Resist the list

I am convinced that there are generations of parents (and librarians) who think the main purpose of a librarian is to create age/grade related lists of books for students to read. When parent-teacher conference time comes around, if parents venture into the library and engage – as opposed to using us as a baby-sitting booth / place to drink coffee and wait / information-direction desk the one and only question they seem to have is “do you have a book list for Grade …”

So why don’t I have a book list for Grade …? When they allow me time to explain, and time to discuss their child(ren)’s reading needs – preferably with the child present these are the themes of the conversation:

What are your (their) favourite things in life?

I don’t start off with what books they like, because their parent(s) probably wouldn’t be having a conversation with me if they liked books or reading. But if I can get a feeling for what kind of person they are, I can start to think what kind of books may be an entry point to intersect with their lives.

I’m very much a “there’s a book for that” type of person and my staff always jokes with me that they can’t have a conversation with me without walking away with a “book for that”.  If a student likes gaming, we have gaming books. If they like art and they’re EAL (English as an additional language) I have no problem recommending starting with some of our fabulous wordless books, picture books or graphic novels. And I’m happy to discuss how sharing a (sophisticated or even just funny) picture book together is a way better and more productive use of time than forcing a child to plod through Shakespeare or whatever classic the parent loved when they were young.

Reading, like physical activity and learning, has to leave the person with the desire for more. The feeling that they’d like to keep doing this for a long, long time. Forever in fact. If we make them hate it now, we’re f*’d as a human race.

How much can you read?

This is a little open-ended. It’s a combination of the dreaded “reading level” and how much physical time they have for reading.

We have a lot of EAL students in our school. With very ambitious parents. Who are often well-meaning but misguided. During my 16 years in Asia, I have always been astounded at the high level of education and knowledge my Asian counter-parts have. Newly minted in Asia I had no idea of the classic / foundational texts of their countries / languages / cultures. They knew so much of the western foundational texts – Grimm, Shakespeare, Greek etc. Myths and Legends. I’m always humbled by this. However, they’re not helping their child when they insist that a child with a phase 2 EAL level reads Shakespeare in the original text.

I’ve not got much against Shakespeare (except inasmuch it’s part of the dead white male canon etc. etc.) and I have Shakespeare in my library in every form / format and level. And I’m happy to help these students to start with an abridged version, an illustrated version, a short story version, a graphic novel version. But when what they need is basic foundational functional language so they can survive and thrive in a classroom and canteen, honestly the Plantagenets is not going to help them.

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reading

Having time for reading is another big issue. There is this romantic notion that all school-going children read for 20-30 minutes a day. You know all the charts … the funny thing is they all have exactly the same 1987 source, and it’s not even an accurate representation of what the article said – see * below.

I don’t know what your classrooms or homes look like, and I’m sure there are schools, classrooms and homes doing brilliantly on reading. Sustained reading. Uninterrupted reading. I fear the truth is otherwise. I suspect students spend a lot more time on Youtube for their learning. YouTube publishes some interesting statistics.  Of relevance is “YouTube is technically the second largest search engine in the world.” and “Average Viewing Session – 40 minutes, up 50% year-over-year”. If I had to put some money on what our students are watching most on YouTube, it wouldn’t be much to do with learning but rather they seem to spend a lot of time watching other students engaged in one kind of game or another.

I think if I had to ask a bunch of our middle-schoolers to preference-rank what they like to do, if reading wasn’t on the list, it wouldn’t even be mentioned. If it was on the list, except for maybe 5-10% of the students it would be way down at the bottom.

So this part is a little about whether the student is able and willing to make time in the day to read, and based on the little perceived time they have, what they could read.

I usually tell students that if they truly are reading every day, they should be able to get through at least a book a week. So the converse is also true. What size, format or type of book can I pair with this student that would guarantee they’d actually finish it in a period of time that will allow the book to remain meaningful?

