Initially, I had hoped to have 10-15 participants provide data for this study, which I imagined would give me a multifaceted view of the various interpersonal skills and personality traits exhibited by my classmates' host media specialists. I was disappointed that only four people participated in my study, and I worried that I would not have enough data to substantially address my research question. However, my invitation's low level of response proved not to be a setback so much as a redirection, and as I examined my data I found that it yielded much more interesting results than I'd expected.

Participant/Media Specialist A

Field Experience

Participant A (P-A) described her host media specialist's day in great detail, providing a play-by-play of everything the host media specialist did, from teaching classes to attending meetings, from assisting individual students to eating lunch! P-A also exhibited a high level of positive feeling about her host media specialist, often discussing in her field experience how impressed she was with how her host handled the many responsibilities she addressed throughout the day. 

After reading this vivid description of Media Specialist A (MS-A), I felt I had a clear picture of her as embodying several key traits, which I believe are echoed by my word frequency analysis of P-A's field experience:

Traits Expressed in Field Experience	Correlation to Top 9 Activities
flexible - adapted to changes of plans and spur-of-the-moment requests	Needing/Fulfilling Needs Thinking
organized, fast-paced, and efficient - moved from one activity to another, keeping track of the people and resources she encountered and completing many tasks throughout the day	Organizing Planning
helpful and considerate - assisted students and teachers throughout the day and considered the audience that would use her assessments	Finding Needing/Fulfilling Needs Assisting
collaborative and community-oriented - worked with other members of the learning community toward larger goals, contributing to discussion and planning for the whole school, not just to benefit herself or the media center/media program	Collaborating Planning
authoritative but humble- taught both students and teachers and delegated responsibilities to her clerk, but also asked for and valued her clerk's second opinion	Teaching/Modeling Managing Thinking

Besides reading participants' field experiences, I also pasted the text of these field experience reflections into an online application called Wordle (www.wordle.net), which uses word frequencies to create a word cloud in which the words' size is relevant to how many times they are repeated within the text. I think the following word cloud of P-A's field experience speaks volumes about MS-A's activities and priorities as a media specialist:



In this graphic representation of P-A's field experience, words such as book, school, teacher, student, discussed, meeting, and lesson surround the word MS, while words such as budget, textbooks, copying, citation, and calendar are represented in smaller text. In my opinion, this Wordle image visually reflects MS-A's dedication to teaching, literacy, and the people around her.

Keirsey Temperament Sorter II Results

The Keirsey Temperament Sorter II (KTS-II) categorized MS-A as a Guardian-Supervisor, a personality type which is characterized by the following values:

As a(n)....

I also entered the MS-A's KTS-II results into the Wordle engine, which generated the following word cloud:



Key words highlighted in this Wordle image include people, others, work and workers, organization, activities, order, comfortable, and coordinate, which to me shows Guardian-Supervisors' dedication towards working with other people to achieve the common goals of their groups or organizations.

Comparison

After completing the KTS-II for her host media specialist, P-A gave the results an accuracy score of 4 on a scale of 1 to 5, indicating that she believed the survey results were relatively accurate based upon her impressions of her host media specialist. P-A particularly noted the accuracy of the KTS-II's description of Guardian-Supervisors as people who "Plan, direct, or coordinate supportive services of an organization"; when asked about inaccuracies in the KTS-II results, P-A responded that she "didn't see any."

I can see why P-A rated the KTS-II results as a relatively accurate representation of her host media specialist, because the Guardian-Supervisor personality description echoes P-A's field experience reflection in many ways. Overall, the personality results indicate an overall need for stability and structure, which I think is reflected clearly in MS-A's work with her students and colleagues throughout the day.

