Tina Launey
Personal School Library Media SWOT
July 16, 2009
Strengths
I believe that my past professional experience has contributed greatly to the strengths that I bring to my job as a media specialist. Although my background is in the field of marketing, not education, I worked at a firm that delved into interactive media as well as print communication. My technical background includes experience designing, developing content for, and programming web pages, web sites, and HTML emails, experience that has served me well as my school’s webmaster and has enabled me to create tools that have proven effective for students, such as online voting forms and a dynamic home page for our school’s online catalog. I also have a fair amount of experience working with online databases that managed and stored large amounts of information; this knowledge has enhanced my understanding of our county’s web-based library catalog, which contains features similar to those I encountered in my previous work with online databases. Having grown up and worked in a technology rich environment, I’ve also become very comfortable using a variety of software programs – from the Microsoft suite of products to Adobe’s creative products, and educational programs such as Kid Pix, Kidspiration/Inspiration, and Graph Club, to name a few – and I feel well equipped to teach students how to use these programs to develop information products. My level of comfort with technology also gives me the confidence to approach and learn new software programs as they enter into the school’s curriculum and administration, and pass that knowledge along to students and staff.
Apart from my technical background, I believe that I am becoming a competent leader in my field. I currently serve on my school’s Building Leadership Team, which adds a level of responsibility to my job as media specialist, but also enables me to be a part of the governance of our school and establishes the school’s media program as a major contributor to the overall school environment. In 2008-2009, I expanded my role on the Building Leadership Team by offering to become the advisor for our school’s specialist team – which consists of the art, music, and PE teachers – in an effort to help the specialists develop strong instructional programs that contribute to student achievement in academic and extracurricular areas. I will continue to work with the specialist team during the upcoming school year. I am also a member of Cobb County’s Media Leadership Team, which serves as an advisory board to the county’s Library Media Education Department; we establish and promote best practices among the county’s media centers, and routinely make decisions that affect our media programs, such as determining the best online resources for elementary, middle, and high schools. I will serve my second year of a three-year rotation with the Media Leadership Team during the 2009-2010 school year. Overall, I feel that I am trusted as a leader and a coworker – my colleagues know they can count on me to do what I say I will do, and do it to the best of my ability.
When it comes down to it, my greatest strength is probably my enthusiasm. Although I joke that I have a love/hate relationship with my job, the truth is that I am wholly committed to my occupation – I love working with the students, love inspiring them to read and equipping them with the tools they need in order to become better researchers and independent learners. I practically live my life with my nose in a book, and I hope that students catch some of that enthusiasm and take it with them. I’m also deeply committed to serving my administration and staff and being the best, most reliable media specialist I can possibly be.
Weaknesses
While my past professional experience has contributed to some of my greatest strengths, it is also the source of my greatest weaknesses. Before working as an elementary school media specialist, I had no experience teaching – I just remembered growing up with a mother who worked in a school media center and recalling how deeply satisfied she was with her job. In addition to my lack of classroom experience, my coursework in library science and school library media included only three education-related courses, so I do not have a strong foundation in primary or secondary education. This lack of experience has made it more difficult for me to collaborate with teachers, because I am still learning what “collaboration” means and how I can best forge meaningful connections between information literacy skills and content standards. I’ve also had to built my “tool kit” one piece at a time, as I learn what strategies and approaches do and do not work well with students – I went into my first year as a media specialist assuming that my students were much more proficient information retrievers and processors than they actually were. I’ve had to figure out where to start with the students and how to engage them so that the activities we complete together have meaning and value for them. Because the majority of my students are English language learners and/or from backgrounds of poverty, learning how to differentiate instruction has also become very important, and I largely develop new methods through a process of trial and error. I’ve definitely had to push myself to become an instructional partner with the teachers – it is so much easier to focus on what I’m good at, like troubleshooting computers and printers – because I know it is a vital component of my occupation.
Going into my fourth year as a media specialist, I am still learning my collection and struggling to provide prompt responses to individual information needs and requests. I want to see the day when a teacher asks me if we have any books about honesty in our collection and I immediately provide her a list of five titles off the top of my head. I also want to know the collection well enough to know what areas need the most development, without consulting a collection analysis report that my book vendor provides me.
