In this class, Resource Alignment for School Librarians, we will be working through the resource alignment process developed by Karen R. Lowe as outlined in her book Resource Alignment: Providing Curriculum Support in the School Library Media Center. Resource Alignment is a library collection development process that includes collection analysis, weeding, curriculum matching, and the development of a 3-5 year library collection development plan.
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Collaborative Work Time
Who did you meet with during your three-hour work time? What time(s) did you meet? How did you meet? How did it go? What did you learn?
I met with and emailed K-6 teachers in our building, with the exception of one grade level (4th - I will catch up with them this week). I then listed out the topics by grade level and dewey number, using colors to code and seperate things out. Most of my time has been spent then analyzing and printing lists (Destiny) of the areas for 1st - 3rd grade; we're seeing the overlap with upper grades.
For the collaborative time I first worked with the HS librarian in my district. We started to go through the Iowa core for Social Studies and Science finding topics in the content and how it would line up with the Dewey Decimal System. This is very much a once over, and general, but it does start to give us a feel of what we need and where there is greater emphasis on topics that there may not have been before. Also as part of our district’s professional development day a couple of weeks ago, I sat in on the power standards conversation with the secondary social studies, science, technology/computers and English. Our power standards are the key concepts and skills that students should know at the end of each grade level. While many of these discussions are still taking place, it is good to hear and be a part of the conversation. I am still in the process of meeting with teachers to discuss things more in detail related to what they are teaching and how this will tie in to the collection and dewey decimal system.
Collaborative work time blog: I met with Deb Wegmann (student in this class) at her school’s library on February 15th from 5:00-6:00. We discussed our collections, mostly the weaknesses that we have in the nonfiction at both buildings. We found it interesting that our collections varied as much as they did. (We teach in two neighboring school districts.) We learned that both collections need some serious weeding but we are apprehensive of getting rid of so many books at once. I will be focusing on improving my 600’s section, while Deb will be working on her 500’s. We both decided that time spent with the classroom teachers would make this process go quicker and easier.
I spent my other 2 hours talking with K-5 classroom teachers at Nixon Elementary during their prep time the week of February 20th. I was informed on the science units that they will be focusing on for the rest of the year, as well as what the teachers could use as support in their new “Bringing History Home” units. I shared the highlighted sheets with them, which related to their units, and took suggestions/ideas from them on what to purchase. This was also beneficial for them to see what the library already offers to support their curriculum that they aren’t using. We also looked at the district student learning expectations for the science and social studies areas to make sure we had covered everything. I need to follow up with the 5th grade teachers as we ran out of time and they had great ideas.
I met with Dave and Alicia, fellow Marshalltown librarians taking the class. We met on March 1 from 4:30 - 9 ish in my Hoglan Elementary Library. (We got a little carried away and just kept working!)
During that time we looked through the Marshalltown curriculum, so we were able to figure out the gaps in our collections. My 900 section will be very bare once I get all of the old books removed!
We took this time to check many of the titles in our collections to see if they are in the Wilson Catalog. I was surprised to find out that my 500 and 600's sections aren't as bad as I once thought. Many of the books that I would have deleted due to age are still in the Wilson Core Catalog. This made me decide to concentrate my purchases on the 900 section this year instead of the 500's like I once thought.
I met with the psychology and anatomy teachers to discuss an upcoming “brain day” collaborative project involving dissection, research, and a final project. I also met separately with each person to discuss other upcoming research papers and/or projects. We looked at gaps that could be filled in with online resources from Heartland AEA and possible print materials that could be ordered from Follett. The anatomy teacher and I also discussed adding more medical based novels for her class next fall. We have met during during their free periods and after school.
I met with the Art teachers in the building to discuss the possibility of adding additional modern art resources. The collection currently focuses on 2D art and so they would like to add some additional resources on 3D art and design. I hope to focus somewhat on ceramics, since they recently added a ceramics II class to the curriculum and we do not have too many books on this topic.
The French teacher and I have been meeting to plan a collaborative unit on French food. We have met during her free periods in her room and in the library. We discussed the possibility of extending the unit to incorporate some other resources and expand the student’s knowledge of cooking methods.
During my annual evaluation with the principal this week, we did discuss my plan for updating the collection, getting rid of outdated material and purchasing new books and electronic resources. He is in favor and will try to get me the budget funds to update key areas of the collection.
I met with 3 of the social studies teachers, individually. The first one was SB who teaches US government. His class was researching in the library Feb 15) and we took the opportunity to discuss supplemental resources. We talked for about 45 minutes. I feel a little bad about it now, because later I decided I would focus on American History before American Government. But, he’s on the list! Second I met with SG who teaches American History and Sociology. She came to the library during her planning period (Feb 20) and we discussed the specific units covered in her class, and what the emphases are. We talked for about an hour. After this discussion I determined to start with this class to align curriculum. The third ss teacher, BT and I talked for about 30 minutes on Feb 24th in the library while his students were researching. He teaches World Geography, and I had previously determined gaps in this area of my collection. Once again, however, my priority is going to be American history from reconstruction to the Vietnam War, with a secondary emphasis on Vietnam to the present ( the collection is deplorable in this area). I will give a nod to geography, and maybe government, but that may not happen until next year. My last meeting was with the 9th grade librarian, who used to be the librarian at the high school, too, until they hired me. We met after school from 3:15-4:15 at her library on Mar 5, and again on Mar 7 after a 6-12 librarian meeting during early out. We reviewed all of the information about the SS curriculum and discussed both supplemental materials to support the curriculum and strategies to ingratiate ourselves into these units.
Heather Hansen and I met 3 hours for collaboration. We worked on Tuesday, March 13th from 8:30 - 11:30, plus we added another hour as we went out for lunch and continued our discussions. We were looking specifically at elementary libraries. We looked at shelf analysis of both libraries and agreed that we are needing to work on our nonfiction sections as many of them were marked quite nicely with yellow. We also had a discussion about the Follett analysis for each of our respective buildings and how this tool helped us target our needs as well as any areas of strength. We both discussed plans on how to go about adding funds to our library budgets - we both have Foundations we are going to approach as well as PTO. We are both excited about this process that has made it easy to see where the holes are and that we now have a systematic way of weeding and adding to our library collections.
