School Libraries 21C

21 responses so far ↓

• 1    Monica Morscheck // Jun 2, 2009 at 9:46 am

  I feel the role of the TL is changing in the school library of the millennium.
  The TL offers greater access to digital information and will spend more time managing these services than traditional cataloguing.
  My role of as a TL also involves a large amount of technical support for students. I manage a senior library in a selective state boy’s school in NSW, and offer a great deal of digital services in a very technology based library environment. Many of the student’s questions deal with uploading, searching, scanning and printing.
  This is a new position in the school, and I am working on promoting the teaching component of my role. Offering classes in website evaluation and referencing for students, and collaboration projects with faculties, for example.
  Don’t worry, there is a comprehensive print collection in the schools general library, and the senior library does have a limited print collection.
  I believe literature should always be in a library, but this senior space focus is teaching and learning support, and hence my role as a TL is very prescribed… I am really enjoying it.

• 2    Victor Davidson // Jun 4, 2009 at 3:07 pm

  Victor Davidson, Teacher Librarian, Birrong Girls High School,
  Cooper Road, Birrong, NSW. NSW DET. Wangal Hearth. Acknowledgment of Ancestors Past and Present.

  As Teacher Librarian I prioritise three functions,
  1) Teacher of Information Literacy and Narrative Structure within the context of syllabus outcomes across all KLAs. This requires CPT to plan and implement programs in the library. Critical Literacy will be a key factor in National Curriculum.
  2) Service Provider to clients in response to needs and aspirations. Negotiation and navigation of client request in order to promote self empowerment is the compliment to the equation for priority 1).
  3) Resource Administrator in the context of Knowledge Management and Knowledge Creation. Resources must yield content flexibly for a range of learners and support the goals of the National Curriculum.

• 3    Dianne McKenzie // Jun 6, 2009 at 11:10 pm

  Collaboration and communication are the keys to making it all happen and remembering we are a service industry. Those interruptions are our job.

  Our job is about people and connecting them to the information they want and need, when they need it, and to help them make sense of it.

  Our job is about people and helping them feel comfortable asking questions.

  Our job is about people and connecting them with their worlds and helping them to do their jobs.

  Our job is about people.

  Dianne McKenzie
  Teacher Librarian / Head of Library
  Discovery College
  Hong Kong

• 4    Gary Green // Jun 7, 2009 at 2:41 pm

  Essential work of TL:

  Learning has to be the centre of what we do. Our role is to blend the priorities of our schools, while acknowledging student differences in the way they learn and to offer pedagogical guidance on how to go about this in our school communities.

  I believe that the most vital thinking skills that will best equip our students relate to the ability to think divergently. At present there is still too much focus on finding the information and categorizing it. This is really a ‘cop out’ that has limited intellectual merit and ultimately devalues our worth. We need also to stop obsessing about ‘process’ and models of investigation and step back and say as a starting point what are the thinking outcomes I want in this task?

  Our teacher librarians begin all of our learning engagement by considering the ‘type of thinking’ question first and then go about working out how we can provided guided inquiry support to build these thinking processes.

  For example, is the thinking analytical in nature whereby we look at data, internalise it and put it into some framework to say what it means or apply it to familiar or unfamiliar contexts?

  Or is the thinking even more sophisticated and of a critical nature whereby the evaluation of data is the key and a student’s ability to pass judgement on it. What type of critical thinking do I want? Is an intuitive response sufficient? Will more evaluative thinking come from looking at things from various perspectives and points-of-view? Or is the form of critical thinking requiring a more rational basis which requires evidence and elements of reasoning to substantiate things?

  Or ultimately do we aspire to the highest levels of creative thinking which compels our students to generate new ideas or concepts? The most challenging and difficult of all but the one skill that a modern society seems to be increasingly valuing.

  The blending of these three forms of thinking along with the metacognitive acknowledgement which asks students to say how these types of thinking helped/hindered their learning should be the essence of what we do.

