Pedagogical Adoption of Reference Resources

When it comes to the adoption of a new concept or pedagogical strategy, a learning leader cannot force the adoption on the stakeholders involved. As if being converted to a belief system, stakeholders must first believe that the perceived outcome of the change is one worth trying to attain even if it means changing their current systems. To get stakeholders to that place takes a very careful presentation.

Once the learning leader has been successful in gaining the approval and willingness of their stakeholders (teachers), the implementation process can occur. However, through the process of implementation comes a myriad of questions along the way. I would argue that, if the learning leader does not sufficiently and respectfully attend to the questions of the stakeholder, the new system may fail at this early stage.

In any given roll-out of a program or idea, if teachers feel something is being prescribed upon them, they often reject the idea regardless of whether or not they believe in its success. A teacher’s practice is very personal.

As Teacher Librarians, we deal with many different stakeholders. Sometimes we are put in a place where we are the “idea-pitcher” as if in a corporate meeting and we are asking the administrator to be an adopter of a new concept or pedagogical strategy. Sometimes we are the recipient of the change, equal to the teachers, trying our best to implement all-school strategies into our Library Learning Commons. And sometimes we are the bartender who, in the center of the school, hears teacher’s dissatisfaction towards an all-school change they are being forced to adopt by the administrator. We quickly learn how to and not to implement change.

With this in mind, I have outlined below the situation, experiences and methods of two teachers in regard to their current use of reference materials and resources. I have designed an approach that will take each of them into a higher level of integration, application, and embedding of these potential resources into their practice.

Colleague #1: Brand new teacher. Theme: Lean on me.

Ava is an early career teacher who, due to the teacher shortage, worked as a TTOC for only a few weeks before being given a short, term position last spring in a grade 5 classroom with few management issues. This year, however, she has the hardest class in the school, a grade 5/6 split with high needs and plenty of behavior concerns to fill her day. Ava is very open with me about how she feels she is barely keeping her head above water.
           
In concern to her programming and planning, Ava is overwhelmed with parent meetings and behavior concerns that she mostly relies on quick fixes to fill her academic day. Using either lessons she picked up during her few weeks as a TTOC or ones she finds for free on Teachers Pay Teachers, Ava knows her strategies aren’t sustainable.
        
 In an interview with her I learned that she wasn’t aware of the potential that can result from collaborating with a TL. In fact, she wasn’t aware of the role of a TL at all. She is very open to collaboration with me. I asked her what her pedagogical goals are to which she answered that she would love to deliver lessons where students’ depth of thought is challenged and where the skills being taught are long-lasting. No band-aids; no time-fillers. Her ideal would be for students to be inspired to take ownership of their own learning through inquiry-based learning strategies. She has never seen this facilitated nor had she done it herself. Okay! I can work with that!


Adoption Pitch: Resource and Inquiry Lesson

Using the concerns-based adoption model, I went forward with an idea I believed in.
I pitched her an idea of using the web-based Canadian Encyclopedia that our school district has linked to our school webpage. It is a reference database that I have found to be user-friendly. The text features make it easy for kids to place different events in Canadian history. I suggested that this resource would be a perfect jumping point for her to allow students to choose a social studies inquiry project based around a theme in Canadian history that they find interesting. I showed her the source and simulated the type of information students could glean with a few chosen topics. After giving her a full scope of the potential of the reference material and some suggestions towards implementation, I left her alone to play with it.

0: Unconcerned
“I think I heard something about it, but I'm too busy right now with other priorities to be concerned about it. (Loucks-Horsley, 1996)”

Stage of Concern completed:
#1 Informational – “I would like to know more about it”
#2 Personal – “How will using it affect me?” (Loucks-Horsley, 1996)

(Suggested Reference Material: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/collections)

Reassess through Questioning:

Ava prepared the lessons using the suggested resource. She brought up some concerns about using the resource and the inquiry lesson model. She had questions about the safety of sending kids to the internet, of the weakness felt by taking away whole-class instruction for this assignment, and how to create a valid assessment tool to cover multiple topics as well as the use of the resource.

