Vision of the Future Final Reflection

Dear Colleagues,  

Thanks for looking at this infographic. I decided to use a timeline format because, as our course concludes, I recognize how much our inquiries and interactions have helped my practice to evolve.

• I have set a course for information literacy development at my school, a key  element of Fostering literacies to empower lifelong learners (Leading Learning, p. 10)
•  I have become aware of some ambivalent feelings about leadership, and this awareness has been a first step in deciding to step more fully into a leadership role, which is one of the hats I believe a teacher librarian must wear.
• The scope and sequence presentation and document I created for my final project will be a foundation for collaboration as I work with colleagues to explore the role of technology in unlikely places such as outdoor learning.  Barbara Braxton's 500 Hats scope and sequence blog transformed my thinking.  Braxton argued that technology skills must be a "lived and dynamic experience and process" (2017).

Researchers Lindsay McNiff and Lauren Hays describe their Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) model as "the practice of inquiry into student learning and the teaching processes that facilitate learning, with the goal of improving both" (2017, p. 367).  They cite four key questions to guide SoTL:

1. “What works?”:   Investigating a new or existing technique to see if it achieves its ends.
2.  “What is?”:   Examining and describing what is happening in the classroom, often with respect to a specific learning process or the features of an effective intervention.
3.  “Visions of the possible” :  Teachers consider new goals.
4. Theory-building questions that seek to develop new conceptual frameworks through which teaching and learning can be considered.

Special Topics 477 has effectively taken me through to developing my "vision of the possible" for next year.  I intend to continue the cycle of outcome generating, evidence gathering and reflection we began in this course, and I invite all of you to stay in touch and remain a part of my community of practice!

Best regards,

Kim

References

Braxton, B. (2017, February 8). The scope-and-sequence hat [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://500hats.edublogs.org/2017/02/08/the-scope-and-sequence-hat/

Canadian   Library  Association   (CLA).   (2014).  Leading   Learning: Standards   of   practice for   school   library  learning   commons   in  Canada.   Ottawa, ON: Canadian   Library Association.   Retrieved  from   http:/ / clatoolbox.ca/ casl/ slic/ llsop.html  

McNiff, L., & Hays, L. (2017). SoTL in the LIS Classroom: Helping Future Academic Librarians Become More Engaged Teachers. Communications in Information Literacy, 11 (2), 366-377.  https://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2017.11.2.8