I also had an opportunity to work with our curriculum director. We are ordering new K-4 Social Studies materials and I talked with the curriculum director about how the library could use some new materials and I targeted what they needed in each level in the "Additional Reading Opportunities" from the company. I used Wilson's for the best books to order to help support this curriculum. I was happy to tell the curriculum director that we had some books, but a some more would be most helpful. I was able to order $1000 in books for our new curriculum. Needless to say I will be on every curriculum committee the year they are looking for new materials!
Kristi and I had a 40 minute conversation by phone to get acquainted and plan our 3 hour collaboration time:
Met 2/18/12 at Oelwein Public Library
1:00 – 4:00
Kristi helped me to stay tough about weeding the 800’s; pay attention to the dates; talked about the big 5; alignment form was begun (mine will be detailed differently than page 33), how our schools are doing with essential learnings with Core Curriculum and our schools are not as far along as they need to be to help us with resource alignment; use of Wilson Catalog and ways to look up things easily; we realized we are in the same boat with our collections (though she has a sizeable budget and I have an extremely, recently reduced, budget). We realized that once the purchase cycle is in place, other books will go out of date and the cycle will go on and on and on….; have a beginning list of Wilson narrow core to start replacement proposal, which for me will begin with 300s next year. There is MUCH weeding to be done. Continuing the conversation with a classmate/colleague is so beneficial. Kristi is not the only librarian in her district, whereas I am K-12 with 4 buildings. It helps to talk to another professional invested in the same class at the same time.
I will be meeting with lang. arts, social studies, health and fcs, science, cte teachers to confirm units of study and incorporating their needs into the replacement cycle and proposals of purchase.
*I have met with social studies and know that this new young teacher is still finding his way, but civil rights and world religions were definite units he identified. He is also indicating U.S. history beyond Civil War, so we will be investigating his possibilities more at the end of the year. I have also met with the health teachers and will be aligning materials (especially using resources across the building levels) for their studies. The art teacher has stopped in an indicated best resources to support his curriculum and would utilize the library more, given specific purchases. There has also been CTE input for up to date careers - a common cross-curricular study area at our high school, focusing on both print and nonprint resources. Math teachers have contributed that some of the older math books contain formulas that are no longer appearing in new publications, so a note of caution about weeding was submitted from them.
Sandy Antons and I met on March 13th during spring break from 8:30-11:30am at her school, Strawberry Hill Elementary in Anamosa. We were both looking at our elementary library collections. We discussed using Follett and their item analysis and comparing ours and then decided that we both need to focus on the non-fiction section of our libraries. We discussed our library budgets and the need to look for additional funding from grants or our school foundations. We talked about how the 5-year rotating weeding schedule will look and worked on getting mine balanced so that each year doesn’t have too many large Dewey ranges included. The time went rather fast as there was a lot to discuss and compare between the two. We had planned to discuss our Science curriculum and enhancing the FOSS kits that our schools use but we ran out of time.
I first talked to my principal about the best way to gather curriculum information, and for the core subjects we decided to use the Course Essential Elements which are the two week pacing guides teachers complete throughout the year. These list the exact standards/benchmarks/core indicators for a two-week period. Talked to several science teachers about these and want to start focusing in that area because of an "object project" they do in collaboration with 8th grade English teachers. I've highlighted key terms for all three grades. Spent 30 minutes talking to our head librarian. Discussions included the Wilson Core, Iowa Core (our district has not aligned its curriculum yet so we are not focusing on that yet) weeding, budget, my Titlewise collection analysis, and reviewed how the English project went this year. I spent two hours collaborating with Kris who is also taking this class on Monday, March 26. We discussed all aspects of what we've been talking about for resource alignment and the steps to take because I don't feel like I understand it all. I talked to Cheryl C. about my frustrations with what a huge task this is, because I really want to weed what I know should be deleted and then use an updated analysis and shelf-list to show my true collection. Then I'd like to work on gaps. There is not enough time to get the weeding done this spring no matter how late I stay. I need to focus on the plan! I'm excited that social studies teachers are starting to ask for more print materials to go along with Culturegrams and other databases, but since there are 28 of them, I feel overwhelmed there also! Recently, a principal told me that we will have a class of dual language learners who will be immersed in Spanish for 1/2 of the day and consequently I will need to add Spanish titles. I have some but they are quite dated. Hopefully, there will be other sources of funding to help with purchasing items. My highlighting has been done, but I do not have all of my gaps marked on the Dewey list yet. So, still working on the resource development plan.
This is a hugh process--especially in a large school. It is important to go systematically through it--and take the time needed to do a good job. Once through the process, it does become easier.
I spent an hour with Keri Annis looking over our results and talking about the Core Curriculum. It was pretty interesting how different sections of our libraries stood out as having "shot guns methods"for how our collections have been added to and weeded in the past. We both agreed this class has been very beneficial for us to take a deeper look at our collections since we are both fairly new to this position. It has both of us thinking about how we weed and how we replace our books. We can't financially afford to replenish all the books that need to be weeded so a five year plan seems more realistic. The other two hours I have spent was talking to grade level teachers before and after school. I don't have common planning with any group of teachers so my time with them is very limited. So I first sent them an email and asked them to think about what their curriculum was and what areas they think we need more resources. This was also a great opportunity for us to talk about items we had that may not have been utilized in the past. When I looked at my analysis of copyrights and what our classroom teachers suggested I decided our 500 section took such a hit and it is a section that needs attention right away, it can't wait. Having good nonfiction literature is very important for students to have readily at their finger tips.
