Vision for the Future: Reflecting on the Process

    If Literacy is the Foundation of a Free Society, then the Library Provides the Building Blocks: My Vision for the Future

Over the past nine years I have noticed a downslide in overall literacy.  What I expected the majority of my grade 6 students to produce during my first year as a teacher was much more than I expect of my students now.  You would think that I have grown in capacity as a teacher, and perhaps this is true; however, students in 2022 have many more challenges to overcome than the students of 2013.  Classrooms are overrun with distraction machines--cell phones--and the global pandemic drastically interrupted learning socially, emotionally, and physically.  As Shannon Miller McClintock and Willian Bass suggest in the text Leading from the Library, even prior to the pandemic students and teachers faced pressure “to get through content while designing engaging learning experiences, demonstrating growth in skills and knowledge, and applying understanding to new situations (p. 40).”  With these many challenges, it is understandable that in older grades, direct literacy instruction gets buried under an overwhelming Math, Science, and Social Studies curriculum.

Additionally, intermediate students are often expected to read to learn, with the assumption that because they can read fiction, they can also read non fiction.  Research shows that this fact is not necessarily true, however.  Consequently, for my Vision for the Future assignment I created a data based collection of free reading and writing lessons and commonly used assistive technology.  My target audience is intermediate teachers, both experienced and inexperienced, and my intent is to provide them with a literacy tool box to draw upon and blend with all curriculum for grades 4-7.

In my first assignments for this course I examined four different areas of interest: data based literacy instruction, assistive technology, healthy technology use, and content creation.  My Vision of the Future assignment focuses on my first two areas of interest, which are data based literacy instruction, and assistive technologies.  As a teacher, I find that there is an overwhelming number of resources available for these topics; however, the lesson plans often require paid subscriptions, and instructional videos are long winded. Who has time to sift through an 8 minute YouTube ramble when all you need is a 30 second refresher on using the highlights function on the Google Read&Write toolbar? No one.  That’s who.

As such, I compiled an easy to use, set of five, three column tables for Google Docs that are organized by month into a basic scope and sequence. I chose to create the resource in Google Docs because this is the best way to share documents inside my school and school district, and additionally, I uploaded each table to my blog in five separate posts for wider use by the public.  In both my blog posts and in my Google Doc I focused on brevity, putting the clickable links and videos at the forefront to minimize searching.  You will notice that my Vision of the Future blogs are extremely succinct, with little to no introductory writing.  This is on purpose.  I hate having to read an essay before getting to a resource, so I put the resources first, and provided the research last.  

All of the lesson links are free, and the assistive technology that I refer to is commonly used in my district and across B.C. For example, I suggest using Google Suites features, iPad apps, and web based tools that have limited free features.  At times, these tools straddle the line between authentic content creation and effective assistive technology.  Ultimately, my hope is to marry literacy instruction with technology.  Because, “the overall goal must remain student learning,” and since the library is the epicenter of print and digital books, it only makes sense for the librarian to build the foundation for literacy within the school, the district, and the community at large.