Library Professional Development

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 This week we are talking about library professional development, and the lack thereof. Many of the articles we read this week confirmed the feelings of isolation that librarians may have in their school libraries and how they can be stand-alone "islands". Honestly I wish I had known this was common my first year on the job as I felt very alone and a bit out of my element. The articles this week talked about ways to bring librarians together and provide professional development. On of the articles that stood out for me, was by Mary Keeling's "The AASL Planning Guide: A District Approach to Powerful Professional Development" that was published in the Library Media Connection. This article discussed  the AASL planning guide, 

The title is a little dry, but it talks about how librarians used the AASL planning guide to do a meaningful self-reflection of their libraries. "The Planning Guide for Empowering Learners is an online program assessment and planning module (Keeling, 30)," so is mostly self-administered. The librarians then gather to discuss and reflect. The planning guide looks at how the library achieves the basic tenants of the AASL library standards. "For selected program areas, librarians considered the questions: 

• Where is the program now? 
• What data or artifacts do you have to justify this rating? 
• What do you have to do to move to the next level? (Keeling, 32)."

 Keeling has also noted that, "the first idea was to embrace the concept of a library program in a continuous improvement cycle. The quality of a program is not fixed; rather, there are specific actions that can change program quality (Keeling, 32)." Once the guide was completed and librarians reflected on their library programs, they then " set one to two specific, measurable, achievable goals (Keeling, 32)." 

What I liked about the planning guide was that while the overall process was done with other librarians, the guide was done independently and was self-reflective. This provides a lot of value directly for a librarian versus more general professional development that may or may not directly apply to the library. The article notes, "although self-evaluation can be intimidating, responses indicated a general feeling of trust among the group. One librarian said, "We liked that we could assess ourselves without the pressure of 'reporting publicly'—[it] felt like we were more open (Keeling, 33)."

Works Cited: 
Keeling, Mary. "The AASL Planning Guide: A District Approach to Powerful Professional Development." Library Media Connection. March/April 2023.