By Debra Kay Logan, Sunday @ 1:30pm
Website: http://www.deblogan.com/ On the right side of her website, there's a section labeled "Deb's Presentations". Notes for this weekend's presentation will be forthcoming in the next week or so, but feel free to browse through some of her others in the meantime.
" Get your message across to your stakeholders".
The message is to demonstrate exactly what impact School Libraries have on student achievement.
Who are our stakeholders? Our students, our teachers, our parents and other community members, our administrators, and our state and local officials.
What are their concerns? Grades, homework, student safety, MCAS scores, getting into good schools, projecting the "right type of image" for the school and community, application of information in the workforce, 21st century skills relevance, etc, etc, etc. The list is endless!
So, just what role does the school library play in helping students achieve their goals?
Combine marketing and public relation skills to get our message out...what is it we do and how.
Deb recommends data collection to validate our efforts. Not just the usual circulation statistics, reference questions, number of students and classes, but real meaningful data that demonstrates the impact school libraries have on student learning. After each lesson, Deb has the students fill out a questionnaire:
1. Name something that the student has learned from this lesson
2. How will they use this new information?
3. What did they like about this lesson?
4. Any suggestions that would make the lesson more valuable to the students?
All information is tallied and shared with the collaborating teacher, and is used to improve existing lesson plans. When conducting your own data collection, it is important to decide how this information will be used, collected, managed and shared. To add credibility to your findings, link your data to research (refer to the handout by Ross Todd, "School Libraries and Evidence"). Point out any obvious and pertinent connections.
Deb also recommends creating Lesson Plans, even if you your district does not require you to have them. Link your objectives and goals directly to state standards; identify topics from other subjects that are covered in your lessons. Having this information in place and sharing it with your stakeholders BEFORE there's a problem is key. Documenting information in the form of assessments, instructions, finished products or projects, photo galleries, quotations, humorous anecdotes are all excellent ways to share. Make it all about the students, and it won't look like you are just tooting your own horn!
In closing, I will leave you with 2 messages from Deb:
"NO WHINING!"
and
"Libraries are an investment, not a cost" (Gary Hartzell)...it's up to al l of us to be sure that our stakeholders get that message.
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Thanks for sharing Deb's presentation. One of the things I liked was her candor about receiving negative feedback from students and the ability to see it as the real opportunity it is. Deb says we "need" negative feedback to help improve our own practice. There is nothing wrong with hearing about what we can do better. The thing I like about this is that is exactly what we try to get kids to do, self assess, and that is often part of the lesson that gets left out. It forces critical thinking about the process and all of us should be striving to be better and improve so our students improve...it is about how well we teach students, not about our own egos...
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