This year one of the goals on my Professional Development Plan (PDP) was to raise the perceived status, professionalism, and value of the school library by creating a strategic plan with 1, 3, and 5 year goals which align with my school’s broader Strategic Improvement Plan (SIP). This is a complex task which requires a significant investment of both time and mental energy. Since I’m currently still off work due to my aforementioned kneecap dislocation I figured that there’s no time like the present to get started on this gargantuan mission.
My first port of call was to investigate the process of creating a strategic plan, and to do this I revisited the ETL504 Teacher Librarian as Leader readings. After re-examining my notes I decided to run them through ChatGPT to create a simplified summary of the process:
1. Preparation and Planning
A. Form a Planning Committee
Include diverse stakeholders: librarians, teachers, administrators, students, and parents.
Define roles and responsibilities.
B. Conduct a Needs Assessment
Survey students, staff, and parents to gather input on current library services and desired improvements.
Analyze usage data (e.g., check-out statistics, digital resource usage).
Review current library policies, resources, and programs.
C. Set Clear Objectives
Define the purpose and goals of the strategic plan.
Ensure alignment with the school’s overall mission and educational goals.
2. Environmental Scan
A. Internal Analysis
Evaluate current library resources, staff capabilities, and technology.
Assess the library’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT analysis).
B. External Analysis
Examine trends in education, technology, and library services.
Identify potential partners and resources in the community.
3. Developing the Strategic Plan
A. Vision and Mission Statements
Craft or revise the library’s vision and mission statements to reflect long-term goals and core values.
B. Strategic Goals and Objectives
Set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals.
Focus on areas such as resource acquisition, technology integration, literacy programs, staff development, and community engagement.
C. Action Plans
Outline specific actions needed to achieve each strategic goal.
Assign responsibilities and set deadlines.
4. Implementation
A. Develop a Timeline
Create a detailed timeline for implementing each action plan.
Prioritize tasks based on importance and feasibility.
B. Allocate Resources
Budget for necessary resources, including materials, technology, and professional development.
Seek funding opportunities through grants, donations, and partnerships.
C. Communication
Communicate the plan to all stakeholders.
Use various platforms (meetings, newsletters, website) to keep the school community informed.
5. Evaluation and Adjustment
A. Monitoring Progress
Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure progress toward goals.
Regularly review and assess the implementation process.
B. Feedback Mechanism
Collect ongoing feedback from users and staff.
Adjust the plan as needed based on feedback and changing circumstances.
C. Reporting
Provide regular updates to stakeholders on the progress and outcomes.
Celebrate successes and acknowledge contributions.
This will be my guide for the next few weeks as I move through the strategic planning process. Already there are some roadblocks arising from the fact that I’m working from home and not on site, such as the difficulty in forming a library committee of interested stakeholders or conducting an environmental scan of the library space. However, one piece of research I found in this initial exploratory stage of my investigation argues that strategic plans are vitally important for a variety of reasons:
To develop a flexible roadmap to guide the library’s strategic priorities
To clarify your library’s purpose
To set strategic priorities and initiatives
To tailor services to meet the specific needs of your community
To cultivate devoted and enthusiastic champions for your library
To inform resource allocation and where to focus efforts
Use the plan for fundraising, community relations, and attracting employees
I therefore need to do what I can to the best of my ability and try not to worry about the things I can’t control! And now that I have a plan to make my plan, all I have to do is … plan!
Last week I posted about the structure of the Wide Reading Program I’ve been trialling for the past few years. This week I thought might be useful to give a bit more detail about how I introduce the program to students.
Activity 1: Brainstorm and Discuss the Benefits of Reading
As we all know, if we simply tell a teenager to do something they’re probably not going to follow our instructions. I’m therefore a big believer in trying to get our students to understand the reasons why we learn certain things, and this is where I start with the Wide Reading Program. In previous years I’ve relied on a class brainstorm and discussion of the benefits of reading for pleasure, but this year I rejigged things to include a Canva presentation which sets things out for my students more explicitly.
This year I found that during the brainstorm and discussion most students were able to easily identify the literacy benefits to reading for pleasure while some said it helped them to learn about things or to relax or escape from their problems. However, I found that very few students recognised the wellbeing benefits. In particular I focus on the idea of reading as developing our ability to empathise with others, since this is inherently relevant to the teen experience. Hopefully seeing the visual in the presentation helped them to recognise the multitude of ways reading can help them in their everyday lives.
My reading lessons are only an hour long, and this year due to the excellent discussion sparked by the Canva visual I found that I didn’t really get to the second and third discussion points regarding why they read or don’t read and what behaviours they count as reading – these ended up being incorporated into subsequent lessons. Next year I’ll likely remove them completely from the lesson to streamline my teaching activities.
Activity 2: Reader Identity Survey
Instead, my priority was to get students to complete the reading habits survey so I could get a better understanding of who they are as readers and how I can best support their reading journey. The first two questions in this survey are based around their reader identity and confidence:
I think I am:
A confident reader
An OK reader
Not a very confident reader
I am:
Someone who loves reading
Someone who will read if there’s nothing else to do
Someone who doesn’t like reading
I’ve previously examined their this year’s results, with most students identifying themselves as OK readers who aren’t that enthusiastic about doing it for fun which is consistent with the research in this area. However, after attending a recent webinar by ALIA on Fostering a Passion for Reading, next year I’ll reword the second question to something like “I really don’t like reading but wish I was better at it” to promote a growth rather than fixed mindset.
The second part of the survey asks students about their reading preferences:
However, this is an indecipherable wall of text for struggling readers and rather difficult to navigate on the devices we used. This screenshot is only capturing half of the options I’ve given them! Next year I’ll therefore either simplify this or remove it; I did actually remove it for our streamed Literacy class and found it worked much better. I originally included it with the intention of using it to find specific books for each student but due to time restraints I haven’t had the opportunity to do this yet and doubt I will find the time in future years.
The third section of the survey is a bit more open-ended and could easily replace this second section to help me get a better idea of who my readers are. It features 3 questions:
What was the last book you remember reading? What did you think of it?
