Program Learning Outcome 4

Understanding your audience is important in any situation, but for a teacher librarian it is especially valuable. For the most part our audience is made up of students, though at times it can also be fellow teachers. Regardless, knowing who your audience is, to the best of your ability, impacts your decisions about how and what to teach. Today's students are diverse in more ways than just culture and ethnicity. Students have different knowledge bases, motivation, interests, and preferred learning methods (Small, Arnone, Stripling, & Berger, 2012) and we need to keep that in mind.

The collaborative lesson that I planned in LIS 693 was actually an example in failing to understand my audience and yet an ability to recognize mid-lesson and make alterations. Realizing that the group did not have the background knowledge that I expected them to have, I had to change my strategies in order to keep them engaged and impart some of my goals.

Learning from that experience, the lesson that I planned as a part of my goal project utilized strategies that the students were more accustomed to. I had always planned for a scavenger hunt, but learned the importance of utilizing the smart board and videos with this group. This lesson felt much better than the previous one.

The professional development project that I designed for LIS 635 was a more formal method of instruction as well as a more formal method of communicating the need for instruction. With this plan, there was an infographic created as an advertisement, multiple sessions planned, and a specific time and place for each meeting. For a less formal situation, I created a fun "menu" of ways that the library could help teachers. These help to get the communication channels open as there are things that a librarian can do that are often not known by faculty. It is also very useful to start working with one person per grade and let word of mouth and newsletters do a bulk of the work for you.