Category Archives: Module Reflections

With whom the buck stops

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The NSW Department of Education in its Library Policy tells us that it is the teacher librarian, on behalf of the Principal, who is responsible for selection and acquisition of resources. Yet, should it be solely the teacher librarian who is making selection (and deselection) decisions? Of course not. Teacher librarians have a unique skill set in that they have the capacity to source, evaluate and make available resources their colleagues may not otherwise have found. Teacher librarians strive to stay abreast of developments in curriculum and the publishing industry as well as common digital resource providers so that they might identify and make available the most up to date resources available. But they are not usually subject specialists in all subjects. Class teachers and leaders have an intimate knowledge of their curriculum, their students and how the two might most beneficially be brought together. Teachers and leaders have insight into how resources might best be used with their students. It is sensible, therefore to include class teachers and leaders in decisions regarding selection and, particularly, deselection, of resources. At the end of the day, though, teacher librarians are intimately acquainted with the school library collection and are in the best position to know how a new or existing resource will fit within the context of the current collection and within the vision for the future collection. Teacher librarians are responsible for the budget of the library and, should therefore, in my opinion, have the final say as to which resources are purchased. The teacher librarian must be prepared to be influenced by the arguments and suggestions of other members of staff and of the wider school community but must approach those suggestions, requests and arguments with a critical eye, evaluating their merit within the context of the existing collection. It is this contextual evaluation that gives me pause when considering the possibility of patron-driven acquisition models that allow patrons (in this case students and staff) to trigger purchases on behalf of the library without regard to the context of the existing collection and without consideration being given to other budgetary considerations the teacher librarian might be grappling with.

How then might teacher librarians encourage community involvement in selection and deselection decision making? Students can be given the opportunity to suggest or request specific resources by completing a suggestion box slip or similar or by sending an email request to the teacher librarian directly. Teacher librarians on a fixed schedule can use a lesson here or there to ask students to produce a book talk about a book they have experienced outside of school and that they would recommend to others. Students could use their book club or book fair literature to ask the library to purchase particular books. Teacher librarians might consider asking student leaders (in my school we call the library monitors Reader Leaders) to provide suggestions and hold focus groups at particular times of year (eg in book week) to seek student input.

Some schools hold planning sessions for grade or stage teams to prepare teaching programs for the following term. This occasion could be used to seek teacher feedback on potential new resources identified and considered for purchase. It could also be an opportunity for teachers to request specific resources that they want to use. A suggestion form similar to that offered to students could be offered to staff and parents also. An online slip, such as a Google Form could be available to the entire school community via Orbit or the school website or app if in use.

Literacy in the 21st Century

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The redefinition of literacy in the 21st century has seen a move away from the traditional view of decoding and encoding text and now considers a vast array of skills, contexts, forms and media. It is, at its heart, though, still about gleaning,, understanding, communicating and relating information. We do need to adapt the ways we teach. Print based materials that formed the curriculum resources of the past have a certain structure to them that needs to be taught. Students need to learn about chapters, contents pages, indexes, imprint information and so on. The new media forms also have structural features that need to be taught. They are just different structures. Where in the past we might have taught students about appropriate subjects for books, as opposed to newspapers, personal letters or business documents, the 21st century media requires students to learn about appropriate content, forms and features of many different types of information delivery systems. But they are still learning about the organisation, purpose and audience of the thing they are ‘reading’ (viewing/constructing/interacting with…). The proliferation of media items that purport to be something they are not (eg an advert disguised as an informative text) requires students to criticially reflect on everything they read or view and connect it to what they know about the topic from other sources. This is not a new skill, however dealing with and synthesising the sheer amount of information and the constant bombardment in every day life is a learned skill that is more important now than at any time in the past. It is vital to ensure that sifting through the barrage of twaddle is a skill taught and taught well in schools and in the wider community.

Information literacy theories

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Bruce, Edwards and Lupton (2007) describe six approaches to teaching information literacy. Each has its own focus and related skills and assessments. This is useful for teacher librarians who are interested in developing the information literacy skills of their students because they can assess which skills the students are strong in and which need further instruction. Teacher librarians can then work with class teachers to design tasks that fall within that frame.

While Six Frames (bruce, Edwards & Lupton, 2007) seems to be advocating the use of a particular piece of software , ROSS, the concept behind it is useful in so far as it demonstrates a method of ensuring students have the opportunity to engage in different search techniques and to reflect of the success or otherwise of each one. This also has the advantage to encouraging students to be cognisant of the strategies they employ and to apply different techniques in different situations as appropriate. The authors describe four categories of information search “lenses”, increasing in complexity with the increased focus on planning and reflecting on the information search process. If teacher librarians recognise the lens that students are using most often, they can tailor teaching and learning activities to encourage students to be using more sophisticated methods.