We have this illusion that if only we could find the “right” book, a student will just want to read it non-stop and then will be converted to reading for life. I don’t think that is true. I think we need to find a succession of books that students will be successful with so that they can build up some kind of reading stamina that will result in them being “good enough” readers so they can be successful academically. And if we’re lucky they’ll pick up a book again after they leave school.

What are your friends reading?

The need to belong is second only to the need to breathe for teenagers. There are glorious moments when we can ride on the wave of “it” books (yes, like Harry Potter). Where there is a buzz around a book or an author that makes it possible for us as librarians to just ensure we have enough copies and that we get out of the way of the stampede to the check-out desk. And make sure we have enough read-alike lists.

That, for teenagers may be the critical bit – the herd immunity thing. Having a critical mass of “cool” students who are readers, who then infect the rest.

My only compromise to lists is having students recommend to each other. Before, when I was in primary and could see each class each week, I had a list per grade. Now, I’ve convinced one grade (6) to make a list as a gift to the incoming class.

What is your teacher reading (aloud) to you?

If only, if only. And when a teacher starts a habit of reading aloud to a class I can guarantee that book will become the favourite of just about every child in that class. Bonus points if the book is the first in a series, because they’ll then rush to complete the series independently.

I’m just going to put out a plug again for the Global ReadAloud. I’ve curated the resources for this year’s books in a Libguide. It’s not too late to start.  It’s never too late to start. Just read. Or read and connect. Read now, with the current great list of books. Or read some of the books from previous years. Or read this year’s books now and other books from previous years later. Honestly it doesn’t take much time. I’m reading aloud each morning from Front Desk before school to a small group of students. We have about 10-15 minutes and get through a chapter or two/three depending on the length of the chapter and what else we do / discuss around it.

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And this is where I tell parents that if all else fails they should read to-and-with their student. Even if they’re 14. And I tell them how we still read aloud to our IB-level child who also doesn’t like reading. And they look askance at me. Or they make apologies for their own poor reading – and I tell them that’s exactly why they should be reading with their child. As an empathy building exercise. As a gesture of solidarity and understanding that it is not perhaps easy, but it is important. Important enough that we both spend time on this.

Lists are easy to make. Easy to ignore. Conversations are harder, take more time, but potentially have more value. What do you do in your schools / libraries?

————————————————————————————————————————————

*This is where things get very interesting – I went back to the original article and it says nothing like what the posters say … it’s about vocabulary acquisition and learning new words based on context (nothing about standardised tests!). AND they’re talking about students reading 15 minutes IN SCHOOL, plus out-of-school reading of newspapers, magazines and comic books. So the sum for an “average” 5th grader is:

600,000 words in school; 300,000-600,000 words out of school = +/- 1 million words

I doubt the average fifth-grader is reading anything near that amount in or out of school.

” Though the probability of learning a word from context may seem too
small to be of any practical value, one must consider the volume of reading
that children do to properly assess the contribution of learning from context
while reading to long-term vocabulary growth. How much does the average
child read? According to Anderson, Wilson, and Fielding (1986), the
median fifth-grade student reads about 300,000 words per year from books
outside of school; the amount of out-of-school reading increases to about
600,000 words per year if other reading material such as newspapers,
magazines, and comic books are included. If a student read 15 minutes a
day in school (see Allington, 1983; Dishaw, 1977; Leinhardt, Zigmond, &
Cooley, 1981) at 200 words per minute, 200 days per year, 600,000 words
of text would be covered. Thus, a rough estimate of the total annual
volume of reading for a typical fifth-grade student is a million words per
year; many children will easily double this figure. Reanalysis of data
collected by Anderson and Freebody (1983), using information on the
frequency of words in children’s reading material from Carroll, Davies,
and Richman (1971), indicates that a child reading a million words per
year probably encounters roughly 16,000 to 24,000 different unknown
words.
How many words per year do children learn from context while reading,
then? Given a .05 chance of learning a word from context, and an average
amount of reading, a child would learn approximately 800-1,200 words
well enough to pass fairly discriminating multiple-choice items.
These numbers are at the low end of the range that we have previously
estimated (Nagy, Herman, & Anderson, 1985; see also Nagy & Anderson,
1984), because of the lower estimate of the probability of learning a word
from context and a more conservative estimate of the number of unknown
words encountered during reading. Yet, the figures suggest that incidental
learning from written context represents about a third of a child’s annual
vocabulary growth, an increase in absolute vocabulary size that has not
even been approached by any program of direct vocabulary instruction.

