stick them in the chat window and that way we will have a record of it for others.
Let's see, we have listed here underneath the experts handbook or the guide, three other handouts.
So the one that I'm going to be referring to is the understanding your learners.
So if you would also kind of have that at the ready, that would be great.
And I'm not seeing anything in chat, which is sort of interesting.
Well, so you do have a list of our experts in case you do want to contact someone else -- one of them or follow with one of them to either collaborate with or contract out for some of your development.
All right.
Great.
So let's go into this session.
The how.
Oops.
Let me forward the slide.
Okay.
The how of supervisor development.
Let me grab a drink.
Okay so for the rest of the hour, we will be looking at best practices for supervisor development.
I have to point out what may be obvious but maybe not.
That is that supervisor development in and of itself is a best practice and it's probably the best how of them all.
So how do you reduce under management and hopefully even eradicate it?
How do you build a strong supervisory culture?
Just the act of announcing the programs to your staff.
Just the act of encouraging supervisors to participate, just the act of resourcing supervise development is a best practice in and of itself.
And just -- you know, just six years ago we did none of this, maybe you can relate.
But I can tell you that the power of just the offering is phenomenal.
And it sends a really strong message that there is a certain skill set, that there is a certain set of activities that supervisors are responsible for, and it sends the message that supervisors need to develop, that we want them to develop, that they should, indeed be developing.
And they don't have to do it on their own or haphazardly or rely solely on their supervisor to teach them how to be a great supervisor.
So, you know, I know a lot of people are thinking, well, of course, Jerilyn!
But how do I -- but I know that there are probably others in this group who are thinking, yeah.
Bring it on!
Let's see.
So let's see -- as we go along, and go ahead and type some of your thoughts in the chat box and I will try to see them as we go.
So along these lines, my next slide is about how development needs to be an ongoing pursuit.
It doesn't stop after your learners have left your supervisor development training retreat and you cleaned up all the food.
Development is an ongoing pursuit.
And I will say it again and we'll say it throughout this whole symposium, it doesn't stop with one event that you host every year, or two years or three years or whatever.
It doesn't stop when the supervisor leaves the classroom or logs out or 9 person logs  out -- the person logs out of your eLearning program.
Here's a great quote from one of the great experts in your experts handout.
She says "workplace training must be an ongoing conversation.
It is almost impossible to solve a workplace challenge with a single training session.
So supervisors must continually discuss their training needs and learning progress with their managers."
And here's another one.
DeEtta Jones.
"I think the most effective approach is to offer regular planned development experiences that expect leadership no exist everywhere in the organization."
And it's important to create an organization with a growth mind-set, to support and to infuse supervisor development throughout the organization, and the point is here that it shouldn't be a one-shot venture.
What I'm getting to here, what I'm alluding to here is a growth mind-set organization.
It's probably the best practice for supervisor development and any other development.
But before I get into that and ask you a question about that, let's go over the annotation tools and Jennifer, do you want to do that or should I do that.
>> JENNIFER:  I will do that.
If you advance the slide.
Some of you may know that we like to use annotation tools to engage with you and keep you on your toes in our -- as our audience.
So I have given you all access to the tools and I'm going to walk you through how to access them and you can test them open this slide.
If you go to the top left corner, you will see a marker, click on that marker.
And then I want you to go halfway down the annotation tools to the square.
Click on that square and go to the check mark that's under the square menu.
So go a little bit further into the annotation options.
Find that square and go to the check mark excellent.
It looks like you are finding that check mark and we'll be using this periodically throughout the session.
So note that that's the way to find it.
And now that you all have tested on this slide, Jerilyn, we'll ask you to pause your annotations and we'll move to the next slide and have you answer her question on that slide.
So let's go ahead and pause our tools at this point.
Go ahead.
>> JERILYN VELDOF: Can I forward it now?
>> JENNIFER:  I think you can, yes.
>> JERILYN VELDOF: Okay.
Great.
Great.
Thank you.
So let me get back to the growth mind set, Carol Dweck, she's a professor over at Stanford and she's really written the definitive text on this.
