DuMont's Library

My Scenario: We all have a story.  My story so far is what has led me to make this website .  It’s a messy one with many ups and downs in leadership.  And it’s a long one, but I feel it all must be told in order to understand my vision. I have been working at my middle school for 7 years.  In the last 4 years I have been blessed with time built into my schedule to do what we call curricular support.  Basically, I work with teachers to co-plan, co-teach, and co-assess.  It’s a really sweet gig.  I work closely with my admin team of 3, and I support and help grow their vision, all of which is part of the role of a teacher librarian, according to From School Library to Library Learning Commons .  This year, in their strategic thinking (Eisenberg, 2002, p.48),  my school is focusing on student agency, so my focus will be on that.  However, last year’s focus was on assessment, so I also am honouring that as my colleagues are in all different ...

  How important is this topic?  Well, it’s report card season, and I just spent a whole day touring a rabbit hole of information about libraries and mobile devices in developing countries.  It’s beyond important. Here are the down and dirty facts to get your brain moving:  The cost to build a library and create a physical collection is extraordinarily high and certainly not available to developing countries 250,000,000 children in developing countries are not learning to read and write, despite being enrolled in school (this is due to a lack of reading resources - see the first fact) That sucks.  Those are huge numbers of people who do not have access to a human right!   But get this: Of the estimated world population of 7 billion people, 6 billion now have access to a working mobile phone. 4.5 billion people have access to a toilet (hmm…) (Image from bankmycell.com) Doesn’t this bring us to the obvious solution of using digital platforms to teach read...

   This topic deserves a whole living website, not just a little blog.  The idea of sharing new ideas to colleagues who are in all different spaces in their abilities, experience, and interests in order to better student learning is monumental. Colossal. So, this is just a taster of what we might be thinking about when looking into how we can give back to our colleagues and community in order to leap forward in teacher and student learning. (Image created at imgflip.com by K. DuMont) There is so much literature about collaboration.  I am leaning into two influential documents used here in British Columbia: From School Library to Library Learning Commons and Leading Learning Framework . Working with teachers to improve student learning is the absolute best part of being a teacher-librarian.  However, that isn’t to say it’s easy.  A person can learn all there is to know about up and coming ideas, technology, and assessment and still not a soul is darkening t...

When you show students that you get so much out of researching by speaking to people, and that reading information online is not the only way to gather information, a certain newness comes to their approach to learning.  Is this not also true for adults?                                                                                                         ( Image created through imgflip.com) Recently, I used a design thinking approach in my Inquiry class for grade 9s.  Part of this process is to interview people.  Real, live, breathing people.  And although the students were trepidatious about this process, when they finally gained the courage and skills ...