Inquiry Post 3- Developing Professionals

Inquiry Post #3- Developing Professionals

How can we, as educators and Teacher-Librarians share what we’ve learned with our wider communities of practices?

As teacher- librarians we have the ability to synchronize a community of learning, by acting as digital curators, who direct what is worth sharing and what is not (Valenza, 2012). We can be the filters that make sense of the vast amount of content that is continually being produced (Valenza, 2012). So, one way to share what we have learned with our community is by creating an informed playlist which identifies, evaluates, classifies, and organizes content for a target audience (Valenza, 2012). Teacher librarians are the most suitable for this function because they understand the curriculum, and the specific needs and interests of their teachers, admin, and parents (Valenza, 2012). The teacher-librarian must first choose a platform on which to curate, and then a selection of resources to meet the purpose and/or needs of the audience (Valenza, 2012). The curation can be either to support teacher professional development, or guide/supplement teaching lessons (Valenza, 2012).

Curation can serve multiple functions, as listed below.

•        Sharing valuable information to a community of learners.
•       Facilitating the discovery of valuable Web content (Valenza, 2012).
•       Promote users back to print material (Valenza, 2012).
•       Strategy for building a reading culture (Valenza, 2012). 

Another way to share information with a community of learners, is similar to the way we have been in this course. We are encouraged in this course to take to twitter to share our classmates’ blogs, but also our own work. By doing so we are sharing information in regards to what we have learned and also informing the community of learners in our class and online.

 How can we best respond to the needs of our staff, in their wide spectrum of abilities and experiences, with the most appropriate and useful professional development?

Professional development can be promoted via “participatory professional development,” workshops (Hamilton, 2011). These workshops would be appropriate because they would promote and provide a space for educators to share their learning and discoveries (Hamilton, 2011). These workshops would take on the role of creating a space for discussion on student learning and impact, and present collaborative learning opportunities (Hamilton, 2011). The teacher-librarian would have an opportunity to have other professionals do the teaching (Hamilton, 2011).

Typically, most school libraries had a “Professional Collection” of resources, journals, articles, publications and even technology that could be signed out by staff members at the school. How can we evolve and adapt this practice to be more responsive to the personalized needs of the educators, staff, admin, parents, and other members of our educational community?

As mentioned above one way to be responsive to the needs of educators is by curating resources based on their needs and interests. Another way is by creating a text set. A text set is a collection of texts, both print and digital, grouped around a common element (Donham, 2013). The resources in the text set can provide multiple perspectives on an issue and also unify a big idea (Donham, 2013). By doing so the educator can get an all-encompassing view on the issue which they wish to explore. When choosing a text set the teacher librarian must keep the following criteria in mind. Firstly, the resources must be qualitative, meaning they interpret meaning on multiple levels. Secondly, the resources must be quantitative, in other words consider sentence length, word length, and sentence structure (Donham, 2013). Thirdly, the text must have a reader and task dimension, meaning text matches the reader. By implementing curation and text sets we can evolve from the traditional professional collection from the library learning commons, to a personalized collection based on the needs of the community.

What can you do differently, or new, this year that better support their inservice?

This year, I would like to spent time curating some resources that would best fit my needs in taking on the role of teacher librarian. I have been learning lots in my courses and would like to save the articles and resources I have found most useful, so that when I am in the library I have a reference point, to which to refer to.

Work Cited

Donham, J. (2013). Text sets, deep learning, and the Common Core. School Library Monthly 29(6): 5-7.

Hamilton, B. J. (2011a). Creating conversations for learning: School libraries as sites of participatory culture. School Library Monthly 27(8): 41-43.

Valenza, J. (2012). Curation. School Library Monthly. 29(1): 20-23.