Blog 4: Michal Hope Brandon, Muller Road Middle School

 
Mical Hope Brandon was the first librarian at Muller Road Middle School.

Introduction

Michal Hope Brandon was the first librarian at Muller Road Middle School in Blythewood, SC since its opening in 2011. She has worked in education for twenty and half years and has been a librarian for most of those years. She recently transitioned into a new position, but has been helping the librarian aide Allison Daniels on a part time basis. I was hired as the new librarian at MRMS in February and will start in August 2024. During our interview, we focused on AASL standards Shared Foundation of Inquire and broadly discussed a few of the Key Commitments. Since I will be transitioning from high school to middle school, I wanted to get a sense of how the inquiry could possibly look in middle school.

Reflection and Takeaways

We discussed several ways she has used inquiry with students including starting with exploring animals in sixth grade on DISCUS and eventually working up to argumentative essays in the eighth grade. One effective method she discussed was to have students fill out a graphic organizer where they can write down their prior knowledge and then add what they have learned through research. However, one thing we discussed is the struggle of activating student prior knowledge when many students don’t have a broad knowledge base to build upon.

I also learned about some new resources I didn’t know about that I could implement. The science database Credo Reference sounds like a wonderful resource that science teachers can use. Another goal of mine in the future is to make a list of the useful databases in DISCUS for each content area so teachers have a handy guide to explore resources for students. Although I am familiar with Infobase, I need to explore that more as well and make lists or Destiny Collections to create a guide to the resources.

Since I have years of experience as an English teacher, I am fairly familiar with the resources for ELA, so I need to be intentional about exploring the different resources in DISCUS for science, math, and social studies. Another learning curve for me is to make sure I am providing sources that are at student's reading levels and that are challenging for the magnet students.

Some examples she gave of making the inquiry a real world connection is the news show. She also discussed cultural days and would do something related to that country of the world. This would be a good place of expansion to highlight the different cultures at the school. 

However, Brandon also lamented the lack of time to collaborate with inquiry because of scheduling, teachers prepping for testing, and the librarian being pulled from the library to cover classes. This is where a newsletter or central location for resources could be helpful. She emphasized to me that it's important for me to advocate for myself and ask the principal to not have me cover classes. I am blessed to have learned so many advocacy tools from this MLIS program and will be using them early and often.

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