  Gary Green
  Secondary Teacher Librarian, Western Australia

• 5    Ross Todd // Jun 10, 2009 at 6:02 am

  Thanks Monica, Victor, Dianne and Gary! We sure welcome your valuable ideas. I am continuing to read through the research report that I posted in Thread 2 – “What did you do in school today?: Transforming Classrooms through Social, Academic and Intellectual Engagement ” It really is compelling reading. I particularly love the ideas on P. 34 “Make it mean something”. It argues that intellectual engagement comes through efective teaching. And effective teaching is characterized by the thoughtful design of learning tasks that have these features:
  • The tasks require and instill deep thinking.
  • They immerse the student in disciplinary inquiry.
  • They are connected to the world outside the classroom.
  • They have intellectual rigour.
  • They involve substantive conversation.
  These alone challenge us very clearly to redefine what the long-standing information literacy agenda o school libraries is all about.

• 6    Belinda McKellar // Jun 10, 2009 at 1:22 pm

  As a Literacy Consultant working across a region and in schools K-12, often in remote rural areas , I consider the TL to be the fulcrum of Information Literacy Skills within a school.

  They often have expertise which is valuable for Staff Professional Learning; particularly when teachers in their early years post training are wrestling with classroom management, content and external task requirements.

  As laptops for Learning come into Year 9 explicit teaching for teachers and students in accessing the My Library site and learning how to use various reference programs (set up by the TL) will be essential to improve Information Literacy.

• 7    Judy Hall, Principal // Jun 15, 2009 at 2:01 pm

  Role to include:
  - development of networks, systems
  - systemic knowledge of colections and websites
  - assist in developing research tasks and assignments – setting up blogs and wikkis.
  - professional learning – technology link for staff
  - reading advocate and promotin of same.
  - awareness of curriculum and standards
  - GATS – conduit for students and e-learning groups

• 8    Anne Zarinnia // Jun 19, 2009 at 1:08 am

  Please forgive an outsider popping in. For years I have looked at the kind of analysis that GIS enables, but the software has been beyond most schools. Now GIS enables all sorts of questioning and reasoning about issues that concern everybody. It is not just where the state capital is, but how money is best spent, where it is most needed, whether for environmental or social purposes. The data is now within reach, the tools are there, the associated crossover of data and spatial reasoning is now within reach of our students – and the most critical thing we can do is to develop their ability to reason. How are school librarians going to assist?

• 9    Diane Ridley - Teacher Librarian NSW Gov school // Jun 22, 2009 at 12:26 pm

  Our role is to support the school community in learning & professional development. Within these functions it is essential we stay off the timetable so the school can use our skills/time to the best advantage the whole school. If we are to ‘teach’ information skills it should be in context with learning & not in isolation & co-operative teaching is essential here.

  Continual professional development for ourselves is important & ASLA & our local networks are essential here. The tools we use will change, our physical surroundings will change but essentially I feel our role will remain very similar. We all have common roles but these need to be adapted to the needs of our individual school community.

  The library systems & technology should be adequately maintained to allow easy & up-to-date access to resources.

• 10    Lee Cutler // Jun 23, 2009 at 9:58 am

  This is a group round table response from the Northern Tablelands Teacher Librarian group. The school involved are a mixture or rural Public, Central and High schools plus a few Private schools in the area who meet every term.

  - TL’s have an overview of the information searching skills of students which is critical in successful learning for students
  - Refer to ASLA Code of Practice

• 11    Ruth Buchanan // Jun 23, 2009 at 11:55 am

  It’s important (impossible, in daily work?) to forget the “teacher” in teacher librarian. “Teaching” encompasses a whole lot of things defined by syllabi and curricula and working conditions.

