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Facilitate the library end of research projects

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Facilitate the library end of research projects

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Support inquiry based learning

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The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects an 18.7 percent growth in employment in science and engineering occupations between 2010 and 2020, compared to 14.3 percent for all occupations (NSF 2019). Due to the need for STEM-skilled workers, the U.S. government is pushing initiatives to increase the number of students studying in STEM fields during secondary and post-secondary education (Scott 2012). In 2018, the U.S. Department of Education earmarked $279 million in discretionary grant funds for high-quality STEM education.

Yet, despite the attention being placed on STEM education, schools are faced with limited instructional time and a lack of resources for teaching STEM subjects. Enter the school librarian! The school librarian is an expert in curating resources, designing inquiry-based instruction, and demonstrating technology tools for communicating learning.

School librarians are charged by AASL Standards Framework for Learners to engage students in the inquiry process where they formulate questions, conduct investigations, apply information and media to learning, and generate products that illustrate learning. STEM instruction and inquiry-based learning go hand in hand. Research suggests that inquiry-based science instruction enhances students' understanding of concepts in science and increases students' interest in the field (Hoftsein and Mamlok-Naaman 2007). Inquiry-based learning experiences help students develop critical thinking skills and give them a sense of accomplishment.

Not sure how to engage students in scientific inquiry? Not a problem. The 5E Inquiry-Based Instructional Model can serve as your guide during the design and implementation of STEM instruction.

The 5E Inquiry-Based Instructional Model is based upon cognitive psychology, constructivist theory to learning, and best practices in STEM instruction (Bybee and Landes 1990). The 5E learning cycle leads students through five phases: Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, and Evaluate. The 5E Instructional Model brings coherence to different teaching strategies, provides connections among educational activities, and helps science teachers make decisions about interactions with students (BSCS 2019). Compared to traditional teaching models, the 5E learning cycle results in greater benefits concerning students' ability for scientific inquiry (Bybee 2009).

Engagement
In this first phase of the 5E Learning Cycle, the teacher gauges student prior knowledge and/or identifies possible misconceptions (Duran and Duran 2004). This student-centered phase should create a desire to learn more about the forthcoming topic. According to Duran and Duran (2004), the engagement phase is not intended for the teacher to lecture, define terms, or provide explanations.

Exploration
The exploration phase provides students with a common base of hands-on activities. These activities will help students use prior knowledge to inquire, generate new ideas, and conduct a preliminary investigation (Bybee 2009). This phase of the learning cycle usually incorporates the main inquiry-based experience, which nurtures students' understanding (Duran and Duran 2004).

Explanation
The third stage in the instructional model is more teacher-directed and guided by the students' experience in the previous phase (Duran and Duran 2004). Students explain their understanding of concepts and the teacher corrects students' misconceptions (Bybee 2009). During this phase the teacher may provide formal definitions, notes, and labels (Duran and Duran 2004).

Elaboration
In the elaboration phase students are encouraged to apply their new understanding of concepts, while reinforcing new skills (Duran and Duran, 2004). According to Duran and Duran (2004), "Students may conduct additional investigations, develop products, share information and ideas, or apply their knowledge and skills to other disciplines" (p. 53). This stage in the learning cycle presents opportunities for the teacher to integrate science with other content areas (Duran and Duran 2004).

Evaluation
According to Bybee (2009), "The evaluation phase encourages students to assess their understanding and abilities and provides opportunities for teachers to evaluate student progress toward achieving the educational objectives" (p. 5). Formative and summative assessment are appropriate in this phase. Duran and Duran (2004) provides a list of non-traditional forms of assessment that are appropriate for evaluating students' understanding and performance: portfolios, performance-based assessment, concept maps, physical models, and journal logs.

According to Williams (2019):

A focus on content at the expense of process in STEM education (and all education, really) will inhibit student learning, because the important learning occurs through the activities of the process. When the learning of content is necessary so it can be applied, through an activity to a situation, such content is perceived as relevant and so will be learnt more effectively and efficiently. (p. 3)

The 5E Instructional Model serves as a flexible learning cycle that assists curriculum developers, classroom teachers, and school librarians with the creation of STEM lessons that illustrate constructivist, reform-based, best teaching practices.
Learn more about the 5E Instructional Model at BSCS.org. Works Cited
BSCS Science Learning. 2019. "BSCS 5E Instructional Model." Retrieved from https://bscs.org/bscs-5e-instructional-model/

Bybee, R. W., and Landes, N. M. 1990. "Science for Life & Living: An Elementary School Science Program from Biological Sciences Curriculum Study." The American Biology Teacher 52(2): 92-98.

Bybee, R. W. 2009. The BSCS 5E Instructional Model and 21st Century Skills. Colorado Springs, CO: BSCS.

Chitman-Booker, L., and Kopp, K. 2013. The 5Es of Inquiry-Based Science. Teacher Created Materials.

Duran, L. B., and Duran, E. 2004. "The 5E Instructional Model: A Learning Cycle Approach for Inquiry-Based Science Teaching." Science Education Review 3(2): 49-58.

Hofstein, A., and Mamlok-Naaman, R. 2007. "The Laboratory in Science Education: The State of the Art." Chemistry Education Research and Practice 8(2): 105-107.

National Science Foundation. 2019. "What Does the S&E Job Market Look Like for U.S. Graduates?" Retrieved from www.nsf.gov

Scott, C. 2012. "An Investigation of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Focused High Schools in the U.S." Journal of STEM Education: Innovations & Research 13(5): 30-39.

Williams, P. 2019. "The Principles of Teaching and Learning in STEM Education." AIP Conference Proceedings 2081(1).

Categories: Advocacy/Leadership, Blog Topics, Makerspaces/Learning Commons, STEM/STEAM, Student Engagement/ Teaching Models, Technology

Tags: 5E Model, best practices, constructivist learning theory, future ready librarians, hands-on learning, inquiry, inquiry-based learning, inquiry-based teaching, Instruction, learning cycle, stem

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The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects an 18.7 percent growth in employment in science and engineering occupations between 2010 and 2020, compared to 14.3 percent for all occupations (NSF 2019). Due to the need for STEM-skilled workers, the U.S.

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Advocacy is not optional

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School libraries are often a refuge for learners who feel overwhelmed, need a safe space, or just want somewhere to go. At the start of the school year many are feeling stress and anxiety about the unknown of what the school year holds so I always try to make a point to do as many SEL activities to reduce stress for our learners across campus. By having SEL activities readily available in makerspaces, passive programming, active programming, or even lessons in collaboration with the counselors or teachers, the culture of the school library will grow. After the past few stressful years that we all have been going through, providing these activities is needed for all students, staff, and even yourself.

I want to state that I always work with my school counselors on any of the SEL activities I do. School counselors are experts in this field and consulting them has always been a great asset because they can give insight and guidance on these topics. Plus, reaching out to the school counselors is a great way to open up the chance to collaborate. I know that the school counselors on my campus have incredible resources and together we are able to make an impact on our campus.

For me, these are a few of my favorite SEL activities to do with learners to build school library culture. All of the activities that I do are cost-effective and easy to administer in any setting.

Bullet Journaling- For this activity, I have the learners bring their journals but I supply the markers, pens, washi tape, etc for them to decorate. Either I, or the school counselors, talk about the benefits of bullet journaling to reduce stress, focus on the good and to prioritize what is important.

Watercoloring - Watercoloring is a great tool to allow learners to be creative and relieve anxiety. For this activity, I get long sheets of white butcher paper from the workroom and grab a variety of different watercolor paints. I just lay everything out on tables and allow learners to be as creative as possible. I love doing this because it creates community art that all the learners work on together and could be displayed.

Speed Friending - Speed Friending is just like Speed Dating but for friends! I set this up where each learner is given a number and a set of questions. They then rotate through and meet different people who they might not have known or been friends with before. The questions guide conversation if they are unsure what to say. This allows students to meet new people and make connections with people they might not have known before.

Origami Worry Boxes - Origami Worry Boxes are another SEL activity that I love to collaborate with the school counselors. I usually do this activity on National Origami Day, November 11. For this, I just teach how to make an origami box and either I or the school counselors talk about how worry boxes work. Worry boxes are the perfect way to write down your worries and put them in the box and forget about them.

Coloring Pages - Coloring pages are a great way to just allow learners to decompress and shift their focus to something else. One of my favorite things to do with coloring pages is to have coloring pages based on the different holidays or themes of the month. For example, in September, I have Loteria coloring pages.

Write down, ripe up, and throw away - This SEL activity is a fun way to have learners forget what they are worried, anxious, or stressed about. Learners write down what is bothering them, ripe up the paper, and throw it away. The school counselors and I talk about how this can help relieve what is bothering them and how this can help them whenever they need it.

All of these activities are simple, cost-effective, and easy to implement in any sort of library format but have a major impact on the learners and the school library culture. Having activities like these provided will create a safe haven and a safe environment for learners.

Author: Jessica Fitzpatrick

Jessica Fitzpatrick is a high school librarian in Houston and is in her tenth year of education. She holds a Bachelor of Science in education from the University of Houston and a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of North Texas. She is a 2022 Library Journal Mover & Shaker, 2022 TLA MVP, an AASL Inspire Special Event Grant recipient, 2022 YALSA's MAE Award for Best Literature Program for Teens, the 2022 TLA Branding Award Winner for Reading Program, the 2020 TLA Branding Award Winner for Community Engagement, YALS article contributor, and on the TAYSHAS Reading Committee. She enjoys running, reading, and spending time with her two daughters and husband. You can follow her on Instagram at @librarian_fitz and on Twitter at @librarianfitz .

