1980 – School libraries developing literacy.
2009 – School libraries developing multiliteracies.

If we agree that the desired eduational outcome is to produce transliterate students. Students who can can move across text which has been composed in a variety of formats (relying on their skills in print literacy, visual literacy, digital literacy, critical literacy …). Then I can think of no other area in a school, other than the library, which provides the tools and the expertise to achieve that goal.

I chose the word ‘developing’ rather than ’supporting’ to acknowledge our active role in the process. Through collection development and management we try to provide resources in a variety of media and in addition We tackle the tough literacy – critical literacy abnd an aspect of digital literacy that is often overlooked – through our particular focus on information literacy.

[Critical literacy: The ability to question, challenge and evaluate the meanings and purposes of texts. It involves an understanding of the ways in which values and attitudes are communicated through language, including how subject matter, point of view and language embody assumptions about issues such as gender, ethnicity and class.

Digital literacy is the ability to locate, organize, understand, evaluate, and create information using digital technology. ]

We document our involvement in teaching these literacies in the various tools/programs/handouts we create and run. Time permitting – we enhance this through pre-tests and post-tests. These make what we do explicit – to staff and students.

Our focus on content rather than medium encourages students to see the connections across formats and facilitates the development of transliteracy (from any media into the media that meets your needs and interests ).

I have seen how students curiosity for the internet has lead them to new websites or information that conflicts aspects of their previous knowledge. Hay & Foley (2009) state “basis of student learning through the school library is an inquiry based instructional program (p. 17). ” The students seemed to automatically begin this process through questioning (inquiry), reflecting on background knowledge and basic evaluating skills.

School libraries offer a range of resources allowing students to access diverse information which in turn offeres opportunities to develop their learning through inquiry based instructional programs. As well as catering to further develop students skills in accessing information.

Tania Abbott

As a primary TL, I was touched by your mention of “continually asking teachers to bring their classes into the library but they feel the main priority is completing the syllabus i.e. all the assessments and other programmed aspects.”

That must be so incredibly frustrating. I don’t want this to sound patronising; primary school TLs find it hard to envisage the way large secondary staffs have to work. The strategies I have used to “win over” reluctant K-6 teachers re coming to the school library were made easier because we can timetable everyone in, anyway. Also, it isn’t so impossible to get the whole primary staff in the one place at the one time. A co-teacher and myself could report on our successful collaborations to the whole staff, at any fortnightly staff meeting (and to make other teachers so jealous that they ask to work with me “next time”).

You are right that in a school with state-of-the-art access to IWBs, Clickview, etc., it’s become very hard for the school library to compete. I guess we have to keep looking for aspects of the role that we can do better, things that we can prove – with evidence-based practice – will definitely improve the students’ achievement of outcomes.

Ian McLean,
Teacher librarian,
Penrith PS, NSW.

Libraries are not large enough and very few are equipped to a standard students expect. We need more computers and more relevant books, more flexible layouts, more understanding by other staff members of the role we play. A library is only as good as the amount of us made of it by both staff and students. As a TL I am continually asking teachers to bring their classes into the library but they feel the main priority is completing the syllabus i.e. all the assessments and other programmed aspects.
Few are willing to incorporate library use when they can stay in their classrooms and use IWB’s, Clickview, etc from there.

Once upon a time these were only available from the library but now technology is often better outside the library. Our role is to inspire the quest for learning in students and enable them to use research techniques wherever they may be. As a TL this is a role I see as crucial. We need to have time to develop the students respect for TL’s by showing them new methods of research, establishing a relationship with students and getting the opportunity to work with them and staff.

I have been collaborating with teachers K-6 (30) since I have been in this position (4 years). Time was allocated for this collaboration. The collaboration has been more successful with some stage teams than others, due to their level of understanding of the importance of concurrence of learner goals between the work in the library and classroom. These teams now include the IL and ICT criteria (along with other criteria for classroom work) addressed in the library into their stage rubrics. The TL and classroom teacher collaboratively assess these criteria and at times student assessment for these criteria effect their overall assessment. The teachers who collaborate in this way have developed an awareness of how library work can improve outcomes for students and how the work in the library plays a role in this.

Personally, I cannot provide “hard” evidence as is being asked (where’s the time) but anecdotally I can assure you when a student is shown a research procedure that helps them find THE piece of information they require and the “aha moment” arrives re how to research and where then, quite clearly, learning has taken place.
Currently I am in the process of assisting Year 11 and Year 12 students become used to using the newspaper database “Newsbank”. It is astounding the number of teachers who do not know of this service (I will be conducting an in service soon on this) but once they see it their professionalism kicks in and suddenly the library AND the teacher unite with a common goal that definitely improves student outcomes down the track. To what level can never be calculated at this school due to time factors but you know it is happening without quantifying it to the nth degree.
I certainly agree with the contributor who stated it was the “executive” at the school that propels (my word) the process. If they have tunnel vision re investing the money, thus time, by not supporting a proper library structure where teacher librarians can actually teach the skills so magnificently outlined by others in this forum then the school will NOT leap forward in increasing student outcomes, various scores for University entrance and life long research skills.
Here is an opportunity for you to “force” the executive to push information literacy into the 21 st century by making strong recommendations that a school MUST, and I repeat MUST, place the teacher librarians at the front of the curriculum and not as a token addendum. It needs to be a directive and not an “if you like” recommendation. If done I cannot see how all statistics would not rise.

Gordon Pikes CEO Rightforu Pty Ltd – Developer MARC21 semantics.

Let me count the ways! Or share the starts as above.