I met with several teachers individually during the past few weeks. First with the history teacher and science teachers separately after school a couple of times in early March, then collaborated with the English teacher after school on March 6th. During an in-service work time on March 12, I was able to talk about curriculum individually with the business, art, science, math, English and health teachers for a total two hours. Finally I concluded with a discussion on March 20, prior to morning classes with the family consumer science teacher. I did not get as much specific information concerning curriculum as I had hoped. The teachers are overwhelmed by all the changes we have encountered over the past 1 1/2 years. They are adjusting and still learning the curriculum of their new teaching assignments, as well as trying to complete information for the state. Many of the teachers use mostly online sources for research. With the addition of junior high students, I will work at updating the non-fiction, focusing on this age level; beginning with history and biography books.
For Joyce VonGlan: In February, one of our high school social studies teachers actually volunteered to help me go through the 300’s. Using a copy of the Iowa Core Social Studies standards for 9-12 grades and our high school curriculum for social studies, we proceeded to check for relevancy and make a list of the gaps and weak areas. We worked on this project several hours before and after school.
On March 8 during our Professional Development early out, I met with the seventh grade teachers for about an hour. They were discussing and reviewing the success of their across the curriculum unit on biographies. Naturally, the library plays a very important part in this unit because the students begin their selection of a famous person by browsing through our collection of biographies / autobiographies. We encourage each student to read a book that has an AR test available. Of course, if we do not have a book to match their selection, the AEA and other libraries are contacted to locate a book at the appropriate reading level. In art the students made a sculpture of the person. In English and Computer classes they write and publish a paper. Finally, the students will make a presentation at the spring concert. The teachers were ready with suggestions for biography / autobiography books and AR tests. After this unit many students discovered that they enjoyed reading the biographies and continued to read this form of nonfiction. This area of our library has a good selection, but we did discuss the importance of keeping it up to date. Fortunately, our principal agreed.
My collaboration time was spent with a couple groups of people.
I first met with my principal to share what I was doing in this Resource Alignment class. I was also hoping to get my principal on board so she may see the necessity to increase my budget. She was very receptive and even excited to hear how it works. I look forward to sharing my 5-year plan and budget with her when I have them completed. We met for 30 minutes.
I next met with my Professional Learning Community (PLC) which consists of me and four other district teacher librarians. Three of my colleagues have already taken this class, so they were a wonderful help. I asked them to help me clarify how to find gaps in our collection with respect to our curriculum. They showed me a wonderful trick that they use when finding the gaps. I showed them my collection analysis form and my highlighted shelf list. They shared with me that they highlight the areas they lack items in with one highlighter color, and then highlight the curricular areas with another color. The areas that have overlapping colors are the ones that they concentrate their resources (budget/funding) on. I think that is brilliant! We met for 30 minutes.
I met with my PLC a second time when I had questions about finding resources for the areas that I identified as immediate needs. They shared their strategies and methods of acquiring resources for these areas. We met for 20 minutes this time.
I have a Library/Technology Committee in place at my school, of which I am the lead member. It is comprised of one teacher from the K-1 team, one teacher from 2nd grade, one teacher from 3rd grade, one teacher from the 4-5 teams, and one specialist teacher. These teachers meet with me periodically to discuss technology and curricular needs at specific grade levels and building-wide; to share technology and library resources; and to complete “leader” training for technology. I met with this committee to discuss the particular science curriculum needs at the grade levels. I shared my Titlewise analysis and the work that I am currently doing to align our library with the District curriculum. We had a 40-minute discussion of the topics and needs they have for their specific classrooms with regard to the Iowa/National Core Curriculum. I asked them to return to their respective grade level teams (I would meet with the Kindergarten and 5th grade teachers to do this as there was no Kdg or grade 5 teacher on the committee), and develop a list of specific science topics that they felt needed to be “beefed up” in our library that they were not able to locate through AEA or online, etc.
I met with the Kindergarten teachers at various times as (I was not able to meet at their common planning time), and we discussed what their needs were. The total time I spent with the Kdg teachers was about 25 minutes.
I met with the 5th grade teachers collectively for 20 minutes. They shared with me that many of the items that they require can be reserved through our AEA or found online through various websites, but gave me more general suggestions for purchases.
When the Library/Technology committee met again, each shared their grade level team needs. Our K/1 representative shared a book that she thought should be purchased in multiple copies for use by all grade levels. The other committee members readily agreed, after perusing the book. I put it as a major priority for my purchases. Suggestions were also made that each of our science curriculum teacher guides also included a resource guide for supplemental reading books. I decided that this will be my starting point for the areas that were determined the greatest need areas. I also shared a little about Wilson’s Catalog and how this resource will help me identify books to purchase for the need areas, too. We will meet one more time prior to purchasing where I will share my list of books with the committee for any feedback. This meeting spanned 45 minutes.
I am still preparing this list and have not met with the Library/Technology Committee a third time yet.
I met with a 2nd grade teacher, a 3rd grade teacher and a 4th grade teacher over the course of several weeks. Most times were just a 10-15 minute short session where we would talk about what is upcoming for them in units, what is covered in Iowa Core, what they are using for their 'big ideas' with SWH, etc... I then took those conversations and put them to work in the library assessing exactly what I had available in those areas as well as varying reading levels that will need to be addressed. I found that my 500's are pretty good in relation to what is currently being taught in classrooms - which I felt really good about. My 600's and 900's are a little lax in certain areas curricularly as well as interest as well. I have a hard time with finding suitable age reading material for topics such as WWI, WWII, Civil War, etc. in the 900's. A lot of what I find is meant for older readers. My kids do love the Graphic Library set of historical events, so may need to see what else is available in those. All teachers I met with were very appreciative of the resources that I currently do have to offer them and my willingness to purchase more of what they are going to need with Iowa Core coming down the pike! :)
Feb. 6 20 minutes. Discussed with Kim, my colleague about the class and what are next steps are. We both agreed our school is just starting with evaluating our curriculum but there are a few projects that will probably stay. We will focus on those and keep asking about new developments. I also felt we need to make better connections with the special needs department.
Feb. 14 40 minutes on the phone with Pat to plan our meeting and we discussed general things about our collection. Our school is starting to work on curriculum in relation to the Iowa core. Since we are just beginning it is hard to know which projects will stay and which will go.