What was the best book you have ever read? Why?
What is your reading goal for 2024? e.g. would you like to read a certain number of books, a certain style of books, books from a specific author or culture etc.?
In future I’d love to work with the classroom teacher to nominate three students each per term to target based on these goals. While this won’t allow us to reach everyone in the class, it will allow us to focus on the kids who might otherwise slip through the cracks.
So there you have it – my first lesson in the Wide Reading Program. If anyone has suggestions on how else I can improve or activities that have worked for you, please leave a comment below! If you’re enjoying these activities, stay tuned for more in coming weeks.
One of the difficulties I’ve found in transitioning from a classroom teacher to the teacher-librarian role is the lack of clarity around our role and what we actually teach. As an English and History teacher I always had a syllabus with specific outcomes to guide my teaching programs, and moving into the TL role felt a little bit like I was lost at sea without a map. While the Information Fluency Framework released recently by the NSW Department of Education provides some structure to our role as information specialists, there isn’t a similar local guideline for our roles promoting reading for pleasure.
To help guide my programming for the Wide Reading Program I’ve been trialling over the past few years, I created a mission statement and a series of inquiry questions. These are still very much in the draft stage but have been useful in directing my teaching and learning activities and helping me focus on specific aspects of developing a positive pleasure reading experience for my students. Ideally each term would focus on a separate concept with a different guiding question each fortnight but, due to the number of interruptions we experience each year, this has yet to be the case.
Mission Statement
This program aims to create a school-wide culture of pleasure reading. Reading for pleasure has repeatedly been shown to improve student literacies and socio-emotional development. Student reading drops off during adolescence for a number of reasons, including lack of access to quality texts, lack of positive reading role-models, lack of time, and lack of confidence in their reading ability. This program aims to address these issues by providing students access to appropriate, self-selected texts and by setting aside a 60 minute period each fortnight to allow students time to explore, share, and value their reading in a socially supported positive learning environment. Through this program we aim to create independent, lifelong readers who are set up for personal and academic success.
Guiding Concepts and Questions
Term 1 Focus Concept: Introduction to the Library and Reading Behaviours
How can the library help you achieve your personal best?
Why do we read? What are the benefits?
Who counts as a reader?
What behaviours count as reading?
What positive and negative experiences have we had as readers?
Term 2 Focus Concept: Reader Identity
What sort of reader am I?
What rights do I have as a reader?
What barriers prevent us from reading for pleasure?
How can we overcome these barriers?
How can reading shape our sense of self?
Term 3 Focus Concept: Social Reading and Building a Reading Community
How do we find the right book?
How does social media influence what we read?
How can reading be a social activity?
What benefits can reading have on our sense of connection with others?
How can we share our reading experiences with others?
Term 4 Focus Concept: Building Reading Stamina and Motivation
How can we get the most out of our reading experiences?
How can we build our stamina as readers?
What motivates us to read and keep reading?
How we achieve our personal best through reading?
Over the coming weeks I’ll try to post some activities that have worked for my classes, so stay tuned for more detail about how these guiding questions translate to actual teaching and learning activities!
Artificial Intelligence is an amazing, yet terrifying new technology that has the potential to be used for both good and evil in schools. As information specialists, Teacher-Librarians should be leaders in the space surrounding emerging technologies and how they can impact both teaching and learning – a difficult task considering that AI is evolving faster than a Pikachu with a Thunder Stone!
This year I’ve been doing a lot of research into reading for pleasure and investigating the best ways to build a reading culture in my school. As a result, I’ve got some pretty lengthy notes on the topic and it’s getting to the point where it’s all a bit overwhelming and I’m getting lost in the sheer amount of information I’ve gathered.
Enter ChatGPT. Despite it’s potential to cause harm in education, it also has great potential as a tool to maximise our efficiency. I decided to test out its capacity to summarise my notes so far and see whether it could help me make a bit more sense of the mountains of information I’ve gathered.
First Summary:
The research discusses various episodes related to overcoming barriers to reading for pleasure (RfP) as part of the Open University Reading for Pleasure (OURfP) initiative. Here are the key points summarized:
Peer Role Models: Recognize the importance of peer role models in promoting reading for pleasure, especially if students lack role models at home.
Different Reading Behaviors Count: Understand that all reading behaviors are valuable and that there’s a benefit in children seeing diverse reading role models beyond typical fiction lovers.
Creating Communities of Readers: Shared experiences of reading the same books can create powerful communities of readers.
Personalized Recommendations: Know the books students are reading, recommend similar books, relate to their reading experiences, and know the characters they love.
Normalizing Reading Choices: Avoid denigrating students’ reading choices; share the idea of readers’ rights to validate all reading behaviors.
Social Approach to Reading: Foster a culture of safety and non-judgmental reading choices through book talks, reading modeling, and promotion of different interests. Encourage student-led recommendations and involve parents in discussions and modeling.
Factors Affecting Pleasure Reading: Understand the various barriers to pleasure reading, including lack of access to books, time, will, skills, and peer pressure. Address these barriers by increasing access to books, engaging in reading aloud activities, involving parents, and promoting authentic reading experiences.
Synergies in Promoting Reading for Pleasure: These include constructing literate identities, intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy, text access, time and space, social interaction, and role modeling and connected communities.
Overall, the research emphasizes the importance of creating a supportive and inclusive reading environment, promoting diverse reading choices, and fostering positive reader identities among children and young people.
Second Summary
The ALIA Webinar: “Fostering a Passion for Reading” highlights strategies to promote reading culture and engagement, leveraging social media and community involvement. Key points include:
Using Social Media: Social media platforms like Instagram can be powerful tools to connect with the community, promote reading, and engage learners. Schools can use existing popular templates but tailor them to focus on reading. Personal appearances and trending formats can enhance engagement.
Collection Development: Understanding the community’s interests and needs is crucial for effective collection development. This involves community connection, consultation, and gap analysis to ensure a diverse and engaging collection. Weeding, sourcing from trusted suppliers, and regular acquisitions are essential steps in this process.
