Domain 4:
Professional Responsibilities

As an experienced educator who is new to being a school librarian, I have sought to take advantage of professional development opportunities that would enable me to develop my professional learning community and grow my proficiency in librarianship. To this end, I have participated in the BOCES School Library System (SLS) Mentor Program, which has provided me with both in-person and virtual opportunities to learn more about a variety of library-related services and opportunities, learn from seasoned school librarians, and connect with other school librarian newbies.  Additionally, I have also attended the Northeast Media Literacy Conference and its concurrent STI course in the interest of deepening and extending my knowledge of media literacy and developing new strategies for teaching it to my students.

In addition to these past experiences, I also have several upcoming professional development opportunities I am excited about, including being a presenter at breakout session of the BOCES SLS Conference, Advancing Equitable and Inclusive School Libraries, in March 2023, and being a participant in the Responsive Classroom STI in April and May.

When I saw that Southern Westchester BOCES was looking for presenters for its 2023 Annual Joint School Library System Conference Advancing Inclusive and Equitable Libraries, I reached out to my BOCES cohort of new librarians, who I met while attending the full-day BOCES School Library Services (SLS) Mentor Program, to see if they would be interested in presenting together on a panel; after several other new librarians agreed, I put together our proposal, and it was accepted! 

On March 27, 2023, at the SWBOCES Conference in Harrison, NY, we presented  "Just One Thing: New librarians share their first steps," one of the concurrent breakout sessions offered at the conference. In this presentation, we shared "just one thing" we had done in our new roles to start the work of making our libraries more inclusive and equitable spaces.

My portion of the presentation was entitled "Promoting Inclusivity and Accessibility through Wayfinding Signs," and I focused on the work I had done so far this year to make the Fox Meadow library an even more inclusive, functional, and accessible space for all students by using the 7 Principles of Universal Design, specifically Principle 4: Perceptible Information, to inform how I redesigned wayfinding signs for the library.  Below I am including my portion of the presentation, complete with my speaker notes, along with pictures of me presenting. I look forward to continuing my work to increase the inclusivity and accessibility of the Fox Meadow library, both through wayfinding signs and other means, in the future.

Since families do not often have an opportunity to visit the school library themselves, keeping them informed of what is happening in the library, and establishing open lines of communication, is an important component of a school librarian's professional responsibilities.

In order to give parents a glimpse of what students do during library time, I have created a new Twitter account for the school library, which I linked on the library website. For most of this year, the majority of my tweets have been retweets from teachers posting about what we have done during library class, but in the future I plan to increase communication with families by expanding my Twitter use, creating an Instagram page for the library, creating monthly newsletters to share library lessons and happenings, and redesigning the library website to make it more accessible.