Tag: information literacy

Reflections on Leadership

Reflections on Leadership

by clairetuminello89 ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Through the ongoing isolation of the 2020 and 2021 calendar years in Australia, never has it been more startingly obvious that humans are naturally social beings. We humans crave social connection, interaction and relationships. In a blog entry on July 18, I suggested that “leadership is about people…a major role of the leader is to bring people together for a common cause regardless of differences.” Colvin (2000) presents a strong argument about people and leadership, suggesting that a group of people with united values comprises an awesome power to create, articulate and sustain such values for the benefit of others. In an organisation such as a school, leadership roles are appointed to create, articulate and sustain values and a culture which relate to providing the best possible educational outcomes for students in the context of that particular environment. Schools, therefore, are complex organisational structures that involve many levels of leadership, both internally and externally.

On commencement of ETL504, I held the narrow view that each individual leader exhibited a particular and singular leadership style when given opportunities to lead. This is highlighted in my introduction post on the discussion board, when I suggested that I was looking forward to “reflecting on my own leadership style” (Tuminello, 2021, July 15). Throughout the unit, my learning has led me to discover a range of different styles of leadership, as well as traits, and highlighted the importance of being able to integrate a range of these in schools to elicit the best outcomes. No one style is suited to every leadership role or responsibility, and it is the ability to adopt and integrate a range of styles and traits that makes a great leader in a school. Smith (2016) emphasises the requirement for schools to employ an integrated model of leadership to create effective schools that promote a positive school culture and encourage teacher satisfaction and performance.

As a budding teacher librarian (TL), it is important to consider the leadership styles and traits that are most appropriate to promote oneself as a leader in the school. School libraries envisage themselves as knowledge centres that play a key role in the promotion of literacy skills (Hartley, 2020). The definition of literacy has changed with rapid advancement in technology, and in the twenty-first century school libraries find themselves in the unique position to adapt and promote themselves as collaborative and exciting learning hubs that encourage innovation in pedagogy and learning so that the needs of twenty-first century learners are being met.

In a blog post on August 20, I reflected that it is up to the TL to see their responsibility as a leader in a school to “accept the challenges presented by rapid and dynamic technological change…by collaborating effectively via structured professional learning (PL) and collaborative planning and teaching practices.” From my perspective, the roles and responsibilities of the TL as a leader in a school lend themselves best to servant leadership, instructional leadership and distributed leadership styles. A shared dimension evident in all three is the ability to work with others effectively to achieve a common goal. I still believe that strong and effective collaboration with all stakeholders to demonstrate the important leadership role that the TL holds in a school is an optimal way to inspire others, lead from the middle, and promote the school library as a hub for exciting, twenty-first century learning experiences.

 

References

Colvin, G. (2000). Managing in the info era. Fortune, 141(5). http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2000/03/06/275231/index.htm?iid=sr-link1.

Hartley, C. (2020, August 4). Libraries, the heart of the school. Professional Educator, 1, 23. https://scis.edublogs.org/2020/08/04/libraries-the-heart-of-the-school/

Smith, B. (2016). The role of leadership style in creating a great school. SELU Research Review Journal, 1(1), 65-78. https://selu.usask.ca/documents/research-and-publications/srrj/SRRJ-1-1-Smith.pdf

The Challenge of New Opportunities

The Challenge of New Opportunities

by clairetuminello89 ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

The Australian Curriculum is providing teachers and teacher librarians with many new challenges, including the need to continually improve personal knowledge and understanding of digital tools and digital environments. Indeed, if we are expected to contribute to an educative experience that prepares our students to function efficiently and effectively in 21st century society, then we ourselves need to accept a level of responsibility to develop our own skills and knowledge in relation to digital tools and digital environments. These tools and environments are likely to feature extensively in workplaces and in society in general for a long time to come.

Putting aside the complexities and politics of a teaching career, being a teacher provides a wonderful challenge for those in the profession to embrace and adapt to constant change. Certainly, it sometimes feels like the change is never ending and it can really induce a lot of stress! But ever the optimist, it is something I secretly love about being a teacher. Danielson (2007) describes teaching as a “flat profession”, whereby as we gain experience, our responsibilities are essentially the same as a new teacher. I don’t necessarily agree with this. Sure, there are similarities in being able to deliver exciting learning opportunities to students regardless of the stage of your career, or being passionate about your subject and content. However, I think that as we gain experience, it’s not a “flatline” but (hopefully) on an upward trajectory in terms of the richness of what we can provide! Our challenges and responsibilities change quite a lot. The responsibilities of a new teacher are to learn how to juggle life as a teacher, how to manage a class of students after being dumped headfirst into your own classroom with limited practical experiences, how to try a few different things just to see if they work and be OK if they fail, and be motivated to improve them to make them better, even if they do come off well. Experienced teachers have different responsibilities – they’re often no longer experiencing the aforementioned challenges, but rather a whole set of new ones.

A huge personal challenge for me is the rate at which technology, and in particular digital tools and environments, are changing. It is really difficult to keep up with all of the fantastic opportunities that the digital world presents, which in turn makes it feel like an enormous challenge! A great example of my ignorance in this field relates to coding. I find it extremely intimidating, I have never done it and I wouldn’t even know where to start. However, I acknowledge and accept that coding is likely a working/learning skill required to function in 21st century society. On completion of this masters, I will hold a leadership role in a school as a teacher librarian. Part of my role is to embrace such challenges, and acknowledge the importance of digital upskilling for the benefit student learning, and ultimately, a rich and useful education. Furthermore, I’ll probably have to inspire others to embrace them too!

