Looking Back

I'm ba-ack!  This past semester has been a wild ride with completing my MLIS degree at the University of South Carolina, catching up on some travel with my family, and then dealing with a round of COVID infections in the family to cap off the school year.  I'm looking forward to a summer of travel and rest!

That said, I'm also thinking about how this school year as gone.  As I reflect back on the past school year, I think about what has worked, what hasn't worked, what I want to change or do better going forward.  I thought I'd share one of my favorite things that worked:  highlighting quick reads!

Like many libraries, my middle school library collection includes "hi-lo" books - books that are written on high interest topics for readers of a certain age but with lower reading comprehension requirements.  For my students, this means the books cover topics of interest to tweens and early teens in a pretty compact format with less complex vocabulary and syntax.  Not surprisingly, students aren't really drawn in by the "hi-lo" label, and I found that most of the hi-lo titles in my collection had circulated ... well ... never!

Which is a disservice because hi-lo does not equal low quality or boring.  My solution: rebranding!  Hi-lo books may not get any love, but "quick reads" definitely do.

Back in December when students were getting close to finals, I pulled all hi-lo books from the stacks and created a special display cart.  Fiction in our library is genre-labeled, so each genre got its own bin.  While it's not pictured here, I later added a bin for nonfiction quick read titles, as well.

I am looking forward to running the circulation numbers again when I complete inventory, but based on my observations of students in action, this display has been a huge success.  The cart attracts English language learners looking for a book that isn't "baby-ish" but also isn't too difficult to understand, developing readers who are working on fluency and vocabulary acquisition, and on-level or advanced readers just looking for something quick to read when they finish classwork.  

Just the other day, two students came in to work collaboratively on a book project that was due the next day.  One of the students had forgotten about the project and needed a book they could ready quickly to complete the project.  The other student - an avid library user - was along to offer support with finding a book.  When the students asked for a book that would allow quick completion of the project, I directed them to the quick reads cart as just the thing they were looking for.  The students selected an action & adventure title, sat down and read the book together, then brainstormed book project ideas that could be completed quickly.  I loved watching them in action!

Looking to grow your hi-low circulation?  Give this concept a try!

AASL Standards in Practice: Inquire

I have had the very good fortune to spend five days over the past few weeks with Paula Boston, school

librarian at E. Rivers ElementarySchool in Atlanta.  Paula’s library is vibrant and full of kids from the moment it opens until the end of the school day.  These pre-K to fifth graders are BUSY and full of questions!  So I thought it only appropriate to sit down with Paula to talk about AASL SharedFoundation I: Inquire.

Foundation I is all about facilitating curiosity, questioning, and research, and these activities are ongoing in the E. Rivers library.  Even the set-up of the library – with a chalkboard wall, centers for game play, Lego wall, and iPad table in addition to the traditional storytime rug and bookshelves – encourages children to seek information.

To encourage children to ask questions, Paula poses questions on the chalkboard wall and encourages students to add their thoughts.  She will also often display selections of books with a question for students to explore. 

And students from kindergarten up are regularly learning about the inquiry process through library instruction.  Paula recommends using the strategies from Making Thinking Visible by Ron Ritchhart, Mark Church, and Karin Morrison and the SOS strategies from Discovery Education.  She shared how she used “See Think Wonder” to get kids thinking about an artwork showing the signers of the Constitution.  Students added sticky notes to large sheets of chart paper to share what they saw, what they thought, and what they wondered about the image.  She got great questions (like “I wonder why there are no women”) to spur conversations with and among students.

As an IB school, E. Rivers places emphasis on research.  Teachers spend time in their PLC groups focusing on research, and fifth graders complete a capstone research project.  To support this instruction, Paul loves using GALILEO, the Georgia Virtual Library, to help students practice their inquiry skills.  She pairs the databases available in GALILEO with the WISER strategy:

• Wonder
• Information
• Synthesis
• Express
• Review/revise

She also recommends Facts4Me, a database created by librarians that costs $50/year, for kindergarten to second grade students.

To get teachers on board with inquiry instruction, Paula uses organic networking with teachers, often stopping them in the hall to ask “What are you studying right now? What activities are you doing?” and then bringing teachers in to have their classes engage with choice boards that foster development of inquiry skills.  She also offers a menu of choices for teachers!

While I was there, a class of second grade students were sharing Jamboard presentations they had created after asking lots of questions about extreme weather phenomena (tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, and more) and then digging in to books, GALILEO, and Facts4Me.  It was so much fun to see the kids in action!

AASL Standards in Practice: Engage

It’s me again, back to talk more about the AASLNational School Library Standards for Learners, School Librarians, and School Libraries and how librarians in the field are putting the standards into practice every day.

