Practicum Summary
The library has always been one of my favorite places in the world. Some of my favorite memories as a child was going to my local library and participating in the programming, walking down to my school library to select books and listen to the librarian read, and even working as a page in high school. Over the years teaching, I’ve found myself spending more and more time in our school’s media center. While I love to teach Language Arts, I only get to work with a small portion of my school. Being a Media Specialist would provide the opportunity to work all the students, staff, and community (including the local public library). It would give me the chance to share my passion for books and writing with everyone and that idea excites me.
I was so fortunate to do my practicum with our school media specialist, Jodi Rzezsotarski. She came to our district about a decade ago and has transformed a space that was hardly ever populated by students into an area that now has to limit the amount of students who come to it at some points during the day because it gets too full. She’s added hours after school and on the weekends and has shown everyone in the school how much more a media center can do beyond just checking out books.
As an educator, we often talk as teachers about how no one really knows the extent of the work we do. How people complain about our summers off, long breaks, and leaving the building at 3:00 p.m. The thing is, no one truly knows the amount of work that goes into a job in education and each teacher and their specific workload is different. For some, the days might look easy, but we may not be aware of the prep that goes into preparing a lesson or how much time is spent grading. Other teachers may spend the entire class working directly with the students and never gets to sit down for a break. The days are long for teachers and without really stepping into their shoes, most people aren’t aware of how much goes into that day.
That was where I stood before my practicum. I wasn’t sure of what to expect when I started my practicum. I had worked with Jodi often throughout the years, and we’ve created some really great things together for our school community. I thought I knew what running a media center was like, since I spent a lot of time in our’s. I was definitely wrong about that. Jodi took me through the entire process from reading trade magazines, ordering books, cataloguing them, placing the labeling on them, and putting them on the shelves. It’s a multi-step process and this alone takes so much time. It’s incredible to think about what is involved in making a media center run smoothly. And that’s just the tip of it. Our media center is full of makerspace and STEM activities, resources for kids who need help in classes or a place to relax, groups that Jodi runs, a constant rotation of items and decorations to make it an inviting place, and new books arriving every week. Her work never ends, and I’m in awe of how much she does.
During my practicum, I got to experience all different aspects of what makes up the job of a Media Specialist. While I worked with Jodi learning the day to day operating parts (circulation, purchasing books, budget, shelving, and weeding books), I was also able to develop some projects and activities that we implemented while I was working with her. I identified a need in our media center (books and activities for our students with mental and physical disabilities) and worked with Jodi to write a grant in hopes of establishing that. We wrote two more grants for an up-cycled herb garden and podcasting equipment. We submitted an article pitch for The School Library Journal and have begun to plan an event in February that will invite the entire community to come and explore everything our space has to offer. I created a bi-weekly program for our makerspace called Craft & Snack. Currently, the students come every single day and there are usually 15+ students in the space. I helped to initiate a book club that focuses on building empathy toward others who might be different, and was a part of starting Saturday Hours, which opened the media center to students for four hours once a month and created a Writing Center full of creative writing resources for students.
I also got to observe the middle school media center in my district and see a Scholastic Book Fair and learn how it works. This was very eye-opening to me since I’m usually someone who purchases books and never knew how it all worked. Jodi invited me to attend a meeting of the LGCA consortium of media specialist, where I was able to hear discussions about things happening in local school districts. This allowed me to be privy to a lot of the things that media specialists may deal with and given me ideas for things to think about when (hopefully!) I become one too.
My practicum reaffirmed my desire to work in a school library setting. While stepping out of the classroom can be a scary thought, I know that what I will step into is exactly where I belong.