Nagy, W., Anderson, R.C., & Herman, P. (1987). Learning word meanings from context during normal reading. American Educational Research Journal, 24, 237–270

Content plus

One regularly hears phrases bandied around schools such as “Every teacher is a language teacher”; or “Every class should start with 10 minutes of reading” and you’d be hard pressed to find a teacher who doesn’t agree in theory, that reading is a good thing. But then there is the “reality” of supposed too little time, too much pressure, too much content to cover and the theory of reading becomes such an abstract notion that there isn’t even a consideration of how it could be implemented.

Last week-end, Katie Day and myself gave a 90 minute presentation to around 100 educators at the Neev Literature Festival titled “Books & Beyond”. You can find a copy of the presentation here as well as other resources.

We’re on break now, and when we get back I was asked to present to our HODs for a few minutes on integrating reading into units in the middle school. I’ll probably just show this one slide:

I’d call it “content plus” – it’s from a G8 Earth Science unit that the Science team and I put together at the end of last year and they’re teaching now.

The idea is that you still have the science content as core to the unit – in this case Earth Science and learning about Sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic rocks and the minerals they contain and mining and the  products of mining. But to that you add the environmental and human impact, and the lens of the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals).  And in order to help build empathy and understanding, add some literature.

Katie also had the brilliant idea, that she’s implemented in her school (and I’m going to be following quickly behind!), of getting good, relevant articles, stripping off the advertising etc (she uses Safari Reader View; I use Mercury Reader) putting them in binders and making them available in the library and classrooms – see slides 42-47).

You can of course choose any minerals, but in this case to make it relevant to G8, we focused on the primary elements of an iPhone.

 

iPhone ingredients

Ideally, and this takes time, some of the science and or math units would be linked to Language & Literature or Individuals & Societies units allowing more time to explore literature.

In the mean time, one of the wonderful ways of adding literature into units is through picture books. In the guide we created for the Neev Festival, we made suggestions around groupings of the SDGs of the Neev shortlisted picture books plus lots of other books. It’s still a work in progress, but over time I’m hoping that for each and every global goal I have 10-20 picture books, (as well as 10-20 fiction books and 10-20 really good nonfiction books) that can easily and quickly be introduced to a class, thereby adding a very special element to learning, and truly making “every teacher a language teacher” and every teacher able to devote a tiny slice of their class to reading.

Why awards?

This week’s blog post will be very brief as a function of my extreme exhaustion – just been up and down to Bangalore for the Neev Literature Festival 2019. Beijing-Bangalore is not a commute I’d recommend to anyone who prizes their sleep or sanity but WOW what an intense 2 days it was.

The theme this year was “Taking Children’s Literature Seriously” and I’ll write a bit more about the rest of the festival another time.

For now I just want to highlight the winners:

Screen Shot 2019-09-22 at 20.11.30

After a year of reading the long lists and short lists in four categories the awards were announced on Saturday for this year’s winners. I must say it was a surprisingly emotional moment even for me just as one of the jurors, I can’t imagine what it must be like for the authors!

There’s been a bit written recently about literary prizes – “Who Cares about Literary Prizes” is a wonderful article combining the idea of “canon” and popularity in this context with some very cool data representation. Book Prizes, the more the merrier, and A guide to the most prestigious prizes.

Book buyers, librarians, teachers, parents tend to rely on a fairly narrow range of sources for their book purchasing decisions. One of those is lists, and the other prize winners (and often lists of prize winners). In this context the existence of speciality or niche book prizes is incredibly important to shed light on otherwise neglected corners of excellent children’s literature.