Feb 17 20 minutes with Kim Traw. She told me about a new class and some of the projects the teacher has started this year. However when I checked with the teacher he didn’t know about that project. So I will not focus on developing information for this project. The science department is also adding another class but when I talked to the department head she said they would be writing the curriculum this summer.
Feb 18 3 hours at Oelwein Public Library. See her post for more details.
5 minute conversations:
1. Talked with the drama teacher about purchasing more plays. She suggested we buy one or two plays from the past 5 to 10 years that have won Tony Awards. I will also share with her the list of potential play deletes and let her decide if we should keep them.
2. Talked with one of the special needs teachers and asked her what she needed. She volunteered to put together a list of subjects she would like.
3. While meeting with the Social Studies teachers I encouraged them to let me know about resources they needed. One teacher gave me a list of 5 titles and another teacher asked for information for his Developing Nations class. I need to print out some of the resources from Wilson Cat and have him highlight titles he thinks would be helpful.
I learned that our non-fiction collection is very dated and our fiction collection really isn’t that bad. The departments at CF are working hard at flushing out their curriculums in relationship to the new Iowa Core. Some departments are moving ahead quicker than others so as the curriculum is firmed up the collection development will need to follow. Right now I feel the best thing to do is to make a five year plan but look at it next year and rearrange if necessary depending on the curriculum work.
In addition, we have started planning for more electronic sources. After our recent conversation with Follett, we think we could afford electronic books. These electronic books could very easily play into my five year plan.
I worked with the 5th grade teacher at one of my schools to determine what the core subject topics for social studies were for that grade level. We met for about 1/2 hour in the library and discussed what he is currently teaching and which subjects he thought we should get more supplemental books on for the non-fiction section. Additionally, we are working on a genre unit together and we discussed how that was going, what types of genres the students most liked to check out, and which genres we thought would need some additional titles for the next school year. Additionally to that time I talked with the other elementary teacher-librarian on the phone, in person, and mainly through e-mail (more than 1/2 hour over time) regarding weeding the collections at two of my schools that are merging (Roosevelt and Emerson elementary schools) because she is also in the process of merging the collections of two of her schools into one collection for a new building. We discussed the number of books we could fit in our collections, sizing for our collections, and the average copyright date for the different sections of our libraries and in our nonfiction areas by 100s. Summation of that--no matter how many books we weed, our average copyright year is still over 15 years old or close to it and barely moves a year even with the number of books removed for being out of date or non-circulating. Frustrating! Especially when we don't have tons of money to just go out and buy newer books or at least enough to seem to make an immediate difference in copyright age. Finally, on March 26th I met with Shelley Sweeney at North Middle School where she is the librarian. We met for 2 hours. We are both taking the class so we met to see how things were going with the class and with weeding our collections. We talked about how to work on the budget/weeding plan for the collection to make it relevant to our schools needs and something that would really show our administrators why they need to try to provide more funding for library materials. We talked about our head teacher's push with e-Books and how the purchasing of e-Books would affect the purchasing of hard copy books to support teacher curricular units. Would we want duplicates? If we had e-Books was that a better alternative to purchasing more expensive hard copy books? Which areas of the nonfiction section would benefit more from the purchase of e-Books? Additionally, we discussed how our weeding was going, which areas needed the most weeding or had the largest gaps based on the copyright date chart in our text book. We wrapped it up by discussing the upcoming homework assignments and how we would need to work on our 5 year plans and budget requests to complete the classwork. It was good to get input from a variety of people (teacher, elementary teacher-librarian, middle school teacher-librarian/classmate) to guage how the class was progressing and what is needed to help make the library collections at my schools more relavent to the needs of my teachers and students. It made me realize how outdated my non-fiction areas of my collections are and that it is harder to update them than it is to do so for the easy fiction and fiction sections of the library. I realized that I need to work more closely with my teachers to build a collaborative relationship when ordering new books to meet classroom needs so that I don't end up with a lot of books that end up sitting on the shelves collecting dust until they become outdated.
I meet with these teachers 2nd Grade - Social studies and writing, had a many resources for current unit. Did gather things from other elementaries in our district. After looking at those things we are borrowing from other district, we will order them for our own library.
4th grade- Social studies and writing. Our students can use Culture Grams and Encyclopedia Britannica provided by Iowa AEA Online. However, we still would like update our 1999 set of state book.
5th Grade - Social Studies and writing. Yes, they will continue to study American Indians. I have discarded one set of our Indian books and have already ordered a newer set of books.
6th Grade - Social Studies and writing. Yes, We are going to keep our Ancient Civilization books but not order any more at this time.
I met with our two HS Science teachers and two of three English teachers to identify what areas of the curriculum will be kept/enhanced as Iowa Core is applied to the HS (we are a bit behind in the IA Core). This led me to our MS science teacher who does an excellent job of using the library to set the stage for the HS science classes. It was determined that some of the HS Biology materials should continue to support both buildings since the materials is repeated to some extent (human systems, diseases, cell biology), but that at the high school Chemistry is offered, leading to a discovery of another area of the 500s that is in rough shape.
In terms of English, I have purchased materials to cover many of their research topics but a new interdisciplinary (Social Studies, Art, English) unit on the Holocaust has brought another glaring hole to the front of my "need to purchase" list. I love the time to talk about what and how they teach and to get the teachers excited about new materials. At the same time, it is frustrating how the topics taught can change when a teacher changes, due to the small school district. With only three English teachers, our topics used to cover an element in the Core can look very different from year to year and I can get caught without matching materials. This typically doesn't happen in Social Studies or Science where Iowa Core is more prescriptive. I left our meetings feeling like I had been proactive and that would be helpful in future purchasing decisions.
When I met with the curriculum director, her response was her usual - "sounds good to me" which is affirming, but not always helpful! Still, it's nice to hear I am headed in the correct direction with regards to curricular support and the Iowa Core.
