"I do this for money, prestige, and power."
~Said no Librarian, ever:)
~Said no Librarian, ever:)
My Skewed MAET Perspective and Ultimate Transformation
By Rebecca Thompson-Baron
My career in education has not been “typical” from the very start. I come from a family deeply rooted in education; my father was my high school physics, chemistry, math, and drivers’ education teacher, as well as, my coach and class advisor, while my mom was a secretary in my high school’s office. I now work in that same school, where my sister and my aunt are both teachers and my uncle is the IT director. When I graduated from high school I wanted to be as far from the education realm as possible, so I signed up for an undergraduate degree in zoology at Michigan State University. One and a half years into the program I realized that I simply was not smart enough to be a zoology student. My first zoology major course was Invertebrate Zoology, which entailed memorizing the specific traits and characteristics of one hundred different aquatic worms. I knew very quickly that this field was not for me. My sister, who was two years older than me and enrolled in Michigan State’s Elementary Education program, encouraged me to apply to the Education School at MSU and give education a chance. I was accepted the following year and felt at home right away.
My year of student teaching was another transitional time for me. I was very excited to be working with a lead teacher who was the first runner up for Michigan’s 1998 Teacher of the Year award. It was a very unpleasant surprise when I realized that one of the reasons she was up for the award was because she spent a lot of time developing and running extra-curricular activities that pulled her out of the classroom for a majority of the year. My lead teacher was not around enough for me to get much guidance from her. It was sink or swim for me that entire year. Luckily, I had wonderful instructors who were able to pick up the slack and help me along, but my internship was not what Michigan State’s Education program-leaders had in mind at all. I finished that year feeling very disillusioned with education in general once again.
One year after finishing my teacher education program, I got married and moved to Indiana with my husband where I learned my teaching certificate would not transfer. In order to teach at a public school in Indiana I would need to take nine more credits and pay to student teach for one semester. I was able to find a position as a developmental kindergarten teacher at a private school connected to a local church. I loved that year of teaching because so much of developmental kindergarten focuses on socialization which was my favorite facet of teaching. I never loved the instructional end of teaching in a classroom. For some reason I always lacked confidence when I was presenting information to kids and I never felt that the lessons I created were everything they should have been. Even though I never received a bad evaluation I was always very self-conscious about my classroom teaching abilities.
That year of teaching in Indiana was one of the most enjoyable of my career, but I was only earning eight dollars an hour which was just not paying the bills, so I took a job as a relocation coordinator at a big real estate firm in Indianapolis and left my teaching career behind me for a while. Ten years and two kids later I was thinking about renewing my teaching certificate for another try, when the librarian from my alma mater mentioned that she was two years away from retirement and would love for me to take her place at Lake City Area Schools. I have always had a great passion for books, and libraries have always been my favorite places on earth, so to go back to work as a librarian at the school that had always felt like a second home to me would be my dream job. I needed nine credits to renew my teaching license and the first three courses in the MAET program seemed like the ideal answer. I quickly realized how very far behind I had fallen in those ten years when CEP 810 began. Luckily it didn’t take me very long to catch up on all the ways that educators were putting Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to good use in classroom settings. Once again, I realized that my experience and perspective on those first three classes were very different than most of my classmates. I was aiming for a job, not as a classroom teacher, but as a librarian. Every assignment took on a different meaning for me since I never really planned on having a classroom full of students of my own. I began to shape everything I did in CEP 810, 811, and 812 as a means of supporting a classroom teacher which is how I envisioned my future position at Lake City. Luckily I was right on the mark.
I subbed and volunteered for three years before I was finally hired as the Librarian/Media Specialist for Lake City Area Schools in June, 2010, just one month after finishing CEP 812. The designation of “Media Specialist” was added to this position knowing that the traditional role of Librarian within a school district was outdated and insufficient for all the expectations that were being placed on me in my new career. I was hired to check books in and out to students, as well as maintain the current library collection and purchase new books each year, but the newest part of the job entailed supporting teachers within the district in all of their technology needs. The first day of the school year for teachers found me presenting the district technology updates and introducing teachers to some of the new or updated technology tools and resources now available to them within the district. It did not take long for me to identify a major issue with my district’s teaching staff. Even though we had a large number of teachers who were very up-to-date and tech savvy, there were an equal number of teachers who were very far behind on the technology curve. There were very few teachers in that middle ground. The teachers either knew it or they didn’t, and it was now my job to bring everyone up to speed.