  And then it’s also the people stuff. A trusted adult. A sounding board. A friendly greeting. A safe place. (And I’m not excluding colleagues.) Someone to talk with, to ask for advice, to test out ideas. Someone to whom it’s safe to say, ‘help?’ or ‘where?’ or ‘how?’ or ‘why?’, and it’s a person there, listening, answering, helping: not a typed machine response. LOL or ROFLOL on a screen ain’t the same as sharing laughter over the Pigeon trying to drive a bus, or marvelling over the mad wonder of Philippe Petit’s tightrope between the Twin Towers.

  Being a teacher librarian is very much about being a part of the school’s community as a teacher, not isolated but actively integrated. Sometimes you wonder, at the end of a day containing everything from highly thought out lessons to on-the-run solutions, whether that word here or helping hand there, the smile, the interest taken, those little interactions that are always part of a teacher’s day, may in fact be the most important part of what you’ve done that day, for a student or colleague.

  The ground level daily stuff, the interruptions met with grace, the myriad interactions, all this is part of the essential work of teacher librarians, just as much – and maybe more – as the grand plans. And it can provide a strong, worthy foundation on which those grand plans can grow, whatever the shape of the future may be.

  I’ve been a TL with the DET in NSW for over twenty years, and though many things have changed, this remains true.

• 12    Wilma Kurvink // Jun 23, 2009 at 12:30 pm

  Some reflections on role- when I think about roles in the 21st century I am reminded by the work of William Bridges, “Managing transitions- making the most of change”. Bridges suggests that its not the “changes” that are the issue, its the transitions- coming to terms, intellectually and emotionally to the inevitable change. When we attend to the transition we can make allowance for the sense of loss, the fears, and uncertainty that change brings with it. Being in the grip of these can be a profoundly anxious experience. In acknowledging the transitional time, we can search and identify what is worth preserving and what indeed needs to be entirely new, or indeed a new opportunity, and a shift in practice.
  There is no doubt in my mind that Libraries in their traditional “information provision” (whatever that really was) role is a thing of the past.
  In the school library, I agree with Ross, there is an opportunity to redefine roles, and to be focussed on collaboration, higher order thinking, and creating physical settings for a range of learning- creating, reflecting, collaborating and more.
  The resulting challenges for us are how to create entry points in teachers curriculum to integrate these- a very significant challenge when there are many teachers still “covering content” rather than teaching for understanding. I believe it requires the TL to be very skilled and knowledgable in curriculum design and pedagogy to be able to have the conversations, and deliver what can be integrated in new higher order thinking task /inquiry design.
  Then there is another skill set- relationship building, negotiation skills, interpersonal skills, and awarenesses. This can be learned in the right environment and integrated in a PD program for the team- usually known as “soft skills” but which offer the greatest rewards in moving a team forward. We have engaged in this over the years with very interesting growth experiences for staff
  There is much more ….such an interesting topic, but I’ll leave it here and look forward to hearing from folks.
  regards
  Wilma

• 13    Susan Schneider // Jun 23, 2009 at 3:19 pm

  Appreciating the clarity of these contributions and being a recent TL graduate familiar with much of this focus. My focus is on informative destinations to support teachers, ie digital resources: DVD’s and websites. I am developing my digital skills and pedagogy to use with my own classes, enhance library access and to support teachers. The fiction collection is going strong but mostly on popular series rather than challenging fiction. Lots of students still seem to value that imaginative time out in a fiction encounter. The non-fiction is for teacher directed assignment tasks and I am putting less time into this collection. It is responding to teacher topics rather than a whole collection strategy, because of limited funding and websites are so plentiful. My focus is on getting teachers involved in and linked into portals and digital information environments.

• 14    Brian Waddell // Jun 23, 2009 at 7:53 pm

  As Dianne McKenzie above suggests, the role of the TL is about people. It’s about helping to meet the information and literacy (reading) needs of the school community. Helping to meet, because to be really effective I believe they should not work alone, they should be collaborators – have the skills to lead and guide others through the complex traditional and currently available sources of information.
  The TL is also a teacher and as others have mentioned a key role must be a focus on learning and therefore thinking in all its variations. After all that is where the learning is at, isn’t it?
  Finally the TL must be an effective leader able to lead and also be led. I like Sergiovanni’s notion of ‘leadership density’ – the TL having the ability to set up pockets of leaders, amongst colleagues and students and so bringing about change through the school community.