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: AASL, collaboration, library programming, makerspace, programming ideas, school librarians, school libraries, SEL

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Different types of SEL Activities to Build School Library Culture -

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School libraries are often a refuge for learners who feel overwhelmed, need a safe space, or just want somewhere to go.

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What Is a Makerspace?

So what IS a makerspace? "A makerspace is a physical location where people gather to share resources and knowledge, work on projects, network, and build. Makerspaces provide tools and space in a community environment . . ." (7 Things You Should Know About ... Makerspaces™) Makerspaces allow students a place to collaborate, "fail forward" and develop their passions and may be high tech with 3D printers and wearable technology, medium tech with raspberry pi and robotics or low tech with origami or design projects with recycled materials.

5 Secrets of Successful Makerspaces (PDF article)

Funding a Makerspace Through Grants

Funding a Makerspace Through Partnerships

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New York City School Library System: Innovation Makerspaces: Home

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Skip to Main Content It looks like you're using Internet Explorer 11 or older. This website works best with modern browsers such as the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. If you continue with this browser, you may see unexpected results. So what IS a makerspace?

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Ultimate Makerspace Guide For Schools and Libraries | Makerspaces.com

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101+ Makerspace Resources For Starting and Running a Maker Education or STEM Program. Learn about Makerspaces,Projects, Ideas, Materials, Tools and more

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Evaluating patrons and community through data

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Evaluating patrons and community through data

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Its that time of year again! That's right, its time for the "end of year reports" (EOY Report). EOY reports are a good advocacy strategy that librarians often use to present the many ways the library served its students during the school year. Its a way to show the efforts and the outcomes of those efforts. Basically its one way to wrap the year up and celebrate some of the ways a successful school library benefited its students that year.

**Just to be clear its important that one EOY report every 12 months not be your only advocacy effort each year. Advocacy is more of a continual and ongoing (and constant) thing we should be working on all year, because, sadly, many people still don't really understand how modern school libraries benefit the students and therefore it is very important that we are doing our best to try to educate our communities on the benefits.

EOY reports are also a good tradition because it forces the librarian to take a pause and to reflect on the year. To take a moment to "use the science in Library Science" by compiling, analyzing, synthesizing, and presenting on the actual data. It is so important that we are making data driven decisions, that we are keeping our student's actual needs as the driving force for our programs, policies, resource curation, etc. Things can get chaotic and fast paced in our profession, and it can be hard to make sure we are not getting swept along with the tide of trends and personal interests, so its critical that we pause to reflect on and analyze the data. That we take time to pull as many reports as we can and to explore as much of the info as we can so that we can try to keep a clear picture of what's working, what we should try next, what isn't working or might need to be shifted or tweaked, etc. Sitting down with your data and synthesizing it into an EOY report really helps to keep our priorities in order, to ensure we are keeping those actual demonstrated student needs and interests as our driving forces. And it helps give us a good sense of what we might want to focus on during the upcoming school year.

In this post I'll share some info on which reports I run in Destiny each year to gather my EOY report data, and will try to provide some examples of how I use or interpret the data.

How Do I Pull the Data?

The following is a list of the Destiny Reports that I run and how I use them to collect and compile my EOY data.

Collection Statistics - Historical - Examine circulation statistics for a particular timeframe.

This is the report you use to run more comprehensive circ data. It allows you to limit or organize by time frame as well as copy category, resource list, call number prefix, or circulation type. It also lets you see results in PDF or excel.

I use this report to see how many circulations each genre gets. Because I use "copy category" to designate genre in my catalog, it allows me to run the circ data by genre via the copy category. This is why I highly recommend using not only sublocation but ALSO copy category to designate genre if you are generified.

I like to see which genres circulate the most as that helps me know what's popular and that in turn helps inform my purchasing decisions in future.

Collection Statistics - Summary - Examine current circulation, age, and value statistics.
Cannot be run between 8:00 AM and 3:00 PM (Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri).

This is the really in depth stats report, usually used to help inform weeding decisions. I don't tend to run this one for EOY report info but I do use it to help inform weeding.

Hold Statistics - Identify titles in high demand based on the holds placed.

This report shows you which titles received the most holds in a time period. This can help inform you of some titles that you may want to purchase additional copies of so that hold lists don't need to be as long.

Library Statistics - View a snapshot of the state of the library plus statistics.

This is the report I use most often throughout the year, it provides a "quick glance" at your library statistics such as # of books checked out, # of items overdue, how many materials the library has, how many patrons, how many fines are due, etc.

I usually use this to run quick looks at total circulation in a given time period. For example if we have all of 9th grade into the library on a certain day for book buffets I might go to this report at the end of the day and click "see todays checkouts" so I could get a quick glance at how many books circulated during the day as a result of the book buffets!

I sometimes will then do a quick audit on the titles checked out that day to see if our circulations are inclusive of books with diverse voices and perspectives.

I also use this report to check the overall circulation for the year and comparing it to years previous.

Search Statistics - Examine how patrons are searching the library.

This report is really neat, you can check to see which books/authors/things patrons typed into the destiny search bar most frequently.

You can sort this in a few different ways:
-Filter by "searches with results": If you want to see which books you have in the collection that were searched for more often. This informs you on popularity of titles, its good additional info to circ data because it shows which books patrons are most often searching specifically, rather than finding spontaneously through browsing.

-filter by "searches without results": this is a neat one to run because it will show you which things patrons typed into the search box to look for but which had no results. There are two different situations that crop up here:

-They spelled everything correctly but there were no results because your library does not have the item. This data can help indicate to you some items you might want to purchase. If a certain book or author is being searched for frequently but you don't have it, perhaps that is a good indication there is enough demand for the book to buy it!

-They spelled something wrong or called it the wrong thing so that even though you do own the item they searched for it didnt show up in the results due to the misspelling: This is REALLY helpful, because you can use this info to add keywords to the item records so that the record WILL show up when they search the incorrect way. So, if you see a trend where a lot of people are searching for something one way, you may want to add that term to the book record.

For example, many of my students search for "Steven King" instead of "Stephen King." When they search it with the incorrect spelling our catalog comes back with "no results" because the catalog does not know they mean "stephen king." So I went into the stephen king records and added "steven king" into the marc records as an alternate name. Now when they search "steven king" the books by "stephen king" will show up! Its all about removing barriers of access where we find them. Another example is if they search for something like "the turn away study" it won't show up because the book is actually called "the turnaway study." So it can be really helpful to check the search statistics each year to keep up to date on some of the common mis-typed searches and add those terms to the marc records as "varying form" so when people use the mis-typed search it will still bring them to the item they are trying to find.

Top Homerooms/Grades - View a list of the homerooms or grade levels with the most circulations.

This report allows you to sort circulation data by grade level of homeroom. I use this one to see which grade level checked out the most books in a year.

Top Patrons - View a list of the patrons with the most circulations.

This report lets you see which specific students had the most circulations in a given time period. I don't publish that information because of student privacy, of course, but I do check and I'll include something in my EOY report to indicate how many books our top patron checked out (but I do not mention the top patrons name or any identifying info).

Top/Bottom Titles - View a list of the titles with the most or least circulations

This search lets you see which titles circulated the most or the least during a certain time period. I like to run this near the end of the year and I like to run it multiple times for different areas of the collection as this report allows you to run it by "total collection" OR to filter it by sublocation. So if you have your genres or sections set as sublocations you'll be able to quickly see which books in each section were most popular!

So I'll check the top 25 circulated Fiction titles, then limit it to nonfiction to see which 25 nonfiction circulated the most, then I'll also do the same for memoirs, graphic novel, manga, and each genre section.

I then like to create little displays (physical and digital via tiktok) to show off our "Top 10 most circulated X books for the year!"

Title & Copy List - List your collection with optional copy detail.

This is another report I run a lot. I often use this report to help inform weeding but in particular, at the end of the year, I run this report after I've completed inventory so I can see which books are "lost." I like to run this report near the end of the year so I can go through it and make note of which of the lost books I'd like to purchase replacements for in the upcoming school year. I also use this report more generally to assist with weeding because it allows me to run the report as an excel sheet and to include both circ stats AND copy category info. Since I use copy category to identify the book's genre, it is helpful for me to have a report like this that lets me filter and sort by copy category for weeding.

How Do I Present the Data?

Using a multi-pronged approach, because I know that if I only sent this out via email newsletter not that many people would see it. If we librarians are honest with ourselves we must admit that not that many people open and read our email blasts. It is understandable, as everyone in education is so profoundly overworked and overwhelmed, I can't blame many for ignoring one more email. Nevertheless I do want people to see our incredible data and advocacy, so it takes a multi-pronged approach to get the info out there as widely as possible. Here are a few things I do:

Create an infographic

Share infographic via email blast to all staff

Share infographic via Canvas (our LMS) blast to all students

Ask Admin to share infographic in their EOY newsletter to families

Create a physical poster
I like to make my infographic into a large physical poster (using rasterbator.net) & place it outside the library's entrance so anyone passing by can see it

Create instagram-able versions of the infographic
for sharing on our library socials. You can see the social media campaign posts in the slideshow and instagram screenshot below

Create Physical and Digital Book Displays for top circulated titles

Choosing What To Present?

