There’s nothing better in education than providing students with an open-ended challenge and seeing them problem solve, persist, collaborate, teach each other and generally just have bucket loads of fun. That’s what I’ve been privileged to witness this year with our Robotics Club. Here's a reflection how I run our club and why I love it.

Congratulations, you made it to September. August felt like a bit of a the whirlwind, especially with the highlight of CBCA Book Week. So, this month’s professional learning list has plenty you can dip into when you have a few quiet minutes (we can hope). There’s lots to catch up on, with news stories, videos and articles celebrating Australian School Library Day and showcasing the wonderful work happening in school libraries. 

I’m a massive fan of professional learning. I find it so important for renewing my enthusiasm around school libraries. It gives me a boost when I’m really flat or tired. It connects me with people and enables me to see what others are doing in their spaces and I find that so inspiring. I really love sharing my ideas and what we do in our school library.

Celebrating Book Week in a secondary school can be tricky. Some of those traditional ways we celebrate, like character parades, can be hard to fit in around curriculum-focused class time or sporting events, which take priority. It can also be hard to engage teenagers in Book Week activities. So I’ve focused a lot of my Book Week attentions and planning to my library lessons.

Last term we finally undertook a well overdue task. That was to deliberately purchase books to support our dyslexic readers. We had some books in dyslexia-friendly fonts and formats and a few from publishers like Barrington Stokes, but I hadn’t spent the time I should have to deliberately purchase more of these titles.

What are you looking for when it comes to professional learning this month? Maybe it's just a few minutes to find time to read through an article or catch a quick podcast episode. August is the biggest month in the Australian school library calendar (thanks to CBCA Book Week), but there's still time for you in all the celebrations. Maybe even a leadership masterclass, a bibliotherapy course, an article on supporting readers in a book slump, or a webinar on a helpful school library toolkit.

Innovation. It’s the word plastered to the front wall outside my school library. It’s in some of my staff’s role titles. It’s in the name of my space. And it’s at the heart of my Seven Domains of School Library Practice Framework. But I think it has to be one of the most misunderstood and misused words in education. So what is innovation?

The biggest barriers I encounter to teaching information literacy to students is time and access. I have a flexible timetable, which is great, but also means I can’t guarantee access to students to teach them the information literacy skills that form my curriculum and that they need to navigate an information-rich world. Over my eleven-plus years teaching in the school library setting, I’ve approached teaching information literacy through many different methods, depending on what time and access and programming was available to me.

I’m always on the lookout for new, creative ways to solve needs or address challenges in our space. This year we’ve been fortunate to be able to add some amazing items to the library’s makerspace. Each item has been very purposeful in its selection, designed to solve an issue or fill a specific need. From assisting students with their prototyping to both structured and open-ended activities to engage students in engineering, here are five awesome items we’ve added to our space

And just like that, July 2026. Half way through the year. Well done to everyone for making it this far. For some, you are now on a well-deserved mid-term or end of year break. Others are still hard at work. Where ever you might be, I hope this list of professional learning opportunities for school library professionals finds you well and gives you a little boost at this mid-way point.

Children's Book Week is such a special event, celebrating Australian children's literature and reading in libraries, bookshops and schools around Australia. These celebrations often feature a character dress up day. Lots of fun, but finding a costume can also be stressful. So that's why I create lists of super-easy, super-affordable and super-book-related costumes that you can throw together with wardrobe staples.

The Children’s Book Council of Australia Book Week 2026 is drawing near. I've started to collect resources, links and some ideas for activities and ways to celebrate. The theme for 2026 is Symphony of Stories. The official dates are set for August 22nd - the 28th.

What would you do if you were told your role was being made redundant? Or a parent levelled a complaint against you because of a book on your shelves? What would you do if your hours were reduced, your budget cut, told there were no funds for repairs to a damaged space, or told what you do doesn’t count or isn’t valuable?

Prototyping and constructing visual representations of ideas has to be one of the most popular uses for our makerspace, the Possibility Hub. Along with creating a lot of mess (it's brilliant). We often have classes in creating 3D models, turning ideas into reality and consolidating their knowledge through trial, error and a visible representation of their idea, whether that’s cells, Rube Goldberg machines or towers to race cars and measure speed.

*Note, I wrote this over 12 months ago but couldn’t bring myself to post it. As I write this I’m shaking, just a little. And wondering if I did the right thing. Will I regret it? Isn’t it just better to keep my head down? I’ve just emailed our school’s leadership team. I’ve included an update about the junior library and our annual report.

Over the past few years (probably much longer), we have had many regular library users spending lots of time and gaming on their laptops. Some were studying, but many others were gaming, watching movies or scrolling social media. This was before school, after school and during breaks. We’d have large groups taking up lots of space in the library, being noisy and sometimes dissolving into fights over the games they were playing.

Happy June. Welcome to another list of professional learning opportunities for school library staff. This edition offers some wonderful webinars on leading from the school library, podcasts on profession identity (highly recommended), and articles on censorship, funding and the impact librarians have on literacy. I hope you find something that interests, challenges and inspires you. 

Disciplinary Literacy in Primary Schools - Reading, writing and speaking across the curriculum - Shareen Wilkinson- Hachette Published 22 August 2025 If I asked you what literacy in primary school looked like, you might answer with learning to read and write. While they are the foundational stones of literacy, there is much more to it. In “Disciplinary literacy in primary schools” Shareen Wilkinson captures and explores the nuances of literacy across the whole curriculum, noting the importance of learning to speak and listen, alongside reading and writing, and how these skills can and should be developed across the curriculum and how they vary in each subject.

Can you see the future? There are times when I wish I knew what was coming and then others, the mere idea terrifies me. What will tomorrow hold? What will the next month or year? In a similar vein, we don’t know the future of school libraries in general let alone the future of our own school libraries. That can be scary.

I was pondering strategic planning and envisioning the future of school libraries recently and I decided, on a whim, to ask ChatGPT to create 5 possible future scenarios for school libraries looking 5 - 10 years into the future. I was a little surprised by the 5 scenarios it created for me. Of course, these scenarios reflect the work being done by incredible library teams around the world and sharing their work online, safeguarding and creating an impactful future for school libraries.

Another month of professional development links, articles, webinars, podcasts and more. As Term 1 comes to a close here in Australia, I hope you find some time to put your feet up and maybe enjoy an hour or two of professional learning. 

When AI hit in the first big way for education in November 2022 (gosh, can you remember those days?! It feels like so long ago now. And so much has changed) I did a lot of reading and learning about the emerging tools and how it would impact our schools and school libraries. I watched with interest as some schools and systems tried to ban the AI tools (unsurprisingly that didn’t work) and was grateful that instead my school leadership decided to embrace it, not scared but ready, not unsure, but knowledgeable.

Last year I found myself in the position of needing to explain exactly what a library does, from its curriculum to space and everything in between. When I approach promoting and advocating for the library, I believe it’s important to share about all aspects of the school library. Often one gets the focus (like collections and reading) or is the part more easily documented (like the beautiful photos of students creating in our makerspace), while other aspects are harder to capture and share.

Innovation. It has certainly been a buzzword in education and schools for a while now. But it’s not just the education sector using this word. Do a quick online search for Innovation Centres and you’ll find results from around the world and in every sector from business and marketing to technology and health care. Narrow that search down to “schools innovation centre” and it seems a number of schools have an innovation building or are constructing one or have created positions with Innovation in their titles.

Do school libraries need to embrace a mindset and approach of innovation? I believe, very strongly, that they do. But what does innovation mean (hint: it's not just technology) and what does it mean and look like for school libraries?