Professional learning and library teams

  by  Super Furry Librarian 

Professional learning in the library team.

Last week our Library Teaching Team attended Learning 2.013 conference in Singapore. It led me to reflect on the power of shared professional learning. So often schools send one member of a team to attend a conference with the mandate to report back to their team at school. Does that work? One person is inspired, but can they pass that enthusiasm on to others to effect change?

When our Principal at AIS agreed in 2011 to send all 5 of our teacher librarians to 21st century learning @Hong Kong, I vowed to show him in 6 months' time what we had learnt and achieved as a result of that conference. I did that. That experience was transformational for our team. We were overwhelmed by the ideas that had bombarded us, but it inspired us all to action. It put us on the same page, with a shared vision of what we could do, why we should do it.

There has been some change in our team but again I believe this shared experience at Learning 2.013 is a powerful agent for consolidating our vision and practice.

In our Library Teaching Team meetings we have an agenda item called Spotlight. It is an attempt to move our discussions on from library management to teaching and learning. We showcase tools and ideas that we have tried and want to share. It keeps us all in tune with what is happening in each others libraries and good use of technology, resources and web 2.0 tools. I'm wondering if we can take that one step further. I think there is an opportunity in a team our size to extend the idea of learning from each other. Could we invite each other into our classes to observe or participate? In the library we are so used to an open classroom - can we extend this to each other? It will take trust and openness, but what a dynamic professional learning environment that could be and the conversations that would come out of it. 

What about our non-teaching staff in the library?

This has recently been a discussion point in our library network ISLN. How can we provide professional learning opportunities for our library staff? Jacqi Makselon at Tanglin Trust School has led this initiative in encouraging her non-teaching staff to visit other libraries in our network, including AIS, to establish connections and build a dialogue between school library staff. This is a great initiative that is sure to grow as reciprocity is already under way. In Australia, the wonderful work of the School Library Association of Victoria includes professional development days for library technicians and assistants. Is this something our ISLN network could do?

Learning 2.013

Last week our library teaching team and several other teachers from our school  attended Learning 2.013 at UWCSEA, Singapore. An impressive feature was the student-led sessions. The mornings started with spotlight presentations of the longer sessions, another great idea.
The conference was sub-titled "Making change" and it was a rich opportunity to be stimulated and provoked into reflection of our own practice and contemplation of new ways of doing. There were some immediate takeaways - Haiku Deck, Weavly, some new books to buy. There were also big picture ideas to bring back to our library teams and schools for consideration - attribution and intellectual property; how to ensure our use of technology in our classrooms is transformational; the idea of providing an ebook store for our school communities and their ebook creations; publishing student presentations to TEDxYouth. I have created a Blendspace page of the tools that were used or mentioned in the sessions I attended.
Go to my Learning 2.013 Blendspace here.

So what next?

• Share some ideas at Humanities Department meeting from the session on "Bringing History alive." 
• Discussion with our Director of ICT about an ebook store as a place for publishing the creations of members of our school community. I see this as a growing area as we move to IOS and Apple devices next year, with the brilliant iBooks Author program at hand.
• More conversations with our DP Academic Standards about how we ramp up our approach to Academic honesty and intellectual property - for staff and students. Plans are already in hand but space needs to be found (in year 9 and 10 PGD?) for sessions on intellectual property and Creative Commons. That's a conversation for Heads of Year.
• Sharing amongst our library team of what inspired them, plans for action. Discussion of ideas for Library Action Plan 2014:  investigation of the maker movement -Makerspaces in libraries. professional learning in the library team for teaching and non-teaching staff.