When deciding which information to include in your EOY report, there is not "one size fits all" suggestion. And it doesn't need to be the same stuff each year, you can have fun with this and play around. For example, I don't usually make my EOY reports so heavily book focused. Usually I include more info on instructional collaborations, programming, grants, and other things. But this year our circulation was so outrageously high, truly so SO impressive that I decided to make this year's EOY report all about the books and reading. You can see my previous EOY reports below if you'd like more ideas on the kind of info you might choose to include on an EOY report. As you can see, there really is no limit to what kind of info you might present! I tend to change mine up each year to keep it fresh!

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EOY Reports: Which Reports to Run & Why?

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Its that time of year again! That's right, its time for the "end of year reports" (EOY Report). EOY reports are a good advocacy strategy that librarians often use to present the many ways the library served its students during the school year. Its a way to show the efforts and the outcomes of those...

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Thoughtful and inclusive collection development practices

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Thoughtful and inclusive collection development practices

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For more information on weeding you can see my first weeding post: "Weeding My H.S. Library"

I recently did a presentation on this topic for a school district's librarians, and it made me realize it had been a while since I'd written a blog post on weeding! Which is a shame because I love weeding! This will be a two-part blog series, and will function as a good intro to weeding, provide some rationale & weeding philosophy to consider, and in part 2 we'll cover practical tips to the actual weeding process as well as ideas for how to advocate about weeding to your community to help them understand the reason for. (If the practical tips page gets too long I may split the advocacy part into a third post instead, we'll see)

What Is Weeding

Weeding is the (continuous) process of evaluating a collection, & of removing materials that no longer meet the needs of the user community

Rationale for Weeding

People, both those within and outside of the profession, often struggle to understand the need for library weeding. This stems, I believe, largely from nostalgia and an emotional feeling that books are sacred objects which should always be preserved and protected. These are feelings often embedded pretty deep inside a lot of us, and so the removal of books can feel deeply anathema to some. However, its important to remember the purpose of the school library, and to keep that purpose at the front of our minds at all times. A school library's purpose is not to function as an archive or museum. A school library is not an archive. It is a school library, which has different purpose than an archive (not better or worse, just different.) A school library's purpose, in my opinion, is to facilitate access to the resources our current students need in order to meet their current and emerging academic, social, personal, or professional needs. Any resources that don't meet current and emerging needs probably do not need to stay in a school library, even if we personally still appreciate, love, or enjoy the resource.

A school library's purpose, in my opinion, is to facilitate access to the resources our current students need in order to meet their current and emerging academic, social, personal, or professional needs.

Thinking of a collection like its a garden can help us contextualize the need for weeding. Most people understand the harm that weeds can cause to a garden, right? And we understand why weeds need to be removed, in order to keep a garden healthy and accessible. To make sure there is enough room & resources for other things to grow. Library collections are much like that too! As time passes, the needs of our communities change, and the collection has to continuously change to keep up. There are a few different goals or incentives to weeding, let's dig into a few of the ones I think are most important.

Weeding For Currency

Moving forward from the belief that the school library collection exists to facilitate access to resources which help students meet their current and emerging academic, personal, professional, & social needs helps us to determine what various criteria to include in our weeding. Collections should be current. It is helpful to run collection analysis on publication years to find out what the average age of your collection is, and to set currency goals to work towards. There isn't really a universal standard (that I know of) for how old a collection can be, though the CREW Method provides some helpful goals per subcollection, with different recommendations for fiction and various types of nonfiction, and this really helped to give me a good starting point & context to work from. After years of weeding I eventually determined that my goal is to ensure the average age of collection generally does not fall outside of my youngest student's lifetimes. Since I teach high school students, I ideally would like to work to ensure the collection's average age falls after they entered middle school. I think its really important that the collection reflects their lived experiences and the world they are growing up within. The world changes so drastically and quickly now that this makes collection development more complicated but more important. Weeding out old, outdated, no longer needed items is critical to make room for new, relevant resources.

Weeding For Equity

Weeding for equity, in my mind, is all about keeping an eye on the collection and continuously evaluating it through a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Antiracist lens. We want students to have equitable access to a well stocked library, but we also want the representation they find on the shelves to be affirming, reflective, representative, and, hopefully, not harmful to any of our students, especially students who are members of our most vulnerable, underserved, & systemically excluded communities.

Developing a collection which meets these goals requires continuous weeding, it requires that we be evaluating the resources on the shelves, always on the lookout items that promote:

Harmful stereotypes (via text or imagery)

Racist, queerphobic, misogynistic, xenophobic, ableist & other harmful ideologies

Outdated & harmful terminology

Inauthentic voice / harmful representation

Misinformation, Disinformation, Superseded information, etc

When we find resources with harmful content, we need to evaluate them carefully to determine whether they really should stay in the collection. We should be able to answer the question "why is this book staying on our library's shelf?" And the answer we can give to that question had better be really, really good. It had better be good enough to warrant any harm keeping it causes. Some answers that are not good enough, include:

"because of my personal nostalgia for it"

"because its a "classic"

"because it's always been here"

"because it feels like censorship" (weeding is not censorship)

"because I don't have funds to buy other books"

Remember, harmful representation is not better than no representation, they're both not good

Weed as needed, empty shelves are a powerful motivator to stakeholders that funding is needed, or can be used as evidence in grant or fundraising efforts

Please remember that this post is directed primarily at school librarians. I have never worked as a public librarian and therefore the weeding practices which make most sense to meet their goals is not something I can speak upon. Academic and Special/Archives Librarians likely also will have drastically different collection goals and needs, so this advice may not pertain well to those libraries either. But when it comes to school libraries, that I can speak to. We must remember that the children in our schools have no choice about being there. They are legally required to spend every school day in the school and therefore the library must be safe and representative for them. The library must be accessible, useful, and safe for them. Students of color deserve better than to browse shelves full of harmful anti-BIPOC portrayals, inauthentic representation, & racist stereotypes. Queer students deserve better than a library which either doesn't reflect them at all or which only reflects stories in which queer characters experience only suffering and violence as a result of their queerness (the trope commonly referred to as "Bury Your Gays.") Students who immigrated here, or who speak languages other than English deserve to see more representation beyond suffering, gang activity, or violence. White cishet students deserve better than to see only white, cishet saviorism and supremacy reflected on the shelves. All of our students deserve to access collections which affirm, uplift, and celebrate the various identities present not only in the school, but also in the global community we all share and are a part of.

Building a collection that meets current & emerging needs requires that we are constantly re-developing our collections. We cannot just be adding new resources. We cannot build a strong, safe structure atop a crumbling or flawed foundation. The foundation has to be evaluated, patched, & corrected, continuously. Sometimes the foundation may need to be decimated before the rebuilding happens. Its not enough to just add new items to the library, you have to be also evaluating what's already there and interrogating whether those things are still serving today's current & emerging needs, whether their presence allows your library to meet its goal of being safe & useable to all of your students, especially your most vulnerable students.

Weeding For Accessibility

Weeding is also an accessibility issue. The fact of the matter is that even if we did want to keep every book on the shelf forever, we would not be able to do that because of limited shelf space. We will always have a limited amount of library space, and we need to be very intentional about ensuring that each inch of space is being used to its fullest potential in allowing us to meet our goal, which is to serve current & emerging needs. This means that we need to be constantly evaluating and re-evaluating every resource, furniture, tech, etc that takes up space & critically examining whether that is the best use for that space or whether it needs to be weeded out so the space can be used for something else that may better meet current & emerging needs. Weeding is not only about evaluating books, its about evaluating all of a library's resources, policies, programs, etc.
When evaluating library resources/policies, I find it helpful to ask the following questions:

Why is this item here/what purpose does it serve?

Which specific current or emerging need does this serve?

Could the space this item takes up be better used for something else our students need?

In other words, every item should have a clear argument for why it's present in the library, and that argument should be tied directly to an explicit purpose as relates to the library's mission or goal: to facilitate access to resources students need for their current & emerging academic, personal, social, or professional needs. If you are looking at a book and can't see any connection to current curriculum, current student needs, & it isn't circulating, then it should go. The same goes for other things in the library like technology, furniture, policies, games, etc. If its not being used, doesn't meet a current/emerging need, & doesn't support curriculum then it is just taking up very valuable space that could be better used for something else that is needed.

Believe it or not, a smaller more relevant & updated collection will circulate better than a large but outdated collection. More options isn't necessarily better if the options aren't relevant and needed. Shelves that are crammed full of books no one wants or needs, or which are dusty, musty, and unattractive, are an accessibility issue. It is difficult and stressful for students if they have to comb through tons of old, irrelevant, uninteresting books to try to find one that interests them or meets their needs. Sometimes too much choice is actually a hindrance, especially if majority of choices presented aren't actually needed or wanted. Its actually best to weed regularly enough to keep the collection pretty tightly focused on current & emerging needs, so that the collection, while smaller, can be more successfully use-able and navigable to students.
Weeding out unneeded items can make room for things like:

Making room for new things like:

more stories with great BIPOC, Queer, Disabled, & other representation

books to support new or changed curricular units, electives, etc

developing specific collections to be larger, perhaps you need more space for a better mental health collection, college & career collection, manga/graphic novel collection, or whatever your needs assessments indicate are needed

Reclaiming shelf space for better, more accessible organization strategies like:

Reclaiming floor space for things like:

maker activities

social spaces

collaborative work zones

flexible furniture

green screen/recording area/other tech resources

Here are some examples of the kind of changes weeding allowed me to make to ensure our library better meets the current & emerging needs of our students. Next week I'll post part 2 of this blog series, which will cover "practical tips & tricks for the actual weeding process" as well as "advice for advocating about weeding to your community"

As seen in picture above, shifting and consolidating the collection (and weeding, of course) allows us to remove many large bookcase stacks, which reclaims floor space that can be used for comfortable seating and smaller displays, but also opens the remaining shelves up in ways that make them far more accessible. Its not as fun to browse in between dark, gloomy, towering stacks. Removing those allows more sunlight to stream into the room, more light, easier access to the books, a more pleasant browsing experience!