Programming to Improve Reading Culture: Various programming, including reading lessons, book talks, read-alouds, and themed activities, can help foster a social reading culture. Offering a variety of activities, such as readers’ cups, staff book clubs, and themed weeks, can cater to diverse interests and preferences.
Engaging Reluctant Readers: Strategies to engage reluctant readers include creating a supportive environment through social activities, targeted individual interviews to understand barriers to reading, and promoting a growth mindset towards reading. Programs like “Read with a Mate” aim to encourage social reading and provide personalized recommendations based on individual preferences.
Overall, the webinar emphasizes the importance of leveraging social media, understanding community needs, and implementing diverse programming to foster a passion for reading among students.
Third Summary
The series “Building a School Reading Culture” by Madison Dearnaley explores various aspects of cultivating a reading culture within educational institutions. Here are the key points from each part:
Part 1: Assessing Reading Culture
Identifying a school’s reading culture involves observing factors such as library usage, collection layout, time allocated for reading, conversations about reading, and events like Book Week.
Dr. Kay Oddone suggests strategically assessing and enacting organizational culture change to foster a reading culture.
Part 2: Understanding Organizational Culture
Organizational culture influences how an institution operates and its members’ behavior.
Developing a reading culture involves leadership, shared values, and aligning behavior with the desired culture.
Part 3: Strategies for Culture Change
Culture change requires time and understanding behavioral drivers.
A five-point strategy involves matching change strategies with existing culture, focusing on small behavioral shifts, honoring strengths, integrating formal and informal interventions, and measuring and monitoring progress.
Part 4: Defining Reading Culture
A reading culture reflects how members of a school community value and engage with reading.
It involves embedding reading across all aspects of school life and promoting reading for pleasure, intrinsic motivation, and autonomy.
Strong leadership, a shared vision, and commitment to supporting the library are essential for building a reading culture.
Part 5: Measuring Reading Culture
Measurement methods include surveys, data analysis, and review of strategic plans and policies.
Key indicators of a strong reading culture include availability, opportunity, encouragement, intrinsic motivation, engagement, and choice.
Part 6: Identifying Reading Culture Characteristics
Characteristics of a strong reading culture include providing opportunities for reading, promoting and supporting reading, fostering intrinsic motivation and engagement, and offering choice and autonomy.
Measurement involves assessing resources, time allocation, visibility, staff involvement, reader motivation, engagement, and reader-driven collection development.
Part 7: Integrating Reading with School Values
Integrating reading with school values such as creativity, global citizenship, entrepreneurship, and well-being can garner support for building a reading culture.
Demonstrating the role of reading in achieving broader school goals can help prioritize reading initiatives and gain leadership support.
Each part emphasizes the importance of leadership, shared vision, community engagement, and strategic planning in cultivating a reading culture that supports student achievement and well-being.
Fourth Summary
The article “Getting Students Reading Through Social Media” by Overdrive, Nahomy Ortiz-Garcia, Melanie Wood, KC Boyd, and Amanda Hunt highlights effective strategies for using social media to engage students, staff, and parents in promoting reading. Here are the key points:
Identify Audience and Encourage Interaction:
Tailor content to engage with the audience by asking questions and encouraging interaction.
Incorporate bite-sized content and involve students in posts to showcase their reading experiences.
Celebrate Reading Milestones:
Foster a culture of reading by celebrating reading achievements and milestones.
Provide content with educational value and share additional reading resources and learning opportunities.
Strategic Content Posting:
Avoid overwhelming the audience by spacing out content and posting at optimal times when the audience is likely to be online and receptive.
Content Ideas:
Share school events, curriculum connections, holidays, student interests, and feature authors/illustrators.
Make posts interactive and visually appealing to maintain engagement.
Utilize Various Social Media Platforms:
Use different social media platforms based on community engagement.
Tell a unique story about your library reading program and keep posts concise.
Promotional Strategies:
Inform, define, and promote the reading program to parents, colleagues, and policymakers.
Use memes, newsletters, usage tutorials, and QR codes/flyers at school events to promote library programs.
Encourage Reading Through Curated Content:
Create themed and curated book lists and understand feeder elementary school programming to tailor content accordingly.
Engage in community programs and interactive scavenger hunts associated with prizes.
Personal Connection and Visual Appeal:
Show your face to build a connection with students, especially if you don’t see them daily.
Use fun filters, visuals, and short videos to create exciting and relatable content.
Consistent Content Creation:
Set reminders for regular content creation and schedule it into your workday.
Experiment with different social media platforms and content formats to find what works best for your audience.
Useful Tools and Apps:
Explore apps like CAPCUT for video editing and incorporate features like short video recommendations, trending book lists, author highlights, and new releases to keep the content fresh and engaging.
Implementing these strategies can effectively leverage social media to promote reading and foster a positive reading culture within the school community.
Overall Reflections on ChatGPT as a Research Summary Tool
As you can see, it’s done a fairly decent job of summarising the key points of my research. While ChatGPT does have great potential to save teachers time in this area, there are nonetheless a few limitations I’ve noticed:
It can’t directly access or view specific webpages or documents. We therefore can’t simply enter a URL and tell it to summarise the key points of a webpage or pdf.
It misidentified my notes as an article. There were other minor errors or parts where the AI failed to identify what I would have argued was the actual key point.
It has a word limit for your input, which meant that I had to break my research up into chunks which resulted in the four separate summaries above.
I tried to have it amalgamate these four separate summaries but it failed to synthesise the information effectively and instead created a bastardised, repetitive description rather than anything that would be of real use e.g. “Peer Role Models: Importance of peer influence in encouraging RfP.” I therefore didn’t post it here.
The input function doesn’t appear to allow for easy formatting of paragraphs. It also didn’t reflect my bullet point hierarchy and therefore my notes were all lumped together.
This is only a minor issue, but it took my Australian English spelling and spat it back out as US English e.g. ‘recognise’ became ‘recognize’. This hurt a little.
