7320 Reading, Collaboration & Website Reflections by Julia: Collaboration

After completing this unit with my collaborative partner Amy, I can confidently say that I was fortunate to have a strong partner who made this experience educational and fun. From the beginning it was clear that synergy would allow us to grow as school librarians. Our main successes came from the fact that we both have an understanding of what it takes to work in a group. We showed up to all meetings, did the work we said we would do before the meetings, set up times and dates for future meetings and remained flexible throughout the process. Additionally, we both put a tremendous amount of effort into the project, sharing our knowledge and ideas along the way.

We chose to use Skype and Googledocs as our main communicative tools. Skype proved to be a powerful way for us to connect and share ideas. It was also helpful that we left Skype on so we could call each other with quick questions. Googledocs allowed us to access the same documents so each of us could work on them according to our own schedule. I was very excited to use both of these technologies and see the potential benefit to using them even when teachers collaborate within the same building. I intend to use Skype as a tool with my partner teacher from now on as sometimes the simple act of meeting in each other’s classrooms is too time consuming. With 25 minutes to work together allotted each day giving up a few minutes to walk around the building is too valuable to waste.

The main challenge we faced was getting the spacing correct using this wiki. We encountered several roadblocks as far as page naming and page layout on the wiki. We got better at it as time went on but some pages like our demographics page still looked odd no matter what we did to adjust the sizing. In addition, I was fortunate that Amy was incredibly understanding of the fact that I couldn’t seem to maintain any semblance of health this semester.

Final Refection

Assessment Blog Assessing Student's Learning and Sharing What They've Learned with Stakeholders

Assessment of this unit is where our discussion about the actual unit began. Aside from the obvious discussion centering on what we want the students to learn about the media center, social action and research, we spent a lot of time taking about how we were going to go about assessing their learning.

As we began the discussion, we realized that we both would not be able to assess every single portion of learning together in a real-world situation. In order to share the assessment we looked at portions of the summative and formative assessment that we would each assess. We decided to approach the partitioning of the grading by having the librarian focus the assessment of the students learning on the lessons that she teachers. The teacher will assess the students’ essay. We then agreed that we should both assess the presentation portion of the project and blog or video diary. Therefore, the final evaluation will be a collaborative effort.

By assessing the presentations in a collaborative setting, we will be able to help the students polish their projects for their final presentations. We have decided that we would like to hold an Isearch for Social Action Showcase. This will allow students the opportunity to take their work public and communicate their learning to the community’s stakeholders as we plan to invite the school board, parents and community members. We believe that showcasing the student’s work stakeholders will have an opportunity to witness the integral role the school library plays in students’ learning.

Students will receive detailed checklists that will layout exactly what is expected for the paper and the presentation. Students will receive a checklist of what they have to share on each journal, blog, video blog or podcast as well. These checklists will show exactly how many points the student will earn for completing each of the required elements. Prior to the showcase the students will have the opportunity to make improvements to their work.

Between having two teachers available to assist the students, an opportunity to express their learning through journaling and the opportunity to polish their work, we believe that all students will be able to find success through this project. Moreover, we hope that this assignment will awaken their potential to effect change in their world by empowering them to find the information they desire.

Mid Planning Blog

Working Together and Division of Labor

My partner and I have conducted several meetings over Skype and through email in which we divided up tasks, set up a working schedule and shared information. As a team we talked through questions and concerns about the unit and then moved quickly to dividing up tasks, in order to, efficiently being working on our unit.

For now, she has delved into the curriculum standards. I have created a calendar laying out lessons and who will be the lead teacher of the lessons on each day. Together, we have discussed the demographics of the school and I have taken on the task of writing up the description of the demographics.

Again, I feel fortunate to work with Amy she totally understands how to divide up work logically and fairly. She does what she says she is going to do which allows us to move forward at a clipping pace. She thinks about curriculum design and student needs, making me hone in on my expectations of student learnings. I feel that we have a great working relationship, which is making this project not only a potentially usable project in the classroom but also a fun assignment.

