Melissa Stewart

Melissa Stewart has written has written more than 200 nonfiction books for children.  She presented on the evolution of the nonfiction book, and described some of the more interesting types of nonfiction books currently available for children.  These include:

Traditional narrative--take a topic and tell what you know; the True book series follows this model

Creative narrative--takes a nonfiction topic and tells it from a particular point of view, follows a chronological order, or imposes some other structure on the information

• layered texts are now often employed in some texts, in which basic facts are presented in large type and more detailed information is also provided using a smaller font for more sophisticated readers

Compare and contrast--just what it says

List --a general concept or category is presented and then examples are provided on each page

Question and answer books--some are especially well done, such as Steve Jenkins "What Do You Do With a Tail Like This"

Stewart's website includes lots of ideas for how teachers and librarians can use nonfiction texts, and she has a great example of how she revised a book that could be used when working with students on their writing.

Paige Jaeger: Nonfiction and the Common Core

Paige Jaeger is leading a group of NESLA pre-conference folks through a discussion of the role of
Nonfiction and Common Core.

Pay attention to assessment so you can show your own efficacy!  Assessment is turning from a way we determine if students know something to a way to show we are doing our work effectively.  A good instructor DOES assess learning.  We need excellent rubrics.

If you do or create anything--make sure you indicate that it comes from the library!  Get credit for what you're doing!

The big picture--where does nonfiction fit in to the Common Core:

SHIFT 1 & 2:

• Close reading and text-based answers
• writing from sources

SHIFT 3 & 4:

• spotlight on vocabulary
• literacy is not just ELA

SHIFT 5 &6:

• building knowledge
• 50% - 50%--reading fiction/nonfiction

GOAL:  College and Career readiness--reading, writing and information literacy is needed

Sleeping kids in your class with no engagement is a waste of tax payer money :)

We need to engage kids in a deep learning experience

New challenges for us:

• how kids search--quick, bouncy, look at a site for a total of 2 minutes to evaluate if it is good/useful
• 3 dimensional reading--reading a screen is not a left-right/up-down experience
• expect high level of excitement to stay engaged
• if you don't give a student a question, they don't know when to stop a search
• good questions mean you need to craft questions that cannot easily be "googled"
• "selfie generation"--needs to be all about them

Half of the Common Core is content and half is delivery

• the delivery change is where the library comes in!!-
• IFORMATION is mentioned 10 times more than TECHNOLOGY in the standards
• Teachers should move from a "covering" content mode to an "uncover and discover" mode:  nonfiction should be at the heart of information delivery
• Research is one of the only types of learning that embraces every shift of the CCSS; lots of short research is useful--research is an ANCHOR STANDARD

Book recommendations:  Practice Perfect by Doug Lemov -- will help you address this as you talk to your teachers about bumping things up

Prescription for the Common Core by Paige Jaeger--organized essential questions

Vocabulary:

• The fastest way to improve vocabulary is READING (Marilyn Jager Rand) and nonfiction has higher level vocabulary
• Librarians who can get students to do more independent reading will prove their worth
• Develop an academic vocabulary -- over a 4th grade level (BIG issue for ELL kids and kids coming from poverty)
• Paige Jaeger has Vocabulary bulletin board ideas on her website

Reading:

• You cannot JUST read a book--the book and reading must serve a purpose--have a question where kids are using evidence from the book to support a claim
• Think about how to draw attention to high-level vocabulary during library read-alouds  (e.g., read Dav Pilkey's Kat Kong and tell kids that there will be 15 amazing new words in this book--create a bookmark list of the words.  Have the kids notice when these words appear in the text and help figure out what they mean)
• As you read a nonfiction text to students, talk about what the key words you could pull out to do further research on that topic
• Help kids practice fluency and use a technology such as audacity to record kids reading with tone and voice; select a book with the right lexile level and one that has content that ties into curriculum (e.g., So You Want to Be President for grade 5 civics)
• Wordless picture books--what is the main idea?  Put it into words.  Have kids write dialog and use great words.

