SLOs Are Having a Measurable Impact... On My Summer Goals

I've just re-read my summer goals post from 3 weeks ago, and already I am questioning the goals I set for myself. Since then I have attended a three-day workshop on SLOs for librarians - and it was overwhelming. SLOs directly apply to two of my goals, but I hate to say this, but I think SLOs are going to occupy a huge amount of time and creative energy on our part. They certainly will help me accomplish my goal of showing measurable student growth - that's what they are meant to do, after all. However, I want to show measurable student growth at all levels, and I cannot do all 7 grade levels with the current SLO expectations (nor would I want to - the entire format is too much for all those students).

Furthermore, I think they can be a powerful tool in advocacy for the library. We always complain that "so-and-so" doesn't understand what we do. This could be a great way of showing our impact on student learning that is the same in other parts of the school! It's so important, in my mind, to use the same "language" to show what we do. If we can prove that we teach students skills that are not taught anywhere else, and those skills help students learn, we will have achieved a powerful thing. It's hard to eliminate teachers that are having a direct impact on student achievement.

That said, I am afraid the district will push the librarians as a department to "keep it simple" and simply administer a test of some sort to measure how well students know their way around the library. This is not what I teach, and we all know more testing is not the answer. The easiest way for us to meet the expectations of SLOs is to "keep it simple," but is that going to improve student learning? Is it what's best for kids? Absolutely not. I refuse to have my curriculum, and my position, dumbed down to meet the expectations of a poorly thought-out initiative. I'm not going to "keep it simple" because that's not what I do.