Having leaned on the insight and support provided by my first three MAET classes as this new part of my life began, I immediately felt the need to continue my education at Michigan State by completing the rest of the MAET program. I knew that it would be important for me to have a solid foundation of educational technology knowledge in order to be able to service the teachers I had been tasked with helping. Having relied so heavily on my classmates from CEP 810, 811, and 812 I quickly realized that it would also be essential for me to have a solid peer group behind me as I proceeded down this new path. Knowing how helpful those first peer interactions had been to my success I felt confident that continuing my education surrounded by others who are also passionate about educational technology would be important for me to authentically help others in my district.
From the start my MAET classes offered a unique challenge to me as a school librarian/media specialist. I found that I was often asked to create lessons based on the information presented in my classes, but never having a classroom full of students I had to go above and beyond to actually test out my lessons on the classes of my fellow teachers at Lake City Schools. The kids in my district got very used to having Mrs. Baron in their classes to try out a new unit of instruction. There were times when it would have been helpful to have more media specialists to share ideas with in my MAET classes, but I ultimately realized that the best way for me to help the teachers in my district use all the new resources I was being introduced to was to show them exactly how to use them within their own classes as I practiced implementing them on their own students. The whole process couldn’t have been more practical if I had planned it that way.
The first class that really brought this phenomenon to the forefront was TE 846: Accommodating Differences in Literacy Learners. It had been a very long time since I had undertaken a serious study of literacy principles and this class was an amazing refresher course as well as a wealth of very pertinent research information. I was able to use several excellent research study findings to inform my instruction with my teacher peers in very transformational ways. In both the lower and upper elementary schools in my district we have a large number of struggling readers who I knew could benefit from all the things I was learning in TE 846 so my final project was an experiment with a literacy intervention that involved activating prior knowledge to increase phonemic awareness. This activity worked so well that the Title I teachers are still using it to this day during their pull out sessions with students in both elementary schools. Ironically, at the same time I was working on this project my son was in first grade at another school district struggling to read at grade level. I was able to use a lot of the literacy strategies that I learned about in TE 846 to bring my son back up to a 1st Grade reading level by mid-year. Building a solid foundation in literacy instruction has been an amazing asset to me as a professional developer in my school district and as a parent in my own home.
The second MAET course that was very transformational for me was CEP 820: Teaching Students Online. I had always been concerned that my school district was not fulfilling one of the Michigan Department of Education’s requirements for graduation which states that every student should have one online course experience before graduating. When I realized that CEP 820 was all about creating just such an experience I was ecstatic. I was able to create an entire learning unit using Haiku as my learning management system. I suddenly realized all the things that go into creating an authentic and productive learning environment online. The first obstacle I encountered involved my video choices which needed to be accessible for all learners. This posed a problem since I needed to find videos that provided a Closed Captioning options which meant using YouTube videos, which are blocked in my school district. Once again I was faced with the issue of beta testing my creation for CEP 820 without a classroom of students. Not only do I not have any students but I took CEP 820 during the summer session which meant that it was also summer vacation for in my school district. My children were my student stand-ins once again. By the end of the class I felt very comfortable starting the 2013-2014 school year with a professional development session that allowed me to introduce LMS and CMS options for my district teachers and also show them the 3rd Grade Internet Safety Online Course I had created using Haiku. Currently all of the 3rd Grade teachers are using my Haiku Course and at least half of my High School staff is using either Edmodo or Coursesites to create authentic online courses for their students to use second semester of this school year.
The final course that really established a firm foundation for me was CEP 815: Technology and Leadership. The one part of my job that I have always struggled with is the leadership aspect. I am a rather shy person who is much more comfortable in my librarian position among my books and silent readers. Having to present at professional development sessions has never been remotely close to my comfort zone. CEP 815 really taught me about the many facets of leadership and made me feel comfortable in my role as a strong support structure to the rest of my staff. I also learned valuable strategies for assessing the impact of technology tools in both qualitative and quantitative ways. For the past three years I have watched teachers ask for new digital devices without first thinking through how these devices would impact learning. Since taking CEP 815 I have been purposeful in guiding the teachers under my care to ask questions like: “How are students being asked to use and interact with classroom technology to enhance their learning?”
All of my MAET courses have made me the librarian/media specialist that I am today, which is much different than the one I was just three and a half years ago when I first started my job at Lake City Schools. I went from being a CEP 810 student who didn’t know what a thumb drive was to a confident technology leader in my own district. I am quick to contemplate the instructional value in a new online resource as opposed to simply being attracted to the flash of its aesthetics. I am confident in my abilities and I really do not think that would have been possible without the instruction and support of my MAET cohorts and professors. Even though I entered the MAET program with a different perspective than my peers, most of whom are dedicated classroom teachers, I feel my transformation into a productive librarian/media specialist, who is finally comfortable in a classroom setting, will help me to continue to be an asset to my district as a competent technology leader.