It’s time to share about my chat with Brian Montero, librarian at Midtown High School, about AASL Shared Foundation VI:Engage.  This foundation challenges school librarians to “demonstrate safe, legal, and ethical creating and sharing of knowledge products independently while engaging in a community of practice and an interconnected world.

As the person in charge of managing Midtown’s technology, both hardware and software, Brian is involved daily in the interconnected world of high school students, teachers, and families.  How does he navigate helping students develop critical ethical decision-making skills when it comes to finding, creating, and sharing information?  Brian says that a key step is to “position yourself as the support person for providing as much resources beyond the classroom as possible.”  He starts by working with “excited teachers” who come in to the library with their classes and leverages those relationships to promote sharing ethical practices throughout the school.

A number of school resources go into Brian’s daily practice in support of Shared Foundation VI, including Schoology, the school’s online learning management system, and GALILEO, the Georgia online library, which provides reliable resources for student research.  In particular, he finds GALILEO to be a fantastic tool for teaching students about the benefits of reliable sourcing.  During orientation and throughout the year, he reminds students about the databases that GALILEO provides and the value of using peer-reviewed resources from academic journals found in those databases.

While the school’s status as a 1:1 school where each student has a device is a benefit, it does create a couple of challenges for helping students make ethical decisions with information.  For one thing, “now that we’re 1:1, we lose some of the natural contact and opportunity for training [students on ethical practices] because they are not coming in to the library to use the computer.”  Brian finds that he needs “much more of an online presence to plug in library resources” and uses the Schoology platform to share information on ethical information practices. 

In addition, Brian faces the challenge of “making the library relevant” for students accustomed to doing everything online.  He notes that lately he has been “reintroducing the library [to students] because they haven’t been in a physical library space for a while” due to COVID.  He used the annual orientation as a time to re-engage students, spends time engaging students and teachers with one-on-one readers’ advisory to meet their needs, and also looks for opportunities to be an instructional collaborator with teachers and get them into the library so students can learn those critical ethical skills.  In addition, Brian is working to collaborate with the public library’s electronic resources librarian to maximize the value of the Schoology platform with the resources provided through the school district and public library partnership, ClassPass. 

On the whole, though, Brian notes that while things change, our biggest asset is our reading culture, and keeping the focus on literacy is the best way to engage!

Stay tuned as I share a final discussion with another school librarian about how they are putting the AASL standards into practice every day!

 

 

AASL Standards in Practice: Curation

I’m back to talk more about the AASL National School Library Standards for Learners, School Librarians, and School Libraries and how librarians in the field are putting the standards into practice every day.

 This past week, I got to work with not one but two school librarians and chat about the school librarian domains and competencies!  Today, I’ll share with you highlights from my conversation with Christen McClain about AASL Shared Foundation IV: Curate, and then I’ll be back in a few days to dish on my chat with Brian Montero about AASL Shared Foundation VI: Engage.

Christen is one of the librarians at Midtown High School here in Atlanta, which is the high school that my middle school students at David T. Howard Middle School go on to attend.  I have had the extremely good fortune to volunteer with Christen for almost a decade at our children’s elementary school and then to work with her for two years at Inman Middle School (our school’s former name before we relocated).  I know that she is a whiz at curation!

Foundation IV is all about making meaning “by collecting, organizing, and sharing resources of personal relevance” (AASL, 2018, p. 50).  As Christen explains, curation involves making information “user friendly,” and this means that knowing your community is critical!  “You have to be aware of your students’ preferences and pay attention to requests,” she notes.  You then use that information to organize your collection in a way that is logical and sensible to them as well as to make appropriate purchases for your collection.  It’s all about giving students the tools they need not just to find information but to create – to curate – their own learning!

One cool curation project that Christen has managed is using color coded labels to help students locate titles of interest.  As she explains, students often request information by category or subject –

          “How do I find a good horror book?”

                        “Where are the mysteries?”

“I love politics. What do you have?” 

And I have definitely experienced the same as Christen when students then “look at us funny when we say the books are arranged by author!”  Using colorful labels allows all the books to remain in the collection organized by author but also allows students to easily find materials of interest. 

Christen began work on this project when we worked together at Inman, and a library intern and I recently completed the labeling.  Christen is now planning to use the same basic color-coded system to label books at Midtown.  That way, students leaving my library at Howard Middle will walk into the library at Midtown and instantly feel a sense of familiarity with the curation system!

Photo of us back at Inman - our coworker Deborah on the left, Christen in the middle, and me on the right

Colorful labels for the project

Labeled books on the shelf at Howard

A guide to using the labels & finding books

This curation activity supports Domain A: Think by “designing opportunities for learners to explore possible information sources” and by modeling a way that students can organize their own information.