Evaluation of Learning and Essential Question

As far as evaluation of learning we believe that some pieces can and should only be evaluated by me as the teacher. Yet, we see that many lessons and learnings can and should be evaluated by the media specialist and the teacher. As we build the calendar it is becoming easier and easier to see who will be evaluating student learning each day. We are also thinking about ways to engage in further collaboration that will allow us to target students who are not grasping certain concepts. Since we have two teachers working with the class there is a better chance of gaining understanding of which student needs additional instruction or lesson modification to master essential learnings.

As far as essential questions go, we have created an over arching essential question and then are adding in essential questions for each lesson plan. Our main question is:

What can I, as a young person, do to effect social change?

Essential questions for each lesson plan thus far include:

What is social change?

What is one thing that I see in my world that needs to be changed?

What can I do about it?

How can I use the tools in the library to help me gain the information I seek?

By presenting a focused question each day, we feel that we can better empower students to take on a specific task.

Because we have chosen an inquiry-based project there are literally tens of benchmarks and standards that we can weave into our unit. Currently, Amy is assessing which standards best fit the plan. It is hard to say where the standards entered in the discussion because we constantly went back to the standards to make sure that we were on track with our planning. Therefore, standards were discussed whenever we were talking about the actual unit.

Abilities and Needs of Historically Underrepresented Students

When it came to discussing the needs and abilities of historically underrepresented students we looked at the lesson as a whole and the demographics of the students that we are working with. In order for students of all races, socio-economic statuses and abilities to succeed, we have created a variety of summative assessment pieces that will allow each student to participate in creating social change on a level that his meaningful to him or her.

In addition, my librarian partner has graciously allowed students working on the project to use the computers during lunchtime in order to compensate for student who many not have computers at home.

____________________________________________________________________ Early Planning Amy and I spent the week hashing out where we want to go with this assignment. We both are excited to create an I-search like assignment where students will choose an issue revolving around social change, research the topic and take action. Our subject area for this topic is language arts. In a "real-world" setting we would collaborate in the same ways we currently use in my school. We will meet during prep-period time, professional learning community (PLC) time and email to collaborate. Times will be planned using the paper calendar in the media center and my paper lesson book. At this point, we believe students will be assessed through explanation of their meta-cognition. The final project will look like an essay and may have a presentation portion. We also discussed possibly having student video blog progression throughout the project. A rubric will be used to grade their final product. Our biggest roadblock so far has been finding time in both our busy schedules to meet. In addition, I have been very sick this semester with the flu and painful colds and have been having a hard time staying awake after work (who says 8 years in the classroom builds immunities?) We have overcome this road block by using email. What went really well is that we both are on the same page to the point that I will start to describe something and Amy will know exactly what I am talking about. As far as what can be improved we are both a little confused about how the project will be scored, what specific lesson plan format we are expected to use and how many lessons we should plan. We both resolved to reread the course information after our last Skype chat. As far as our collaboration and communication goes, I think things are going really well. Even though we come from very different backgrounds we seem to have a very similar educational philosophy. We both think that this project will engage kids from diverse backgrounds and will be highly usable for us in the classroom and/or the media center. Pre-Planning Thus far, my partner Amy and I have been off to a great start. We have talked about how we will meet in the future, what our individual strengths are and how we can best support each other to complete this project. Our communication will happen in the following ways, igoogle, googledocs, skype and email. We feel very comfortable with these options. We have thrown around several ideas for the unit that we would like to collaborate on and we seem to be on the same page of staying flexible and trying to figure out what will work best for students. We are throwing around the idea of creating a research project called isearch. Flexibility and open communication the biggest strength that we bring to the project. In our discussions so far our biggest aspiration is to create a project that will allow the students to have the best possible experience where they have the opportunity to learn and grow from the asset of having two teachers in the classroom. At this point, I do not feel any fears surrounding this project. We are both willing to take on the task at hand with enthusiasm and excitement. We do however know that we face one significant weakness. Neither one of us has experience of being a media specialist. Luckily, we feel that we have already created a working relationship that will support us in overcoming this weakness. Working in my school situational, I have had successful collaboration. The only hardship that I have faced in the past is that our LMS is only part time in our building. Luckily, Amy and I don't have this constraint. We are considering that we will have a full time LMS for this project and that we will have the benefit of a varied culture in a public school. In sum, we are off to a great start and we are very excited to work on this project together!