Tanya Martin's Applied Project
 
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I. Overview

Contents

  1. 1 Introduction
  2. 2 Background
  3. 3 Research Question
  4. 4 Importance of the Study
  5. 5 Context


Introduction
Given my experiences with stereotypical librarians who came across as cold and impersonal, as well as my own introverted temperament, I decided to study how media specialists' interpersonal skills might influence their perceived effectiveness.

After conducting a review of literature related to media specialists' interpersonal skills and personality traits, I began my own study by recruiting participants from my graduate school classes. Four participants provided me with a reflection from one of their media center field experiences; these volunteers also took the Keirsey Temperament Sorter II personality inventory pretending to be their host media specialists, and they provided follow-up information about the accuracy of their KTS-II results.

I analyzed this data qualitatively by searching for key ideas related to interpersonal skills, and I also performed a quantitative word frequency analysis on the field experiences and KTS-II results. The resulting data was organized into several spreadsheets and a set of visual word frequency clouds, which I analyzed in the hope that I would find some meaningful pattern or set of interpersonal skills that would be applicable to my practice and others'. 

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.

In the end, this study reaffirmed the conclusion that I had reached in my literature review--that self-assessment, self-awareness, and self-reflection were all tools I and my media specialist colleagues could use to help us become more collaborative, effective members of our learning communities.

Background

    • As a former K-12 student, I had vivid memories of my own perceptions of school library media specialists’ attitudes and effectiveness at the schools I attended.
    • As a K-12 teacher, I’ve worked with two different media specialists and formed very different perceptions of their attitudes and effectiveness. 
    • As an SLM student, I’ve engaged in two very different field experiences with host media specialists and formed my own perceptions of their respective attitudes and effectiveness. 
    • As an SLM student, I’ve encountered many people who say, “You’re in school for what? I had no idea you had to be certified to be a librarian. I thought you just sat at a desk and read books!” 
    • As an SLM student, I’ve read a lot about effective collaboration, which requires a certain set of interpersonal skills that don’t seem to correspond with traditional perceptions of librarians. 
    • As an aspiring media specialist, I’d like to work on the interpersonal skills necessary to be perceived as an effective, approachable media specialist.

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?

Importance of the Study

    • The learning community must perceive media specialists as effective and approachable for collaboration to occur, and this perception depends largely on the media specialist’s interpersonal skills and interactions with members of the learning community.
    • This problem addressed issues I’ve encountered throughout my life in education.
    • This problem addressed a professional need of mine, because I perceive myself as having strong intrapersonal skills (i.e. I naturally self-reflect and self-assess) but weak interpersonal skills (i.e. I’m often shy about approaching people and tend to work independently as a teacher).
    • Researching this problem helped me see more clearly what interpersonal skills an effective media specialist possesses and how I could develop these skills to become a strong collaborator and leader who is perceived positively by my learning community.

Context

Since my research problem focuses on the media specialists’ interpersonal skills and interactions with others, its most immediate context is the media center; however, the problem extends beyond the media center as others form perceptions of the media specialist, which in turn play a role in determining the amount and quality of collaboration throughout the learning community.