Reflection

11/29- 12/06   1. What is differentiated instruction? Differentiated instruction takes into account students ability level, learning style, interests and uniqueness as an individual when choosing materials, assignments and ways to teach them.

2. What does differentiated instruction have to do with me? Differentiated instruction is important because as a school librarian we are responible for more and more teaching. Students will have different needs and be at different levels. Effective teaching will require methods tailored to individual students or groups of students. As librarians we will also teach the same students in different grades throughout their time at the school. Differentiation can help present the same themes in different ways each year. Differentiation can also be a concern when purchasing new materials.

4. As a first year LMS, how can I begin to differentiate? Get to know students. Have options available. Similar assignments at varying levels of difficulty. Student choices, choice in tasks, choice in books to read related to same theme or content.

5. As a LMS, what must I keep in mind about differentiation? Lessons should be differentiated. Struggling students may have tasks too difficult for them or too easy. Students must feel empowered about learning. Students are all different and need to be challenged. 11/15-11/21  Module 9. UbD's and Grant Wiggins. Enduring understandings answer essential questions. 11/7- 11/14  Thomas, Chapter 8. Thomas differs from Harada/ Yoshina in that she discusses assessment from both the teachers perspective of evaluating students to get an idea of how they're grasping the material and from a wider perspective that measures the value of the library. This may evaluate library services or programs such as determining the ratio of books to students. Harada/ Yoshina focused only on assessing individual students progress. One common aspect of both Harada and Thomas, is the idea that students should be evaluated on authentic tests. In my observations it seems that elementary and even junior high school students are covering some basic information literacy and research skills. An Italian class worked with the internet to answer some questions from their teacher. The librarian provided some pathfinders to help them. Other lessons stressed bibliographies, idexes, glossaries, and evaluating websites. 11/1- 11/7  Harada/ Yoshina, Chapter 5. Assessing Learning and Teaching. This chapter discusses assessment as a tool to be aware of a students progress during an assignment rather than evaluating it at the end. This allows adjustments, modifications, and interventions in instruction. The text outlines ways to assess progress in a lesson. These include informal checking, checklists, conferencing, graphic organizers, journal writing, rubrics, and prcess-folios. I'm writing in a journal now, I feel I should reflect on what I'm learning, how I'm learning and how i fell about the process. It discusses rubrics as an assessment tool. In the webquests we looked at recently most of them included a rubric for student self assessment. Student assessment should be ongoing where they make sure they are satisfyling or exceeding the requirements. It also means students know whats expected of them. Students work may be assessed by students, teachers, parents, administrators, policy makers or peers. We may not choose to have any of these assessing our students work but it will happen all the same. Students self assessment should be about striving for quality results. -  Chapter 6: Connecting Information Searching and Inquiry. Why do I like lists so much? Here we first have a list of information search skills from the process models we've become familiar with. A list of inquiry skills is divided up among the information skills that they are a part of. We then get a lost of "elements of sound teaching." These elements of sound teaching can then be used to teach any or all of the step in the information search process or the specific inquiry skills involved in the steps of the process. 10/24- 10/31 ** Inquiry Learning **  Harada, Chapter 2- Inquiry based learning focuses on the habits of mind and thinking skills as opposed to focusing on specific course content. It relies on questioning, investigation and experimentation to give students a more active role in education. Students are involved in deciding what to learn and how they will demonstrate this learning. Tasks are meant to have meaning and create what could be useful products or achievements. Instead of a one page paper, it will be a real or simulated blog, newspaper article, journal, letter or other document a person might be expected to produce. -  Harada, Chapter 3- Collaborative relationships: This chapter stresses the need for and benefits of collaboration. Partnerships allow for creative problem solving, pooling of knowledge, taking advantage of talents or expertise and division of labor. Librarians work as facilitators and initiators of collaborative efforts. It is important to make clear what you hope to accomplish for student learning. To involve all group members and run the collaborative group in an organized manner. -  Harada, Chapter 4- Designing Inquiry Driven Instruction:   Theme based learning involves developing a general idea that satisfies content and literacy standards. Students explore the theme based on their own knowledge and focusing questions provided by the teacher. Themes are meant to be broad to allow for personalization in addressing the issues and for relating the theme to their own lives. Specific processes for developing both theme and problem based inquiry lessons are given. -  Problem based learning requires students to develop a solution. They will explore a problem collaborating with the instructor on deciding what information they need to know to solve it. Both theme based and problem based learning are collaborative efforts between librarians, teachers and students. They focus on thinking skills and share the commonalities of inquiry learning. ** WebQuests ** Webquests are interesting web activities. They are lessons in the form of a website. There are step by step procedures, links to information resources and tasks to complete on your own, with a group or partner. Many webquests are on interesting topics and engage children with technology. The Tom March WebQuest "Searching for China," does and doesn't stand the test of time. As for material and content there are activities that can be used today. One problem with web based links is that only one of the links still works. In at least this incarnation of the webquest it's all on one page. It's broken up so it could be on multiple pages. It's also rather plain, many things now have more graphics and are visually stimulating. At first I thought the assignments were ambitious but they are meant to be divided up by the class. -  10/14 Readings:   Chapter 7: The Impact of the internet on Information Skills Instruction. Past research happened in a closed library system where professional librarians carefully selected books and judged their accuracy and reliability. While not perfect it provide some discernment of materials. The world wide web is a jumble of information and can cause problems. It can be a lot to sift through, difficult to find things in and and you don't know when you have enough information. Online search strategies are often a non linear process. Teaching search strategies and presearch activities. We also looked at Partnership for the 21st Century Skills. This is a federally funded initiative lead by the president of the AASL to modernize and improve education. The focus is on critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity. The site has many resources, lesson ideas and ways to tie things to the core curriculum. -  10/7 Readings:   The weeks readings dealt with Kuhlthau's research on the Information Search Process (ISP). This study looked at how students search for information or should search for information and the librarian/ teachers role in each step of the process. We then looked at other instructional models based on Kuhlthau's research including the big6, the handy 5, the I search model, REACTS, flip it! and others. This all came together under a discussion about constructivism and the specific skills these models are meant to teach. 10/4  Reflection: Assignment 1


