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The Ripple Effect of Book Challenges MSLA 2024- Kerry Cowell

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Active Learning in the School Library MSLA 2024

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Building Mulitilingual Libraries MSLA 2024 - March 11, 11_11 AM

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April 3, 2024 Helpful Tips and Tricks For An Awesome Year In Your Library and School 

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Tips, Tricks and Ideas For An Awesome Year In Your Library and School

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Edelweiss, by Above the Treeline, is the book industry's platform to sell, discover, and order new titles.

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KidLit TV - Explore the world of children's literature.

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Welcome to the award-winning KidLit TV! Go on an adventure in a world of stories with us! We're a trusted resource for parents, teachers, and librarians. KidLit TV is a winner of the Parents' Choice Gold Award and one of the American Library Association's Great Websites For Kids.

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Listen to this post as a podcast:
If no one has ever encouraged, pushed, or insisted that you build more higher-order thinking into your students' learning, it's possible you've been teaching in a cave.

Higher-level thinking has been a core value of educators for decades. We learned about it in college. We hear about it in PD. We're even evaluated on whether we're cultivating it in our classrooms: Charlotte Danielson's Framework for Teaching, a widely used instrument to measure teacher effectiveness, describes a distinguished teacher as one whose "lesson activities require high-level student thinking" (Domain 3, Component 3c).

All that aside, most teachers would say they want their students to be thinking on higher levels, that if our teaching kept students at the lowest level of Bloom's Taxonomy -simply recalling information-we wouldn't be doing a very good job as teachers.

And yet, when it's time to plan the learning experiences that would have our students operating on higher levels, some of us come up short. We may not have a huge arsenal of ready-to-use, high-level tasks to give our students. Instead, we often default to having students identify and define terms, label things, or answer basic recall questions. It's what we know. And we have so much content to cover, many of us might feel that there really isn't time for the higher-level stuff anyway.

If this sounds anything like you, I have a suggestion: Try a curation assignment.

When a museum director curates, she collects artifacts, organizes them into groups, sifts out everything but the most interesting or highest-quality items, and shares those collections with the world. When an editor curates poems for an anthology, he does the same thing.

The process can be applied to all kinds of content: A person could curate a collection of articles, images, videos, audio clips, essays, or a mixture of items that all share some common attribute or theme. When we are presented with a list of the "Top 10" anything or the "Best of" something else, what we're looking at is a curated list. Those playlists we find on Spotify and Pandora? Curation. "Recommended for You" videos on Netflix? Curation. The news? Yep, it's curated. In an age where information is ubiquitous and impossible to consume all at once, we rely on the curation skills of others to help us process it all.

In an educational setting, curation has a ton of potential as an academic task. Sure, we're used to assigning research projects, where students have to gather resources, pull out information, and synthesize that information into a cohesive piece of informational or argumentative writing. This kind of work is challenging and important, and it should remain as a core assignment throughout school, but how often do we make the collection of resources itself a stand-alone assignment?

That's what I'm proposing we do. Curation projects have the potential to put our students to work at three different levels of Bloom's Taxonomy:

Understand, where we exemplify and classify information

Analyze, where we distinguish relevant from irrelevant information and organize it in a way that makes sense

Evaluate, where we judge the quality of an item based on a set of criteria

If we go beyond Bloom's and consider the Framework for 21st Century Learning put out by the Partnership for 21st Century Learning, we'll see that critical thinking is one of the 4C's listed as an essential skill for students in the modern age (along with communication, creativity, and collaboration) and a well-designed curation project requires a ton of critical thinking.

So what would a curation project look like?

Suppose you're teaching U.S. history, and you want students to understand that our constitution is designed to be interpreted by the courts, and that many people interpret it differently. So you create a curation assignment that focuses on the first amendment.

The task: Students must choose ONE of the rights given to us by the first amendment. To illustrate the different ways people interpret that right, students must curate a collection of online articles, images, or videos that represent a range of beliefs about how far that right extends. For each example they include, they must summarize the point of view being presented and include a direct quote where the author or speaker's biases or beliefs can be inferred.

Here is what one submission might look like, created on a platform called eLink (click here to view the whole thing).

Because they are finding examples of a given concept and doing some summarizing, students in this task are working at the Understand level of Bloom's. But they are also identifying where the author or speaker is showing bias or purpose, which is on the Analyze level.