This one here on this slide is her trade book for the general public and it's really excellent.
Or you can Google her, I guess.
She has a great TED Talk.
It's really interesting to look at if you haven't investigated her.
She talks about individual mind-sets but I think more about organizational mind-sets.
So for me, a growth mind-set organization has a culture of continuous learning.
And so how do you know if you have that?
You are looking at this continuum, going where do I put my check mark.
Look at things like your hiring practices.
Think about this, do you hire for potential?
Do you hire people who have the right attitudes, who have been innovative, who are curious, all of those kinds of things and if so, great!
But if you hire people because they have done the job before, or because they have demonstrated competence at doing the same thing, you are hiring them to do, you might work in more of a fixed mindset organization, which is on the other side of the spectrum from the growth mindset organization.
Another example is how often do you create new jobs and move existing employees into them, even though they may have no idea what the new expertise entails?
We do that constantly here.
We have created dozens and dozens of new jobs over the years and we typically move existing staff into these brand new roles.
It's happened to me four times personally.
But it's happened all over.
We had a library assistant cataloger who is now a project manager of our brand new publishing department.
We have an engineering library who is now our lead for a whole new area of research and discovery systems.
We have a physics librarian who is leading our eLearning initiative.
I could go on and on.
This is all parts of a growth mind-set organization in operation.
Then ask you, what happened open the other side of that?
What is a fixed mind-set.
They likely keep the same people in the same roles doing what they are expert in for as long as they will stay.
And when or if they do promote them into leadership, they will expect that these individuals will get it on their own because they are smart.
They are competent and they probably wouldn't invest in supervisor development training or coaching or mentoring for these folks.
They don't really need it.
That's a fixed mind-set organization.
So you can see why some organizations are more apt to offer supervisor development and some organizations are less apt to do it.
And much of it depends on the mind-set of the leader and their team, and where they are on the continuum.
So you guys have been awesome putting in all of your check marks and it looks like we have people across the whole continueup, but it's so nice to see so many of the people on the yes side.
We do still have a lot of people on the not at all side.
What if you are at that not at all side?
And you work in a fixed mind-set organization and you need to be offering supervisor development programs?
Those of you in the -- well, anywhere on continuum, feel free to type in what your advice would be in the chat box and let's see, I will take a stab at -- at that here.
So here's what I would do, if I was at the not at all side here, the fixed mind-set side.
This is my advice for you to see if you can sell a very basic traditional program.
You know, like a typical standalone one shot event.
Maybe it is a two-hour session or multiday session, and once people -- if you can get that through, once people start to learn how much they don't know about supervision and management, you will want to survey them.
So right away they walk out of that classroom and right away survey them.
Ask them if they would like to build on -- what they would like to build on.
Ask them what they want clarification on.
And then go pitch that to your leadership and make -- and what you believe would be a useful follow-up.
And you can use what we will be covering today in this symposium, to craft a more tailor made or custom made solution for your organization or if you are a consortium for your members.
Let's see what else.
I'm looking in the chat here.
I'm a library director of a small college.
I have two staff members who work at different times.
Any suggestions?
You are going to have to partner with other people in your same boat, in your region if you have other small libraries in the region or if you can broaden in out to your state and see if we can get the state level to provide some training, if it's in person.
Now, we will talk about alternatives to in person during rest of the session.
And for many of you at small libraries that's probably what you will have to do create an online solution, so people can create community, be in community, but do it remotely and in many cases asynchronously.
Yes, Sandra reminds us that we will be talking more about this in the third session.
Awesome.
Okay.
Yep.
Third session.
So let's move on to the next point here, which is really understanding the techniques and the approaches that are going to work best for your particular learners.
In your particular organization, in your particular library type, because I will be talking a lot about generic things but, of course, we need to look -- we need to figure out ways to customize that for your situation.
Or from a consortium for your particular member community.
So I'm going to spend a little time on that before we jump into the specific techniques and then I will get really specific and we'll talk about ten specific best practices towards the end of this session.
So understanding your learners.
This is one of your handouts.
The first thing we have to do, of course, is identify our learners.
