Reading Review Part A

How can Collaboration, Inquiry and Innovation Impact the Learning of our School Community?

Image courtesy of:

http://www.indigo.co.za/show/blog/blog-image/11980-NOAA5W.jpg

I feel very fortunate to be in the situation I am in. I am a teacher librarian at a middle school (grades 7-9) where teachers and the administration are working together to better meet the learning needs of the whole school community: students, staff and parents. Our administrators have given us collaboration time, funds and technology to help support this. As a TL this is very exciting, but I find myself wondering how best can I meet the needs of my school community.

I have come up with 3 questions I am pondering:

1. How can I continue to support collaboration within my school?
2. How can inquiry be used effectively to help teachers and students learn?
3. How can technology be used innovatively to support inquiry and increase student engagement with learning?

This environment of working together to make positive changes has not always existed at my school. When I started at my school 7 years ago along with 3 other teachers and a new administrator, we entered a school that was very traditional. The staff and administrator had been together for a very long time, they had a way of teaching that had not changed in years. Us “newbies” heard the phrase “that’s not the way we do things at this school” a lot. The library at the time was a ghost town. The librarian was very traditional and teachers and students had very limited access to the space, let alone to the books and resources. Most students were afraid to sign out books. The new administrator was very patient and had a motto that he used over and over to combat the traditional way things were done: “We will do what is best for our students”. This ruffled the feathers of many on staff and slowly those that were opposed to change began to leave. It was during this time I was asked if I was interested in transforming our library to a learning commons. I was ecstatic! I am now beginning my third year as a TL.

When I first started out as TL we had a small team of teachers, myself and the administrators who worked really hard to figure out how we could better meet the learning needs of our students and teachers. We wanted to work on collaboration, inquiry and increasing student engagement with learning. We are now going into our third year with these same goals and we have already seen the positive impact on our students and staff, although we still have a long way to go. With the new teaching positions opening up at our school this year our administrators hired teachers who wanted to be a part of this change.

As a result we have so many new and enthusiastic teachers wanting to work together towards these goals. I already have had so many requests to collaborate with teachers making this a very exciting time for me, but it is also a little daunting. I just want to be sure I can contribute effectively so that the positive changes will be evident to our school community. Many are asking for help with changing from a traditional teacher-centered way of teaching to a student-centered approach using inquiry. Many teachers are not sure where to start and are nervous about the process. I am hoping the through the co-planning process and the co-teaching process we can learn from each other and work toward changing the way we learn in our school.  Using resources like the Points of Inquiry, constructivist theory, connectivism theory, and ideas from bloggers like John Spencer I hope that I can help provide the support and resources so that our school can transform the way we teach and learn in our school.

Technology can be very effective in supporting inquiry based learning and developing 21st century skills. I feel that this is an area that will need some work. Many teachers are using technology in their classrooms but in ways that support traditional teacher centered methods of teaching. There is a false sense that some teachers have that because they are using innovative technology that they believe they must therefore have innovative teaching methods. Larry Cuban addresses this issue in his blog “As Teacher Use of New Technologies Has Spread, Have Most Teachers Changed How They Teach?” We have access to some amazing technology like GAFE, virtual reality glasses thanks to Sesqui, virtual field trips, online databases and so much more, but we need to change how we teach first and use innovative technology to support innovative learning. This is definitely an area that I need to further explore.

Image courtesy of :http://teaching.utoronto.ca/caption-this/

As you can probably tell from this post I have many ideas swirling in my head. This image represents my early brainstorming.

I am really excited to further explore the questions I introduced at the beginning of my post. I can’t wait to do further research to narrow down my focus. Inquiry in action is pretty exciting!

Works Cited

Cuban, Larry. “As Teacher Use of New Technologies Has Spread, Have Most Teachers Changed How They Teach?” Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice, 20 Sept. 2012, larrycuban.wordpress.com/2012/09/20/as-teacher-use-of-new-technologies-has-spread-have-most-teachers-changed-how-they-teach/. Accessed 16 Sept. 2017.