I was using the free ChatGPT version 3.5. Functionality is quite possibly improved in the upgraded GPT-4. For funsies, I also copied the summaries written by ChatGPT and asked it whether it wrote it to see whether it would potentially pick up on any plagiarism; it correctly identified this content as generated by ChatGPT: “‘Yes, I wrote the summaries you provided in your earlier message.” I’m not sure how effective it would be at picking up content generated by other AI tools, however; this might be an experiment for another day.
Overall, while it certainly saved time summarising my research, this would not be an effective way to create summary notes without having first done the initial note-taking process. We therefore need to caution our students not to rely solely on AI but to still use the old noggin to create their notes first, and always read through to fact check any content generated by these wondrous, alarming, and soon to be ubiqituous tech gremlins.
In my last post, I reflected on how difficult it can be to build relationships, trust, and visibility when things are tough for us both personally and professionally. I was struggling to reconcile the need to do these things when circumstances work against us, and my injury has unfortunately led to continued absences which further damage my ability to be reliable and relevant with every day off.
I recently found a Reddit post from an early career teacher who was struggling with similar feelings of guilt and ineffectiveness due to a bout of the flu. The comments from fellow teachers indicated that this is a widespread problem among our profession, and we often find it hard to put ourselves first in difficult times for fear of failing our students or adding to our co-workers already-intense workloads. I’m far from alone in these thoughts, so I thought for this post I’d share a few things that have helped me recently.
After all, as a wise woman in a fabulous dress told me, sometimes we need to stop and reframe things to put them into a more helpful perspective!
Reframe Our Understandings and Look For ‘Chopportunities’
One thing to consider is what it actually means to be reliable and reframe our understandings. Cambridge dictionary offers the following definitions:
Someone or something that can be trusted or believed because he, she, or it works or behaves well in the way you expect;
Deserving trust; dependable;
Someone you can trust to work hard and do what they say they will do.
ChatGPT offers a similar breakdown: Being reliable means consistently performing a task or fulfilling a duty with accuracy, dependability, and trustworthiness. A reliable person can be counted on to follow through on commitments, meet deadlines, and deliver results consistently. They demonstrate consistency in their actions and behavior, which builds trust and confidence in others.
Interestingly, neither of these sources say anything about showing up 100% of the time. I’ve been lucky that I’m in the position to work from home a few hours each day, so I’m still following through on my commitments and meeting deadlines where possible even if I’m not physically present. Given the circumstances, I’m working to the best of my ability, even if that capacity is somewhat reduced. I’ve previously written about the idea of the ‘chopportunity’ – a challenge that can be reframed as an opportunity. While I might not be physically present to teach classes and support people on site, I can instead view this as an opportunity to get some admin work done without interruption.
Be Kind to Ourselves
However, even if I wasn’t able to work from home, it’s important for educators to remember is that there’s no prize if we sacrifice ourselves upon the altar of teaching! Martyrdom might be a good career move for aspiring saints, but for teachers (and many other professions) sometimes, to be our best selves and to ensure we continue working to our best abilities, we need to take the time to heal. If I need to take a day or a week or even a month to recover from illness or injury, then that’s what is needed. We’re not the Terminator, able to sacrifice ourselves and then resurrect for several sequels. At the end of the day we’re human and need to treat ourselves with kindness (and no, this doesn’t mean ordering Uber Eats).
Watching and redirecting negative self-talk is a big one here. One helpful strategy is to treat yourself like you would a colleague or a friend. Would you criticise them for not running a class when they’re off due to injury or illness? Would you think of them as unreliable for taking the time they need to heal? We wouldn’t talk to others that way and I certainly wouldn’t put up with the kids treating each other poorly in my classroom, so it’s important that we don’t talk to ourselves negatively either.
Don’t Make It Personal
In this instance, I need to remind myself that I’m not letting others down; my circumstances, which are absolutely beyond my control, are letting others down. I’m not the main character in this narrative, and I’m not responsible for the education system which makes it so hard for teachers to take time off without impacting our jobs. I’m an NPC, a cog in the machine, another brick in the wall. My guilt around letting others down therefore is a reflection of systemic issues rather than any personal malice or incompetence. Worrying about not being there for my colleagues and students might be a valid concern, but it’s definitely not helpful to dwell on and forget the wider context of my absence.
Control What You Can
“God grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference.”
I’m not an alcoholic nor am I particularly religious, but there’s a lot of wisdom in the AA Serenity Prayer. Our fears and negative thoughts are often fed by the thought of ‘what if’ which can cause us to spiral. What if my absence makes things harder when I return? What if the lack of access to the library space affects the momentum I’ve built with the library programs? What if teachers won’t trust me and want to work alongside me since they can’t rely on me? I could go on, but it really wouldn’t be helpful. I can’t change what how others respond to my absence or the fact that I can’t physically be present right now.
Instead, I need to focus on ‘what is’ and, in particular, what I can control in this situation. I am supporting my students and colleagues where possible by working from home and teaching online. I am taking the time I need to heal so I minimise the risk of reinjury, especially considering that this isn’t the first time it’s happened at work. I am giving my body what it needs to be able to perform my duties effectively when I return. And, most importantly, my actions (where possible) are still aligning with my values, and I’m celebrating my successes as they come, however big or small they might be. After all, I’m very fortunate in my role to be able to have the impact that I do!
So there you have it – my rambling thoughts on how we can live our best lives even when things go wrong. If anyone reads this and has other tips on how to get through difficult times as teachers, feel free to comment below!
The last few weeks have been an emotional and physical rollercoaster! In addition to dealing with the stress of soon having to attend court to testify against an ex-colleague regarding things I reported at the start of my career, I’ve also managed to dislocate my kneecap while putting together a display promoting Shakespeare on our brand new, you beaut shelves, so I’m off work for a bit. Needless to say, I’m not living my best teacher-librarian life right now.
