change process | School Librarian Leadership

This fall graduate students in “IS516: School Library Media Center” have participated in bimonthly Twitter chats. The chats are based on the pull quotes from chapters in Maximizing School Librarian Leadership: Building Connections for Learning and Advocacy (ALA 2018).

We invite you to join us our final chat of the fall semester on Monday, December 9, 2019 from 7:00 to 7:30 p.m. Central Time. Chat questions are posted on this blog on the Wednesday before our Monday chats.

December 9, 2019: #is516 Twitter Chat: Leadership

This post is adapted from the Maximizing School Librarian Leadership preview podcast.

I believe school librarians have three converging pathways that point the way to leadership. School librarians are culture builders, professional developers, and changemakers.

School librarians are culture builders.
When we create a welcoming, accepting, risk-taking space for exploration in the library, our influence can spread throughout the building. With smiles, hellos, and a service orientation toward all library users, the library, the largest classroom in the school, can be as important as the front office in creating a climate of welcome.

With resources reflecting diverse perspectives, the library can be a place where learners – of all ages – come to explore their own worldview and the worldviews of others.

And with a commitment to exploration, the school librarian can model risk-taking—accepting missteps as an essential aspect of learning and growing from mistakes in order to fail forward. A whole-school, or systems thinking, approach helps school librarians serve as effective culture-builders.

School librarians are professional developers.
Through sharing our expertise and integrating the library’s resources into the classroom curriculum, school librarians practice reciprocal mentorship with the classroom teachers and specialists with whom we form effective instructional partnerships.

Collaborators coteach multiple literacies, inquiry, deeper, and digital learning. Educators model and coteach skills, such as collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and creativity. We model and coteach dispositions, such as flexibility, openness, and persistence.

Through coplanning, coteaching, and coassessing student learning and our own instructional proficiency, we practice the best kind of professional development—job-embedded. As collaborating educators, we develop our craft by working as equal partners; we coteach with classroom teachers, real students, actual curriculum, available resources and tools, with the real supports, and within the constraints of our everyday teaching environments.

School librarians are also changemakers.
We understand that the teaching and learning landscape is in a constant state of change. Lifelong learning is an essential behavior for all education stakeholders. Preparing students for futures that we cannot imagine takes a leap of faith and a willingness to accept change as the defining feature of all our lives.

Rather than sitting back and waiting for change to happen to us, changemakers are proactive. We strategize; we experiment; we test and retest until we create learning environments and opportunities that engage, excite, and support students as agents in their own education.

All three of these pathways to leadership require collaboration.

Effective school librarians can maximize leadership opportunities by collaborating with others—with administrators, educators, and students, and with family and community members.

#is516 Chat Questions (for copy and paste)

Q.1: How do you/can you show a commitment to continuous change/professional growth? #is516

Q.2: Why is collegiality so important? #is516

Q.3: How do you bridge Ss in-school and out-of-school lives? #is516

Q.4: How can you help develop an effective teaching force in your school? #is516

Please respond with A.1, A.2, A.3, A.4 and bring your ideas, resources, experience, questions, and dilemmas to our conversation so we can learn with and from you!

For previous chat questions and archives, visit our IS516 course wiki page.

Thank you!

Post Adapted from
Moreillon, Judi. 2018. Maximizing School Librarian Leadership: Book Study: Preview Podcast. https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/moreillon/episodes/2018-08-05T19_58_04-07_00

Maximizing School Librarian Leadership: Building Connections for Learning and Advocacy was published by ALA Editions in June, 2018. Chapter 9 is the final chapter in the book.

Chapter 9: Sustaining Connections in a Learning Culture

“Courageous leadership and the perseverance to continually improve are critical to creating a better learning culture for all students and ultimately, to transform learning” (Sheninger and Murray 2017, 227).

Building and sustaining a collaborative culture of learning provides the necessary foundation for change. In order for any innovation to be successful, all stakeholders must work together to achieve that shared goal. In this culture, leaders engender trust and ensure positive relationships among team members. Beginning and ending with the plural pronoun “our,” all members of the school learning community share responsibility for learning and take pride in the outcomes. They all have a common stake in continuous improvement that results in student success.

A collaborative culture of learning allows individual educators to capitalize on the strengths their colleagues possess while they build their own instructional expertise. When school librarians enter into future ready learning partnerships, they help others achieve their goals. Working in teams, they build trusting relationships. In classrooms and libraries, educators practice reciprocal mentorship in order to improve student learning outcomes. They take risks together to coteach, and they believe that their instructional practices can develop at a much greater rate with more assured improvements when they collaborate.

With leadership, a successful change process breeds more change. School librarians working as change aides have the opportunity and responsibility to collaborate with administrators to codevelop and sustain library programs that are at the center of initiatives to transform learning and teaching. As leaders, librarians embody the vision, walk the talk, and go the extra mile.

What you will find in this chapter:
1. Graphic from How to Make a Switch (Heath and Heath 2010);
2. AASL Shared Foundations and Key Commitments (AASL 2018);
3. Your Plan and Reality Graphic;
4. Empowered Collaborative Culture of Learning Graphic.

For all stakeholders to work together over time, an empowered learning culture must be nurtured in order to sustain change. Time and time again, principals, school librarians, and teacher leaders will be called upon to renew and reinvigorate the learning community’s commitment to growth.
School librarians can be essential leaders who build and sustain the relationships that cement the foundation of a culture of learners—young and older—who strive to make schools joyful, relevant, challenging, and effective learning environments for all.

Works Cited

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

Heath, Chip, and Dan Heath. 2007. Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. New York: Broadway Books.

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.

Image Credit: Word Cloud created at Wordle.net