National Literacy Conference Towards Excellence

We have both had our heads down for a while with backroom matters hence the lack of postings but we were out and about last week.

On Tuesday 10^th March we attended the National Literacy Conference, held at the Hilton Hotel in Glasgow. We had been invited by the Literacy Team of the Curriculum for Excellence and the event was organised by Learning and Teaching Scotland. Most of the attendees were teachers but there were a few librarians. The day was mostly taken up with parallel workshops but there were two presentations which kick started the day. The first by HMIE: Mary Ritchie and Janie McManus on some wonderful examples of good practice that they as inspectors had come across that engaged with learners and highlighted that it was all about developing and planning opportunities for learners to use their literacy skills at an appropriate level to meet their needs and that learning must go out beyond the classroom. There were so many good practices that they didn’t have much time to talk about Journey to Excellence (http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/journeytoexcellence/index.asp) and the Professional Development Pack (http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/journeytoexcellence/learningtrails/index.asp ) they are working on which they are keen to engage and talk about. Something we need to investigate further.   Next was an introductory keynote by Professor David Booth of the University of Toronto who has spent a lifetime researching and promoting reading and had some good ideas on how to encourage it.

The morning workshops included an impressive presentation by Pamela McLean, the Access Co-ordinator at the Mitchell Library who works mainly with primary schools to promote educational visits to Glasgow libraries to encourage the use of the Libraries’ resources. This includes some basic information literacy training. Perhaps her service could work with school libraries to develop a more co-ordinated approach to information literacy training in schools.  A second morning seminar was about Glow which is naturally of interest to librarians. The presentation revolved around a case study of work by an English teacher. While this was very informative the discussion flagged up a worrying ignorance of copyright issues by teachers and clearly they lack guidance and advice. With the coming of Glow this is a bigger issue than before. In higher education most universities have copyright advisers who are usually librarians. Perhaps schools should have copyright advisers too and who better to do it than the school librarian. At lunch time we had a chat with the GLOW team about this issue and discovered there is a section on GLOW about copyright but unfortunately it appears that those teachers who are using GLOW have still to discover this resource.

The first afternoon session included a presentation by Louise Ballantyne, a primary teacher currently on secondment to Learning and Teaching Scotland’s Literacy Team. John attended this presentation and Louise spoke about her ‘Real and Relevant’ information literacy training material which is aimed at Primary 6-7 and early secondary. Among the sources she has used is our Framework.  The session was extremely well attended and she was kind enough to refer to our work and hand out some of our leaflets.  Her materials should be available on the Learning and Teaching Scotland website in the autumn. Meanwhile Christine attended another excellent presentation by Anne Louise Nicholson, St James’s Primary, Paisley on using Glow to Promote Literacy (Primary) in which it was amazing to see how Primary 1/2 pupils were engaging with Glow, having fun and learning. Children who didn’t participate much in class seemed to find their voice using Glow. This wasn’t just using technology for the sake of it but showed that with innovative learning and teaching very young children can work at their own level using all the technological advances available to them.  Anne’s conclusions was that it had lead to  – fun and meaningful learning, more ambitious learning, richer language experience overall, able to tap into real life events and involve children, easier collaboration, use of experts to educate (a local painter (artist), wider audience for work to be showcased, easier to evidence using Glow.

The final afternoon session Christine attended was Literacy across the Curriculum – two English teachers who have been working in partnership with a Science (Physics) teacher and a History teacher in different schools in East Dunbartonshire to improve pupils understanding in different subjects through the development of literacy skills. Common areas of concern where; written accuracy (basic spelling, punctuation) and poor quality of extended written responses; in both cases the extended written responses were addressed through note taking and skimming and scanning techniques which lead me to ask the question of whether the school librarians had been involved in this work. Silence! The answer was no and I asked why not since these skills and competencies were the school librarians professional skills and competences. Fortunately there were other presentations which did involve school librarians. As a profession (library and information) we need to do more advocacy work with the teaching profession.

During the coffee and lunch breaks we were entertained by a wonderful school band from Turnbull High in Bishopbriggs. The performance on the drums was particularly spirited. Every conference should have a school band.