On left of above picture, you see our old computer lab, which is inside the library. It used to have 30 desktop computers but our school went 1:1 with ipads several years ago and eventually had to stop trying to service & maintain the old, no longer needed desktops. Since I knew the lab wouldnt be needed for desktops anymore I proposed a different use. We use it now as a flex classroom/multi-use room for things like classroom collaborations, a quiet room, club meetings, department meetings, even greenscreen recording. The old use for this space was no longer needed, so I examined it, and figured out how to reuse that space to meet other needs. On right you see what used to be a display case that had locking glass doors. These used to be used for storing our physical audiobook tapes & CDs. Since we use e-audiobooks now, I weeded the physical unused ones and repurposed the display cabinets by painting them, putting wheels on the bottom, and removing the glass doors. Now they function great as mobile board game & makerspace shelving!

As seen above, another space in the library which was being underused was our old magazine display shelves. These are on the fall facing the circ desk, so I spent years staring at these empty shelves and wishing that the shelves were not tilted at such an odd angle so that I could actually use the shelves for something. We had significant need of shelf space, I needed somewhere to develop a strong graphic novel collection and I spent 2-3 years dreaming about using that space for it. Then one day I thought to myself, "I wonder if the tilted shelves could just be removed" leaving only the flat shelves. When we examined the bookcases to see how they were attached we found that yes indeed, they could be removed from the wall and once removed you could easily see, on each side, the spot to simply unscrew the tilted shelves. I was going to just have only the tilted shelves removed, leaving the flat shelves that were underneath each tilted shelf, but then when one was disassembled I had a lightbulb moment brainstorm. I realized that having SOME tilted shelves would be great for displaying the thin, usually paperback graphic novels and comics in front-facing position. I just needed the tilt angle to be deeper than it was for the magazines. So we just re-installed some of the tilted shelves at a better angle! I left the bottom two shelves without tilt shelves so they can function as normal bookshelves, but we reinstalled the tilt shelves on the top shelf and top of bookcase. And now look at how awesome and functional the space is! It didn't cost anything but a little bit of investigation and exploration!

Above you can see how I repurposed another unused area in the library. At one point in its history the library had these bookbag cubbies for students to place their belongings in while in the library. That policy is no longer in place, as most students prefer to keep their personal items with them, and I prefer they do also. So we had these unused cubbies. Another stretch of wall space that I spent years being annoyed with because they were weird shapes instead of useable shelving (I thought). Then, last year when we began developing a manga collection I realized that the cubbies were actually great for manga, since each manga series can have its own cubby space! Regular shelves would be better, but you work with what you have and this functions pretty well at meeting a new need we had!

So you can see that weeding isn't only about evaluating the books to determine what needs to stay or go, its also about evaluating everything else too, whether its policies, furniture, programs, technology, etc. Everything should be serving current and emerging needs, and if its not, then maybe the space its taking up is better utilized on something that will meet current and emerging needs.

Concluding Part 1

To wrap up part 1 I want to share some of my library philosophy. I know there is this famous old adage in our profession that says "a truly great library should have something in it to offend everyone." (quote by Librarian Jo Goodwin). But I don't agree. Personally I don't think trying to offend everyone should be our collection development goal, nor an excuse for "both sides-ism." I think a school library's goal should be to build a library which meet's the library user community's current and emerging needs and which causes as little harm as possible to the user community, starting with our most vulnerable, underserved, and systemically excluded community members.

Because a truly great school library isn't trying to offend everyone equally.
A truly great school library seeks to meet the current & emerging needs of the community while causing as little harm as possible.

A truly great school library can do that without promoting and platforming hateful rhetoric in a misguided bid to "counter balance" the promoting and platforming of affirming, uplifting, and representative information our most vulnerable community members so desperately need access to. Let's not seek to offend, instead let's seek to uplift.

Part 2 of Blog (coming soon)

Practical Tips & Tricks

See the upcoming blog post, part 2, for tips & tricks!

Community Advocacy

See the upcoming blog post, part 2, advocacy advice!

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Weeding: For Equity, Accessibility, & Relevancy Pt. 1

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For more information on weeding you can see my first weeding post: "Weeding My H.S. Library" I recently did a presentation on this topic for a school district's librarians, and it made me realize it had been a while since I'd written a blog post on weeding!

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As school librarians, we know that collaboration is a large part of our role. In the AASL National School Library Standards to collaborate is to "work effectively with others to broaden perspectives and work toward common goals." We also understand that collaboration can take many forms.

This year I have been really looking at my lessons to determine their purpose and relevance. My focus has been on asking myself questions, "Is this the best way to teach this lesson?" or "Does this project truly teach the objective?" In doing so, I have been reflecting on how I work with other teachers in my school. What I have discovered is what I felt was really effective collaboration may still need more time to develop.

Recently, I joined the Educational Technology Task Force for my school. This is a group of educators from preschool through twelfth grade that are working with the Edtech Coordinator to help determine the direction of technology integration across grade levels. This committee started by looking at the PIC-RAT model. This model allows educators to see how their teaching practices and student use of technology are connected. It also shows how lessons or projects can show different levels of technology use.

A Model

This model got me thinking that collaboration could be put into these boxes as well. I began searching for models like this related to collaboration in education. In my basic research, what I discovered is that there are many different examples, however, most of them relate to other fields. The ones that I did find related to education were more about developing skills between students and teachers or between the students themselves. Thinking about collaboration between teachers was a bit more difficult to find. To me, this was a sign. It shows why collaboration can sometimes be a challenge. What seems like collaboration to one person may not be what the other had in mind.

In most of the models, there were elements that could be used in education and what I was hoping to create for my own practice. Although the PIC-RAT model was my original inspiration for diving into this, I decided a continuum seemed to make more sense when thinking about collaboration in a linear way. Using the models found in the resources as my guide, I determined what levels are on my continuum of collaboration.

Sharing

Sharing is the level that which collaboration begins. This involves me sharing resources with my colleagues. It also includes when teachers request books or research materials for lessons or projects. Sharing is the level that school librarians can control. You cannot make someone work with you, but you can be open and willing to share whenever the opportunity arises.

Cooperation

At this level, the classroom teacher and I do not plan together, but we do talk about what we are each teaching so that lessons can coordinate. We also share teaching methods and strategies so that students can have a consistent form of instruction.

Coordination

This form of collaboration includes lessons or projects that we schedule and discuss together but are taught by one teacher or the other. At times, both the teacher and school librarian are present, but the lessons are not truly co-taught as one teacher is truly the lead and doing the majority of the preparation.

Integration

This is when our curriculum objectives are truly aligned. We have planned together and developed a lesson or project that meets the goals of the subject area as well as the information needs of students through the library. We co-teach the lesson or project together. This level requires trust by both people and includes shared ideas and decision-making.

I think it was stated best by The Minnesota Prevention Resource Center "...no single type of collaboration is "better" than another. The best type is the one that is the best fit, given what you and your partner hope to achieve." I plan to continue to look at lessons and projects through this lens for the remainder of the school year.

Resources:

American Association of School Librarians. AASL framework for learners . Retrieved March 28, 2022, from https://standards.aasl.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/180206-AASL-framework-for-learners-2.pdf

Model #1:

Levels of collaboration . Minnesota Prevention Resource Center. (2018, December 27). Retrieved March 27, 2022, from https://mnprc.org/2018/12/27/levels-of-collaboration/

Model #2:

Tools for measuring collaboration . Broadleaf Consulting. Retrieved March 28, 2022, from https://broadleafconsulting.ca/uploads/3/4/0/8/3408103/tools_for_measuring_collaboration.pdf

Model #3:

A collaboration framework for use in extension . Mississippi State University Extension Service. Retrieved March 27, 2022, from http://extension.msstate.edu/publications/collaboration-framework-for-use-extension

PIC-RAT Model:

Kimmons, R., Graham, C. R., & West, R. E. (2020). The PICRAT model for technology integration in teacher preparation. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 20 (1). https://citejournal.org/volume-20/issue-1-20/general/the-picrat-model-for-technology-integration-in-teacher-preparation

Author: Kelly Hincks

I am the librarian at Detroit Country Day Lower School in Bloomfield Hills, MI. I have worked as a librarian for the past eleven years. I was a classroom teacher for four years prior to that. I have worked in charter, public, and private schools. My favorite thing about being a librarian is the opportunities I have to work both with students and teachers. I love the co-teaching opportunities and connections I have been able to make! I have served on AASL committees as a member and chair. I currently serve as secretary of my state association, MAME.

Categories: Community/Teacher Collaboration, Student Engagement/ Teaching Models

Tags: co-teaching, collaboration, collaborative culture, leadership, school librarians

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4 Levels of Collaboration for Teachers and Librarians - Knowledge Quest

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As school librarians, we know that collaboration is a large part of our role. In the AASL National School Library Standards to collaborate is to "work effectively with others to broaden perspectives and work toward common goals." We also understand that collaboration can take many forms. This year I have been really looking at my lessons to determine their purpose and relevance.

