I had the chance to listen, learn, and share some ideas about the Common Core State Standards, public libraries, and nonfiction at the Massachusetts Library Association Annual Conference last week in Cambridge, MA.

I was honored to meet and join these great people at the panel discussion, The Common Core and Nonfiction:  How Does It All Fit Together? –

- Author Deborah Kops (among her books: The Great Molasses Flood)

- Author Kristine Carlson Asselin (among her books: The Real Story on the Weapons and Battlegrounds of North America)

- Lou Pingatore (of independent booksellers Pingi Bookstore).

Each of us brought our perspectives on what the Common Core may hold for kids and nonfiction.  Kops shared some insights on her writing and research process (and the requisite and valuable trips to her local library), and reflected on the potential for a heightened interest in literary nonfiction.  Asselin explained some things I never knew about work-for-hire nonfiction writing with school library market publishers (read more here), and compared the research behind writing a book about Jennifer Lopez (many transcribed TV/online interviews) and one about Martin Luther King, Jr. (many archival newspapers).  Pingatore described some new nonfiction coming from publishers, including one I’m curious to read about using and contributing to Creative Commons.  I talked about how school librarians are embracing the CCSS as an opportunity to collaborate and lead in the teaching of 21st century skills, inquiry, and reading of complex texts.

The questions and comments from the audience were challenging and well-considered, including concerns about the cost of nonfiction books, the potential to build partnerships across small public library systems to offer more titles for kids, and the need to collaborate with school librarians or classroom teachers, especially in school systems without elementary school libraries (which many librarians in attendance reported were common in their communities).

It was a pleasure to meet the dynamic leaders of the MLA Youth Services Section (YSS) Noelle Boc, Sharon Colvin, and Erin Daly (who lived tweeted the day’s events @mla_yss).

What connections can school librarians foster with public librarians?  Here are a few ideas and resources in this developing Listly.  Please share your ideas in the comments!

Image: Children’s Room public PCs, by Newburyport Public Library on Flickr. Used with a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.

–Rebecca Morris

” . . . students said teachers had warned them that the test would be the most challenging they had taken. ‘When they ask, ‘What’s the main idea?’ and you have to put it in your own words, it’s a lot harder, said Ron Yogev, a sixth grader.”

“Students said they struggled with questions that asked them to discuss how a writer constructed a story rather than about the content of the passage itself. One question, for instance, asked students to analyze how an author built suspense in describing a girl whose rope snapped while in a cave.”

For schools in Common Core State Standards states (holding at 45 at this date), an essential direction for advocacy efforts is first figuring out, then explaining to the school community, school librarians’ roles in teaching the Standards.  Two key (and probably fairly evident) roles are suggesting resources to teachers and collaborating in using them effectively – but turning those nice-sounding ideas into practical strategies is still rather a work in progress.  Luckily, the March SLM offers some great inspiration!

To build understanding of abstract concepts through reading and discussing across texts, Jean Donham recommends strategies for selecting and teaching texts connected by big ideas, such as immigration, family, and revolution.  In the March School Library Monthly article, “Text Sets, Deep Learning, and the Common Core” and the accompanying “Use This Page: Sample Texts for Conceptual Text Sets,” Donham offers criteria for selecting text sets (such as varied representation of topics) and questions for discussing texts with students (such as asking about similarities and differences).

Donham takes what may sound like a familiar literacy learning practice into the realm of critical reading of complex texts.  When I was a first grade teacher about ten years ago, we teachers structured our literature-based curriculum around “themes,” such as homes, family, and all about me.  So when we taught “all about me,” we paired easy readers for students (like Anthony Browne’s Things I Like) with read-alouds like Franklin Goes to School and Chrysanthemum as the basis for related learning experiences in literacy and math.

As I think about that approach to teaching now, I think we were just on the edge of building text sets to support the learning of abstract concepts, as Jean Donham proposes.  Beyond the more literal interpretations of the themes – say, “homes,” for instance, stories like A House Is a House for Me, The Little House, and The House that Jack Built contain seeds of ideas about place, change, and perspective.  If I were to teach “homes” with students today with a “text set” approach in mind, I’d develop more purposeful questions to explore these ideas and stories.  I’d also look for (or ask my librarian for!) texts that show diverse ways of interpreting “home,” and perhaps choose stories like What You Know First by Patricia MacLachlan, about a little girl’s reluctance to leave her family’s prairie farm and her familiar surroundings, or maybe stories that show not brick and mortar “homes” but other instances of belonging, familiarity, and connection to a place.

Reference: Donham, Jean. “Text Sets, Deep Learning, and the Common Core.” School Library Monthly 29, no. 6 (March 2013): 5-7.

Image: House, by Images_of_Money on Flickr. Used with a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.

–Rebecca Morris