Standard+4.3+Comprehensive+and+collaborative+strategic+planning+and+assessment


 * Reflection - AASL Standard 4.3: Comprehensive and collaborative strategic planning and assessment **

Over the past four years as a media specialist, I have worked on collaborating with teachers and administrators to align our school media program with the mission and goals of our school. As a member of the leadership team, I was involved in the construction of our school mission statement and vision. By being a member of this team as well as the school improvement team reading committee I am in touch with what we need to do with our media program to align it with school goals and objectives.

As stated previously in reflection 4.2 one of the main resources that were needed in our media center last year were non fiction books to compliment the science and social studies curriculum in our school. The building of background knowledge within our students at our school has been a priority for the past few years, since many of our students come from low income families and are not exposed to many enriching experiences that would develop a fine repertoire of background knowledge. In our Children’s Literature Class Reed 620 we were asked to create a thematic unit for instruction in our media center. I chose the theme of Let’s Explore and decided to connect it to the reading series in our school. During this unit the students in our school would be exposed to non fiction as well as fictional books that tied in directly to their reading series and the objective was mainly to build background knowledge. For example in unit one of the fourth grade reading series the students have a story about camping in a national park. So to prepare them for that story, I ordered a set of national park books for them to use as a resource to create an informational commercial about why someone should go to the park that they were researching.

Another way that I attempted to build background knowledge this year that is noted in the journal reflection that we did in ISTC 789 was setting up displays in the library for each grade level with non fiction books that related to each reading unit throughout the year. When the students came to media I would do book talks and encourage the students to check these books out for independent reading selections. This idea generated a lot of excitement among the students and also got the teachers attention when they brought these books back from media class. I also communicated with the teachers on a regular basis to let them know which lessons we were doing in media class and how those lessons supported the content they were teaching in their classrooms.

In addition to building background knowledge another need that was identified by the leadership team this year for our students was the developing the use of text features to assist students in the reading of non fiction material. Through my collaboration efforts, I was able to work with many teachers this year on projects and mini lessons that involved the use of resources from our media center as well as co teaching lessons in their classroom. An assignment that came from our Introduction to Research Class ISTC 685 was an action research project that I collaborated with the pre k teacher and her assistant on in the use of the Super3 Research Process while using text features in non fiction resources.

Before beginning our research we set up a standards base objective chart that is attached to this standard. By completing this task we made sure that our action research project was aligned with school goals and objectives. During our research we also created and analyzed data that was used to measure student growth and achievement. This was done in Microsoft Excel and served as a basis for our findings and recommendations for future research initiatives.

As a media specialist, I feel that I have grown immensely over the past four years. I also feel that by being part of the leadership team and being involved in all aspects of our school community, I have made improvements in our school media program and shown how an effective media program can support the achievement of students in our school.