Developing A Learning Philosophy

Richland Library is about a medium to large public, county funded system.  We currently have 12 locations and about 400 staff.  We have a Learning Engagement Department of 4. The information below was created in partnership with our Learning Engagement Librarian,  Chief of Program and Innovation, and our talented marketing and learning engagement team.  In 2012, we began asking questions like

• Where does learning live?
• How can we foster collaborative learning as such a large team across multiple locations?

That year we formed our first ever system-wide Learning Team. Using a little inspiration from Peter Senge’s monumental work “The 5’th Discipline,” we explored ideas of systems thinking and had lengthy discussions about how nothing is ever influenced in just one direction.

This 14-member team from across our system helped develop our first ever Learning Philosophy. Our aim was to develop a philosophy that would help us discover how to tap people’s commitment and capacity to learn at all levels.

Our Learning Philosophy is a way of thinking, guidelines for engagement and a path for personal growth:

• We take responsibility for our own learning.
• We are more intelligent together than apart.
• We share learning and information freely.
• We allow our curiosity to guide our learning.
• We think critically; we analyze how parts of a whole interact with each other to produce outcomes.
• We are unique individuals who learn in different ways and at different paces.
• We take risks, experiment and openly assess results.
• We learn from our mistakes.
• We encourage questions and discuss alternatives to work toward a better future.
• We believe in the power of knowledge and learning

To introduce our Learning Philosophy to our 400 employees, we asked supervisors and Learning Team members to lead their branches and departments through a short, Smartie-themed activity that involved examining the individual tenets and responding to them as individuals and small groups.

Staff across the system helped come up with examples of how we support and learn from each other, and identified gaps between ideal collaborations and reality.

We encouraged departments to share photos and outputs from these sessions and published them to our library’s intranet, where everyone could see common themes and new ideas alike, and many branches used the dialogue as a springboard for creating shared learning goals.

In the wake of our Smartie-branded Learning Philosophy launch, the Learning Team explored the learning preferences described at VARK-learn.com: VARK stands for visual, auditory, read & write, kinesthetic; and how awareness of our own and our colleagues’ and customers’ potential preferences can help us guide our approach to both learning and sharing information.

In May 2014, the Learning Team embarked on a Road Tour, sending members to our ten branches to follow up on our Philosophy discussions, lead employees through a short VARK assessment, and explore ways we can enhance individual and shared learning within our system.

This helped lay some of the groundwork for the next major project that our Learning Team tackled. As part of our library’s strategic plan goal of engaging our team, we worked to develop and implement a core tech competencies that would be scalable for all staff system-wide. Click here for a print copy of these Basic Tech Skills.

 

Our library’s Learning Philosophy speaks of the value of learning from each other, letting curiosity guide us, and taking responsibility for our own learning.

As library employees, we all work with incredibly talented people who share their knowledge with our community, so our executive director, Melanie Huggins, has invited all our staff to “staff it up!” Learn more about that initiative here.

What do you WANT to be true about learning in your organization?

What do you wish was implicitly understood by all of your colleagues?

Learning happens at all levels and wanting to encourage that systemically what this is all about

Feel free to duplicate or repurpose any of these ideas.

Cheers,

Susan