Collaboration, Redemption Falls and primroses

Since retiring, I have unsubscribed to most of the listservs and educational sites which emailed me regularly but, for some reason, I haven’t stopped getting eSchoolNews. This week, a headline caught my eye about ‘Teacher collaboration with digital tools’ – I guess because collaboration has been a hot topic of debate and research amongst teacher/school librarians for the past 40 years, and because I have written about this topic and had my students debate aspects of collaboration on forums. This feature has a series of links to reports, research and tools which it may be useful to dip into, and selectively distribute within your school, or to TL/SL colleagues.

On the fiction front, I have just finished reading Joseph O’Connor’s ‘Redemption Falls’. The Guardian reviewer calls it ‘a huge dishevelled monster of a book’ because it contains not only a striking narrative, but also folk ballads, songs, documents and transcripts. So, your straightforward novel it is not. It is also very detailed and descriptive in places. While not all of the voices in the book are completely convincing, this tale of post civil war America, and of the American Irish involvement in both the war and its aftermath, is nevertheless an outstanding read. You need a fairly strong stomach when reading parts of it e.g. the atrocities of the war witnessed by a drummer boy, and the savage treatment of his sister who crossed the states to find him. The protagonist O’Keefe is loved by some and hated by many. If you like your fiction strong, with a forceful narrative and a range of intriguing (in some cases weird) characters, then this book is for you.

 Now that Spring is well on its way, the primrose/polyanthus plants in my garden are in full flower. The two flowers are different although the terms are used interchangeably. The one in the photo below is (I think) a polyanthus. It is one of these flowers that are very much plain Janes or Johns when not in flower, but are radically changed when the flowers appear and you get this dash of colours in your Spring garden. They also flower more than once a year, so are very thrift plants also.

Polyanthus

Collaboration and Seacliff beach

Over the past couple of weeks, my students have been discussing the sometimes thorny issue of collaboration in schools. The main focus is on TLs collaborating with teachers with my students. However, I do remind them that we need to think of collaboration as an issue for the whole school, as many teachers find it difficult to collaborate with other teachers, especially outside their own department. School culture has a major effect on whether collaboration is likely to happen in a school. In some schools, collaboration is actively encouraged between departments, and between the TL and teachers. In other schools, there is an assumption that collaboration will be on the minds of school staff, but there is no active encouragement. So, many TLs face the issue of teachers wondering why they are being approached as a potential collaborative partner, as this is not something that happens in that particular school. Explaining the value of collaboration to both sides is the key starting point here. It can’t be assumed that this value will be recognised.

On Sunday, a bright and sunny day, a walk along Seacliff Beach, which is about 10 miles (16.2k) from Dunbar. It’s a lovely spot for walkers, surfers and fishermen, and there are great views across to the Bass Rock, where 100,00 gannets are presently nesting, as well as to the sun-kissed Tantallon Castle. As you walk along the beach, if you look up, you can see the ruins of Seacliff House, which must have been a very impressive sight when it was in its prime. There’s something exhilarating about walking along a beach, then over the limestone pavements which form the rocks, and which include little pools of sea water, each of which is a world of its own. The photo below shows the rod of a hopeful fisherman with the Bass Rock in the background.

Seacliff beach and Bass Rock

SIGMS article and Edinburgh in early Spring

Thanks to my colleague Joy McGregor, I can alert you all to an article in ISTE’s Learning and Leading with Technology journal, which you would do well to add to your favourites and to pass on the link to colleagues. The article - rather naffly entitled Not your grandmother’s library - gives some very good examples of teacher librarians using technology to very good effect i.e. by enhancing student learning. From the very well-known Joyce Valenza, to Keisa Williams and Wendy Stephens, the article highlights examples of the work of these three teacher librarians. Also in the issue of the journal are articles on tagging, Google sites, collaboration and advocacy. Well worth a look.

In Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital city, yesterday. A glorious early Spring today in (relatively) warm sunshine and a big blue sky. Edinburgh is a city for walking and you can reach most of the eye-catching attractions with fairly short walks. The centre of the city is dominated, on Princes Street which is the main thoroughfare, by the Scott Monument, the largest monument to a writer in the world. It is in praise of Sir Walter Scott , author of famous novels such as Waverley and Ivanhoe. At this time of year, it’s a joy to walk through Princes Street Gardens and enjoy the masses of crocuses which line the banks. The picture below shows the flowers below the Scott Monument.

