Reflections: SAIBSA January 2020

A Teacher Librarian’s role encompasses a lifelong learning journey. It is a continuous process of deepening knowledge, skills while developing new habits of the mind. Learning becomes more fruitful, especially when it comes from a mentor or a professional who is very much committed to their profession.

The learning experience at SAIBSA for DP with Kuntal Bhandare as a facilitator made the SAIBSA session engaging and genuinely fruitful. The dedication and zeal were visible in the session, making my learning focused.

With Kuntal Bhandare leading the session meant that there would be a lot of learning and knowledge sharing. I knew that at the end of the day, I would learn something new.

One of the critical mantras that we learned from this session was to push ourselves out of our comfort zone and create a place for ourselves.

We as librarians need to make that place so that school colleagues start to recognize us. All of us need to prepare ourselves before we take that to our students. As rightly said by General Norman Schwarzkopf “Success is Sweet, but the secret is Sweat.”

Kuntal showed us her library planner and gave us input as to how we can formulate our planners. Looking at her planner was itself a great erudition.
We discussed in detail about Information literacy and Media Literacy skills she incorporated in her lessons.

An attempt was made to bring out a lesson plan based on research skills. The experience of fellow librarians helped a lot. Kuntal also discussed TOK and EE in detail. Her expertise in the extended essay clarified our doubts.

We attempted to select a topic and formulate a research question for an extended essay. The session was undoubtedly very exhilarating. There was a lot of resource sharing during the session. She shared with us her timelines and how she manages her work and prepares her students for the extended essays.

We discussed referencing tools and discussed Turnitin, Easybib, Cite this for me and other machine citation tools.

We did not realize how time quickly passed by, her knowledge, enthusiasm and a sweet smile did keep us hooked throughout the session — looking forward to more such enthralling sessions in future.

– Ketki Bedekar