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Showing posts from October, 2020

Walking with Our Colleagues as They Take Their Next Step

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  The CBAM Framework  In today’s blog post I’ll be using the Concerns-Based Adoption Model (CBAM) as the lens through which I view my co-teaching support role as teacher librarian in a COVID19 era school. The framework “holds that people considering and experiencing change evolve in the kinds of questions they ask and in their use of whatever the change is” ( Loucks-Horsley, 1996). These stages of questions start as self-focused, take on a more task-oriented slant, and then become centered around the effect this change has had on student learning.  The voyage from stage one “Awareness” to last stage of “Refocusing” can take anywhere from 3-5 years (Loucks-Horsley, 1996).    My Context and Challenges I would like to acknowledge that the expectations for this framework cannot be applied perfectly to my current teacher librarian experience. First, the changes asked of teachers during this time of COVID19 do not provide a timeline conducive to a questioning dialogue. It is expected that te

Chasing Relevancy

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Each morning the sun travels across our sky trying to chase down the moon, and each night the moon follows the same trajectory and tries close the gap. They are stuck in a cycle of eternal pursuit without conclusion. Somedays, as I learn more about the monumental task of managing and evaluating a reference collection, I feel as though I have entered a similar dichotomy. Teacher librarians will always be chasing relevant resources and those same resources will inevitably need to be replaced.   Theme Two In studying theme two I learnt about the basic requirements and the steps needed to take when evaluating resource materials. By reading the chapters from Riedling's Reference Skills for the School Librarian , I was given concrete examples of what constituted acceptable reference resources. This was complimented by Achieving Informational Literacy which provided examples for what below standard, acceptable and exemplary reference resources would look like. For a first year teacher-li

A Quality Picture Dictionary Is Worth A Thousand Words

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I signed up for this course because it was a core course and required for the completion of the Teacher Librarianship Diploma at the University of British Colombia (UBC). The topic seemed interesting, but apart from a vague understanding of reference material that I had gleaned from my summer job as a page at our local community library, I had not given reference material much thought. As the weeks passed, I came to an understanding about the value of reference resources and started looking with interest for my school library’s reference materials. To my dismay, they were out of date, obsolete and all were scattered around the library like paper sheets in a windstorm. Once they were reunited, they formed a very sad and very embarrassing reference collection.   From this very limited reference resource section, I selected the  Dorling Kindersley Ultimate Visual Dictionary  for the purposes of this paper. I was drawn to evaluate this resource because it looks to be in quite good conditio