TL Under Construction

Future Lab just emailed their latest newsletter and I’ve been exploring one of their resources called Vision Mapper. This site is an Aladdin’s cave of resources, activities and tools to assist schools (or a school library) to exercise their ‘what if’ skills.

There is so much happening on the educational reform front in Australia that it seems hard to lift our heads from the paperwork at the best of times but when we do get that chance then what? How do we clear our heads to vision forward, what should we focus on? Well this site offers many directions. I’ve been particularly looking from a TLs point of view and thought the Future Day activity could be a powerful one for collaboratively rethinking the school library. It encourages the participants to ‘ build new ideas and identify new practices and resources’ by focussing on current routines then re-imagining routines for an ideal typical day.

Imagine your library staff undertaking this exercise together, thinking though changes and ‘play[ing] out’ decisions to see how they might affect typical days’. The chance to stand back and look at what you’re doing on a really basic level could open up missed opportunities of all kinds – services, resources, environmental aspects.

Vision Mapping offers much to explore and to share with your principal and colleagues, I’ll definitely be bookmarking this site.

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Photo: Visions by Jerry Leandera from flickr

Wow! Life sometimes pushes our best intentions over the edge and between work, study and family, I admit to having had to give up a lot of life’s pleasures just to regain some footing and that’s included writing here. But I’m really looking forward to being back on my blog and ready to continue writing about this curious voyage I’ve undertaken to become a TL, a darn good TL.

A short summary of the past few months in my TL life –

After a marathon run of fifteen meetings, the decision-making working party finally worked through the process to a chosen solution which involves a re-working of the management system and splitting the management into educational and business sections. Like many other schools they have chosen to look for a business manager to handle some of the myriad of tasks that need doing as well as many other changes. My job as a facilitator to the group finished a fortnight ago and I have put the group in contact with some professional change facilitators to help them formulate a 5 year strategic plan which is what Step 6– Implementation of the Decision Making process will involve for them.

Implementation is of course the most challenging of the steps in the process – the time for talk is finished and the doing must happen. In an initial meeting with the two change facilitators, they emphasised to me that the solution the group chose involved changing the school’s culture not just implementing innovations, changing the way we do things not just what we do. It really harkened back to the main message in Michael Fullan’s books.

In the more hands-on sphere of this TL we had the building that held the little library at our school demolished to make way for a new set of classrooms and the library moved into a portable. The whole process was very poorly timed – no notification as to when the demolition would happen until two weeks before the demolition. School did not hire movers or allow for any over-time so … let’s just say summer holidays were most welcome!

I managed to throw a few photos up on flickr.

The portable was meant to be a temporary home for the library for the next two to three years. That is until our Prime Minister, Mr Rudd announced the Building the Education Revolution (BER) plan. While our school opted not to apply for major funding for a new library (they went for a multi-purpose building), they did apply and receive the renovation/capital works grant to ‘do up’ one of the existing buildings to house the library permanently. This will mean another move in December, hopefully at a more leisurely pace.

I’ve continued to push for Web 2.0 integration into our school and have had the pleasure of being the first to acquire an IWB thanks to a bargain on E-bay! A small demo model came up for auction and I was able to ’snipe’ it for just over $300 – bargain! It arrived and was installed by a most obliging husband (Thanks, BH!). All this happened just in time for my first collaborative project with the Year 5/6 teacher. The class has embarked on the IASL’s wonderful GiggleIT project.

So,things are really starting to bubble along. Exciting times ahead!

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Photo from: Marc Shandro’s Flickr photostream

Fellow blogger, ghostlibrarian recently posted about preparations for teaching ICTs in primary school and the special considerations when conditions are not of the textbook sort here and here. Shortages of computers and lack of collaboration between teachers and TLs are situations many TLs must work around. And there are ways to do this as well as resources to help.

Our small library has only two computers, one of those is used for circulation and is the main catalogue search computer. When I did my original SWOT analysis at the beginning of the year I listed this as one of the library’s weaknesses. I wanted to teach cybersafety to all the grades in first term.  If I wanted better computer odds than 10:1, I needed to move Library sessions out of  the library and into the classroom. And why not? It lowered the ratio to 4:1 and had the added bonus of the teacher often coming in at the end of the session and seeing what was happening, sometimes even being a bit involved. It also set the stage I think for the system to begin thinking more flexibly about the LRCs best resource, the TL. Why shouldn’t we be as ‘borrowable’ as the books? I’d like to bring the administrative thinking around to me being reserved/booked for work in the class with the teachers during project times to support both teacher and students in their information searches and ICT use.

A 4:1 ratio of kids to computers may still not sound ideal, but after watching Sugata Mitra’s video on Ted’s Talks called “How Kids Teach Themselves” you may change your mind about breaking up that little clump of kids that hang around behind someone on a computer. There is a lot more going on than I first assumed. Mitra’s project proves that children are natural collaborators and are another great resource that we often overlook.

