NCLE --great opportunity for librarians

The National Center for Literacy Education is a great opportunity for school librarians to shine in front of our colleagues in education.  NCLE is a coalition of over 2 dozen educational organizations with an interest in promoting literacy.  NCLE offers grants, promotes best practice, and shares ideas among its stakeholders.  I first heard about NCLE at the ALA Midwinter meeting in Seattle and joined its listserv.  I have been very impressed with the quality of resources about literacy initiatives and best practices that appear weekly in my email, and have put many into practice and shared many more with my principal and teachers.  This afternoon, Cara Calvin, an AASL volunteer who acts as a liaison to NCLE described how librarians could ask NCLE for small grants to support projects in schools and districts to pilot projects and get materials.  She also urged us to join the site and post projects to showcase best practices.  It is clear that this is a strong opportunity for librarians to demonstrate their skills as teachers and to show colleagues and administrators how we add value to student learning.  I hope to promote this initiative when I return to Massachusetts!

What happens at Affiliate Assembly?

AASL Affiliate Assembly met this morning.  We were represented by Amy Short and Sharon Hamer, and I went along too.  This group is where representatives from school library organizations throughout the country come to share ideas and concerns and to recognize good things that are happening in the field. Over the years, we’ve gotten some terrific ideas here from other state initiatives.  For instance, check out what Colorado is up to!

MSLA sends two representatives to the assembly as voting members.  We are then grouped by region, and we belong to the New England region, called Region 1 here.  We sit with our region and share.  Ours is the only region that has formed a professional organization (NESLA), and our affiliate assembly representatives are also our representatives to NESLA.  Within our region, we elect a director, who sits on the board of the AASL Executive Board and helps shape their policies.  The regional directors spend an enormous amount of time meeting while we are at ALA to plan and organize for AASL.  As of this weekend, Valerie Diggs from MSLA stepped down after four years in this position, and turned the responsibility over to Michelle Luhtala of Connecticut.  This morning we discussed how Region 1 states select their delegates and got some good ideas for refining our own selection process. Sharon Hamer was nominated as our regional representative alternate to work with Michelle at our meetings.   Sharon and Amy will be sharing information about the specific work of this affiliate assembly with MSLA through our next issue of the MSLA Forum. 

On the level

Elementary librarians (like me) and maybe even the middle school practioners spend lots of time tryin to decipher what the reading people are up to--and one of the trickiest bits involves book leveling.  Kate Todd presented a librarians guide to leveled reading and explained the difference between quantative leveling (such as lexile levels) that use a formula based on word length, sentence length to determine reading difficulty, and qualitative leveling (such as Fuontas and Pinnell) that use additional features of the book to determine reading difficulty.  Notes for this are here.

Todd then presented some potential benefits of leveling books--helping students to find books they can read independently, providing the motivation of a successful reading experience.  However, she pointed out that librarians, appropriately, have some concerns about using book leveling in the library.  In fact ALA and AASL have issued statements cautioning librarians about some issues with book leveling, such as revealing confidential information about students (telling students they can only take a book at their reading levels shows each student who can and cannot read well), having children limited in their book selection and censoring what they select, and skewing the reasons for reading to be about rewards (e.g., Accelerated Reader) and not about the intrinsic value of reading.  LOTS of discussion ensued with many concerns raised about leveling in the library...an interesting topic to pursue in our own practice with our own reading teachers.

Loving kids, having fun, using digital resources

 Mark Edwards, Superintendent of Mooresville Managed School District in North Carolina presented at the AASL President's Program this morning.  We heard about his district's astonishing results in education using well-thought through shifts to digital learning (every student has a laptop) and project-based learning.  He told us that librarians are part of the shared leadership in the district, where when they have to lay off staff, they NEVER lay off librarians!  Edwards embraces an "All in!" approach where every child and every adult matters and every child and every adult is responsible for adults.  Students track their own learning and from young age have an awareness and a responsibility for their "trajectory of learning."  Edwards prizes professional development and created a summer institute for teachers and 12 early release days each year to have teachers think deeply and reflectively about practice. Edwards recommends all staff read specific books in unison to discuss common strong ideas to lead to an ongoing and evolving teaching culture:

·         All Systems Go by Michael Fullton

·         Building Leadership Capacity in Schools

·         Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

·         Brain Rules:  John Medina

·         Drive:  Daniel Pink

·         A New Culture of Learning:  Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown

Hello From Chicago with great websites

Massachusetts is well represented at ALA Chicago this summer.  Here on official ALA business are Valerie Diggs, Kathy Lowe, Judi Paradis and our representatives to the AASL Affiliate Assembly Sharon Hamer and Amy Short.  In addition, we have been running into many friends from home--members of the MSLA Board, and friends from the Massachusetts Library System.