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ReplyDeleteI met with and emailed K-6 teachers in our building, with the exception of one grade level (4th - I will catch up with them this week). I then listed out the topics by grade level and dewey number, using colors to code and seperate things out. Most of my time has been spent then analyzing and printing lists (Destiny) of the areas for 1st - 3rd grade; we're seeing the overlap with upper grades.
ReplyDeleteFor the collaborative time I first worked with the HS librarian in my district. We started to go through the Iowa core for Social Studies and Science finding topics in the content and how it would line up with the Dewey Decimal System. This is very much a once over, and general, but it does start to give us a feel of what we need and where there is greater emphasis on topics that there may not have been before.
ReplyDeleteAlso as part of our district’s professional development day a couple of weeks ago, I sat in on the power standards conversation with the secondary social studies, science, technology/computers and English. Our power standards are the key concepts and skills that students should know at the end of each grade level. While many of these discussions are still taking place, it is good to hear and be a part of the conversation. I am still in the process of meeting with teachers to discuss things more in detail related to what they are teaching and how this will tie in to the collection and dewey decimal system.
Collaborative work time blog:
ReplyDeleteI met with Deb Wegmann (student in this class) at her school’s library on February 15th from 5:00-6:00.
We discussed our collections, mostly the weaknesses that we have in the nonfiction at both buildings. We found it interesting that our collections varied as much as they did. (We teach in two neighboring school districts.) We learned that both collections need some serious weeding but we are apprehensive of getting rid of so many books at once. I will be focusing on improving my 600’s section, while Deb will be working on her 500’s. We both decided that time spent with the classroom teachers would make this process go quicker and easier.
I spent my other 2 hours talking with K-5 classroom teachers at Nixon Elementary during their prep time the week of February 20th. I was informed on the science units that they will be focusing on for the rest of the year, as well as what the teachers could use as support in their new “Bringing History Home” units. I shared the highlighted sheets with them, which related to their units, and took suggestions/ideas from them on what to purchase. This was also beneficial for them to see what the library already offers to support their curriculum that they aren’t using. We also looked at the district student learning expectations for the science and social studies areas to make sure we had covered everything. I need to follow up with the 5th grade teachers as we ran out of time and they had great ideas.
I met with Dave and Alicia, fellow Marshalltown librarians taking the class. We met on March 1 from 4:30 - 9 ish in my Hoglan Elementary Library. (We got a little carried away and just kept working!)
ReplyDeleteDuring that time we looked through the Marshalltown curriculum, so we were able to figure out the gaps in our collections. My 900 section will be very bare once I get all of the old books removed!
We took this time to check many of the titles in our collections to see if they are in the Wilson Catalog. I was surprised to find out that my 500 and 600's sections aren't as bad as I once thought. Many of the books that I would have deleted due to age are still in the Wilson Core Catalog. This made me decide to concentrate my purchases on the 900 section this year instead of the 500's like I once thought.
I met with the psychology and anatomy teachers to discuss an upcoming “brain day” collaborative project involving dissection, research, and a final project. I also met separately with each person to discuss other upcoming research papers and/or projects. We looked at gaps that could be filled in with online resources from Heartland AEA and possible print materials that could be ordered from Follett. The anatomy teacher and I also discussed adding more medical based novels for her class next fall. We have met during during their free periods and after school.
ReplyDeleteI met with the Art teachers in the building to discuss the possibility of adding additional modern art resources. The collection currently focuses on 2D art and so they would like to add some additional resources on 3D art and design. I hope to focus somewhat on ceramics, since they recently added a ceramics II class to the curriculum and we do not have too many books on this topic.
The French teacher and I have been meeting to plan a collaborative unit on French food. We have met during her free periods in her room and in the library. We discussed the possibility of extending the unit to incorporate some other resources and expand the student’s knowledge of cooking methods.
During my annual evaluation with the principal this week, we did discuss my plan for updating the collection, getting rid of outdated material and purchasing new books and electronic resources. He is in favor and will try to get me the budget funds to update key areas of the collection.
I met with 3 of the social studies teachers, individually. The first one was SB who teaches US government. His class was researching in the library Feb 15) and we took the opportunity to discuss supplemental resources. We talked for about 45 minutes. I feel a little bad about it now, because later I decided I would focus on American History before American Government. But, he’s on the list!
ReplyDeleteSecond I met with SG who teaches American History and Sociology. She came to the library during her planning period (Feb 20) and we discussed the specific units covered in her class, and what the emphases are. We talked for about an hour. After this discussion I determined to start with this class to align curriculum.
The third ss teacher, BT and I talked for about 30 minutes on Feb 24th in the library while his students were researching. He teaches World Geography, and I had previously determined gaps in this area of my collection. Once again, however, my priority is going to be American history from reconstruction to the Vietnam War, with a secondary emphasis on Vietnam to the present ( the collection is deplorable in this area). I will give a nod to geography, and maybe government, but that may not happen until next year.
My last meeting was with the 9th grade librarian, who used to be the librarian at the high school, too, until they hired me. We met after school from 3:15-4:15 at her library on Mar 5, and again on Mar 7 after a 6-12 librarian meeting during early out. We reviewed all of the information about the SS curriculum and discussed both supplemental materials to support the curriculum and strategies to ingratiate ourselves into these units.
Heather Hansen and I met 3 hours for collaboration. We worked on Tuesday, March 13th from 8:30 - 11:30, plus we added another hour as we went out for lunch and continued our discussions. We were looking specifically at elementary libraries. We looked at shelf analysis of both libraries and agreed that we are needing to work on our nonfiction sections as many of them were marked quite nicely with yellow. We also had a discussion about the Follett analysis for each of our respective buildings and how this tool helped us target our needs as well as any areas of strength. We both discussed plans on how to go about adding funds to our library budgets - we both have Foundations we are going to approach as well as PTO. We are both excited about this process that has made it easy to see where the holes are and that we now have a systematic way of weeding and adding to our library collections.
