Regardless of my role as an acting teacher librarian over the last few years, creating, selecting,sharing and using resources to engage students in their learning is an essential skill set as an educator and one which I have particular experience with as a former English as a Foreign Language instructor in a non-English speaking country at the start of my career.
EFL teaching only required a post-secondary degree of any kind and no teaching background. As with many others in my position, I went from the airport to a private learning academy and was given a class (8 classes a day to be clear) and no curriculum and told to teach English. This was scary and stressful, but as the days went by and conversations with other teachers and the owner happened, expectations became more clear. What also became clear was that engaged students were much easier to teach and demonstated learning, but resource creation would be essential.
Without any knowledge of curriculum resource creation, selection and use would be very hit and miss. Again, time spent with student text books and with knowledge of the state curriculum, creating resources became more targeted and successful. Such resources ranged from story telling props, verb cards, visual cues and stimuli, simple costumes, tests, tape recorders, worksheets, song writing, playdoh, Madlibs, cloze passages… This happened for seven years and the resources were massive. Over the last two years, a small group of EFL teachers in our city began to share lesson plans and resources and our quality of life, and the quality of our teaching, improved immensely. By AITSL standards, our small group of teachers had achieved Highly Accomplished levels of Standard 3.4:
Assist colleagues to create, select and use a wide range of resources, including ICT, to engage students in their learning.
Currently, I am ten days into a new school as the teacher librarian and primary coordinator of the library in a K-12 school. My practice has been dialed back for the moment due to a lack of familiarity with students, teachers, the school community, and the resources available to me as a teacher librarian. However, in these ten days I have attended four Year Group meetings, sat down with the head of teaching and learning, and started reviewing the library’s role in supporting classroom teachers and their students in engaging with the curriculum and the library catalogue at various points and purposes. In becoming familiar with the scope and sequences of the stages, and in getting a sense of the students in these groups, I am creating, seleccting and using a wide range of resources for my own lessons, but I am also making sure that this teaching, including the resources created, selected and used are aligned with the big picture and, thus, are assisting my colleagues in a engaging students in a common goal.
Over the next few weeks, I will offer short and targeted guidance on using features of the Encyclopedia Britannica (subscription managed by the library), including how to locate particular resources within EB based on NSW curriculum outcomes, but also communicate my plans for teaching students how to use this resource at various stages across their primary years as it connects to areas of KLAs and the Information Fluency Framework. Year 5 teachers will be assisted in learning how to create ‘Timelines” via the World Book Encyclopedia from our library resources as it connects with the next term’s major work on writing biographies. In doing this, I hope to be modeling exemplary skills in making connections between resources available through the library and how they support high student engagement in classrooms.
