5.4 Strategic planning and assessment
Candidates communicate and collaborate with students, teachers, administrators, and community members to develop a library program that aligns resources, services, and standards with the school's mission.
2010 ALA/AASL Standards for Initial Preparation of School Librarians
 Me as McGonagall
"But why's she got to go to the library?"
"Because that's what Hermione does. When in doubt, go to the library." - Harry and Ron, making sense of Hermione [Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets] I would love for my entire school community to operate on Hermione’s philosophy: “When in doubt, go to the library.” To encourage this, the media center must align resources, services, and standards with the school’s mission. During my Internship Course, SLM 552, I completed a program assessment of the media center in order to evaluate the effectiveness of an area of the media program. Each school community is unique and research was necessary to begin the assessment. I viewed the vision and mission statements of the school, county, and state. Then I discussed with the school library media specialist what areas of her program she might want assessed. In the discussions, I learned that both the Social Studies and the Science curriculums would be changing prior to the following school year. I decided to assess the current collection by topic and publication year in order to gauge how well it will meet the needs of the new curricula. I interviewed the content resource teachers and discovered that while both departments were receiving new curriculum, the Social Studies department would most likely not receive any information about their new standards and objectives until late in the summer. The Science department, however, will be working with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) beginning in the fall, and the resource teacher was able to pass the standards on to me. |
Once I had the standards, I could then evaluate the current media center collection for alignment. I learned about many available reports in the library catalog system (Destiny), and my mentor media specialist allowed me to experiment with building various reports. While she was available to help if needed, this trial and error method of digging into the capabilities of the back office side of the catalog was valuable to my learning and comfort level. I collected teacher input through a Google survey. The science teachers were not aware of what was in the media center collection, but they were aware of what resources they were lacking in their own department. Specifically they mentioned a need for more up-to-date resources on genetics and human body systems. After reviewing the survey data and comparing the content of the new standards to the resources in the current collection, I was able to come up with the following goals:
Education is constantly changing. Curriculum revisions, demographic variation, resource availability, and technological innovations all lead to a need for constant and cyclical examination of the collection. In the future, I will need to collaborate closely with resource teachers and team leaders as they are informed of upcoming changes. It was a major roadblock that the social studies department would not receive any information on their new curriculum until late July. The school library media specialist will not be able to align the collection to the instructional needs for that department until the school year is already underway. The school library media specialist needs to continually communicate and collaborate to remain aware of the changes in order to keep a collection current.
- Increase the collection on Physical Science and Human Body Systems, Cells, and Genetics by 20%, which will also decrease the average publication year.
- Collaboratively plan one research project per grade level with the science department incorporating subscription database resources and web-start pages that include up-to-date research.
Education is constantly changing. Curriculum revisions, demographic variation, resource availability, and technological innovations all lead to a need for constant and cyclical examination of the collection. In the future, I will need to collaborate closely with resource teachers and team leaders as they are informed of upcoming changes. It was a major roadblock that the social studies department would not receive any information on their new curriculum until late July. The school library media specialist will not be able to align the collection to the instructional needs for that department until the school year is already underway. The school library media specialist needs to continually communicate and collaborate to remain aware of the changes in order to keep a collection current.
This portfolio and the artifacts contained herein by Amy Soldavini are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License |
Revised July 2013
