Volume 40 Nº 1: March 2004

Letter from America

Ross Todd

We are getting ready to burst into spring, after a rather long and snow-covered winter. The trees are laden with buds and any day now New Brunswick will be covered in a spectacle of blossoms. Spring creates a buzz all round. People awaken from hibernation, there is an energy and movement around the place. It's a time when professional associations complete their professional activities for the year, and get underway their planning for the new academic year commencing in September 2004.

I have been involved in the planning of 'Collaboration and Reading to Learn @ your Library', which is the Fall Forum presented by the American Association of School Librarians, to be held in Dallas, Texas from 1st to 3rd October 2004. The whole theme of this conference focuses on professional development and strategies for collaborating with classroom teachers, reading and literacy specialists and others who play a critical role in promoting reading for understanding. Stephen Krashen will be the keynote speaker. In recent years, some of the most important reading research in relation to school libraries has been undertaken by Krashen. Collectively his studies explicate the contextual and instructional dimensions of reading development fostered by the school library. His evidence shows that students get a large portion of their reading materials from libraries; students read more when they have a quiet, comfortable place to read; free voluntary reading has a positive impact on reading comprehension, vocabulary, spelling ability, grammar usage and writing style; access to books and magazines predicts higher reading achievement; an ample supply of books is key to the fostering of independent and engaged readers, particularly ESL children; and students who read more typically have higher literacy development as well as overall higher student achievement. If Australian teacher-librarians and librarians interested in fostering children's reading are heading to the USA in early October, this is a conference to attend.

Teacher-librarians may also be interested to know of the 'Learning through the Library Best Practices' Archive, now available on the AASL's website: http://www.ala.org/ala/aasl/ aaslissues/aaslinfolit/learningthrough.htm

'The Learning through the Library Best Practices' are brief snapshots of successful teaching-learning projects, units of study, and strategies in K-12 schools and school districts. These practices reflect the Information Literacy Standards for Student Learning and demonstrate strengths in some of the following areas: integration of information literacy learning with various content area learning; evidence of improved student performance; use of technology as an effective teaching and learning tool; support of school reform efforts and national curriculum standards; and organisation and access. Best Practices are organized by grade level clusters: Elementary (K-5); Junior High / Middle School (6-8), and High School (9-12).

In early March 2004 I had opportunity to travel to Lewiston, Maine. Now, Maine is a beautiful state to visit, even if it was still knee-deep in snow. Historic villages, magnificent coastal scenery and quaint pubs, cafes, antique stores and rustic book stores all invite with the delicious aroma of fresh brewed coffee. Blueberries are one of its major products, and blueberry pies, scones, muffins, cheese cake, even blueberry wine are all significant temptations. I sinned. Here, I conducted a day-long professional development for Maine school librarians. This program built on a workshop program in late November 2003, when I presented an evidence-based practice program to 120 school librarians - its rationale, processes and strategies, barriers and enablers. At that workshop, I asked the Maine school librarians to undertake a small professional development project which focused on charting student learning outcomes of a collaborative inquiry unit with a classroom teacher, and which integrated Maine content standards and information literacy standards. The event in March 2004 asked the school librarians to return with their partner-teacher, and to present their collaborative learning projects. I was amazed that 70 school librarians and 70 classroom teachers turned up, and it was an incredibly engaging and empowering day. The range of evidence-based strategies was amazing, and here are some of the explicit measures implemented by the partner-teams to gather evidence of student learning outcomes: knowledge and skills mapping; analysis of student bibliographies; reflection sheets/self assessments; comment cards; minute papers; rubrics; checklist of current skills and acquired skills; process/search journals; knowledge tests (pre-post); teacher feedback recording sheets; video recording of learning process (for showing at staff meeting); summaries of evaluations of presentations and products; surveys/questionnaires; informal comments/anecdotes; before/after brainstorming records; portfolios of work; photo voice; exhibitions, displays of products plus student self assessments of learning; motivation board (staff room and library); and individual instruction review.

As the school librarians and classroom teachers shared their projects, a number of benefits to this collaborative adventure emerged, moving beyond the obvious benefit of being able to articulate more precisely and clearly a range of learning outcomes. These included: being able to spend meaningful time with teachers; being able to cover more curriculum content in less time; pooling of expertise puts stronger emphasis on creative and authentic learning; knowing that you are succeeding by being able to state specific outcomes; being able to make more effective judgments about student progress and providing clearer feedback to students and to school community on outcomes. The partners present all agreed that this took time for planning, and was enabled by a joint belief in a learning-outcomes focus, a willingness to be involved and to actually make a commitment to action rather than advocacy, and knowing what indicators to look for: setting concrete outcomes - that is 'the students will be able to ...' and knowing what to look for as evidence.

I was fascinated to hear of the strategies used by the teaching partners to communicate the outcomes to their school community. These included: putting a summary of projects in school newsletter to parents; highlighting learning outcomes in staff, curriculum and parent meeting; profiling teachers and thus indirectly profiling the library's learning focus; putting up photos and commentary of teaching units on the school web site, including student feedback of process and learning outcomes; teachers speaking at school librarian meetings; and community newspaper stories of the students' successes.

When I asked why they were so motivated to engage in evidence-based practice, particularly when one of the key barriers was TIME, I received this thoughtful response: 'Finding time is always a problem. However, this is often an excuse for lack of commitment. We pretend we are busy with other things because we have not made the commitment to student learning outcomes. We've stopped at information, rather than knowledge. As we grow to value something, we tend to make time. It really is a matter of what our priorities are'. Another said: 'My greatest fear of the future and my role is me not changing'. And one school librarian put out this challenge: 'The more we see and hear about different approaches to EBP, the more our confidence and experience is built. EBP should be the focus of our PD in the next few years'.

It was great to catch up with so many teacher-librarians when I visited Melbourne recently to speak at the SLAV professional development day. I look forward to catching up with many of you in Sydney when I return in July to speak at the Association of Independent Schools' conference

Formerly of the University of Technology Sydney, Dr Ross Todd is currently Associate Professor and Director of Research, Center for International Scholarship in School Libraries, School of Communication, Information and Library Studies (SCILS), Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.