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A new study from the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG): Educating for Misunderstanding: How Approaches to Teaching Digital Literacy Make Students Susceptible to Scammers, Rogues, Bad Actors, and Hate Mongers, reveals some of the issues.

Researchers studied 263 college students at a large East Coast state university and presented them with two tasks.

The first asked students to evaluate the trustworthiness of a news story from a satirical website. Two-thirds of the students failed to recognize the article as satire. The few who left the article to investigate the S eattle Tr ibune's website found the clear disclaimer:

The Seattle Tribune is a news and entertainment satire web publication. . . .All news articles contained within The Seattle Tribune are fictional and presumably satirical.

The second task asked students to evaluate the credibility of an article on the Minimumwage.com website. Though the cloaked site claims to sponsor nonpartisan research, a quick search of its parent organization, the Employment Policies Institute, reveals connections between the Institute and a professional restaurant industry lobbyist with clear interest in maintaining a lower minimum wage.

Relating to the cloaked site task, the study noted that 85% of the college students neglected to explore beyond the site to investigate its trustworthiness, relying solely on the information the site itself offered. While 45% of the college students did reject the site, they "based their judgment on irrelevant features, like the site's top-level domain . . . Only seven students out of 138 connected minimumwage.com to the public relations firm of Berman and Company"

Educating for Misunderstanding reveals that at the university level:

Students struggled. They employed inefficient strategies that made them vulnerable to forces, whether satirical or malevolent, that threaten informed citizenship.

Overall, the study concluded that students:

Focused exclusively on the website or prompt, rarely consulting the broader web.

Trusted how a site presented itself on its About page

Applied out-of-date and in some cases incorrect strategies (such as accepting or rejecting a site because of its top-level domain)

Attributed undue weight to easily manipulated signals of credibility-such as an organization's non-profit status, its links to authoritative sources, or "look" (p. 3)

So, what do we do?

Well before they reach the university, it's time to put down the checklists and the score cards. And it's beyond time to lose the artificial hoax sites. In many cases the students failed using approaches we've promoted.

Alarmingly, students' approach was consistent with guidelines that can be found on many college and university websites. Sometimes these materials are just plain wrong. Sometimes they are incomplete. Sometimes they are so inconsistent that they offer scant guidance for navigating the treacherous terrain of today's internet. Educational institutions must do a better job helping students become discerning consumers of digital information.

Educating for Misunderstanding, as well as other recent work by SHEG and Mike Caulfield, reveal that traditional digital literacy tools-guidelines like the CRAAP test- simply do not work when faced with a web filled with hoaxes and deep fakes and cloaked sites and source hackers and scammers.

In fact, the old tools do more harm than good. Using top level domains, About pages, and update frequency as binary heuristics for authority are dangerous practices to promote. Believing in the inherent trustworthiness of .orgs; noting a site's attractive design and lack of typos; and celebrating the inclusion of footnotes are ineffective strategies for fact checking.

Sometimes, you've got to leave the page. All the careful reading and spotting of clues won't work when the answer is not on the page itself-when the page, or the image, is professional designed to deceive. You need to use tools like reverse image searching, triangulation and seeking original sources.

When confronted with dubious claims, Caulfield's SIFT (The Four Moves) suggests students:

Check for previous work: Look around to see if someone else has already fact-checked the claim or provided a synthesis of research.

Go upstream to the source: Go "upstream" to the source of the claim. Most web content is not original. Get to the original source to understand the trustworthiness of the informatio n.

Read laterally: Once you get to the source of a claim, read what other people say about the source (publication, author, etc.). The truth is in the network.

Circle back: If you get lost, hit dead ends, or find yourself going down an increasingly confusing rabbit hole, back up and start over knowing what you know now. You're likely to take a more informed path with different search terms and better decisions.

Michael Caulfield's Four Moves & A Habit

In a landscape filled with information landmines, strategies like lateral reading are critical. Educating for Misunderstanding warns:

The basic assumptions of the CRAAP test are rooted in an analog age: Websites are like print texts. The best way to evaluate them is to read them carefully. But websites are not variations of print documents. The internet operates by wholly different rules.

Isn't it time to ditch the checklists and offer our kiddos wholly different tools?
Resources and References Civic Online Reasoning website Stanford History Education Group website
Wineburg, Sam, Joel Breakstone, Nadav Ziv, and Mark Smith. (2020). "Educating for Misunderstanding: How Approaches to Teaching Digital Literacy Make Students Susceptible to Scammers, Rogues, Bad Actors, and Hate Mongers" (Working Paper A-21322, Stanford History Education Group, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 2020). https://purl.stanford.edu/mf412bt5333.

Wineburg, Sam and Sarah McGrew. (2019). Lateral Reading and the Nature of Expertise: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information. Teachers College Record, 121(11), n11. Preprint available.

Caulfield, Michael. (2019). Check, Please! Starter Course.

Caulfield, Michael. (2017). Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers

Filed under: technology

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Enough with the CRAAP: We're just not doing it right

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It's not the web it used to be and our traditional approaches to teaching about it no longer make sense. In fact, we teach strategies that often fail our students.

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Media literacy efforts are intensifying, targeting students as they approach voting age. But some educators struggle "to push through that apathy."

Send any friend a story
As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.

Paul Blakesley has spent years teaching high school students in Colorado how to identify bias and misinformation. Credit... Stephen Speranza for The New York Times

Between lessons about the Revolutionary War and the functions of Congress, juniors in several history and U.S. government classes at Palmer High School in Colorado Springs are taught to defend themselves against disinformation.

The students, many of them on the cusp of voting age, spend up to two weeks each fall exploring how falsehoods, prejudices and opinions can lurk in the many places they get information. They learn to trace the origins of documents, to validate a website by leaving it to consult other sources and to train a critical eye on the claims made by TikTok influencers and on YouTube videos.

"With students and adults alike, it's just easy to look at stuff on social media and take it as it is and not question it," said Paul Blakesley, who has taught students about media and information literacy for several years at the high school. "It can be difficult to push through that apathy, but it's well worth trying."

But with young people spending more time online, where misleading and false narratives swirl around the upcoming midterm elections, the Covid-19 pandemic and other topics, educators are increasingly trying to offer protection. Using techniques updated for the digital age, they are teaching students that virality does not confer legitimacy, that content can be fabricated or manipulated and that a .org domain does not make a website trustworthy.

At Palmer High School, Mr. Blakesley tries to demonstrate how to distinguish between good information and bad: Who are the sources? What is their perspective? When is it appropriate to turn to Wikipedia?

Alarmed by the surge of misinformation online, several educational groups representing more than 350,000 teachers in math, social studies and other disciplines created an alliance to better support those trying to teach media literacy. One of the founding groups, the National Association for Media Literacy Education, said its own membership had more than doubled in the past five years.

Federal and state legislators have tried in recent years to support media literacy in public schools. Five states, including Colorado, passed language since early 2020 that required education departments to take steps such as providing literacy resources and revising learning standards, according to the nonprofit group Media Literacy Now. Many of the existing laws amount to legislative endorsements of the need for literacy education rather than actual mandates. Only one state, Illinois, requires that high school students be taught how to gain access to and analyze media messages.

Mr. Blakesley in his classroom at Palmer High School in Colorado Springs. Credit... Stephen Speranza for The New York Times

Without an explicit mandate from lawmakers, though, some schools - many of which face staff shortages and political fights over classroom subjects - struggle to integrate media literacy into their curriculum. And those that manage to do so often teach it using outdated checklists delivered in short bursts, rather than as an integrated part of core subjects.

But media and information literacy advocates said the difficulties were outweighed by the dangers if young students fail to recognize rhetorical red flags and fall prey to confirmation bias online, where they could unwittingly feed rumors and contribute to polarization.

"There are challenges with getting this into schools," said Jimmeka Anderson, who founded the youth-focused group I AM not the MEdia. "But it's a necessity for the way we live today because we're all engaging in this online space, especially youth."

For a study published last year, researchers at Stanford University asked 3,446 high school students to evaluate several types of content. They did not do well. In one example, a website claimed to offer facts about climate science, but was actually tied to the fossil fuel industry. It duped nearly 97 percent of the students.

Such findings suggest that many students need help learning to filter the barrage of information coming their way, said Sam Wineburg, one of the researchers, who leads the Stanford History Education Group. He and other researchers have suggested teaching students to read laterally, fact-checking online information by exploring beyond the original website.

Other studies have presented websites promoting the preservation of imaginary animals, which the vast majority of children and adolescents surveyed did not recognize as hoaxes. One global study this summer found that nearly half of young adults shared misinformation because they thought it was true, while a third did so impulsively. Many said they were too busy to verify the information or felt pressure to weigh in on a current event, according to the research, which was led by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.

Gracie Gilligan, a former student at Maynard High School in Massachusetts, said many of her peers were polarized at a young age. Credit... Vanessa Leroy for The New York Times

Gracie Gilligan conducted her own study this year in Maynard, a small liberal town in Massachusetts. Ms. Gilligan, a recent Maynard High School graduate, found that 47 percent of students in her school district rarely talked to their parents and guardians about what made media sources trustworthy. Only 52 percent of seniors had been taught that media companies make money by selling audience attention.

However, in what she considered a heartening sign, 95 percent of seniors said they had done a research project that required them to gather information from multiple sources and summarize their findings.

Ms. Gilligan, who worked on the survey with the nonprofit group Media Literacy Now and the Media Education Lab at the University of Rhode Island, realized that Instagram was becoming one of her primary information sources, via infographics and "posts that contained one-sentence explanations of really complex issues."

