Assessment Not an Option: Gathering Evidence of Effectiveness

In the age of accountability, school librarians must join classroom teachers and school administrators in collecting evidence to demonstrate that our teaching makes a difference in student learning outcomes (SLOs). While there are many “indirect” ways to document evidence, evidence of practice as defined by Ross Todd  (2007) places a “higher premium on direct measures of student learning” (71). If school librarians position their work at the center of their schools’ academic programs, there are many ways to document evidence of teaching effectiveness.

Ross Todd  (2009) described the evidence-based practice (EBP) model in three interrelated phases:

• Evidence for practice is scholarly research on which school librarians can build their programs.
• Evidence in practice is when school librarians collect data that indicate how students and educators benefited from librarians’ instructional interventions.
• Evidence of practice is when librarians analyze the results of their teaching to identify successes or areas for improvement.

School librarians then apply this evidence to adjust subsequent teaching interventions and disseminate their successes so that colleagues and administrators are aware of their contributions to improving student learning.

The Context for Effective Assessment

The American Association of School Librarians is a stakeholder organization in the National Center for Literacy Education (NCLE). NCLE stakeholders are working together to “identify and share the plans, practices, support systems, and assessments used by educator teams working to improve literacy learning” (http://www.literacyinlearningexchange.org/about/national-center-literacy-education). In October 2015, NCLE released a report based on surveys conducted in 2013 and 2015 and qualitative data collected in 2014: Building Literacy Capacity: The Conditions for Effective Standards Implementation (http://www.literacyinlearningexchange.org/building-literacy-capacity). When analyzing these data, NCLE focused on schools where teachers indicated that standards implementation was improving classroom practice and benefitting students. Their goal was to determine what these “strong-implementation” schools are doing to support the integration of new literacy standards.

NCLE learned that assessment along with leadership, instruction, curriculum, and professional learning is among the factors that support successful implementation of standards. In the report summary, NCLE noted that when schools are building capacity to support educators and students for success, new assessments are viewed as “useful feedback on the learning process and a fair measure of what students can do.” School librarians can work alongside their administrators and colleagues to build this kind of supportive learning community. In this collaborative culture, everyone is invested in everyone else’s success. This climate supports the conditions for assessments to be used most appropriately—as tools to provide feedback to educators who aim to continuously improve their instructional practices.

Dipping in or Teaching Deep

School librarians who are mindful of their administrators’ perceptions of the librarian’s contributions to student learning, will plan, teach, assess, and reflect on their teaching in order to continue to increase their instructional effectiveness. In short, they engage in EBP. According to Jennifer Richey and Maria Cahill (2014), school librarian participants in their study generally know about and practice aspects of EBP. However, two-thirds of these school librarians did not gather data related to SLOs. This is a missed opportunity on two fronts. First and foremost, these data help school librarians as they monitor and adjust the effectiveness of their teaching. And as advocacy tools, these data provide evidence that school librarians’ teaching makes a positive difference in students’ learning.

Dipping into a unit of instruction has been practiced in school librarianship. When classroom teachers are preparing to teach or reteach an existing unit, they often think of short-term interventions that their school librarian can make in order to support students during a research or inquiry assignment. Examples of this practice include teaching students how to locate resources, use the electronic catalogue or databases, evaluate websites or determine bias, and more. While these interventions can support students’ learning and the teacher’s unit, they do not yield data for EBP unless school librarians target formative assessments on the specific skills they taught in the unit.

While such an effort is more effective than teaching skills in isolation, it is not as effective as it could be in terms of maximizing the school librarian’s capacity to add value through joint instruction. Rather than dipping in, school librarians can go deeper by co-planning with teachers to align classroom curriculum with AASL’s Standards for the 21st-Century Learner. Through co-implementing lessons and units of instruction, school librarians not only teach specific information literacy and inquiry skills, but they can also support students in a myriad of ways through co-monitoring students’ guided practice. School librarians can note when students need remediation and review or reteach skills with individual students, small groups, or the entire class as necessary.

