Monthly Archives: March 2019

Educator Reflection

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Just as students benefit from reflecting throughout the inquiry process, so, too, do educators. Metacognition, or thinking about one’s thinking, is an essential aspect of learning. Thinking about how we plan for instruction, monitor student progress, provide interventions, and assess our instructional expertise helps coteachers transfer prior learning to their next teaching (and learning) experience.

School librarians can engage in various types of reflection. They can reflect as individual educators. They can also reflect along with their administrator(s) or supervisor(s). They may reflect in small groups such as Professional Learning Communities or along with a cadre of job-alike colleagues. One of the most effective reflection practices in terms of its impact on student learning may be reflecting with coteaching colleagues during the planning process, during lesson/unit implementation, and post-implementation.

School Librarian Self-Assessment
The AASL National School Library Standards for Learners, School Librarians, and School Libraries includes a “School Library Checklist” that covers a range of school librarian behaviors and responsibilities (2018, 174-180) I hope that it is no accident that collaborating with other educators is the first criterion on that list.

Figure 7.3 School Librarian Self-Assessment Criteria shows the keywords used by four organizations that school librarians can use to guide their reflection: AASL, Follett Project Connect, Future Ready Librarians, and International Society for Technology in Education (Educators).

“Collaborate,” “instructional partnership,” “collaborative leadership,” and “collaborator” are various terms used across these four sets of criteria on which school librarians can base one aspect of their self-assessment. Reflecting on one’s ability to lead through collaboration is an essential behavior of effective school librarians (see Leadership Requires Collaboration: Memes Have Meaning).

Different Planning/Thinking Styles
Being aware of how we think and learn can help school librarians, in particular, to be more effective in their roles as instructional partners. Perhaps, you, the librarian, are a sequential planner/thinker who is building a collaborative relationship with a random planner/thinker colleague. You will need to give up some measure of control in order to accommodate the preferences of such a coteacher. It is likely you will need to be flexible enough to think on your feet and approach planning or teaching at a different speed, via a different path or take learning in a different direction all together.

When we demonstrate our flexibility by accommodating the thinking styles of our colleagues and administrators/supervisors, we further show our readiness for future ready education. In order to meet the needs of today’s students, we must be flexible, responsive, and collaborative educators.

Strategies for Reflecting
Ensuring that reflection is a component of learning is difficult to achieve in practice. It seems that reflecting on any learning process has not yet become standard practice in many classrooms and libraries. Perhaps by including reflection time on planning forms and on lesson plans, educators can remind one another of the importance of metacognition.

For coteachers, including reflection before, during, and after an instructional intervention can help educators think, create, share, and grow. Educators may choose to write/draw/record their individual reflections. While reflecting individually is a useful strategy, reflecting together as trusting partners may be even more effective. (Sharing individual reflection documents is one way to do that.) Shared reflection can be a time for educators to express gratitude for what they are learning with and from one another. It can also be a time for coteachers to identify areas for improvement and recommit to growing together as instructional partners.

Reflection is also an important component on semi-annual or annual self-assessment or formal assessment/evaluation instruments. Keeping a journal throughout the year can help school librarians prepare to compose a comprehensive semi-annual or annual reflection. As instructional leaders in schools, administrators will want to know what educators themselves perceive as their areas of greatest strength, areas for improvement, and next steps for future learning.

Questions for Discussion and Reflection

  1. What are your strategies for ensuring that you make time to reflect on your teaching and learning?
  2. What are the advantages of reflecting with an instructional partner?

Works Cited

American Association of School Librarians. 2018. National Library Standards for Learners, School Librarians, and School Libraries. Chicago: ALA.

Moreillon, Judi. 2019. “Leadership Requires Collaboration: Memes Have Meaning.” School Library Connection Online.

School Librarian Evaluation

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Episode 7: Assessment (Evidence-based Practice) Virtual Podcast Interview with Kelly MillerIf school librarians are to achieve their capacity as leaders in their schools, it is their charge to influence the practices of their colleagues. As noted in Chapter 2: Job-Embedded Professional Development, coteaching is an ideal context in which educators organically practice reciprocal mentorship. Coteachers learn with and from one another as they guide, monitor, and assess student learning outcomes.

If school librarians are to collect direct measures, “they must be proactive in creating the conditions in which they can collect, analyze, and use evidence of their impact on student learning” (Moreillon 2016, 30). In short, in order to maximize their leadership, school librarians must seek out instructional partnerships, and they must coplan, coteach, and coassess student learning outcomes.

