In my professional and personal life, I have always been excellent at time management and prioritising what needs to be done. Being in a demanding profession such as teaching has honed my time management skills even further. On the other hand, negotiation is an area that I need to further develop if I want to become an effective teacher librarian.

 

When I think about teachers who I have worked with in the past that possessed influential qualities, my mind goes one executive teacher. Their influence and impact in my formative years of teaching was so great that I continue to this day to think that is the teacher that I want to be. She was not only influential to her team, but also the students with whom she connected with. When my teaching team watched this executive teacher model quality teaching practices to us, we would always note how mesmerised the students (and us) were when she taught. Her calm demeanour made it easy to approach her whenever you needed support. She was also able to see potential within me that I could not see in myself and always encouraged me to develop my pedagogy across different areas of teaching.

 

When identifying the advanced skills in time management and negotiation that this executive teacher possessed, one major concept influenced both areas: the students. Being in an executive role is demanding, but it was clear that this executive teacher managed their time by prioritising anything related to student learning. When it came to negotiating with her team or with other executive staff, she remained solutions focused and was always equipped with reasons and evidence to back up what she was trying to negotiate for. If others put up defences, she would respectfully question their reasons and draw everything back to how it would impact student learning.

 

I believe I can achieve more productivity as a teacher librarian by utilising digital tools and becoming more fluent with them. I touched on this briefly in a previous blog post entitled Using Digital Tools to Collect Evidence, where I discussed how digital tools can help a teacher librarian work more efficiently as once established, many applications can run automatically. Using online calendars to manage my time, particularly when it comes to the collaboration aspect of teacher librarianship, will enable me to clearly envision what is ahead of me and help me to prioritise tasks.

 

I need to build up my confidence in the art of negotiation. I believe confidence and experience play a factor in the development of negotiation skills. Thinking back to that influential executive teacher, I need to remember that everything I negotiate for has a direct impact on student learning. If I can keep this in the forefront of my mind and provide evidence to back up my case, slowly but surely, I should be able to build my negotiation skills.