The Library is My Happy Place

Creative Commons licensed image courtesy of geralt on Pixabay 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. Creative Commons licensed image courtesy of Foundry on Pixabay The Learning Never Stops As a new teacher lib...

Free image by Robfoto on Pixabay, text added by Holly Broadland As a new teacher librarian, I feel like a sponge, absorbing information and skills from many sources. In addition to my coursework, I learn through meeting with people in real life, through online interactions with people I know, through attending workshops and conferences, and through social media.  In Person Interactions The life of a teacher librarian can be isolating, due to the fact that we are often the only person in our role at a school. However, I've been lucky enough to work with other teacher librarians several times and I've learned something from each of them. While I was a primary teacher at my former school, the teacher librarian saw my interest in librarianship and asked me to come along on a book buying trip. What fun! In the past six months, I have attended two meetings of the Vancouver Teacher Librarians' Association (VTLA), my local chapter of the BCTLA and I find it inspiring a...

Image created by Holly Broadland for LIBE 462 using WordSwag app As I am currently a classroom teacher anticipating my first days as a teacher librarian, I look at the role of the teacher librarian with idealism and optimism. In past courses towards my teacher librarianship diploma, I have focused on the relationships a TL develops with students, teachers, admin, parents, and other teacher librarians as one of the major aspects of the role. I see the TL as the connector between people and knowledge. Teacher librarian as connector, image from FotographieLink on Pixabay I continue to believe that being able to develop relationships with the school community is an essential aspect of the job. If no one likes the librarian, people aren't going to want to go to the library and collaborate! Chocolate chip cookies, photo by Holly Broadland I created a Padlet in LIBE 462 entitled Collaboration in the Library . It includes my thoughts on how to encourage collaboration, and...

I chose to do a learning curation about Week 7's module as it meshed so well with my essential question for this course. This week's theme was "The teacher-librarian as educational leader: Supporting networks and partnerships in the library" and my essential question is all about developing relationships. I have used Padlet once before to collect links for a unit and this time I created multiple posts that were a mix of notes (with images to add interest and help make a connection to the topic), links to articles, and links to videos. I linked to readings from the course and then searched for some additional resources that were relevant to this module's topics such as the collaborative planning sheet from the BCTLA, the blog post about an Ontario TL finding ways to collaborate in the LLC, and a BCTF article on the benefits of collaborating with your TL. My notes from the readings built on the ideas I had expressed in my "Building Relationships...