Objective: Understand why being safe, responsible, and respectful online is important

Location: Sarah Adams Elementary School

Date/Time: 03/21/25

Grade: 1st

Objective: Students will discuss the use of emotional triggers in media and analyze and apply the C.R.A.A.P. test to digital sources.

Location: Barrington High School English Class

Date/Time: 03/10/25

Grade: 9th

Mentor: Liz Ballou

Mentor: Nancy McFadden

Barrington High School

• Illinois Standards Aligned Instruction for Libraries (I-SAIL)

• AASL

Sarah Adams Elementary

• Illinois Standards Aligned Instruction for Libraries (I-SAIL)

• AASL

Barrington High School

• There is no planned curriculum, Nancy is working with different departments to begin this "work." She is currently creating curriculum to teach 9th-grade English classes, Media Literacy.

Sarah Adams Elementary

• There is no planned curriculum. Liz currently uses FreshINC with 5th-grade students, which is the closest to a set curriculum. Splitting library time to be library and STEAM makes creating curriculum difficult.

Are there formative or summative assessments to document student learning?

Barrington High School

• Nancy is able to collect formative and summative data before and after lessons.

Sarah Adams Elementary

• Liz can sometimes collect formative and summative data after her lessons are completed. It depends on the content she is teaching and the grade level she is working with.

Are there examples of guided inquiry lessons/units/themes with teachers? How did that work?

Barrington High School

• Not at the moment.

Sarah Adams Elementary

• FreshINC program she uses with 5th-grade allows for some inquiry units.

Barrington High School

• Nancy is working on finding ways to support reading literacy outside of the library.

Sarah Adams Elementary

• Liz runs Battle of the Books and can present new titles to students every time they come to the library.

What are their viewpoints on some of the current issues/debates that relate to promoting reading?

Barrington High School

• Nancy is a firm believer that students should be allowed access to books they enjoy. As she has transitioned from Elementary to Secondary, her goal has been to help the high schoolers feel like they have access to a variety of books from different genres.

Sarah Adams Elementary

• Liz feels that with recent times, making selections of books to add to her library has become monopolized, because of this, she has become very well versed with the districts book selection policies.

Barrington High School

• Nancy is working on ways to do this. She has been able to work with the English department this year and hopes to expand to other subject areas in the years to come.

Sarah Adams Elementary

• Liz often pulls books for teachers when they request and is able to help them locate sources for student to use for classroom research.

Barrington High School

• The district decides the technology tools the district has available for use. There is a wide selection of tech tools and programs that the district purchases/pays for across all grade levels.

Sarah Adams Elementary

• Liz has access to the tools she needs and often finds that the tools she has access to go unused in the library space, due to the restraints that teaching Library and STEM have on her ability to expand lessons.

If they have a makerspace, what LEARNING is happening – what materials and activities. Are they teaching the computer science standards?

• N/A @ both locations

Barrington High School

• The yearly budget has two components to it: book purchasing and materials. The book purchasing budget is dependent on the number of students enrolled in the building. The materials budget is the same as that of all other teachers in the building.

• The district uses Amazon Business for purchases and Follett for book purchases.

• Nancy has written grants in the past to be able to purchase books for a school whose population was majority Spanish speaking.

Sarah Adams Elementary

• Liz is given a $5,000 library budget, a regular "teacher" budget for materials, a periodicals budget, and a budget for STEM.

  
  

What role did the associate play (if there was one?) Who evaluated the associates? (Is there an example of a job description, interview questions, evaluation?)

Barrington High School

• 3 associates assisted with student questions and technology needs.

Sarah Adams Elementary

• 1 associate that assisted with book return, checkout, reshelving, and any other needs that arose while the TL was instructing.

What are some techniques the TLs used to manage student behavior?

Barrington High School

• There was no need to manage student behavior besides the occasional reminder to lower voices; even then, just a reminder to lower their voices sufficed. She said they had set high expectations throughout the year and made sure to stick to them.

Sarah Adams Elementary

• Liz has a class reward system where students can earn a "fun" day in the library. She also has a set "schedule" when students come in and an agenda that students know and follow that aids in making sure students are on task.

  
  

Barrington High School

• Nancy currently bases success on the circulation of materials in the library.