They might be new -- brand new supervisors.
They could be seasoned managers, midlevel leaders, or maybe a mixture of these.
And I'm not going to go into that here.
Identifying your target learners.
If you have questions about this piece, do ask.
I'm going to assume at this point that you have identified your target learners, and once you have done that, I'm going to go into kind of what do you do next.
So here are some of the things you want to do.
First you want to get clear on what you already know about your target learners.
Like I mentioned before, are they brand new to supervision and they don't really know what that work entails beyond what they have observed from their own supervisors or are they seasoned managers who were promoted up from being competent, expert, subject matter experts, those kinds of types?
Who are your target learners?
Do you need to learn more about those target learners?
Might you gathering them through reading or focus groups?
So if you do need to gather more information and you need to understand them more before you tailer a program to them.
What are 89 characteristics of the target learners that may affect their learning?
Do they lack confidence and might they be intimidated by what you are covering.
Are they fairly savvy.
Are they confident only?
Will you need to simplify content?
Or can they deal with advanced concepts or do you have a mix?
What kind of mix do you have?
That's the kind of thing you want to do in number two.
And number three, you are looking at what are their knowledge?
What are their skills and what is the attitude that they already have about supervision that may affect their learning?
So an example of attitudes are they interested in management as a practice or are they reluctant managers?
Example of knowledge.
Let's say do they already know the value of performance management and the basic process, for example?
In terms of skills, an example might be can they have a development conversation?
Are they practiced at it?
Are they comfortable at it?
So those are the kinds of things you want to look at in three.
And then in four, you kind of -- you want to start investigating their learning preferences.
And this is -- this is more of a -- we could talk more about learning styles and learning styles theory have been pretty much debunked but there are still preferences that people do have.
So what we want -- we want to set out here if they feel they learn best when, let's say presented with a lot of content through lectures or do they learn best by in-depth work sheets, where they really get to puzzle something out on their own or do they learn best by an open laboratory experience?
What approaches to learning work best for them, and you also want to find it here, what might turn them off to learning.
And this is all in your handout, by the way.
So you can get to it there.
Including the part on the right, which is how might you find that out?
What questions might you need to ask or want to ask?
And let's see, we have eight questions here.
You can borrow from those.
And put together a little interview or a little focus group at the end of a leadership meeting or a supervisory meeting or whatever.
If you have ideas, if you have done them before, go ahead and put them in the chat box.
I have done this quite a bit and so I can share too.
Sometimes I just do the survey, but I find that the face-to-face discussions are much more rich.
All right.
So you are going to have a ton of feedback after all of.
This just a ton of data.
And you want to start thinking about those, putting those into three main buckets.
What are the learner characteristics?
What is the previous knowledge skills and abilities?
In other words what are they coming to your learning with already?
And then what are their style preferences?
And then you might have a fourth bucket too, that's sort of like miscellaneous stuff.
So those are -- that's sort of the nuts and boltsy piece that you need to do before you jump into picking and choosing from a whole host of techniques.
Let's see, I think I'm pausing next.
I'm pausing here to take a breath to look at the chat.
Let's see if we have anything that I should respond to.
>> JENNIFER:  There's some great conversation going on.
Some suggestions for how external vendors, external training has been helpful.
And there's been a great exchange -- I love to see people asking for advice within the chat environment.
So don't hesitate to do that.
And please don't hesitate to post questions as they come to you.
>> JERILYN VELDOF: Thank you.
All right.
So now what we are going to do with the rest of the time before the Q&A is to really dive into techniques that we will draw from.
So what I would like you guys to do is think about the techniques or the approaches to supervisor development that you i implemented for your staff or those that you experienced yourself.
Some of you have already jumped in and talked about outside vendors which is great.
Another person, let's see, Kerry, talked about excellence in leadership 1 and 2, which is a series that she offers.
Great.
So if you have -- you know, feel free.
Many of you, like I said, have done these or you have been part of these.
So go ahead and jump in and share yours as we go.
Focus groups.
Yes.
Brainstorming scenarios together as a small group.
