The Ripples We Make – Reflective Assessment in Children’s and Youth Services

We live and work in a hectic world that prizes always doing more. It’s important to take a moment to breathe, step back, and look at where we’ve been in our practice as professionals. Reflective assessment can be a way to do this.

Assessment refers to gathering information about something you are doing to determine progress and effect meaningful growth (Campana, Mills, & Ghoting, 2016). Assessment data can give you the basis for an advocacy story to share the ways in which you are having an impact through your work. This can, in turn, inform your own professional development. Another way to think about assessment is that it’s about understanding what has taken place so that you can continue to strengthen what you do and how you do it.

Traditionally library staff have relied heavily on outputs as ways to conduct assessment to understand the impacts of their programs, collections, and services (Zweizig, 1985). These outputs refer to things like:

• Number of visits
• Number of materials used
• Circulation
• Percentage of searches for library material by young adults
• Attendance at programs
• Annual number of contacts with community partners
• Youth participation rates (Walter, 1995)

These numbers tell part of the assessment story, but they don’t explain what the experience was like for the families nor if they’re likely to come back. So you’re only seeing part of the picture. Moreover, programs and services for children and youth are complex opportunities for assessment because they also involve understanding the impact of various embedded opportunities for learning and growth on the children who attend. And this impact cannot be fully portrayed through outputs alone. The problem of how to assess children’s and youth programming persists today, as libraries grapple with how best to gather and analyze data, visualize it, and utilize it to tell compelling stories for sustainability and job security.

Fortunately, because there really is no single way to measure, understand, and advocate for the importance of programs for children and youth, there are exciting opportunities for individual creativity and innovation (Mills, Campana, & Clarke, 2016). The most useful and important moments for assessment often take place during informal conversations and interactions with community members during and outside of programs and services (Mills et al., 2015). Two strategies—self-reflection and peer mentoring—offer fruitful ways to obtain assessment data from these kinds of informal moments (Mills, 2021; Walter 2001). Let’s look at each of these.

Self-reflection is about considering your own practice and comprises two activities—reflection-on-action and reflection-in-action (Schön, 1983, 1987). Let’s look at reflection-on-action first. Take a moment to think back on:

• How a program or service went;
• The successes and opportunities for growth;
• What you learned and heard; and
• How you might revise the activity for the future.

This informal, personal approach often takes place during dedicated moments for assessment as well as during intermittent moments between programs and other duties—cleaning up after a program, working at the desk, etc. Reflection-on-action can be casual, spontaneous, and unstructured—whatever works best for you.

Reflection-in-action refers to observations you make during your programs that impact (in big and small ways) the decisions and actions you take. For instance:

• You are proceeding with a planned program;
• You notice something different or unusual happen;
• You shift and change your plan based on that difference; and
• You try out a new strategy, observing the effects of that change.

This kind of reflection relies and builds on your own expertise to handle unexpected moments and continuously grow and shape your practice. When you realize that you’re already doing this in-the-moment reflection (and most of you are!), you can communicate this work in your overall program assessment.

Peer mentoring (Campana, Mills, & Ghoting, 2016; Mills et al., 2015) is another kind of reflective assessment in which staff work together to provide and receive feedback. Ask your colleagues at your branch or library, or maybe from nearby branches, to help you grow your practice. If you’re the only one in your building doing programs/services for children and youth, you can ask a daycare teacher or
parent/caregiver you trust to help you. Peer mentoring can take several forms:

There are five main benefits to this:

1. Built-in self-reflection. Peer mentoring enables both parties to reflect their own programs and processes and learn new ideas they can apply going forward.
2. Outside perspective. You gain valuable feedback from someone outside of your planning process who can see things that you may not be able to and offer some input from their own perspective and expertise.
3. Advocacy. You are building a relationship with a peer that can give both of you a partner with whom to craft compelling advocacy stories to communicate the impact and effect of all that you both are doing for your community.
4. Opportunity for professional development and training. You are a professional with particular skills that you can grow and strengthen through the help of reflective practice.
5. Community of practice. You are building a peer community with your colleagues that can help you learn from one another, build and sustain your own work and that of your colleagues, and provide you with innovation and creativity during difficult times.