Since Ahimsa is already relatively well known in international children’s literature circles, I’m going to just put in a few words about the other three books.

Machher Jhol is a richly illustrated book showing the journey of a young boy through the roads of Kolkata to get the ingredients for a fish stew for his father. There is a wonderful twist to this tale that will make it beloved of any class looking for books on resilience.

When Jiya met Urmila is written for that space of emerging readers where very few authors manage to successfully tell a great story but make the writing accessible to the beginning reader. The story gently probes how segregated childrens’ lives can be.

Year of the Weeds is one of those books that I can see becoming part of a canon of middle grade / young adult books that are used in the classroom to promote thinking about globalisation, sustainable development goals of economic growth (8); industry and infrastructure (9); sustainable cities and communities (11) responsible consumption and production (12); and Life on land (15) – while still being an excellent read.   The link above goes to a very interesting interview with the author.

neev awards.jpg

Another thing that awards do – reward publishers for taking chances on genres, topics and authors.  This year Duckbill publishers had two award winning books – here’s hoping they continue to bet on this calibre of writing AND even more importantly that their books get attention and distribution outside of India, because the world needs these books.

In response to requests – here is where to find the books:

Ahimsa

When Jiya Met Urmila

I will be sharing an email to contact if you are interested in buying the short-list or finalists in multiple copies.

In addition if you’re interested in other books:

Here is the short list:

Here is the complete LongList nominated by Indian publishers

 

Seek and Find – breakout

In the interests of trying new things myself, and also making library orientation and searching the catalog / tracing items from the catalog to the physical copy more fun, I decided to create a library breakout.

I’d watched the “Breakout” phenomenon ebb and flow about 3-4 years ago and had always put it in the “fun, but how?” box, and this year finally decided to get into action. Our HS Edtech person had purchased the official “Breakout box” so I could have a look at that and the resources in the official site, and our ES Edtech person had deconstructed the idea and had a bunch of Stanley boxes, suitcases with locks and locks, so I had a lot to play around with. The first port of call was the official Breakout Site. Like all great ideas, this seems to be one that had its hey-day around 2015 and many of the potentially interesting links to library orientation were either broken, or the video instruction didn’t work or there were other issues, so, I left, muttering “maintenance” . I found a few good breakout description online (Library Media TechTalk; The Bright Ideas Library; LibraryStew; Ms. Kochel’s book blog;) and then, after getting an idea of how it could work, sat down and thought of what my aims would be.

  1. I wanted to highlight the “Panda” books – the annual students’ choice books that are on a huge display in the library but often get overlooked by students and teachers alike – we order 5/6 copies of each book each year and students vote on their favourite in March.
  2. I wanted students to be familiar with the library guides and bookmark the front page.
  3. I wanted to make sure students could log onto the library catalog, search for a book and then find the physical copy in the library
  4. I wanted each student to know how to use the “self-checkout” station
  5. I wanted the students to search the catalog to find more obscure items (in titles, in descriptions of books, number of books in a series etc)

With my “ISTE educator” hat on, I wanted to ensure I could work on the role of “Facilitator”:

Educators facilitate learning with technology to support student achievement of the 2016 ISTE Standards for Students. Educators:
a. Foster a culture where students take ownership of their learning goals and outcomes in both independent and group settings.
b. Manage the use of technology and student learning strategies in digital platforms, virtual environments, hands-on makerspaces or in the field.
c. Create learning opportunities that challenge students to use a design process and computational thinking to innovate and solve problems.

In this case they would be “Knowledge constructors”

3. Knowledge Constructor
Students critically curate a variety of resources using digital tools to construct knowledge, produce creative artifacts and make meaningful learning experiences for themselves and others. Students:
a. plan and employ effective research strategies to locate information and other resources for their intellectual or creative pursuits.

