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It’s fair to say that when I left teachers college three years ago I had greatly underestimated how much focus there would be on teaching literacy strategies. As a science specialist, I had been taught some scientific literacy, but mostly it was theory-based or examples given during lectures of other peoples teaching practice. As a learner, I find it a lot easier to implement new techniques into my teaching if I can watch or talk to someone who is already giving it a go. This made it difficult to know where to start when I came to realise just how much support my students needed with literacy.

Before Southland Boys’ High School became involved in the Information Literacy Spaces research, I was already working with our amazing librarian Senga White, as well as English teachers on different literacy strategies for junior science. When Senga approached me about the new project…

After an enthusiastic and productive two days of learning and sharing at our annual Hui, I returned to school and a mountain of work.

However, through the busyness, I was reminded how rewarding and exhilarating collaborating with a teaching colleague is.  My level 2 chemistry teacher booked space for her Year 12 class to use the library computers in the last three weeks of this term.  We then met to discuss the research requirements of the upcoming assessment.

Now, I am no scientist, and chemistry definitely doesn’t feature on my personal knowledge radar, but together we had a highly productive discussion that resulted in a planned collaboration that neither of us had expected.

After identifying areas for grade improvement based on the previous two years’ results for this assessment, my teaching colleague articulated wanting to try a strategy that would move some of this year’s cohort from a merit to an…

The library I work in at Southland Boys’ High School has been a flurry of research activity this year!  Last term Year 7 & 8 classes were researching World War I, Year 9 & 10 social studies classes a variety of events from the 20th century, Year 12 biology classes were discovering element of the abyssal zone and Year 13 history students were investigating New Zealand-focused topics.

This term has already become a real juggling act to accommodate all the research that’s happening.  The Year 12 history classes have come onboard the research train with conspiracy theories, English classes are researching inventions as well as conspiracy theories, and our lovely Year 7 & 8 classes (all 11 of them!) are undertaking individual research about a conflict of their choice, following on from their WWI topic in term 1.  To say we are a busy library would be an understatement!

Research becomes…

Today I had the absolute pleasure and privilege of working with the Year 12 & 13 students at Aurora College in Invercargill.  Aurora is a small co-educational Year 7-13 secondary school, which is part of the group of schools working in our project.

Following on from our initial Hui in February I was invited by their lead teacher Kirsten Erasmus to present an introduction to their senior students about information literacy skills needed for successful learning.

I had two one-hour sessions, the first with Year 12 students and the second with Year 13 students.  I kicked off by talking about what makes us successful learners and why a positive attitude is vital to push through when things are hard.

We then went on to cover

• the importance of following a research process
• using a research pathfinder to keep on track
• Google searching strategies for successful searching
• moving beyond Google and using databases