Sunday, January 26, 2014

Library Evaluation

Evaluation of school librarians...presented by Judi Moreillen, Paige Jaeger, Kathryn Lewis, and Mary Keeling

What do you do well?
How do you prove it?
How do you measure student growth in non tested areas?
What are indicators principals should look for?
Evidence must be measurable AND rigorous (Worth measuring)  and appropriate to what is being taught
What library activities or programs lead to student growth?
Library instruction should be emphasized, and AASL Empowering Learners document has lots to mine for this
Areas to focus...information literacy, multiple liters it's, reading strategies
How to measure- information literacy?  Overwhelming! Looked to ACRL for college proficiency and worked backwards with rubrics by grade levels and student goals, used Stripling model and AASL materials to help with this
One way to get librarians to reflect is to take snapshot - give librarians standards and ask them to show what they did that day/week to meet the standard.  This gets them aware of standards and can be shared to give librarians ideas about what others are doing
Some concerns that narrowing focus to very specific areas can lead to leaving out some teaching that is happening now

Http://whateveryprincipal.pbworks.com
Instrument for principals in school library monthly.  Would be great tool for talking to your principal about what your program SHOULD look like

We need to change perception of what school librarians do and how we can make an impact.  Formative assessments are very very important for librarians, so much of what we do impacts student learning but can be hard to tease out of quantitative assessments.

We heard about efforts being made in various states and districts to evaluate librarians.  Amy short described efforts with ma DesE
Colorado added appendix to standard state evaluations; evaluation must include test scores and grappling with how to show how librarians make impact on PARCC
Fairfax VA is using teacher eval tweaked for non tested teachers--- progress can be based on student data or on program goals that department sets
Ohio set rubric based in part of PA and sent to OH DOE and it was well received, but still no DOE evaluation past that for teachers
MI has local control with poor funding with huge loss of librarians..no common standards:  state school library association is trying to develop standards for local districts
PA has done lots to set up rubrics and model curriculum, and has nice baseline from PA study that can be used

Big problem is that few states have person at state DOE to oversee school libraries, district administrators are also less common and this is leading to problems

Push librarians to think always about MEASURING....exit tickets, pre- and post-assessments, running records,etc

Judi moreillen wants ideas for what could be studied for hard data about the processes we teach kids,  what data can be directly tied to what we do AND keep us collaborating, and does measuring skills (which is easy to measure) really give great feedback on what we do best?






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