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Guest blogger: My student teacher reflects

November 27, 2007
For the past three weeks I've had a student teacher.  Margie spent time at one of our elementary schools, and our middle school, before joining me at the high school. 

I wondered about her impressions of our district.  I wondered what practice looked like to her after the classrooms of her LIS program. 

I asked her to reflect and she was generous enough to share:

Joyce asked me to give my impression of the academic preparation of School Library Media Specialists from the viewpoint as a student librarian in the field.  Since my time as a student is coming to an end, I better do it right now.  Next week, I’ll be a full-fledged school librarian (albeit unemployed!).   It took me 1-1/2 years of hard work to complete this MS-LIS degree, but now as I near the end of my formal training, I find that I question whether the content of the courses required by my university program adequately prepared me to practice as the top notch SLMS that I plan to be. 

I am not saying that my courses weren’t rigorous (most were), and I’m not saying that my professors weren’t good (the majority were); I went to an excellent university and I learned incredible amounts of great information. But despite this, I feel that my formal schooling did not offer instruction in many of the state-of-the-art practices that the top-notch school librarians of today are utilizing in their classrooms.

Despite numerous education and library science classes in the School Library Media Specialist track, I was never instructed in much of the technology available to enhance the education process.  For example, I learned about WebQuests, creating websites, and designing pathfinders, but not about interactive whiteboards, or Classroom Performance Systems.

I was not exposed to the capacity of many Web 2.0 applications to improve the classroom, nor instructed in how to harness them to enhance the learner experience.  Prior to my field study, I had never designed a wiki, nor created a podcast; nor explored how blogs could be used to enhance classroom communication.  Shouldn’t my education or school library classes have included these new tools?  Wouldn’t you expect that a major university would be on the cutting edge of this educational transformation? (I did).

During the past three months, I have been lucky enough to have had the wonderful opportunity to spend time with three great school librarians who practice within a school district that overtly values and supports the central role of the school library (and the work of their librarians). My preceptors patiently taught me so many things… including how to harness the power of the technological tools at my disposal to enhance the learning experience.  I feel like it was three months of catch-up, but now I too, can offer teachers and students information on a wide variety of classroom communication tools.

I can’t help but wonder what kind of school librarian I would have made my first year out of school without the experience of the last three months. I feel that my field study has changed not only my concept of what tools a quality practitioner should have in their toolbox, but has also transformed my ability to provide that in the field. 

-Margie Weil

Posted by Joyce Valenza Ph.D on November 27, 2007 | Comments (7)