Candidates in school librarian preparation programs are effective educators who demonstrate an awareness of learners’ development. Candidates promote cultural competence and respect for inclusiveness. Candidates integrate the National School Library Standards considering learner development, diversity, and differences while fostering a positive learning environment. Candidates impact student learning so that all learners are prepared for college, career, and life.

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1.1 Learner Development: Candidates demonstrate the ways learners grow within and across cognitive, psychomotor, affective, and developmental domains. Candidates engage learners’ interests to think, create, share and grow as they design and implement instruction that integrates the National School Library Standards.  

1.2 Learner Diversity: Candidates articulate and model cultural competence and respect for inclusiveness, supporting individual and group perspectives.

1.3 Learning Differences: Candidates cultivate the educational and personal development of all members of a learning community, including those with diverse intellectual abilities, learning modalities, and physical variabilities.

1.4 Learning Environment: Candidates create both physical and virtual learner-centered environments that are engaging and equitable. The learning environments encourage positive social interaction and the curation and creation of knowledge.

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Evidence

 

• Required: LIS 693 Lesson Plan Parts 1, 2, and 3

  • 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4

• LIS 654 Inquiry Unit Plan

  • 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4

 

How It Aligns

 

The LIS 693 Lesson Plan allowed me to demonstrate my knowledge of learner development, diversity, differences, and the learning environment by designing and teaching a differentiated lesson for a specific 1st grade class to introduce online research skills. The lesson was structured around learning more about barn owls, which gave the learners an opportunity to build on their previous knowledge by investigating research questions using digital resource materials (online videos and websites). The lesson involved classroom discussion, independent research, and a printed worksheet that measured their understanding. I accounted for learner diversity and differences by making sure I had multiple learning modalities represented and multiple levels of reading and writing skills that students could demonstrate.

 

The LIS 654 Inquiry Unit Plan is a three-lesson unit for 4th graders to teach foundational research skills like information literacy, online discernment, and differentiating between fact and opinion. As the new librarian at a school that had been without a librarian for a few months, I realized that even 4th graders needed additional instruction in some of the fundamental research skills. These three lessons are each structured in a way that begins with the simplest content first and the most challenging at the end. While this is a common structure for any lesson, in this case, I knew in advance that the initial content was significantly below some of the students and the last content might be beyond some of the students’ knowledge and skill levels. In teaching these lessons, I applied several differential instruction strategies to meet learners where they are. Activities included physical and digital exploration of library resources and makerspace opportunities for students to be creative. The makerspace activities included a sharing session, where interested students could share their drawings, writings, and other measures of understanding with their peers.

 

What I Learned

 

• How to scaffold content within a single 35 minute lesson to meet the needs of a single classroom with a wide range of knowledge, skills, and abilities

• How to develop a makerspace activity that satisfies the dual requirement of a challenging creative task and a curriculum-based learning experience

• How to blend in social experiences (group discussion, makerspace sharing) with a more structured, traditional lecture

 

Impact on Students and Connection to Best Practices

 

While the lesson plan and the unit plan fulfilled a requirement for my MLIS program, I am currently working as an elementary school librarian and have taught both to multiple classes, which has provided me with the opportunity to observe students’ responses during the lesson. While the LIS 693 Lesson Plan was created with the AIG teacher, I have taught it with and without her so I am well aware of the benefits of a 1:15 versus a 1:30 teacher to student ratio, a factor that is well documented in educational research. In all instances, I have found the students enjoyed the combination of discussion and independent work on a topic they find interesting. However, as educators, our ability to provide differentiated instruction in a co-teaching environment is essentially doubled, improving the classroom experience for all students.

 

The 654 Inquiry Unit Plan is a three-lesson unit that is structured to move from the most basic aspects of research to the most complex, ethical questions about accuracy and reliability. By providing students first with an understanding of how the layout of the library and the ways in which books are organized, students are then able to become more active participants in the later two topics of online discernment and differentiating between fact and opinion. The initial two lessons are primarily discussion-based. Learning outcomes are measured at the end of each lesson with a creative makerspace exercise.

 

References

 

Bishop, R. S. (1990). Mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom, 6(3). https://scenicregional.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Mirrors-Windows-and-Sliding-Glass-Doors.pdf

 

Joseph, V., Sheikh, I., & Rajani, S. (2022). Inquiry Based Learning Method Of Teaching In Education: A Literature Review. Webology, 19(3), 799-813.

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