Fall 2010 TL Update

WELCOME BACK!

WELCOME!

We are looking forward to meeting this week in our Fall 2010 TL Update sessions with our 100+ full- or part-time TLs. What will we focus on to help ensure your school library program gets off to a good start? Check out the next 5 blog entries.

News

We have more than 25 staffing changes in our school libraries and face new and important challenges in starting up the school library and building its essential program.

I have appreciated the mentoring I have had from the "chatelaines" of VSB school libraries in preparing an agenda for our meetings of what they see as important enough for us to come together to learn. Thanks, Michele, Linda, Wendy, and Maryann! Your input helps to make order for us out of the uncertainties and complexity of the shifting world as it translates and is translated into school libraries.

Role of the TL Mentor

The TL Mentor position has less time available for TL support than the full-time TL Consultant position. With one "block" on Day 2s or mentoring days being my prep block, you will need to consider there is 75% of every second day for "our work" -- or, put in other words, unfortunately you will need to expect some severe limitations to the capacity of this position. Check the schedule for Day 1/Day 2 dates and expect a one-day delay if you are contacting me on my Day 1.

The Mentor position differs from the consultant's in the degree of focus. My work as your consultant was driven by The Haycock Report and the goal of improving student access to important resources. It required the development of an interactive website (so you got the blog and wiki) as well as a more responsive Digital Library. It included, of course, the Pro D piece and consultative support for TLs. As TL Mentor, the mandate is to ensure the effective use of print and digital resources, as well as effective integration of technology with teaching and learning, to prepare TLs for changes in the nature of resources and learning and enhance our capacity to support both teaching and learning in the 21st century. While TL Mentor needs to be flexible in responding to the needs of the field and to do some on-site mentoring, there will have to be a more contained focus on the scope of work as professional development and on using the Churchill "demonstration library." See the difference?

As some of you know because you are there "in class" with me, I am also a sessional instructor, teaching LLED 469 "Resource-based Teaching" online, for UBC this term. This is a new facet of my career and will be a wonderful opportunity not only to teach what I strongly believe in but also to learn to use the online environment for teaching. So far, Week 1 under way, I am enjoying the new challenge.

TLs and their Dispositions:
Interesting Results of a Recent Study

From Michele, notice of an important new study -- Exploration to Identify Professional Dispositions of School Librarians: A Delphi Study, by Gail Bush and Jami L. Jones, professors from universities in the eastern US.

What do you need to know about this study? Why is this important? The Delphi method seeks "expert knowledge" (in this case, members of the editorial boards of five field journals including SLJ and TL, or "oracles," as suggested by the name of the method) of leaders in the field, both scholars and practitioners. This study group included 2 Canadians, one being Michele. Unlike a focus group which might solicit and encourage shared understandings, the Delphi method initially sought individual independent responses to the request to identify and prioritize important dispositions for TLs; when compiled, these dispositions are shared amongst the group for response and ordering/combining.

First, the term dispositions needs a little consideration. It is an American term being used in their new curriculum standards to describe desired and characteristic patterns of student thinking and acting; in this study, the same notion that one might expect dispositions as in AASL "standards in action" for student learning (copies in every Vancouver school library) is considered for educators. That is, educators provide modelling of the student-learning dispositions. Dispositions identified by the NCTAF for "effective teachers [are that they] integrate content knowledge with pedagogical understanding to ensure that all students learn at high levels." Dispositions of effective teachers included being reflective, understanding diversity, collaborating to advocate for children, using a variety of instructional strategies, and so on.

The study is also underpinned with the notion that "teacher quality is vital to student learning and achievement" and that strong school library programs and qualified TL support are implicit in standards for student learning. There is some discomfort with the notion of identifying TL dispositions for their subjectivity and their proximity to ideas about evaluation, but it was deemed desirable to have TLs identify the vision or ideal of TL dispositions themselves, as a "compass" for TL education and professional development.

OK, so what is it we need to know from the results, and what does this tell Canadian TLs? Perhaps most importantly, the study makes a very clear statement that TLs need to be recognized for their quality teaching from a distinctly school library perspective:

These dispositions encompass the school library writ large, both the physical environment and the twenty-first-century networking environments. It has a societal context that provides for a learning environment where inquiry reigns, access is universal, and minds meet to construct new understandings. School librarians have a unique position as an instructional partner who integrates learning through all curricula and engages with students throughout their tenure in a school ....

This longitudinal relationship with both the student and the curriculum establishes a fundamental engagement shared by each student as he or she journeys through the school .... [TLs] help transform intellectual character as [they] focus on ... learners in a developmental approach .... The school librarian is a constant in the learning environment of the student over time, unlike the classroom teacher who knows a learner for approximately 185 days throughout one school year. The school librarian not only focuses on integrating content in the curriculum but also focuses on the learner, on guiding and influencing an openness to new ideas and ways of making meaning, of critical and creative thinking, of building on the knowledge of the student as learner throughout each developmental stage. Here the library becomes a way of learning rather than a physical or virtual space -- it becomes embedded in the life of a student's mind as the student has access over time to changing resources depending on discipline and developmentally appropriate resource allocation.