Kutner and Armstrong (2012) argue that information literacy teaching must be incorporated into discipline based teaching and learning activities in order to give an authentic purpose to the learning. This requires a high level of collaboration with class and subject teachers. While the authors were writing specifically about the higher education environment, their argument is equally applicable to the school environment. In order to keep information literacy instruction relevant and engaging for students, an authentic purpose for the learning is required. Bruce, Edwards and Lupton (2007) recommend that this might be accomplished through the use of assignments that require students to engage with the information skills they are learning in order to meet the standards of the assessment.

There is much debate in the literature regarding the nature of information literacy: whether it is a learning process or the outcome of a learning process (Combes, Fitzgerald & O’Connell, 2019). At this early stage in my studies, I agree with the notion that information literacy is a set of skills which can be taught and assessed. There is always context, growing global context, social context, for these skills and any search for, analysis, synthesis or use of information sought and found must take account of that context. This is also, in my view, a skill that can be taught. The extent to which it can be taught in a primary school situation, or even a high school situation, is less clear.

References

Bruce, C., Edwards, C., & Lupton, M. (2007). Six frames for information literacy education. In S. Andretta (Ed.). Change and challenge: Information literacy for the 21st century. Blackwood, SA: Auslib Press. eBook, CSU Library Reserve.

Combes, B., Fitzgerald, L. and O’Connell, J. (2019). Information Literacy Theories. In ETL401: Introduction to Teacher Librarianship. Retrieved from https://interact2.csu.edu.au/webapps/blackboard/content/listContent.jsp?course_id=_42381_1&content_id=_2899468_1

Kutner, L. & Armstrong, A. (2012). Rethinking information literacy in a globalised world. Communications in Information Literacy, 6(1), 24-33. CSU Library.

What is literacy?

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So many definitions of the term literacy exist that it would be a much larger task than this post to list and categorise them. CILIP has assembled a broad collection. My own understanding of the term is that it has evolved over time and continues to be adapted and modified to suit new technologies, contexts and purposes. In its current use, the term seems to indicate capability, understanding, command of a skill or set of skills, ability to use and understand a particular process or concept. By way of an example, “digital literacy” indicates an ability to use  and understand digital technologies and environments. The ability to operate the technology and turn it efficiently and effectively to one’s own purpose. The term will continue to be adapted to suit the ever changing fields of human endeavour but I believe it will remain used to refer to the making and expressing of meaning and understanding in any and all forms.

Australian Teaching Standards and the TL

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Evidence based practice. I have been hearing this term for many years now around schools and I thought I understood what it meant. I believed that it meant choosing elements and characteristics to add to your teaching practice from the available research and literature in the educational information landscape. That the reference to evidence referred to a study that had shown this technique or that resource type to be effective. This week, upon reading reading the work of Todd (2015), I have come to see that it is actually about collecting evidence about the effectiveness of one’s practice – ultimately evidence of impact on student learning. So many more things make sense now.

The Evidence Guides for Teacher Librarians (ASLA 2014, 2015) reveal themselves in this new light to be illustrations of how a teacher librarian might have an impact on student learning. This is, of course, the ultimate goal of all educators. They show the types of evidence the TL should be looking for in order to determine whether they are having the desired impact. They also serve as a guide to how a TL might modify their practice if they are not seeing the impact on student learning that they would like to have; they provide a description of quality practice that one might measure oneself against; a guide to evaluating ones practice and to demonstrate to oneself and also to the leadership of the school that the TL and the school library is a beneficial entity that should enjoy the support of management.

References

Australian School Library Association (ASLA)  (2014). Evidence guide for teacher librarians in the highly accomplished career stage.  Retrieved from: http://www.asla.org.au/site/DefaultSite/filesystem/documents/evidence-guide_ha.pdf

Australian School Library Association (2015). Evidence guide for teacher librarians in the proficient career stage. Retrieved from http://www.asla.org.au/site/DefaultSite/filesystem/documents/evidence_guide_prof.pdf

Todd, R. J. (2015). Evidence-Based Practice and School Libraries: Interconnections of Evidence, Advocacy, and Actions. Knowledge Quest, 43(3), 8-15.

Meeting AITSL Standards

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The Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) published a set of professional standards for teachers in 2011. ALIA Schools (2014) published a document detailing the features of excellent teacher librarian practice, showing how teacher librarians might interpret the Professional Standards in their particular context and the sorts of evidence that might be available to demonstrate how the teacher librarian has met the Standards. ASLA (2014) also published its evidence guides for the Proficient and Highly Accomplished career stages.