  Brian Waddell
  Teacher Librarian, Wellington, NZ.

• 15    Ross Todd // Jul 2, 2009 at 11:15 pm

  As I have read the responses, I see that several have made important comments about the reading role. I want to make some comments here, having just had a discussion on this with my colleague here at Rutgers, Dr Carol Gordon.
  In the 20th century the teacher librarian focused efforts on recreational reading and what was available in the library collection. The TL motivated students to read through book talks, author visits, library displays, reading lists, and book fairs, literature circles and the like. A number of these approaches are passive activities that may raise the profile of reading, but do not directly involve students in reading. At the same time, teacher librarians touched upon non-fiction through attempts to broaden students’ reading interests, and this has become a bigger focus recently with the research about gender differences in reading preferences and the proclivity of boys toward nonfiction. In the 20th century teacher librarians encouraged free voluntary reading in schools. Stephen Krashen, a leading researcher on school libraries and reading has collected evidence in his book “The Power of Reading” that compares the effects of free and voluntary reading done by students on their own with direct instruction that teaches students to apply reading strategies to monitor their reading and improve comprehension. These studies have found that free voluntary reading is just as effective as direct instruction in improving reading, vocabulary, spelling and writing, and increasing motivation to read. The school version of “Free Voluntary Reading” is Sustained Silent Reading when the school sets aside schooltime during every week for a span of time for everyone to stop work and read something of their choice. School libraries have heavily supported Sustained Silent Reading and research shows good results in raising reading scores. Another form of Free Voluntary Reading is Summer Reading, which is an American phenomenon not widely practiced worldwide. In the USA, for example, school librarians collaborate with teachers to create grade level summer reading lists from which students are required to read at least 3 titles during their summer break and complete a project about each of the three books they read.

  However, the role of the teacher librarian in reading has grown in the 21st century to include reading for understanding, which focuse on reading comprehension of informational text, usually in the context of inquiry learning. This practice supports all students who are encountering digital reading environments that pose particular reading challenges. In these digital environments reading is unmediated. Students are no longer confned to the materials selected by the teacher librarian as they surf the internet for information. The implication of this freedom to access and read almost anything is that even the best of readers will encounter reading materials that are at their level of frustration. Reading for Understanding follows upon the educational trend of the 1080;s and 90;s that posited that all teachers are teachers of reading. This movement, reading in the content areas, encouraged classroom teachers to apply direct instruction in the form of reading strategies to help their student understand text. My sense is that teacher librarians now struggle with ways to incorporate these reading strategies with inquiry learning. The ASLA / ALIA policy on Guided Inquiry shifts the emphasis of information literacy from searching and retrieving information to using information to build knowledge. Reading comprehension is a critical dimension of inquiry learning.

• 16    ianmclean // Jul 5, 2009 at 7:14 pm

  Hi again Ross,

  Re: “… Free Voluntary Reading is Summer Reading“, which is an American phenomenon not widely practiced worldwide”:

  I’m happy to report the local success of the “Holiday Reading is Rad“ program, available here for NSW DET schools that are already participants in the Priority Schools Program (PSP).

  As teacher-librarian, I have been coordinating this reading program out of the school library for the past few years and – combined with the annual “Premier’s Reading Challenge“ and our regular community reading picnics – we are getting great results.

  The aim of “Holiday Reading is Rad” is to maintain PSP students’ reading ages over the long Christmas vacation break. Students and their parents must commit to participating in the scheme – in writing. The students receive a reading diary, stimulating reading matter (including magazines and comics) and stationery. The parents receive a free holiday subscription to the newspaper; an excellent idea, since some PSP homes do not have a lot of reading matter passing through them, especially in English.

