Welcome, welcome one and all! This is the first piece of many to my collaborative unit plan for LIS 7320, the media specialist as teacher and instructional consultant. Many questions and concerns flood my mind, as I begin to plan out and brain storm ideas and topics for this mock collaboration between a classroom teacher (my partner Andrea) and a school librarian (me). I hope that this project helps to lay the ground work of what it would be like to collaborate with real classroom teachers. I also hope to integrate many concepts and ideas that are being presented in class, such as, new literacies for 21st century learners, inquiry based learning, digital resources, and many other theories and how they translate into practice.
At the beginning of any project there are fears, weaknesses, and strengths that materialize before any work has been completed.
One fear that I have, is not understanding the directions and all the components that are required for the project. Before starting a project, it is vital to have complete understanding of all the directions and intricacies that are involved and I fear that I still have a weak grasp on this knowledge. Another fear that I have is, not using the team wiki enough to receive maximum credit. A third fear is losing contact with my teacher partner. I want us to communicate well and have the same goals set for the project. I'm worried that since this is an online class, it will be easy to lose touch with each other. So far, those are the only two fears that I have of this project.
Some personal weaknesses that I plan to keep in check with this project are making sure enough time is set aside to complete the projects components on time and to the best of my ability. As the semester continues, course work in other classes and everyday routines and errands sometimes get in the way of school priorities. My goal is to keep these project priorities before other objectives in my life. This project is a great way to see my weakness and then set goals to overcome it and assist me in becoming a better professional.
Now that I have gotten the fears and weaknesses out of the way my strengths can be revealed. I pride myself on being very creative and being able to think outside the box to find solutions to many problems. I have the ability to integrate many different student skill sets into lessons so that they are utilizing many different type of literacies. I believe that these strengths will help to create a final product that could be used in a real classroom setting.
The fears, weaknesses, and strengths seen above have been compiled from past experiences in my undergraduate program from field experiences and student teaching, which have been both unsuccessful and successful. However, these collaborations have only been between teacher and student teacher. I have never seen any collaboration successful or unsuccessful between classroom teachers and school librarians.
As far as brainstorming ideas for the actual content of the project, I would like to focus on social studies or languages arts because those are my strong suits. However, it would be beneficial to me as a professional to push myself and try a subject that I am not as familiar with such as science or math. Whatever subject topic is chosen, I want to try and integrate pieces of other curriculum topics. I believe it is important to try make other curricular connections so students can see how subjects are interconnected with each other.
Overall, I am very excited and ready to collaborate on this project. I think it will be a me great experience for my future as a school librarian!
Rachel,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading your first blog entry. I am confident that the strengths you bring to this collaborative unit plan in terms of creativity, technology, and cross curricular interests will carry you through nicely. I tried to give you the big picture of the major assignments in the recorded syllabus overview I created on the first day of class. I wonder how I can make that recording more useful so that there are less questions about what to expect. I think sometimes the fear of the unknown will dominate the students thinking regardless of how much I provide but any suggestions you might have are welcomed.
As I've repeated to your classmates, regardless of whether you've witnessed strong teacher-librarian collaborations in the past I want you to envision a collaboration where the school library partner makes tangible contributions to the unit plan and documents what that looks like in a way that is accessible for stakeholders in the learning community (e.g. teachers, administrators, parents, etc.) Use the AASL 21st century standards to help you frame the big ideas that you want students to learn.
Prof. K.