I thought that reflecting on my own practice objectively might be quite challenging. As an experienced practitioner, working in a school with a curriculum framework based on inquiry learning, I was confident about my inquiry pedagogy, probably because I moonlight as a workshop leader for the International Baccalaureate and run workshops about inquiry for teachers in IB schools. Fortunately, I managed to be open-minded during the process of analysing a student inquiry that I had had a significant hand in planning. What I discovered when the student inquiry was measured against theoretical models was that, not only was there room for improvement, but I needed to examine the role I was playing in an inquiry.
In my role as teacher-librarian, I model inquiry teaching to colleagues who attend library lessons with their classes. I love whipping students into a frenzy of excitement about their inquiry and engaging students in discussions that provoke deep thinking; introducing content that has students wondering and making connections, but what I discovered through the analysis is I wasn't doing my job! I hadn't differentiated between inquiry learning and information literacy. Maybe I was dazzled by Kevin Costner's notion that if you build it they will come, but I forgot that it was my job to show the students how to get there: to explicitly teach students how to inquire, how to conduct research. It was a combination of the SLIM survey results and the GeSTE windows that brought me crashing to my knees. I was surprised at the numerous comments students made about the difficulty they encountered attempting to locate information, yet I happily positioned the Year 5 inquiry in the Transformative Window. There was an incongruity in these circumstances. There was something missing. The skills and processes of the Generic Window had been overlooked, possibly due to an assumption, based on apparent, but not actual, student competence. However, given the nested windows in the GeSTE model, the Year 5 inquiry did not meet the criteria of the Transformative Window. Unfortunately, I can't have a do over on my library lessons, but I can ensure that I am addressing the basics of information literacy, to support student inquiry in the future. It is ironic that I have made this revelation now, after working in a library for two years, at a time when I am nearing completion of my teacher-librarian formal qualifications, but it is not surprising. It is not surprising because as I reflect over the learning I have done in the past semester, I realise that my own information literacy skills have been on a steady upward trajectory. Learning to conduct expert searches on the internet and using databases was truly enlightening. I started teaching these skills to my students and the penny should have dropped at that stage ... information literacy skills make a difference. It felt good to be sharing such valuable knowledge for a reason. Despite the confronting realisation I have experienced, there was a lot of consolidation and affirmation of my professional practice. I am a very adaptive teacher, always enthusiastic to try new things and I continually strive to improve, so I am not disheartened, but inspired by possibilities. There has been a lot of soul searching as I reflected on my own practice, an appreciation for all that I have learned, and an increased empathy for student researchers who may be floundering, in need of guidance from a teacher-librarian, maybe from me. In my professional learning journey, the challenge now is to embed information literacy skills and processes in the context of the inquiry, because information literacy is at the core of the inquiry. The focus of my ongoing personal inquiry will be to integrate the information literacy into my pedagogical repertoire.
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