Tell Your Story Every Day
Course
Turning the Tide with Campus Leadership [6:47]
You've started to advocate with all your students, teachers, parents, and even the outside community. Now, you need to begin to work directly with the campus leadership as well.
This is not a one-way street of conversation coming just from you and your base, it needs to come back down so that there is an actual conversation that's reinforcing all of these points and allowing you to fill in gaps when curriculum changes or philosophy or leadership. You need to really work to build this.
There's also a systems principle in there. I did read an article that talked about how they actually are more important for you to access because they are the next level of principles, and if we can teach them how important libraries are in their lives and in their teachers' lives, it will be easier as they are promoted up the chain, so that's a little side bit to think about.
As you build this relationship with leadership, you have a few goals. You want the leaders to see you as important by seeing that you are supporting student achievement directly though student interaction, and indirectly, through collaboration with teachers and parents. You want your base, those teachers, parents and students, to mention the positive experiences in the library in regular conversation.
You hope that leadership will refer to the library as a campus program strength when speaking to teacher and parent groups, and even to district leadership. You want to be able to say to leadership, "Stop by Mrs. X's room to see the book trailer students did," or whatever example the week is a strong representation of your involvement in classroom curriculum.
A couple of times a year, you might make a week-long log, there's an example attached, of how you spend your days. Be sure to include all those meetings, scheduled or hallway moments, that lead to classroom support or class visits to the library. You can use this log both to improve your own practice and to share with administrators to show that you are really busy in student-focused activities, every day, all day. This is part of being seen as participating in the active education of students all the time.
We all know, as librarians, that literacy is the lynchpin of education and libraries are keys to literacy, but our leadership doesn't always make that connection. You can look to Stephen Krashen and Richard Alington for research that supports the importance of free choice reading in advancing student comprehension, as well as their enthusiasm for reading. There's an article by Pilkington that goes in the same direction in making sure that libraries contribute to literacy.
Then, there's Anne Martin's article for the National Association of Elementary School Principals that talks about the fact that digital natives are not necessarily digital literacy. Too many people say, "Well, we've got the internet. Why do we need a library? When in fact, we need a librarian more than we ever did before the internet and we needed us a lot, at that point."
You can also look at how you might demonstrate the return on investment for library expenses: staffing, book expenses, even database resources. The article, Libraries: The Best Bang for your Education Buck, by Zinkin, as well as an ALA, almost seemed a throwaway PDF, but it's The Value of Non-Adult Juvenile Public Library Circulation. It sounds dry and tedious, but what it talks about is figuring out if a book costs $20 and it circulates 20 times, what is the return on investment? You've just gotten 20 x 20 worth of value in the money expended.
So if people don't understand that, they're thinking that they're just throwing this money away. There are ways, there are formulas. You don't have to do a lot of it. I think a few judicious efforts at that do more than overwhelming people with data. The Australian School Librarians have lots of websites and articles that are worth looking at. They are scattered through my various bibliographies and definitely worth your attention.
The one that comes to mind this minute is The World of Mrs. C, and then, not an Australian but Jennifer Legard's Open Letter to Principals about what they need to look at when hiring a librarian. That's not just useful if your principal is trying to hire a librarian. It's useful for you and your principal to understand what they should be expecting of the librarian. So you have a lot to live up to on a daily basis and he has a lot that he should be expecting, or she should be expecting.
Then, there's Page Jager's article Smart Goals for Visibility. Make yourself goals, small goals that you can manage to be visible. I've given you a lot of ideas already and I'm not done, but use those quotes that you picked up from teachers and students. Use them in conversation or put them on posters, or stick them in your newsletter. Invite the principal to the library often to see you in action while you're teaching, while you're just doing reader's advisory with a student or three, and to the special events that I'm sure you hold.
In Texas, there's a big bunch of stuff around the Blue Bonnet Award. Whatever you do that features reading, literacy, research skills, resources, make sure the principal is aware of all that you do, every day, so that they realize they can't do without you, and don't forget to make sure that you know what his professional development, her professional development goals are for the teachers because you can feed articles and resources that will help with those goals. Then, you're not only indispensable to student achievement and teacher success, but to principal growth and principal leadership success.
It's all a circular process and a spiral that builds this pyramid, so there are three geometric illustrations of all the things that we need to pay attention to.
Dorcas Hand acknowledges that communicating with campus (or building) leadership is a complex endeavor, one that can be supported but not shouldered entirely, by allies and supporters. The public perception (held by some) of a diminishing role for libraries in technology and information today may be similar to views held by school principals and administrators. The school librarian must show evidence that the library is essential and communicate this effectively to administrators. Hand points to numerous resources to be coupled with local data collection and efforts.
1. Following the suggestions and sample log provided by Hand, keep a week-long log of library activities. Include class visits, booktalks, reference support, teacher collaboration planning, collection development activities—as thorough a record as is reasonable to keep. As Hand suggests, "be sure to include all those meetings, scheduled or hallway moments, that lead to classroom support or class visits to the library."
2. Review and reflect on your log at the end of the week. Categorize your activities into themes or sets, perhaps according to the roles of the school librarian: teacher, instructional partner, program administrator, leader, and information specialist. Where is your time spent? Does the log reflect your work as you thought it would? What are areas of strength and areas for growth? How might you share this information with your principal or administrator? Remember that it's ok to share needs for professional growth with your principal. Time NOT spent with students is important to document and consider, as it may reflect practices not necessarily under your control.
MLA Citation
Morris, Rebecca J. "Tell Your Story Every Day: Log Your Practice." School Library Connection, September 2017, schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/1987177?learningModuleId=1987183&topicCenterId=2247903.
Entry ID: 2128160
Additional Resources
About the Author
Dorcas Hand, MLS, is Director of Libraries at the Annunciation Orthodox School in Houston, TX. She earned her master's in library science from SUNY Albany. She is editor and co-conspirator of the www.studentsneedlibrariesinHISD.org website, an advocacy site in support of Houston ISD librarians. Hand is also editor of Independent School Libraries: Perspectives in Excellence. Her work is available on www.strongschoollibraries.com.
MLA Citation
Hand, Dorcas. "Tell Your Story Every Day. Turning the Tide with Campus Leadership [6:47]." School Library Connection, ABC-CLIO, November 2015, schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/1987177?learningModuleId=1987183&topicCenterId=2247903.
https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/1987177?learningModuleId=1987183&topicCenterId=2247903
Entry ID: 1987177