ABC-CLIO – Product – Growing Schools: Librarians as Professional Developers – Debbie Abilock, Kristin Fontichiaro, and Violet H. Harada, Editors via kwout

We are delighted that our new book, envisioned two years ago, has just been published. Two years ago, I’m not sure any of the editors or contributors realized how important professional development (PD) would be in the lives of librarians. Sure, we need PD to help us navigate the tricky multimedia waters and the drumbeat of standards, but many of us are spread across multiple buildings or taking over responsibilities once fulfilled by parent volunteers, a second librarian, or a clerk.

How do we have impact in our buildings when it is impossible to see all of the kids? One powerful way is PD leadership. If you can’t teach every child about databases, but you could teach every teacher, and they could pass it on, then you have impact. There’s a huge difference between teaching 2000 students or 100 teachers. 100 teachers is doable; 2000 students may not be.

Whether you do what Judi Moreillon calls “job-embedded PD,” where you co-teach and co-learn alongside a classroom teacher; help a teacher one-on-one, which Debbie Abilock calls “concierge PD”; lead a PLC; present at a staff meeting; roll out a “23 Things”-type self-paced learning; or give webinars, being a PD leader is a way to shift your pivot point so that you can keep your signal strong when your contact time has been reduced.

We want to know what YOU are doing for PD. Here are some questions to get you thinking:

1. How do you use staff meetings to deliver PD? What do you talk about?

2. Do you present alone or in a team? How do you determine presentation partners?

3. How do you know if your PD work has been successful?

4. Do you do any extended PD learning across a semester or more? What does that look like? What is your role?

5. How do you document your efforts and successes?

6. What role does technology play, from a PD blog to emailed newsletters to webinars?

Thanks for thinking about this! This is the last request … so once I hear from you, it’s time to get writing! Thanks for helping me get some work out of the way before the students descend on campus again!

As librarians, we often struggle to help our student researchers understand that post-research writing is more than just listing facts or stating one’s own perceptions of the world. In the “olden days,” we would have sorted our paper index cards and painstakingly outlined (sometimes more than once!) before we wrote a rough draft.

In the past decade or two, we have been under such administrative pressure to “incorporate technology” that, accidentally, we may have truncated the traditional experience of stating a case and then giving supporting details.

As Common Core testing inches ever-closer, it calls on all grade levels to return to a more classical, traditional approach. From writing standards to research standards, the vocabulary of “topic sentence” and “supporting details” are bubbling back up to the surface.

What do you do to help kids get ready to snap into this more formal development of arguments?

Here are some questions on our minds to get your thinking started:

1. Is outlining still important in the digital age?

2. In a Facebook era of, “Like,” with no rationale required, how do we steer children’s brains back into having to provide reasons?

3. How do we fight against overly-formulaic writing, even as such writing may become an essential survival strategy on standardized tests?

4. In early years, how do you use storytime as a way of both eliciting student predictions and getting them to back them up?

5. What writing strategies or scaffolds do you use to help students organize their thoughts?

Of course, we’re sure you’ve got even more interesting stuff on your mind. Lend us a hand and help us get these columns organized before we start school? Thanks!

Ay yi yi! If there’s one Common Core subject that seems to have us up in arms more than any other, it’s the thorny issue of complex text. We are told, in Common Core’s ELA Standards, and again in ELA’s Appendix A, that text complexity is measured in three ways:

1. Quantitatively – How do we use syllable/letter counts or words-per-sentence counts to determine how difficult a text is? In other words, what can a computer measure about the perceived difficulty of a text? (This is typically how many leveling programs have measured difficulty.)

2. Qualitatively – The qualitative difficulty of a text depends on humans’ ability to read nuances in the text, such as figurative language, metaphor, satire, or allegory. These cannot currently be measured by computers. This style of measuring text difficulty has not been discussed much in the past decade.

3. Matching Reader to Text and Task – Knowing what the reader’s purpose is in approaching a task also impacts its relative difficulty. For example, a child wanting to browse a DK book is different from a child who needs to be able to recall specific details. As the ELA standards say on page 30, “Reader variables (such as motivation, knowledge, and experiences) and task variables (such as purpose and the complexity generated by the task assigned and the questions posed)” are important factors. Reading a newspaper article to find out where the bombed building was versus reading to find out motivations for the bombing are two different approaches to the text.

So here are some questions on our mind as we think about text complexity:

1. There is public debate about the appropriate level of scaffolding that teachers should provide to make complex texts accessible to struggling readers. How do you know how much is just right?

2. Do you plan to substitute simpler texts (e.g., an abridged version or a graphic novelization of a Shakespeare play) for students who struggle?

3. How do you see the question of text complexity as simpatico with reading incentive programs like Accelerated Reader? How do they come into tension with one another?

4. Once concern about text complexity is the worry that this will be a return to the classics and to a world where, for the most part, everyone is white and middle-class. Are there specific world culture texts that you think raise the bar, at any grade level, for text complexity? What are you doing to ensure that students experience a more diverse world through the words they read?

5. Do subscription databases have a role in text complexity? What is that?

Thanks! We are eager to hear your thinking!