Reflections on This School Year

Last Friday was the last day of school for the students, and yesterday was the last teacher workday. In my district, the librarians are lucky enough to be paid for 10 extra workdays, so we don’t have to volunteer our time to get necessary library tasks done. My last day is Friday–the light at the end of the tunnel!

At the end of last year, I talked with my administrators about focusing on library circulation rather than teaching research units. Last year the library was closed every other week, for most of the year, so I could do research instruction. This year the library has been open for most of the year. I thought circulation would zoom up, but it was a 10% increase, mostly making up the 8% that it went down last year. Average daily circulation actually fell, by 14%. I’ve felt chained to the desk most of the time, because even when classes aren’t here, students trickle in on passes in a steady stream. The pace has been much more reasonable, though.

Because I’m being evaluated this year (and because I am mostly evaluated as a teacher, not a librarian), I did work with one teacher on part of a research unit. Using our recollections of previous units, we decided that I would focus on two parts: Asking Questions, and Notetaking. We scheduled two days, with one in between. The day before the students came in, the teacher had them write questions about their biography subject, to be used as a baseline assessment to show student progress. The next day, I instructed the students on writing good questions, and they repeated the assignment. Our plan was to have them take notes independently the next day, then I would teach about notetaking the following day. It took the students longer to do the initial notetaking than we had planned on, so when they were ready for instruction, I was already having classes in for checkout and couldn’t do much.

I was surprised when I crunched the numbers for the two assignments’ pre- and post-assessments. Overall, 70% of the students showed at least a 10% improvement on the first assignment, and 92% showed at least a 10% improvement on the second assignment. Possible reasons: 1) the instruction that I did less direct instruction and more coaching on resulted in greater gains, or 2) students didn’t want to re-write their previous questions on the second Question assignment. Next time I’ll try to make sure I assess the first Question assignment and then have them add to it for the second one.

I’m planning to have another book fair next year. My husband helped for the whole thing, and commented that the kids seemed to be really enthusiastic. We have an amazing community of readers, and I want to make it even better. I also hope to have a Library Guild again, with some re-structuring. We had 22 kids here on the last day–amazing!