Portfolio Introduction

There is so much to cover in the middle school curriculum. In order to select appropriate materials, plan effective collaborative lessons, and maintain sanity, a media specialist might find it useful to align her library media program with the information literacy standards and the school's goals, objectives and content standards.To begin this labor intensive process, I communicated with teachers from every single department at my school and had them educate me about the basics of their content's curriculum. We also discussed places where they felt they were lacking in materials. I organized this information into a handy school curriculum chart that I could refer to in the future when planning lessons and purchasing materials. I then created a second chart focusing on my how I could make sure that I met the information literacy standards while still assisting the other content teachers in meeting their requirements. The resulting library media curriculum chart will prove useful when planning collaborative lessons. Considering that most middle schools operate on a flexible schedule, it will be important for me to know which skills best complement the larger needs of the school at each grade level so that I can be an effective teacher. The unit plan collaboratively created for History Day Fair is a fine example of how the information in these two charts can be merged to form a creative and cohesive unit. The marriage between the information literacy skills and social studies content is not forced which resulted in some very knowledgeable and confident researchers and several award winning History Day Fair projects!