ATLS (approaches to learning):

  • Thinking – Creative thinking / problem solving
  • Self Management – Affective – show resilience; Demonstrate persistence and perseverance
  • Social – Collaborative – share responsibility and roles with others

Universal design for learning:

  • Multiple means of Engagement: Provide options for Sustaining Effort & Persistence
  • Multiple means of Action and Expression: Provide options for Physical Action

The guide for the breakout can be found here with the clues. Students could access this guide through a QR code on the box.  Most of them didn’t examine the box for the QR code but went straight for the printed instructions.

The activity needed at least 50-60 minutes – with some classes we had that, and generally those were the more successful classes who managed to complete all locks.

Some teams / classes didn’t complete for various reasons, and they didn’t get anything. Nothing. No compensatory prizes, no consolation prizes. The teams who did succeed could trade in their “key for success” cards in the box for boxes of “smarties” or chocolates – and the feeling of success.

Main takeaways:

  •  Students need to be carefully guided to read the instructions completely and carefully
  • Their enthusiasm and “let’s run here” inclinations needs to be tempered with “hey guys, how about stopping and thinking about …”
  • Where an activity led them to need to get a next clue from the library staff, our staff was instructed that they only proceeded if they were politely addressed and asked (part of the hidden agenda that my staff are people with feelings who need to be treated respectfully)
  • Students (and teachers) often don’t see displays and look over them – their attention needs to be brought to things deliberately
  • Don’t assume anything – some 14 year olds have never done puzzles or have any idea of what a cipher wheel is!

 

How to lie and cheat …

Teaching academic honesty is always a tricky one. Last year, my involvement was limited to showing a tool (Noodletools) to large groups of students, howling in protest that they preferred the predatory alternative EasyBib, too late in the year and being a second opinion on whether submitted work was honest or not.

This year, I’m more of a “known factor” and when I offered to start the year with a more general discussion on honesty rather than just getting into the nitty gritty of citation, a fellow teacher offered to lend a hand in a Day 9 session.

In order to get more than three nerds to sign up, I billeted it as “How to lie and cheat your way to academic success” and an unprecedented 30 students signed up for the session – the maximum allowed. During the planning we set out to find out a little more about the motivations of students and to ensure we engaged MYP ATLs, and I wanted to make sure we covered the ISTE student standards of Digital Citizen and the UDL (Universal Design for Learning) standard of “Multiple means of Engagement”. 

ATLs (Approaches to Learning)

Thinking skills

  • Critical Thinking
  • Creative Thinking

Research Skills

  • Information Literacy

ISTE Student:

2. Digital Citizen
Students recognize the rights, responsibilities and opportunities of living, learning and working in an interconnected digital world, and they act and model in ways that are safe, legal and ethical. Students:

b. engage in positive, safe, legal and ethical behavior when using technology, including social interactions online or when using networked devices.
c. demonstrate an understanding of and respect for the rights and obligations of using and sharing intellectual property.

My co-teacher Jo had some valuable day-to-day insights from the classroom of where students had a lack of understanding or were mis-understanding the topic which helped guide our planning and thinking about the session.

We started with a quick survey using Mentimeter to get an understanding where any potential plagiarism could arise. The questions were adapted from the “Symptoms of Plagiarism” by Dianne MacKenzie, further discussed here. We explained that all answers were anonymous and it wasn’t any reflection on them but rather feedback to us as teachers. We zoomed in on discussing “must do well” to better understand whether the pressure was internal (self) or external (parental) or a mixture and found it was pretty evenly spread. As teachers and creators of assignments the 25% who said they “didn’t understand the assignment” gave further pause for thought on how we set and word assessments and assessment rubrics, and also credence to our new MYP coordinator’s emphasis on ensuring teachers and students are familiar with the MYP command terms (Libguide by Stephen Taylor).

 

After this, we showed them their homework diaries, where at the back we’d included a graphic of our Middle School Academic Honesty Policy, and an adapted summary of Turnitin’s spectrum of plagiarism. Yet another example of not assuming “if you put it there they will notice” since none of them had noticed what was at the back of their homework agenda! Following the Turnitin spectrum we discussed the various types with real life examples. They didn’t have any idea there were so many variations, and in particular were interested in the fact that reusing your own work was not ethical if you

Academic honesty

didn’t cite yourself. As was making up data for lab reports or “client requests” for design. 