"A lot of my friends and my peers got really polarized at a very young age, and people were really angry at anyone who believed differently than them," she said. "And a lot of that came from having a very one-sided view of the issues that we were seeing."

Ms. Gilligan at Maynard High School with Olga Doktorov, left, an assistant principal, and Erin McNeill from Media Literacy Now. Credit... Vanessa Leroy for The New York Times

This year, Ms. Gilligan turned 18 and has planned to vote for the first time in the midterms. But many instructors believe that media literacy education should start much earlier, in middle or even elementary school, when children are just beginning to venture online.

Efforts to appeal to younger students have included illustrated books and search engine scavenger hunts. The National Association for Media Literacy Education used a video game theme for its "Level Up" conference in July, which featured graphics modeled after the Super Mario video game franchise and a session about harnessing the power of memes. Google created an online game, Interland, in which a robot explores digital worlds such as a "Reality River" that "flows with fact and fiction."

Since 2004, Timothy Krueger has taught history to younger teenagers in the North Syracuse district in upstate New York. His students once raised a bogus TikTok conspiracy theory that Helen Keller faked her blindness and deafness. Others had said they were unvaccinated against Covid-19 because their parents had told them, inaccurately, that the shot would make them infertile.

Mr. Krueger began including more lessons about evaluating evidence and fact-checking. In November, a pilot program he helped design with the American Federation of Teachers will be piloted in Cleveland, helping in part to train educators to teach media and information literacy using "safe" methods to shield them from harassment.

"We're under attack - it's now such an openly polarized society, where teachers are afraid to talk about hot topics or controversial issues," Mr. Krueger said.

But, he added, teachers are "Step 1" in showing young people how to think clearly for themselves: "If we want them to be a truly intelligent constituency, we have to start now."

New educational efforts are constantly being deployed. Twitter and Google have so-called pre-bunking initiatives to warn users about common misinformation tactics. The nonprofit News Literacy Project, which said the number of students using its free Checkology curriculum surged 248 percent between 2018 and 2022, recently introduced a short elections misinformation guide on Flip, a video-based online platform for teachers.

But Peter Adams, a former teacher who heads research and design for the News Literacy Project, is pushing for a broader consensus on the types of skills students should learn and the results educators want. Without it, he worries that lessons could backfire.

"Some methods have become entrenched in schools that almost imply that students should question everything they see with an equal amount of skepticism," he said. "This can invite young people to conclude that all sources of information are equally suspect or, even worse, to inflame a kind of nihilism, that all sources of information have some sort of hidden motive or are out to manipulate them in some way."

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When Teens Find Misinformation, These Teachers Are Ready

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Media literacy efforts are intensifying, targeting students as they approach voting age. But some educators struggle "to push through that apathy." Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.

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The Secret to Creating Effective Community Partnerships

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A former elementary school principal describes how her school integrated community volunteers to enhance students’ academic growth.

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The author touches on some interesting contemporary topics, especially for school librarians and youth librarianship.

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First Conference to Attend Since Pandemic
I have been away from public school since the summer of 2020. I have spent the past two years working nearly full-time for the Arkansas Army National Guard. In March, I had the opportunity to teach as an adjunct instructor for McDaniel College in their school librarianship program. It has been wonderful to be involved with graduate students preparing to join our wonderful profession as school librarians. After beginning to teach the course, I discovered that the Arkansas Association of Instructional Media had scheduled a conference in April. I thought the timing would be perfect to attend especially since the course I was teaching covered Personal Learning Networks (PLNs). There are few better places for one to develop a PLN than at a conference!

When I was a school librarian, I really loved attending conferences. This was especially true if I could attend one near the end of school in the spring semester. It was always exciting to learn new technology and connect with authors and their new works. I encourage all administrators to send their school librarians to such conferences with the understanding they must bring their learning back to the school. I have always viewed a school librarian as a leadership position since we impact the entire learning community. It was always fun to bring back new ideas and technology to share with teachers and students during the year, especially near the end of school. It always helped me stay energized right up to the beginning of summer. Such energy and excitement are contagious! I couldn't wait to attend the conference since I haven't attended one for several years, pre-pandemic.

In the paragraphs below, I will share highlights of my learning from the 3-day conference.

Keynote Speaker Todd Nesloney
I really enjoyed hearing Todd talk about his experiences as a classroom teacher and administrator. Some of my biggest takeaways were that we all need to share our stories as school librarians. Todd suggested that if we do not tell our own stories, someone else will tell them for us! He discussed empowering students to help us tell our stories via social media by allowing them to take photos and help create the posts that go out. He also shared that we can Tweet to authors when we read their books. We never know when an author might respond and interact with us. This is important and exciting for students to see!

Another wonderful idea from Todd was his suggestion of inviting school board members, central office administrators, community leaders, and others to read to students. If they can't come in person, send them a Zoom. Everyone should be modeling a love of reading to students at all grade levels. I really love this idea! He also stated that administrators should be able to find plenty of funds to purchase books. There were many more ideas that he shared. Be sure to follow him @TechNinjaTodd on Twitter.

I attended a session about book challenges. The best takeaway from this session was the suggestion that school librarians should know their district's selection and challenge policies. School librarians should review these processes with administrators so everyone is aware of the procedure. This should alleviate most problems that would be encountered. In addition, I remember more than one district having a challenge policy that required the complainant to read the entire book being challenged to discourage a select portion from being taken out of context. I also recall one district placing the responsibility to suggest a comparable text on the person making the complaint. This is a topic I want to continue researching since it has become a frequent issue in recent months. There are also resources for book challenges at ALA and AASL.

Tik Tok Book Toks
I have noticed that TikTok has become very popular with young people in recent months. When I saw that Dena Meriweather, the school librarian at Bigelow High School, was having a session about it, I had to check it out. Dena shared her story about how she had the idea to use TikTok to create book talks to share with her students during the pandemic. I thought this was a very innovative way to reach students, especially during the COVID lockdown period. I plan to write more about this in a future blog post. I look forward to sharing information about this with my graduate students!
Malvern ELA Teacher TikTok
I was excited to attend a session by a middle school ELA teacher from Malvern. Claudine James discussed how she had to evolve as an educator during the pandemic. After she discovered the COVID crisis was going to continue into the fall of 2020, she realized she had to adjust her strategy to reach students that were frequently not at school. After she talked to her students about posting lessons on YouTube, she realized few students were watching her videos. She then started posting her lessons on a new TikTok account. Her students helped her come up with the username @iamthatenglishteacher. She immediately began gaining hundreds and eventually thousands of followers. By January 2021 she had 100k followers. One of her lessons gained 54.5 million views. She has now gained national attention. I love seeing educators step out of their comfort zones to reach students where they are! The most important takeaway for me is that she asked her students what they thought might be the best approach. What can we learn from this?

I attended a session about the Copyright and Creativity resources website (copyrightandcreativity.org). The session was led by Brittany Fleming who is also a trainer for the site. I was very excited about this since it is a resource we share in the class content I have been teaching at McDaniel College for Learning Technologies. Brittany gave a brief overview of copyright laws, the four factors to consider, and the website resources at Copyright and Creativity. The site features a copyright-related curriculum for grades K-12. The content is free and only requires a login registration. I plan to write more about this wonderful resource in a future blog article.
PLN and Modeling Best Practices for My Graduate Students
One of the topics we cover in my current class at McDaniel College is Personal Learning Network development and social media. I used this conference as a way to model best practices for my graduate students. I sent Tweets, Instagram posts, and Facebook posts to the #SLM508 and #AAIM22 so they could observe highlights of my professional learning at the conferences. I have always connected with other professionals by using this practice at conferences and other learning events. I hope my students will enjoy building their PLN via social media as they move forward in their careers. Sometimes being a school librarian can be a lonely place since most schools only employ one. With a PLN, we are never alone as professionals. There is always a learning conversation happening via social media, especially Twitter.

There is so much to unpack and reflect upon from this three-day conference. I plan to write a piece about Dena Meriweather's TikTok Book Toks very soon. I think this is a great way to reach students with popular social media. I also want to share more about the Copyright and Creativity site. There are so many excellent resources to explore and it needs to be done in a dedicated blog article.

I hope you enjoyed reading the highlights of what I experienced at the conference. Learning online during a webinar or a Twitter Chat is a wonderful thing, but in my experience, it doesn't have the impact that an in-person conference can have on personal learning. Being able to meet colleagues and visit is priceless. The fact that we get to hear leaders speak in sessions and share their best practices inspires us to take action. I hope that this can become a regular happening for all educators as things continue to improve following the pandemic.

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First Conference to Attend Since Pandemic I have been away from public school since the summer of 2020. I have spent the past two years working nearly full-time for the Arkansas Army National Guard. In March, I had the opportunity to teach as an adjunct instructor for McDaniel College in their school librarianship program.

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Of the approximately 73 million children living in the United States today, over 12 million live in poverty. That's 17 percent, or around one out of every six kids. Statistically speaking, there's a high probability that some of the children who walk the halls of your school or sit in the seats of your classroom are experiencing significant economic hardship.

Poverty yanks kids off the track: Studies suggest that it places children in a prolonged state of catch-up when it comes to foundational skills like literacy and language development, chasing after their more affluent peers. They may have limited or no access to basic human necessities like food and clean water, fixed housing, hygiene, and consistent uninterrupted sleep-conditions that impact their physical and cognitive development and abilities, their mental health, and their internal motivation to succeed in school.