And in the best of all possible worlds, school librarian evaluators would observe them and provide actionable feedback in the context of coteaching. I was fortunate in my career to have site-level administrators who, with the classroom teacher’s permission, observed me during cotaught lessons. In several cases, our pre-evaluation conferences were conducted with the other educator present. In all cases, the post-evaluation conferences were one-on-one conversations between my evaluators and me.

Readiness for Coteaching
Jennifer Sturge, the Teacher Specialist for School Libraries and Instructional Technology for Calvert County (MD) Public Schools published an article in the January/February issue of Knowledge Quest (KQ). In the article, Jen shares how she provided collaboration training to help classroom teachers and school librarians prepare for classroom-library coteaching. She also worked with administrators to help them overcome possible barriers to coteaching such as library scheduling, collaboration time, and library staffing.

Jen found that 83% of the classroom teachers she surveyed believed that collaborating with school librarians would benefit students. Of course, there were challenges along the way, but can-do collaborators found solutions to address them. As Jen notes at the end of her article, “I was hoping to succeed but was also prepared to fail. After all, how could this project take off without funding? Through the sheer determination of everyone who has recognized the benefits to students and worked along with way with me, we’re moving slowly but surely to a more collaborative approach in our elementary school libraries” (Sturge 2019, 31).

Evaluating Coplanning
Using a coplanning form is one way to assess you and your colleague’s readiness to coteach. In the January/February KQ article “Co-Planning and Co-Implementing Assessment and Evaluation for Inquiry Learning,” I provided sample planning forms that include standards, learning objectives, and student outcomes evaluation criteria (Moreillon 2019, 42-43).

Effective collaborative planning creates a framework for measurable student success; it addresses the Understanding by Design (UbD) approach (Wiggins and McTighe 2005) to planning instruction. School librarian evaluators will benefit from observing, participating in, or reviewing educators’ evidence of collaborative planning.

Evaluating Coteaching
Evidence-based practice (EBP) suggests that educators base their instruction on published research, apply research-based interventions in their practice, and measure the success of their efforts in terms of the targeted student outcomes. UbD and EBP are aligned and can assist educators in determining the effectiveness of their teaching.

In the same issue of KQ, the literacy coordinator for Bismarck Public Schools Misti Werle shared her leadership in implementing and evaluating instructional partnerships in her district. Writing along with middle school librarian Kat Berg and English language arts teacher Jenni Kramer, Misti shared a “Levels of Library Services and Instructional Partnerships” document that guided Bismarck school librarians in serving as equal instructional partners. The document assisted them in stretching their collaborative practices and helped them assess their progress as well (Berg, Kramer, and Werle 2019, 35).

Evaluating the Outcomes of Classroom-Library Collaboration
In her podcast interview, Kelly Miller, Coordinator of Library Media Services for Virginia Beach (VA) Public Schools, provides school librarians with a pathway to leadership through evidence-based practice. When school librarians collaborate with others to develop an action research project, they can demonstrate their professionalism, collect and analyze data, and document how they are improving teaching and learning in their schools.

This tweet was cited in a recent issue of ASCD’s Education Update: “Have a dream or vision and struggling to get there? If so, let go of perfection, bring as many people together as you can, and focus on continuous improvement rather than a destination point of ‘success’” (@PrincipalPaul 2019, 3). Collaborative relationships can be challenging. Codesigning and coimplementing an action research project can be imperfect at times and collaborators must be able to self-assess and regroup.

Just as educators help students strive for continuous development, wise administrators and school librarian supervisors support educators in continually improving their practice. Approaching school librarian evaluation as providing feedback for learning means that librarians will have the necessary guidance to move their practice forward. Success is in the journey rather than reaching some static target for “perfection.”

Questions for Discussion and Reflection

  1. Why is it essential for school librarians to have a different evaluation instrument than classroom teachers?
  2. Think of a time you had an effective coteaching experience. What would an evaluator have noticed during this teaching and learning event?

For Fun!
Effective classroom-library collaboration can flourish in a positive school climate and a collaborative school culture. Figure 7.4 in this chapter (also available as a free download) shows a possible way to involve one’s administrators and colleagues in suggesting criteria for assessing the school librarian’s effectiveness.

Works Cited

@PrincipalPaul. 2019. ASCD Education Update 61 (1): 3.

Berg, Kat, Jenni Kramer, and Misti Werle. 2019. “Implementing & Evaluating Instructional Partnerships.” Knowledge Quest 47 (3): 32-38.

