Is your district pursuing Response to Intervention to see if student gaps can be fixed before they “need” special education? If so, hop over to Education Week and read this interview with Richard Allington of the University of Tennessee about the intersection between reading ability, RTI, diagnostic tests, and teachers’ embedded diagnostic skills. You’ll also hear some zingers about teacher effectiveness and some praise for Reading Recovery.

Lucky Michiganders, we have Allington coming to speak to us on Saturday morning at Oakland Schools.  Can’t wait to hear him in person.  Hear he’s a great speaker!

There’s no easy way to deal with the fact that school librarians are losing their footing in the race to stay employed.  I’ve always posited that, to date, the great majority of school librarian cuts have been “choiceless choices,” e.g., districts that simply have no other personnel left to cut.  Or, in some cases, an administrator removing an ineffective or outdated school librarian.

This week’s news in the state of Oklahoma, though, have sent a frisson of panic through me. To save money, legislators in Oklahoma have been considering relaxing some state mandates, including the requirement that schools have credentialed school librarians. Textbooks, early childhood, and class size requirements would also be exempted through 2012.  The story has changed since November, when Oklahoma was actively pursuing school librarians (though, it must be said, sometimes at extensive per-librarian cost). 

Shonda Brisco, an assistant professor and education materials librarian at Oklahoma State, has decided that it’s time to start tracking what’s happening with school librarians, harnessing the power of crowdsourcing.  She’s created an open Google Map onto which anyone can add a pin describing their school or district’s reductions, eliminations, or other situations.  It’s been scary over the past 12 hours to watch the map populate.

As far as I know, it’s the first attempt at graphically representing the loss of school librarians. And it’s another example of how Web 2.0 is transforming the way that librarians come together as activists.  It’s a groundswell activity; a grassroots effort; not something created by an association. Shonda got the idea and almost immediately was able to get people acting.

Will the map change our employment outlook? Uncertain. Will it help us see our own individual power as leaders and information gatherers? Absolutely.

Updated 4:30pm - Here’s Joyce Valenza’s take.

This is a must-view video for all of us.  Dweck’s research probes the perils of empty praise and reinforces much of what the AASL Standards tell us about building students’ dispositions and self-assessment skills.  Don’t miss this or Dweck’s book, Mindset.

One of her key ideas is that we have a responsibility to help students develop a growth mindset (in which students believe that they are on a continuum of growth and can continue to build skills and expertise) instead of a fixed mindset (in which students believe their intelligent is pre-determined and cannot change, as in, “I’m smart, so I should know how to do this, and I can’t, so I’m frustrated” or, “I’m dumb, so that’s why I don’t get this - I give up.”)

Her work is so, so powerful, especially for those of us who work in upper middle-class environments in which there is some pressure to demonstrate “good parenting” or “supportive teaching” by praising — or over-praising — our students.

View it here.