Christen and I also discussed that sometimes the challenge of curation is just not knowing about available resources, or, as she puts it, not “being informed on the depth or features” of tools that are available.  We had a great discussion of how I am using resource lists in Follett Destiny – the library management software used by both of our libraries - to curate information for my readers.  Look at us librarians - learning to curate from each other!

Stay tuned as I share more discussions with school librarians about how they are putting the AASL standards into practice every day!

AASL Standards in Practice: Collaboration

Even though they were adopted in 2018, the AASL National School Library Standards for Learners, School Librarians, and School Libraries still feel new.  I wanted to hear from librarians in the field about how they are putting the standards into practice every day.

I recently had the opportunity to chat about the school librarian domains and competencies of AASL Shared Foundation III: Collaboration with Dr. Zenobia Johnson, school librarian at Mary Lin Elementary School in Atlanta, Georgia.  We discussed how school librarians can help students and fellow teachers and staff with maintaining a culture of communication and cooperation.

Of course our conversation was tinged by the topic of the moment: COVID.  How do we encourage collaboration when our focus is on keeping safe by keeping socially distanced and wearing masks?  Thankfully, while collaboration may look different in these COVID times, the need to foster collaboration remains one of the shared foundations of school librarianship. 

One of the key concepts that came out of our conversation?  Collaborating outside the library space!

When our schools here in Atlanta went online for instruction in March 2020 and stayed online for most of the 2020-21 school year, students lost access to a key collaborative space: the library.  Even now, with limits on social contact, collaborating in the library space can be challenging.

During online learning, Dr. Johnson continued to facilitate collaboration as outlined in Domain A: Think using online tools.  Thanks to school resources available through Google, her students could actively work together using Google Meet for virtual face-to-face communications.  In addition, the district provided access to Zoom, which allowed students to continue to meet and interact collaboratively and engage in important digital citizenship lessons with Dr. Johnson. 

Dr. Johnson notes that her students are now “ecstatic that the library is open again!”  But even though students are engaged in the library in person, COVID guidelines still limit their ability to work closely.  Thankfully, the ability of students to exercise their creative muscles continues to extend beyond the library space.  Domain B: Create calls for librarians to help learners “build on their own prior knowledge and create new knowledge.”  During online learning, Dr. Johnson introduced students to tools like Google Slides to collaboratively create projects and share their learning.  Students continue to use these online tools even now that they are back at school in-person.  This year, for example, students will create slide decks for the annual school-level science fair, rather than the traditional tri-fold boards, to share their presentations.

Collaborations with community partners like the local bookstore Brave & Kind bring authors in to chat with students through virtual visits while in-person visits are not an option due to continued restrictions on visitors to the school building.  Through these virtual visits, Dr. Johnson continues to promote students’ access to diverse perspectives (Domain C: Share) and to stimulate group discussions (Domain D: Grow).  

Stay tuned as I share more discussions with school librarians about how they are putting the AASL standards into practice every day!

Wrapping up summer reading... and starting a new school year!

I have been thrilled to be back in the David T. Howard Middle School library for the past few days!  It's been great to be masked up and back among the books, preparing for students to start circulation and library instruction.  Here are a few pics:

More on school soon!

For now, here's a quick look at the books that wrapped up my summer:

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm still convinced that Colson Whitehead is incapable of writing a bad book. This intense, creative visioning of the Underground Railroad as a literal railroad kept me turning pages. Cora is a protagonist that will occupy my thoughts for some time to come.

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The Bone Code by Kathy Reichs
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm a big Bones fan, and I enjoyed this latest installation, but I didn't love it. Something about the story just never gelled for me. That said, I'll be looking forward to #21 for my #AnotherDayAnotherTrhiller fix!

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Rabbits by Terry Miles
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So much fun! This scifi thriller follows the adventures of K, a gamer geek with a propensity for going down rabbit holes. I don't want to give away any of the plot, but this adult novel would be great for teens as well. Lots of game references (a la Ready Player One) and a solid scifi plot.

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The Slow Undoing: The Federal Courts and the Long Struggle for Civil Rights in South Carolina by Stephen H Lowe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A well-written, deep dive into the Civil Rights decisions in South Carolina federal courts that led up to and followed the period of intense Civil Rights action in the state. It evoked Richard Rothstein's The Color of Law for me, and it's well worth a read by my follow lawyers.

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Scythe by Neal Shusterman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

So many of my students dig this series and now I totally understand why! Those who know me know I love a good thriller and am a huge speculative fiction fan, so when they come together in such a good way, I am a truly happy reader! (And, of course, I love authors named Neal - ha!)

