For the library program, I am very fortunate to have Bridget, my wonderful elementary counterpart, because we have spent much time together in the last years planning and reflecting together on what is most important to focus on and build into our library curriculum. We have fully embraced the fact that "Reflection makes us better", and taken every opportunity to do that. Through that reflection with both Bridget, my administration, and my curriculum team, I have focused in on the goals of my library program, and boiled it down to the following mantra:
"Growing Innovators, Building Community, Connecting Globally"
All of these stem from goals for instruction, programing and professional development, and I would like to use them as the base for gathering evidence to speak to the success of the high school library program. These are big ideas and goals, and I am continuing to work through specific, concrete methods for identifying and gathering evidence. I have started by breaking each of these big ideas into concrete goals for this school year:
Growing Innovators:
- Continue to develop inquiry skills in our students.
- Identify and gather meaningful data in our library program.
- Implement a badging system in the MakerSpace.
Building Community:
- Move forward on the redesign of our library learning commons.
- Create and work with a library advisory club
- Increase promotion of literacy
Connecting Globally:
- Begin to infuse lessons with design thinking concepts.
- Build authentic audiences
- Invite in real world voices
Next, I need to develop a plan to identify successes and failures in each area. Some thoughts I have brainstormed to this end are below:
Growing Innovators:
- Identifying benchmark lessons/ inquiry skills at different grade levels to identify "holes" in the implementation of our WISER inquiry curriculum.
- Participation numbers in the MakerSpace
Building Community:
- Literacy Promotion ---- Book Checkout (Do the books I promote/ display/ booktalk get checked out at a higher rate than other titles?)
- Numbers participating in library programs... though I also want to capture quality participation and not only quantitative data on this topic.
Connecting Globally:
- Opportunities to implement Design Thinking
- Participation from community members (both local and global) in library programs and/ or instruction.
