By Peter Murgatroyd

The annual Learning@School Conference run by CORE Education was held in Hamilton 26-27 January. With a focus on integrating new technologies to empower learning and transform leadership, the Conference, while targeting school leaders, principals, teachers, and ICT and technology advisers, is an excellent professional learning opportunity for school librarians and one that I would encourage colleagues to consider in 2013.

With more than 1500 delegates, inspiring and challenging keynote speakers from New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, dozens of breakout sessions and workshops, a state-of-the-art conference venue with ultra-fast wireless access enabling a myriad of parallel conversations happening via social networks, Learning@School 2012 (#lats12) was both invigorating and exhausting.

Participation in the Conference was an invaluable opportunity to look at schools through the lens of teachers and school leaders to better understand their challenges in the face of what Mark Treadwell described as a perfect storm of change that is causing educators globally to rethink what education for today’s students should involve.

The themes of the Conference were:

• Develop leadership capability
• Foster creativity in thought and action
• Raise achievement for all learners
• Build school, whanau and community partnerships

There were a number of common threads that ran through all of the keynote addresses. Ideas and glimpses of new ways of thinking not just about the impacts of far reaching changes in technology but arguably more critically about changes in the way that students are learning and interacting with the world, deconstructing how we think about our learning environments, our relationships with our students and the notion of what it is to be a learner, a teacher, a librarian.

Common threads included:

• the shift to personalisedlearning environments
• a focus on building competence and confidence in learning how to learn
• empowerment of our students
• providing a supportive, inclusive environment for students that recognises and builds upon their strengths and abilities
• preparing learners to be agile, creative and able to respond to an ambiguous and rapidly changing world
• teachers as enablers and facilitators
• thinking beyond institutional and geographic barriers and embracing a global vision of collaboration and partnership

It struck me how closely the conversations reflected the dominant ideas and values at the forefront of transformational thinking about twenty first century libraries. There is much to be gained in engaging in conversations with our teaching colleagues to explore new models of collaboration and new ways that the library can support new and emerging teaching paradigms. There is a great deal we can learn from one another.

Conferences such as these often pose more questions than answers. Indeed Christian Long challenged delegates to embrace the notion that there are no clear answers and that all that we can really do is to foster a culture that encourages divergent thinking and an ability to test ideas in messier and messier ways.

Participation at Learning@School was also an invaluable opportunity to engage with our teaching colleagues on new ways of thinking about libraries and literacy. Five separate workshops and presentations were facilitated by National Library Services to Schools staff and there was a vibrant presence in the Exhibitors hall promoting EPIC, Any Questions and Curriculum Services.

It continues to be vitally important that librarians are visible and engaged in the wider education debates that are shaping our schools, that we articulate our visions and ideas, and that we seek to understand the key trends in education that are likely to impact on the work of New Zealand teachers and schools in 2012 and beyond.

• Learning@School 2012 Conference blog
• Learning@School 2012 video channel
• Presentation by Lisa Oldham: The connected school librarian
• Core-Eds Ten Trends 2012

The elephant approach to change.

How do we succeed in changing things when our current initiatives seem to have got bogged down?
Often change becomes bogged down when we think that because we have discussed something and the need for change seems to have been understood, change will happen.

Actually the logical part of our brain is like a small rider on the emotional part of our brain: the elephant. Change only happens when the elephant agrees with us.

• How can we create conditions where the elephant agrees with us?
• How do we create situations where the emotion does not take over?

Direct the rider. Be clear what is wanted. The elephant is in charge if the rider is confused.

Motivate the elephant. Grow good stuff so that the elephant moves in the right direction. Grow people, find the excitement. Build positive habits of mind.

Create the path that the elephant can traverse more easily. What can be done that will make what we want easier and what we don’t want harder?     

For more “elephants and change” inspiration, take a look at Chip and Ben Heath’s book: Switch, discussed by Dr Jennifer Garvey Berger at the recent NZCER Connected and Contagious Conference in Wellington.

Glynis

Big changes are in the wind for your school?

What are the conditions that best promote positive change in New Zealand schools?

Structure

• Centralised organisational structures in schools are isolating.
• De-centralised structures where there is a network of leaders connected to a central position are effective in promoting professional learning and change.
• Distributed networks where there is no obvious central direction are slower to produce change.

Collaboration

Early learning about something new as a group (promoting “redundancy”) encourages change.  Such successful groups often develop visual overview metaphors of the new direction which become the touchstones for a new “shared way of being” for the future in the school e.g. “The 6 kindnesses poster” is one school’s metaphor for implementing the New Zealand curriculum in their school.

External inputs:

School leaders are strategic in deciding when to bring in an outsider with new ideas into the school, and when to develop new ideas within the group.

Leading learners in change are

• Active networkers within and outside the school
• Willing to distribute leadership especially once the broad direction is established
• Clear sighted and good at establishing priorities
• Visionary and able to imbue change with a clear sense of moral purpose
• Enablers of constant reflection and review

The above is a summary of some of the points made by Dr Rosemary Hipkins based on the results of research on New Zealand Curriculum “early adopter” schools, when she addressed the recent NZCER Connected and Contagious Conference in Wellington.

Glynis

AnyQuestions.co.nz, the free online reference service, has been around since 2004.  In that time we have helped over 80,000 New Zealand school students.

The aim of the service is not to give students the answers but rather, to teach them valuable information literacy skills so they can find the information for themselves.  In the past year the service has undergone some dramatic changes.  We switched to a much more reliable and friendly to use chat software, revamped our companion site ManyAnswers.co.nz and most recently overhauled our core AnyQuestions.co.nz site.

So why have we done this?  The goal was to make the site easier to use for students and librarians as well as integrating our full services a lot better. 

Up until recently, students needed to fill in an information survey before they engaged with a librarian.  It was vital that we captured this information, yet the method we used failed to create the engagement with students that was needed.  We rethought this survey and have incorporated it on the site as the start of a conversation between the student and the librarian.  At each “step” of the survey students are asked a question in a conversational tone before entering the chat software proper. So far we have found this successfully creates an engagement that leads to positive interactions between the student and the librarian.

We have also integrated AnyQuestions.co.nz with our companion site ManyAnswers.co.nz. ManyAnswers.co.nz is home to hundreds of “answers” to commonly asked questions on AnyQuestions.co.nz and UiaNgāPātai.co.nz (our te reo service). 

Like AnyQuestions.co.nz we don’t give the students the answers, instead we guide them to find answers for themselves. The big advantage ManyAnswers.co.nz has is that it is not limited by the opening hours of AnyQuestions (Monday to Friday 1 – 6pm).

There are hundreds of answers on ManyAnswers.co.nz in both English and te reo Māori and more being added every week.  We have integrated the two sites on every page with search functionality, RSS feeds of the latest answers and tag clouds of keywords and tags.  We hope that this interweaving of the two sites will provide a better service for students.

Our next project is integrating similar changes into our te reo site, UiaNgāPātai.co.nz. 

Our goal is to continue to enhance our services.  We welcome your feedback and suggestions!  You can do this through the Contact Us page on the AnyQuestions.co.nz site.

http://www.anyquestions.co.nz/

http://manyanswers.co.nz/

http://www.uiangapatai.co.nz/

Robert Baigent - Manager AnyQuestions