Embedded Files
Welcome!
I'm excited to learn alongside you. Having been both a teacher librarian and district administrator, I have been in hundreds of leadership conversations over the last 28 years. Thanks to my experiences 'on the dark side' of administration, I been able to build on my perspectives as a teacher librarian to understand what makes for productive partnerships with school and district leaders and how to effectively engage and collaborate not only with administrators but with fellow educators at all levels.
This course is intended to help you have more productive conversations and collaborations with school and district leaders. Using the Future Ready Librarians Conversation Starter Tool as a starting point, this course will guide you through a step-by-step process that includes self-reflection, research into school and district strategic plans, planning for conversation, and facilitated strategies for effective collaborative planning meetings with school leaders.
As part of the course, you will be expected to prepare, plan for, and have at least two meetings with a school or district leader. These can be either in-person or virtual. It is up to you to determine who you wish to meet and work with. Ideally, this person should be someone who knows you and is in a decision-making position with the ability to work with you to identify a collaborative project, or plan. This person could be a building leader (principal or assistant principal) or district leader. It could be your supervisor, but does not have to be. If you work with multiple buildings or districts, select one that is most relevant to your practice. In the scope of this course, it is recommended that you choose just one person for the initial conversations. At your discretion, additional colleagues and leaders can be brought on board after your initial meetings.
You will keep a Leadership Conversation Portfolio which will serve two purposes. The first is as a practical place to collect, curate, and reflect in preparation for your leadership conversations. For the purposes of the course, it is a persistent place to complete required activities and assignments while allowing me to review them, provide feedback, and ask questions.
A focus area will be identified and collaboratively developed through your self-reflection, research, and partnership meetings. Because this focus area will be guided by school and/or district needs and priorities, it could impact students, teachers, staff, parents, and/or the community. That will be up to you and your administrator partner.
Keep in mind that the primary objective of this course is to build capacity and confidence in collaborating and partnering with school and district leaders. It is not about project management. By the end of this course, you will have started a process of planning and implementing something exciting for your students and teachers, but the completion of this project will be up to you.
I recognize and respect you as accomplished educators and library leaders. This course is based on the FRL Conversation Starter which was designed for any librarian to use and includes suggested ideas, steps, resources, and processes of which you may already be familiar. The FRL Conversation Starter presumes that the librarian is starting from scratch or may struggle with effective administrative partnerships. As part of this grant and your exceptional professional learning community, you may be in a different place. You have already learned and worked as a librarian leadership cohort. You may already enjoy strong and productive relationships with administrators and perhaps already collaborate with them as part of your library leadership. I've tried to adapt the Conversation Starter process and framework with this in mind. I've included some 'training wheels' in the form of prompts and guides in case they are useful, but feel free to ride without them as you see fit.
This course will be somewhat atypical as your time will be spent less on academic reading and writing and focused more on professional reflection and engaging in authentic leadership conversations with administrators. My role as the instructor will be not to evaluate your responses, but to guide your thinking and support you as you reflect, research, plan, and implement leadership conversations with an administrator.
In addition to this site/course organizer and some other online tools and surveys, you will use three primary documents for your work.
Leadership Conversation Portfolio - Open this Leadership Conversation Portfolio document and select Column D. Click on your name to open your copy of the file. There are prompts, questions, and activities which you will contribute to during the course. It is intended to both function as evidence of your learning for the course and as a practical organizer for your leadership conversations. On a regular basis, I will view what you've written, making comments or posing questions.
Focus Sheet - this is a simple worksheet that you can use for your second meeting as you identify challenges with your administrator. Open the Leadership Conversation Portfolio and select Column D. Scroll down to the Focus Sheet pages. Click on your name to open your copy of the file. The file contains three copies for you to use and adapt as you see fit.
Future Ready Librarians Conversation Starter Tool - as mentioned above, this course is adapted from this protocol. Use this resource as a complement to the units and activities in this course. Additional questions and activities are included in this tool which may support your understanding, reflection, and success.
We will also stay in touch using the Facebook Group. I will pose periodic prompts, reminders, and questions during the course of the class.
Before you proceed in the course, select your Leadership Conversation Portfolio document in Column D and enter the following information:
Name of school or district leader
Leadership position
Name of school and/or district
Why did you choose this person? (100 words max)
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