Week 12: Mapping my Learning

Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.
-Richard Powers

How am I/have I been supporting the ESL learners in my class/es and, given what I have learned, where can I adjust and amend to support them further in the future?

My role as Teacher Librarian puts me in a pretty special place in the school to affect academic change. I especially like collaborating with our ESL teacher who is new in her position and comes from being an English teacher for many years. Our school has a RAD committee and they have concluded that there is a systemic lack of literacy skills in our school. So, what role can I take on?

My main role is one of collaboration with teachers and staff. I Googled the meaning of collaboration: (definitions found by putting define:collaboration in Google) and here are some fragments that spoke to me:

Collaboration is shared control over decision making, working together in pursuit of common objectives, helpful to discover new perspectives, an endeavor that is creative in nature—by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus.

I spend all day collaborating with my colleagues and I have seen the good, bad and the ugly of collaboration. I agree that we have strong biases about the “right way to teach” and we can become entrenched in our way to teaching. We become closed to new or different ways of getting to the same place of learning with our classes. I learned a lot about being flexible when I lived and worked in Latin America. I came with a fixed way of doing orientation camps and workshops for the international youth exchanges that I was coordinating and came up against another culture’s way of being. I learned to be more open and to consider other ways of doing things. When I was working with my team to organize a workshop I needed to acknowledge my “freak out” feelings as my alarm bell of being inflexible. I needed to chill out and listen more to my team members. Obviously, there is only so much you can bend because collaboration is about finding a consensus from a myriad of ideas and strategies. That is what makes it so beautiful and maddening.

I agree with other students in this course who have written that you have to trust the person that you are collaborating with. There are teachers in my school who are doing a research project together for their Masters and they are co-teaching a class together. Collaboration has lightened the load for both of them. Another pair of teachers in my school co teach a course over the school year and they rotate units with the class and sometimes teach some classes together. Students get the opportunity to experience two teaching styles and the teachers have more flexible prep time.

The UBC professor and Teacher Librarian Carole Wilson did a thought provoking workshop for Surrey Teacher Librarians this past September about collaboration. She created a blog that contains many resources about collaboration:

http://theinvisiblethreadsofcollaboration.blogspot.com/

I really enjoy doing collaboration with teachers because I know that the work I do with teachers enriches the learning environment for students. Usually teaching in secondary is so isolating with everyone in their teaching caves and I hope over the years to encourage teachers to do more co-teaching within and outside of their subject area. Why can’t English and Science teachers do units together? I think that Elementary teachers do a lot more of collaboration together and they could teach us more about it in secondary. I wish that I had had training about what a Teacher Librarian could do for me and I now concentrate on working with the student teachers in our school. I learn so much from them.

Collaboration has to be controlled by teachers and it is part of our teaching autonomy. Don’t tell me to collaborate so that I can get students to score higher on provincial exams or FSA tests. I will not play the empty standardized teaching and testing game.

The library is a place of solace for ESL students and I need to support them but also I need to challenge them to move out of their comfort zone a bit. Perhaps I will mix up students at the tables and encourage them to interact more in English. I need to continue to encourage ESL students to volunteer in the library. At the moment all my volunteers in the library are Asian ESL students and this role gives them confidence to work with other students. They check books in and out and help monolingual students to find books for recreational reading and for research for school work. The library volunteers becomes the "expert" and they love it.

So as I map my learning throughout this course, it now my job as a Teacher Librarian to guide other teachers to examine how they support their ESL learners in their classroom. This course has helped me to deepen my understanding of the needs of ESL students and how I can support their learning. When work with their teachers, then I can really make a difference as they work with the ESL students for a whole term and I might just see them at lunch in the library. If every teacher can start to do one thing in their classrooms to support ESL students then this will make a big difference in students' lives. We as teachers need to see immigrant students as people who bring a great deal to our classrooms.