Understandably, there are challenges to doing assessment work, otherwise everyone would be doing it. Time and staffing are often the biggest ones (Mills et al., 2015). It is important to communicate with your supervisors about why it’s important to have dedicated time for engaging in both self-reflection and peer
mentoring as part of continuing to offer engaging, learning-rich programs and services for the children, youth, and families in your community. When dedicated time isn’t possible, try to find impromptu moments and then use the information you gather during those moments to craft your assessment story. You can then use that story as part of your continued efforts to secure dedicated assessment time.

Another common challenge is unclear communication between administration and staff in the library about the nature and purpose of assessment. Unclear communication can lead to pushback and lack of buy-in from staff to assessment efforts (Robbins et al, 1990). It is important for you and your supervisor to discuss shared goals for this work and how they align with the goals of the institution.

To combat these challenges, here are three recommendations:

1. Library administrators – give your staff dedicated time for implementing reflective practices, to enable both self-reflection and peer mentoring. This can help support advocacy, demonstrate impact, and promote professional development.
2. Library administrators and staff – develop a system of assessment that is grounded in improving practice, intentionally creating a safe space where staff can share ideas and solve problems together as a community of practice.
3. Library administrators and storytime providers – engage in open communication about organizational and individual goals and situate assessment in that goal setting process.

A reflective approach to assessment can offer you thoughtful, meaningful ways to a) determine the impact of your programs and services for children, youth, and families in your community; and b) understand how you can continue to grow as a practitioner. When you take the time to reflect on your programs, you can be intentional in the ways you plan and deliver your programs and services. When
you work with your peers, you are building a community that can help you improve and sustain all that you do.

References

Campana, K., Mills, J. E., & Ghoting, S. (2016). Supercharged storytimes: An early literacy planning and assessment guide. Chicago: ALA Editions.

Mills, J. E. (2021). Never the same storytime twice: An exploration of the nature and role of reflection in public library storytime assessment. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.

Mills, J. E., Campana, K., & Clarke, R. I. (2016). Learning by design: Creating knowledge through storytime production. Proceedings of the 79th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.

Mills, J. E., Campana, K., Fullerton, S., Brouwer, M., Carlyle, A., Metoyer, C., & Dresang, E. (2015). “Impact, advocacy, and professional development: An exploration of storytime assessment in Washington state.” White paper. Published at https://views2.weebly.com/resources.html.

Robbins, J., Willet, H., Wiseman, M. J., & Zweizig, D. L. (1990). Evaluation strategies and techniques for public library children’s services: A sourcebook. University of Wisconsin-Madison, School of Library and Information Services.

Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York: Basic Books.

Schön, D. A. (1987). Educating the reflective practitioner: Toward a new design for teaching and learning in the professions. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Walter, V. A. (2001). Children and libraries: Getting it right. Chicago: American Library Association.

Walter, V. (1995). Output measures and more: Planning and evaluating publiclibrary services for young adults. Chicago; London: Young Adult Library Services Association, Public Library Association, American Library Association.

Zweizig, D. L. (1985). Output Measures for Children’s Services in Wisconsin Public Libraries: A Pilot Project–1984-85.

Today’s blog post was written by J. Elizabeth Mills, Ph.D., for the ALSC Research Committee. Dr. Mills is an independent researcher and a guest faculty at University of Washington’s Information School. Her research examined how children’s librarians are using reflective practices in the ways in which they produce storytimes for young children. She can be reached at jemillsresearch@gmail.com.

The post The Ripples We Make – Reflective Assessment in Children’s and Youth Services appeared first on ALSC Blog.

 We live and work in a hectic world that prizes always doing more. It’s important to take a moment to breathe, step back, and look at where we’ve been in our practice as professionals. Reflective assessment can be a way to do this. Assessment refers to gathering information about something you are doing to determine progress and effect meaningful growth (Campana, Mills, & Ghoting, 2016). Assessment data can give you the basis for an advocacy story to share the ways in which you are having an impact through your work. This can, in turn, inform your own professional development. Another way to think about assessment is that it’s about understanding what has taken place so that you can continue to strengthen what you do and how you do it. Traditionally library staff have relied heavily on outputs as ways to conduct assessment to understand the impacts of their programs, collections,…
The post The Ripples We Make – Reflective Assessment in Children’s and Youth Services appeared first on ALSC Blog.  Read More

ALSC Blog