The group work triggered a sense of urgency during the semester. I felt that as I am not skilled in articulating my thoughts immediately after the readings and having personal time constraints in only being able to work on my posts at the start of a week, I endeavoured to lead by establishing the initial post and thoughts regarding what points we would need to cover. It was, in one way, a distributive leadership role as I encouraged others to take my initial thoughts or scaffold and build our response from there. Being over a two week period I was able to come back, reflect on what others had contributed and add further information/understanding. The readings of group contributions allowed for a stronger formation of concepts in my mind. Our ability to collaborate was strong with each person providing more thoughts on what had previously been posted. Strong communication through emails, whilst effective, lacked follow-up other than the posts in our wiki. Our group shared leadership roles and no one person was always in charge of the posts. I felt each persons contributions when available built a strong working Group 10.
At the present I can see the benefit of the Case Studies, as someone who seeks to avoid conflict in most settings and often I just do things myself so it is done properly, I have an appreciation for how the role of Librarian can be one of balance and balance of leadership (Case Study 6 Group 10, personal communication, September 22, 2019). I’ve developed an understanding of how a leader can demonstrate the qualities they would like others to demonstrate without enforcing these ideas (Case Study 3 Group 10, personal communication, August 18, 2019). The case studies caused me to reflect on how to approach and communicate with others not as a direct discussion but as a series of reviews to work on areas of improvement in small increments (Case Study 2 Elyse McMaster, personal communication, July 29, 2019). Case Study 5 also demonstrated how the role of the library can exceed beyond the libraries core roles and into marketing its role to other staff members for the benefit of student learning (Group 10, personal communication, September 20, 2019).
This semester I feel that I have let myself down somewhat with maintaining forum contributions and blog posts. I knew before the census date that we would likely be moving during the semester but was determined to push through and I didn’t account for other factors which occur during a semester. I found returning to work to be overwhelming whilst trying to balance my other duties and this severely limited my ability to maintain the efforts from the previous semester; This isn’t to say I haven’t tried, rather it took time away from reflective practices throughout the semester as evidenced by my few posts. Whilst I spent the time early on reading ahead and remaining up to date, the last half I have felt like I have been playing catch up, managing to stay on track for the case studies was successful as I knew others were relying on me.
References
ETL504: Teacher Librarian as Leader. (2019). Case Study 2 Elyse McMaster. Discussion Forum. Personal communication, July 29, 2019
ETL504: Teacher Librarian as Leader. (2019). Case Study 3 Group 10. Discussion Forum. Personal communication, August 18, 2019
ETL504: Teacher Librarian as Leader. (2019). Case Study 5 Group 10. Discussion Forum. Personal communication, September 20, 2019
ETL504: Teacher Librarian as Leader. (2019). Case Study 6 Group 10. Discussion Forum. Personal communication, September 22, 2019