Media specialists?

OK so I never thought of librarians as media specialists.  There's one I'll have to ponder further over.

Goodness me school libraries have only really taken off since the 1970s.  That's awfully late.  That's in my lifetime.  So the position of TL has only been around since I've been around!  Before that it was just Sunday school teachers and churches providing the education.  Which is probably why so many schools come from churches.

Relationships with staff

Next thought re Teacher Librarians: they've got to have a great working relationship with the staff.  The TL will be one of the ways teachers will get info and resources.  You'll have to know what each year level is covering in their classroom, and at what angle.  So a knowledge of the curriculum will be needed as well.  The new Australian Curriculum springs to mind, as well as access to a scope and sequence for the years in the school.  eg P-7, 1-6, whatever the school is.

So in order to provide the teachers with

• what they need
• when they need it
• in the fashion they can cope with (learning styles!),

you'll need to know:

•  who you are working with,
• what they are working on,
• when they need what stuff, and
•  how they would prefer to get it. 

For instance, Year 2 may be working on local history in term 2 and 1 teacher find IT stuff tricky.  They would need websites directing them to local places of interest that are linked to the past, the local phone books with maps in to locate these, maybe a link to Google maps so the kids or teachers can look up their local suburbs, local history books with lots of pictures the students would recognise as places they had been to locally, and probably old school end-of-year magazines from a variety of years to look and research the age of schools in the area.

Soon, all will call me Master!

So here I am blogging for the very first time, a thing I didn't think I'd ever do.  But I've been dragged into it, not very reluctantly, because I'm becoming a Master!  A Master of Education, that is.  To be a Teacher Librarian.  It's part of the subject I'm doing, so here I go.

First thing - what do I think a Teacher Librarian is?  Hmm....Easy answer is a Teacher who is also a qualified librarian.  Little more thought...a qualified teacher who has the skills necessary in Information Services to organise and convey these skills not only to students but also to any staff working in the library. 

More to come.