After the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 school year it was REALLY easy to find yourself and your team in a reactive stance – after all we had spent almost two years having to constantly pivot and respond to new masking mandates, new covid testing expectations, new information about what is dangerous and what isn’t.
During those two school years, our Library Team, composed of 5 library staff members, met twice a month on Zoom. Meeting agendas for our monthly Oakland Unified School District library staff professional development, PD, were often only rough sketches that we filled in based on what might happen that week and they were fully operational because they needed to be:
Questions were rarely forward thinking or based in instruction because it was really hard to imagine what things might be like even a few days, let alone a few weeks away.
As the 2020-21 school year came to a close, we began to ask ourselves:
At the beginning of the 2021-22 school year, OUSD Libraries made an intentional choice to partner with Lead by Learning to begin to embed a cycle of inquiry model into our monthly all staff professional development time and develop our leadership of adult learners as a Library Team. Our hope was to move towards PDs that were focused on aligning staff’s every day practice and their vision for their libraries. We asked library staff to pick a professional dilemma or an aspect of the student experience they wanted to focus on and interrogate it over the course of the year. Library staff’s inquiries asked questions such as:
This process of redesigning our professional development time was exciting and not without bumps in the road. It was difficult for some members of the team to go from meetings that were about very technical problems with clear answers (How do you teach kids to log into our online library?) to meetings that focused on exploring questions without easy answers (How do you teach a kid to browse for books?). Some staff members expressed that they felt the cycle of inquiry was overwhelming or even a waste of time.
Early in the spring semester, I got a call from a staff member who had not been participating in our meetings much this year. She wanted to talk through a dilemma she was having in her library. She noticed that, in general, her 8th grade students were checking out fewer books than students in other grades and was curious if I had any theories as to why. I drew on my Lead by Learning training to listen to her concerns, ask her some reflective questions, and reflected what I heard her saying back to her. In taking a listening stance, I supported her in the moment to be a public learner. At the end of the conversation, I casually pointed out that this honestly sounded like a great cycle of inquiry question, and if she chose to come by our next meeting she could definitely dig a little deeper into it and have a conversation just like we did with her colleagues. I wish I could say that after that she came to all our meetings and was a total devotee of the cycle of inquiry model, but she did say she would think about it, and expressed openness to participating next year.
Conversations like this reminded me as a leader of adult learning that organizational change is slow, and through little moments shifts in both mindsets and changes can happen.
At the end of the year, it was still a mixed bag in terms of “buy in” to our new style of PD with cycle of inquiry. Supported to collect some end of year data from our adults about their experience, library staff were asked if their attitude or approach to cycle of inquiry had changed over the course of the year. Responses included:
And even with the bumps in the road and “mixed bag” around buy in our end of year survey positively showed the impact of our professional development on students, instruction, and our professional growth.:
What did I learn as a leader?
Culture shifts are hard. They take time. They take repeated exposure to new practices and traditions. Based on the answers above, I would not argue that OUSD Libraries PD totally transformed over the last year, but I do feel confident saying that important steps were taken in moving towards professional developments that give library staff space to explore meaningful problems of practice and make meaningful progress towards making their vision for their libraries a reality. And as a Library Team we grew too.
So what’s next? Next year we hope to continue using cycle of inquiry with our staff. We want to take some staff feedback and find the right blend of technical staff meeting work and cycle of inquiry professional development work. We will keep inviting staff into the process and keep engaging with our teammates’ concerns, dilemmas, and questions as we move the needle of culture change in our professional learning community.