Welcome back everyone. While it might appear that your Committee has had a quiet couple of months, we have been busy behind the scenes.

We’ve spent some time looking at options to deal with increasing membership numbers, a great issue to have(!), as well as the provisioning of automated renewals, enhanced website features, and community-building functionality.

We recently subscribed to the membership management software, Wild Apricot, and have been working to have your membership renewals for 2019-2020 ready to be sent out this week. The Wild Apricot software will also manage registrations for events such as our Online Meet-ups and State Library conferences.

Time to renew your SLANSW Membership

For those renewing their institutional membership for 2019-2020, we have two special offers. The first is access to the new SLANSW-branded CiteMaker service - check here for details. The second is a Fairfax Media subscription offer for schools and a free subscription to one lucky institutional member who joins SLANSW or renews their membership before the end of September this year, check out this announcement for details.

The Committee will continue to explore further partnerships with industry to enhance the benefits for both personal and institutional members. 

Check out membership benefits for more information.

by Di Laycock, President

Holiday breaks provide a great opportunity to catch up on some professional reading. If you haven’t yet caught up with Margaret Merga’s 2018 publication,Reading Engagement for Tweens and Teens: What Would Make Them Read More? make sure you get to it soon. Filled with research and practical strategies to encourage young people to read, it’s a timely and essential advocacy tool for those working in Australian school libraries.

Something else that caught my attention over the break was the article, 'The Continuing Journey to Understand Dispositions and the Concept of the Ho-hum Librarian' by Jones and Long (2019) in the journal, Teacher Librarian, 46(4). The article is shaped around the question: Do we emphasise knowledge and skill acquisition for school librarians at the expense of attending to the development of professional dispositions?

Rather than focus on the skills needed to sponsor successful library programs, Jones and Long emphasise the importance for school librarians to develop professional dispositions – ideas and behaviours directed towards broad goals – that will move the profession forward. The authors’ interviews with nine “exemplary” school librarians indicated that such dispositions present themselves broadly as “thinking dispositions,” “relational dispositions,” and “motivational and forward-thinking dispositions related to technology.” Well worth a read!

And finally, something to share and discuss with your colleagues. Daniel Willingham’s (2019) How to Teach Critical Thinking is an occasional paper commissioned by the NSW Department of Education in the series, Education: Future Frontiers. In this paper, Willingham "considers what cognitive science can tell us about how critical thinking is acquired, and the implications for how education might best develop young people’s critical thinking capabilities in light of this evidence" (p. 3).  In summary, Willingham recommends a four-step process in the teaching of critical thinking:

1. identify subject-specific critical thinking skills;

2. identify subject-specific content;

3. plan the sequence in which knowledge and skills should be taught; and 

4. plan which knowledge and skills should be revisited across years.

Call for participation in a research study with Dr Margaret Merga

Click here for further information and to access the survey https://ecuau.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0BAo9yD53AEPFmB

At our March online meet-up, Dr Margaret Merga mentioned that she was currently seeking secondary English teachers to participate in a study about struggling literacy learners in Australian secondary classrooms.

Participation involves the completion of a short survey which aims to draw the knowledge of English teachers teaching in secondary classrooms, with a view to enhancing our understanding of how to best meet the needs of students who struggle with literacy skills beyond the early years of schooling.

If you are currently working in a high school, please encourage your English teacher colleagues to be part of this research conducted by Edith Cowan University.

It will take less than 10 minutes to complete, and contribution will be anonymous and highly valued. This project has been kindly funded by the Collier Charitable Foundation.

Members of the Committee have agreed to devote a weekend during Term 3 to attend a face-to-face meeting in order to do some very necessary strategic planning for the Association. Committee members have identified the areas of SLANSW responsibilities on which they wish to work over the course of the weekend. The intended outcome of the meeting will be a SLANSW Strategic Plan that will communicate the future directions of the Association to members.

Photo by Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash

The SLANSW Regional Representatives on the Committee have agreed to organise an online meeting for those in their regions via the SLANSW Zoom Room. This meeting would offer regional members an opportunity to discuss their needs and to make suggestions for future professional learning that might be organised by SLANSW. We are currently developing a list of dates when the regional representatives will host these meetings and members will be invited to sign-up to both attend and to encourage non-member colleagues to participate in order to witness the benefits of a SLANSW membership.

A generous offer has been made to SLANSW institutional members by Courtney Harvey from Fairfax Media. Access to this offer will be provided in Term 4, the offer applying to subscriptions in 2020.

With no logins, no passwords, and no limits on concurrent users, the subscription to The Sydney Morning Herald, The Financial Review, and The Age would be activated by the school's IP address and the school supplied with URLs that direct users to the digital replica of the day's printed newspapers.

Fairfax Media are offering SLANSW institutional members a 10% discount on the following subscription prices:

Fairfax Media has also generously offered SLANSW one free subscription to the three-papers package and this will be used as a prize in our 2019-2020 membership drive. All those who join or renew their SLANSW institutional membership for 2019-2020 before 30th September will be eligible to go into a lottery for the subscription package that will be drawn at the SLANSW Conference at the State Library of New South Wales on Saturday 19th October.

There are a number of free referencing generators available to assist students to appropriately acknowledge information sources. That said, many such tools come with a heavy advertising component. We are therefore delighted to offer an alternative to schools in which our members work.

Michael Hargreaves from Citemaker has generously offered to provide free-of-charge a SLANSW branded referencing generator whereby schools would be provided their own unique URL (as is provided for paid subscriptions). This offer is available for schools charging less than $5,000 annual tuition fees and with less than 1,000 Year 7 - 12 students.

The free SLANSW branded version of CiteMaker would differ from the full subscription version in that:

A SLANSW version of Citemaker would otherwise have full citation generation capabilities which includes access on multiple platforms, including tablets and smartphones. Our arrangement with Michael Hargeaves is currently being finalised and details of how eligible schools can access the SLANSW Referencing Generator will be sent to members once available.

Off we go…

I just love the start of the year – it’s hectic, it’s crazy, and it’s wonderful.

February is a passing parade of technology and library orientations, of teachers needing resources and services yesterday, and conversations with students about what they read over the holidays and what to read next.

As we start the new year, here are a few websites that I continue to find useful for information about reading and digital technologies:

Common Sense Media 

Digital Technologies Hub 

GCF Global 

National Library of New Zealand 

If you haven’t been accessing Margaret Merga’s compelling and copious research regarding school libraries, the role of teacher librarians, and the state of reading amongst “tweens and teens,” do make it a priority for this term. Also consider networking with other NSW teacher librarians on the Facebook group NSW School Library Matters. This group is an incredibly welcoming, knowledgeable and collaborative group who can help with almost any request. It’s a fabulous arena for professional learning.

by Di Laycock, President

Photo by Austris Augusts on Unsplash