On a personal note, my interpersonal skills are a source of weakness that I want to continue to address, even though it makes me uncomfortable. I’m not known for my flexibility, which is not something to brag about when you work in an elementary school where 600 students and 100 teachers all have different needs and different opinions about what a school media center and what resources it should provide. I get easily frustrated when I am asked to fulfill obligations that I see as being outside my role as a teacher and instructional partner; I quickly lose patience when a teacher interrupts me in the middle of a lesson to tell me she’s unable to log into her computer, for example. My media clerk once said of my predecessor, “No matter what she was saying to you, she said it with a smile on her face, and it left you with a good feeling.” I want to become a focused, empathetic listener who responds to situations instead of reacting to them. I know this will help me build my emotional bank account with my colleagues and make for a more positive, productive working environment.
Opportunities
I am very fortunate to have supportive administrators who believe that I’m doing what’s best for students and support my objectives and initiatives. My involvement in the school and county leadership teams keeps me abreast of the state of affairs in the school and the district and provides me the opportunity to develop and promote best practices and forge new partnerships with other educators. I’m also very fortunate to work in a county that believes in the importance of strong media programs and provides us with program supervision and budgetary support, even in the absence of legislation that enforces quality standards to the degree that they may have been enforced in the past. Finally, I am excited to be enrolled in the specialist program at West Georgia, because it encourages me to development new goals and initiatives for my media program and provides me with tools and strategies that make for more meaningful collaboration and instruction.
Threats
The last couple of years have brought worldwide economic hardships that I have not experienced during my lifetime, and they make the future seem more uncertain for media specialists, as for all educators. My county has been able to preserve media jobs and budgets for the upcoming school year, and I join everyone in hoping that the economy will rebound and restore our previous levels of job security. However, the district has instituted severe cutbacks in our Technology Services division, at a time when every school in the district is being outfitted with 21st century technology tools such as interactive whiteboards, LCD projectors, sophisticated sound systems, and other components that will need to be maintained and that teachers and students must be trained to use properly. In my discussions with media specialists who have become the primary technology support person in their schools, the quality and quantity of their collaboration with teachers has suffered greatly. As I begin my specialist program, I wonder how my role as media specialist will change in the upcoming years, and I wonder how media programs will weather continued cutbacks, if they don’t face elimination altogether. Current legislation does not protect media programs and media specialists to the degree that other instructional positions are protected; whereas the No Child Left Behind legislation mandates that teachers be Highly Qualified to teach in their content areas, it fails to mandate that school media centers be staffed by Highly Qualified media specialists, arguably diminishing the importance of well-developed media programs staffed by trained professionals. And as my fellow media specialists continue to push for collaboration with teachers and meet resistance, I wonder if our jobs will become less about stressing the importance of information literacy skills and working with teachers to develop independent learners, and more about filling other gaps our employers need us to fill.
Goals
Several motivating factors prompted me to begin work on my specialist degree. I can’t deny that the additional income I’ll earn is a necessity, but I specifically chose the program at West Georgia because I wanted to prepare myself to become a qualified candidate for a position as a district level supervisor of media services. With my technical background, I believe I will one day be well suited to make many of the decisions that a media services supervisor routinely makes, and I think that I would enjoy supporting other media specialists and their programs. In the short term, I want to strengthen the quality of my media program, and my one short semester at West Georgia has already aided me on that front. At the end of the most recent school year, I set myself a goal of developing a collaboration plan – based on input from teachers at each grade level – that would include a different lesson for each grade level each month of the academic year, integrating lessons and activities with grade level content standards. This goal became the foundation of the project I recently completed for MEDT 7485, Special Topics in Media. I had already met with grade level team leaders at the end of the 2008-2009 school year to determine their greatest needs and map out an implementation plan. As part of my project for MEDT 7485, I actually developed all of the lessons and resources that accompany them – these are available on my ePortfolio at http://stu.westga.edu/~tlauney1/medt7485/medt7485.html -- and I am prepared to hit the ground running when the 2009-2010 school year begins. I’ve also learned about several ways to integrate video production more successfully into my media program, and I plan to implement these ideas, particularly student development of digital stories, as soon as possible. I am very confident that my coursework at West Georgia will directly strengthen my media program, in addition to providing me with a broader range of future career opportunities.