School Library Leadership
Action Plan: Integrate AASL, ISTE & GaDOE Standards
Be an Instructional Leader
- "Creating and communicating a vision for literacy
- Modeling and promoting a love of reading
- Remembering Ranganathan: collecting for your population and creating a system that works for students and staff
- Working with the school site and district to create complementary goals
- Becoming a literacy expert and sharing knowledge with staff
- Collaborating with teachers to plan, teach and evaluate lessons that promote literacy
- Deepening our understanding of how literacy is changing"
A second important feature in your role as an instructional leader is your ability to be a curriculum specialist. In order to collaborate with content teachers and integrate multiple standards in your lesson, you will have to be an expert on your school's curriculum. And as Howard (2010) points out, that goes further than just knowing what's on your teachers' lesson plans. You must have an understanding of the full curriculum map - both horizontal (the unit by unit schedule) and vertical (the scope and sequence across grade levels). In addition to improving your ability to collaborate, curriculum mapping knowledge will increase your ability to do collection mapping. After all, "the purpose of the school library collection is to support the elements of the curriculum being taught in the classrooms" (Howard, 2010, p. 90).
The action plan found below uses digital citizenship taught through design thinking as an example of the librarian exhibiting instructional leadership by being an instructional partner to the student and content teacher. These collaborative lessons have, though the nature of design thinking, an inquiry-based approach to learning, the ultimate path for a student to become an independent learner (Howard, 2010).
Click below to see the action plan designed to showcase the instructional leadership of the SLMS. Note: all references are included on the last page of the action plan.