Spring+Retreat+Notes

Department Retreat Notes 04 24 2009 Present: Christine, Carolyn, Brooke and Ben:
 * 1) After having lunch as a department, we began the work of looking at our mission statement, reviewing our policies and procedures, and updating the status of each divisions search for meaning in the scope and sequence/ library program,K-12.
 * 2) We reviewed the misson statement and agreed that there was an element of educational leadership missing in the statement's intent. We discussed the leadership role of the librarians with information and technology. In future we would like to have some meetings with the technology coordinators from each division to look at goals, define knew techonologies and determine the best way to get involved with these technologies. As we learn new applications in 2.0 like Voicethread, wikis, twitter, etc., what is the most effective way as leaders to teach teachers this technology and let them take the lead with their peers or try to find ways to make 2.0 and other applications work within the context of the library program as a model? We also discussed the place for libraries/librarians in the social networking scheme. There is some feeling in the profession that meeting students where they live, on Facebook, is the best way to promote library services. Many public and some school libraries are moving in that direction. There is now a Group on Facebook that looks at the various ways libraries are using Facebook, from simply stating hours and giving the web page link, to offering interactive services. We have no plans to have a Facebook presence at this time but will look at the Facebook page that gathers information about the range of ways libraries are using Facebook and determine if and how it might facilitate our communication with our community, perhaps with parents as well as older students. Ben volunteered to work with the current mission statement to add some of the "leadershp" statements. Thank you Ben.
 * 3) The policies and procedures are in need of review and in some cases updating. Each member of the department will select a "chapter" for review. This will be an ongoing process and not likely to be completed until the NEASC year. Our goal is to have a clear, comprehensive, approved policies and procedures manual for the library by 2011. Carolyn suggested we might think about making some of the updated policies available through the website. The policies for review include but are not limited to; collection development, fair use, acceptable use in the library (does the school acceptable use policy suffice for each division library?), volunteers, and procedures for lost materials. Ben will be taking a library media class in the summer at URI which will be looking at policy manuals. He has agreed to collect policy ideas from other school libraries for our consideration. In the interim we will each choose a section to review for the fall and the start of our work on this comprehensive update. Ideas may be shared on the wiki.
 * 4) Information Literacy/Critical Thinking Scope and Sequence K-12. The discussion started with a review of the article on the Home page of the wiki called "What Today's College Students Say About Conducting Research in the Digital Age." Although the focus is on college aged researchers we all recognized behaviors regularly used by students and faculty at all division levels. We discussed looking for authentic and organic skills and goals for information literacy/critical thinking. Christine reviewed the Middle School Information Fluency skills and compared them to a very user friendly scope of skills developed by the Elementary Independent Schools Library Association (EISLA). The Middle School Goals currently show skills being taught, at which grade level and in which content area. A meeting is scheduled for May 5th with social studies and science teachers to further identify skills and work to incorporate them in these curricular areas as well as part of the IL scope and sequence. Brooke will be meeting with grades 3-5 where she will review skills taught, current projects and how these skills might become part of the content area standards. It was discussed that the model used by EISLA may work for our format of the skills sequence. Carolyn has been working with the ACRL (College and Research Libraries) standards and has asked a task force of teachers to review these skills and common courses in which these skills may be taught through the departments. The first meeting of the task force is scheduled for this Friday at 10:45 and will convene on the next two Fridays to continue the work. There was some discussion and concern about being able to generate a unifying scope and sequence document for K-12 while using different skill sets AASL(School Libraries), EISLA (Indpendent Libraries) and ACRL (College and Research Libraries), but we agreed that whatever the standards, the skills being integrated were the same. Brooke noted that our current scope & sequence works well for us, but the one we are developing will make our program more clear to faculty. The meeting closed with thanks expressed to Christine for creating the opportunity for us to spend focused time together on our shared work.
 * 5) The department will meet again on May 20th to review progress and to talk further about the sequencing of skills.