With three years of classroom teaching experience in the States, another year overseas, and a Master of Arts in Teaching, I came to the Information School with a fair amount of experience as an educator.   Nonetheless, the three years I’ve spent as a dMLIS student have afforded me the opportunity to further advance my pedagogical skills.

Shortly after I enrolled in the dMLIS program in the Summer of 2004, I accepted a position as a school library media specialist at Decatur High School in Federal

Way, Washington.  As the only employee working in a library serving over 1500 students, much of my job centered on the tasks necessary for simply keeping the library doors open and the library functioning at its most basic levels.  However, between checking out resources to students and teachers, processing and cataloging new books, helping students locate library resources, overseeing the library’s computer lab, and maintaining a sense of order and decorum in the library, I found the time to craft and teach a fair number of formal information literacy lessons.

An example of one of such lesson is the web site evaluation instruction I gave several groups of juniors who were about to begin conducting research for a formal research paper.  Preparing and teaching this lesson was significant for me not only because it was the first information literacy lesson I taught as a library professional, but also because it was one of the first times I actively promoted my school library program and the teaching of information literacy.  I did so by actively  seeking out opportunities to collaborate with other teachers in designing and incorporating information literacy lesson components into already-existing curriculum.  Prior to this particular lesson, I sat down with the students’ English teachers, discussed their expectations for the project, and, discovering that neither of these teachers had taught web site evaluation with their students in the past, suggested that they incorporate a formal web site evaluation assessment into the project requirements for the research paper.  The teachers liked this idea, and I volunteered to design the assessment.  The next day I created this web site evaluation form and presented it to the teachers.  Both were impressed and agreed to require their students to complete a form for at least one web site appearing in their works cited list, and over the next two weeks the teachers brought all of their junior classes to the library where I delivered a brief direct instruction lesson on the importance of assessing web sites for validity and how to use the web site evaluation form I designed to do so.  This lesson turned out to be quite successful and received positive feedback from both the teachers and their students, and I still use the same lesson, with some minor revisions, at my current position at Lakeside School.

In addition to designing and teaching information literacy lessons during the past few years, I have, on occasion, instructed my peers on library-related skills.  At the beginning of the second year I spent at Decatur, Federal Way School District updated its OPAC from an older version of Follett to Follett Destiny.  At this time, I was offered and accepted the role of Follett point-person for other librarians in the district.  My duties included helping district librarians troubleshoot issues they were having with Follett and providing a formal instructional session on how to create a web page.  I have provided the instructional handout I wrote for this session here.  This was a particularly significant experience for me both because it was both the first time I had formally taught a fairly detailed technological skill and because I had never before instructed a group of my peers in a professional setting.  This opportunity furthered my teaching ability and my confidence in both regards.