Think Tank Project 2015: Revisiting Goals

Decluttering and decorating helps me think!

This year, I am applying a concept and a process that I have learned in one of our PD (professional development) sessions in school to actual library practice. I am calling this approach as the 2015 Think Tank Project where design thinking is the methodology I will use to plan programs and services for library patrons and users.

Design Thinking is espoused by David and Tom Kelly, authors of the book Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential With In Us All. It is a four cyclical process where participants go through periods of Inspiration, Ideation and Experimentation, Synthesis and Implementation. To strengthen the approach, I am applying Roger von Oech's Creative Whack Pack as strategies to see me through the entire process.

To start, I am looking at the services and programs the library staff has delivered for the first term. Picking out three "take aways" from an informal survey I conducted during in-service training, I will think through and reflect if the "take aways" and the library services and programs agree or adhere to each other. This way, I am able to analyze and explore current practices with insights from library patrons. The patrons I gathered insights from being the teachers.

From here, I write questions to ask myself and my staff. We will do this individually and as a group. These are the questions I have written:

a. How did the library support student research during the 1st term?
b. What helped teachers in facilitating research when they asked assistance from the teacher librarian?
c. What mechanism did the library staff use to inform the community of new resources?
d. How did the community respond to these mechanisms?

This is only the first part, which is Inspiration. Ideas and insight are generated from a context and/or a content. The questions I crafted help me Explore what is current and in front of me. This exploration is like a whack on the head (von Oeck) at seeing what is obvious. Sometimes, we can get answers to questions by looking at the resources we currently have.