Reflections on RBL

I believe wholeheartedly that resource based learning is a viable model of learning. While perhaps the effective practice of RBL is currently less pervasive than we would wish I am confident that both the frequency and success of RBL will continue to increase as both classrooms and school libraries around the world reinvent themselves for the students of the 21st century.

As a primary school teacher I have spent a number of years designing and implementing such student centred, inquiry based units of work and have found that using units which are designed in this way, both maximises student engagement and readily supports differentiation in the classroom.

I am excited that in the move towards RBL, the role of TL (and indeed of the teacher) is moving “away from an overemphasis on ‘how to find stuff’ and place greater emphasis on how to extract, process and use information” (Haycock 1991, p20) - i.e. critical thinking skills - and I believe that there are a growing number of schools which embrace this vision.

Whilst it is true that throughout my teaching and indeed even in my early years as a teacher it was more common than not to encounter classroom teachers who taught ‘front and centre’ and TLs who worked in isolation to the classroom program and who repeated the same lessons on how to borrow and return a book, the majority of my 10 years teaching has been spent in schools that have been committed to a RBL approach. These schools have been more exciting, dynamic and intrinsically motivated learning environments than those clinging to out-dated, teacher centred practices and I know that with continuing professional development and the ongoing injection of newly trained teachers and TLs such ‘last century’ institutions will slowly but surely fade away.

In the same way that the advent of the internet has dramatically broadened the scope of RBL, so too has it accelerated the evolution of RBL in schools. Fueled by access to other technologies in schools such as smartboards and digital cameras, learning experiences are readily made interesting and relevant to real world experiences. They become characterised by RBL values - experiential and student centred - placing the teacher in the exciting role of facilitator and guide.

In today’s ‘global, hi-tech, diverse and information saturated society’ (Library of Congress video), information in a variety of forms such as podcasts, interactive webpages, animations and online videos can be immediately accessed and responded to - thus allowing our teaching focus to shift solely from the mastery of content (Bloom’s Knowledge, Comprehension and Application) to actively include (rather than merely address if we have time or gifted learners!) the higher order processing of that content by all learners (Bloom’s Analysis, Synthesis and Evaluation). The discourse created simply by the immediacy with which we can access and begin to process information, invites collaboration and cooperation (be it face to face or digital) both between students, between staff and between students and staff and in this way education becomes ‘repackaged’ (Library of Congress video) and the school library evolves to become “a learning laboratory” (Haycock 1991 p20) within the RBL culture of the whole school.