Yeah, I will be talking about peer learning too as a really powerful way to -- powerful technique to implement inside of a program or really even as a standalone aspect.
Reading and discussion.
Yeah, reflection, contemplation.
That was from Molly, thank you.
Mentoring program.
Awesome.
Okay.
So we will be talking about a lot of these things.
If you have experience or advice, I really encourage you to jump on to the chat and share that with colleagues.
Accountability through performance management process, yes.
We are now big into that here at Minnesota as well.
We do quite a bit of -- offer coaching as well have Cheryl.
This is awesome.
Really good stuff.
So let me dive into 9 -- what is it now?
I think it's ten specific best practices that we have here, and you will see how many of them overlap and reinforce each other.
The best -- first one I will talk about here is the power of a professional development plan.
Has anybody ever done a professional development plan, use it in their training?
Go ahead and jump on chat with that.
It's really the one technique I would strongly recommend before you provide any supervisor development, if you can.
It's to have your supervisors complete a plan for themselves.
Claudia Monte here, recommends that people do this even if they are just considering management.
She says consider succession management in advance of need.
And then says that should be part of a comprehensive professional development plan for this individual.
So rather, they are already in the track or they are considering getting on a management or supervisory track, professional development plans are an awesome tool.
And I'm talking about using these prior to participation in any program or experience you are going to design, to have -- to have people really think deeply about what they would like to develop and where they are going with their own careers.
And whenever you can do anything to increase your learners' intrinsic motivation to participate, you are setting your learners up for much greater success than if they didn't come into the sessions or the program with that already.
I have a link here to a collection of templates that I have been collecting.
So you can see how they vary and you can maybe adapt one that will work in your organization.
We have had all of our directors do this, and we have had three cohorts of non-positional leaders, you know, people who we consider leaders but who aren't supervisors as managers, et cetera.
They have gone through individual development plans.
Let's see.
Let me just look over here at -- yes, so people are piping in about that.
We are beginning to think about that said Cheryl.
Thank you, Jennifer, for putting the link in there.
Oh, we are working towards all employees having an IDP.
An IDP, by the way, is the term for individual development plan, professional development plan is basically the same thing.
Most of the templates I gave you are probably called individual development plans.
I use professional because Claudia used professional in her quote.
I don't think it matters.
Okay.
So next piece of advice is to take a holistic approach.
Management skills are developed on an evolving basis, through awareness, learning and reinforcement.
We saw some of the people in the chat already kind of talk about this.
Again, your supervisor development program will be much stronger if it looks more like an initiative.
An initiative covers many levels and layers of the organization.
So what do I mean by that?
How might you achieve this or a number of ways.
All levels of leadership would be coaching to the next level down.
One-on-one meetings would include a segment during which the supervisor reflects on their management practice for the next week, what worked, what hasn't.
Performance reviews which was commented on in the chat, they would reinforce supervisor skills and practices, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
You know, we will have more examples of this as we go on in the -- in the symposium.
The second quote here is just reinforcing that.
If we don't do what we can to help our learners integrate their learning in daily practice, what is the point?
Learning is change and without change, one could argue that true learning hasn't occurred.
In is one of my favorite -- it's not like it's a paraphrase -- it's one of my favorite paraphrases from -- I will have to get back to you on that.
When teaching training isn't saying, I think it is but I will have to get back to you on that.
And somebody else said my favorite general supervisor book is "the management book by Steven Robbins.
9 next is layering and learning.
And there's a great quote by DeEtta Jones where she recommends layering the approach to learning and include things like reflection time.
Somebody brought that up in the chat window.
Reflection time, small group interaction, around  the reflection or a case study and large group exchange.
And everyone's learning style will be covered at some point and allowed for equitable contribution among participants.
Layering the approach to learning.
This next technique has more to do with content delivery.
Use a variety of modes to deliver content.
And Kimberly Sweetman points out that different people respond to differently to various training methods.
We know that.
It's good to remember this and it's good to actively bring this into our program design.
She says, "to create a culture of continual growth in learning that is meaningful to a variety of people, you will need to offer a variety of methods."
