Schools are winding down for Christmas. Films are being played during lesson time, the glitter is everywhere, and the staff are rehearsing for the staff pantomime (okay, only the last one of those is definitely true. I’m assuming some work is still happening across the school). It’s time to relax… or so you would think.
In fact, this week has been a bit of an unusual one for me – I’ve had not one but two training sessions!
Wednesday: Accelerated Reader workshop
If you work in a school library or English department, chances are you’ve at least heard of Accelerated Reader. It’s a programme by Renaissance which allows students to take quizzes on books they’ve read and keeps track of their reading. It’s a really good way for staff to make sure the students are understanding what they’re reading, which is really important for improving comprehension skills in general. For us, Accelerated Reader is incorporated into weekly library lessons for all of Key Stage 3.
I must admit, we don’t use all the features of it, or the testing system that is normally used alongside it, as we use another system. But the workshop was still really useful, mostly because I got to talk to other librarians and teachers in charge of literacy, and this gave us all lots of ideas for engaging students and tackling problems. The focus was really on helping the students who are falling behind on their reading, so it was great to see what options there are – including ways of keeping them interested in reading and encouraging making the right book choices!
Friday: Librarian Networking Meeting
As if that wasn’t enough, at the end of the week I got another chance to network and share ideas with other people. As part of a chain of academies, our school has yearly training days where each department attends events with staff from the other schools. Again, it was really interesting to hear what other people have been up to in their libraries, what issues they’re having and how they’re going to deal with them.
Something particularly interesting we’re going to be working on is a book award across the academy network, to celebrate some of the best childrens’ and YA fiction published this year. We’ve come up with a shortlist of books and will be getting copies of them for students to borrow and read, then asking them to rate them out of 10 and working out which gets the best score. This way the students don’t have to read every book, but can read whichever appeals to them. As it’s being run across several schools, it’s also a really good way for us to carry on building our relationship with other libraries and librarians.
One thing that stood out to me this week was the differences between what’s available to different school libraries. For a start, although the network day was open to library staff across many academies, we only had a small group turn up – presumably because not every school has dedicated library staff. One attendee was an English teacher as well as the librarian, and quite a few staff members had little or no help in their libraries – one mentioned that she didn’t have any cover for a lunch break and so never had a time in the day when she wasn’t supervising pupils. On the Wednesday workshop I also spoke to several librarians who didn’t expect to be replaced when they retired. It’s really reminded me how lucky I am to have a graduate trainee position, especially in a school library, given how challenging the times are right now.
I am feeling mostly very positive about my career choice so far – and sharing ideas with other professionals is definitely really interesting and useful. Hopefully we’ll bring some of this in our own library – although being as busy as we are, it’s hard to see when we’ll have time to put new ideas into practise! It’s just a shame that libraries in schools don’t always get the support, funding and help they need (and deserve), and that occaisonally this makes me worry about how easy it’ll be to get a paid professional post in the future. But fingers crossed – and getting the experience from training and networking can’t hurt my chances!
Bookish Fish 