I believe that it is the PEOPLE part of school libraries that create meaningful interaction and connection with individuals, resources learning, and aspects of technology. The diversity of all the above isn’t easy to keep up with, but then trying and balancing is a strong component in all school library approaches.

People figure strongly in our policies, day to day management, certainly communications across the board (kids, lib staff, teachers, admin, parents, community), thinking/ doing and supporting learning, creating of positive learning environments and experiences, resource development, and planning and prioritizing of everything from skills to displays to personal mind sets.

As tls we collaborate with kids and teachers and share learning with both in contexts that are different from conventional classroom settings. We have formal and incidental input into a whole spectrum of learning situations for all concerned. We often become the link for the people, projects, attitudes, technology, resources, environment and support that helps make genuine learning happen.

Last year I devised a listing of practical ways in which I try to support teaching and to support learning to share with a range of other info at faculty re-orientations to our lovely library. It seems important to identify both the formal and informal types of input we can have AND to communicate it so that we can DO it and not just be a peripheral person to the learning that should take place in our own schools. Yes, people’s response is sometimes, “WOW, I didn’t know you could/ would do all that.” So getting our personal role “out there” is a plus for all.

So whether we call it Info Process or Guided Inquiry, it really doesn’t matter. There are so many ways we can be part of the whole learning bit. Some is intuitive and some is formalized. Some is people stuff and some is technology. All is learning. We need to be proactive in doing a range of initiatives to make sure we are always right in the middle of supporting curriculum and other learning interests for kids and teachers and our selves.
JACkie Hawkes – SCHS Library – LEARN . . . to do your BEST!

Hi Ross,

Yes, I agree that often outcomes and impacts are “assumed some how to be lurking in there”. When a new syllabus comes in, educators often try to bend existing units of work to fit the new document, rather than to use the new outcomes to plan new, statistically-valid, pre- and post- tests that will enable staff to prove that learning has occurred. I’m guilty of that myself, trying to stretch old print-based resources to fit new units when library budgets are too tight.

Unless a school has cause to collect measurable data of the students’ achieved outcomes – eg. schools defending expeditures in Priority Schools Programs; teacher librarians undertaking post-graduate study (and requiring valid results for their assignments); etc – that all-important post-test, and results analysis, often get lost in the shuffle in the end-of-term mayhem, and that often happens four times a year, of course.

In a previous school, long before outcomes appeared in every KLA syllabus, we had our first taste of the power of collaboratively-planning valid, measurable, pre- and post- tests, when we re-examined our school-based science and technology units, spent a considerable amount of money on relevant resources that truly supported what we were hoping to achieve, and ensured that every S&T unit maximised the capacity for Talking & Listening (in English).

Schools need to plan for constant revisiting of syllabuses and evaluation strategies. I was going to say especially in schools with a high turnover of staff but, no, every school needs to do this in a structured, cyclic way.

Certainly, I’ve noticed renewed opportunities for the teacher-librarian to be more involved in collaboratively-planning valid, measurable, pre- and post- tests as a result of my voluntary role as an editor of several teaching colleagues’ half-yearly student reports. When educators have to clearly articulate just where on the learning continuum each student is, and for each key learning area, the traditional, waffly comments of yesteryear just don’t wash. I can see where certain gaps are exposed, and then I try my best to lend assistance.

Statements about students’ achievement, at our school, now have to be written in terms of outcomes. The new online reports, as daunting as they are, do seem to be assisting with providing a strong focus on value-added results. Of course, the new reports have brought in an additional problem: many outcomes sound too much like eduspeak, and that can really make some parents feel even more out of the loop.

And, of course, sometimes the best ideas for how something could have been evaluated come too late. (Hurray for cyclic programs, which can be improved each time the units are revisited.)

Similarly, a few years ago, I volunteered my services as an editor of the Annual School Report, and we noticed that the library had, previously, not really rated a mention in the ASR. The last few years have seen added paragraphs about the interrelationship of this school library with other important, high-profile school programs and events: Holiday Reading Is Rad, reading picnics, visiting storytellers, participation in annual community artshows, book reviews in the local newspaper, Circle Time, Premier’s Reading challenge, book raps, and a wiki.

This year, I hope to add OASIS Library borrowing statistics, too, and this is another easily-obtained set of data.

How to ensure that higher order thinking, and pre- and post-tests, are vital elements of the teaching program?

Well, I’m a great advocate of the online book raps and event raps run by the School Libraries and Information Literacy Unit (NSW DET). Programming and planning (including evaluation strategies) are provided. At the conclusion of each rap, we have solid data of learning progress, and the students’ jointly-constructed responses to the rap points remain online, for parents to visit via home or local library computers.

While the maximum benefit from book raps would, ideally, include teachers and the teacher librarian working collaboratively on the rap points, we have also used a highly effective “withdrawal of rappers” strategy, that requires the students reporting back to their classmates. We timetable what is achievable, and that can vary. Because book rapping takes place in the school library – and the new interactive whiteboard arrived this term, and is also in the library, the profile of the library is constantly being flagged (and raised).

Our school wiki (which I instigated, and made a point of branding as the Penrith PS Library Wiki (see “Scan” vol 28 no 1, 2009, pp 30-37) has several pages dedicated to outcomes-based annotations of the students’ progress, much of it in the students’ own words – pre-, during and post- tests, as gathered through whole-school Talking & Listening programs, such as Circle Time (see “Scan” vol 26 no 4, 2007, pp 4-7).

Ian McLean,
Teacher librarian,
Penrith PS, NSW