"Many of us grew up hearing admonitions from parents that we should clean our plates 'because there are children starving in India' (or China or Africa)," William Parrett and Kathleen Budge write in their book Turning High-Poverty Schools into High-Performing Schools, 2nd Ed. "It was not clear how eating everything on our plates would help hungry children, but what was clear was that hunger was a terrible thing that happened to other people in faraway places."

But, as Parrett and Budge illustrate in their book, neither hunger nor poverty plagues only people in faraway places. The authors, who are professors emeritus at Boise State University, synthesized their findings from research and close observation inside of 12 high-performing, high-poverty schools-in American cities such as Brownsville, Texas, and Murtaugh, Idaho-into a case study of practices, policies, and mindsets that change student outcomes.

Despite the difficulties of the challenge, they remain resolutely optimistic, maintaining that "any high-poverty school can become a high-performing school."

I sat down with Parrett and Budge to discuss systemic classism and societal stereotypes about poverty, what they mean by "poverty-disrupting educators," and why so much of their work begins with confronting mindsets.

Paige Tutt: In the second edition of your book Turning High-Poverty Schools into High-Performing Schools, you mention an educator's "mental map"-"the images, assumptions, and personal perspectives that we hold about people, institutions, and the world in general (Argyris & Schön, 1974), formed by our lived experiences." Why should we examine our mental maps about poverty?

William Parrett: For 15 years, we've been asking educators the same question: "What do people in this country believe about people who live in poverty?" Ninety-eight percent of the time, what's the first thing they say? "They're lazy."

If we're not just tolerating, but actually educating, all kids in this country, what do we have to do to be successful at that? If we have mindsets and misconceptions about people that live in poverty, how are we going to look at those kids when they come in our door?

Kathleen Budge: Often, on a phone call with somebody who wants us to come work with them-it could be a superintendent or a principal-they will say they're worried about people's mindsets. They'll say: The teachers don't think the kids can learn, they have low expectations of the kids, they blame the kids-all of these things.

Nobody at any school we've studied said to us, "To address these mindsets, we spent one or two years really engaged in a deep study of systemic classism in the United States." What they did instead was get to know the students and their families very well, and developed much more grace, compassion, and empathy around what the families were facing.

Tutt: Is this related to what you call "an inquiry stance"?

Parrett: Yes. Many schools want to figure out poverty. They want a simple answer, an approach, a program, and then they'll be there. But the high-performing, high-poverty schools know it's a journey, and you have to do the work if your kids are going to succeed.

Budge: Right. Educators who ask lots of open-ended questions and make deep connections with students' families through things like home visits; that decide they're going to really focus on literacy, and then see growth in what kids achieve academically; that engage in some kind of professional development with an aim of really trying to understand poverty-that combination of focusing on relationships, experiencing academic success, and investing in professional development puts people in a time and place to examine their mental maps, to surface and think about their biases and ultimately challenge them.

Under those conditions, an educator's mental map about what they are capable of as teachers-and what their students are capable of as learners-fundamentally changes. The work dispels some of the stereotypes that they are likely carrying around in their minds.

Eventually, poverty-disrupting educators grow into self-efficacy and act from a conviction that they can influence how well students learn, even those who appear to be unmotivated. They know their content well, understand and can apply theories about human learning and motivation, use research-based practices effectively, and engage in reflective practice.

Tutt: You suggest that high-poverty schools should ask questions about the community they serve more broadly: What has happened in the community that has shaped collective experience? Who are the "haves" and "have-nots"? What do families believe is the purpose of the school?

Why is it important to understand things at a community level?

Budge: These questions increase educators' awareness of both the historic and contemporary marginalization of people who live in poverty. They also help them become more conscious of the ways in which power and privilege has operated, and continues to operate, in the local context, including the way in which their own power and privilege plays out. Educators who lack that context are likely to be less effective-or even harmful-because their perspectives aren't grounded in the inequities experienced by the community or the local schools, so they may not be responsive to the assets and strengths found in both.

When these questions are asked, we have seen systems, structures, and pedagogies change at the classroom, school, district, and community levels.

At the district and community level, for example, we've witnessed changes in systems and policies that ensure state-of-the-art schools are built in low-income neighborhoods, and funding is differentiated for schools based on need. Partnerships with community organizations have been developed to address the interests and needs of low-income students and their families: mentoring programs, scholarship programs, community schools, food banks, medical clinics, and before- and after-school programs.

Tutt: What about the questions educators ask about the school itself and the students they serve?

Parrett: Asking the right questions in the school starts with knowing your kids first. We often ask the educators we work with: Do you know how many kids in this building have a caring, meaningful relationship with an adult? The common response is often "How would you know that?" But you can know that by getting the adults in the building together and going through the kids one by one. What do you know about each child? Can you name a teacher or staff member the student has a relationship with? And then, can we share that information and lean on each other to help reach the kids who are vulnerable or alone?

You've got to be really curious about the kids that aren't succeeding, as well as the kids that are. If you want kids in high-poverty schools to attend college, for example, ask yourself why they can't go. The college placement exams are requirements-who's going to pay that $110 for the ACT exam? That was a huge equity issue that had to be uncovered. Now a lot of districts pay for this, as well as for kids to take AP classes. We would say that is broadening your understanding of-and becoming more aware of-the impact of poverty on kids.

Tutt: Both of your books talk about this notion of poverty disruption. What does it mean to be a poverty-disrupting educator?

Budge: There are two overarching attributes of a poverty-disrupting educator.

Stephen Covey has this great piece in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People about being proactive as opposed to a reactive person, being "response-able." It's a play on the word responsible. Poverty-disrupting educators take "response-ability" for themselves. They are able to choose their responses and refrain from blaming conditions, circumstances, or other people. They view their professional learning not only as a cognitive exercise, but also as an "identity-shaping" endeavor that is not just about "acquiring skills and information" but also about "becoming a certain person." This entails knowing as much as you can about your own mental model related to poverty and people who live in poverty. You have to understand the work starts with you-and you have to be willing to do this tough work, to surface implicit bias, and to question your assumptions when you fail.

Tutt: Does the role of poverty disruptor differ depending on your role in a school's ecosystem?

Budge: Absolutely. A key difference between a teacher's and a principal's ability to disrupt poverty is the principal's broader sphere of influence. A principal has the authority to say, "We're going to change the way we do business here, because it isn't working." That authority-informal and formal-has a really powerful effect over whether teachers are going to be willing to challenge the status quo in their classrooms and in the school more broadly.

Leadership can create safe environments for teachers to innovate, for them to feel they can step out and say something that is in their gut but they were scared to mention. Maybe a teacher is seeing something going on in another colleague's classroom that they know isn't really good for kids, but there's a culture of "I stay in my classroom and I don't advocate outside it." That's changing because of the equity-oriented, social justice-oriented work that's happening in schools, but it's still really hard for teachers to do if the principal isn't on board.

We rarely see a school where the teachers will challenge the status quo without having the principal absolutely insisting that the status quo's not working well for all kids. That is a key piece.

Tutt: In your book, you write that "once excellent teachers and staff are hired, the challenge then becomes retaining them," especially because the challenges in high-poverty schools are often greater than in more affluent ones. How can administrators invest in approaches to avoid staff burnout?

Parrett: When a teacher knows their time is being valued and knows they've got a group of encouraging peers around them and a leader that supports them and has a relationship with them, they'll feel a whole lot differently about staying in that school and doing this work.

But this all starts with good, competent hiring-getting the very best people you can. The typical sequence of hiring is at the end of the school year when teachers are worn out, burned out, tired, they leave and the principal handles filling those positions. If you think about one teacher affecting how many kids over how many years, it doesn't take a lot of math to understand the importance of getting a good, promising teacher.

Then you have to actively support them; use the resources around you in your school to encourage and develop relationships among your staff. We know from talking to educators in so many of these high-performing, high-poverty schools that they don't have high turnover. In fact, teachers actively seek to get hired into these schools. The staff work hard together and they get better together.

Budge: The most successful schools hire for fit and mission orientation. They might have prospective hires come and actually spend time in the school and observe candidates in that environment. They might even ask them to teach, or have kids conduct interviews of the prospective teacher and provide input to the principal or the hiring team.

Tutt: The work is challenging and the conditions can be stressful-what are some ways you've seen schools make this work more sustainable?

Parrett: Burnout was a looming concern. In a few of the 12 schools we studied, we observed programs that provide counseling for educators, wellness programs, mindfulness training, accountability support partners, and many other supports.

One of the districts that we work with, they've set a policy that after six o'clock at night on weekdays, all nonessential communication stops. And the same is true from six o'clock Friday night until six o'clock Sunday night. So unless it's an emergency, administrators tell staff, "we don't want you to be sending or receiving emails. Admin won't be calling you. We're going to respect your time away from school-ensure you take time to rest, to recover, to do whatever you need to do. We know it's hard work, and when you're here, we want you on it."

Tutt: Whose problem is poverty? Is it a broader societal issue or something that schools can have a considerable impact on? Is it both?

Budge: We don't bother arguing the chicken-and-egg question. A lot of scholars do: "Society has to improve before schools can" versus "No, schools have to improve before society can." We tend to start with something that another scholar, Paul Gorski, said: "Are you taking care of your own house first?" What is it that you can do within your sphere of influence?

There is a ton that schools can do if they are willing to challenge the status quo, to challenge the system. Schools make a huge difference in the lives of kids, and those kids can break the cycle of poverty. So schools do have a role, even amidst this larger, broader societal piece that really does also need to change.