In short, while there was also amongst the "oracles" a "sinking feeling" that the current reality of TL'ship is still far from the ideal, there was real delight that "teacher" was widely held to be the most important aspect of the work. Work needs to be done to design and implement "signature pedagogies" for teacher-librarians and "build on this study to further crystallize a robust vision of school librarianship."


Can't help but think this is what James Henri's directive to us three summers ago to "meet teachers in curriculum" meant! Oracle Henri!

The Point(s) of Inquiry

There are things about my job that I will miss terribly, including the capacity to model collaboration and enact what we TLs do when we work with teachers. Last year, our TL Inquiry looked at the question, How can we, as a professional learning community, support TLs in implementing exemplary school library programs in our schools?

With time and expertise provided last year by funds provided by Learning & Development and my TL Consultant budget, a remarkable group of ten TLs was enabled to participate in and work collaboratively within a Teacher-librarian Inquiry, facilitated by Denise Johnson and Leann Buteau. It was a transformative experience, in my way of looking at things. We kept a TL Inquiry Wiki of the discussions and products.

The overarching Inquiry question was answered in a number of ways. Two of our TLs worked on the development of a revised mentoring model which, with some additional funding for release time from my own and the L&D budgets, we have been able to implement as the mentoring pilot this year. Three of our most experienced TLs, Patti, Linda, and Wendy, are enabled by the release time, supplemented by the schools that are to receive this benefit, to take their very high-level mentoring capacity to where it is most needed. French Immersion funding has also been utilized to support the needs of TLs in dual-track schools.

The mentoring focus has resulted this year in two extension projects. Thanks to Wendy, the Horizon manual is now fully revised and site-specific, customized as a start-up manual to replace the old and tattered ones. No one had anticipated that, once it had been distributed to forty schools where there were new or new-ish TLs, everyone else would want one! These additional 50 elementary binders are in production for distribution at or before the May Update sessions.

The other extension of the mentoring project has been the creation of acquisitions lists. Patti created starter lists for non-fiction acquisitions, particularly science and social studies, for our annex TLs where the TL is more likely to have little or no training or experience and be split amongst a variety of roles within the school. Elly has worked collaboratively with French Immersion TLs to produce a similar list for those who are new or less fluent. Nice nice work, this.

Another way to support TLs in creating exemplary programs was to make a film to provide authentic examples of how it looks when TLs create viable and meaningful school library programs that enable students to engage deeply in Reading as Inquiry or Research as Inquiry. Check out Cheriee's 11-minute video about Student Inquiry if you haven't already seen it. It's great to see Jo-Anne, Cheriee, Patti, and of course, Michele. (Missing Michele? She is, as ever, in this video, at her most encouraging. It's not hard to see why, two years ago, Michele was BC's TL of the Year; last year, the Canadian TL of the Year.)

I am profoundly grateful for Leann's having been there as a facilitator for the TL Inquiry. It was Leann who, quite serendipidously, brought us an article on student inquiry by Barbara Stripling. Striping is one of the creators of various research models, alongside Kuhlthau, Pitts, and Big6 Eisenberg. Because I was busy posting discussion notes to our wiki (you can see this discussion entry for May 26 ), I missed out on the chance to read and discuss the article. The experience of my shifted perspective -- the AHA! moment -- would have to wait until later.

I remain thankful that my engagement with this project meant that I did follow-up with the reading or I would have missed the transformative moment! The work I had been doing for at least two years, with my fellow BCTLA members, to develop a new BC "Research Process" model was transformed by this reading. Instantly I could see how it would provide for me a new structure or way of looking at Student Inquiry. My "products"for the Celebration in early June would be the TL Inquiry Wiki and the new Inquiry graphic and chart (pdfs available) based on that reading of Stripling's article.

The latest iteration of the "Points of Inquiry" Approach to Reading and Research was presented to the Chapter Councillors of the BCTLA last weekend. Word has it that the CCs have returned to their posts with the draft model and are reporting out. The re-modelling continues.

Yesterday I flew to Cranbrook to do a workshop called Implementing a Culture of Inquiry. I shared the new draft model with them and showed our video. This Inquiry model is on my job "bucket list," things to have done and out in schools for teachers and TLs by the end of June. BCTLA President Heather Daly from Coquitlam and I are heading off with a paper to Edmonton to share at "Treasure Mountain" with important people like Dave Loertscher, Carol Koechlin, and Sandi Zwaan. You have to love serendipity.

From our TL Inquiry, so much has flowed. And just in case you were wondering what I am up to, the answer is lots. It's not over yet. Head down, keep working, I mutter. I remain hopeful that there will be a way to support new directions for school library programs that will empower the kind of reading and learning that makes a difference for students in the 21st Century. While much of the capacity to support this kind of work through Learning Services is regrettably slated to be gone next year, I know that Denise and I both have been thrilled to support this wonderful mentoring project for all TLs as an outcome of Teacher Inquiry. I know that you will be the first to agree that losing the support for Teacher Inquiry as a powerful means of engaging in professional growth and development is a huge loss. Maybe we should have talked more about how these have prompted change in our old and cumbersome system. Maybe we should have been more shameless in the promotion of our work in supportint teachers.

So, is blogging as a form of healing? Yes, and sorry about that!