Domain 3:
Delivery of Service/Instruction

As part of our effort to support the district's media literacy goals, Peter McKenna and I spent the month of January co-teaching collaborative lessons on digital and media literacy to students in grades 3-5. In order to prepare our collaborative unit, we dedicated December afternoons, when teachers were engaged in parent-teacher conferences, to developing our media literacy unit; this included meeting with the Edgewood technology/librarian team to learn from their collaboration strategies, reviewing existing media literacy curricula, and establishing our goals for each grade; we then followed up our initial planning sessions with additional meetings and emails to develop, alter, and refine the Common Sense and Be Internet Awesome curricula we used to best meet our students' educational needs and our teaching goals. Students discussed their responsibilities to their online communities and to themselves, developed strategies for handling hurtful online comments, analyzed altered images and videos, grappled with developing norms for chat groups, analyzed and created clickbait, and developed strategies for determining credible sources. 

The artifact below includes an image carousel of the collaborative lessons Peter and I co-taught, the clickbait worksheet I created for the 5th graders, and a few examples of the finished clickbait examples created by 5th graders.

Another example of collaboration took place when I offered to help a 5th grade teacher with a new poetry project she wanted to do with her students. While, in the past, students wrapped up their immigration unit by writing a diary, this year she wanted to have them write poems instead and was looking for some additional support in implementing this new project. As a former English teacher, I have an extensive background teaching poetry to students, so I offered to use library class time to introduce students to a few foundational concepts in poetry and some simple poetry forms they could use as they completed their projects.

The materials below include the planning emails, the mini-lesson I gave the students about poetry, and the poem worksheets I had students use to begin experimenting with writing poetry.

Both my professional and student goal this year was to make the library more accessible to students; for students, this has meant ensuring that they were able to navigate the library at a developmentally-appropriate level, which has included teaching lessons on some of the fundamentals of library organization. It has also meant periodically providing lessons that connect literature with design thinking and extension activities as ways to provide students with different ways of thinking about and engaging with literature.

The artifacts below highlight students learning information literacy skills and engaging in design challenges inspired by picture book read alouds.

To celebrate Women's History Month, I read biographies to students in kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grade about women who were pioneers in their respective fields, and then students engaged in hands-on extension activities that brought the lives and work of the women they learned about to life. In kindergarten, students read Mae Among the Stars, and after spring break, will extend both their classroom learning and our library discussion about spaceships and forces, using pompoms and straws.  In 1st grade, students read Dinosaur Lady: The Daring Discoveries of Mary Anning, the First Paleontologist and then worked in groups to dig for fossils and recreate their dinosaurs. In 2nd grade, students read The World Is Not a Rectangle: A Portrait of Architect Zaha Hadid and worked in teams, using rectangular index cards, to create their own organic structures. The images below highlight the 1st and 2nd grade extension activities.

1st Grade Paleontology

2nd Grade Architecture