  Each year, a higher proportion of our student body enter the program, and a higher proportion of entrants receive certificates of completion the next February.

• 17    Robin Pulver // Jul 8, 2009 at 2:48 pm

  Robin Pulver, Teacher Librarian at Moorefield Girls High School (NSW DET) and Committee Member (15 yrs) of St George Teacher Librarian Network.

  The essential work of teacher librarian would be as administrator and facilitator – acting in collaboration with staff. Teacher librarian would be on the Technology and Literacy Committees and take a leadership role in curriculum development and resource management.

  Teacher librarian would attend professional development days and keep staff informed of new technologies and other developments.

  Teacher librarian would be responsible for school information on a school blog, maintaining archives and organising guest authors. Teacher librarian would be responsible for a positive atmosphere and provide a welcoming, stimulating environment as the heart of the school. All this is possible now if there is sufficient staff (ie 2 Teacher Librarians and 2 Library Technicians)!!

• 18    Jane McKenzie // Jul 27, 2009 at 8:31 am

  Jane McKenzie, Teacher Librarian / Assistant Principal, Quirindi Public School.

  Some very brief ideas on what essential roles of the tl might be.

  Effective communicators and collaborators that deliver professional development on inquiry based learning, constructivism, collaboration, visual literacy, critical thinking strategies, IC & Ts, information literacy, information processing skills etc. Engage in professional discussions in classrooms, staff rooms, libraries, anywhere. Locate and distribute professional reading for staff. Advocate the important role of the tl. Provide support in program development with teachers and other tls.

  Engage students in the teaching, learning and assessing cycle by developing and facilitating activities based on curriculum documents, QTF, IBL, IPS & HOTS. Ensuring that we are meeting the needs of all of our students (and teachers). Ensure that we are at the cutting edge of student learning.

  Maintain the administrative side of the library/learning space/information centre. Coordinate programs / teams. Be involved in relevant policy writing. Purchase relevant books, journals, software etc.

  Keeping up to date with pedagogical theories and practices, trends in libraries & IC&Ts (not to mention the constant new lingo if we want to know what the kids are talking about), developing not only literate but digitally literate students and teachers.

  Thank you!!!

• 19    Garry Scale Teacher/Librarian Bondi Beach PS // Jul 28, 2009 at 6:17 pm

  In the future the essential work of a teacher/librarian would be..
  1. Continue to excite children about the pleasures of reading.
  2. Introduce children to writers and illustrators..the faces behind our books.
  3. To relate the importance of telling and sharing stories.
  4. To encourage the reading of classic literature and our tales of the past and the tales of the many diverse cultures which make up our schools.
  5. To keep up to date on developing reading trends and technical advances.
  6. to provide enrichment activities to gifted and talented students.
  7. Provide lessons which support classroom programs.

• 20    Tania Abbott // Jul 29, 2009 at 10:16 pm

  This is a very interesting question as I am currently working this out. I have just got a new job as a teacher librarian and the school seems to be going through alot of changes.

  The teacher librarian needs to be a teacher, faciliator and motivator to students as well as providing elements of professional development to school staff.

  Allocation of time to each of the following elements of being a teacher librarian; teaching students, faciliating staff, acqusitions, resource management and general running of the library; is what I have come to realise is one of the trickiest aspects of being a teacher librarian.

  Tania Abbott
  Tuggerah Lakes Secondary College – Berkeley Vale Campus

• 21    June Wall // Aug 5, 2009 at 11:38 pm

  The role of the TL should be only about learning. Then a focus on the various skills needed for this – information literacy is just one of the skill set – priority needs to be placed on ICT and higher order thinking / critical literacies. So the TL could be viewed as the curriculum analyst / strategist with the skill set to develop learning paths for whatever the teacher or student needs.

  June Wall

  ASLA NSW
  Past President
  ASLA
  Vice President – Association Operations
  Head of Library
  St Ignatius College, Riverview

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