Assessment for Librarians

With no gradebooks to turn in—and many other responsibilities within their purview—school librarians can be prone to discount their role in student assessment. But assessment is an essential component of helping students learn, as well as a powerful tool for advocacy, making it a crucial part of any school librarian's position.

Assessment builds trust with students, helping them see clearly what's expected of them and empowering them to establish their own bar of achievement. Assessment is a way of providing scaffolding for students and helping them move through their personalized zone of proximal development. Assessment also helps librarians develop more effective instruction that meets students' needs directly. When implemented well, and in conjunction with other best practices, assessment can elevate any library program.

So how can you help your librarians both see its import and build the skills to help them start infusing it into their own instructional practice?

This workshop kit, built around Dr. Barbara K. Stripling's online course, "Assessing to Empower Learners," will equip you with the materials to do just that. Implement it to help your librarians, at every level, realize the power of assessment. By participating in the content delivery, reflective prompts, and collaborative activities embedded in this workshop, they'll be able to understand the reasons to assess, develop reliable mechanisms for creating effective assessments, and work through examples that they can apply in their own libraries to enrich student learning.

"Assessment for Librarians" encompasses five components:

1. Part I: Guided prework to be completed by participants in advance of the first in-person session, approximately 60-90 minutes: "What Is Effective Assessment and Why Should We Assess Students in the Library?"
2. Part II: An interactive in-person session of 60-90 minutes: "What and How Do We Assess?"
3. Part III: Self-study with peer review, 2-4 hours over the course of 1-3 months: "Incorporating Assessment into the Plan"
4. Part IV: A second in-person session of 60-90 minutes: "Summative Assessment"
5. Part V: Ideas for continued application throughout the year: "Putting the Learning to the Test"

Each district's situation is different, so we hope you'll think of this outline as a jumping off point—use the materials and ideas in the format that will work best for your community. Many of in the in-person activities could be revised to occur digitally, especially if you can make use of "breakout rooms" in your conference software.

All of the materials to run this workshop are provided in the accompanying section. Take them and make them your own!

Workshop District Objectives:

• Participants will come to look at assessment as a core responsibility
• Participants will learn to position themselves as assessment experts in their school communities
• Participants will learn how to use assessment to improve as instructional leaders