I’m very lucky to be part of OZTL_NET an online forum for Teacher Librarians and other information specialists. They are the most generous group I’ve ever met, there is nothing they don’t know or can’t immediately assist each other to find/access. Recently a member brought to our attention the work of Andrew Churches in NZ. He has been working with Bloom’s Taxonomy to create Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy. Here’s a brief quote from the synopsis of his paper:

The Original taxonomy and the revised taxonomy by Anderson and Krathwohl [2] are both focused within the cognitive domain. As a classroom practitioner, these are useful but do not address the activities undertaken in the classroom. This Digital Taxonomy is not restricted to the cognitive domain rather it contains cognitive elements as well as methods and tooling. These are the elements that as a practitioner I would use in my classroom practice. Like the previous taxonomies, it is the quality of the action or process that defines the cognitive level, rather than the action or process alone. (Churches, 2008, p.2)

Churches’ take on Bloom’s Taxonomy is an invaluable resource for people like me trying to decide how to assist primary students to use ICT at levels appropriate to their development. There is a lot of information out there for students in highschool. Those students are ready for the challenges of higher order thinking skills. But for children in primary/elementary, developmentally just on the start of their thinking journey, there are far fewer resources available to guide us. As Kuhlthau (1995, p. 8 ) points out, the age of a child will make a difference in the way they are able to deal with information. Before the age of 11 or 12 children are still not able to deal with abstract notions and will need to concentrate their research efforts on concrete topics and problems. This means they are still operating mainly in the lower areas of Blooms Taxonomy and this will affect how ICT  will be planned and carried out .

Churches’ new Blooms Taxonomy is well worth a look for teachers and TLs/LMSs wanting to get the right tools to the right kids at the right times. After looking at Andrew Churches paper, you may also wish to access more of his resources through his wiki ” Edorigami“.

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Kids Hand on a Computer: http://www.flickr.com/photos/16873103@N05/1819182353/

Churches, A. (2008). Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/file/view/bloom%27s+Digital+taxonomy+v2.12.pdf

Kuhlthau, C. (1995). The process of learning from information [Electronic version]. School Libraries Worldwide, 1(1), 1-12.

Having defined a rather complex problem so well last meeting, the decision making working party was ready to tackle what turned out to be an even more difficult part of the problem definition stage: stating the outcomes.

Stating the outcomes answers the question:

How will we know when the problem is solved?

This question and the discussion seemed to drag the group straight back into jumping to solutions. It was very difficult to steer them to think/visualize how ‘it’ would be once the problem no longer existed.  The group did agree that the outcomes should be measurable otherwise it is too difficult to tell if there is an impovement trend or just ‘hiccups’ that look good but are not sustained. Some suggestions were made but at one point, the group became so bogged in trying to avoid solutions but find outcomes I suggested perhaps we break and look at solution criteria for a moment.  At this point I am undecided at to whether it was a good idea to move forward then back. At first it seemed to confuse the group more. Some members couldn’t understand the difference between outcomes and solution criteria. But once I gave them examples from the book and the parents with experience in using similar methods in business further elaborated, they were set to give suggestions of solution criteria a go. The group also agreed that these should be quantifiable wherever possible.

We once again generated cards,  this time one side had the statement:

“To improve ***** , the solution must ___”

and on the other was:

“To improve *****, the solution should ___”

The group worked on the cards individually so members each had an equal voice. Time was running out so I collected them and grouped them in the minutes I sent out after the meeting. We briefly returned to the outcomes for review and people seemed happier with what they had written but no consensus was reached at that point.

Photo: Logical outcome  from http://www.flickr.com/photos/commandments/2128889805/

Now that my last assignment has been shoved out the door, I can take the time to update my blog and reflect on the path our working party is travelling down.

At the beginning of the meetings we always ask for PITS – any personal or interpersonal issues that need to be discussed before we begin. At this meeting the senior teacher wished to discuss the preciseness of the survey results. Given that some members did not have all the facts about issues (ie. amount of prep time given to teachers) she felt the results would not reflect reality and would change the results. There was more discussion about the purpose of the survey exercise — which was not to collect facts but perceptions of problems/symptoms in order to generate statements to lead to a root cause.

I have concerns that at the end of the PITS discussion this person was not convinced. An agenda is revealing itself in this case and I am relying somewhat on the fact that the rest of the group is also aware of this agenda and is working well together to stay on track with the bigger picture of what they are trying to do.

The group next looked over the results of the survey and we focussed on any areas that had gaps of 2.0 or more between actual and desired conditions. From these gap areas I had prepared analysis summary statements (ahead of time) but asked for feedback to modify them if necessary.

One example analysis summary statement:

“School and community need to communicate more effectively”.

There were seven statements in all. Using the seven summary statements on a white board I took the group through an exercise using an Interrelationship Digraph structuring tool in order to determine the cause of the SITNA.

There was much discussion as to which ways the arrows should go (pointy end to what is affected) on a couple of the areas but over all everyone was satisfied with the result at the end.

At the end of the exercise a question was put to the group –

Q. Are these symptoms of another, bigger problem or is one or more of these the root cause of the short-fall SITNA?

The group agreed that while two other factors were key drivers, management/leadership issues were the root cause of the problem. There was unanimous all five’s ‘fist-o’-five’ consensus on this.

With only twenty minutes left in the set meeting time — we celebrated the fact that we had defined our problem and went home early on a small high. ( I did mention that Step 2 was not complete until outcomes were also stated but wanted to finish on a win).

I know that management issues has been an obvious problem to everyone but the victory that night was that they arrived at the definition through a proper process. The problem definition has been validated. Also now everyone knows and knows they have agreed. This group has resolved to find a solution to the real SITNA not leave it in the too hard basket.

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/seetheeasylife/2535236720/