In a world where teacher librarian roles are misunderstood and at risk of being diminished or dismissed, so much of the TL degree emphasised the importance of being accessible to our colleagues, open to collaboration, and presenting ourselves as reliable, trusted experts who can support their work and make their lives easier. Several researchers highlight the importance of trust, reliability and strong relationships as crucial factors in leadership (Branch-Mueller & Rodger, 2022; Ezard, 2015), which is especially important considering that most TL positions are leading from the middle without formal authority (Cox & Korodaj, 2019). Indeed, the International Literacy Association (2022) argued that there are 3 key factors which boost perceptions of teacher-librarians as essential within a school:
Librarians as collaborators.
Librarians as advocates of literacy equity.
Librarians as providers of access.
To advocate effectively for the importance of our role, we therefore need to become important in the eyes of those around us. We need to be visible and position ourselves as essential for both staff and students, to become reliable sources for support and access to resources, and to build strong relationships with all members of our community based on mutual respect, trust, and recognition of what we do.
But what happens when things go wrong? How can we build this trust and these relationships when we can’t be reliable? What happens when staff are willing to work with us, but factors beyond our control threaten to break that trust?
So much has been written about the need to be reliable, trustworthy, collaborative, and supportive, but I couldn’t find much at all on what we can do when circumstances work against us despite our best efforts! It’s so easy to give in to despair when things constantly seem to go wrong, and so hard to be visible when you literally can’t get in to your workplace!
Over the last fortnight I’ve needed to cancel two senior research lessons and my Wide Reading classes, and since I’m not replaced when I’m absent the library has been shut during the breaks, affecting access to the space, its resources, and the safety it offers so many of our students. All the little ways I support teaching and learning at our school – such as mentoring students, de-escalating heightened kids, making sure students aren’t truanting in the library – as well as the big ones like maintaining the collection and providing valuable learning opportunities have come to a halt as a result of my absence.
Each setback represents a step backwards in the progress I’ve made in centering the library within our school community, with loans and visitor data always reflecting how hard it is to bounce back after extended closures. I’ve witnessed the impact of unreliability with previous librarians as both a student and staff member, and I need to ensure that this doesn’t become my reality.
As such, I’ll need to work twice as hard upon my return to catch up on missed work, repair relationships and rebuild trust in my abilities and reliability. After all, how we bounce back from adversity can be a ‘chopportunity’ to showcase our professionalism and advocate for our continued importance to our school community. It’s also important to model resilience to those around us, and to remember to control what we can and try not to worry about the things we can’t.
I also need to remember I’m lucky that I have built strong relationships with various staff members in my school, and although I might feel I’m letting them down they’re generally very understanding about my situation. I’ve been in frequent communication with many of my regular collaborating teachers during my absence, offering up lesson resources and the library space in an attempt to ensure minimal disruption and continued support of their work. I’m attempting to do as much work from home as I can, which will hopefully make the transition back to work onsite a little less overwhelming.
If anyone reading has further suggestions on how to build reliability and trust as a teacher-librarian in need, I’d love to hear them! In the meantime, I’m going to do my best to be like Dory, and just keep swimming!
Last week was a stressful one, but one big success was the long-awaited installation of our new shelving units in the lower library walkway. I’ve invested a significant amount of time and our library budget in beautifying our library over the past few years, and this was the next step in the process.
When I first came into the library, I managed to scavenge some old desks that were being removed from one of our classrooms and for the last few years they were the site of my new release and themed book displays. While they got the job done, they were messy, didn’t match each other or the rest of the furniture, and required shelf risers to create visual interest. Additionally, students would crawl into the space underneath and staff tended to move the books to sit at the desks during meetings without putting them back afterwards, which created more work for me since I was continuously having to redo the displays.
Before: The old desks which served as a display table – functional but not very aesthetically pleasing.
After: Our beautiful new shelving units!
The new shelves were expensive, but worth every cent! Not only do they now match the other furniture, but they’re easily adjustable to allow for book displays while allowing space for our games to be visible underneath, which will allow me to remove our old, tacky games cupboard. I also love that they have reversible shelves, which means I can have them flat or slanted to create visual interest.
I’m still in the process of adding the finishing touches, but so many people (including our Principal) have taken the time to comment on how nice they look. Along with the new carpet and paint job installed last year, this old 70s library is starting to feel like a modern, professional library! I was so excited I even made a CapCut video to celebrate, which will eventually go on our social media platforms to advertise the space to our school community.
My experience with these shelves just goes to show that our library spaces are important advocacy tools, and creating an inviting, professional-looking space is not just about resource management; it can also go a long way in advertising our own professionalism.
One of the big lessons I took from my TL degree was around the importance of promoting our work as a way of advocating for our value to our communities. There’s no point having an efficiently managed collection or killer programs if no one knows they’re available. Even worse, a lack of visibility means that our hard work goes unnoticed, and our often isolated positions within schools makes us especially vulnerable if we’re not getting out there and spreading the good word. NSW Department of Education schools have recently been hit with new budget cuts, making it even more important that I ensure that my work is understood and valued by those around me, especially by those who hold the power and purse-strings in the school.
In addition to my displays, social media posts, and Annual Reports (which ended up receiving positive feedback from my Principal), in Term 1 I advocated for the library to our wider community in a number of other ways. Last term we moved to a new website platform for our school newsletter, which allowed me to be a bit more creative than our old pdf offerings. I now have an entire page dedicated to library events and news, and used it as an opportunity to promote the Premier’s Reading Challenge as well as our virtual library. Due to the interactive nature of the new platform, I was also able to include a digital presentation, which I’m also aiming to project onto our library display TV using our Apple TV device during the day for visitors to the library space to see.
We do have a school website but it’s controlled by one person, so every time I need to send an update I need to send the info to her then wait for it to be changed which isn’t all that efficient. One of my Head Teachers raised the idea of having a library website that I control linked to our official school site, featuring study guides, video tutorials, and literacy activities. During the ETL512 subject we had a virtual visit with the teacher-librarians from Lake Tuggeranong College who had a similar library website that I found very inspirational. I think this will be a fantastic opportunity to further share my work and showcase my value, and will definitely be a goal of mine in future.