School librarians who coteach the unit from start to finish will be able to effectively co-assess SLOs with coteachers and modify their instruction as needed. School librarians can also collect reliable data based on their teaching that reflect the impact of their instruction on students’ learning over the course of the unit rather than on a short-term, one-shot intervention basis. This practice may yield more accurate and credible data that can help classroom teachers and school and district-level administrators understand how school librarians’ teaching matters. These data are also the type of evidence that can be used for credible advocacy—support for school librarians’ work and library programs based on results.

School Librarian Evaluations

Most school districts across the country are using students’ progress on standardized test scores to evaluate the effectiveness of classroom teachers. In this climate of accountability, it is important for school librarians who expect to be viewed as “teachers” to collect locally generated data to demonstrate the impact on student learning of their own or their join instruction. While there are other criteria that should be applied, educators feel increased pressure as a direct result of the emphasis placed on testing. These performance-based evaluations are primary concerns of building- and district-level administrators. 

Audrey Church (2015) conducted a three-part study in which she used annual surveys to learn how public school librarians in her state were being assessed. She found that the majority of school librarians were being evaluated on classroom teacher performance standards. As a result, the librarians in her study wrote annual teaching goals related to their teaching practice and did not focus goal-setting on library program goals. “To assess student learning, librarians use locally created pre-test/post-test measures, online assessment tools, and standardized test scores” (14).

AASL provides national guidelines for school librarian evaluation in 21^st-Century Approach to School Librarian Evaluation (2012). In addition and based on the Charlotte Danielson (2007) teacher evaluation model, AASL’s Sample School Librarian Performance and Evaluation System (2009) was rolled out with the Learning4Life initiative. It provides four domains on which school librarians’ professional practice can be assessed: planning and preparation, classroom environment, instruction, and professional responsibilities. It is important for school librarian cadres at the district- or state-level to work together to modify classroom teacher evaluation instruments to reflect the totality of the school librarians’ roles. It is also essential for school librarians who strive to be viewed as educators on par with classroom teachers to maintain a focus on SLOs.

The Bottom Line

Engaging in EBP is critical to the future of the profession (Todd 2009). School librarians must be proactive in creating the conditions in which they can collect, analyze, and use evidence of their impact on student learning. Through co-planning with classroom teachers and specialists, school librarians integrate reading comprehension, information literacy, and inquiry skills into instruction. Through co-implementing lessons and units, school librarians can collect evidence of the efficacy of their instruction. They can use these data to improve their practices and disseminate successes to library stakeholders. School librarian evaluators need our guidance. Co-developing assessment tools that measure the results of librarians’ teaching on student learning plus other aspects of school librarians’ responsibilities should be a goal for our every member of our profession. The bottom line: Assessment is not an option.

Works Cited

American Association of School Librarians. AASL’s Sample School Librarian Performance and Evaluation System. American Association of School Librarians, 2009. http://www.ala.org/aasl/sites/ala.org.aasl/files/content/guidelinesandstandards/learning4life/resources/LMS-DANIELSON.pdf

American Association of School Librarians. 21st-Century Approach to School Librarian Evaluation. Chicago: American Association of School Librarians, 2012.

Church, Audrey. “Performance-Based Evaluation and School Librarians.” School Library Research 18 (2015): 1-36.

Danielson, Charlotte. Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching. 2nd ed. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2007.

National Center for Literacy Education. Building Literacy Capacity: The Conditions for Effective Standards Implementation, National Center for Literacy Education, 2015. http://www.literacyinlearningexchange.org/building-literacy-capacity

Richey, Jennifer, and Maria Cahill. “School Librarians’ Experiences with Evidence-Based Library and Information Practice.” School Library Research 17 (2014): 1-25.

Todd, Ross J. “Evidence-based Practice in School Libraries: From Advocacy to Action.” in School Reform and the School Library Media Specialist, edited by Sandra Hughes-Hassell and Violet H. Harada. 57-78. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.

Todd, Ross J. “School Librarianship and Evidence Based Practice: Progress, Perspectives, and Challenges.” Evidence Based Library and Information Practice 4, 2 (2009): 78-96. http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP/article/view/4637/5318