Ranked Collection: Students collect a set of articles, images, videos, or even whole websites based on a set of criteria (the most "literary" song lyrics of the year, or the world's weirdest animal adaptations) and rank them in some kind of order, justifying their rankings with a written explanation or even a student-created scoring system. Each student could be tasked with creating their own collection or the whole class could be given a pre-selected collection to rank. This would be followed by a discussion where students could compare and justify their rankings with those of other students. (Bloom's Level: Evaluate)

Shared Trait Collection: This would house items that have one thing in common. This kind of task would work in so many different subject areas. Students could collect articles where our government's system of checks and balances are illustrated, images of paintings in the impressionist style, videos that play songs whose titles use metaphors. It could even be used as part of a lesson using the concept attainment strategy, where students develop an understanding of a complex idea by studying "yes" and "no" examples of it. By curating their own examples after studying the concept, they will further developing their understanding of it. (Bloom's Level: Understand).

Literature Review: As the first step of a research project, students could collect relevant resources and provide a brief summary of each one, explaining how it contributes to the current understanding of their topic. As high school students prepare for college, having a basic understanding of what a literature review is and the purpose it serves-even if they are only doing it with articles written outside of academia-will help them take on the real thing with confidence when that time comes. (Bloom's Levels: Understand for the summarization, Analyze for the sorting and selecting of relevant material)

Video Playlist: YouTube is bursting at the seams with videos, but how much of it is actually good? Have students take chunks of your content and curate the best videos out there to help other students understand those concepts. In the item's description, have students explain why they chose it and what other students will get out of it. (Bloom's Levels: Understand for summarization, Evaluate for judging the quality of the videos)

Museum Exhibit: Task students with curating a digital "exhibit" around a given theme. The more complex the theme, the more challenging the task. For example, they might be asked to assume the role of a museum owner who hates bees, and wants to create a museum exhibit that teaches visitors all about the dangers of bees. This kind of work would help students understand that even institutions that might not own up to any particular bias, like museums, news agencies, or tv stations, will still be influenced by their own biases in how they curate their material. (Bloom's Level: Understand if it's just a collection of representative elements, Create if they are truly creating a new "whole" with their collection, such as representing a particular point of view with their choices)

Real World Examples: Take any content you're teaching (geometry principles, grammar errors, science or social studies concepts) and have students find images or articles that illustrate that concept in the real world. (Bloom's level: Understand).

Favorites: Have students pull together a personal collection of favorite articles, videos, or other resources for a Genius Hour, advisory, or other more personalized project: A collection of items to cheer you up, stuff to boost your confidence, etc. Although this could easily slide outside the realm of academic work, it would make a nice activity to help students get to know each other at the start of a school year or give them practice with the process of curation before applying it to more content-related topics.

Most of the above activities would not be very academically challenging if students merely had to assemble the collection. Adding a thoughtfully designed written component is what will make students do their best thinking in a curation assignment.

The simplest way to do this is to require a written commentary with each item in the collection. Think about those little signs that accompany every item at a museum: Usually when you walk into an exhibit, you find a sign or display that explains the exhibit as a whole, then smaller individual placards that help visitors understand the significance of each piece in the collection. When students put their own collections together, they should do the same thing.

Be specific about what you'd like to see in these short writing pieces, and include those requirements in your rubric. Then go a step further and create a model of your own, so students have a very clear picture of how the final product should look. Because this is a genre they have probably not done any work in before, they will do much better with this kind of scaffolding. Doing the assignment yourself first-a practice I like to call dogfooding -will also help you identify flaws in the assignment that can be tweaked before you hand it over to students.

It's certainly possible for students to collect resources through non-digital means, by reading books in the library or curating physical artifacts or objects, but doing a curation project digitally allows for media-rich collections that can be found and assembled in a fraction of the time. And if you have students curating in groups, using digital tools will allow them to collaborate from home without having to meet in person.

Here are a few curation tools that would work beautifully for this kind of project:

Elink is the tool featured in the sample project above. Of all the tools suggested here, this one is the simplest. You collect your links, write descriptions, and end up with a single unique web page that you can share with anyone.

Pinterest is probably the most popular curation tool out there. If your students are already using Pinterest, or you're willing to get them started, you could have them create a Pinterest board as a curation assignment.

Symbaloo allows users to create "webmixes," boards of icons that each lead to different URLs. Although it would be possible to create a curated collection with Symbaloo, it doesn't allow for the same amount of writing that some other tools do, so you would need to have students do their writing on a separate document.

Diigo is a good choice for a more text-driven project, like a literature review or a general collection of resources at the beginning stages of a research project, where images aren't necessarily required. Diigo offers lots of space to take notes about every item in a collection, but it doesn't have user-friendly supports for images or other media.

I'm so excited about all the different ways we can use curation in the classroom, and I would love to hear your ideas as well. Please share them in the comments below. If you have links to student samples, share those, too! ♦

Curation is just one of the modules in JumpStart, my new online technology course created especially for educators. I thought carefully about what specific skills teachers need to make the most of classroom tech, chose 9 of them, and designed hands-on projects that will show you exactly how to use them.

