More on ETL 401 Assessment Task 2

Unlike the previous assignment, I held back submitting this one until almost the deadline. This has been helpful because I have learnt more about the expectations and other aspects from Roy's responses to the forum posting by myself and others. In fact I have re-written some of Part B before submitting today, based on Roy's comments about professional practice being more than just teaching. In doing so, I have abandoned some more specific observations that I made about the standards, which I'm including here.

There are two aspects upon which the two sets of standards differ. The first is the skills that are required to create and maintain “a safe and challenging learning environment” (NSW Institute of Teachers, 2005, pp. 10-11). For the NSW Institute this includes discipline, managing student behaviour and ensuring student safety (pp. 10-11). The ASLA standards appear to emphasise the management of systems and information rather than students. This is probably not the intention but it has the potential to infer that teacher librarians do not require the same management skills as class teachers, which is not the case.

The second example is the reference to the implementation of the school’s mission in 2.3 of the ASLA standard. In this instance the ASLA standards have demonstrated a better acknowledgement of the role of schools as not just knowledge communities, but rather learning communities, which seek to address a variety of developmental needs in their students within a particular social, ethnic, religious or geographic context. The reference to knowledge of library and information management in ASLA 1.4 may seem to be unique to the teacher librarian but it has a parallel with the teacher “continually improving their professional knowledge and practice”.

The other aspect of the assessment task is this blog. Looking at the marking criteria, I am concerned at how much more I may have been expected to log here. As I mentioned in an earlier posting, the expectation of writing this blog and forum posting and actually doing the reading, research and reflection required by the course has been a big ask. I also reflected earlier that I had used Word documents to make my own notes and (as I discovered while reviewing material for Part A and Part B) I had copied and pasted and referenced the Forum comments of others in those Word documents rather than this blog. Right or wrong procedure? I suppose that I will soon find out.