Participant/Media Specialist B

Field Experience

Participant B (P-B) provided the most concise of the field experiences I analyzed, perhaps because much of the day she spent with her host media specialist (MS-B) was consumed by administrative tasks, while most of the teaching and collaborative duties were performed by the media clerk. I did not get a clear picture of MS-B's interpersonal traits, except that she was comfortable delegating responsibility to her paraprofessional and performing herself the administrative tasks needed to manage the media center's resources effectively. While P-B did seem to have an overall positive impression of her host media specialist, her field experience certainly seemed to have less of a positive vibe than the others, as she questioned why MS-B was so involved in managerial duties rather than working with the teachers and students in her school.

My word frequency analysis yielded a focus on these Top 9 activities: working, consuming, organizing, thinking, collaborating/assisting, finding/selecting, feeling, managing, and reading. It seemed that some of these activities--particularly the ones reflecting administrative duties--would relate to P-B's descriptions of her host media specialist, while the activities of collaborating/assisting and reading seemed to reflect the media clerk's actions instead.

The Wordle image for P-B's field experience is correspondingly sparse:



While this image does not contain as many words as the other Wordle images in this project, I think it's worth noting that the image shows a high frequency of words such as technology, inventory, time, room, looking, and working--but it also shows high frequencies of the words school, think, reading, and most of all students. Simply reading P-B's field experience reflection gave me a vague overall impression of MS-B as being task-oriented rather than people-oriented, but the Wordle image, I think, shows that the biggest ideas in P-B's field experience were still related to literacy and the learning community--even though many of these ideas may have been connected more with MS-B's paraprofessional, who was described as performing many of the teaching and collaborative duties. And, as might be expected, the word clerk is featured prominently in the Wordle image.

Keirsey Temperament Sorter II Results

The Keirsey Temperament Sorter II (KTS-II) categorized MS-B as an Idealist-Teacher, a personality type which is characterized by the following values:

As a(n)....

I also entered the MS-B's KTS-II results into the Wordle engine, which generated the following word cloud:



Key words highlighted in this Wordle image include people, personal, work and activities, public, others, relationships, social, growth, and communication, which to me shows Idealist-Teachers' dedication to working towards personal development and the growth of those around them.

Comparison

After completing the KTS-II for her host media specialist, P-B gave the results an accuracy score of 3 on a scale of 1 to 5, indicating that she believed the survey results were somewhat accurate based upon her impressions of her host media specialist. While P-B did not indicate which parts of the results seemed inaccurate to her, she noted that MS-B "seems to want to see the best in everyone and every situation," which certainly echoes the Idealist point of view.

Working with P-B's field experience and KTS-II data proved difficult for me because the two data sources yielded such different overall impressions, and because P-B did not find the KTS-II results for MS-B to be particularly accurate--but didn't really explain why. 

I wondered, had P-B visited her host on a day when administrative duties had not been the primary focus, whether she would have seen a different side of MS-B--and whether that side of MS-B would have corresponded more or less to the personality description that the KTS-II yielded.

Overall, given the brevity of P-B's field experience write-up, it was hard for me to see what personality traits she did see in her host media specialist, which made it difficult to analyze the KTS-II results.

Participant/Media Specialist C

Field Experience

Like P-A, Participant C (P-C) provided me with a detailed and reflective field experience write-up describing the day she spent with her host media specialist (MS-C); however, P-C's field experience did not indicate the day's time frame or structure as clearly as P-A's, instead summing up the overall activities and impressions of the day and providing a couple of anecdotes as illustration.

As I read, I formed the following impression of MS-C's key character traits, which to some degree corresponded with the word frequency analysis I did of the media specialist's top activities:

Traits Expressed in Field Experience	Correlation to Top 9 Activities
flexible - shared workspaces with others	Thinking Working
organized and responsible - managed many different resources and spaces	Working Organizing Finding Assessing
welcoming, collaborative, and community-oriented - provided P-C with media center tour, and the media center bustled with people and activity throughout the day; MS-C also collaborated with teachers to integrate curriculum content into her whole-class instruction	Teaching Talking Finding Assisting
helpful and considerate - assisted students and teachers throughout the day and provided students with what P-C described as empowerment	Teaching Finding Reading Assisting

The Wordle for P-C's field experience indicates a similar focus:



In this graphic representation of P-C's field experience, words such as student/students, teacher(s), class, work, book(s), reading, and room are highlighted, indicating a focus on people and literacy that I think is clearly reflected in the descriptions of MS-C throughout the field experience.

