The role of the teacher librarian in essential learning (Volume 17 Issue 3, 2003)

Lynden Leppard

Lynden Leppard is Principal of Clarence High School in Hobart.  He has been there for about seven years, with 18 months helping with the co-construction of the Tasmanian Essential Learning Framework and the standards framework.  He was a co-writer for the Nationally Agreed SOSE Statement and Profile.  He is particularly interested in the nature of intellectual challenge in school learning and the nature of, and relationships, between, inquiry, metacognition and ethical thinking and the pedagogies that develop them most effectively.

(The views expressed in articles are those of the author(s) concerned and do not necessarily represent the views of ASLA.)

To change the System we must change ourselves or we will unconsciously perpetuate what is really holding us back. (Jenlick)

I doubt anyone reading this will discover anything new, if new means things they have not heard before. There is a challenge for those of us who have read the literature and attended the seminars on information literacy, teaching thinking, project and problem based inquiry and use all the contemporary words to describe our actions. Has our practice really changed and moved or have we merely re-badged what we have always done? The question is similar to asking a fish to notice water. So many of our assumptions and habits are such a part of us that stepping outside and looking in critically is very difficult. A natural tendency of our brains is to make things fit the known and the paradigms we believe exist become invisible in our choices. Studies done by Newmann, during the Queensland Longitudinal Study as part of the New Basics and anecdotal, persistent reports in Tasmania suggest that intellectual challenge, higher order thinking, and critical analysis are uncommon in our schools. The evidence is strong that we are kidding ourselves when we claim that we teach students how to think, research, reflect or analyse. We need to be both alert to what is really happening and alarmed that typical learning experiences may not be as we imagine.

Ian Tattersall in his book The monkey in the mirror explores the process by which scientists work hard to fit new observations into old ways of organising and often actively reject new paradigms that threaten their view of how things are meant to be. Eventually the new paradigms ossify and they become the ones people fight to protect. He notes that this behaviour is understandable and natural given that science is a collective human enterprise designed to disprove and be sceptical.

He gives an example of the development in the 1960’s of the new geological theory of plate tectonics that overturned the view built up over centuries that the basic form of the earth’s surface was essentially static. You may think that geologists would be delighted with a new unifying theory of unstable blocks of relatively light rock that float around on heavier molten rock below them. "Not so. There was tremendous resistance to the new ideas, not just among the old guard but also among younger colleagues who remained under their influence" (p19).

Tattersall makes an observation that we as educators need to consider. "Paradigms must change sooner or later, as knowledge accumulates. The piling-up of anomalous observations that cannot be explained by old hypotheses cannot forever be ignored, and must eventually lead to the demise of inadequate explanatory frameworks, however tenaciously these latter may tend to linger." (Tattersall p21).

A focus question for us all is "Have I stopped really challenging my assumption about how learning and teaching work?" Here is a simple example. In my early teaching days, information was textbook based and some risk takers used newspapers and magazines. The publication process approved information and all assumed authority behind that.

It was insightful in the late 70’s to observe that our job was not to teach the facts but to teach learners how to get the facts. Around that time student based learning was interpreted as giving students open-ended projects so they could "discover" learning.

Now we know we are drowning in information. Information is not hard to find and it is a simple thing for anyone to search a topic and put together a pretty set of facts, pictures and sounds with no engagement at all in understanding. It is very easy to seem impressive with a PowerPoint presentation merely because it looks good. An invisible template provides the plot.

Merely locating information using any library or electronic system is now a low level skill of trivial magnitude. What matters now is working with learners on what information is strategically most important to answer the inquiry question they are asking. A challenge here is to pause and ask, "What precisely do I do to add value to student learning, what questions do I ask them and how to I follow up those questions?" If the learning task is to investigate a topic without a set of questions worth asking and if students can perform the task by trawling for information and then collaging a project together based on anything but focusing questions, then we are letting them down. We were ten or twenty years ago and we are now if we stopped at the insight that it is necessary to teach students how to find information and not just give it too them. This means more than critical review of the information, although that is important. Selecting information relevant to answering questions worth asking is a lot more than that, more the tip of the iceberg of authentic, purposeful intellectual challenge.

What does this mean for teacher librarians in particular? There are several areas of reflection that teacher librarians may find useful in challenging their assumptions and their practices. They can do none of this on their own. They must be members of teams and part of a habitual building of shared understanding across the school of what a learning environment looks, sounds and feels like. Fundamental to this shared understanding of what learning is and what it looks like are some stated positions and that is some of purpose of the Essential Learning Frameworks One and Two in Tasmania.