Essential Questions

• Give kids an essential question and then an article that contains information that will help them determine an opinion;  Tell kids that we are going to have an "evidence-based" discussion
• Important role for library is to provide multiple perspectives and help students see multiple points of view--more than one source matters
• Creating an essential question--you want to create an enduring understanding
• A good essential question can help save a lame research question--look at your "find the answer" types of research and think about how you can improve it with a targeted question:
• what can you ask that will compel the students to find an answer
• can you embed a pronoun (we, I, us, you)
• What is the moral of the story/
• If your assignment can be answered on Google, then it is void of higher level thought.

Look at Intel Teach Program for ideas for "country reports" that matter--looking at real world problems--nice website

Up and at 'em with NESLA

Our annual conference is underway!  This morning we are kicking things off with a preconference event sponsored by NESLA.  NESLA decided that it would make sense to offer some preconference days for its members tied to state conferences, and MSLA was the first to take them up on this exciting offer.

Today, we arrived early on Cape Cod (where it promises to be above freezing!) to gather as NESLA President Irene Kwidinski gave the annual awards out for NESLA, to announce NESLA's new ability to offer webinars, and to hold a brief annual meeting.

The highlight of our day is a presentation on Nonfiction and the Common Core.  We are waiting to hear from Paige Jaeger and author Melissa Stewart about how to effectively use excellent nonfiction books in engaging students and teachers in this new focus of the Common Core standards.

Throughout the weekend, we look forward to having librarians with us from around the state and around New England.  Please check in here for updates throughout the weekend as we gather and learn.

Library Evaluation

Evaluation of school librarians...presented by Judi Moreillen, Paige Jaeger, Kathryn Lewis, and Mary Keeling

What do you do well?
How do you prove it?
How do you measure student growth in non tested areas?
What are indicators principals should look for?
Evidence must be measurable AND rigorous (Worth measuring)  and appropriate to what is being taught
What library activities or programs lead to student growth?
Library instruction should be emphasized, and AASL Empowering Learners document has lots to mine for this
Areas to focus...information literacy, multiple liters it's, reading strategies
How to measure- information literacy?  Overwhelming! Looked to ACRL for college proficiency and worked backwards with rubrics by grade levels and student goals, used Stripling model and AASL materials to help with this
One way to get librarians to reflect is to take snapshot - give librarians standards and ask them to show what they did that day/week to meet the standard.  This gets them aware of standards and can be shared to give librarians ideas about what others are doing
Some concerns that narrowing focus to very specific areas can lead to leaving out some teaching that is happening now

Http://whateveryprincipal.pbworks.com
Instrument for principals in school library monthly.  Would be great tool for talking to your principal about what your program SHOULD look like

We need to change perception of what school librarians do and how we can make an impact.  Formative assessments are very very important for librarians, so much of what we do impacts student learning but can be hard to tease out of quantitative assessments.

We heard about efforts being made in various states and districts to evaluate librarians.  Amy short described efforts with ma DesE
Colorado added appendix to standard state evaluations; evaluation must include test scores and grappling with how to show how librarians make impact on PARCC
Fairfax VA is using teacher eval tweaked for non tested teachers--- progress can be based on student data or on program goals that department sets
Ohio set rubric based in part of PA and sent to OH DOE and it was well received, but still no DOE evaluation past that for teachers
MI has local control with poor funding with huge loss of librarians..no common standards:  state school library association is trying to develop standards for local districts
PA has done lots to set up rubrics and model curriculum, and has nice baseline from PA study that can be used

Big problem is that few states have person at state DOE to oversee school libraries, district administrators are also less common and this is leading to problems

Push librarians to think always about MEASURING....exit tickets, pre- and post-assessments, running records,etc

Judi moreillen wants ideas for what could be studied for hard data about the processes we teach kids,  what data can be directly tied to what we do AND keep us collaborating, and does measuring skills (which is easy to measure) really give great feedback on what we do best?

ALA midwinter Philly

Cold, slushy and full of cool librarians.....Sharon Hamer, Amy Short, Jennifer Kelley Reed, and I are here for midwinter meetings.  Most of midwinter is about meetings - AASL Affiliate Assembly, L4L learning and a host of workshops.  Lots of nice informal talks too as we run into people from MLS, MLBC, Horn Book and colleagues from around the country - all of whom have great ideas that I love to borrow and bring back home.  For example, the legislative arm of ALA showed some great promotional videos that Amy Bloom and the Advocacy Committee could use as exemplars for our work in Massachusetts.  We always find some good stuff to bring home.

