Being a leader can be a daunting prospect for many people, especially since most people do not truly understand what leadership entails. Leadership is not a trait that one must be born with, but an attitude to be cultivated. At its core, leadership is born from passion; when one is passionate about a cause and willing to devote time to furthering that cause, then they have already taken the first steps to becoming a leader.
There are qualities that are necessary to be a leader, but they are not what you might expect. Charisma, power, and public speaking are not requirements for leadership. Integrity, cooperation, vision, and a sense of humor will be far more useful in pursuing leaderships roles (Weisburg & Ballard, 2017). A leader needs to be someone that others can trust to work for the good of the whole group, to have a vision for the future, and to be able to appreciate the good in a situation that may otherwise seem negative. All of these qualities will inspire loyalty from others, meaning that your leadership efforts will go further with their support (Weisburg & Ballard, 2017).
Advocacy is one of the most important aspects of leadership that a librarian can demonstrate, and this is especially true for school librarians. For many years, school librarians felt secure in their roles in schools, but when the economy crashed it became apparent that many administrators and districts saw librarians as expendable. Schools across the nations lost qualified librarians to budget cuts, and some schools lost their library programs altogether. To keep this from happening again, librarians must advocate for their programs.
What is advocacy? Advocacy is how we promote and protect our school librarians. It is a continuous process of building relationships and explaining our worth and value in schools (AASL, 2015). We advocate for our school libraries so that the next time budget cuts threaten our positions, we can prove that we are too vital to student success to be cut. We advocate so that other stakeholders will see what we do and speak up about our value to them when we need them to. We advocate so that the community sees we are committed to improving student learning and understands that students will suffer if library programs and staff are cut.
For school librarians, I believe advocacy starts with being able to describe to others why the school library program and the librarian are important to student success. This requires planning and research, because you need to be able to give evidence that your work impacts students in a beneficial way. Being able to cite published research documenting the impact of school librarians is a start, but you also need to show how you are helping to meet the school’s goals. Know what those goals are, and be able to point to specific things you do to meet them.
One common tactic for this part of advocacy is something called the “elevator speech.” This is just a short statement you can make in response to anyone who asks you “what do you do?” or “why do we need school librarians?” at a moment’s notice. Essentially, you are giving a brief statement of the role of the library in the school community, backed up with evidence from research. Being caught unawares to questions like this can result in misunderstandings for stakeholders, leading to a loss of support for your library program. To practice this skill, I worked with a small group in LIS 653 to create an elevator speech that could be used with school administrators who are unfamiliar with the benefits of having a qualified school librarian in a school.
Advocacy is also about building relationships. You need for teachers, administrators, and parents to appreciate what you do, and that starts with building those relationships. If teachers don’t know who you are and what you do, can you really expect them to speak up for you? It is the librarian’s responsibility to reach out to teachers, to build a reputation with them as someone who provides a vital service to the school community.
The most-foolproof method for building relationships with teachers and gaining their support is to make their jobs easier. Be their resource for instructional support. Share new technology and resources that they can use in the classroom. Offer to co-teach, and be sure to help with assessment of what you teach.
The Parent-Teacher-Student Organization can be one of the school librarian’s greatest allies in terms of advocacy. If the librarian convince parents that he or she is helping their students learn better and succeed, then the parents will be willing to support the librarian in a number of ways, even up to advocating for school libraries at school board meetings.
Now that I’ve outlined some of the many ways to be a leader and advocate for your school library, I want to emphasize the importance of having a plan and a vision for your advocacy. Advocacy works best when it is targeted to your audience. School administrators want to hear how you are impacting student achievement. Teachers want to know how the school library program can help them teach better, and again, increase student achievement. Parents want to know how their child is doing and what kind of learning experiences the library offers that the classroom teachers don’t. When planning advocacy efforts, it is important to consider how you should approach each different audience, and how to best ensure that your advocacy benefits your library program in the way you intended. Consider what methods of communication will work best with your audience as well. Flyers around school won’t help you much with contacting parents, but they will catch the attention of students and staff. Email is great for contacting teachers and administrators, but not students. All of these decisions will change the impact of your efforts.
In LIS 653, I created a plan for how I would carry out advocacy related to two services offered by the library at my school. For each service, I outlined several objectives, detailing who my audience was, what strategies I would use, how I would communicate with the audience, and how I would evaluate the results.
AASL. (2015, December 15). What Is Advocacy? Retrieved September 27, 2017, from http://www.ala.org/aasl/advocacy/definitions
Weisburg, H. K., & Ballard, S. D. (2017). Leading for school librarians: there is no other option. Chicago: Neal-Schuman, an imprint of the American Library Association.