Check out this great School Library Journal article about Monarch Academy’s Keisa Williams.  It’s a great article to show how school librarians need to be pragmatic and start where the students are, slowly scaffolding and building their skills over time. 

I believe that school librarians should go into a school knowing our professional standards for learning.  Then, like Margaret Mead, we set about the task of getting to know our kids and our learning community.  How will we get from where we are to where our profession encourages us to be?

It’s that ability to visualize and shore up the bridge from Here to There that helps us be change agents.   Keisa does a great job of showing the realities of how this works.  In order to start building her big dreams (tech integration), she had to start with smaller building blocks (keyboarding practice).

Congratulations, Keisa!

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Hey there! We’re looking for your lesson plan tweaks that would help move two stodgy projects closer to inquiry. Submit your ideas, and you could see your name in an upcoming issue of School Library Monthly!

• Pet Research - How can you help move a teacher past a list of pet facts on a poster?  (This is the same scenario we discussed at AASL in Charlotte a few weeks ago.)
• Overly-Narrow Research Topics - The teacher proposes a research topic that is too narrow and too shallow. How can you take the learning deeper?

Please share your thoughts by Sunday, November 29.  Thanks (and please help spread the word!).

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As part of our work on the AASL Learning Standards and Guidelines Implementation Task Force (aka Learning4Life or L4L), many of us prepared presentations for the 2009 AASL conference that focused on how we can implement the L4L vision in our libraries.

I was to give a Webinar and a live presentation on small steps that can lead to big instructional design changes.  But alas, the Convention Center’s broadband rebelled, and the poor Web attendees had no images and no voice — just me maniacally typing my entire presentation into the chat window! The Webinar organized said they could podcast my live event, but alas, they were called away elsewhere.

So I recorded the session on my iPhone and synced it with the slides.  You can see it on Vimeo.  We had some amazing conversations about instructional design, working with traditional and/or difficult teachers, etc.

Enjoy!

Update 11/25/09: At Sharon’s request (see below), I’ve added the slides here. Having seen the faces of my exhausted grad students in class this week, I am reminded of what it feels like not even to have 45 minutes to watch something!

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