Moreillon, Judi. 2019. “Co-Planning and Co-Implementing Assessment and Evaluation for Inquiry Learning,” Knowledge Quest 47 (3): 40-47.

Sturge, Jennifer. 2019. “Assessing Readiness for School Library Collaboration.” Knowledge Quest 47 (3): 24-31.

Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. 2005. Understanding by Design, 2nd ed. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

 

Assessing Students’ Dispositions

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Assessing one’s development of future ready dispositions is an important aspect of self-assessment. During the course of inquiry learning, students have multiple opportunities for choice and voice that can lead them to becoming proficient as self-regulating learners. Feedback regarding dispositions is essential because it helps students see their progress and points them in positive directions for improvement.

Dispositions such as confidence, persistence, and self-direction may be more visible to educators than others such as flexibility, openness, and resilience. Students and educators can share joint responsibility for assessing students’ progress with regard to dispositions. Their different perspectives can create opportunities for social and emotional growth for students and greater understanding of students on the part of educators.

Student Self-Assessment
Assessing dispositions directly is a challenging proposition. It may be true that a student’s own perception of her/his progress in developing specific positive dispositions may be the most effective assessment. This will require trust between students and educators and student self-awareness and honesty. (I have found that many students are harder on themselves in self-assessment because they think educators are looking for perfection rather than for progress.)

“Ideally, educators will guide students to notice how they are applying dispositions throughout the inquiry and involve them in self-assessment throughout the process—not just at the end of the unit” (Moreillon 2019, 46). Polling can be used to “take the temperature” of the class regarding their feelings about the topic, task at hand, or progress toward learning targets. Exit tickets, journaling, and reflection logs are some of the most frequently used assessment tools than can help students drill down deeper to find their areas of strength, improvement, and challenge.

Modeling Dispositions
“Collaborating school librarians play a key role in helping students develop these dispositions in authentic contexts. When educators coteach, they model dispositions associated with team work—flexibility and open-mindedness. When they coteach technology-supported learning experiences, educators model on-going digital learning and dispositions, including perseverance and risk-taking. When educators guide students in real-world online learning, they model curiosity and grit” (Moreillon 2018, 95).

It is also important for coteachers to acknowledge when they make missteps in terms of dispositions. They can share their own negotiations during planning and implementing lessons so that students see how adult use various dispositions to work effectively with other people. If they are especially open and trusting, educators can invite students to observe and comment on how educators are demonstrating dispositions during coteaching.

Educator Assessment
If developing dispositions is one goal for students during an inquiry learning process, then assessing dispositions must be part of the process evaluation. Ideally, educators will name the dispositions students may be utilizing during inquiry. Educators will point out students’ developing dispositions and where they might be challenged in terms of social-emotional learning (SEL). This should be done individually and confidentially for individual students. It can also be done when noting a trending disposition for the whole class.

Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) offers an Assessment Guide that “provides several resources for practitioners to select and use measures of student SEL, including guidance on how to select an assessment and use student SEL data, a catalog of SEL assessments equipped with filters and bookmarking, and real-world accounts of how practitioners are using SEL assessments.”

As Christina Torres, an English teacher in Honolulu, Hawaii, wrote: educators “must get content- and skill-based data and socioemotional information to best support our students. Discovering and supporting your students’ needs, allowing students to share their strengths, and asking them about their emotional state shows we care about what they think and how they feel. Data doesn’t have to reduce students to a number, but the way we treat students can” (Torres 2019, 2).

Side note: When classroom teachers and school librarians coteach, it seems natural that they would also engage in shared assessment in terms of the development of dispositions they practiced as they coplanned, coimplemented, and coassessed student learning outcomes and their instructional interventions.

Questions for Discussion and Reflection

  1. What has been students’ and classroom teachers’ responses to assessing students’ dispositions, especially if this strategy is new to them?
  2. How do you self-assess your own dispositions in terms of your growth as an instructional partner or leader?

Works Cited

Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. “CASEL: Educating Hearts. Inspiring Minds.” http://www.casel.org

Moreillon, Judi. 2018. Maximizing School Librarian Leadership: Building Connections for Learning and Advocacy. Chicago: ALA.

­­­_____. 2019. “Co-Planning and Co-Implementing Assessment and Evaluation Strategies for Inquiry Learning.” Knowledge Quest 47 (3): 40-47.