Sarah Adams Elementary

• Liz determines success from the lessons she presents and student work.

  
  

How do they inform/educate others about their program? 

Barrington High School

• Nancy is working with different academic departments in the building to let them know how she can help and support their efforts in the gen ed classroom.

Sarah Adams Elementary

• Liz shares a blurb every month in the principal's newsletter about the work that is being done in the library. She wishes she was able to be in the building all week long so that she could work more closely with general education teachers.

What professional activities do they encourage?

Barrington High School

• Nancy highly encourages attending the AASL National Conference, the librarians in the district attend every year.

Sarah Adams Elementary

• Continuing to take coursework available and leaning on other librarians as a new librarian, as you work on getting adjusted to the role.

  
  

I think I'd find the ALA Core Competencies, I-SAIL, and Illinois Common Core standards most helpful. The ALA Core Competencies have allowed me to grow as a librarian and are a good foundation to base my practices off of. The Illinois Standards Aligned Instruction for Libraries (I-SAIL) focuses on instruction of information, media, digital, and individual literacy. It focuses on what students should learn from libraries and librarians. Knowing and working with the Illinois Common Core standards will help me partner with general education teachers and be able to work alongside them to teach and aid the curriculum being taught outside of the library.

Barrington High School

• Anchor 2 - Emerging/Developing

• Anchor 3 - Not Started

• Anchor 4 - Operationalizing

Sarah Adams Elementary

• Anchor 2 - Emerging/Developing

• Anchor 3 - Emerging/Developing

• Anchor 4 - Emerging/Developing

Barrington High School

• Creating promotional material to encourage students to read. Making sure that students know the layout of the library in terms of the recent genrification.

Sarah Adams Elementary

• Not right now

Barrington High School

• Nancy can collaborate with a few of the academic departments and other librarians in the district.

• Nancy is working on making library content available to students and staff outside of the library, through LibGuides.

• She is new in this role, so it's taking some adjustment and "getting to know" coworkers and students in the building to expand her expertise.

Sarah Adams Elementary

• Not much collaboration was observed.

Barrington High School

• Operationalizing - The next step could be to collect data from students and staff to help the TL learn how she can provide students and teachers with learning opportunities using media that they may not be familiar with or that might be newer to the district.

Sarah Adams Elementary

• Not Started - The TL could expand the school library's presence on the school website. This could be creating an area where teachers can find resources to support their instruction. Going beyond this, the TL could reach out to other teachers and see how she can assist them in instruction- doing this would allow her to tie the library to the whole school curriculum and encourage more collaboration.

Barrington High School

• The informational text area is outdated. If I were the school librarian, I would reach out to the different departments and ask them to share topics they cover in their courses throughout the year. I would then work to make sure I have texts that will help them, along with continuing to weed through books to remove outdated text.

Sarah Adams Elementary

• Teaching library and STEM to all grade levels. If I were the TL, I would split the school year into sections and focus my instruction in the library to one subject at a time. During certain sections, I would only teach STEM and during the others I would focus on library content. This would allow for more time to be spent on "library" related content and some time for STEM which the TL is expected to teach.

As a future elementary school librarian, I could see limited time for collaboration being a big barrier. Due to the nature of the library being a "special" that students attend, I likely won't have a set plan time where I could meet with individual grade levels. As a new librarian, I could also see teachers resisting changes I'd like to make as I learn and begin my work as a librarian. Lastly, I could also see competing priorities being a barrier to being a "true" leader.

At my secondary placement, I was able to learn about the budgeting within the district where I will be a TL, and even got to see the current budget. I was also able to work on weeding and updating the catalog. I was able to reach this goal. My biggest takeaway was that as TL's we need to use the budget completely every year, to avoid cutting back on funding.

I was able to reach this goal by helping create a LibGuide that would aid students and teachers in creating bibliographies. My biggest takeaway was that there are other ways to connect the community to the library besides teaching lessons, especially at the secondary level. Going forward, I want to work on creating resources that connect families to the library/school community.

I was able to teach one lesson about digital safety and one lesson about media literacy. My biggest takeaway was that you can tie both of these to a variety of different settings. Going forward, I want to explore how I can instruct younger students on digital literacy, grades K-2.