Advocacy for school libraries. How we can take responsibility

After the success of my post in November 2017 Why do teachers need school librarians? 5 questions to ask yourself. Where over 29000 people viewed it I began to worry about how I could ever match that again. I think I have come to the conclusion that I can't! I just have to write about what I feel passionate about and let the world decide if it is interesting enough to read and share so here goes.

Advocacy

(Photo by alexander milo on Unsplash)

Today I want to talk about advocacy for school libraries, it may seem an impossible mountain to climb but I do feel that we all have a responsibility to engage with it one way or another. It is not about shouting about how great we are, it is not about demanding that teachers work with us, it is not even about increasing our loan figures. It is all about our students and this is the only reason that advocacy is important. Our students deserve the right to have access to a good school library with a librarian to support them, they deserve the right to understand how to access good quality information and they deserve the right to have access to fiction that will enhance their literacy and learning. Without the support of the teachers and senior leadership teams in schools these rights are undermined and one of our roles as school librarians is to make sure that teachers know and understand what we can do. 

Ok, I hear you say, that is easier said than done. I agree the thought of sticking your head above the parapet is frightening, you are one librarian in amongst a whole school of teachers. Who are you to be telling the teaching staff what to do? I thought I would share some of my ideas for advocacy this year in the hopes that it may inspire you to try at least some of it.

Advocacy Ideas

Staff meetings

Like you, I have always felt frustrated that I know that I can make a difference to a teachers job if they allowed me to work with them. The problem is getting them to give you enough time in their very busy day for you to explain. The only way I have found that works is to ask the Headteacher to give you a staff meeting slot at least once a year. It doesn't really matter when, so if you ask now and you can't have a slot until September then at least you know it is booked in. Before you approach the Head make sure that you know what you are offering. Do you want staff to know about all the resources you have? Do you have new resources that you want to share? Have you worked with a teacher in a innovative way that you think would inspire other teachers to work with you? It may be an opportunity to share what you would like to happen or to show what other schools are doing that you could do too. Here are a couple of blogs that I follow that give some great ideas for innovative teaching:

Read. Research. Rest. Repeat by Kathleen Currie Smith
Heart of the school by Caroline Roche

Also take a look at my scoop.it account here which has lots of ideas for school librarians

Have all my staff meetings gone well, no! You should not give up though as the more you do the better you get at it. Even if you manage to get one teacher to understand what you do and start working with you then that is a win. Sometimes I feel that all I do is talk but that is ok. Advocacy is about talking and sharing what we do. It will generate interest eventually!

Social Media

Next, make sure that your social media is working for you. Have a library twitter,  Facebook page , Instagram account, or whatever tool you like the best, to show what you are up to in the library. You may not be collaboratively teaching yet, but posting new resources and book groups is a good place to start. If your senior management team are not keen on you having one for the library show them some good examples of what other school library twitter and Facebook accounts look like. Here are some worth following:-

Twitter
Canon Slade Library
La Mare de Carteret High School Library
Worle School LRC

Facebook
St Sampsons High School Library
What a difference a school library can make

If they still are not keen then ask them to post on the school accounts on your behalf. If you keep pestering them with all the good stuff you are doing it raises awareness but it may also lead to them saying you can have your own because they don't have time to post everything you want :)

Blogging 

This is a perfect advocacy tool either for yourself or your school library. It is a place where you can write about what is happening in your library and critically evaluate what you are doing. How can you make it better, is it worth sharing so that others can learn? Don't use it to vent your anger but put it to good use. Saying that there are many times when I have written a blog post in anger and spent a week re-writing so that I could understand, learn and share how to improve the situation. It does not always work and those are the posts that stay forever as a draft. Sometimes you just need to get something off your chest! Great library blogs:-

The Library Voice By Shannon Millar
The Daring Librarian by Gwyneth A. Jones

Here is a list of other library blogs to follow. You are now spoilt for choice :)

Podcast interviews

I am not suggesting that you start up your own podcast, although if that is your thing then go for it. Rather look out for educational podcasts and offer an interview suggestion about school libraries. I did one recently with Lucy Parsons whose podcast is about what makes a good school. I really felt that you should not be talking about good schools without talking about the school library so I offered to be interviewed and you can listen here I have plans to work with Martine Ellis on her podcast The teaching space, as she is asking for volunteers to be interviewed. This is a great way to share our passion for what we do. Take every opportunity within a teachers environment to share the benefits of
school librarians.