This is not difficult or controversial. The Essential Learning Frameworks (ELF) are conservative. They are evidence based and the research comes from mainstream researchers and universities. Much of what the frameworks say has been known for years and already widely valued. They are also conservative in that they answer old questions, reflect community expectations and offer predictable solutions to long-standing problems. The tensions people feel around the ELF are largely due to differences of choice on what the "essential" should be and the new policy environment in which the curriculum is no longer a smorgasbord that teachers can select freely from. The ongoing and necessary dilemma will be what should be essential at this time for these reasons and many of us are challenged by the expectations that we are required to address. Teacher librarians must play a role in collaborating with their teacher colleagues to respond to these rigorous demands.

Tasmania, and every state system, is developing a definitive set of outcomes, core knowledge and concepts and some statements about what effective teaching and learning environments look like. Perhaps they have some common features that teacher librarians can use as tools to assess the quality of their own work and identify their own unique contributions to learning. Indeed if they do not have a unique purpose that adds clear value, or if their tasks can be undertaken by a technician, there is no need for them to exist as "teacher-librarians". The value that teacher-librarians have is the opportunity to contribute skills and knowledge to key elements of a school’s transformation plans.

Facilitating inquiry for understanding

Disciplined inquiry is a necessary characteristic of quality learning and there are several questions and issues that a teacher librarian is in an ideal position to address.

Is there a whole school understanding of the generic characteristics of inquiry? Is there a shared understanding between staff of what "research" means? Where the curriculum is organized around discrete disciplines or subjects, what are the particular interpretations of inquiry in each of them?

A school’s unique purpose is to assist learners to make meaning and that raises issues about how time, content, concepts, outcomes and tasks are organized by a timetable. The questions posed above are relevant whatever structure a primary school teacher or a secondary timetable use to organize learning.

Many schools use one of many integrating models to put large numbers of students together with teams of teachers with the intention of developing a shared set of intentions and meaning they can then take to the students. These models may be called middle schools, humanities, transdisciplinary learning and integrated studies for example. In these circumstances the teacher librarian can play the role of designing a generic approach to inquiry that allows particular elements of different discipline inquiries to be added. At a basic level this involves working with colleagues and students on the following:

• What are the teaching intentions, learning outcomes and big ideas driving this learning task?
• What questions about this area of investigation are worth asking?
• What will learner understanding look like during and at the end of the task and how will the understanding be demonstrated or performed?

Linked to these questions is the ‘project’. A young learner many years ago alerted me to the futility of projects for the sake of filling in time and doing work for the sake of work when I asked her what her project was going to be about. "Wool" she said. "What about wool" I asked. "Just wool… you know, pictures from magazines, some wool off the fence, stuff on knitting." "Why would you do that?" "Because I always do wool, I’ve done wool since grade 4" she patiently explained. She knew what projects were about and she assured me she had it pretty well worked out when she finished with, "and I always get a good mark." I wonder what she and I would make of a project on ‘Aborigines’ now? Would we get into the issue of what constitutes history and the debate generated by Windshuttle, would it be a collection of bits and pieces about traditional; culture, or perhaps an unreflective summary of stories from a visiting elder. That would depend on the teaching intentions and the focusing questions on which the study would be based.

So, what is a project worth doing?

It has to develop understanding of something worth knowing about when there is so little time at school anyway. In addition to the questions above there are some characteristics of intellectual challenge that frame how an investigation should be designed.

These characteristics built into the outcomes and standards and incorporate three criteria for judging intellectual work developed by Newman. These are part of the foundation on which the Essential Learning Framework and the Outcomes and Standards have been deliberately built.

• Construction of Knowledge: using or manipulating knowledge as in analysis, interpretation, synthesis, and evaluation, rather than only reproducing knowledge in previously stated forms.
• Disciplined Inquiry: gaining in-depth understanding of limited topics, rather than superficial acquaintance with many, and using elaborated forms of communication to learn and express one’s conclusions.
• Value Beyond School: the production of discourse, products and performances that have personal, aesthetic, or social significance beyond demonstration of success to the teachers. (Newmann 2000)

Project design and management is an authentic complex process that can be adapted to the tasks students engage in. Colleagues at my school use a project management process that includes attention to risk analysis, timelines, resources, audience, purpose and quality control. Teacher librarians could base all the inquiry learning they do with students on a simple project management approach that can be expanded according to student potential.

