Teacher Librarians, Training, and Expertise

Carol Brzozowski writes on transition librarians are making in order to revitalize library programs and services to support the changing needs of today’s students. One Canadian school district made clear decisions about the development of their school library services. According to Brzozowski, the district’s instructional technology services department provided multiyear training of teacher-librarians to help launch a new video on-demand service, and then an extensive training program to show teacher-librarians how to use productivity software, video-production technologies, and podcasting tools (2015). Trainings are great, but it’s necessary to define the vision for school librarians and teacher librarians. But today, the teacher-librarians are also expected to help “curate and guide learners and teachers to find good content and use it effectively”—a challenge at a time when the massive amount of digital content available to schools resembles the “Wild West,” Mr. Ray said after being interviewed by Brzozowski (Brzozowski, 2015). The expectations for teacher librarians are extensive but important as their roles are defined. Brzozowski observed progressive steps the Canadian district made, by investing their own education funds beyond grant funding to train librarians. The results were encouraging, through librarian training they were able to save money later, through streamlined acquisition and tracking programs district wide when monitoring textbooks. This training and ease of textbook management improved teacher’s job responsibilities as well. The benefits and the cost proved to make this districts decision easy to implement. I hope to uncover more stories about districts backing and building strong library designs for educational benefit and to bring patrons back to libraries. This story is a model of a strategy that experienced nothing but success.

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K-12 Librarians' Roles Shift to Meet Digital Demands

A Washington state district treats librarians as digital mentors

By Carol Brzozowski

April 13, 2015

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/04/15/k-12-librarians-roles-shift-to-meet-digital.html