Conferences

How often have you sat at a conference and thought, I could do that? or that they are not saying anything that I am not doing already? Then this is the time to push yourself forward and start sharing what you are doing. I agreed to talk at the SLAYLG conference last year and then I blogged about it. Here is the link to my write up. Once you are more comfortable with talking to other librarians about what you are doing then the advocacy kicks in. How about presenting at a teachers conference? How else are our teachers going to learn about what we do if the library is not represented at the conferences they attend. I went to the Practical Pedagogies conference in Toulouse to present at a teachers conference about using the school library across the curriculum and as scary as it seems I am off to BETT on Thursday this week to do a 20min presentation about how school librarians can support teachers. Honestly if I can do it anyone can! I do not have magic powers I am just passionate about getting our message out. 

Writing articles

This is our opportunity to advocate what we do big time! As much as it is important that we share best practice with our fellow librarians it is also important that we are writing where teachers are reading. Have you something important to share then two places you should consider publishing is edutopia and ukedchat as both are widely read by teachers. I usually share something I have already written on my blog for ukedchat so that I don't have to write more and it is a great way to share. Here is one I wrote about about the importance of parents in independent learning.  You can find the same piece here on my own blog. 

Hopefully some of these ideas for advocacy will inspire you to try some of this yourself. Please write in the comments and share what you are doing. 

I just want to take this opportunity to share with you some good news I have had. I have been asked to write a regular column for CILIP Information Professional magazine about school libraries. The first one should be in the March edition so please watch out for it and let me know what you think. I am always happy for ideas to write about. 

If you have enjoyed this then come over to my new website to see more https://ehutchinson44.wixsite.com/schoollibraries/blog

Inset training - How librarians can support teaching and learning.

This blog was written as part of the #futureReadyLibs #blogchallenge which can be found here. I agreed to write about professional development and hopefully have demonstrated how we did this by providing training for our teachers in their inset day. Enhancing their skills through using the school library and its online resources and demonstrating how information literacy linked with the curriculum.                                                                                                                                                                                    #FutureReadyLibs #bloggingchallenge

10-week #FutureReadyLibs #blog challenge, where librarians are invited to reflect upon the different cogs of the Future Ready Librarians Framework. Please join in on the conversations by posting your own blog responses and by joining the Future Ready Librarians Facebook group, where a new weekly blog .

Making changes

St Anne's school library in Alderney has undergone some big changes in the last few months. Schools’ Library Service (SLS) supports this school from a distance as we are in Guernsey which is a short flight away. This means that we only visit twice a term. On one of our visits, last year, we discussed how we could support the school library and help create a space that was well used by both students and teachers. We agreed to weed and renew the resources and gave them some ideas to move the library around to suit the needs of the school. It was lovely to go back a few months later and see how they had been empowered to change it again.

Creating opportunities

This led to conversations about the importance of information literacy and how it can support and encourage students to use the school library to become independent learners. Exciting discussions have been had about embedding information literacy into the curriculum, meaning that the school library, its staff, SLS and teachers will become a hub of teaching and learning for the students of St Anne’s.

Will you run our inset day?