Term 1 for 2024 has wrapped up, so it’s a good time to pause and reflect on my practice so far this year.
Supporting Teaching and Learning
Supporting teaching and learning across the school is a vital aspect of the teacher-librarian’s role and helps us showcase our value to our colleagues. During Term 1 I was able to display this in four key ways: first, through supporting the NAPLAN testing running in the library; second, through supporting the ongoing programming, implementation, and resourcing of the new 7-10 English syllabus; third, through the provision of one-on-one senior mentoring and assessment assistance; and fourth, through the expansion of the Teacher Reference collection.
However, reflecting on my practice in this area reveals that there’s more I could be doing to support teaching and learning across other curriculum areas, especially if I wish to raise the library’s profile amongst the teaching staff. I have recently conducted a significant weeding of our non-fiction resources, so could restock this collection with more relevant, updated texts to support current teaching units across the school. At the moment my information literacy and research skill lessons are one-off bookings, so I could also approach different faculties to embed these skills into their assessment tasks, or create pathfinders to support staff as they guide students through the research process.
I’ve previously put out surveys to my colleagues asking for feedback on what they teach and what resources they’d like to see from me, as well as asked staff to send me their assessment notifications so I can support their faculties with informative displays and assessment help. However, staff responses are always limited, revealing that when teachers are under the pump and feeling the pressure of heavy workloads they’re unlikely to prioritise such surveys even if they see their value. It therefore might be more effective to visit different staffrooms in person, either by attending different faculty meetings or by booking in time with each Head Teacher to see how best I can support the teaching and learning in their specific curriculum areas. I could also use this time to promote our Teacher Reference section, which isn’t getting much love from our time-poor staff.
Action moving forward: Speak with Head Teachers in person to determine how I can support teaching and learning in their faculties.
Developing a Whole-School Reading Culture
As I’ve discussed previously, some of my colleagues and I are in the early stages of planning a new whole-school reading culture initiative. We’ve made some small progress in this space over the last term and have begun putting together a strategic proposal (inspired by the work I completed during my degree) which we plan to eventually present to the Senior Executives at our school. One of the teachers has also taken the initiative to create a ‘Current Reads’ poster for the English staffroom windows which has already launched several conversations with students about reading for pleasure.
Action moving forward: Collaboratively develop the reading culture initiativeproposal.
On my end, I’ve been working on developing a culture of pleasure reading in a number of different ways. This term I’ve been working on developing the Wide Reading Program for years 7 and 8, with all classes bar one participating. As always seems to be the case, these lessons experienced significant interruptions in Term 1, with 51% of lessons needing to be cancelled because of other programs using the library space, staff illness, public holidays, and other whole-school events. As a result, four of the ten participating classes have less than 50% program attendance, with two of those classes having had only one lesson to access the library and its resources.
To ameliorate the impacts of my absences when I was sick, I supported the classroom teachers in running the program themselves by providing the lesson materials. However, staff feedback suggests that the program runs best when I’m at the helm, reinforcing the value of a trained teacher-librarian’s expertise and skill in spreading a passion for reading!
Student feedback so far this term has also been positive. I’ve placed a significant emphasis on trying to build excitement around reading and on highlighting different reading behaviours in an attempt to get students to self-identify as readers. As such, we’ve played a variety of games such as Never Have I Ever and an adapted mad-libs game inspired by Cards Against Humanity which I’m calling Books Against Humanity. In this game students must obtain a variety of quotes from the book they’re reading and in small teams choose the best quote to complete the prompt I give them. There were a lot of laughs at this one, and it was great to see even reluctant readers engage with the task!
In large part due to the Wide Reading Program, our loans stats are strong so far this term. While this is not a hard and fast indication of reading culture, it does give some indication regarding the number of books ending up in student (and staff) hands. During Term 1 we loaned out 1140 resources from our physical and digital collections, surpassing the total loans for some previous years in their entirety. However, this is compared to the 1250 resources we loaned during the same time last year; the down-turn is due in part to falling student enrolments, the number of interruptions leading to the library’s closure, as well as a decrease in digital loans from our virtual library. Another pertinent fact emerging from this data is the increasing popularity of our magazines, with 31 loaned this term compared to only 2 in the same time last year.
Another way I’m trying to build a reading culture is by celebrating reading achievements in our school. I’m updating our Readerboard every month to show the students with the highest number of loans, and giving these students both merit certificates and house points in their roll calls to visibly highlight their achievement and show that we value reading. I’m also in the early stages of planning a celebratory afternoon for the students who finished the Premier’s Reading Challenge last year – they’ve chosen a movie afternoon as their reward, so hopefully other students will see their reward and want to get in on the action too! Another way I can increase participation is by embedding the challenge into the Wide Reading Program through read-alouds, book talks and activities such as the CBCA Shadow Judging.
Action moving forward: Embed PRC resources into the Wide Reading Programand continue developing activities to develop enthusiasm around reading.
Fostering Positive Wellbeing
Our school’s strategic plan has a strong focus on wellbeing; this is therefore an area where I can support the school community while advocating for the value of the library. I recently bought some of Margaret Merga’s books on this topic and intend to add them to our Teacher Reference collection, and can’t wait to read them to gain some more ideas on how to be active in this space.
So far this year, I’ve continued to support social-emotional learning through the provision of social clubs during the breaks. I’ve encouraged students to form their own clubs with my support, and as a result we’ve now added a Trading Card Game Day and Origami Club into our schedule, alongside our regular offerings of the Nintendo Switch Club and Dungeons and Dragons. While the Nerdvana Day didn’t get off the ground this term due to time constraints, this has previously been a great success with students and I will endeavour to make it a priority in Term 2. I have also discussed the possibility of a Year 12 Reading Retreat during their Trial exams to help them relax during this otherwise stressful period.
Action moving forward: Organise the Nerdvana Day and Year 12 Reading Retreat in Term 2.