Scott Monument

Futures thinking and lighthouse

From the ever informative Futurelab, comes an excellent resource for schools which TLs might download and pass on to colleagues in the school. The Futures Thinking Teachers Pack provides a resource which can be used with students who are engaged in discussing a ‘possible, probable and preferable’ future society in their country, as opposed to trying to predict what might happen in the future. The complete pack can be downloaded but there are subject packs covering English and Geography and other subjects. This looks to me like a set of resources – there are also webcasts and lesson plans – which could be used in many different countries, so please take a close look.

At the weekend, on the walk around St Abb’s Head – mentioned many times in this blog, I got a close shot of the lighthouse and you can see the prisms through which the light shines. Many light houses has Fresnel lenses which allowed much more light to be captured and the lenses allowed the light to be seen more than 20 miles (32.4k) away. There is of course, the children’s book The Lighthouse Keeper’s Lunch which many of us read to our kids and is used in primary schools for a range of activities.

St Abb's Head Lighthouse

What makes a good teacher (2) and banksia

Following on from the previous post, we might ask – what makes a good teacher from a TL’s point of view? Should there be any difference between how we as TLs view teachers (including ourselves) and how other teachers view teachers? I think this may be important, as all professions tend to take an introverted view of others. So, for example, I’ve heard TLs referring to colleagues in schools as ‘non-librarians’ alhtough this tends to happen at conferences, where the outside world can sometimes appear remote to some delegates. In answering the question posed – what makes a good teacher from a TL’s point of view? – one of the first things I would suggest is that a good teacher recognises that the TL is a fellow professional and also recognises what the TL’s roles are in the school. TLs often complain to me that teachers only view them as librarians but there’s a danger that TLs only see teachers as subject teachers – an equally narrow view. Thinking about what our colleagues view of us might be is always a valuable exercise. As Burns expressed it ‘ O would some power the giftie gie us, to see ourselves as others see us’.

One of the pleasures of spending time in Australia is the range of flowers on display at all times of the year. At this time of year (autumn in Australia, spring in Scotland) the banksias are in full flower. I think that the banksia in the photo below may well be a coast banksia, in that I saw it near Manly beach. Apparently, there are a lot of rich people in Manly and they can be seen chuckling to themselves on their morning walk from Manly beach to Shelley beach i.e. they are laughing all the way to the banksia.

Banksia in autumn

Rich tasks and festive running

I was at my local school today, interviewing the headteacher/principal about students on work experience and how they experience different information environments in the workplace than at school, in many cases. We also talked abut the school’s Rich Tasks programme which is a cross curricular initiative which involves year 7 students in a range of skills and activities, including information literacy. The Rich Tasks programme has its origins in Queensland and has now been adopted in a number of Scottish education authorities. In one area of my local school – Dunbar Grammar School, which I attended in my youth – students are engaged in modern languages, ICT and art and in another area, where they look at a disaster area in the world, they are engaged in craft, design and technology and  geography. One of the elements of both projects is the development of students’ information literacy skills as they are engaged in collaborative research and the school librarian is an active member of the team. I will learn more about this in 2010.

On Sunday, I was involved in doing timing and taking photographs for Dunbar Running Club’s  annual Festive Half Marathon/10K (which turned out to be 7 miles i.e. 11.34K). Every year, different runners turn up dressed in festive costumes to do the runs and this year, there were 2 fairies, an elf and a Xmas tree. What was worrying was that husband and wife team Santa Claus and SANDRA Claus did not turn up for either run. What the implications might be for children across the world on 25th December is anyone’s guess. The information has not been released to the financial markets, in case shares drop dramatically because of fears of non-delivery. Visit the club’s website for photos of festive runners. The photo below shows a fairy on the bridge and a man in a red top – SC in disguise?

Festive runners

Wikis and marking

Interesting conversation with my co-researcher and primary school TL (thanks Stephanie) about wikis and how they are used in schools. One the one hand, wikis can be seen to be used very well, to stimulate learning and encourage cooperation amongst students; to enable students to create knowledge; and to involve students in a range of literacies e.g. as in the Futurelab Report. On the other hand – and this comes from anecdotal evidence as most of the material on wikis tends to stress the positive only – wikis are being used in ways which may, in fact, restrict cooperative working amongst students. This is where students are given tasks to complete and to only contribute individual comments on or ideas on to the wikis. This is usually a case of technology being used for its own sake, as in “This is new for the class and makes them use ICT, so they will be motivated”. Well, maybe not for very long. Wikis and other educational ICT tools are best used as an addition, and not a substitute, for student centred learning, which includes group working and discussion – face to face.

