Happy New Year!

Many of us sit down in December at year’s and send messages to friends and relatives reporting what happened over the past year. To make them more interesting, many add pictures of the various events in our lives.

For those of us in education, September is a new year, and this one comes with the promise of new beginnings after months and months of empty schools and unexpected challenges. It is a good time to think about the past year and all the successes that you managed. It is a time to gather the positive things that happened. How were you able to get books to your students? Was it when they collected their lunches? Did parents come by to collect them? What numbers of children were able to get books to read and what did they say about what they had read? Were you able to read stories to your students during a regular time? How did you approach using your website for communication? How did you assist teachers in using technology wisely? How did you help students judge the quality of information they encountered online? How did your database usage change with students writing their research papers? How did you collaborate with teachers to co-teach online units? How and what did you do to help teachers teach and students learn? Which of these things that happened during the pandemic tested new ways that were effective in helping students in your suddenly online environment, especially those you will continue in this new year?

Once you have your list, read it to make sure it can be understood not only by your principal and teachers but also by parents. Sometimes our library vocabularies are our worst enemy (our circulation statistics have nothing to do with our blood pressure).

Then you can take this list and add your goals, objectives, and expectations for this next year. Which of the online/pandemic-tested activities will continue because they were successful?

If you have always done this type of review for your principal, teachers, and parents at the beginning of your school year, you may be able to offer suggestions to others for how you have presented this report. If you have never done this, the pandemic gives you the opportunity to start this new powerful and positive approach to showing your community the role and worth of the school librarian in the education of your students.

Happy New Year!

Author: Blanche Woolls

Categories: Advocacy/Leadership, Blog Topics

Tags: advocacy, books, gooals, new school year, pandemic resource, school library goals, success, virtual learning