I am starting the day at the roll out of AASL's Best Websites for Teaching and Learning--my pinterest boards are growing by the minute.  The best website list is not up on the AASL website just yet, but some of the sites rolling out that look good include Wonderopolis, Marqueed, icivics, Seriously Amazing, Edudemic, and Science NetLinks.

So I have had several days to process the really great conference from last weekend. Here in the midst of another winter storm, I get some unexpected time to write about it. I think the most important benefit of these conferences is the opportunity to meet up with other school librarians. I know you have heard it all before, but the cliche is true: networking is critical, and we learn so much from each other that we simply must get out of our buildings and be together. I had some really great conversations during the meals, and in between sessions, and I count those to be as valuable as what I learned in the sessions.

First, kudos to the conference committee. Year after year, a dedicated group of school librarians work tirelessly to bring us the very best speakers, opportunities, and facilities to enhance our learning. THANK YOU!! I appreciate you! :-)

Despite some connectivity issues, which really hindered some of the presentations (I felt badly for those presenters; they brought Powerpoint slides for just such an occurrence, but those sessions didn't work very well), I thought that the sessions I attended were generally all of high quality. The conference began with a bang, with Pam Berger's session on inquiry, primary sources, and technology. Pam provided us with some good examples about how to get kids to think critically about primary sources, and make personal connections. But this activity led to one of the best ideas I heard at the conference from one of the librarians at my table (I'm so sorry, I don't remember who it was! Please write and let me know, if you read this!). She explained how she gets multiple versions of Paul Revere's ride, which include various artistic renditions, Longfellow's poem, maps from the Park Service, and things Revere himself wrote about the events. She then asks students to compare the different versions, and investigate why some of the versions are different from each other. Inquiry! Investigation! Critical thinking! I love it! I will definitely look for opportunities to incorporate this sort of inquiry when talking with teachers about upcoming units.

In the afternoon, Richard Byrne made a pretty compelling case for why Twitter can be an educator's best friend. This is when the internet began to slow down, as did his presentation, but I was grateful for the kick in the pants to get myself connected on Twitter to a lot of my Mass. school librarian colleagues. I will definitely try to figure out how fit Twitter into my (almost) daily schedule now. Time has been a barrier to fully integrating it; I encourage you to give it another try if you, like I did, sort of gave up on it.

The other major highlight for me was the description by Maureen Ambrosino and Anita Cellucci of the public library/public school collaboration that they have developed. My nascent Student Advisory Board has been struggling to stay afloat, and I hope to be able to reach out to our public librarians in Hudson to see if we can re-energize this group. I firmly believe that students need opportunities to take charge of their learning and activities (see the Search Institute's "40 Developmental Assets") and I need to find a way to help my students make this jump, and take charge!

So again, thank you so very much to the Conference Committee. I was energized, and I learned new things that I can try to put into action right away! Well, maybe after it stops snowing...

Sync the Library and Computer Lab

And start a Library Technology Center--a la Laura Beal D'Elia and Dan Callahan in Burlington--

LTC—library technology center—THEY CALL IT THAT and so do the kids….Laura and Dan are viewed as a team—branded and interchangeable:

Some good stuff heard in this session--

All lesson plans are written together in a google doc—and they note in each one where they are hitting their standards and the Common Core—at the end of the year, the plan is to get together and look at these and see where they need to upgrade lessons

All kids have online portfolios

Physical space—library with space for class work, and connected to the computer lab—lots of flexibility;   Shared space helps team stay connected—tons of informal meetings and planning; many tools help them stay connected—dropbox, google drive, icloud, and a massive white board with calendar for  the month

Laura has  a “wall of awesome”--I have no idea what this is, but I want one

Find them at pineglen.info  -- easy for remembering

Library is fixed schedule but not prep time—30 minutes per class/ so looks as flexible/fixed

Sometimes kids have ITS during “library time” and he does book stuff! 

Right now they are thinking about doing 45 minute fixed time each week that either Dan or Laura could do and do that scheduled time as prep period—some of this is now happening with 4^th and 5^th grade.  Their thought is that this would give them more regular time to work on projects.  They are also trying to get at the idea that you don’t have to checkout a book every week—especially with older kids.

Piloting a 1:1 ipad project right now with about 18 kids per class.  They like the idea of ipads for working with kids OUTSIDE of library—in classrooms (including specialists).  Ipads can be anywhere, including outside.

Volunteers cover the LTC, and are scheduled throughout the day doing checkout and other circ, collection work, etc.  Huge training session and commitment

Folding in the teachers—3 grade level teams.  They find that working with teachers individually works well and focus on doing a project really well.  Lots of informal meetings as one of the team members walks through the hall.  All the projects are curriculum-based.  They have flexibility to work with either entire team or specific teachers. 

They have a school youtube channel

Little kids and research—let the kids create their own questions—grade 1 mammal project; kids got to choose the mammal to focus on; kids generated a lot of questions about mammals and then organized them into topics; then they had figure out where they information they found went