I’ve been marking all day and before anyone thinks that this is a plea for sympathy or is preparing metaphorical violins, let me say that I accept that marking part of what I do and provides very good feedback to students – whether that feedback is positive or negative, or both. Marking tends to be a mixture of exhilaration, where some students excel and take their learning further than the subject requires; satisfaction, where most students have learned from your teaching, have stayed on task and produced worthwhile (if improvable) work; frustration, where some students produce a mixture of the incisive and the plain banal, but lack consistency (e.g. they appear to have read one part of the advice but ignored other parts); and downright annoyance, where a very small minority of students appear to have ignored the speicfication, the marksheet, the advice on the forum, and the podcast. The trick with marking is always to end on a high note i.e. the last assignment you mark should always be a good one. However, it’s like cycling – you don’t always finish feeling good, no matter what you’ve done earlier.

School culture and crocuses

Reading some research by one of my PhD students got me thinking about school libraries and school culture. Writers on school libraries like me often push aspects such as advocacy, collaboration and marketing. This raises the question of school culture and whether these techniques can work in a school where there is no culture of library worth. In such a culture, the library (and the teacher/school librarian) is tolerated, occasionally praised and subject to individual as opposed to collective use by teachers but there is no culture of library worth i.e. the library has low value in the school and school policies often ignore the presence of the library. So what comes first for those libraries/librarians which are in a school where there is a culture of library worth – the culture or the advocacy/collaboration/marketing of the teacher librarian? There’s no simple answers here and for some teacher/school librarians, the key aim may be to raise the worth of the library in the school by making inroads into the culture.

Spring is more or less here in Scotland and after putting their green stems above ground a few weeks ago and then holding back because of low temperatures, the crocuses now feel confident enough to flower and to show off their yellows and purples. In historical terms, in ancient Greece, young women apparently would wear crocuses to show you men that their hearts were available but that’s maybe what you get when men write history? In the photo below, the crocuses look to me like young birds in a nest with gaping mouths or maybe the crocuses are just singing?

Crocuses in the garden

Scan and history society

I’ve just got round to reading the latest edition of Scan - the journal produced by the DET in Australia’s New South Wales. It’s the normal good quality eclectic mix of articles and guidelines. Now, I know that Scan is not available to many people as you need to subscribe but there are some online articles available on the website and if your school has access to online databases, you may be able to access it. There is a good article about using interactive white boards in a primary school and an interesting research study on collaboration by Patricia Montiel-Overall which links collaboration with enhanced student learning.

Last night, I went along to the local history society, knowing only that it was the 2nd Tuesday of the month and that it started at 7.30pm. I walked in to the Dunbar Public Library  where the meeting was and the title of the talk was “The silver darlings: the herring fishing industry”. So a Herring learning about herring. The talk went back in history and showed many photographs and paintings from the 17th century onwards. At times, you could walk across the Victoria Harbour  because of the number of boats there. So, a nice break from writing up research on information literacy and transfer in schools – of which more later.

Web 2.0 report and licorice ice cream

A new report from Becta - the UK’s ICT in schools organisation – focuses on the use of Web 2.0 in UK schools. The report states that school students are using a wide range of Web 2.0 applications in their spare time but not much in school – well, no surprises there. However, the report does identify a number of benefits of the use of Web 2.0 in schools, stating that it “helps to encourage student engagement (Becta bold) and increase participation”; “encourage online discussion among students outside school”; “encourages some individuals to extend their learning”; and that “Pupils feel a sense of ownership and engagement when they publish their work online”. It also found that most teachers thought that Web 2.0 applications should be used more but that most teachers had not used Web 2.0 in the classroom. In many schools, TLs are seen as the Web 2.0 experts but not necessarily as the person to whom the teacher would turn for advice. Time for a change.

If you ever go to Tauranga  (pron. Towronga) in New Zealand’s north island – in fact, if you’re in New Zealand, you should make a point to vist Tauranga, and while you’re there, book a table at the Somerset Cottage Restaurant. There you will get outstanding food, very attentive service and excellent value for your money – you can even take your own wine.  The restaurant is rightly praised for its delivery of very well cooked and tastefully presented food but the highlight for me was the best ice cream I’ve ever had anywhere in the world. I’ve never had licorice ice cream before but the Somerset Cottage licorice ice cream is superb. It’s great to look at (see picture below and thanks to joint owner Anne Butcher for sending it to me) and the taste – ooof!

A chalice of pleasure