 * 1) ** What did you learn as you progressed through this assignment? **

I learned a few things as I progressed through this assignment. I learned about the librarian’s role in schools and their contribution to student achievement. I learned about what information literacy skills we’re teaching to students and how integrated instruction is carried out. This assignment was also practice using the mechanics and tools of power point.

** 4. What did you find to be difficult? **

At first it was difficult to decide what I was going to say and how to convince parents that what librarians are doing is worthwhile when I was not exactly sure what school librarians did. Finding pictures was not a difficult process but is time consuming and it’s easy to get sidetracked looking through all the photos online. Also I noticed some of my spacing and alignments were lost in the shuffle from ppt to scribd to wiki.

** 6. What will you do differently next time? **

Next time I will put a little more care in the craftsmanship. The pictures could have been better chosen, the design could have been better. I meant to vary the slides more by color and positioning. For instance I wanted to have some white background with black letters and to mix in more black background with white letters to provide some differentiation. I also wanted to vary the positions so it wasn’t always text on top above a picture but to have the picture or diagram to the side, above the text or in different places so it’s not all the same.

** 7. Why do you think I developed this assignment? **

I think you developed this assignment with a dual purpose. First of all to give us a way to creatively express and deal with the information we’re learning in the first few weeks of class i.e. the role of the library and performance expectations of the librarian. The second purpose is for us to get some experience with the specific technologies such as wikis, scribd and power point.

9/23

Today we had our first online class. We discussed a quote and a poem in small groups. I found the online chat style format of the class to be unwieldy and will take me some getting used to. The quote and the poem we looked at were meaningful. The poem "To Be of Use," was about work ethic and touched on some other points as well. It's hard to argue against things that are positive and well intentioned which this poem was so I won't spoil the fun.

Readings: For the week included the librarians role in advocacy and the New York social studies curriculum. The curriculum deserves a full reading, first for integrating information skills instruction into the curriculum and also for being able to know what materials to provide teachers with. Social Studies has a stronger connection to the library in that they will commonly do research and there are other opportunities where info skills apply. Such as credibility of sources, paper writing, citations, local history and organizing information.

Advocacy talks about aligning your goals with the goals of others. Your goals have to be things others want or see the value in if you expect them to provide funding for it or advocate on your behalf. The book mentions advocating to others to advocate in support of you. getting the principal, community and other teachers on your side.