And here are the ones she mentions -- in her section.
The ones-shot instruction sessions.
We have that down but she also talked about self-paced training modules.
I don't know about you guys but we are heavy users of Linda.com content.
Our public library even has -- we have a license at the university, but our public library has a license to Linda.com, online eLearning.
Very good quality work for managers.
And I can talk a little later if you want to how we have used that.
She talks about, of course, in-person sessions, remote learning, and multisession themed training.
I'm a big fan of this.
And, in fact, I'm just starting another themed training on performance management that is kicking off next week.
It is a three parter.
The main message here with this technique is to intentionally switch it up.
And, again, I know we already know this intuitively, but it should be top of mind when we are designing our programs.
Okay.
Next practice.
We have already heard some folks add voluntary indicating this in the chat.
Including a mentoring component into our programs and this is such a great way to integrate new learning into daily practice, as we have already talked about.
All candidates for supervisory positions, says Hilda Weisburg as well as supervisors should have a mentor with whom they can go to for advice.
And then Kimberly Sweetman, mentoring conversations with managers, communicate practice, and sessions with external professional coach are all useful tools.
Absolutely.
And we have used all of those as well.
Maybe some of you have as well.
The next technique is to combine content experts with peer learning.
DeEtta advises us to build in lots of opportunities for participants to learn with and from one another, as well as the content expert.
Kimberly is also a proponent of both formal and informal communities of practice.
So that supervisors can learn from each other.
We do this quite a bit in my library, one of the things that I do is host a little brown box lunch every six weeks with director level, where they can have an informal community practice, basically.
So they set the agenda and I just facilitate the discussion and then take notes.
And decide -- help with, like, you know, follow-up action.
It's a great informal community.
We have a number of them here.
As DeEtta points out here, peer learning gives people the sense that they are not alone in their particular challenges and I think that's what's so important about that lunch and other avenues that we give people to come together and talk.
You are not alone, because it's very isolating being a supervisor.
You know, the people around you are not doing the same work you are doing necessarily.
She also points out that peer learning can really boost confidence and build a sense of community.
I can attest to that.
And really community might be one of the most important outcomes for people who feel like, again, they are pretty much working in isolation.
All right.
So not only do we want to provide opportunities for peer learning.
We want to provide opportunities to practice.
Practice, practice, practice.
Hilda Weisburg here, she shared with us some real specific ways to do that.
She was saying, you could work into a program by giving examples of reports, generated by librarians about what they are doing, about their program, their area of -- their initiative.
And if possible, show a 20 or 30-minute video of a librarian in action.
And then have participants evaluate those and then discuss with each other how they would support or guide this librarian to improve their program.
It sounds like really great advice.
Think about other ways you could work practice into your programs.
An example from my library, after we had a number of managers go through a session on coaching, on development coaching for their employees, I offered a series of these small scale sessions where managers could work together through a scenario that I gave them, and kind of play out the role of supervisor and superviseee.
And I can tell from you that experience, that the majority of the learning happened not in that classroom but in those follow-up practice sessions.
Really powerful.
Okay.
Next.
Well, this one won't be a surprise to people.
Provide in-person events but it is kind of in the sense that we are moving to such an online community, kind of approach to learning.
So I thought this was still an important dimension.
Linda Bruno says that the delivery method for supervisory training should be based in part on the topic to be addressed.
So we have got to remember that.
So for more reflective topics such as those about things like emotional intelligence and creating a motivating environment, that these are the kinds of things that often work better in face-to-face situations, and face-to-face workshops, that the kind of things that allow fore easier group discussion.
Although she does, however, say that spreading out these kinds of topics over two or more days to allow participants to really fully digest the information is a best practice.
It's not always possible for us to do that, but it is a best practice.
Let's see, DeEtta places a lot of value on in-person events too, because she thinks people -- they do benefit tremendously from what she calls synergistic exchange and Claudia Monte also spoke up about this, and she says that ideally a classroom setting allows for more interaction for exercises, for demonstrations and sharing of experiences.
This is not like a shocker.
Of course, we know this.
