The four topics that I chose to investigate over the past two weeks were technology and coding, school community development, teacher collaboration, and parent involvement.
I have a vision of what I would like my library to look like and how I would like it to run, and I am hoping to find ways to make that happen. I found the most useful articles to have practical suggestions and activities that I could use right away to further my goal. I highlighted six of them in my previous blog post, but there were many more that were available online.
The article by Michele Rzewski Copeland1 on parent involvement in the library was full of great ideas and information, but it was a very long doctoral dissertation and I had to really read carefully in order to pull out the information that applied to my search. These types of academic articles are very useful however, when it comes time to advocate for your library program. Being able to back up your requests with research is always a smart plan of action.
There are a lot of opinion pieces available to read online, but I mostly enjoyed reading articles and blog posts written by current teachers in the system, more so than the academic-based articles. The blog posts by Shannon McClintock Miller2 were the most practical and user friendly. I also really enjoyed the piece put out by the Surrey Teachers Association and BCTLA on Teacher Collaboration3. Both of these contained ideas that I could start using right away.
Of all the topics I looked at, I was able to find the most relevant articles on the topics of technology and coding, but not as many on building school community. Most of the articles I found related to school community were talking about teacher training programs or about building community among staff. I had hoped to find information about rebuilding a school wide sense of community since students have had to distance from each other for most of the past few years. This may be too new of a topic though, as many schools are still in survival mode and the rules and guidelines are continually changing.
When looking into the articles about coding and technology, I came to the realization that our school and district is lacking the hardware that is needed to implement these programs the way that I would like to. I work in a smaller school district and I knew that we had the bare minimum of technology resources at our school, but seeing the activities that some Teacher Librarians are able to do with their classes really opened my eyes. I don’t have access to class sets of devices for most classes, we have one laptop cart and one half-full iPad cart that are shared among the whole school of 450 students. I think that I would have to start by teaching the programs and skills to the whole class as a demonstration to begin with and then have a stations-based approach in order for my students to be able to practice with devices. Eventually I would like these coding and STEM activities to be a choice activity in the library for students to work on after our story/activity and book check out time. This would require having a few devices that are kept permanently in the library.
Seeing all of the schools that have devices available full time in the library has made me want to advocate for our school to add more to our building. I have a very supportive PAC group who are willing to help with funding the library, but many of their fundraising efforts have been put on hold due to Covid restrictions for the moment. I ended up down a rabbit hole of school technology grants, so I hope to apply to a few of those this year as well. It will take some time, but hopefully I can achieve the vision I have for our space!
Works Cited
Huerta, M. (2015, April 17). Coding in the classroom: A long-overdue inclusion. Edutopia. Retrieved January 2022, from https://www.edutopia.org/blog/coding-classroom-long-overdue-inclusion-merle-huerta
Kammer, J., King, M., Donahay, A., & Koeberl, H. (n.d.). Strategies for successful school ... - files.eric.ed.gov. Strategies for Successful School Librarian and Teacher Collaboration. Retrieved January 2022, from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1292862.pdf
2McClintock Miller, S. (1970, January 1). The Library Voice. Retrieved January 2022, from https://vanmeterlibraryvoice.blogspot.com/search?q=coding
1Rzewski Copeland, M. (2012, November). Parent Involvement In Elementary School Libraries. Retrieved January 2022, from https://www.proquest.com/docview/1354472965
Sturge, D. M. & J. (2019, November 21). We're all in this together: Building Community in a school library. Programming Librarian. Retrieved January 2022, from https://programminglibrarian.org/blog/were-all-together-building-community-school-library
3Surrey Teachers Association. (n.d.). What can collaboration with a teacher-librarian look like? Retrieved January 2022, from https://bctla.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/teacher-librarian-infographic-final.pdf
This is a good post reflecting your reading and research thus far. Your narrative and personal reflections draw the reader in and help them connect to the work you are doing. I appreciate your comment about finding a balance between the academic and the practical. You may have woven in some of the ideas from our Leading from the Library reading on equity this week at the end of your post.
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