Case study 6 required students to take a different approach from those of case study 1 to 5. Students were asked to brainstorm together in the group space before individual sharings under the group thread in the discussion forum. All 12 members in the Group have decided to post their individual responses in the group blog and also the discussion forum. Due to the pressure of everyone working on the completion of assessment 2 at the same time, there was a limited amount of sharing in the group space. This situation shows that team work may become patchy when facing competitive priorities and demands.
During stressful times, great library leaders need to utilize their leadership skills to facilitate team work, especially when team work is facilitated in an online communication environment. The traits of great library leaders are discussed in Hall’s (2013) article. Communication and empathy are the most important qualities. Having a clear vision owned by all team members is also crucial. The reason why communication is important is because when team members know one another well, they tend to be more open to give comments and support one another. Although getting to know one another can be challenging in an online team work environment, it is not impossible to achieve through positive and constructive feedbacks to one another’s posts and maintaining a professional and courteous manner in the online communication environment.
Team workers who are willing to take the lead and inspire their co-workers can help the team work processes progress much more productively and fruitfully during stressful times of multiple competitive priorities and demands. Lubans (2010a) described that successful middle leadership is commitment to bring out the best in each person, to make decisions collaboratively and is able to anticipate and respond to challenges. A member from Group 12 showed this quality by calling for group members’ opinions of how the work should be processed to complete case study 6 so that the group members would not be lone practitioners of their own but support one another and work collaboratively to come up with outstanding responses for case study 6.
My work as a teacher librarian in a school library is always busy and can sometimes be overwhelming. My daily task list is long and can be changed at any time depending on the needs and demands from the senior executive team, my supervising head teacher or classroom teachers walking into the library or approaching me. It is easy to lose track of the important things and priorities during busy times. Connecting to teachers and building a trusting relationship with them may be overlooked. I am planning to enhance my communication skills and increase my empathy in my interactions and dealings with the teachers or else teacher librarians could easily become the lone practitioners in schools.
As I am now more aware of the limitation of online team work communication through my experience gained from the case study for the ETL504 subject, I plan to make regular visits to the faculties throughout the term instead of just relying on emails and phone calls which seem to be a time-saving method of communication. Teacher librarians bear the role of curriculum and information specialists. Therefore, I will take my ideas and plans to the teachers by attending their faculty meetings. While I understand the demands of syllabus requirements on teachers and the various priorities they have to deal with within their faculties, I can still propose creative ways to integrate information literacy learning into students’ learning through working collaboratively with the teachers.
References:
Lubans, J. (2010a). “Leading from the middle”, and other contrarian essays on library leadership. Santa Barbara, California: Libraries Unlimited.
Lubans, J. (2010b). Leading from the middle. Paper or plastic? Library Leadership & Management, 24(4). Retrieved from http://www.ala.org/llama/publications
Hall, R. (2013). Traits and training: Attributes and skills of Pennsylvania academic library managers. Pennsylvania Libraries Research and Practice, 1(1). Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/10.5195/palrap.2013.12