The School Librarian Reads

 I spoke with a middle school librarian at an arts magnet middle school for my third interview. The school has an enrollment of 788 and is closely tied to a nearby arts elementary school as well as the Fine Arts Center, the public high school for the arts. All three schools are in Greenville County.  Questions that guided our interview included:  How do you embrace curiosity in your library?  How do you encourage teachers to work with you?  Has genrefying your collection changed students' checkout habits?  What are some of the challenges you've experienced getting students to try new books or genres? The Shared Foundation we focused on was Inquire. We began by talking about the fiction collection, which the librarian had genrefied at the beginning of the school year. He reported that it had been a huge undertaking initially, but that they got the actual moving of the books completed within a few days, and students have really taken to it.  While studen...

For my second interview, I spoke with an elementary librarian at a Greenville County magnet school for math and science, where I completed my additional site visit. School enrollment is 674, and it is a Title 1 school.  Questions I asked her throughout our conversation included (these were mainly prompted by topics that came up throughout my site visit):  Which Shared Foundation would you like to begin with?  How do your book bins fit the Explore Shared Foundation? Could you tell me more about your pacing guide and what you hope to do to improve it?  How do you think elementary library instruction could involve the standards in a more structured way?  The librarian and I started by discussing the standards as a whole and how she wished that the district had a more specific pacing guide for her library instruction that included the standards. As a former teacher, she missed the details of standards, pacing guides, and lesson plans that characterize teaching docum...

 My first school librarian interview was with a high school librarian in Greenville, S.C. who has been at her current school for four years. Previously, she worked at the middle school level for 10 years. The school where she works has about 1800 students, and is connected to the Fine Arts Center (FAC), a public high school for the arts.  We focused on the Shared Foundation Curate and discussed how she integrates the standards into her work by talking about a specific collaborative lesson she was working on with a teacher of Environmental Studies. A few of the questions I asked, besides ones specific to the standards, included:  When you received the new standards, did you feel they were giving you additional work to complete, or did you feel they were integrated pretty well into your work already?  Could you tell me about a collaborative project that was either very successful or rather unsuccessful?  How do you typically work with teachers? Is it usually a sit...

 

 After this week's readings, the two things about cyberbullying that I think are the most insidious are the anonymity and the speed with which posts and messages can spread.  In the Faucher, Cassidy, and Jackson article (2015), the authors mention these nuances of cyberbullying, in addition to others like a detachment from the victim's response and the permanent nature of online messages, that make it different from face-to-face bullying. This offers some explanation as to why it can be so virulent among young people (and of course, adults too)—the lack of connection to the person who sees the message makes it so much easier to say things one would never say in person.  What's encouraging to me, however, is that anti-bullying programs do seem to work, at least according to both the Cyberbullying.com site and the JMIR article. I found it interesting that the results of the study discussed in the JMIR article found that males seemed to learn and be more likely to adopt pros...

When I was considering assistive tools that would be useful for students in the school library, I tried to begin by first thinking about the learning activities I would lead with students, and then considering what types of tools would bring those activities more in line with the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). The readings and videos this week emphasized the advantages of inclusion and assistive technology and tools for all students, not just disabled students, and I wanted to use that framework as a way to evaluate potential options. The activity I ultimately decided to examine was read-alouds. What kinds of tools could help students, both with and without disabilities, engage more actively with the librarian during a read-aloud? At my children's school, read-alouds in the classroom are often done by the teacher without any visual aids. In the library, the librarian often uses a projector so the students can also see the images and text, but the text isn't ...