ReplyDeleteI also had an opportunity to work with our curriculum director. We are ordering new K-4 Social Studies materials and I talked with the curriculum director about how the library could use some new materials and I targeted what they needed in each level in the "Additional Reading Opportunities" from the company. I used Wilson's for the best books to order to help support this curriculum. I was happy to tell the curriculum director that we had some books, but a some more would be most helpful. I was able to order $1000 in books for our new curriculum. Needless to say I will be on every curriculum committee the year they are looking for new materials!
Kristi and I had a 40 minute conversation by phone to get acquainted and plan our 3 hour collaboration time:
ReplyDeleteMet 2/18/12 at Oelwein Public Library
1:00 – 4:00
Kristi helped me to stay tough about weeding the 800’s; pay attention to the dates; talked about the big 5; alignment form was begun (mine will be detailed differently than page 33), how our schools are doing with essential learnings with Core Curriculum and our schools are not as far along as they need to be to help us with resource alignment; use of Wilson Catalog and ways to look up things easily; we realized we are in the same boat with our collections (though she has a sizeable budget and I have an extremely, recently reduced, budget). We realized that once the purchase cycle is in place, other books will go out of date and the cycle will go on and on and on….; have a beginning list of Wilson narrow core to start replacement proposal, which for me will begin with 300s next year. There is MUCH weeding to be done. Continuing the conversation with a classmate/colleague is so beneficial. Kristi is not the only librarian in her district, whereas I am K-12 with 4 buildings. It helps to talk to another professional invested in the same class at the same time.
I will be meeting with lang. arts, social studies, health and fcs, science, cte teachers to confirm units of study and incorporating their needs into the replacement cycle and proposals of purchase.
*I have met with social studies and know that this new young teacher is still finding his way, but civil rights and world religions were definite units he identified. He is also indicating U.S. history beyond Civil War, so we will be investigating his possibilities more at the end of the year. I have also met with the health teachers and will be aligning materials (especially using resources across the building levels) for their studies. The art teacher has stopped in an indicated best resources to support his curriculum and would utilize the library more, given specific purchases. There has also been CTE input for up to date careers - a common cross-curricular study area at our high school, focusing on both print and nonprint resources. Math teachers have contributed that some of the older math books contain formulas that are no longer appearing in new publications, so a note of caution about weeding was submitted from them.
Yes, it definitely helps to talk with teachers. They can provide insights in their areas that we may not realize.
DeleteSandy Antons and I met on March 13th during spring break from 8:30-11:30am at her school, Strawberry Hill Elementary in Anamosa. We were both looking at our elementary library collections. We discussed using Follett and their item analysis and comparing ours and then decided that we both need to focus on the non-fiction section of our libraries. We discussed our library budgets and the need to look for additional funding from grants or our school foundations. We talked about how the 5-year rotating weeding schedule will look and worked on getting mine balanced so that each year doesn’t have too many large Dewey ranges included. The time went rather fast as there was a lot to discuss and compare between the two. We had planned to discuss our Science curriculum and enhancing the FOSS kits that our schools use but we ran out of time.
ReplyDeleteHopefully this began conversations that will continue into the future as you recognized the value of working together.
DeleteI first talked to my principal about the best way to gather curriculum information, and for the core subjects we decided to use the Course Essential Elements which are the two week pacing guides teachers complete throughout the year. These list the exact standards/benchmarks/core indicators for a two-week period. Talked to several science teachers about these and want to start focusing in that area because of an "object project" they do in collaboration with 8th grade English teachers. I've highlighted key terms for all three grades.
ReplyDeleteSpent 30 minutes talking to our head librarian. Discussions included the Wilson Core, Iowa Core (our district has not aligned its curriculum yet so we are not focusing on that yet) weeding, budget, my Titlewise collection analysis, and reviewed how the English project went this year.
I spent two hours collaborating with Kris who is also taking this class on Monday, March 26. We discussed all aspects of what we've been talking about for resource alignment and the steps to take because I don't feel like I understand it all. I talked to Cheryl C. about my frustrations with what a huge task this is, because I really want to weed what I know should be deleted and then use an updated analysis and shelf-list to show my true collection. Then I'd like to work on gaps. There is not enough time to get the weeding done this spring no matter how late I stay. I need to focus on the plan! I'm excited that social studies teachers are starting to ask for more print materials to go along with Culturegrams and other databases, but since there are 28 of them, I feel overwhelmed there also!
Recently, a principal told me that we will have a class of dual language learners who will be immersed in Spanish for 1/2 of the day and consequently I will need to add Spanish titles. I have some but they are quite dated. Hopefully, there will be other sources of funding to help with purchasing items.
My highlighting has been done, but I do not have all of my gaps marked on the Dewey list yet. So, still working on the resource development plan.
This is a hugh process--especially in a large school. It is important to go systematically through it--and take the time needed to do a good job. Once through the process, it does become easier.
DeleteI spent an hour with Keri Annis looking over our results and talking about the Core Curriculum. It was pretty interesting how different sections of our libraries stood out as having "shot guns methods"for how our collections have been added to and weeded in the past. We both agreed this class has been very beneficial for us to take a deeper look at our collections since we are both fairly new to this position. It has both of us thinking about how we weed and how we replace our books. We can't financially afford to replenish all the books that need to be weeded so a five year plan seems more realistic.
ReplyDeleteThe other two hours I have spent was talking to grade level teachers before and after school. I don't have common planning with any group of teachers so my time with them is very limited. So I first sent them an email and asked them to think about what their curriculum was and what areas they think we need more resources. This was also a great opportunity for us to talk about items we had that may not have been utilized in the past. When I looked at my analysis of copyrights and what our classroom teachers suggested I decided our 500 section took such a hit and it is a section that needs attention right away, it can't wait. Having good nonfiction literature is very important for students to have readily at their finger tips.
Plus the 500s is one area where kids are curious and like to investigate!
DeleteI met with several teachers individually during the past few weeks. First with the history teacher and science teachers separately after school a couple of times in early March, then collaborated with the English teacher after school on March 6th. During an in-service work time on March 12, I was able to talk about curriculum individually with the business, art, science, math, English and health teachers for a total two hours. Finally I concluded with a discussion on March 20, prior to morning classes with the family consumer science teacher.
