Teacher Librarian as Leader

Blog of Elizabeth Hutchinson focusing on the value and worth of school libraries

Conclusion is the most useful

Whether you're the CEO of a large company or the head of a small production team, all leaders share similar responsibilities. To work effectively with a group, big or small, every leader must manage meaning, set the emotional tone, and put people in the right emotional range for their best performance.

10. That you are a teacher who teaches not content but process. You teach children to be information literate, digitally literate, media literate, and visually literate. The skills that you teach, the dispositions that you help children to develop, the responsibilities... Read More ›

Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), "The Leadership Challenge : Improving Learning in Schools (Conference Proceedings)" (2007). http://research.acer.edu.au/research_conference_2007/1

The digital content they consume, who they meet online and how much time they spend onscreen - all these factors will greatly influence children's development. So how can we, as parents, educators and leaders, prepare our children for the digital age? Without a doubt, it is critical for us to equip them with digital intelligence.

Welcome the the New Technologies & 21st Century Skills website. This website is an ongoing project created and maintained by the Laboratory for Innovative Technology in Education (LITE). 21st century skills are an important consideration for every educator as we are striving to prepare today's students to become prepared for the competitive global market of tomorrow. This website seeks to provide a resource that allows educators an opportunity to easily navigate educationally relevant Web 2.0 tools, resources, and examples of standards alignment. Connecting these skills to familiar frameworks, such as Bloom's Digital Taxonomy, can assist educators who are transitioning into meaningfully integrating technology into their classrooms.

Michael Fullan and Maria Longworthy explore the dimensions of learning needed to allow new pedagogies - rich learning enabled by technology and 21C skills - to develop in a school as a "positive contagion".

Hi, just read an article in The Sunday Age "Digital natives or just digital labourers". 15/05/16. It is worth taking a look at. Some young people seem to be feeling the need to "switch off". I note that in my reading for Assignment 2 in FYI, vol 20 Number 1, Summer 2016 "Developoing a reading culture" one of the opportunities provided by libraries is "the chance to be still, to be quiet and to be absorbed in another story and another world." This is not a Luddite statement about the evils of social media, rather an acknowledgement that somehow school libraries need to accommodate and be so much to so many students. If we have makerspaces, games and gaming how can we also provide the space for quiet reflection, reading and private study? This challenge seems to consume much of our thinking in our library at the moment. Our library has three full time staff, and no separate, larger rooms. If we divide the space into rooms, then we limit its flexibility. I think this is called "being between a rock and a hard place"

Chris Betcher writes about the stultifying effect of a fixed mindset reflected in the phrase "That's the way we've always done it." or similar and talks about the very nature of education - as students learn, they change, each year the world changes - and how it is beholden on teachers to reflect this in the classroom teaching practice.