Early last month Martin Winward, headteacher at St Anne's, and I were chatting about how we could ensure the changes in their school library could continue to have an impact on students and teachers. We both agreed that after the initial excitement and interest in the changes, it was important that we found a way to continue engagement. Martin asked me if I was willing to run an inset training day about information literacy and the school library because it was apparent that unless we had teachers on board, who understood what we were trying to do, nothing was going to change. We needed to share out vision.  I jumped at the chance, how often does the librarian get the opportunity to demonstrate the importance of the school library and librarians to teaching and learning. This was especially important as the new Guernsey curriculum is due to be implemented in September.  It is very much skills based curriculum and this is what information literacy is all about. it was perfect opportunity to talk to teachers about how we can support them and have an impact on student learning.

Martin sent me an outline of the areas he wanted us to cover. Improvements in the school library, Information literacy and the framework, resources and tools to support learning and examples of best practice. We also wanted to demonstrate how this all fitted in with Educations ‘big picture’. After a couple of conference calls I started to create my presentation and shared it with Martin and Wendy, deputy head.  Luckily for me, Wales is currently creating a new curriculum and have decided to incorporate information literacy into it so I was able to incorporate their slides into my presentation. It was important for me to make sure that the day was full of information but hands on too so I made sure it  included :-

• Innovative games/ideas that they could use in their own lessons
• Google Hangouts
• How social media can have an impact

Inset training day

I felt It was important to start the day by demonstrate that this training and message was not just coming from me. That schools all across the world are using their school libraries successfully alongside the internet and that the two can and should work together, it is not about one or the other, it is both. It was also important for me to show that there are many school librarians out there doing inspiring things and working with teachers so I started with a demonstration of how social media was important to me and my own personal learning. I explained that I had sent a message out to my followers on twitter asking the following:-

I had some wonderful responses which I shared with the teachers but the one that I finished with was this one. A brilliant message!

I then moved onto information literacy and how the framework SLS are currently using links and supports the new Guernsey curriculum. We were able to show how the framework and SLS staff can support students to becoming independent learners through using the school library. We demonstrated how we could support and train teachers to use the school library in an innovative way, opening their eyes to the countless possibilities of using resources that were already in their school and just waiting to be used. All at no extra cost to the school and with full support and training included.

Kahoot

We played Kahoot an online quiz that you can create yourself. We wanted to demonstrate how easy it was to create a quiz but also use it for our own purposes. Our quiz made sure teachers knew about the support available from SLS and how to use the school library. It caused some great discussions especially around the thorny issue of using pictures without credit. We will be following up with some guidelines on this for teachers.

We had planned to play breakoutEdu after break but we began to realise that we needed to help the teachers understand what was available from the school library and how to access it otherwise they would not be able to play the game so we spent some time showing them how to find their way around the resources that we provide, how to access and use their ebook collection and their school library catalogue. We explained that they needed this information to play the next game.

BreakoutEDU

Julia created our breakout game for this inset day. Breakout is based on a gameshow in America where contestants had to break out of a locked room. As it is not appropriate to lock students into a room this game has been adapted by school libraries, especially in America, to challenge students to unlock a box, using clues.   Ours was set up to ensure that teachers used the school library in order to work out the clues but teachers can use this game for their own subjects too.  They had to work as a team in order to get into the box in under 30 mins. It was great to see how fully engaged all the teachers were.

The box is in the middle of the teachers!

They managed to breakout in 23 mins...

Photo's by Martin Winward

Google Hangouts

I am very lucky to had made some very strong connections with librarians from twitter, so we decided to invite a couple to our inset day through Google hangouts. It was important to demonstrate how easy it was to connect with others around the world but also to help them understand how other school librarians support teachers in their schools. We invited Stony Evans a library Media Specialist at Lakeside High School in Hot Springs, Arkansas and Caroline Roche , a school librarian at Eltham College, South East London to give a 15 min presentation about how they collaborated with their teachers. Both gave really interesting presentations and shared lots of idea with us. We were very grateful for their time and enthusiasm in sharing their best practice with us.

Stony, talking to us at 7am in the morning!  

Photo by Stony Evans

Finally

The day ended by giving teachers the opportunity to feedback on what we had covered during our inset day and to decide how they would include any of this in next term's lessons. Several teachers commented on trying to use the Kahoot and Hangout within a lesson. There was also a lot of feedback on using the SLS website more and asking for support.

