Category: ETL504 – Teacher Librarian as Leader

The fortnightly case study discussions and forum posts were an effectively designed pedagogical tool which allowed the instructional leadership of our course coordinator to guide us into effective 21st century collaboration with our peers and to experiment with other forms of leadership within the digital space and demonstrated directly the leadership and role of teacher librarians in selecting tools for information exchange of students.

The case study context was rich with detail, problems, characters, and potential pathways to resolve the issues we were asked to assess.  A key learning I expressed early in communication was the diversity of people and styles that leadership encompassed and simplistic taxonomies or dichotomies were “fustrating to me that everyone gets reduced to a binary of extrovert or introvert when the reality is so much more contextual to any individuals experience” (A quiet Leader is Still a Leader, March 11). This was evidenced when we began using our private communications through the Group  2 discussion board and wiki is that the real world ramifications of a pandemic and schools transitioning to digital learning squeezed what time we had available.  Because of the flat power structure the first successes  were in Anne-Marie’s servant leadership. She asked us “Can we ‘give’ ourselves 24hrs to draft out some ideas and share them on the wiki’ (Anne-Marie, Personal communication, 28th March, 2020) and ‘if you are both OK thought I’d put together on this theme? (Anne-Marie,29th March, 2020) which drew several responses from the group and Anne-Marie became the go-to person for posting our group’s final responses.

I aimed to contribute differently so wrote up the characters and their traits of the Case Study context in a table thinking that this might assist other members to see the information in a more digestible format. Unfortunately I posted my text in the description rather than the body of the post. Fortunately in another case of servant leadership Kate who had created the forum was able to delete and repost my contributions in the way I had originally intended.

I felt that my contribution of synthesis and formatting was an attempt at transformational leadership to reframe things and make our goals easier but it is difficult to know if it helped anyone else. That is another realisation of leadership from this course that even if you are doing what you believe is theoretically the right leadership you may not get any immediate feedback that it is working.

Case Study 4 analysis happened around my redundancy and my posts ended up in the forum rather than the wiki where the group was collaborating which gave a certain equality as other members had missed posting in earlier weeks.
The group accepted my failure and we moved forward with the final Case Study 5.

Anne Marie summed up this final process for all of us with ‘I am usually far more disciplined about I submit, but am feeling very under the pump with work and assignment 2’(Personal communication, 15th May, 2020) so our group succeeded in crawling over the line despite the pandemic pressures as we learned about leadership roles of teacher librarian as advocate, manager, collaborator, and boss.

Reference List

CSU Forum, March 11,
Forum: Module 1: Week 1. (2020, March 2-9). Thread: Module 1. CSU Interact 2 ETL504. https://interact2.csu.edu.au/webapps/discussionboard/do/message?action=list_messages&course_id=_44236_1&nav=discussion_board&conf_id=_88817_1&forum_id=_186993_1&message_id=_2732524_1

I want to reflect on the digital pedagogy of group work within case studies and forums posts within the course before working up my final reflections for the final assignment on leadership.

One of my concerns about modern tertiary education, especially when you get to post graduate study, is that students live such full lives with partners, jobs,  and a society that pressures them to fulfill needs in every moment that they don’t have the time to dwell with the learning and knowledge that is torrenting from the tap of institutional education or with the experiential emergent studenting that happens from incidental interactions. I feel the value of this is lost in the rush of getting it done. People rush back to their lives and miss out on the enrichment lying around in its potentiality.

Within this course I succeeded in the first semester by getting into contact with 5 of the Melbourne cohort and getting at least 3 together in the Northcote Library and once meeting one other in Victoria’s State Library. I found this to be enriching, empowering, and exciting to draw people together into a learning community.

The second semester was quieter in that I had no physical interactions with my cohort and this 3rd semester pandemic has put paid to interacting with anyone at all in the course in the physical realm.

Yet it seems to me that this course was resilient in the face of the disruptions which have shattered the execution of tertiary education across Australia.
As universities struggled without enough experienced practitioners to execute the shift of all courses to online learning, the Master of Education (Teacher Librarianship) which has been delivered online for a number of years and has its roots in a correspondence course  operated decades before had resilient and effective pedagogical structures in place.

I have seen leadership in the effective structures of communication used by all of my teachers this semester in quite different ways that accord to the strengths of their own particular style. One provides weekly video instructions, one does exhaustive lists and links, and one has been particularly effective in responding to emails from me. I even had a personal phone call from one.

Communicating ideas and structures is a key part of instructional leadership and so must be kept in mind within the teacher librarian role. Choosing which structures to use and being able to understand their strengths and weaknesses is a key role of a teacher librarian.

My teachers either have experience working as a teacher librarian or have extensive research experience across the library field. The ways they model information transmission within their subjects informs us as their students how we might structure our own missives in future.

Given that this course has had a consistent online delivery, compared to the scramble of every other tertiary course in this pandemic, the forum and case studies were the critical tools selected for our group interactions and opportunities to explore leadership with the theoretical frameworks provided by the readings in mind.

People being time poor was still an issue as several members of my group were working teachers doing 1 – 2 units part time during the crisis transition to online learning delivery of primary and secondary school as part of the CV-19 pandemic for case studies 3 – 5.

With the first case study being responded to via our posts in the public discussion forums this allowed us to become fluent with the context of hypothetically working as the director of information in a three campus K – 12 school system. Case studies are an effective and complicated learning experience that requires  critical engagement towards narrative, comparative critical reflection on fictional and real world experiences, and the synthesis of both of these to create potential solutions to large problems.

Doing this as a group adds another layer of complexity but also allows the sharing of alternative perspectives Tactics included proposing deadlines like ‘can we all get some ideas down in 24 hours’ and my suggestion of moving our discussions into the Wiki.