Keirsey Temperament Sorter II Results

The Keirsey Temperament Sorter II (KTS-II) categorized MS-C as a Guardian-Inspector, a personality type which is characterized by the following values, many of which are similar to the Guardian-Supervisor and some of which differ.

As a(n)....

I also entered the MS-C's KTS-II results into the Wordle engine, which generated the following word cloud:



Key words highlighted in this Wordle image include work, people, training, comfortable, perform, training, procedures, and organization, which to me clearly shows Guardian-Inspectors' desire for stability, organization, and clear-cut rules and procedures.

Comparison

After completing the KTS-II for her host media specialist, P-C gave the results an accuracy score of 3 on a scale of 1 to 5, indicating that she believed the survey results were somewhat accurate based upon her impressions of her host media specialist. P-C provided no comments as to which specific parts of the results seemed accurate or inaccurate to her or why she scored the results as being only somewhat accurate.

However, examining P-C's field experience reflection and the KTS-II results in comparison does show some similarities and differences that may be useful to consider.

As far as similarities, both the field experience and the KTS-II results for MS-C indicate a need for structure and organization; corresponding with the KTS-II results for this area, MS-C comes across as quite stable and organized in P-C's field experience as she manages the many resources and workspaces in the media center. The sign-up sheets for different rooms and resources also support this emphasis on order and planning.

To me, the biggest differences between MS-C's KTS-II results and the descriptions in P-C's field experience relate to MS-C's interactions with people. While the KTS-II description of Guardian-Inspectors indicates a decided introversion, with aversion to being the center of attention or working in a large group, MS-C shows an effortlessness as she interacts with multiple people throughout the day in a variety of ways. If MS-C is as introverted as her KTS-II results indicate, she certainly doesn't show it in her interactions with the learning community, and this may account for P-C's low accuracy rating of the KTS-II results.

Participant/Media Specialist D

Field Experience

The field experience reflection that Participant D (P-D) submitted to me was quite descriptive and detailed, similar to the field experience write-ups of P-A and P-C. However, P-D's experience was quite different because she spent five non-contiguous hours in the media center with her host media specialist (MS-D) instead of simply visiting for one full day. P-D's field experience was also the most overtly positive of the four I examined, characterizing MS-D not only as an effective media specialist, but also as one of "the nicest people at the school."

Reading P-D's field experience yielded the most vivid host media specialist picture of the four, providing me with a very clear picture of MS-D's key personality traits that integrated seamlessly with my word frequency analysis of MS-D's Top 9 activities:

Traits Expressed in Field Experience	Correlation to Top 9 Activities
communicative - told jokes, gave pep talks, and encouraged discussion	Teaching Assisting Collaborating Thinking
kind, considerate, and encouraging - allowed noise, gave pep talks, provided snacks at meetings and kept them short, ordered books based on popularity and student/teacher requests, and asked for suggestions from teachers and the media committee	Needing/fulfilling needs Teaching Assisting Thinking
creative - used humor and games, allowed noise, and liked visually appealing books	Creating Thinking
organized, practical, and efficient - covered a lot of material in a short time, made meetings worthwhile, planned and prepared for lessons, multi-tasked, set up automatic AR test scoring, used book reviews to inform book ordering, and ordered books with durable binding	Needing/fulfilling needs Organizing Thinking Consuming Working
collaborative - worked with teachers to order materials and plan lessons, and adjusted goals to adapt to an administrator's request	Needing/fulfilling needs Teaching Assisting Organizing Collaborating Creating Working
flexible - adapted to changes of plans and technological problems	Needing/fulfilling needs Thinking

Here is the Wordle image for P-D's field experience:



In this graphic representation of P-D's field experience, the word students is the biggest, corresponding with the consistently student-centered approach MS-D displayed throughout the field experience write-up; other key words include class, book/books, information, reference, sources, challenge, lesson, and meeting, which I think correlates clearly with MS-D's focus on collaboration, teaching, and information literacy.

