Transcript
SARAH:
I think collaboration and being proactive with teaching staff is absolutely crucial. Because if you don't have your resources that you've got visible, they just gather dust on the shelf. And nobody even knows they're there. So we have to maintain a high profile. And that means going out there and finding the people we need to engage with.
So we might be talking at staff meetings. Quite often I would just make up a question, just so that I could get my voice heard at the meeting by the other staff. It's also getting that slot for the new teacher induction and making sure, even if it's only five minutes, that you're on that agenda. Ask for slots at training days, inset days. Invite them into the library as a venue for an event they're holding, or perhaps give an assembly, if you can. And sometimes that can link in well with an event such as World Book Day.
It's important to find, who are the teachers in your school that are interested in working with the librarian and your library resources? That way, you can select the resources you need together. And another thing I used to do was I always, even if it was on a non-fiction topic, I would pop a fiction reading list into that topic box, so that they could read around the subject and learn the vocabulary in a different way by reading a story.
Another thing we can do is to find out who is the school governor who's got special responsibility for the library. If we know who they are, we can demonstrate and show them all the vibrant things that are going on in the library. Invite them in to shadow us for a day.
Student voice is often ignored. We think, as teachers, part of the staff, teaching and learning, that we impose our ideas on them. But actually, if we listen more to the students, they can give us ideas about which are the best resources to use.
Sometimes I take a box of books into the classroom for a topic. And I get them in pairs to look through it and then to tell me which ones they thought they'd use in the project and why. Then I could put notes on the catalogue to show how it's been used in the past by students. For instance, I could say, year seven castles project, ook on page 23 of this book, and you'll get the diagram that you need for your work.
We need to appear knowledgeable. We need to show the people, the teachers that we deal with that we know the curriculum, that we know the syllabus. And if we listen and watch other teachers, we can speak the speak as well.