Bust I think what is really powerful about this is remembering that just because somebody is in the classroom doesn't mean that all you have to do is have a lecture.
That the lecture is probably the least effective part of an in-person event and all of these comments really have to do with interaction, exercises, sharing, exchanges.
So make sure that we don't forget that when we design our in classroom, our face-to-face kind of learning activities.
Okay.
We have two more to go.
The next one is -- is about providing blended learning events.
Most of you probably know this, blending refers to mixing up both in-person and the online learning and Claudia Monte says that given -- you know, so true.
Given the challenges of libraries releasing staff, especially those of us in small libraries, a blend of webinar or online learning and classroom learning is probably more realistic.
Especially, you know, if you just don't have backup or you can't justify a full day off site for training.
So let's think for a second about what kind of training works online.
Linda Bruno, she characterizes some of these kinds of things as basic skill-based training.
So like you are going to be focusing on organizational skills, or delegation skills or skills for conducting effective meetings.
Those are the kind of topics that she says could really benefit from face-to-face programs but they might also be just as effective in an online environment.
So really be discerning.
What kind of -- for X topic, which would be the better approach and then, of course, which is the approach that we have to take because we have other restrictions or limitations.
Hilda Weisburg also talked about this.
She says even if most of your training is done online, it's still a good idea to have at least one face to face, although, you know this could be done on Skype or whatever the equivalent of that.
She also says that it works well if participants can have a -- she calls it -- I think she calls it a reunion of sorts after X amount of months or so to identify what is working and what isn't.
So Hilda is basically saying if you do the majority of your program online, still have a face to face, or, you know, an aspect of that program where people get to come together in community.
Learning reunions are the best says Jennifer.
Reflective learning is so important, right?
Okay.
So our last technique for this session is incorporating experiential learning wherever you can.
This is a picture here of our storage facility.
It's built into the side of the Mississippi River Bank and you can see here someone who is in training to drive this lift.
She's going around this cone and it's such a great example of how you need experiential learning opportunities to really get to internalize what you are learning.
Claudia Monte again, she recommends that sessions be scheduled with a two-week or longer break in between.
And that allows participants time to really apply the skills that they have learned and then when they return, their experience should be discussed at the beginning of each subsequent session.
It makes the learning real for them, she says.
Now, the way I worked this into our management training is by very intentionally crafting email messages to the supervisors of the participants prior to each session and I tell them what we'll be covering in session and give them specific discussion questions for either their management teams if they have them, or their one-on-one meetings with their supervisors who are participating in the training.
So I don't leave this to chance.
I actually give them questions to ask and ask them to talk about how -- ask them to ask their supervisors to talk about how they have applied the learning in their day-to-day work.
And so I encourage you, don't leave these kinds of discussions up to chance.
If you can do -- start any kind of influence to make sure that people are actually getting outside of the sessions to experience and put into -- to apply what they are learning, that's just awesome and often it's the supervisor of that person who really helps to motivates them to do it and not just shelf the training materials on a pile or something.
Okay.
So we have talked about cultivating a growth mind-set in your organization.
We have talked about integrating development into the everyday fabric of your organization, and we just talked through ten real specific techniques to use when creating your supervisor development programs.
I'm going to -- let's see, I will ask you a question now.
Here's the annotation tool.
I will ask you a question now that has the -- that will have you use this again.
Hopefully you remember you go to the upper left-hand corner of your screen and pick that little pencil, paint brush, and that's how you get into the annotation tools.
If you are having trouble with, that go ahead and put something in the chat.
>> JENNIFER:  And feel free to practice again, if you want to practice on this slide before we move forward for folks to find that little check mark.
And I will mention on the next slide, we have carefully defined boxes for you to check in.
So hopefully that will help folks know where to check.
And I encourage you to find the smaller check mark.
Use the smaller check mark if you are able to.
It's underneath the box that is on the middle of your annotation tool panel.
So go to the middle of your panel and find the square and then scroll down to the check mark.
Okay.
>> JERILYN VELDOF: Okay.
Thank you.
All right.
If you guys could just hold up on your practice.