Professional Standard 4.1 calls for teachers and teacher librarians to support student participation by “Establish[ing] and implement[ing] inclusive and positive interactions to engage
and support all students in classroom activities. ” (ALIA Schools 2014, p8).  within Standard 4.1, AITSL requires teacher librarians to establish and implement inclusive and positive interactions to engage and support all students in classroom activities. I do this by considering the special needs and interests of the students in the classes I teach. One example is a young man in Year 1, lets call him John. John displays many of the characteristics of high functioning autism but does not yet have a diagnosis of such. He responds well to lots of positive praise, explicit one step instructions with his name in the sentence, hand gestures to complement verbal cues and visual supports. John has a special interest in military history and weaponry. During one lesson in mid Term 3 of 2019 his class were learning to place an image into a PowerPoint presentation. I read Heads and Tails: Insects (Canty 2018) to his class to support their recent class work on using prediction as a reading strategy. I asked the students to copy and paste an image of their favourite insect from a bank provided onto their own slide. John expressed that he was not interested in insects. As I knew of his special interest, I suggested that he could select his favourite model of tank to include on his slide instead. Once he had a picture of a tank on the slide, he was then happy to copy and paste a dragonfly onto the side of the tank and told me a story about a dragonfly seeking the protection of the tank to avoid the enemy. While he did not complete the same task as the other students in his class, John did achieve the stated learning intention (copy and paste an image in PowerPoint). This small exchange demonstrates the importance of modifying tasks to suit the particular needs of students in order to create a learning environment that is inclusive and in which all students can be successful and access the learning content.

Standard 4.2 requires that teacher librarians “use effective strategies to create well-managed learning environments in the school library” and Standard 4.3 requires teacher librarians to  manage behaviour in their workplace (ASLA 2014, p.14). If I am being completely honest, this is something I am still working hard to improve. Many of my classroom management techniques translate well to the library setting. I can call student’s attention to something, manage groups, use prevention strategies, modify the physical environment to suit certain activities. I can modify learning activities, roam, use voice variation and humour and adjust management techniques to suit different age groups. However, I find the physical layout of the library at the moment to be challenging. The long, tall shelves of the non-fiction section invite students to hide and misbehave as they think they can’t be seen or heard. The bank of PCs sits behind the non-fiction shelves and can not be easily seen from other areas of the library and so students take advantage and are sometimes off task or misusing them particularly at browsing time. During this time many students need attention for their circulation needs and text selection questions and I find it difficult to manage the behaviour and attend to the circulation tasks simultaneously. I am seeking to address this by changing the layout of the library to put the tall shelving around the perimeter of the room and move the computers out into the middle of the room, or better yet, replace them with Chromebooks. Setting independent work tasks first for students and then inviting only the students who are borrowing to move off to browse the collection does seem to lessen the behaviour issues, however circulation rates drop significantly especially among those students who can least afford to avoid reading. This concerns me and I think this is not as useful a strategy as one would wish.

Standard 4.4 requires teacher librarians to be “aware of relevant current school curriculum and legislative requirements and implement these documents in library management and teaching practice”(ASLA 2014, p. 14). The introduction of the new Science and Technology syllabus (NESA 2017) in NSW schools has prompted our school staff to reflect on our teaching of digital technologies and ICT capabilities. The school’s scope and sequence for this area of study is under review. We are developing new cybersafety units of work and resources to support them. When complete, these will be suitable to demonstrate meeting this standard. In addition, the emergency procedure posters and maps that detail procedures in the case of a lock down, lock out or evacuation are displayed next to both exits from the library. Student medical information and first aid kit is displayed near the circulation desk and in the workroom. Rules for safe use of the library space are displayed and referred to in each lesson. The school’s PBEL visual prompts are displayed in prominent places. All of these features could be photographed and used as evidence of meeting this standard.

References

The Australian School Library Association (2014) Evidence guide for teacher librarians in the proficient career stage : Australian professional standards for teachers retrieved from https://www.alia.org.au/sites/default/files/AITSL%20Standards%20for%20teacher%20librarian%20practice%202014.pdf

ALIA Schools (2014) AITSL Standards for teacher librarian practice retrieved from https://www.alia.org.au/sites/default/files/AITSL%20Standards%20for%20teacher%20librarian%20practice%202014.pdf

Canty, J. (2017) Heads and tails: Insects. Kew East, Victoria: Berbay Publishing

NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA). (2017). Science and Technology K-6 Syllabus. Retrieved from https://educationstandards.nsw.edu.au/wps/portal/nesa/k-10/learning-areas/science/science-and-technology-k-6-new-syllabus

 

Are Teacher Librarians an Endangered Species?

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Karen Bonanno (Australian School Library Association, 2011) argues that teacher librarians are more valuable than ever, yet they are somewhat invisible. She argues that TLs need to differentiate themselves in the school community. They must identify what it is that they can do or offer that others don’t. Make it visible, necessary. Follow a focus area through until successful. Establish relationships with students, staff and leadership. Show how the work of the TL enhances and develops the general capabilities. In her follow up article, A profession at the tipping point (revisited) (Bonanno 2015) Bonanno adds that TLs must keep abreast of developments in curriculum and pedagogy to ensure that the curriculum is effectively and efficiently resourced, and they can share their knowledge, advocacy and solutions with their colleagues.

References

Australian School Library Association (ASLA) (2011). A profession at the tipping point: Time to change the game plan. Keynote presentation, Karen Bonanno. Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/31003940

Bonanno , K. (2015). A profession at the tipping point (revisited). Access, March, 14-21