The last three years of my study have been an amazing cognitive adventure. Starting as a classroom teacher where I looked to the library as a provider of resources, to now looking out from the library with ideas on how I can help teachers and students with information literacy, research skills, wider reading and just learning in general.
As I headed into each subject throughout my course, it offered me the opportunity to critically look at the role of the library within the school environment. As with most courses of study, what you start studying is never really what you end up with. Distance Education has had it's challenges as far as juggling home, work and study. But I have somehow managed to get through it (almost) in one piece!
Subjects Completed:
ETL 401 Teacher Librarianship
ETL 504 Teacher Librarian as Leader
ETL 503 Resourcing the curriculum
EER 500 Introduction to Educational Research
ETL 505 Bibliographic Standards in Education
ETL 507 Professional Experience/Professional Portfolio
Developing and maintaining a blog has been essential to my development and re-branding as a teacher librarian. It has been important to be able to develop a voice for the profession I am about to join and to put my ideas and my opinions out there for people to digest and hopefully discuss with me.
As a 21st century teacher librarian you need to be connected and in-touch with what is happening online. Gone are the days when you can just catalogue a book and then retire for the evening. The occupational invisibility that often existed with a librarian can't continue if we want the profession to survive. I have explained the rationale behind choosing Blogger for the platform for my reflective portfolio and the reasons why I have created a web of links rather than one page with the whole reflection posted to it.
I have broken up my final reflection into the following areas.
- Redefining the role of the Teacher Librarian
- What does it mean to resource the curriculum?
- Teacher Librarians; Leading the charge for change in our schools
- Why is educational research important for Teacher Librarians?
- If you can google it, why should we organise it?
- References and Readings
Future Professional Development
As I move forward as a qualified Teacher Librarian there is still so much to learn and apply. But one area that I would like to concentrate on is developing an effective strategy for applying a research scaffold into the school.
2015 will see me continue my role as wider reading coordinator in my school. So I would like to build my knowledge a bit of more the YA genre's that I haven't yet encountered and also streamline the system that I introduced this year to document the reading that was occurring during these fortnightly sessions.
Connect with me
Twitter - https://twitter.com/konstantkaos
Pinterest - http://www.pinterest.com/margaretmlawson/
Instagram - http://instagram.com/konstantkaos/