The new organization of information and the valuing of knowledge

Effective inquiry requires competence in specific skills of information collection and selection and teacher librarians can add value beyond the technical processes of information retrieval and evaluation. While students need training in effective and efficient searches, there is now the particular challenge of teaching them how to judge the credibility of sources and the relative value of different types of information they have gathered. That is long standing challenge; is it quite different now? The question takes us into the significant area of the new nature of knowledge and information.

Teacher librarians must be filters not funnels for their colleagues and students.  If it is accurate to characterize teacher librarians as those best placed in schools to reflect on the new nature of information and how it is organized and presented to learners, then they have a role to play in helping us all learn about the invisible mechanisms that have profound influences on the construction of meaning.

There are some specific elements that can be addressed. These are based on some beliefs that you may have a view about:

• More information does not necessarily lead to better understanding.
• More information does not mean better decisions.
• Most important decisions are not right or wrong but hard choices made on balance.
• Learners do not wait to learn until they have all the facts, and we cannot wait until we know enough to make some important choices.
• People make choices and make meaning they best way they can at any given time.
• Choices are made according to what we value most at any one time rather than a clear ordering of values.

These beliefs lead to some conclusions about how information is used to make decisions and solve problems. The crucial one is the notion of strategic information – "what critical facts, views, consequences do I need to know and understand to make a decision about this?" It’s this approach to making the best possible contingent decision in the time available that learners need to be helped with.

Learners also need help developing the skills of a critical interpretation approach to the means by which information is organized and presented and what the creators or transmitters of the information value most. Assisting learners to do that requires us to understand what it is in precise terms. What are the elements and essentials of such critical interpretation?

Just in time curriculum design

The nature of authentic (or life imitating learning) tasks means that textbooks and other forms of permanent information sources are just a part of what is required by learning task designers as resources. This is not a new challenge but it remains common for teachers to pull together a range of sources that tend to remain static and become increasingly irrelevant over time. Curriculum and unit design are difficult and time consuming tasks and both individuals and teams need constant support to provide quality information to learners to suit the teaching intentions, the required outcomes and the needs of the learners. This is a creative joy for teachers but also a risk of missing opportunities.

Teacher librarians need to be members of teaching teams to contribute significant skills and play several roles.

• They add value to the team’s intentions when they work alone with students because they understand the intentions and can complement and enhance the quality of any inquiry.
• They have a multi-purpose resourcing support role that includes people and places as well as the usual IT resources.
• They can assist the team design the tasks because they know the resources in the school and networks the school can be part of.
• They are able to scan and filter for teachers constantly refreshing the information and resource base of their teaching units.

Partners in professional learning

Another role for teacher librarians during this period of school and individual transformation is as the resource person for organizational learning. They can support leadership teams, individual staff and teaching teams to meet their own professional learning needs as they push the limits of their own practice. The teacher librarian should know what the school’s change plans are and what each staff member’s professional learning priorities are within that plan. This requires a whole school approach to professional learning of which the teacher librarian is a crucial part. Where the teacher librarian has a special and vital role in these endeavors, their place will be valued and assured.

References

Blythe, T., (1998). The teaching for understanding guide. Jossey-Bass.

Diamond, M., Hopson. J., (1999). Magic tress of the mind. Plume.

Essential Learning Framework One (2002) and Two (2003) Department of Education Tasmania.

Paul, Richard., (2001). Critical thinking: tools for taking charge of your learning and your life. Prentice Hall.

Fullan, M., (2001). The new meaning of educational change. 3^rd Edition. Jossey-Bass.

Jackson, A., (2000). Turning points 2000. Teachers College Press.

Middleton, M., and Hill. J., (1996). Changing schools: challenging assumptions and exploring possibilities. Hawker Brownlow. (for Jenlick reference).

Newmann, F., (1996). Authentic achievements. Jossey-Bass.

Newmann, Fred, (2000). Authentic intellectual work: what and why? University of Minnesota, Centre for Applied Research and Educational Improvement. Volume 8 Number1.

McTighe, J.and Wiggins. G., (1999). Understanding by design. ASCD.

Tattersall, Ian (2002). The monkey in the mirror. Harcourt.