Connecting and Learning - Inquiry Blog Post #5

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Relationships are Essential

The importance of building relationships with students, staff, and other teacher librarians has been a theme of my coursework throughout this diploma. My research and reflections in Phase 2 of this course reinforced the essential nature of working on connections with others as a librarian. When you have strong relationships with the school community, it is easier to build a reading culture and collaborate. If you reach out to others, you will learn more and develop your ITC skills. When you have good connections with teachers at your school, they'll be more interested in coming to your lunch and learns or other pro d opportunities. Finally, when you reach out to global librarians, you will learn about how libraries function around the world. It all comes back to relationships.

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The Learning Never Stops

As a new teacher librarian, one of the big ideas that stood out to me over the past several weeks was that there is always more to learn. I have been exposed to books, videos, blog posts, articles, workshops, and a wide variety of websites that all offer ideas for developing my pedagogy. I know I can't learn it all at once, but I have been collecting ideas online for future reference. For example, I have taken note of two books (Lead with Literacy by Mandy Ellis and Passionate Readers by Pernille Ripp) mentioned in my classmate Theresa's blog post on reading culture and will aim to read them in future. I attended the BCTLA Conference on October 19th and had a productive and inspiring day. I enjoyed Emmeline Downs' presentation for new teacher librarians and was happy to discover her slideshow and many others on the BCTLA's Resources and Publications page. I will be sure to refer back to that page at a later date.


Give and Take

As in any healthy relationship, there needs to be a way for both parties to contribute their ideas. I have found twitter to be an excellent way to communicate with my PLN, especially as I have increased my activity on this platform over the past year. I recently hit 100 followers for my professional account (@hollybroadland) and I have been tweeting my blog posts as well as observations from my library. I would like to explore twitter more in future and participate in some of the ed chats I've heard about. I feel like I've made a good start and I can still develop my connections and deepen my conversations online.

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Baby Steps

Finally, I am trying to remind myself that all of this change takes time and I need to have patience as I learn and develop relationships. At this time, I have gotten to know about half of the teachers on my staff and I have noticed that others don't come to the library on the days I'm at the school. I am in a job share position, so I have even less time than most in order to get to know the staff and students. I have only been in the position for two months at this point, so I'm just at the start of my learning curve. The good news is that I love being in the library and I'm starting to collaborate with several teachers!

Comments

  1. Aaron MuellerNovember 5, 2018 at 7:08 AM

    A good reflection post that has some very important reminders for all of us. Your discussion and sharing of key learning, highlights and early steps are all very common and useful experiences that others can benefit from reading. You are right to prioritize relationships with staff and students to best support them in their personal journeys. You've also got to be realistic and authentic in your abilities and time to support others. As well, your discussion of ways to connect with other T-Ls in a school, district, provincial and global context is excellent. A good look back to help inform your future directions.

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  2. D HallNovember 9, 2018 at 9:46 PM

    Good job on building up your twitter followers Holly! I'm slowly inching my way in to twitter but am really seeing how it's a good way to make connections and learn from like minded educators. I feel like we are in similar starting places with the library. I started as a one day a week job share in the library two years ago and really took the time to learn from the outgoing TL, and thinking about where I would take the library if it was my own space. You seem to have done so much for just two day in there!
    I'm glad Theresa mentioned those books in her blog, I'm also looking forward to reading the Lead with Literacy: Pirate leader's guide to building a reading culture :)

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