Here are my thoughts on it:
The TL seems to move in and out of all of these roles as the moment requires, and most seem to converge on the Programme Administrator role (forgive my English rather than USA spelling). A timeline could almost be drawn through roles as new units of study are introduced to the school community.
As an Instructional Partner they sit beside classroom teachers to assist in designing and resourcing units of study. They know what is being taught. (Classroom teacher – what is being taught in their year level and maybe the one above and below. TL – what is being taught across the entire school)
As an Information Specialist they guide both teachers and students in accessing the information and techniques they need, almost like a portal to information. However, this portal is not passive but actively develops and expands the higher order thinking and filtering skills so teachers and students can evaluate, filter, retain or discard information. They make choices about its relevancy or importance.
As a Teacher they use their teaching skills to instruct staff and students how to find, access, and distribute not just knowledge and information, but the methods to do this – be it software, the Dewy Decimal system, websites, databases. For instance, how do you narrow searches on EBSCO to find what you really need?
As part of the Programme Administrator role, they already have a good handle on their learning community – their interests, their ages, past experiences, level of literacy and aliteracy.
This would then converge in the Programme Administrator role again as the questions would come up:
· Do we have the current resources to meet the needs now identified?
· How can these be best presented and distributed?
It seems that, with the exception of the role of leader, all 4 other roles are done to some extent by a good primary teacher on a much smaller and more focused scale.
Hi Emma, I am high school trained but I get what you mean. What I thought when reading the Purcell article was that there is a big overlap between many of the roles she mentions and that of teacher. To me, the roles of Leader, Instructional Partner and Information Specialist all have aspects that link closely into the role of teacher. As a high school classroom teacher at the moment I perform some of these roles already on a small scale in my subject area. As a TL, I assume I would be doing this on a whole school basis, across all subject areas. Look forward to following your blog during this course.
ReplyDeleteHi Emma, Not a comment about your post. Just wanted to say I really like the background picture of your blog. It is very effective. Good luck with the studying. It is all very busy but interesting.
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