As the books are returned, inventory is completed, and you start looking ahead to summer, you may be thinking about what you want to do next year. That is an excellent goal, and one I will come back to in a future post. But what I encourage you to do now, before the school year is completely over, is to reflect and make notes on what went well, what you enjoyed, and what you remember wanting to change.
Life is often lived at full speed, which can be wonderful, but we also need time to reflect so we are better prepared to make good decisions about how to spend our time and resources in the future.
When I reflect at the end of the year, I find at least an hour to write down notes and ideas. I physically write my reflections, but you can just as easily type them and store them in an accessible place. Interestingly, now that AI lets us take photos of handwritten notes and turn them into typed documents, I find myself physically writing more.
Once my reflections are saved, I will come back to them (perhaps not as often as I should), but when I get into full planning mode for the next school year, I will pull out my notes and decide where I want to put my time and resources. Sometimes reflections on the previous year change my thinking or affect how I approach something I have been doing for years. Other times, I am unable to act on the reflections due to limitations. If that is the case, you can make a note to revisit the ideas in a future year and see if the limitations are still present.
While I create end-of-the-year reflections now, when I first started working as a professional librarian about 15 years ago, I would take the time to write reflections about instruction sessions and library events much more regularly. Those ongoing written reflections were really helpful to me when I was new in my career. While I can’t imagine finding the time to do that these days, I do often think it would be useful because my thoughts would be fresher, and I would be able to capture more ideas than I can when I take the time at the end of the school year.
If adding reflective practice would be useful for you, a place to start might be writing down notes on how students were using the ILS (integrated library system) and what you may need to do differently (or the same) next year to support student growth in the use of library-focused technology.
Something else to reflect on is how you worked with classroom teachers to incorporate databases and other electronic resources into classes. You can remind yourself of what specific activities and assignments you supported. Then, reflect on how those activities and assignments were received by students and whether the students demonstrated that they learned the objectives.
The end of the school year is always an exciting time. I hope you find yourself enjoying it and are ready for summer.
0 Comments