Torres, Christina. 2019. “Assessment as an Act of Love.” ASCD Education Update 61 (2): 1-2.

Sharing the Power of Assessment with Students

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Sharing the power of assessment with students is a natural segue from the digital learning chapter in Maximizing School Librarian Leadership. Power sharing with students became a central feature of effective instructional practices when technology tools and digital information first entered our classrooms and libraries. Educators literally “handed over the keys” to learning when multiple resources, perspectives, and devices supplanted textbooks as go-to information sources. In this context, educators who could best share power in the classroom were the most effective at technology integration.

Perhaps the same can or will be said about educators sharing the power of assessments with students. If “research shows that less teaching plus more feedback is the key to achieving greater learning” (Wiggins 2012, 16), then making a regular practice of both educators and students assessing students’ progress can also lead to transferrable learning. Students who have the authority to monitor their learning process and progress can apply self-assessment strategies throughout their lives.

Self-regulating Learners
“Students must be given opportunities to self-assess their progress if they are to become self-regulating independent learners” (Moreillon 2019, 42). Self-regulating students know how to focus their attention on classroom activities, ignore distractions, and direct their actions. They also know how and when to apply skills and strategies and marshal their dispositions. Self-regulating learners are more effective at carrying out a task and without external interventions. These behaviors help them succeed in school… and in life.

Ensuring that students have agency is a trending topic in education. Self-regulation is an aspect of agency. “Agency can help motivate students as they develop positive dispositions, such as perseverance and the ability to tolerate ambiguity. Agency also supports students as they personalize, self-regulate, and own their learning, including negotiating unequal access to tools and resources” (Moreillon 2018, 95). As Eric Sheninger and Thomas Murray note: “Our students will enter a world where their ideas—their genius—will only matter if they have the agency to develop and share them. Helping students become their own biggest advocates is key” (2017, 77).

Inquiry Learning and Self-Assessment
Inquiry learning supports students as self-regulating learners by connecting them to their own background knowledge and asking personally meaningful questions. When student take responsibility for assessing, analyzing, and evaluating information to answer questions and using reliable information to take action, they practice and demonstrate their ability as agents of their own learning.

Self-assessing their learning process, solutions, and final products is the next level of self-regulation and agency. Educators guide students in using various self-assessment tools throughout the inquiry process to help learners monitor, track, and evaluate their process and products. When students self-assess their inquiry process, they analyze the information sources, they use during their investigation. One key commitment of school librarians within the AASL Shared Foundation of “Curate” is defined as “making meaning for oneself and others by collecting, organizing, and sharing resources of personal relevance” (AASL, 2018, p. 94).

Educators provide students or create along with students graphic organizers, exit slips, journal prompts, rubrics and other assessment instruments to help students assess their progress. Students can complete these assessments as individuals or in partners or groups depending on the organization of instruction.

Evaluating Solutions and Final Products
Students can use checklists, rubrics, and other assessment tools to evaluate their solutions and final products. Again, students can conduct these self-evaluations as individuals or in teams, and can also provide assessments or evaluations of other students’ work. Student-led conferences in which they share their learning with educators and family members are a way for students to take ownership of their process and final products. Students can also reflect and identify how they will take the next steps in their learning as part of their self-evaluation.

As Rick Stiggins and Jan Chappuis (2012) have noted, assessment should be for learning rather than of learning. Assessment must be a path to improvement for students and for educators. Educators whose ultimate goal is to help students become independent lifelong learners who apply critical thinking and take action in the world will want to guide students in becoming self-regulating learners. They will want to share the power of self-assessment and self-evaluation with students.

Questions for Discussion and Reflection

  1. How do you prepare students to share in assessment?
  2. What has been students’ and classroom teachers’ responses to student self-assessment, especially if this strategy is new to them?

Works Cited

Moreillon, Judi. 2018. Maximizing School Librarian Leadership: Building Connections for Learning and Advocacy. Chicago: ALA.

_____. 2019. “Co-Planning and Co-Implementing Assessment and Evaluation Strategies for Inquiry Learning.” Knowledge Quest 47 (3): 40-47.

Sheninger, Eric C., and Thomas C. Murray. 2017. Learning Transformed: 8 Keys to Designing Tomorrow’s Schools, Today. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Stiggins, Rick J., and Jan Chappuis. 2012. An Introduction to Student-Involved Assessment for Learning, 6th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Wiggins, Grant. 2012. “7 Keys to Effective Feedback.” Educational Leadership 70 (1): 11–16.