Then they played a matching game of plagiarised text to type of plagiarism. And successfully matched all types.

In four groups they were given a moral compass and allocated 10-12 “Got Ethics” cards to discuss and place on the compass based on group consensus. And when they were finished they could rank the cards in the “wrong” sector by increasing level of “wrongness”  Interestingly here, one of the groups of girls were critical of the cards themselves saying the clothing of the girls images (exposed stomachs) was sexist and not gender neutral!

The final 15 minutes were spent on a Kahoot where we wrapped up all the elements of the session with a quiz where we explained that some of the questions had no right answer or a few options, and we’d pause every now and again to discuss things like what the difference was between copying a story and writing fan-fiction and fractured fairytales. 

We felt it was 70 minutes well spent with engaged and interested students throughout and will probably run the session again.

Little big things

Or perhaps big little things? The theme for this year’s Collaboration for Growth MYP session is “School Cultures; How do we shape them? How do they shape us?”

It made me think about what is different this year to last year culturally (besides feeling less like a deer in the headlights as it’s my 2nd year). A big thing has been the change in our school food provider. One would think that food is food and there’s not much difference between one and the other, but there has been quite a big shift. Last year many of us descended to one of the lounges and ate communally. It was fun to see on any particular day who would be there, and such interesting conversations would be had between Elementary, Middle and High school teachers and staff. You never knew who you’d bump into and all sorts of know-how and information would be passed along over lunch.

As someone not particularly inclined to shop and cook (and who’s trying to teach my teen to cook for himself, so increasingly leaving him up to fending for his dinners himself) it meant having a nutritious main meal for lunch and not bothering about dinner.

These days, the lounge is semi-deserted. I hardly ever see the people I used to bump into unless we make a point of meeting after school or for an external lunch – so much more effort. No more chatter about what’s going on educationally or personally in our lives. No more great ideas plotted out. Now I make a double meal at night and warm it up in our divisional microwave in our divisional staffroom if I can be bothered, or just eat at my desk when things are too overwhelming.

A little thing. A little big thing. But many have been mentioning the loss. And so culture changes. Without intent, positive or negative.

Collaboration is air to us

And we need it to survive.

I meant to write this post a little while back, but then school started, and whoosh there went all my potential blogging time.

On one of the FB groups I follow someone was asking about teaching academic integrity / honesty. Naturally the librarians in the group responded with “ask your librarian”. To which the poster responded “I took it on. Go me!”

There are so many things wrong with this response it’s hard to know where to begin. And yet it is pretty common. Even in IBO programs. Maybe especially in IBO programs? You see a lot of IB educators (PYP, MYP, IBDP) are really smart people. Often they’re subject specialists. They’ve had additional post-graduate training specific to the IB, and often also have post-graduate degrees.

So what can be so hard for a person like that to teach information literacy / academic honesty etc? Why on earth should they involve their teacher-librarian (assuming that one still survives in their organisation and hasn’t been replaced by a (unqualified) parent volunteer or the principal’s wife?

In the first instance it’s not quite as easy and clear cut as people presume it is. Heck there are people like Mike Caulfield make it their life’s work to seriously consider information literacy and over the years boil it down to its most useful essence – perhaps in response to the “go me!” attitude of educators.

I’ve walked into classrooms where teachers have been talking old-fashioned nonsense that was relevant in the time they studied and had to go back to micro-fiches or dig through unfederated databases. Classrooms where teachers are mixing up APA in-text citations with MLA7 works cited lists in an environment where MLA8 is the norm. Classrooms where teachers have unattributed images or texts in use…

But worse than all of that, they have a black and white view of plagiarism. One that is unsubtle and non-nuanced. One that makes students “good or evil” and neglects the approach that academic honesty is a community effort. That it’s too late to make it a quick add on to a lesson. I’ve written on this in the past – plagiarism is not a simple matter, but mired in assumptions, teaching, culture and ignorance. And that’s the exact reason why it should be addressed centrally with common language, common understanding and be phased in over years with teachers and the rest of the community as role models.