I'm going to advance the slide.
So stop the practice.
I still see little check marks because they will just go on the next slide in like a random place.
Okay.
So I'm advancing to the next slide.
Here are the techniques that I just covered.
Let's see, oh, we have only -- oh, we have a double one.
Well, there are ten techniques.
Sorry the numbering went off a little bit.
So if you can think back to what we talked about.
What do you think are the two most important ones.
Experiential learning is a big one.
Professional development plans, awesome.
Wow!
I didn't know that those were so popular in libraries.
Opportunities to practice.
Mentoring.
That's a big one.
So you only have two check marks.
Again, professional development plans is really coming up to the top.
And experiential learning.
Okay.
So if you will prioritize all of these, you know, you have a sense of what your two priorities are, if you can't do everything.
And are you done with your checks?
Thank you.
Well, Jennifer, will we have this as part of the record?
This will -- yes, this will be in --
>> JENNIFER:  Absolutely.
Yep.
>> JERILYN VELDOF: Cool.
Excellent.
I'm advancing the slide here.
So here's a little bit of an overview of what we covered.
We talked about symposium supervisor development is so important.
We talked about the importance of creating an organization with a growth mind-set.
We talked about understanding your learners and designing your programs around their needs and preferences and then finally we talked a lot about the best practices for approaches to supervisor development.
Phew!
We did it.
I'm going to open up for questions in a minute but let me just say -- go ahead and think about your questions and put them in the chat box but I want to say while we are waiting for that, that we do have the next session that starts at quarter after the hour.
And then the next session we're going to be looking at how -- at an actual supervisor development programs.
So real ones that have been put -- that have been implemented that you can then kind of look at and pick and choose maybe what would work for you, what you can adapt.
And we will -- like I said, we will start that at quarter after the hour.
But we do have a little bit of time here if anybody has any questions and I think the other panelists might be looking at these questions too, if you have any and we'll be jumping in.
Oh, before I pause and look at the chat box, there is a link here on this Q&A page that goes to a survey.
And this survey is -- it's designed to assess your interest in a follow-up to this symposium.
So after every one of the sessions we will show this link.
We are proposing that the next thing we might do is create small teams of you guys who would actually create an element of a supervisor development program for your own constituents.
So that's kind of proposal that's out there.
If that sounds interesting, go ahead and take a look at this link and fill out that survey when you get a chance.
In the meantime, let's look at the chat window and see if there's anything here.
>> JENNIFER:  Yes, there's some really, really great questions actually coming true and I know we are going to be covering some of this again in later sessions.
But I love this question about advice for new very young supervisor whose staff is all off site and also much older.
Can you talk about how to address that both with the culture of learning in your -- in your library staff, but also for that supervisor.
>> JERILYN VELDOF: Yeah, I would say learning how to do some coaching would be really important.
However, I would do that gingerly.
Sometimes coaching from a younger, more inexperienced staff member does not go over well.
So -- and in all cases, if I were in your position, I would be inviting my staff to participate with me and kind of offer this as a possibility.
You are going to be then having to deal with -- if you have to do any kind of -- so your -- let me just make sure.
You are a supervisor of -- not of supervisors but of staff here, that's my guess.
Is that true?
>> JENNIFER:  Mm-hmm.
>> JERILYN VELDOF: This is Jenna.
Yeah, that's right.
I would also do -- and do you meet online?
Do you have staff meetings online?
No.
Okay.
I'm trying to think about any kind of off-the-shelf eLearning that I have -- I have seen on this topic and I haven't because we don't have this issue.
I'm just kind of going through the Linda.com content.
A lot of what you are -- you are going to need is probably individual coaching and support.
So back with Kimberly Sweetman said one of the great things to do for your own development is to hire a coach.
If you can get the funds to do that, that would be great.
We do that regularly for our new supervisors.
We give them experienced coaches who work with them on their individual issues, and work -- work through those issues one by one with them.
So if that's possible -- because I can't think of anything off the shelf or I can't think of anything that's sort of predone that you can go to even in person for this situation.