If you're ready to take your tech skills from so-so to rock solid, this course will change everything for you.

Learn more about the course here.

There's more where this came from.
Join my mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration-in quick, bite-sized packages-all geared toward making your teaching more effective and fun. To thank you, I'll send you a free copy of my e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half. I look forward to getting to know you better!

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To Boost Higher-Order Thinking, Try Curation

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A digital curation project is a fast way to engage critical thinking in any content area. Here's how it works.

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Let’s Celebrate Dot Day 2023 By Connecting Here and Making Our Mark On The World!

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A library and education blog and place to be heard through creating, technology, connecting, reading, collaborating and noise.

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I'm a middle school librarian and I just got the latest issue of Booklist in the mail. I'm looking for books for my middle school readers. I search through all of the reviews for youth and find almost no titles for seventh and eighth graders-not in Middle Readers or Older Readers or Youth Nonfiction or Graphic Novels. Almost every book for Older Readers is recommended for grades 9-12, and every single book for Middle Readers has a lower age range of grade 3, 4, or 5. Surely publishers don't think that middle schoolers have the same interests and intellectual capacity as 8-10 year olds? Are there really no books being published for middle school students? Can this be true?

I would like to say that this Booklist selection is not typical, but it is absolutely the norm. YA books are being written for older teens and even for adults, and middle grade books are almost all written with third and fourth graders as the lower age range. This issue was well documented by Karen Jensen in the Teen Librarian Toolbox blog post of October 18, 2023, A Treatise on the State of Middle Grade and Young Adult Publishing Today. (Read it now if you haven't already -it is brilliant.) I have been ruminating about this issue for years and as I read this blog post I was shouting in agreement. We need shorter books! We need more paperbacks! Give us horror and romance for teens! Give us books for 13-15 year olds! I'm quoting Karen Jensen now because I can't say it better- "Readers ages 13 through 15 are left in a book wasteland wondering where and what they should be reading. We are missing an entire age group in the current trends and that will have long lasting implications for everyone."
In 2019 Angie Thomas tweeted this:

In spite of all the commenters asking Angie Thomas to write for middle schoolers, she wrote her fantasy for 8-12 year olds. I don't know why she did it, but I'm pretty sure it was what the publishers demanded of her. And it's a shame because middle schoolers lost out.

I understand that publishing decisions are largely based on profits rather than the needs of readers. And I know that authors want to be published, so they write what publishers will publish. And I am aware that the publishing industry has set up two categories of books-middle grade and young adult. And both of those categories have wonderful books-but they leave out a significant group of kids who desperately need books to make them readers and keep them reading. So I am here on my knees begging the publishing industry not only to publish books for younger teenagers, but to create a new publishing category that encompasses that unrecognized in-between age.
Since this is a manifesto, here are my demands:

Call these 12-15 year old kids what you want (Middle School is as good a term as any in my opinion, or Mid Teen could work), but under no circumstances should you ever, EVER use the word tween. Just don't.

Give us complexity, action, and edginess. The world is a perilous place and middle schoolers know that. Adults can be evil, and there won't always be happy endings. Just keep the explicit language and sexual scenes dialed down.

1. Write about kids in 8th, 9th and 10th grades. These are the missing years.

2. Don't include books in this category that would be considered appropriate for third or fourth graders. A book that's developmentally right for a nine-year-old is not right for a middle schooler. Yes, I know that younger teens are all over the map maturity-wise, and they can and will still read middle grade books, but this new category of books should be noticeably different.

1. Give us murder mysteries. Yes, murder. I can't tell you how many middle schoolers want to read actual murder mysteries and how few there are for this age range. Also horror. They want to be scared. We are competing with actual horror movies. Children are watching Dahmer on Netflix. Wouldn't a scary book be better for them? Students literally ask me for books about serial killers multiple times a year. Scary books will sell, I promise you. Just write them for a slightly younger audience. There is money to be made in murder mysteries for middle schoolers.

2. Romance please. Give us all kinds of love stories-and make the protagonists 14, 15, and 16 years old.

3. We need compelling books that are shorter than the average novel being published today. Many middle schoolers would never ever pick up a book over 200 pages long. Added bonus, shorter books weigh less. Do you know how heavy their backpacks are? Let's make it easier to bring a book to school. (Side note: the kids who carry books around these days tend to be manga readers-and those books weigh next to nothing.)

1. Humor. Here is another money-making tip for someone: write funny books for 13-15 year olds. They are still devouring Wimpy Kid books, and bless Jeff Kinney for continuing to write them. But someone could make millions if they would write the next level up of funny books that would keep eighth and ninth boys reading and laughing.

