I didn't think it was possible to be even MORE busy now that summer is here and my time teaching my beloved Grade 5-6 class is over. But it is!
In addition to teaching a fully-online Teacher-Librarian Additional Qualification course with Queen's University (based on the new courses that I wrote for them recently), I am also participating in two ETFO Summer Academy sessions as a facilitator, and I am the project lead for a special TDSB writing project. I also plan on attending the NAMLE conference and taking a short vacation. That's a lot for just the month of July!
I decided to focus on the board's writing project on today's blog. I won't go into too much detail, out of respect for the proprietary nature of some of the content (and the privacy of the writers). I think the three main points I wanted to remember are:
1) Like with teaching, sometimes the planning and pre-work is more intensive.
2) Group writing is both easy and hard.
3) Creating a document that is applicable to the entire school board means juggling a lot of elements.
I am so very grateful to Andrea Sykes for the opportunity to guide this work. It is due to her diligence and persistence that this project has become a reality. The team is revising the TDSB's Library and Learning Commons K-12 Teaching and Learning Expected Practice document. Assembling the team took hours of deliberation, consultation, and discussion. It's a small team of only five writers (excluding myself) and we (Andrea and I) wanted to ensure that we had wide representation of the different "library realities" in TDSB as well as varied perspectives. What made it extra challenging is that there are so many talented, hard-working, wise teacher-librarians in our particular school board. If we had the funds, we would have invited so many more participants - but that might not have exactly been a good idea.
Writing (or revising) as a group can be simultaneously easy and hard. I am appreciative of Tina Zita, who carved time out of her schedule to chat with me about how she managed the update of the Teacher-Librarian Additional Qualification guidelines for the Ontario College of Teachers. The processes that she suggested really helped the group bond as a team, find common ground, and consolidate main ideas. (Tina, I need to send you some of the visuals we developed during our first two sessions!) It's a tricky balance. We want to be on the same page, but we don't want a "hive mind". We need to revise and update the content, and word choice is important, but we have to ensure we don't get bogged down in debating the merits of specific sentences. As the project lead, I want to ensure the writers feel they have autonomy but I don't want to be too "hands-off". Thank goodness for online collaborative documents!
This blog title has three E words: Essential, Expected, and Effective. We spent some time during our first day as a team together wrestling with what it means to meet (vs exceed) standards. This document is part of the Expected Practice series. The actions mentioned are not meant to be just for the realm of the exceptional, "level 4" teacher-librarian. The document outlines what *every* teacher-librarian in TDSB must and should be doing. It is the essential work. School libraries are unique to their communities but we must ensure equity of programming, staffing, and expectations throughout the entire board. (That's a lot of E words in this paragraph!) There are so many documents, policies, and procedures that we need to reference but not overuse, as we don't want the document to become too dated too soon. The last time it was written was in 2014. We want to do it right and have it last.
Thank you to the writing team (M, D, K, W, and W) - I look forward to the rest of our scheduled time together!
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