What Can Teacher Librarians do to Manage Change?

1) Managing Change at a Personal and Professional Level:
* develop a professional growth plan through: web sites created by teacher-librarians that contain resources and information on authors, discussion groups,can be involved in continuing education in order to learn effective ways to use technology in their teaching, to access new resources, and to collaborate and communicate with peers outside the classroom.
* seek and develop administrative support by demonstrating the educational needs of students and staff.
* becomes a trusted part of the school staff to be effective by:becoming involved in the school ie. participating in school committee activities and extracurricular social gatherings. Teacher-librarians must know three things about their school: the current teaching practices, the culture of the school and the teachers’ skills, knowledge and attitudes.
* to work with teachers, technology coordinators and administrators to create a team in the school. An action plan outlining the specific needs of the school, how technology will extend resources, and how it will facilitate resource sharing can be developed through this partnership (Bens, 1999). They can assist the computer teacher to think creatively about technology and its educational use in the school. Teacher-librarians can provide lists of web sites geared to a season, a special holiday or a theme. They can also acquire valuable information regarding school library and technology issues. They can help provide training that is school-based on professional development days or during after school workshops. The teacher-librarian who is trained on the use of the Internet, e-mail, and web site evaluation can be a mentor to the staff.
2) Managing Change at the School System Level:
* become a policy maker.Teacher-librarians should try to locate all relevant policies and procedures and decide whether they meet the needs of a twenty-first century school. The teacher-librarian should reflect on how change has affected the library and existing policies should be reviewed for their timeliness:
Student technology use, including the acceptable use of computers

§ Faculty technology use, including acceptable use of computers

§ Circulation issues

§ Copyright and new technology issues

§ Personnel hiring

§ Personnel evaluation

§ Facility use

§ Acquisition of materials

§ Access of materials (Repman & Downs, 1999, pp.9-10).

Library Resource centers and teacher-librarians are really at a crossroads. They are called on to play an increasingly important role in information literacy and electronic information retrieval, analysis, and synthesis. The teacher-librarian must become a technology role model and leader. Failure of the library Resource Center to meet this new mandate and failure of teacher-librarians to embrace the challenge of this new role will inevitably lead to obsolescence. (Bens, 1999).