THE TRUNK: What are my core beliefs and learnings from MET applied to Teacher Librarianship?
My role as a teacher librarian is to design in collaboration with my school community, the physical space, the resource collection, and the human support environment to enable instructors and learners in their inquiry processes. Rather than simply being an expert in locating resources within the school's collection or having an outstanding knowledge of which resources would suit various curricular areas or grade levels, my role as a teacher librarian is best described as facilitation of learning and instruction. Through the use of observation, questioning and reflective reading of research, I am able to work with colleagues (and students) in determining best use of strategies, questions and problems to further the learning of students. I can also assist in determining the best choice of technologies to assist in the learning process, if necessary, as my colleagues are frequently uncertain as to which tools to use for a specific purpose.
The inquiry process is a key component or branch of teacher librarianship and was the entire focus of one of my courses through the University of Alberta. Many library organizations have created organizers for teaching of inquiry process skills. Both Alberta and British Columbia have such organizers and while guided inquiry organizers may seem prescriptive, they are simply a means of scaffolding a constructivist approach to learning. (Hmelo-Silver et al, 2007) It continues to be a struggle to convince colleagues that "read and regurgitate" research projects have little benefit. However, when given the opportunity to explore topics of personal interest, students benefit from direct instruction in skills including effective question development, keyword searching, organization of information, and assessing sources for authority and validity. It is unfortunate that these critical inquiry skills are often not explicitly taught at the secondary school level, due to reduced services or lack of collaboration with teacher librarians.
Another critical component of Learning Commons service is to ensure that patrons have more control over their resource environment. At the secondary level, this can include book reviews by students created as part of the social platform of the library automation system, or patrons being able to create holds and check out e-books after regular school hours through the virtual Commons. In the last two years, having an informal advisory committee made up of students and staff has ensured that digital and physical resources as well as Commons policies reflect the needs of the community.
Finally, it has been as a result of the MET program, that I undertook the challenge of creating a local course which would incorporate inquiry skills, social justice projects and web-based technologies. The course, entitled Web 2.0 and Collaborative Research, was originally based on Buffy Hamilton's Media 21 program. The goal was to give senior students the opportunity to work with a variety of web-based and media tools to research, blog about and collaborate in solving a real world problem. The skills of inquiry would be explicit and students would be expected to write essays, presentations and proposals, as well as prepare videos, podcasts and blog entries. Their summative evaluation would be an ePortfolio reflecting on the various artifacts they chose to include as representative of their work This course incorporated the best ideas of inquiry and technology, in my opinion, but as I took ETEC 512 (Learning Theories), ETEC 530 (Constructivism) and after teaching an initial cohort, I recognized many aspects of the course needed revision, in particular, the foundational assumptions of learning theories which were the underpinning for how the course was structured. I was able to address this problem as part of ETEC 512 and found it challenging but satisfying to address the problems I had unintentionally caused due to course structure.
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