Reading and the Common Core

AASL=seeing your favorite people in the world in person. I subscribe to Library Sparks mostly for Tony Buzzeo's monthly column on lessons aligned to the Common Core.  So, of course, I went to see
Tony Buzzeo's presentation on Reading and the Common Core.  Tony pointed out at the beginning of her talk that we have a HUGE opportunity with the ELA Common Core.  Using EBSCO and other databases has great links to periodical articles and the lexile level for the articles is given for each article.  Teachers will love this.  We also talked about some great informational text authors--Steve Jenkins

She showed us reading standards that we can cite--and many of these are activities that most good school librarians are already modeling all them:

• Pulling out evidence from a text to answer a question
• Comparing 2 texts on a similar topic to show how they are alike and different
• Selecting and sharing books with appropriate complexity for the intended grade level
• Quoting accurately from text (great place to use document cameras/ebooks) to answer a question--and describe what you can infer (start with -- what is a character like?  then show us in the book where it says that)
• Integrate information from several texts on the same topic in order to write or speak knowledgeably about the subject (great opportunity to use a combination of books and periodical articles)

ALWAYS document what you do--attach the ELA standard to what you are doing and make sure classroom teachers and your administrators know that you are doing this. 

Join forces with colleagues--choose topics and divide the work to develop curriculum.  She also recommended Novelist Plus, which has many common core lesson plans.  Massachusetts databases do not include Novelist Plus (just Novelist) and she suggested school librarians request this upgrade to help them with common core.

A couple of books new to me that I will definitely be purchasing:
Do you know which ones will grow? by Susan A. Shea
A wizard from the start by Don Brown
The boy who harnessed the wind by William Kankwambe
Farmer Will Allen and the growing table by Jacqueline Briggs Martin
When the Beat was Born:  DJ Kool Herc and the Creation of Hip Hop by Laban Carrick Hill
My First Day by THE AMAZING Steve Jenkins
Lifetime: the Amazing Numbers in Animal Lives by Lola M. Schaefer
Mr Tiger Goes Wild by Peter Brown (pair it with Mo Willem's Naked Mole Rat)
Pedal It! by Michelle Mulder
Locomotive by Brian Floca

Great handouts here

PBS Learning Media

I have long been a fan of Teachers' Domain, so was eager to go see its new incarnation as PBS learning media www.pbslearningmedia.org

You need to set up free account with email and PW; there is an email account you can use (they will help you set it up) so you can set up an account for students to use

34,000 digital resources, includes:

• Short clips from longer PBS national programs and local productions, some are from high-quality partners (e.g, NASA, Smithsonian), and some are produced specifically for the site
• all clips are selected to be tied to particular curriculum and all are tied to standards
• many clips are associated with a lesson plan that indicates how to use the clip appropriately

All clips are searchable by keywords, grade level, subject area, and by CCSS standards and some national stantdards

• Clips can be saved using favorite buttons and saved to folders; folders can be shared
• There are also clips organized by public media series, state and local collections, curriculum topics and theme
• There is a whole collected of "characteristics of highly effective teaching and learning" that could be used for PD within your school--short videos showing many best practices for teaching and classroom management

Themed-content in middle school literacy practicing reading and writing in the content area (pbslearningmedia/collections/midlit), including science (energy, plate tectonics, health), ELA (character development, personification), social studies, mathematics--most populated at science and social studies

• Lesson plans go with all topics and have been created and vetted with and by experts/teachers
• Includes a number of literacy strategies--categorize, compare/contrast, find evidence, etc etc

We looked at 2 excellent lessons -- one on cowbirds and one on Pocahontus.  The workshop participants all agreed that the lessons were engaging (actually fun and very interesting), and there were some excellent student activities and assignments embedded into each one.    These would make excellent assignments for supplementation, homework, self-paced work in a topic area.

Many, many middle school math lessons and activities will be added soon