My year of student teaching was another transitional time for me. I was very excited to be working with a lead teacher who was the first runner up for Michigan’s 1998 Teacher of the Year award. It was a very unpleasant surprise when I realized that one of the reasons she was up for the award was because she spent a lot of time developing and running extra-curricular activities that pulled her out of the classroom for a majority of the year. My lead teacher was not around enough for me to get much guidance from her. It was sink or swim for me that entire year. Luckily, I had wonderful instructors who were able to pick up the slack and help me along, but my internship was not what Michigan State’s Education program-leaders had in mind at all. I finished that year feeling very disillusioned with education in general once again.
One year after finishing my teacher education program, I got married and moved to Indiana with my husband where I learned my teaching certificate would not transfer. In order to teach at a public school in Indiana I would need to take nine more credits and pay to student teach for one semester. I was able to find a position as a developmental kindergarten teacher at a private school connected to a local church. I loved that year of teaching because so much of developmental kindergarten focuses on socialization which was my favorite facet of teaching. I never loved the instructional end of teaching in a classroom. For some reason I always lacked confidence when I was presenting information to kids and I never felt that the lessons I created were everything they should have been. Even though I never received a bad evaluation I was always very self-conscious about my classroom teaching abilities.
That year of teaching in Indiana was one of the most enjoyable of my career, but I was only earning eight dollars an hour which was just not paying the bills, so I took a job as a relocation coordinator at a big real estate firm in Indianapolis and left my teaching career behind me for a while. Ten years and two kids later I was thinking about renewing my teaching certificate for another try, when the librarian from my alma mater mentioned that she was two years away from retirement and would love for me to take her place at Lake City Area Schools. I have always had a great passion for books, and libraries have always been my favorite places on earth, so to go back to work as a librarian at the school that had always felt like a second home to me would be my dream job. I needed nine credits to renew my teaching license and the first three courses in the MAET program seemed like the ideal answer. I quickly realized how very far behind I had fallen in those ten years when CEP 810 began. Luckily it didn’t take me very long to catch up on all the ways that educators were putting Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to good use in classroom settings. Once again, I realized that my experience and perspective on those first three classes were very different than most of my classmates. I was aiming for a job, not as a classroom teacher, but as a librarian. Every assignment took on a different meaning for me since I never really planned on having a classroom full of students of my own. I began to shape everything I did in CEP 810, 811, and 812 as a means of supporting a classroom teacher which is how I envisioned my future position at Lake City. Luckily I was right on the mark.
I subbed and volunteered for three years before I was finally hired as the Librarian/Media Specialist for Lake City Area Schools in June, 2010, just one month after finishing CEP 812. The designation of “Media Specialist” was added to this position knowing that the traditional role of Librarian within a school district was outdated and insufficient for all the expectations that were being placed on me in my new career. I was hired to check books in and out to students, as well as maintain the current library collection and purchase new books each year, but the newest part of the job entailed supporting teachers within the district in all of their technology needs. The first day of the school year for teachers found me presenting the district technology updates and introducing teachers to some of the new or updated technology tools and resources now available to them within the district. It did not take long for me to identify a major issue with my district’s teaching staff. Even though we had a large number of teachers who were very up-to-date and tech savvy, there were an equal number of teachers who were very far behind on the technology curve. There were very few teachers in that middle ground. The teachers either knew it or they didn’t, and it was now my job to bring everyone up to speed.
Having leaned on the insight and support provided by my first three MAET classes as this new part of my life began, I immediately felt the need to continue my education at Michigan State by completing the rest of the MAET program. I knew that it would be important for me to have a solid foundation of educational technology knowledge in order to be able to service the teachers I had been tasked with helping. Having relied so heavily on my classmates from CEP 810, 811, and 812 I quickly realized that it would also be essential for me to have a solid peer group behind me as I proceeded down this new path. Knowing how helpful those first peer interactions had been to my success I felt confident that continuing my education surrounded by others who are also passionate about educational technology would be important for me to authentically help others in my district.
From the start my MAET classes offered a unique challenge to me as a school librarian/media specialist. I found that I was often asked to create lessons based on the information presented in my classes, but never having a classroom full of students I had to go above and beyond to actually test out my lessons on the classes of my fellow teachers at Lake City Schools. The kids in my district got very used to having Mrs. Baron in their classes to try out a new unit of instruction. There were times when it would have been helpful to have more media specialists to share ideas with in my MAET classes, but I ultimately realized that the best way for me to help the teachers in my district use all the new resources I was being introduced to was to show them exactly how to use them within their own classes as I practiced implementing them on their own students. The whole process couldn’t have been more practical if I had planned it that way.