Leaders in schools, including but not limited to senior executive members, teacher librarians and teachers, have a responsibility to accept the challenges presented by rapid and dynamic technological change. This includes everyone accepting a personal and professional responsibility to learn about digital tools and environments. I envisage a world where professional learning communities made up of teachers across all experience levels and all domains can commit to improving outcomes in digital skills (in the case of coding, these would include digital literacy, design thinking, problem solving, creativity, collaboration, etc.) for students by collaborating effectively via structured professional learning (PL) and collaborative planning and teaching practices. Collaboration in PL can lead to the kind of accountability, support and engagement required to actually implement the PL into the classroom setting (Cole, 2012). I am also as ambitious to think that in a secondary setting, and potentially even in upper primary settings, students could be contributors of skills/knowledge to professional learning in coding, alongside other experts in the field.

Leadership is about many things, but I think great leadership includes a strong element of foresight and anticipating what will be needed in the future. The state of our country at the moment is a wonderfully depressing example of leadership that has failed to employ foresight or anticipated what might happen next (and if it does, what are we going to do). To state the obvious examples, our response at both state and federal levels to the pandemic, our involvement and response to the events in Afghanistan, our response to the bushfires and to climate change in general…it’s quite frankly embarrassing. Instead, we are stuck being constantly reactive and backpedalling.

Digital tools and environments are certainly not new, and they are still ever-changing, but rather than be on the back foot, it is up to us to see the writing on the wall. The present and the future of education is certainly going to include these tools and environments, so it’s up to all of the leaders in schools to embrace them, and attempt to anticipate their use in the future. Collaboratively, we can be held accountable for each other to focus on providing authentic learning for the future.

 

References

Cole, P. (2012). Linking effective professional learning with effective teaching practice.
https://ptrconsulting.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/linking_effective_professional_learning_with_effective_teaching_practice_-_cole.pdf

Danielson, C. (2007). The many faces of leadership. Educational Leadership, 65(1), 14-19. http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/sept07/vol65/num01/The-Many-Faces-of-Leadership.aspx

 

The Times They Are A-Changing

The Times They Are A-Changing

by clairetuminello89 ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Young people in Australia, and indeed across the world, go to school to learn. Learning is an emotional experience that needs to be lived in order to change us. It is really not acceptable, given what we now know about learning, to stand at the front of a classroom and teach to a test. However, as a secondary school teacher who has worked across six schools in ten years, I found myself stunned at how much of this tired old model exists. I reflected in my blog that we need “to be conscious that we are not repeating the way we’ve always done things and expecting an outcome that addresses the changes in the world and the speed at which it is changing.” The sentiment of this statement remains, however my reflection did not begin to suggest how we might practically change the educative experience for young people in schools in Australia. At that point, I had not learnt about inquiry learning.

Charles Darwin said “We are always slow in admitting any great change of which we do not see the intermediate steps.” Inquiry learning challenges us to break down the silos of subject areas, allow students to learn about what they are passionate about and foster lived educational experiences. Furthermore, inquiry learning has the ability to address two issues simultaneously: the information issue that has arisen from rapid advancements in technology in a short space of time, whereby it is critically important for consumers of information to be able to evaluate the authenticity of information, and the issue of the need for pedagogical change with a goal to move away from behaviourist models and towards constructivist models. As leaders in education, teachers, TLs, and other school leaders have a responsibility to contribute to building a community of twenty-first century young people who are agile problem-solvers and lifelong learners. We must foster students who know when they don’t know, and know how to find out. A novice in this field, I find myself truly excited by the prospect of inquiry learning models. Within the realms of the school library, teacher librarians (TLs), teachers, students and school leaders alike can be drawn to libraries for a learning journey, their purpose being to promote deeper thinking, learning and adventure.

The ability to simultaneously teach curriculum content and apply 21st century learning skills with a subject expert and an information expert at the helm is an exciting prospect for young people in Australia. Where a unit of curriculum content requires research, inquiry learning provides a scaffold for all stakeholders to engage concurrently in information literacy instruction guided by the TL, and curriculum content guided by the subject teacher in a (hopefully) captivating way. Whilst many approaches to inquiry learning are employed in Australian schools, I see the Guided Inquiry Design (GID) model as an optimal model if the TL is given the opportunity to contribute to the unit as a full teaching partner. My blog post in response to 5.3b Guided Inquiry outlines the advantages of GID as I see them. The level of detail provided in the model allowing a platform to integrate and assess 21st century learner skills, the opportunity to implement experiential learning in a classroom setting and the invitation for collaboration – between teacher librarian and teacher, and between students too. Whilst this is ideal, schools are indeed time poor environments that have historically been resistant to change. In light of this, there are challenges that are presented by GID. My response to 5.3b Guided Inquiry also highlights these challenges, being change management – reluctance by leadership, teachers and students to be accepting of the approach, the time constraints of the GID unit, and leadership and teachers misunderstanding of the role of the TL leading to GI not being accessed where it could be used effectively and improve student learning. Other models still seek to embed information literacy in curriculum, and should not be discounted. Should the teacher or TL be time or resource poor, these models still support deeper learning than simply teaching referencing or research skills in one lesson, and can be more appropriate given other constraints, such as time or budget.

The role of the TL as a debated topic was news to me at the beginning of this subject, and indeed this course. But on reflection, I can happily admit my rudimentary understanding of the role. Prior to beginning the course, I saw the role as a colleague in a school who a teacher could draw upon if they wished to jazz up a unit, or get some fancy resources to make their lessons a bit spicier. However, I have come to realise that the TL is an intermediary role requiring collaboration, creativity, innovation, critical-thinking and problem-solving, and could truly be the bridge of change for education paradigms.