This is courtesy of the Core Education Facebook page.
Many in schools (particularly Secondary level) might be interested to spend 35 minutes with Rose Hipkins.
Generally school librarians wouldn’t have access to anything like this talk, but curriculum affects you and isn’t it great that you can watch online.
Rose Hipkins, Senior Researcher at NZCER, spoke at CORE Education’s May breakfast session in Dunedin on “The shape of curriculum change, designing a local curriculum from a national framework.” Rose speaks in some detail to a recent explorative report from NZCER highlighting the impact of change on schools, teachers and curriculum.
What is Split Screen thinking? Look at this from Kelburn Normal School.
Who is Michael Fullan? Look at this!
Presentation here: http://edtalks.org/video/shape-curriculum-change
Here is Rose Hipkins presentation on Inquiry learning from 2008. Still topical, still we embrace Inquiry learning and this is still topical. At abut 26 minutes through there is more stuff on Inquiry on the presentation above. If this interests you then it really is a must watch.
On Inquiry learning in this presentation she states “It needs a to be both student centered and teacher directed”. I don’t know about you but does this always happen in your library? Where do you fit in? You aren’t the teacher and you aren’t the student but you can do lots of directing.
At 31min through she talks about student voice and student agency. Interesting stuff here. Things that can be applied to libraries. Buy in from everyone is an ideal but how do you make that happen.
She talks about using your extended community to learn together. Everybody needs to understand school.
serious fun 
#1 by Brian Waddell on June 20, 2011 - 4:28 AM
Excellent blog Bridget. A comment on Rose Hipkins post.
I thought it was a very sad but true comment that it was assumed school librarians wouldn’t have access to a curriculum talk. Surely it’s an indictment on our school libray service across New Zealand that the very people who staff our school libraries are not involved in curriculum development. How can they effectively support learning if they are not involved with the development of the learning culture of the school? By understanding the this culture the librarian would then understand the learning processes for a particular learning area, be able to match the information sources to the specific learning task and provide the necessary support and guidance along the way.
Interestingly the split screen thinking link you provide from Kelburn Normal School is one that originated from our ‘library’ or school wide Guided Inquiry professional development at Kelburn. We looked at Claxton’s work to inform our thinking about focusing on several processes at once. Understanding how you learn, the process you use and being able to reflect on it through the development of, say, a learning journals is an important part of developing a learning disposition.
Surely the development of positive learning dispositions is the goal of every school library.
Brian
Teacher Librarian at Kelburn and Karori West Normal Schools
#2 by Bridget Schaumann on June 20, 2011 - 6:25 AM
Thanks for the comment Brian. Iif we don’t get invited to the table we can find the table through other means i.e. this kind of thing online.
You say “the development of positive learning dispositions is the goal of every school library.” I would say ‘Hell Yes’ to that! Library staff have opportunities (and indeed the skills) to contribute so much to the learning disposition of the entire school, but it is really about realising that you do have that opportunity, and seizing those moments when you can get at the staff to help them understand that. too. We are often too meek and have difficulty asking to be involved.
Hopefully this blog will give people some meaningful PD (and a bit of fun besides) by showing them the enormous amount of knowledge which is out there, and which they don’t need to leave their libraries to get hold of.
B
#3 by Brian Waddell on June 21, 2011 - 8:54 AM
The thing is Bridget, school librarians must be at the table and actually providing some of the food (for thought!) for the table that people involved with supporting learning at the school are sitting at. As Alton-Lee in Best Evidence Synthesis (http://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/publications/series/2515/5959) points out curriculum alignment is a learning enhancer. School librarians must have a role in this if they are to align inquiry across the school. It is more than advocacy, it’s about leadership, leading the learning culture change within the school. I’m afraid relying on advocacy won’t bring about the changes that are required because the rest of the staff don’t listen.
What is required is a career path for school librarians with recognised qualifications, unfortunately New Zealand qualifications connecting the teaching and information environments have disappeared. I doubt whether the provision of online knowledge on its own will be enough, it needs guidance for it to be synthesised and for meaning to be made. After all effective learning is also a social activity and requires others to bounce ideas off with some people providing mentoring roles. Kuhlthau demonstrates this with her work around the zones of intervention necessary to support confidant learners.
Brian
#4 by Carole Gardiner on June 22, 2011 - 9:49 PM
There are lots of interesting points here! I agree with Bridget, that school librarians need to seize opportunities to support and enhance the learning culture of the school, and that we need to be actively looking for and creating those opportunities. Unfortunately far too many teaching staff still think that we are only capable of covering books, so as school librarians we need to be proactive in marketing our skills.
I’m wary of making generalisations since all situations are different, but from my experience a significant number of school librarians ARE involved with developing their schools’ learning cultures. In my view, it is the responsibility of ALL staff in a school to encourage students, provide them with the best possible opportunities for learning, and to be consistent with school rules and policies. I believe that plenty of school librarians, regardless of their training, DO understand the requirements of learning tasks sufficiently to be able to provide appropriate guidance and information sources to their students and staff. For example, I regularly locate information or demonstrate using a particular web tool or database to staff and/or students and have had only positive feedback, along the lines of how helpful that will be for a particular assessment.
I think that collaboration is the key here. In education in general, people seem to be very good at collaborating. A good working example of this would be the session I ran for a class on basic internet searching and website evaluation that was then turned into a unit standard by the teacher to use in her classes in the future. The skill sets of teachers and professional librarians are different, but they are complementary. By collaborating we can have the best of both worlds for our students.