Professionalism: Learning Outcome 4

I have demonstrated proficiency using my leadership skills to provide professional development opportunities for teachers and other school community members.

Description

Part of becoming a librarian is to share your knowledge with other team members.  An effective way to do this is to hold a professional development session.  All teachers are busy throughout the day and normally work past contract hours and the last thing they want to do is to sit through a long boring PD session.  However, sometimes there is information that needs to be shared, especially when it is something that will enrich students learning.  The assignment here is a PD session I worked on is part of a series of 15 minute PD sessions that are informative, but also quick.

Analysis

            After presenting the session to the teachers, I saw there is room for improvement.  Trying to present the information quickly didn’t leave a lot of time to go into detail on some of the resources Discus has to offer.  However, putting the links in PowerPoint was helpful, and after the session I sent the power point to all the teachers.  I think keeping it to a 15 minute presentation gave me more participation among the staff than I would have had with a longer presentation.  This was also a topic that could be used as a short PD verses some others that will require more time.  Most of the teachers were already familiar with the site, but it was introduced to the new teachers, and they had questions on how their students would access the database.  This led me to believe they were receptive, and the session was a success.

Reflection

            Since the PD session did well and was a success, I will continue it as a series.  The timeline for the sessions can be adjusted some and they don’t have to be every month.  I think some can be virtual as well, so that teachers and staff can watch them at their best convenience. There will also need to be other PD sessions that are longer if the content isn’t conducive to a short timeframe.  There is just some information that can’t be gone through so quickly and will need some extra explanations.  The library is a learning community for the entire school and as such the librarian is tasked with providing staff and students with access to information and technology. These short PD sessions are a great place to start, this way staff have access to and knowledge of all the programs and information the library has to offer.