The first class that really brought this phenomenon to the forefront was TE 846: Accommodating Differences in Literacy Learners. It had been a very long time since I had undertaken a serious study of literacy principles and this class was an amazing refresher course as well as a wealth of very pertinent research information. I was able to use several excellent research study findings to inform my instruction with my teacher peers in very transformational ways. In both the lower and upper elementary schools in my district we have a large number of struggling readers who I knew could benefit from all the things I was learning in TE 846 so my final project was an experiment with a literacy intervention that involved activating prior knowledge to increase phonemic awareness. This activity worked so well that the Title I teachers are still using it to this day during their pull out sessions with students in both elementary schools. Ironically, at the same time I was working on this project my son was in first grade at another school district struggling to read at grade level. I was able to use a lot of the literacy strategies that I learned about in TE 846 to bring my son back up to a 1st Grade reading level by mid-year. Building a solid foundation in literacy instruction has been an amazing asset to me as a professional developer in my school district and as a parent in my own home.
The second MAET course that was very transformational for me was CEP 820: Teaching Students Online. I had always been concerned that my school district was not fulfilling one of the Michigan Department of Education’s requirements for graduation which states that every student should have one online course experience before graduating. When I realized that CEP 820 was all about creating just such an experience I was ecstatic. I was able to create an entire learning unit using Haiku as my learning management system. I suddenly realized all the things that go into creating an authentic and productive learning environment online. The first obstacle I encountered involved my video choices which needed to be accessible for all learners. This posed a problem since I needed to find videos that provided a Closed Captioning options which meant using YouTube videos, which are blocked in my school district. Once again I was faced with the issue of beta testing my creation for CEP 820 without a classroom of students. Not only do I not have any students but I took CEP 820 during the summer session which meant that it was also summer vacation for in my school district. My children were my student stand-ins once again. By the end of the class I felt very comfortable starting the 2013-2014 school year with a professional development session that allowed me to introduce LMS and CMS options for my district teachers and also show them the 3rd Grade Internet Safety Online Course I had created using Haiku. Currently all of the 3rd Grade teachers are using my Haiku Course and at least half of my High School staff is using either Edmodo or Coursesites to create authentic online courses for their students to use second semester of this school year.
The final course that really established a firm foundation for me was CEP 815: Technology and Leadership. The one part of my job that I have always struggled with is the leadership aspect. I am a rather shy person who is much more comfortable in my librarian position among my books and silent readers. Having to present at professional development sessions has never been remotely close to my comfort zone. CEP 815 really taught me about the many facets of leadership and made me feel comfortable in my role as a strong support structure to the rest of my staff. I also learned valuable strategies for assessing the impact of technology tools in both qualitative and quantitative ways. For the past three years I have watched teachers ask for new digital devices without first thinking through how these devices would impact learning. Since taking CEP 815 I have been purposeful in guiding the teachers under my care to ask questions like: “How are students being asked to use and interact with classroom technology to enhance their learning?”
All of my MAET courses have made me the librarian/media specialist that I am today, which is much different than the one I was just three and a half years ago when I first started my job at Lake City Schools. I went from being a CEP 810 student who didn’t know what a thumb drive was to a confident technology leader in my own district. I am quick to contemplate the instructional value in a new online resource as opposed to simply being attracted to the flash of its aesthetics. I am confident in my abilities and I really do not think that would have been possible without the instruction and support of my MAET cohorts and professors. Even though I entered the MAET program with a different perspective than my peers, most of whom are dedicated classroom teachers, I feel my transformation into a productive librarian/media specialist, who is finally comfortable in a classroom setting, will help me to continue to be an asset to my district as a competent technology leader.
**Click here to connect to a Google Doc of this Essay**
My first transformational course:
TE 846
Below is a slide show of the Intervention Assessment Tools and their corresponding Rubrics that I first learned about in TE 846. These resources are still being used today in my school district to help struggling readers.
My second transformational course:
CEP 820
To view the Haiku online internet safety course I created in CEP 820 click on the image below.
My third transformational course:
CEP 815
Below are the PDF versions of my four favorite leadership article from CEP 815. I hope they help you as much as they helped me.
This is a Harvard Business Review article by Peter Drucker entitled: "What Makes an Effective Executive"
This is another Harvard Business Review article written by John Kotter entitled: "What Leaders Really Do"
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This another Harvard Business Review article written by Ronald Heifetz and Donald Laurie entitled: "The Work of Leadership"
This is my absolute favorite Harvard Business Review article from CEP 815 written by David Rooke and William Torbert entitled: "7 Transformations of Leadership"
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