A Head Teacher’s Thoughts on Leadership and School Libraries

It’s the end of November and I’m paying a visit to Pauli gymnasium, an upper secondary school situated in Malmö, Sweden. In 2010, the school received a national award for the best school library of the year. Today I’m going to interview Edward Jensinger, who, since 2006, has been head teacher at the school. During this time he has worked hard to draw attention to the school’s competent team of librarians. Since it’s his responsibilty to ensure that the library continues to function as an educational resource, this is a task he takes seriously. I am of course curious about his thoughts on what a school library can be, and about his role in ensuring that Pauli’s librarians become an indispensable part of the school’s collective educational challenge, to see that every student fulfills his or her learning targets.

Edward Jensinger’s holistic view of how a school should be run has shaped the attitude he has towards his colleagues. He argues that for an educational institution to function properly it’s necessary for a diversity of different professional groups to work together to support students in their attainment of goals. You need, for example, librarians, school nurses, employment counsellors and caretakers, as well as teachers. A head teacher must also have full confidence in his staff and their professional competence. It’s necessary to give them the freedom to try out their ideas based on their unique skills. Otherwise, there is no development. In the case of school librarians as a professional category, Jensinger constantly refers to one factor throughout the interview: the necessity of playing a visible role in the daily life of the school. It’s then that you create an integrated educational system that can make a difference, he reasons. A library where the librarians are valued for their skills, where their (strong) wills are allowed to prevail, and where they can take centre stage, are prerequisites for an efficient learning environment. In the light of this, let’s examine more closely the thoughts of a head teacher from a school library perspective.

Where did your interest in school library issues start?
”I became interested in school libraries when I started working at Östra Real, an upper secondary school in Stockholm. We had a UN role-playing exercise at the school and the teachers of course didn’t know everything about the countries which the students wanted to immerse themselves in. When the pupils were preparing for these UN role-plays the library was the natural venue for the acquisition of this knowledge. And it was librarians who led this work. It was here that I became interested in accommodating other educational strategies over and above those which take place between teacher and student.”

How do you encourage and support your school librarians?
”Since I am head teacher, and head of the organisation, I’m expected to be interested in what I am head teacher and head of. As a result, you automatically become interested in libraries if you are in charge of the librarians. As it is, I’ve been lucky with my personnel. They have minds of their own, in a very positive way. They come with very exciting ideas and then I say have a go, try. Sometimes I come up with some thoughts of my own that get bounced around a little and then either get taken up or not. But it’s the librarians’ own ideas which are the central thing here. My role in all this is to be supportive and say, yes let’s give it a go. And to come up with a little extra money for it. If you have personnel who want things, it’s pretty easy to be the boss. At the same time it can be difficult in other ways.”

What have you learned from your librarians?
”I’m someone who is quite determined by nature. Some would call me a bit of a know-it-all. I have opinions, but I’ve learnt that you don’t have to know everything about everything in an organisation. Instead, you can rely on the other professionals around you and that they know what they’re doing. And that they keep me aquainted with the big picture, the important stuff.”

How do you see the role of the school librarian?
”I think it’s important that they are visible. Teachers are like actors. You’re up on stage every lesson. They ’re strong personalities. As a librarian, you also have to be seen. You have to be an extrovert, whether you are as a person or not. Otherwise you’re just going to get ignored. Once the librarian is visible, the next phase begins, where s/he teaches scientific method, language development and information literacy. These are important things that sometimes fall between the cracks.
”I had a wow experience a few months ago when I received a report from the school’s teachers. It was about student projects. It stipulated that all students should go to the library with their project plans in order to obtain the approval of a librarian. I’ve worked very hard with the teachers and the librarians to get them to co-operate. So now we’re going to do that, we’ll put it into the timetable, but this came completely spontaneously! Now I can sit back and reap the rewards. The teachers now see that the librarians are central. It’s really nice to see this. The librarians teach the broader stuff. An educational ideal emerges from the library and makes its way into the classroom.”

What do you think would happen if a librarian was included in a management team?
”We’re not there today. I know there are schools which include special education teachers in the management team. Special education teachers also have a special competence in school development, and I think that’s the next step. At the same time, the rulebook says that it’s the head teacher who should be running the school. So it depends. What’s the definition of a management team? We reorganized in conjunction with the recent upper secondary education reform (SASAM) . We created a mini-group with three teachers, a career guidance counsellor and a librarian. What came out of that was what we today call ”year one education”. One of the things that we agreed about at once was that we should encourage the students to work scientifically. Here the library has taken a leading role together with the teachers. We decided to have a number of compulsory modules for the students. That the library should be involved and co-operate with the teachers is now included in the curriculum throughout the school. If you look at this example, it was having librarians in this micro-management group which led directly to library issues coming up on the agenda.”

What are your thoughts on librarians’ collaboration / networking? What, if any, improvements can be made and how?
”They take part in subject-related conferences, but they could do that even more. It’s natural for them to take part in Swedish and in Social studies, but there’s plenty more out there. What can the library do as far as Physics is concerned? This is an area for development. As a social scientist myself, I might not have the answer to how or what a librarian can do about physics and mathematics, but if I ask the librarians then they probably have quite a few ideas there. So it’s an area for development, absolutely.”

What educational benefits do you see with a school library?
”If you look at skills like information literacy, then the person who’s best at this is the one who’s most qualified and that is a librarian. This is a bit scary, of course, because the teachers do their own thing, and they don’t think along those lines, since they usually like to have everything under their control. That’s what I’ve worked hard with, to get the teachers to realize that here we have a resource in the librarians.
”The educational benefit to students is being able to experience a variety of different “educational encounters”.That students come into contact with a diversity of people in any particular process. If a student is working on something and gets stuck, and the teacher is not there right then to help, but the library is, it becomes natural to go there. Then you get the necessary support to move forward with your questions from competent professionals by whom you’ve already been taught. I see a big plus in that. That we bring librarians into the teaching also contributes to the scientific nature of our work becoming clearer to the students, and also to the teachers.”

What advice would you like to give a head teacher who is planning a school library?
”Firstly, you have to decide what the purpose of having a school library is. If the motivation is no more than that the school should simply meet legal requirements then you may as well not bother. You’ve got the wrong attitude. The aim must always be for the students to get better results. A library isn’t therefore just a furnished room with a person there to keep it tidy, what you need is an active teaching librarian. It must be possible for the librarian to be in the classroom, and then you have to have someone who can go in and man the library (it can be a teacher). I can’t see it any other way than that it’s really important for the librarian to meet students in their classrooms, not just in the library. That’s where ”Project School Library” starts and it’s activities are able to flourish. Ignore the library as a room, ignore the bookshelves and think about what the real purpose of a library is.”

Written by Görel Reimer (librarian at CPI- Centrum för Pedagogisk Inspiration, Malmö)
Translated by Chris Munsey (at CPI- Centrum för Pedagogisk Inspiration, Malmö)