ReplyDeleteI did not get as much specific information concerning curriculum as I had hoped. The teachers are overwhelmed by all the changes we have encountered over the past 1 1/2 years. They are adjusting and still learning the curriculum of their new teaching assignments, as well as trying to complete information for the state. Many of the teachers use mostly online sources for research. With the addition of junior high students, I will work at updating the non-fiction, focusing on this age level; beginning with history and biography books.
For Joyce VonGlan:
ReplyDeleteIn February, one of our high school social studies teachers actually volunteered to help me go through the 300’s. Using a copy of the Iowa Core Social Studies standards for 9-12 grades and our high school curriculum for social studies, we proceeded to check for relevancy and make a list of the gaps and weak areas. We worked on this project several hours before and after school.
On March 8 during our Professional Development early out, I met with the seventh grade teachers for about an hour. They were discussing and reviewing the success of their across the curriculum unit on biographies. Naturally, the library plays a very important part in this unit because the students begin their selection of a famous person by browsing through our collection of biographies / autobiographies. We encourage each student to read a book that has an AR test available. Of course, if we do not have a book to match their selection, the AEA and other libraries are contacted to locate a book at the appropriate reading level. In art the students made a sculpture of the person. In English and Computer classes they write and publish a paper. Finally, the students will make a presentation at the spring concert. The teachers were ready with suggestions for biography / autobiography books and AR tests. After this unit many students discovered that they enjoyed reading the biographies and continued to read this form of nonfiction. This area of our library has a good selection, but we did discuss the importance of keeping it up to date. Fortunately, our principal agreed.
My collaboration time was spent with a couple groups of people.
ReplyDeleteI first met with my principal to share what I was doing in this Resource Alignment class. I was also hoping to get my principal on board so she may see the necessity to increase my budget. She was very receptive and even excited to hear how it works. I look forward to sharing my 5-year plan and budget with her when I have them completed. We met for 30 minutes.
I next met with my Professional Learning Community (PLC) which consists of me and four other district teacher librarians. Three of my colleagues have already taken this class, so they were a wonderful help. I asked them to help me clarify how to find gaps in our collection with respect to our curriculum. They showed me a wonderful trick that they use when finding the gaps. I showed them my collection analysis form and my highlighted shelf list. They shared with me that they highlight the areas they lack items in with one highlighter color, and then highlight the curricular areas with another color. The areas that have overlapping colors are the ones that they concentrate their resources (budget/funding) on. I think that is brilliant! We met for 30 minutes.
I met with my PLC a second time when I had questions about finding resources for the areas that I identified as immediate needs. They shared their strategies and methods of acquiring resources for these areas. We met for 20 minutes this time.
I have a Library/Technology Committee in place at my school, of which I am the lead member. It is comprised of one teacher from the K-1 team, one teacher from 2nd grade, one teacher from 3rd grade, one teacher from the 4-5 teams, and one specialist teacher. These teachers meet with me periodically to discuss technology and curricular needs at specific grade levels and building-wide; to share technology and library resources; and to complete “leader” training for technology. I met with this committee to discuss the particular science curriculum needs at the grade levels. I shared my Titlewise analysis and the work that I am currently doing to align our library with the District curriculum. We had a 40-minute discussion of the topics and needs they have for their specific classrooms with regard to the Iowa/National Core Curriculum. I asked them to return to their respective grade level teams (I would meet with the Kindergarten and 5th grade teachers to do this as there was no Kdg or grade 5 teacher on the committee), and develop a list of specific science topics that they felt needed to be “beefed up” in our library that they were not able to locate through AEA or online, etc.
I met with the Kindergarten teachers at various times as (I was not able to meet at their common planning time), and we discussed what their needs were. The total time I spent with the Kdg teachers was about 25 minutes.
I met with the 5th grade teachers collectively for 20 minutes. They shared with me that many of the items that they require can be reserved through our AEA or found online through various websites, but gave me more general suggestions for purchases.
When the Library/Technology committee met again, each shared their grade level team needs. Our K/1 representative shared a book that she thought should be purchased in multiple copies for use by all grade levels. The other committee members readily agreed, after perusing the book. I put it as a major priority for my purchases. Suggestions were also made that each of our science curriculum teacher guides also included a resource guide for supplemental reading books. I decided that this will be my starting point for the areas that were determined the greatest need areas. I also shared a little about Wilson’s Catalog and how this resource will help me identify books to purchase for the need areas, too. We will meet one more time prior to purchasing where I will share my list of books with the committee for any feedback. This meeting spanned 45 minutes.
I am still preparing this list and have not met with the Library/Technology Committee a third time yet.
The highlighting in two colors that my PLC teammates suggested is done on the Collection Analysis Form.
DeleteI met with a 2nd grade teacher, a 3rd grade teacher and a 4th grade teacher over the course of several weeks. Most times were just a 10-15 minute short session where we would talk about what is upcoming for them in units, what is covered in Iowa Core, what they are using for their 'big ideas' with SWH, etc... I then took those conversations and put them to work in the library assessing exactly what I had available in those areas as well as varying reading levels that will need to be addressed. I found that my 500's are pretty good in relation to what is currently being taught in classrooms - which I felt really good about. My 600's and 900's are a little lax in certain areas curricularly as well as interest as well. I have a hard time with finding suitable age reading material for topics such as WWI, WWII, Civil War, etc. in the 900's. A lot of what I find is meant for older readers. My kids do love the Graphic Library set of historical events, so may need to see what else is available in those. All teachers I met with were very appreciative of the resources that I currently do have to offer them and my willingness to purchase more of what they are going to need with Iowa Core coming down the pike! :)
ReplyDeleteFeb. 6 20 minutes. Discussed with Kim, my colleague about the class and what are next steps are. We both agreed our school is just starting with evaluating our curriculum but there are a few projects that will probably stay. We will focus on those and keep asking about new developments. I also felt we need to make better connections with the special needs department.