Keirsey Temperament Sorter II Results

The Keirsey Temperament Sorter II (KTS-II) categorized MS-D as an Idealist-Healer, a personality type which is characterized by the following values, some of which are similar to the Idealist-Teacher and many of which differ:

As a(n)....

I also entered the MS-D's KTS-II results into the Wordle engine, which generated the following word cloud:



Key words highlighted in this Wordle image include work, people, personal, needs, others, group, health, counseling, and relationships, which to me clearly shows Idealist-Healers' desire to develop personal relationships with the people around them and to serve those people's needs with great devotion.

Comparison

After completing the KTS-II for her host media specialist, P-D gave the results an accuracy score of 4 on a scale of 1 to 5, indicating that she believed the survey results were relatively accurate based upon her impressions of her host media specialist. P-D particularly noted the accuracy of the KTS-II's description of Idealist-Healers' focus on "feeling" and "perception" and said that MS-D is a "kind" person who "promotes harmony"; when asked about inaccuracies in the KTS-II results, P-A responded that the results were "very accurate," and that she thought it helped that she knew her media specialist so well.

To me, the correspondence between P-D's field experience and KTS-II results is striking, as both the field experience and the KTS-II results show a heightened sense of commitment to others' needs.

The Big Picture - Field Experiences

Examining my data as a whole, I was interested to see the different field experiences that were submitted to me. All four participants expressed positive views of their host media specialists, but as I mentioned before, participants A, C, and D had a much higher level of descriptive details, connections to AASL standards, and positive reflection. Overall, the most positive comments in all of these reflections related to their host media specialists' flexibility, organization, collaboration, consideration, and helpfulness.

The Big Picture - Keirsey Temperament Sorter II Results

What was very interesting to me as I considered the Keirsey results was that the four host media specialists I studied fit into two main personality types--the Guardian and the Idealist. Curious to see how these two temperaments compared to the other two that weren't represented, I decided to visit Keirsey's main pages about the other two types, the Rational and the Artisan.

Rationals, I learned, tend to value reason, logic, order, intelligence, skepticism, information, analysis, efficiency, and problem-solving--but aren't particularly known for their people skills, as they often come across as cold and indifferent to others. This fascinated me as it is very similar to the librarian stereotype: someone so concerned about the books and operation of the library that they sacrifice interpersonal skills to make sure the system works.

Artisans, on the other hand, seem to live at the other end of the personality spectrum, valuing art, creativity, aesthetic pleasure, fun, variety, freedom, spontaneity, resistance to conformity, generosity, and living in the moment; they are known for their charm, but tend to resist rules, regulations, obligations, and planning ahead. While Artisans certainly seem to embody the fun-loving nature and dynamic personalities that might be valued in today's re-created view of media specialists, their rebelliousness and spontaneity could certainly get in the way of their ability to plan collaboratively and work within the structures of standards-based education.

Guardians and Idealists, to me, fall in the middle of this personality spectrum, as Guardians are somewhat like Rationals except people-oriented, and Idealists are sort of like Artisans--but with more of a practical, grounded approach to the world. In relation to each other, the biggest differences I saw between Guardians and Idealists were in Guardians' preference for structure and organization compared to Idealists' needs for flexibility and variety. Still, when I think about the similarities between Guardians and Idealists, it fascinates me that all four media specialists in this study yielded KTS-II results that reflect collaborative, communicative, people-oriented personalities, each with some degree of flexibility, structure, and warmth. 