These clubs and activities have had a significant impact on our daily visitor numbers, with an average 138 students visiting each break. Our biggest day was a whopping 334 students! While these increased visitor numbers contribute to a lot of noise and chaos in the library, they also represent an opportunity for students to be exposed to the reading culture I’m attempting to build, with several students who wouldn’t normally identify as readers borrowing books that they wouldn’t have come into contact with had they not been in the library space. However, the data suggests that our daily visitors and loans were trending down towards the end of term; this is no doubt due to the number of interruptions affecting the library’s ability to open in those later weeks, such as the fact that I’m not replaced when I’m absent. Ensuring continued access to the space is therefore an area for improvement in future.
Action moving forward: Advocate for the library space to be covered like any other playground duty in my absence.
Our Library Monitor program is also expanding, with several students approaching me throughout the term asking if they can join the program. Early in Term 2 I will incorporate these new students into the program and develop their skills as junior librarians in training. Their assistance is vital in helping maintain the library collections, especially as our loans increase.
Action moving forward: Train the incoming library monitors.
Maintaining Effective, Relevant Collections
Collection management is one of the biggest, most underappreciated aspects of our role as teacher-librarians, largely because so much of it is done behind the scenes and is therefore invisible to the majority of our school community. We’ve had an influx of student requests, so in addition to my plans to replace many of the outdated resources weeded over the last few years I’ve had to dedicate a significant portion of my budget to fulfilling these requests. As a result, there’s not a huge amount of money left for future purchases! A more balanced allocation of funds might be prudent in future years. However, one benefit of ordering so much so early in the year has been that we are getting a steady arrival of new resources to process in our systems as stock becomes available. This will hopefully allow us to spread out the accessioning process and reduce the number of orders we need to chase up at the end of the year.
Over the past few years I’ve invested a significant amount of time in updating our collection to ensure it’s relevant to the learning and recreational needs of our school community. When I first started, the fiction and non-fiction collections hadn’t been weeded for several years and the median date of publication was 1981. Last year our average date of publication was 2006, and I’m happy to report that due to my efforts last term this date is now 2010, while our median date is now 1995. While this is still not as up-to-date as I’d like, it’s a significant improvement.
I’m also in the process of cleaning up our catalogue and moving some items to locations where our students and staff are more likely to find them. I’ve set myself the goal of cleaning up 10 catalogue records a day, and while this isn’t always achievable it has made a significant impact on the number of resources with outdated or incorrect catalogue metadata.
In NSW Department of Education schools, we are required to have a Professional Development Plan (PDP). This year I’ve set myself three somewhat ambitious goals.
Goal 1: To raise the perceived status, professionalism and value of the school library by ensuring its effective management. This will be achieved by conducting a needs assessment and creating a strategic plan aligned to the school’s Strategic Improvment Plan by the end of Term 3.
This is a huge goal with multiple steps, which is why I’ve set its completion at the end of Term 3. This term I asked for planning time and was knocked back, so have asked for time again in Term 2. I’ve submitted a proposal through my Head Teacher for this planning time to be during the HSC Trial exam period when the library would normally be closed; hopefully my line managers will see the value of this goal and understand my attempts to support the school while minimising disruption.
Action moving forward: Gain approval for planning time in week 9.
Goal 2: To support the diverse needs of our students by working with the Engaged Students for Learning committee to reintroduce a school-wide High Potential and Gifted (HPGE) education initiative.
This is another area where I’ve sadly made limited progress, largely due to the restrictive nature of our committee meeting schedule which has meant we’ve only had one official meeting last term. We were supposed to deliver a presentation during a staff meeting on how to identify and support HPG students, but beyond informal conversations with staff there’s been no movement in this space for me yet.
Action moving forward: Conduct an evaluation of existing HPGE activities with the committee.
Goal 3: To forge strong connections between the library, teaching staff and students by supporting the implementation of the new English syllabus through the expansion of the Wide Reading Program and engagement with research into reading for pleasure and for information.
I feel that this is one area where I have successfully achieved my professional goal. The new English syllabus explicitly references reading for pleasure and our English faculty has embedded the Wide Reading Program into their units as a result of my continued advocacy over the past two years. I’ve also posted previously about my research into reading for pleasure, though more could be done in the information literacy space.
Action moving forward: Continue research into reading for pleasure and information; continue using data and feedback from students and staff to plan engaging activities which provide access and time for self-selected, socially supported reading with the Wide Reading Program.
I’ve been off work sick the last week, and now that I’m finally starting to feel a bit better and have a bit of energy I thought I’d investigate a tool discussed in the social media webinar I did a few weeks ago. CapCut is free to use and so far seems fairly easy as a content creation tool. I have always wondered how all those fun reels on Instagram use existing clips and superimpose them over their own content but it is a mystery no more! CapCut has a fantastic series of templates that made it super easy to create my own fun video in less than 5 minutes.
My Instagram may never be the same! I can’t wait to work with the Student Media Team to create new content promoting the library, or to integrate this tool into my Wide Reading Program to build a culture of reading for pleasure!
One of the things I try to encourage in my school library is student engagement and voice. This year I’ve got several keen beans who have taken great joy in creating book displays, and I’ve worked with them to create social media posts to promote their efforts and advocate for the importance of the library to our school community. Here’s a selection of some of the posts we’ve created so far.
Our post celebrating Taylor Swift as excitement for her Eras tour swept through the schoolWe always get asked where the Romance and Horror books are, so to test the demand for genrefication I had some students help create these themed displays. Other students volunteered to make a LGTBQI+ display as well as one celebrating the Year of the Dragon.
It’s wonderful to see students excited about books and wanting to make the space their own!
While I was completing my Master of Education degree at CSU, I came across some fascinating research about the social elements of reading. This is often seen as a solitary past-time and therefore might be a turn-off for some teenagers, who are going through a development phase of seeking social interactions and determining their identities in these social settings. At the time I started to muse about incorporating more social reading activities it into my Wide Reading Program, but alas! Time was my enemy. While we’re still not exactly on the best terms, I do have a little more of it up my sleeve at the moment and therefore I’m revisiting the idea of leveraging research into social behaviours in this year’s program.