The questions we would ask educators are the questions we ask in the book: What have you done in your sphere of influence? What can you do within those parameters-and have you actually done those things?

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How to Be a 'Poverty-Disrupting Educator'

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Of the approximately 73 million children living in the United States today, over 12 million live in poverty. That's 17 percent, or around one out of every six kids. Statistically speaking, there's a high probability that some of the children who walk the halls of your school or sit in the seats of your classroom are experiencing significant economic hardship.

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Read part 2 of the Diversity Audit blog series here! Read the third part of the diversity audit blog series here!
I first heard the term "diversity audit" earlier this past school year. I knew it was something I wanted to do, but I did not know how to approach it. This past spring I was fortunate that my district "sent" me to a virtual mini-institute hosted by Library Journal called "Auditing, Evaluating, and Diversifying the Library Collection."

This mini-institute gave me a lot of excellent information about diverse books, authors, and #ownvoices, which naturally helped reinforce the importance of doing a diversity audit. Unfortunately it did not really provide any practical "how-to" information to help me understand exactly how to do a diversity audit. I've google'd around a bit and stumbled across a few School Library Journal posts and blogs about diversity audits, but again, I have not really found any comprehensive practical guides. So I am figuring it out as I go, and figured I'd write about my process here. There may be better ways to do this, but this is the way I have come up with, and so far it seems to be working!

Getting Started

**I think a diversity audit, much like a genrefication, makes more sense after your collection has been weeded, since it means less titles to audit. However, the case could also be made for doing it before weeding because you could then use the audit info to help in deciding if a book should be weeded of not**

Why do a Diversity Audit?

First I think it is important to do some PD on the We Need Diverse Books and the #Ownvoices movements, if you are not already familiar with them. In this blog post I am not going to cover the reasons it is important to intentionally, and even aggressively, be working to diversify our collections. That conversation could really take up an entire blog series of its own, so I'm going to proceed here with the assumption that the reader already agrees with the necessity and is just looking for a guide to help get started on a diversity audit! If you need more information on why its important to build diverse collections, check out the linked sites above.

You may also want to google around a bit to read up more information on Diversity Audits in general, before you proceed. I believe a diversity audit is a critical step in building truly representative collections, because no matter how well we think we are doing at this, I promise that our unconscious biases are getting in our way, without us knowing.

We may think we are building representative collections, but we need concrete data to be sure. There is a reason that the Master of Library & Information Science is a master's science degree. Librarianship is a science, and data and research should be the fuel driving our collection development, and other, decisions and goals. Regardless of whether you have the MSLIS degree or not, you're here because you are ready to jump into the science of a diversity audit. Yay! So let's get to it.

Choosing Your Categories

After you have decided to move forward, and have gathered your initial background information, it is time to choose your categories. Meaning you need to decide what types of diversity you want to account for in your audit. It can be as simple as just a couple categories like: Author/character ethnicity: white, not white, lgbtqia+ or not etc or it can be more comprehensive as you want.

I chose to do a very, VERY comprehensive audit instead of a simple one, so I currently have 36 different categories. One reason I decided to be comprehensive is that I have committed my professional goal for this year to being truly aggressive about decentralizing whiteness and decolonizing my practice, myself, and my library collection. I also figured that since, no matter how many categories you audit for, you still need to analyze every single book individually, it makes sense to do as many categories as you want. I am always of the mind that if you are going to take the time to do something then you might as well do it the right way (or comprehensively) so you don't have to go back and do it again later. I also had some categories that I knew would be of particular interest to many of my students, such as "1st generation american," "immigrant," "biracial," "adopted," etc. Here are the categories I chose to audit for:

Author:

white, cis, straight, nondisabled, neurotypical male

white, cis, straight, nondisabled, neurotypical female

diverse author (something other than white, cis, straight, nondisabled, neurotypical)

#ownvoices (book is written by a diverse author AND the character has the same ethnic, racial, gender, sexuality, etc identity as the author)

Main Characters:

Initial Identity markers
Male, Female, Nonbinary/Trans, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Pacific Islander, Asian (broken up by region of asia), biracial or "BIPOC unspecified,"

Additional Identity Markers
plus size, lgbtqia+, immigrant, 1st gen american, physical disability or chronic illness, neurodiverse or learning disability, nonholocaust related Jewish, holocaust related Jewish, Muslim, Homelessness, Adopted, #ownvoices joy, mental health/trauma, addiction, set outside U.S.

Run Your Copy/Titles Report

I am choosing to record my data collection in an excel spreadsheet instead of inputting everything directly into destiny at first. I will be uploading the information from the spreadsheet into Destiny when I am finished. I decided to work in the spreadsheet directly at first because it is much faster than having to open up and manually alter every single MARC record. Its quicker for me to annotate a spreadsheet and then use the spreadsheet later to create .txt files that I can upload directly into Destiny. I will do that at the end to add each of my data points to the copy records as copy categories. I'll go into that part more in depth further down the blog post.

Now, if you doing your audit by genre, you'll want to filter the results so it only shows one genre at a time. You do this by selecting the row showing your categories and then go up to the top of the spreadsheet to click the "sort & filter" button. All of the column headers will now show a white square with an arrow in it (seen above). You can click on the arrow for the sublocation column and then deselect "select all" and only select the genre you want to start with. You'll notice that the spreadsheet now only shows books within the chosen genre. You can later remove this filter by selecting the "sort & filter" button again at any time.

Start Auditing / Researching

Now that everything is set up, it is time to go through the list one book at a time, filling out the audit report. I used a plethora of tools for this. But first I went through and filled out the ones I knew off the top of my head (lord of the rings, harry potter, etc). Then I went back to the top and worked my way down one at a time.

I relied most heavily on goodreads, but I also had to use google a lot to dig deeper. I start by pulling up the book on goodreads and scanning of "ctrl+F"ing to look for keywords such as "diverse," "poc," "lgbt," "ownvoices," "disability," etc. If I did not think I found everything I needed then I went into google and searched things like "book title + diversity rep"or "book title +lgbt" or "author name + diversity" or "author name + ethnicity/lgbt" and etc.

As I went through each book I just noted my findings by entering a "1" into the cell on excel for that category. Once I got into a groove, I found that I went through an entire genre pretty quickly!

Download My Fantasy Audit Info

You can download my fantasy audit info if you want. If your library has a lot of similar titles you may find it helps you get through your's more quickly. I will add the other genres as I complete them! Please note that for the criteria where I audited the character's diversity, I tried not to use side characters, only main characters. I did not want tokenism to skew my results, so just because a book has an underdeveloped side character of color (like Dean in Harry Potter), I did not indicate that on the audit. I only marked off that category if the identity marker belonged to a main or fully developed character. In some books with big casts, like Rick Riordan's recent books, I did include a lot of the characters as long as they were genuinely developed and were not just kind of "token" characters, in my opinion

Reporting Your Findings

Once you finish filling out your audit, you'll next want to compile, analyze, and report your findings. I chose to do this by converting my data into graphs. I have never been much of a numbers person, so the visual component of graphs helps me personally to evaluate the numbers. Graphs are also more successful for sharing on social media, in newsletters, PD sessions, etc.

In order to gather my numbers, I used the "sort & filter" function in excel again. I went through each column one at a time and filtered out the blank cells so that I could capture the number of "tallies" each column/category has. I then input those numbers into a free chart creator I found on google called meta-chart.com. Here are my initial charts:

Add Your Data to Destiny (If you want to)

If you are planning to add your data directly to the destiny records, there are a couple different ways to do that. Some people add the data right into the MARC records. I am still figuring that part out, and figuring out whether that is something I want to do.

I am definitely adding the data to my copy records via copy categories. I am doing this for a couple of reasons. Firstly, patrons can easily browse by copy category, so students looking for books with a specific type of diversity will easily be able to do so on the search page of destiny. Additionally, having the info as copy categories makes it easy to run reports with that info later. It is also very easy to add copy categories in batches using barcode lists, resource lists, sublocation, etc. It is also easy to add them as you catalog new books into destiny. I am a huge fan of copy categories, personally. I use them all the time, even more then I use resource lists of collections.

To create your copy categories go to the "c atalog" page and select the "copy category tab."

Next, add each of your audit categories as a copy category.

Create a .txt file barcode list for each audit category

I do this by going through my excel sheet one column at a time. One by one I filter the spreadhseet by each audit category (column). Then I copy the barcode list and paste it into editpad. org and save it.

First I filter by the first column (audit category)

Then I copy the barcode column

Then I paste the barcode list on an editpad.org and save it. Repeat for each column!

Use barcode list .txt file to batch update Destiny records

Repeat this step for the barcode list for each column category!

What I learned or What I'll Change

One thing I know I'll change is that I will be adding more category columns for the author diversity. My current categories check thoroughly for character diversity inputs, but the author categories are limited to essentially diverse vs nondiverse. I want to have more specific data on the authors so I'll be adding more categories for that.

Happy Diversity Audits, everyone!

I will update this blog post, or maybe write more posts, as I progress further into my audit process. So far I've got about 15% of my fiction collection audited!

If you like my graphic, check out my zazzle store in the link below!

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Read part 2 of the Diversity Audit blog series here!Read the third part of the diversity audit blog series here!I first heard the term "diversity audit" earlier this past school year. I knew it was something I wanted to do, but I did not know how to approach it.

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Defining the roles of a school librarian as a leader, instructional partner, teacher, information specialist, and program administrator.