I wonder whether my study would still have yielded a tendency towards Guardian and Idealist temperaments if I had received data from more participants, and I also wonder how my participants would change their accuracy scores if they had been able to compare their media specialists' KTS-II results with the other personality types; I think it is possible that having this basis for comparison might have yielded higher accuracy scores from some participants because the temperaments differ so much from each other when compared.[Insert content here]

Conclusions

As I began my study, I posed the following research question: How does a media specialist’s personality, reflected through his/her interpersonal skills, affect how school library media graduate students perceive the media specialist’s effectiveness as an instructional partner and leader?

This question houses several key ideas:

I created the following chart in an attempt to summarize how the results of my study relate to these ideas:

	Personality (Temperament)	Interpersonal Skills	Perceived Effectiveness
Field Experiences	Participants rarely commented directly about their media specialists' overall personalities Only one, P-D, made the overall statement that MS-D was "one of the nicest people in the school"	Participants sometimes commented directly about their media specialists' interpersonal skills Often, media specialists' actions indirectly implied these skills All of the media specialists except MS-B (who was completing administrative tasks) showed some level of interpersonal savvy Media specialists in the study showed high levels of communication and collaboration in their learning communities.	Participants commented to varying degrees about their host media specialists' effectiveness, but all painted positive pictures of their media specialists overall Only one, P-B, made any negative comments/criticism, but the weight of these comments was difficult to evaluate because the field experience was so brief and did still contain some positive reflection
KTS-II Results	The KTS-II portion of my study yielded four different KTS-II personality types for the four media specialists who hosted my participants All four media specialists' personalities differed, with each yielding a different result from the KTS-II survey The personalities fell into a range of only two different temperaments, the Guardian and the Idealist	Guardians and Idealists show differing levels of comfort with relationships and structure Both Guardians and Idealists show the interpersonal skills of communication and collaboration	None of my participants' KTS-II results fell into the temperaments of Rational (the traditional and not-so-effective librarian stereotype) or Artisan (spontaneous and creative, but not effective at organizing and planning, and sometimes rebellious) Guardians are sometimes perceived as bossy because of their need for structure, but otherwise are known for their effectiveness as leaders, followers, and members of a group or community Idealists are sometimes perceived as neglectful because of their emphasis on freedom and space, but otherwise are known for their warm personal relationships and effectiveness as members of a group or community
Overall	Media specialists' overall personalities were group- or community-oriented, with different degrees of structure and personal relationships	KTS-II results and field descriptions showed high levels overall of interpersonal skills, especially with communication and collaboration.	Media specialists were portrayed positively throughout most of the data, with overall high levels of effectiveness as members of the learning community.

Overall, based on the data I collected, I felt that my study indicated the following conclusions about the media specialists in this study, who overall were perceived as being effective members of the learning community:

These conclusions neither define nor prescribe any specific interpersonal skills necessary for a media specialist to be positively perceived as an effective member of the learning community--but they do reinforce the idea that effective media specialists are much more than managers of material resources; they are, instead, effective communicators and collaborators who strive for balance between their many responsibilities.

Because I was curious, I took the KTS-II personality inventory myself to see where I fell in the temperament spectrum. I have always been, and always known that I was, an introvert, and though I know personality type doesn't dictate one's effectiveness in a particular career, I have still worried that my introverted nature might hinder my effectiveness as a communicator and collaborator. My KTS-II results? I am an Idealist-Healer--the same personality type as media specialist D in my study. I share a temperament with a media specialist who communicates and collaborates effectively, who is well liked, and who could not be called anything but an effective member of her learning community.

What does this mean for my practice? It means that I can't let myself be hindered by the view I've had of myself as an introvert, because I know that I have, and can continue to develop, the skills I will need to succeed as a media specialist. 

I learned so much from this project, not only about my participants' host media specialists, but also about myself. My results indicated that media specialists who are perceived as effective can embody a wide variety of interpersonal skills and temperaments, and different temperaments have different skills that they can use to become more effective collaborators and communicators. Key traits of the effective media specialists in my study included organization, efficiency, flexibility, communication, helpfulness, and collaboration, but all of the media specialists I studied exhibited these traits to differing degrees and in different ways.