Assignment Reflection 2

Roy Crotty has suggested that we record the "aha" moment for the assignment. Some of this I have already recorded, such as my struggle to grasp the nature of the obstacle in the ETL 401 assignment. The other key thing has been recognising the reason for the literacy skills posters of various types around the library, but more importantly realising that I can assist with the students acquiring these skills even more by designing my tasks with the steps explicitly identified, in other words using a Information Literacy model. As others have noted we often tend to follow these steps intuitively but it doesn't follow that our students will do this. Even designing the task, I include steps such as brainstorming, even if the question or questions are set but I don't ask the students to reflect on that session and record their understanding and their next step.

I'm also beginning to wonder if I should have copied some of my forum posts into my blog. If I have time and they're still up I might go back and check on these. For example, I recently talked about the role of the model as a diagnostic and supportive tool.

Of course, I'm speaking as a class teacher. What this course is teaching me is more about the role that our teacher librarian plays. We work closely together and our library is a valued place. So much of the obstacles and lack of principal support and funding that I read about don't apply. However, we have had some wonderful conversations in the course of both assignments. It was Lyn's observation that teachers don't know what the library has to offer that prompted my choice of obstacle in the assignment. She also noted that information literacy is not taught in pre-service training and so teachers aren't aware of this need or of her role in meeting this need. They continue to see a disjunct between the classroom and the library; wanting their children to come, especially at assignment time but not always sure what support is available. They then discover this wonderful person able to open up the Aladdin's cave of information and support. But unless this is documented and placed in the Year program, the constant changing of staff means that this important information is lost.

Cue readings on collaboration and the professional learning community.