ISE Learning Commons: IB Learner profiles in the library

Open-minded: Never judge a book by it's cover.

At the beginning of this school year our IB Continuum team of PYP-MYP-DP Coordinators and teachers decided to focus on how to make IB learner profile visible in the school and implement the vocabulary and understanding of the attributes into daily teaching and learning.
Here at ISE I have two positions. I am a PreK-12 teacher-librarian and the MYP Coordinator. So implementing the learner profile should be natural... well it hasn't been. I was looking for ways to meaningfully include the attributes into library antics and help the students connect them to the library and things we do here.

In PYP, each year, at the very beginning each grade 1-5 student makes a personal shelf-marker for choosing books. We talks about what a shelf marker is, why we need one, how we use them. I tell a little story about books that live in the library: "Each in its own special place or house. It is very important to put a book back in its proper house or place. If the books are put to the wrong place they get lost. Just like you would get lost in a wrong house. When you take a book off the shelf use a shelf-marker to mark the place where the book has been taken from so you know exactly to where the book needs to go back to." Usually we put the student's name, grade and patron number on the shelf- marker, then students decorate it the way they want to- drawing, cutting and pasting from book catalogs etc. This year I decided to add an IB Learner profile attribute of student's choice onto the shelf marker.

First we took some time to talk about each attribute. Next we tried to explain how these profiles look like in a library contexts e.g. caring means treating books like friends and taking good care of them. Finally each students from grade 1 - 5 chose a profile they felt is important to display in the library and wrote it on their shelf markers along with their own explanation how that profile looks, feel or sounds in the library.
Here are the results.