“I feel more confident to take a more immersive approach to topic work. I will utilise the SLS website and will liaise more closely with them.”

"Loved the cross curricular approach / opportunities…. MORE / MORE / MORE PLEASE" 

We look forward to supporting St Anne's more in the future. We are very grateful for this opportunity and for your enthusiasm throughout the day.

Advocacy for school librarians - Training and Personal Learning Networks PLN

Helping teachers set up their own Personal Learning Network (PLN)

As a librarian I am never sure what I am going to be asked to do next. My own skill set is broad and this being the case I am able to do many things which includes training. Recently, after a conversation with a teacher about Personal Learning Neworks (PLN) I realised that my own skills in setting up my  PLN enabled me to support this teacher and potentially support him to train other teachers in his school.  Is this an important part of my job? Absolutely, teaching and sharing my own best practice,  enabling and inspiring teachers to find the information they need themselves is essential. If  I can work alongside teachers to enhance their learning it allows me to talk to them about their students learning too. Raising my profile and skills set helps me to raise awareness for the school library. I can't be in every classroom but I can teach and up skill the teachers which is very definitely my role.

My own personal learning journey. 

It started in 2009,  I had qualified as a librarian in 2003 and after chartering in 2008 it was time to take responsibility for my own development and learning rather than having to do it because I was studying. My own reading, at the time, started and stopped with the CILIP Update magazine but I needed more and really had no idea where to look.

My decision to use social media for personal learning was for two main reasons. Firstly, I had children who were wanting to use Facebook and twitter and at the time I felt that I did not know enough about these resources. Rather than saying no you can't because they scare me, I realised it would be better to find out about social media and how it worked. Secondly, I was aware of the potential for using social media for more than following your favourite pop star and was interested in finding out if I could use them for work. I was particularly keen to know enough about social media so that I would be able to talk to students about it.

In the beginning I decided to use Facebook for friends and family and twitter for work only. This has changed overtime and my Facebook has expanded to special interest groups to share knowledge too. Twitter has enabled me to learn more and connect with people around the world that I would never have been able to otherwise. Some of the most exciting things that I have done in the last year has been because of Twitter. Trips to Toulouse to present about using school libraries across the curriculum, talking to librarians in Arkansas via Google Hangouts and  requests for articles all have come from my PLN on twitter.

So how did I start? I set up an account, worked out how to follow a few librarians and teachers and then I lurked. I read the threads that came through and have to admit that not much of it made any sense. Hashtags and @ and bad English was what it seemed to be all about. I was not sure how this would help me but then I became aware that some of the people I followed were sharing articles that were very useful and because of this I began to read more.  The idea that other professional have read something and thinks it is worth sharing is very powerful. I then became braver and began to retweet and share articles that I found interesting. Finally I took the plunge and sent out my first tweet. It makes me smile when I read it now as I can't stand anyone who writes about that they are about to do.  I do think there may have been a little sarcasm in my first tweet. I had to start somewhere and this was what I chose to write:-

I used the discover twitter to find this. I admit I did get a little distracted by putting in some of my twitter friends in and laughing at their first tweets. Nearly all are as bad as mine :)

I slowly  began to understand how powerful this tool was. I began focusing on the group of librarians and teachers I was following and started making decisions about unfollowing those who were tweeting rubbish. I did not have time to waste so my focus has always been quality. If someone is not useful to my goal I unfollow. This leaves me with a quality group of people who I have learnt so much from. They share their best practice with me, answer questions that I could not answer myself and through this I began to grow in confidence. It gives me a place to share my ideas and enables me to learn about new teaching practices and help me grow as a professional. My PLN is essential to my role as a librarian which enables me to learn and discover more every day.

Where can I start?

If you are looking where to start here are a few suggestions from my social media friends.

PLN on Pinterest

Twitter tools

Twitter for teachers

Education chats on twitter

Educational hashtags