So I would say get some support and you have a list of wonderful people in the experts packet who may all actually be available for one-on-one work if you can get the funding for that.
>> JENNIFER:  Absolutely and I would encourage others who are gathered here today, if things come to mine, feel free to chime in there.
This is a great question and this is a good pair of questions.
One is, you talked about reluctant managers, as people who maybe don't see themselves as moving too those management positions.
How do you -- how do you address that and are there particular strategies for reluctant learners?
>> JERILYN VELDOF: Yeah, I think first you need to make it real for them.
So one of the first things we did was we -- we took one -- there used to be one line on our position descriptions that said something about your supervisory responsibilities.
One line.
And we busted that out and made -- made it a substantial section of the position description.
Now, we use position descriptions every year in our performance reviews.
So you pull them out, you look at them and you say how well did I do meeting my position description?
You know, b bullets on that.
It becomes very real to people when those specific descriptions, the specific elements of a supervisor's responsibilities are delineated open a job description that then gets used in a performance review.
So that makes it very real, very quickly.
But you can't do that without making sure that these folks -- make sure these folks have those fundamental skills.
So what we did is we -- after we offered a supervisor fundamental series, we took what we learned from the supervisor fundamentals and we basically put that -- we baked that into the job description.
We were not pulling things willy-nilly.
We were pulling all of those skills.
What does it look like when you are a good supervisor from the fundamentals training.
We pulled those things into the job description.
So people knew, you know, if they didn't know how no do something, they knew they could go to their materials and talk to a colleague about what they remembered and they would have the resources to help them -- to make sure that they were going to be successful.
So that's a big -- that's a big one for me.
Anybody else jump in and say anything else?
>> JENNIFER:  The other question I would love to hear.
I know oftentimes in organizations, they are really maybe isn't any opportunity for advancement, the roles that are defined are -- are -- you know, the ones that exist for -- especially for smaller organizations, many of our folks come from smaller and rural libraries.
So I just -- what I want to give a plug for, you know, I'm a real advocate for the idea of the organization being one in which they are learning together.
You know, I even talk about leadership as a subversive activity that we are really growing leadership amongst all of those roles.
So I don't know, in terms of how you bring sort of that idea of learning development, professional development to the organization.
Can you talk a little bit about how you would maybe compensate for that lack of -- of movement, bases to move into and how you address that?
>> JERILYN VELDOF: Okay.
So the ladder doesn't go up.
But does the ladder go sideways?
One of the things that we started doing even before this, that I think changed the culture.
We started giving people leads -- lead roles.
So they retained their job as a reference librarian or as an engineering librarian.
They figured out ways to give them programs or projects that helped to develop them.
So many of us, I mentioned earlier, that we have created new jobs, new programs, new departments.
All of my jobs, all five of my jobs were brand new.
No one had done them before, but in all the cases, after I got into my first job, it was because I expanded my role in a new area in -- you know, within the job that I had.
So I'm very much an advocate, when I was a department head, I was very much an advocate of finding ways to help people have stretch roles in new areas and start building things within their jobs.
So, you know, how to get some backup to them.
How to provide some support while they are doing that.
So at least, you know, they had a possibility of having a new title or, you know, in many cases like in my case, we were able to go to the provost and create a new funding stream and I was able to hire a couple of new positions, not that we funded internally in the libraries but that were funded at the university level.
So every once in a while, those kinds of things happen that we are able to make a case and argue for a whole new position or a whole new area because somebody has stretched out of their job and taken on a new project or a new role that just kind of grew out.
>> JENNIFER:  Fantastic.
I'm so excited because this is the one thing that happens when we do a multiple session event, is that we have just barely scratched the surface but we still have two more sessions!
So I want to thank you, Jerilyn for bringing us into this -- into this scope of what we can talk about today.
Your ten approaches are excellent ways to explore how to bring this training to your communities.
So with, that thank you, and I will let folks know that we will take a short 15-minute break.
Be sure and stand up and walk around and hopefully you can come back in 15 minutes and  we'll begin our next session at 15 minutes past the hour.
Thank you so much, Jerilyn.