These questions showed me that she has really done some great thinking!
Her and I are currently in discussions to the answer for these questions. As a learning leader, I am excited to see her dip her toe into different types of lesson delivery and trust experts who put together this reference material to be the educator for her students. The reality is that neither she nor I could relay the material better than the historians and curators who have created that reference material.

Through this process of her adoption of a reference resource, using the strategies found in  Susan Loucks-Horsley’s “The Concerns-Based Adoption Model (CBAM): A Model for Change in Individuals”, I focused on tweaking the idea to personalize it to her preferences and the needs of her students. Through continued and ever-changing support from me, my hope is that Ava will move from a “Mechanical” use of the innovation to, eventually, full “Integration” of these changes and that her pedagogy is something she can be proud of.


https://s3.wp.wsu.edu/uploads/sites/731/2015/07/CBAM-explanation.pdf



Colleague #2: Retiring Teacher  Theme: Try it out!

On the other end of the spectrum, a colleague and friend of mine is in her last year before retirement. She has had a fruitful career where she has honed lesson delivery and classroom management for intermediate students. At a staff meeting I presented on how we are going to pull most of the old dictionaries from 1998 (see Assignment 1) and move towards a more modern reference material. When I outlined the outdatedness and lack of sensitivity in the ancient dictionaries, most teachers were nodding their heads or were at least indifferent. After the presentation, however, this colleague, Margo, expressed concerns.

The following course of events I have not yet carried out, but it is simply a designed approach to take Margo to a higher level of integration and application of potential resources into her practice.

“Change is a highly personal experience, involving developmental growth in feelings (the Stages of Concern) and skills (the Levels of Use). More to the point, people need sustained help along the way if they’re going to fully implement a new idea, and they’ll require different kinds of help as their needs change."         (Loucks-Horsley, 1996)

Stage of Concern completed:
#1 Awareness – “What is it?”
#2 Informational – “I would like to know more about it”, “How does it work?”
#3 Personal – “How will using it affect me?”  (Loucks-Horsley, 1996)

I find that sometimes people just need their concerns voiced before signing on to a project. I have Margo fill out the Stages of Concern Questionnaire(http://www.sedl.org/cbam/) and we go through each concern together. I answer her questions when I can and am honest when I can’t.

This questionnaire helps because the data gives the learning leader knowledge that they can use to target that specific concern. (Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (SEDL), 2015). If her questions theme around her displeasure about getting rid of the old dictionaries, I center my answers and guidance around that. If her questions theme around hesitation towards the new reference material, I center my answers a guidance around that.
No matter what takes form in Margo’s journey in her pedagogical practice towards using reference materials, I must make sure that foremostly I am her listening ear and encourager. I can help her implement the new Merriam-Webster dictionary app with her students through a collaborative co-teaching session, or I can show her how students writing can be taken to the next level using a thesaurus function. Another strategy would be to team her up with another teacher who has fully ditched the old dictionaries and implemented the use of new digital ones.
Each of these would move her from:
#3 Personal – “How will using it affect me?”
To
#4 Management – “How can I master the skills and fit it all in?” (Loucks-Horsley, 1996)

In time, through seeing 21st century learners take to the new reference materials smoothly and seeing the potential that can come from the addition of tools to the digital dictionary, I hope Margo will move towards the #6 Collaboration stage where she has honed her own strategies but she is looking to others for more ideas.

Bibliography

CBAM: The Concerns-Based Adoption Model. (2015, December 8). Retrieved from American Institute for Research: https://www.air.org/resource/concerns-based-adoption-model-cbam
Featured Collections. (2020). Retrieved from The Canadian Encyclopedia: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/collections
Loucks-Horsley, S. (1996). The Concerns-based Adoption Model (CBAM): A Model for Change in Individuals. Professional Development for Science Education: A Critical and Immediate Challenge. Retrieved 2020, from https://s3.wp.wsu.edu/uploads/sites/731/2015/07/CBAM-explanation.pdf
Oris, A. (n.d.). Intro to CBAM. Retrieved from Concerns-Based Adoption Model : https://sites.google.com/site/ch7cbam/home/introduction
Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (SEDL). (2015, December 8). Concerns-Based Adoption Model (CBAM). SEDL Archive. Retrieved from http://www.sedl.org/cbam/



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