The School Librarian Reads

 For my final interview, I spoke with an elementary librarian at an arts-focused magnet school. She is in a unique position, as she began as a media clerk there and now shares the librarian job with the librarian who has been at the school for many years. She is therefore one of two certified school librarians at the school, and will be the only one when the older librarian retires in the next two years or so.  For our discussion we focused on the Collaborate Shared Foundation. Questions I asked her included:  Could you tell me about a collaborative research project you supported a teacher with?  How do you incorporate inquiry?  Do you teach the Dewey Decimal System to students? (This was prompted by an earlier interaction with a different school librarian that I was curious about.) How much guidance are you giving students, and how much are they working together? We started by discussing a partner research project that the librarian developed for the third grad...

 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...