I made a couple of mistakes during the process. One was that I tried to post a summary of the context and characters but posted the body of my post in the discription which then wrecked the visual aesthetic of our forum but another student kindly deleted and reposted it in the way I intended.

I also tried contributing to Case study 4 in the discussion group but found eventually that everyone else had been working in the wiki

by case 5 everyone seemed pretty wrecked and we were just happy to get something in as led by our most prolific poster.

Now to put this all together in the final part of the final assignment for my Leadership unit

Having just completed our first online group collaborative response process to the case study we were assigned amidst the pandemic shutting down Australia, schools shutting down, and so many of the cohort as active teachers moving their teaching from in person to online this seems an ideal time to reflect.

Having my ‘Group 2’ appear on the side bar in the Interact Learning Management System was helpful as a prompt to start but it was there for a couple of days before anyone posted anything. The first posts were mostly about how busy people were and how they were not caught up with the readings due to the transitions happening throughout the education industry. Some surface level conclusions were drawn by the time I discovered my group had been posting.

I was also intrigued by the wiki format available but felt that as a newer tool of greater potential complexity it made sense that most conversations were held in the discussion forum at first.

I contributed a reformatted combination of the information from the profiles of the persons in our case study with the information from the case study itself. This drew attention to some of the staff transistions that could be made to address some of the issues. However I firstly accidentally posted the body of my text in the description which messed up the forum aesthetics. Another student who had initiated the forum was able to delete and repost my content as I had intended it to be. I tried not to be too specific in pointing out the connections as they already aligned with the direction the group was taking and I didn’t want to be heavy handed in my communication. However I’m not certain that processing and posting the information in this way helped anyone but me.

Once we had a few comments and citations in the wiki one of the members transistioning to online learning suggested we just mush the best description of our idea and the list of citations together and leave it at that as she was time poor and couldn’t add much more. This was agreed to. I left a post inviting someone to put their hand up for the posting and this was taken on by another student the next day.

Two students did not turn up in the forum at all.

It did help to have some discourse about the case study but it would have helped to have more time with it and for people not to be making such large transitions in their life but I suppose this is the case for most times of crises and change.

Conflict resolution is one of the elements of leadership that fly under the radar. If a leader is good at this then they can engage with conflict early before patterns escalate and get set. Solutions may be strategic or structural but as the issues can range from conflict within the individual, between two individuals, within a team, or across multiple teams this means the solutions scale from micro to macro. There can be smaller and smaller microscopic impulses within one person that conflict and there are contemporary global issues causing conflict across the world. Human technology now takes objects and people into space and there are intentions yet to be realised of returning to the moon and establishing settlements on mars. What will interplanetary conflict resolution look like? Or indeed as humanities empire spreads across our solar system or even further afield. We have seen the rise and fall of empires and civilisations many times before and the attendant descent into conflict that results from this cycle.

These issues are going to be mostly in the future as the number of people who have traveled to outer space is still very small so I will also reflect on my own personal experiences of leadership and conflict.

Leadership and conflict resolution are affected by the structure one is participating in as well as the personal qualities of the individuals involved.
In my professional role I am part of a team managing just under 400 volunteers while I myself am managed within a corporate structure containing 175 roles. In my personal life I have experience of volunteering within both community and professional committees as well as in transformational festivals in structures that resemble anarcho-syndicalism.

The professional structure I work within has  a high premium on being fluent in storytelling and oral ability. Often I will preemptively banter with groups of volunteers rather than let them lead the conversation due to experiences early in my volunteer management experience of interactions getting out of hands and unhealthy conflict resulting. Another tactic I use when something has gone wrong is to declare that there appears to have been some miscommunication. The intention of this is to remove responsibility from any one individual and provide a platform to begin the communication again, hopefully more effectively. Within the volunteer committees I’ve experienced issues seem to arise mostly from the low level of resources versus the vision of what we would like to achieve. Success in this realm has been from dividing up responsibilities as evenly as possible across the group and ensuring that at least 3 people will work together on the organisation of any one event. When there have been issues I have had success in identifying the most experienced, connected, and open individual on the team which has helped me in moving forward in very short time frames to secure resources from above our committee to avoid disaster.

Within the transformation festival context where I was also engaging in volunteer management responsibilities the issues we faced were once again resourcing and also the context of everyone  being a volunteer and then dealing with a person who arrived for their volunteer shift but was too drunk to be able to meet the minimum standards of their responsibilities. The decision to send him away from his shift was the correct one but fraught within the festival context.

My style is focused on gathering as much contextual information as possible and then removing the onus on the source of the conflict to instead look at the issue as structural that we can all play a part in resolving. My listening skills while always being further developed are already quite strong. My ability to combine multiple concepts into short statements or questions of great clarity is one of my individual strengths. One of my toolbox questions when I sense someone is being overwhelmed in the way they are speaking is to seek the answer to the question “What would you like to achieve?” which then allows me to understand if they want to move forward in a particular direction, if there has been a miscommunication,  or if they just want listening.

What I would like to work on is knowing when my ability to generate a lot of ideas is useful and when it should be held in check. A better understanding of the norms of corporate, federal, and educational institution structures would be helpful as previous to the last 5 years, in which I experienced all three, I exclusively worked for not for profit youth arts organisations or as a sole trader but I imagine this will mostly come from further experience rather than formal study.

The first things to tease out seems to be the differences between leadership, management, and administration.

In “Managing In The Info Era In the knowledge-based economy, workers will be valued for their ability to create, judge, imagine, and build relationships”y Geoffrey Colvin  he describes how what are now the leadership pathways in business, the MBA, was originally explicitly about administration whereas now it is more in the name than in the pursuit of case studies.