Guided inquiry

Once again, it's been 'a while between drinks' but Christmas, New Year and Assignment one in ETL401 seemed to overtake the last couple of weeks, not mentioning morning (all day) sickness but that's a different story all together!

This little musing will be on a topic which I hadn't planned to incorporate into my 1st assignment but it sneaked in and then seemed to be more important than I'd originally envisaged. It came out of one of the aspects from Herring's 2007 and Purcell's 2010 articles which I found important which was the minimal reference to T in TL - yes the Teacher part of the Teacher Librarian role. It seemed to me from my exposure to schools and TLs so far, that the literature encourages the TL to take on many roles from leadership to administrator and everything in between whereas in reality, the TL is busy TEACHING classes for most of their working hours at the school.  

Research into this subject took me to the increasingly popular way of teaching; guided inquiry or inquiry learning - I just read a great piece about it from this link: http://cissl.rutgers.edu/guided_inquiry/introduction.html by Kuhlthau (the guru!)et al which clarifies what it is all about, in essence, learning through "an integrated unit of inquiry planned and guided by an instructional team of
a school librarian and teachers, together allowing students to gain deeper understandings of
subject area curriculum content and information literacy concepts".  As I said in my assignment, this process of inquiry is clearly beneficial to student learning and the way forward for schools everywhere. However the process is also a time consuming one in which teachers and TLs need to allocate sufficient time to, aside from administrative and other tasks. This is daunting for me as a potential TL but hopefully achievable, I will see what current TLs have to say about it on the forums.

I was also interested in Kuhlthau's  'zone of intervention', described at http://comminfo.rutgers.edu/~kuhlthau/information_search_process.htm , 
part of her ISP (Information Search Process) - the area of Information Literacy teaching models is not one which I have extensively read up on in the past so I am learning a lot. This paragraph stood out to me as key:

The zone of intervention is that area in which an information user can do with advice and assistance what he or she cannot do alone or can do only with difficulty. Intervention within this zone enables individuals to progress in the accomplishment of their task.  Intervention outside this zone is inefficient and unnecessary, experienced by users as intrusive on the one hand and overwhelming on the other.

This intervention by TLs is clearly vital as is its need to be timely - proving my point (I hope) that TLs need to be flexible and available to students for much of their time in order to achieve the best results through guided inquiry learning. This needs to be their priority for the majority of their time and not the shelving of books (for example).  Prioritisation needs to occur and help needs to be received from the executive through time allocation and funding, as well as volunteer parent or student help with delegatable tasks.

So barriers to great guided inquiry do exist (time has been discussed, I haven't even delved into the issue of insufficient ICTs available...) but I hope to use the experience of others and my own initiatives to overcome these as a TL in the future..