I’m lucky to have the Tech Elect class joining us again. I had them last year when they were in Year 7, and while many students enjoyed the program and found it beneficial, I’m still concerned by the number who did not enjoy the program or who reported a decline in their enjoyment of reading.
This class is a BYOD iPad class and therefore the perfect guinea pigs to trial using technology to boost the social aspect of reading for pleasure. I’ve found that my own reading habits have been positively influenced by social media such as Bookstagram, while Booktok has had an undeniable effect on the reading landscape in the past few years.
This year, I’m hoping to start incorporating these elements by getting students to create a Goodreads account and to use the Goodreads app on their devices. One of my uni lecturers, Krystal Gagen-Spriggs, has worked in this space and written a fascinating article on how she used Goodreads in her own Teacher-Librarian programs.
This will by no means be an easy feat but it is one that I definitely feel has the potential to transform my students’ perceptions of reading behaviours and hopefully will increase their enjoyment of reading for fun.
Last week the Wide Reading Program started back up for 2024. I had three classes (two year 8, one year 7) come into the library for their first lesson, where we explored the reasons why we are running the program and what the research says about the benefits of reading for pleasure:
During this lesson I ask students to fill out a survey to give me information about their perceived reading ability, their identity as readers, and their reading preferences. Here’s the results from the three classes I’ve seen so far.
There’s no real surprises here; short books, books with images, and books with connections to other media such as movies or TV shows are usually the top picks for my students. Series books are also identified as a popular choice, supporting the academic research in this space. While manga is generally the most popular genre in my library each year, many students aren’t actually aware of what it is, suggesting that dedicated lessons on manga and how to read it would be beneficial.
Their responses for the reader identity question also supports the research I’ve mentioned previously around teen reading habits, which suggests that by the time they reach high school they are increasingly ambivalent to the idea of reading as a leisure activity.
In this survey I ask students to tell me about the last book they’ve read as well as their favourite book. I also ask them to set themselves a reading goal for the year, and plan in a future lesson to get them to reflect on these goals while designing personalised bookmarks to help keep them on track.
This is only my third year running this program (and my first since graduating from the teacher-librarianship Master degree). There’s no formal curriculum to work with and the high staff turnover alongside constant interruptions in the library space have previously made it difficult to assess the program’s efficacy. Fingers crossed that this year I’ll be able to run it more consistently and I’ll be able to gather useful data to inform the program’s future activities.
Last year I had several requests for books such as Icebreaker and the Twisted Love series. These innocent students had seen these blow up on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram and of course wanted to know what the big deal was.
Therefore, earlier this week I registered for ASLA’s February webinar, “But I saw it on BookTok…” with Emily Feetham. This fantastic professional development resource covered the following issues:
The main social media platforms and how algorithms work.
Content warnings and age recommendations.
How do we as library staff navigate this? How do we encourage age-appropriate reading, without having to resort to censorship?
What are the benefits of these platforms and how to best utilize them?
“Judge a book by its cover” – can you tell if this book is YA or adult just by the cover/blurb?
Having finally found the time to watch it, I’ve taken a couple of ideas for my future practice. I’ve made it a professional goal to create a collection development and maintenance policy this year, and this webinar reinforced the importance of strong policies regarding what is included in the junior and senior fiction collections, as well as ensuring informed parental consent through the use of permission notes. A lot of books that are popular on platforms such as TikTok include extremely problematic content, so one way to tackle this would be to include infographic bookmarks on, say, domestic violence in a book which features a toxic relationship. Likewise, a display promoting healthy relationships could counter this romanticising of abuse. This webinar also highlighted that many parents don’t realise what their children are reading, so a future parent bulletin article outlining ways to help parents select age-appropriate content would be useful.
The rise of these platforms has made finding the balance between access and censorship difficult. However, informed consent should help ensure students aren’t coming across content they’re not ready for or which might be potentially harmful.
School returns in NSW this week! So far I’ve had a few opportunities to advocate for my role and the value of the school library, which I’ve tried to grab with both hands.
This year I’ve been placed under the Head Teacher of Teaching and Learning, and had the fantastic opportunity to sit with her to discuss my vision for the role and a strategic path moving forward.
I also sent out a welcome email to all teaching staff, outlining the various ways I can save them time and support them in their teaching:
One-off or ongoing research lessons
Collaborative planning, teaching, and/or assessing of an inquiry or PBL unit (Maria and I had great fun with this last year!)
Gamification of units to support engagement
Support integrating literacy strategies (e.g. Super Six, literary learning) into your units
Support integrating information literacy strategies and research skills into your units
Support integrating digital literacy, media literacy, or ICT strategies into your units
Curated book boxes to support classroom learning
Curated digital resource lists or pathfinders to support classroom learning and assessments
Targeted library displays which support your subject units or assessments
Accessioning of senior faculty textbooks to keep track of which student has been issued which resource (we currently do this for English and Science)
Summaries of current research in an area of your choosing
A guided tour of the library, its resources and how it can support you (useful for new staff especially!)
Training in how to use our subscriptions such as Clickview or our digital library via Wheelers ePlatform
Training in how to use our library catalogue to search our collection or the local library collections for relevant resources
Personal delivery of requested magazines or books
Collaborative creation and ongoing support of social clubs developing wellbeing and student voice (I’ve previously worked with staff on the Anime Club, Warhammer Days with great success)
Targeted one on one support for students who might need assistance developing their study skills
Finally, my hard work over the last two years with the Wide Reading Program has paid off. I currently have 10 year 7 and 8 classes booked in for a fortnightly Wide Reading lesson. This is a significant increase from the 1 class in 2022 and 3 in 2023 who consistently attended. Last year we also had positive feedback from the majority of the students who participated, with positive changes to many students’ reader identity and confidence.
Last year was a outstanding year for borrowing, and we broke our previous best record by 455 books largely due to the engagement created by the Wide Reading Program. I’m excited to see what 2024 holds!