2. Keep the diversity coming. In my 25 years as a school librarian I have witnessed a tidal wave of diversity and it is grand. My students speak 37 languages and practice many religions and claim a variety of gender identities-and I am proud to say that they are all represented in my book collection in a way that was not possible even 10 years ago. Thank you to publishers, authors, and the We Need Diverse Books movement for this.

As you create this new publishing category, look at these tried-and-true middle school gems for inspiration-they are a little bit older and not as diverse as today's books would be-but they embody what we need in books for 12-15 year olds.
Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds-this book is revelatory to seventh and eighth grade boys. A book that deals head-on with gun violence? A story about a 15-year-old kid? A book that looks big but that I can read in an hour? Yes please.

Unwind by Neal Shusterman-I can make 7th graders fight over this book when I tell them that society has decided to give undeserving teenagers' body parts to more deserving people. And parents can send their kids to be "unwound" when they turn 13! Neal Shusterman's book about young teenagers on the run from a dysfunctional society is the perfect middle school book (and one that you would NEVER give to a third grader). See also Scythe by Neal Shusterman. An absolutely mind-blowing series for seventh and eighth graders.

Nyxia by Scott Reintgen-this sci fi trilogy about desperate teenagers on a spaceship being exploited by greedy adults has it all. It's gritty and original and shocking (and beloved by my students). It's been described as the perfect gateway to science fiction for middle schoolers as young as sixth grade, and I totally agree.

Where would we be without Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson? I don't recommend this book for sixth and seventh graders, but it's absolutely essential reading for eighth and ninth graders. And the new graphic novel version is stunning and has brought Melinda's story of sexual assault and recovery to a new generation. Melinda is just starting high school in this story-she is 14 years old. I don't think her story could find a place in today's publishing landscape and that is sad.

I can't list quintessential middle school books without a shout-out to Gordon Korman. He's been publishing middle school novels since he was a seventh grader-and he consistently writes about seventh and eighth grade protagonists. He's a master of humor, and he has a wide range. Linked is a nuanced mystery with multiple protagonists and a powerful anti-hate message. Restart has an engaging premise-an eighth grade football player falls off of a roof and loses his memory. When confronted with the hard truth that he used to be a bully, he has a chance to decide what kind of person he wants to be. And isn't identity development the essential journey of a middle schooler?

I'm going to summarize here: Give us humor, murder, romance, and shorter books. And also surprise us with mind-blowing speculative stories (see Scythe and Unwind and Nyxia above). Leave in all the amazing diversity that we have been enjoying in recent years. Leave out some of the language and the spicy scenes and maybe don't make all the teenagers attend parties where people are getting drunk. Come up with a catchy name and make it a new publishing category. Encourage authors to write for 12-15 year olds. Publish compelling books. Watch the books fly off the shelves and feel good about yourselves because you want what's best for kids and you saved literacy for a generation!

I will close with the words of Karen Jensen's treatise because they deserve repeating: "At the end of the day, it has to be about the youth themselves. Not what adults want or think is best. Not what legislators who don't parent or sit with or talk to youth think kids need. Not administrators or publishers or book sellers who only think about test scores and bottom lines. It has to be about the youth...If, at the end of the day, it's not about the youth, they are never going to read or develop a love of reading. Because they always know when we're lying or not truly understanding or thinking about them. They always know when we aren't really thinking about them. Always."
Meet the author

Marcia Kochel has worked as a school librarian for 25 years in grades K-12, including 23 years working with middle schoolers. Druid Hills Middle School in Decatur, Georgia is her current school, and her claim to fame is hosting an Indigo Girls concert to raise funds for their library renovation. She was the Georgia Library Media Specialist of the Year in 2021 and was awarded the ALA I Love My Librarian Award in 2017. She is currently serving on the Robert F. Sibert Informational Book award committee.

Twitter: @marciakochel

Instagram: dhmslibrary

Ms. Kochel's Book Blog: https://omsbookblog.blogspot.com/

Filed under: Guest Post, Uncategorized

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A Manifesto in Support of Middle School Books, a guest post by Marcia Kochel

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I am here on my knees begging the publishing industry not only to publish books for younger teenagers, but to create a new publishing category that encompasses that unrecognized in-between age.

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AI and the Re-Search Process - MSLA 2025

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Check out this Presentation designed by Molly Wong.

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Getting Personal: Personalizing Learning with Digital Badges

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Storytime on Steriods | Windows, Mirrors, Doors Lens

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Storytime on Steriods | Windows, Mirrors, Doors Lens

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Killer Underwear Invasion_! Adapting Media Literacy in an Age of Misinformation (MSLA 2025)

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Research in the Elementary Library: Skills, Projects, Lessons Learned and more! Alex Caram

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Amazingly Simple Graphic Design Software - Canva