When I began the MLIS program at ODU, I had just entered my sixth month as the opening librarian of a brand new high school library. Although I had eight years of teaching experience in the Language Arts classroom and felt confident in my ability to teach literacy and research focused instruction, I lacked the knowledge and skills to build an organized, comprehensive, and strong library program that would extend beyond the walls of our school library space. The school library coursework at ODU has helped me to grow as a professional and accomplish many milestones within the context of resource access, knowledge organization, information literacy, and program management.

Standard 1: The Learner and the Learning

As I progressed through the courses that focused on school librarianship, one thing that deeply touched me was the focus on the individual learner at every level. When the school librarian steps into the teaching role, they are often teaching individual students for the very first time! This requires collaborating with the classroom teacher to have an awareness of learner’s development, as well as an understanding of the cultures represented in a classroom to ensure inclusivity under the librarian’s instruction.

In my work on the Collaboration Unit, I had the opportunity to support a diverse group of senior level students in self-selecting a research topic under the umbrella of Gender Equality with the goal of using their research to write an argumentative research essay. For many students, this was the first time that they were completing a research paper, and the skills that I covered in this mini-unit such as developing complex questions and evaluating information for credibility are transferable skills for college, career, and life.

The Storytelling Event Plan allowed for me to think about our learners from a more social emotional standpoint by creating an environment that was inclusive and safe for students to share personal stories with their families and other community members.

Standard 2: Planning for Instruction

While the area of Planning for Instruction was where I felt the most comfortable and confident as an educator, practicing this standard from the position of a school librarian encouraged me to challenge my thinking about the preparation of instruction and the way that I use data and information to reflect on and revise the effectiveness of my instruction.

The Collaboration Unit is the best representation of the work that I did in gathering data and information prior to the start of a unit in order to inform the instruction that was delivered. After a tremendous amount of planning with my collaborating teacher, we determined that students lacked many of the basic research skills they needed to start their Gender Equality research project, and I had the opportunity to exercise my professional expertise to advocate that students needed to learn how to craft strong research questions and generate keyword lists to use in search strings before the search and curation of sources could begin.

This was a particularly powerful area of growth for me as I had the opportunity to work with this teacher the year prior, and lacked many of the instructional skills that I have gained through the lens of a school librarian to create resource-based learning experiences that integrated inquiry for the purpose of ethical information access.

Standard 3: Knowledge and Application of Content

The Knowledge and Application of Content standard is where content knowledge and execution of instructional practice come together. This is an area of school librarianship that allows the librarian to not only provide access to high quality content, but showcase their skills as an instructional leader within their building.

Using the format of a Hyperdoc, I created the Digital Learning Assignment that focused on the learner’s ability to find and use information in an ethical manner. Learners had the opportunity to share their prior knowledge of creating citations, practice finding information that answered a prompt, and giving credit to the source of that information by utilizing a digital citation generator. While I have taught these skills before both in the role of a language arts teacher and a librarian,  building this mini-unit provides an opportunity for learners to engage, explore, apply, and reflect. This mini-unit also offers a curated list of additional digital resources that support instruction about creating citations.

In the Paired Text Teaching Guide, I was able to exercise the unique role that the librarian holds in a school by pairing multiple resources together through the standards of several content areas (English, History, and Economics). Students have the opportunity to engage in learning about the historical event of the Tulsa Race Massacre by reading nonfiction and fiction texts selected for young adult engagement. Additionally, instructors are provided with opportunities to engage their students in the inquiry process through questioning, as well as a variety of instructional ideas that support students in demonstrating their learning.

Standard 4: Organization and Access

The area of Organization and Access is where I had the most opportunities for growth as a school library practitioner. As I mentioned in my opening statement, I opened my library program without formal training in library management, access, and knowledge organization. Developing, curating, organizing, and managing a collection of resources requires a unique blend of skills and a great deal of unseen labor to the community at large. Consistent cycles of strategic planning and collection analysis are just a few of the essential components of an effective school library program.

The Strategic Planning assignment was incredibly powerful for me as a first year school librarian. It was through the steps of this assignment that I developed the core components of my library program, such as developing a mission and vision statement. In order to develop the strategic plan, I examined what elements were available for self-study in a first year school building, considering “where do we want to be” and “how do we get there?” (Moran & Morner, p. 82, 2017). The result of this work was the proposal for a Library Media Course which would center on creating a more robust library teaching assistant program to support my initiative of an unlimited circulation policy in our building. It is with great pride that I can say I implemented the first year of this program during the 2022-2023 school year, and it will continue next year.

Through my Collection Analysis, I learned how to develop evaluation criteria and identify selection tools to appropriately develop my library collection. It was through this assignment that I identified several areas for improvement in our library collection, which included adding additional titles to our Graphic Novel section, expanding our offerings of “class sets” of board games, and increasing our fiction and nonfiction titles that feature Black protagonists and/or authors.

Standard 5: Leadership, Advocacy, and Professional Responsibility

When I first took my position as a high school teacher librarian, a colleague reached out to me and said, “the number one task of the modern school librarian is advocacy”. At the time, I couldn’t fully appreciate how much truth was in that statement. School library programs are under frequent pressure to justify and demonstrate the power of an effective school library program.

In my Collection Development Plan, I had the opportunity to utilize the professional learning I have received through the MLIS program to consider how I would achieve the determined areas of change based on the identified areas of improvement from my Collection Analysis. Through the collection of data, examination of the library mission statement, a literature review, and the utilization of finding aids, I developed an action plan to address these areas of improvement. With this learning, I will be able to effectively collaborate with members of our school community and professional network to find success in making changes that positively impact all of our students and staff.

The Conference Presentation assignment allowed me the opportunity to continue to promote our school library program’s commitment to supporting all learners in their academic endeavors by providing an opportunity for other library and education professionals to view a variety of tools that can be used to support research projects. The opportunity to present professional learning as a leader in my school community has allowed me to model and promote the ethical practices of using and sharing information.

Over the last eighteen months, I have had the opportunity to immediately apply every single element and assignment of the MLIS program to the creation of my own library program. The impact of the ODU MLIS School Librarianship program will be felt throughout my school and identity as a professional for a lifetime.

References

Moran, B. B., & Morner, C. J. (2017). Library and information center management, 9th edition. ABC-CLIO, LLC.