What do you do when humanity has conquered death? For Citra and Rowan, the answer is: be tapped to serve as Scythes and kill off random people in the interest of population management. In this first installment in the series, Citra and Rowan compete for a spot as a Scythe and learn that not all is well in the Scythedom.

Can't wait to read Thunderhead!

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Summer reading... had me a blast!

Vacation... ah... 

Sand...

and sun...

and so much reading!

Here's what I took with me on our recent family trip to Jekyll Island:

I didn't make it through every book, but I finished a few that I had going already, read a few start to finish, and started reading a couple of new books.  Here's the summary:

Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

File this away under my "another engaging thriller" category. No major surprises here, just a solid, readable plot with an ending that provided just enough of a surprise. I was on the lookout for transphobic depictions based on publicity this book got, but Rowling saves that for her Twitter feed.



The Canyon's Edge by Dusti Bowling
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This solid middle grades novel depicts Nora's fight for survival when she and her father are caught in a flash flood in a slot canyon. Starting and ending with narrative chapters, the bulk of the book is a novel in verse, and that form suits Nora's journey (physical and internal) quite well. Readers will bite their nails as Nora struggles to reunite with her father and survive the challenges of the canyon while also dealing with her desire to return to some normalcy after a year of tragedy. As an adult and a parent, I found Nora's father's thought processes to be heart-wrenching, but younger readers will likely focus on Nora. I think that readers who enjoyed Hatchet and similar books will also like this novel.

In the author's note, Bowling mentions the real-life events that got her thinking about the setting and flash flood that Nora encounters. For readers who want to learn more, this LA Times article is helpful: https://graphics.latimes.com/zion-fla....


Love Is a Revolution by Renée Watson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I can't get enough of Renee Watson's novels. It's the summer before her senior year of high school, and Nala is ready to catch up on binge-worthy shows, hang out with her friends, and, oh yeah, maybe fall in love. When she embellishes her activities at her grandmother's retirement home to impress the hot, civic and volunteer-minded Tye, she learns that loving herself first, just as she is - ALL that she is - may be the key to a successful relationship.

I really enjoyed a lot of things about this book:

* the depiction of Nala's deep, loving, complicated relationship with her extended family, including her own mother, with whom she chooses not to live

* Nala's body-positive attitude that makes it clear she is just fine with her physical self coupled with her joy in being her best self through clothing that feels good and hair that expresses different facets of her personality

* the (true and underrated) idea that there are ways for young people to show care and consideration for their communities without being overt activists or constant volunteers (and how the pressure to be activists and volunteers can be a lot for teens).

As always, Watson's book was a joy to read.


Pity Party by Kathleen Lane
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hooray for short stories! Especially for short stories as inventive, sly, weird, fun, and totally plugged in to the middle school experience as these short stories are! Do you feel like you don't fit in? Worry about mean people? Wish for a different life? Feel invisible? Deal with bullies? Well, join the pity party! My favorite story: Behaviorally Challenged. Can't wait to see which ones resonate with my students!

Don't miss this great interview with Kathleen Lane: https://soundcloud.com/user-419678114...


The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am convinced that Colson Whitehead cannot write a bad book. This gut-wrenching, based-in-reality account of two boys, Elwood and Turner, and their time at the Nickel Academy will leave you breathless (and, in my case, in tears). I couldn't put it down. Too intense for most of my student readers, but older teens and adults should check this out.



Remote Control by Nnedi Okorafor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Another page-turner from Nnedi Okorafor... Okorafor writes incredible Africanfuturism books and creates worlds and characters that are lyrical, mesmerizing, and memorable. What happens when you become the adopted daughter of Death? In this novella for adults, Sankofa wanders Ghana searching for her box and its mysterious content, a seed that seems to have chosen her as Death's adopted daughter, accompanied by a small fox, Movenpick. As she wanders, she learns to control the deadly abilities that have been bestowed upon her and grows from small child to young woman on her own. Sankofa's world is recognizably our own but in a future where a robot AI brings security to a small city by managing traffic at a formerly deadly intersection and where corporate interests seek to control alien technology. I really can't do the book justice by description. just read it. And anything else that Okorafor writes.


Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I actually started reading this collection a couple of years ago after picking it up at the AJC Decatur Book Festival. The poems are lovely - by turns meditative, realistic, reflective, drug-addled, melancholic, and joyful. I'll be returning to this collection over and over because I am unabashedly grateful for it.



Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Insightful and engaging, Rosling's book explains in clear and uncomplicated language the importance of understanding data. I appreciated his reminder that things in the world can simultaneously be better and bad. Great read for librarians as they plan for information literacy instruction.

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