ReplyDeleteFeb. 14 40 minutes on the phone with Pat to plan our meeting and we discussed general things about our collection. Our school is starting to work on curriculum in relation to the Iowa core. Since we are just beginning it is hard to know which projects will stay and which will go.
Feb 17 20 minutes with Kim Traw. She told me about a new class and some of the projects the teacher has started this year. However when I checked with the teacher he didn’t know about that project. So I will not focus on developing information for this project. The science department is also adding another class but when I talked to the department head she said they would be writing the curriculum this summer.
Feb 18 3 hours at Oelwein Public Library. See her post for more details.
5 minute conversations:
1. Talked with the drama teacher about purchasing more plays. She suggested we buy one or two plays from the past 5 to 10 years that have won Tony Awards. I will also share with her the list of potential play deletes and let her decide if we should keep them.
2. Talked with one of the special needs teachers and asked her what she needed. She volunteered to put together a list of subjects she would like.
3. While meeting with the Social Studies teachers I encouraged them to let me know about resources they needed. One teacher gave me a list of 5 titles and another teacher asked for information for his Developing Nations class. I need to print out some of the resources from Wilson Cat and have him highlight titles he thinks would be helpful.
I learned that our non-fiction collection is very dated and our fiction collection really isn’t that bad. The departments at CF are working hard at flushing out their curriculums in relationship to the new Iowa Core. Some departments are moving ahead quicker than others so as the curriculum is firmed up the collection development will need to follow. Right now I feel the best thing to do is to make a five year plan but look at it next year and rearrange if necessary depending on the curriculum work.
In addition, we have started planning for more electronic sources. After our recent conversation with Follett, we think we could afford electronic books. These electronic books could very easily play into my five year plan.
I worked with the 5th grade teacher at one of my schools to determine what the core subject topics for social studies were for that grade level. We met for about 1/2 hour in the library and discussed what he is currently teaching and which subjects he thought we should get more supplemental books on for the non-fiction section. Additionally, we are working on a genre unit together and we discussed how that was going, what types of genres the students most liked to check out, and which genres we thought would need some additional titles for the next school year. Additionally to that time I talked with the other elementary teacher-librarian on the phone, in person, and mainly through e-mail (more than 1/2 hour over time) regarding weeding the collections at two of my schools that are merging (Roosevelt and Emerson elementary schools) because she is also in the process of merging the collections of two of her schools into one collection for a new building. We discussed the number of books we could fit in our collections, sizing for our collections, and the average copyright date for the different sections of our libraries and in our nonfiction areas by 100s. Summation of that--no matter how many books we weed, our average copyright year is still over 15 years old or close to it and barely moves a year even with the number of books removed for being out of date or non-circulating. Frustrating! Especially when we don't have tons of money to just go out and buy newer books or at least enough to seem to make an immediate difference in copyright age. Finally, on March 26th I met with Shelley Sweeney at North Middle School where she is the librarian. We met for 2 hours. We are both taking the class so we met to see how things were going with the class and with weeding our collections. We talked about how to work on the budget/weeding plan for the collection to make it relevant to our schools needs and something that would really show our administrators why they need to try to provide more funding for library materials. We talked about our head teacher's push with e-Books and how the purchasing of e-Books would affect the purchasing of hard copy books to support teacher curricular units. Would we want duplicates? If we had e-Books was that a better alternative to purchasing more expensive hard copy books? Which areas of the nonfiction section would benefit more from the purchase of e-Books? Additionally, we discussed how our weeding was going, which areas needed the most weeding or had the largest gaps based on the copyright date chart in our text book. We wrapped it up by discussing the upcoming homework assignments and how we would need to work on our 5 year plans and budget requests to complete the classwork. It was good to get input from a variety of people (teacher, elementary teacher-librarian, middle school teacher-librarian/classmate) to guage how the class was progressing and what is needed to help make the library collections at my schools more relavent to the needs of my teachers and students. It made me realize how outdated my non-fiction areas of my collections are and that it is harder to update them than it is to do so for the easy fiction and fiction sections of the library. I realized that I need to work more closely with my teachers to build a collaborative relationship when ordering new books to meet classroom needs so that I don't end up with a lot of books that end up sitting on the shelves collecting dust until they become outdated.
ReplyDeleteI meet with these teachers
ReplyDelete2nd Grade - Social studies and writing, had a many resources for current unit. Did gather things from other elementaries in our district. After looking at those things we are borrowing from other district, we will order them for our own library.
4th grade- Social studies and writing. Our students can use Culture Grams and Encyclopedia Britannica provided by Iowa AEA Online. However, we still would like update our 1999 set of state book.
5th Grade - Social Studies and writing. Yes, they will continue to study American Indians. I have discarded one set of our Indian books and have already ordered a newer set of books.
6th Grade - Social Studies and writing. Yes, We are going to keep our Ancient Civilization books but not order any more at this time.
I met with our two HS Science teachers and two of three English teachers to identify what areas of the curriculum will be kept/enhanced as Iowa Core is applied to the HS (we are a bit behind in the IA Core). This led me to our MS science teacher who does an excellent job of using the library to set the stage for the HS science classes. It was determined that some of the HS Biology materials should continue to support both buildings since the materials is repeated to some extent (human systems, diseases, cell biology), but that at the high school Chemistry is offered, leading to a discovery of another area of the 500s that is in rough shape.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of English, I have purchased materials to cover many of their research topics but a new interdisciplinary (Social Studies, Art, English) unit on the Holocaust has brought another glaring hole to the front of my "need to purchase" list. I love the time to talk about what and how they teach and to get the teachers excited about new materials. At the same time, it is frustrating how the topics taught can change when a teacher changes, due to the small school district. With only three English teachers, our topics used to cover an element in the Core can look very different from year to year and I can get caught without matching materials. This typically doesn't happen in Social Studies or Science where Iowa Core is more prescriptive. I left our meetings feeling like I had been proactive and that would be helpful in future purchasing decisions.
When I met with the curriculum director, her response was her usual - "sounds good to me" which is affirming, but not always helpful! Still, it's nice to hear I am headed in the correct direction with regards to curricular support and the Iowa Core.