That Was Then….

As a sole charge librarian, my daily routine before involvement in this project would have included any or all of the following tasks: Cataloguing and processing of resources Issuing and returning of books Planning and setting up displays Shelf tidying...

A librarian coming of age in new times….

Much has changed since I wormed my way into the cloistered world of school librarians a quarter of a century ago. Today’s landscape seems to have undergone a radical transformation, so what was there before, is now difficult to recall...

Is presence by inference good enough?

Image from: https://conversation.education.govt.nz/ In November last year, with the end of the school year in sight, the Tomorrow’s Schools Independent Task Force published its report entitled Te Whiria Nga Kura Tuatinitini: Our Schooling Futures: Stronger Together. The Task Force, chaired...

A valuable resource

Do I perceive the role of teaching information literacy skills (ILS) to be part of my job as a school librarian? Absolutely. This is an essential role for which librarians are trained, yet many teachers are unaware of the information...

The room of requirement – really?

We are now two thirds of the way through our research on teacher-librarian partnerships, and over the summer I’ve been reflecting back on these last two years and all we have learned. It has been a truly joyous project. For...

Sharing the effort to get the reward: the librarian, my students, and I

When I first started teaching research skills I noticed that students, who were supposedly digital natives, did not know how to find information, and when they did find any they did not know how to tell if it was any...

To Infinity and Beyond!

To Infinity and Beyond was not the first title I thought of when contemplating what to name this blog post. As someone who manages to always find a quote, song or movie title for most occasions, I had three possible...

Making the implicit explicit: Reactions to chemistry report writing and collaborative learning

It’s fair to say that when I left teachers college three years ago I had greatly underestimated how much focus there would be on teaching literacy strategies. As a science specialist, I had been taught some scientific literacy, but mostly...

When change is good: what the expertise of a librarian can do for students’ learning

When our school started this research journey and the TLRI project (and we were an early joiner), I sat in the initial seminars thinking, as a recently successful uppity postgraduate, ‘Why would I get the librarian to do this information...