Academic honesty is not just about consistent, correct citations. It is an integral part of how we look at research and inquiry. It’s not just a once off lesson taught in isolation, it’s part of us helping students to develop as researchers (please read this post on citations helping research in backward design). But if the teacher librarian is left out of the equation, it is not part of a progression, not part of ongoing development. And then we get teachers grumbling about how students are lazy and just copying and pasting, and having no integrity blah blah blah.

So don’t “go you” – unless you’re going to your teacher librarian (TL). And if you haven’t bothered to talk to, or collaborated with your TL, do yourself, and your students a favour and do so. Yes you’re smart and all that. But the TL is a specialist in this stuff (remember the two masters degrees they need?). And if they’re not used, you’ll be left with a bunch of apps and ignorance. And the problem will not go away with some nifty templates from teachers-pay-teachers or your mates on FaceBook.

——-

Photo by Fedor GoldBerg from Pexels

The unbearable everythingness of being new

This is a post I couldn’t write last year. Because I was new. I’ve just about spent half of my life being new in a country, city, job, school. A third of my life of newness ago I would have unabashedly blogged about the newness, heck, even 10 years ago I would have. Now its become more difficult. Because new never gets easier no matter how often you’re new. And now watching this year’s intake of “newbies” and witnessing the change of our Wechat group name to “twobies” there is still that pang of identification.

There are two opposing forces. The buddhist “where-ever you go, there you are” (title of a meditation book by Kabat-Zinn, source unknown) and the “immovable object vs. unstoppable force”. And every shade inbetween. I just love that video below especially the line about “passing through each other with no effect on each other at all”

That’s pretty meta. In the past year I’ve been through a range of emotions as I attempt do match my version of reality with the culture and situation of where I am. I still have all sorts of plans and dreams and ideals. And at the end of the first week back I see those reflected in those who are now new, as they grapple with trying to understand 100 moving parts all at once and to excavate what is “mission critical” as it relates to surviving and thriving in a new culture while choosing the right priorities that are going to make the most difference to the young bodies and minds we serve and still remaining emotionally intact.

There is this medical myth that you rejuvenate every cell in your body over the course of seven years. I wonder what the equivalent period is for organisations? I wonder what the optimal changeover period is? And I wonder how much change is like me painting my nails? Truth. Every year I think I’ll try and be more groomed. And go off and have my nails painted. And within hours realise that my life is not compatible with manicured nails, as bits get damaged and other bits flake off. If I’m lucky as least one nail will last more than 3 days. I think people who have been in organisations for a long time watch the painted nails come and go. And I think that truly for the brief time they endure in a dominant culture they make a real beautiful difference for the students that are in their classes. But that immovable object.

How do new people in existing organisations replenish? There’s that edu-celebrity stuff going around on twitter with the posters and wall quotes and door signs saying we need to say to students “You are enough. We’re happy you are here” I think we need to be saying that every day to the new cells in our organisation. To be welcoming and absorbing and helping them to be who they are and bring what they’ve brought. Perhaps something easier to do when you’re recently new than if you’ve been around 5, 10, 20 years when you’re orbiting around different planets.

Have a great year everyone, and when you’re not, most librarians have a box of tissues and a workroom or office where the door can shut while you let those tears of frustration flow. We don’t judge.

Librarian Crush – Folks I’m loving right now

About to start our second week of school, and after the first 3 days of teacher planning week I’d just like to make a quick shout-out to some people who make a librarian’s heart very happy!

  • The new teacher, overloaded with moving continents with a family who came into the library and borrowed 4 books to be reading what her students are reading
  • The teachers who took it on blind faith and my raving that the Global Readaloud is something they should “sacrifice” class time for and agreed to participate for the first time this year.
  • The outdoor teacher who came to me to discuss what books and short stories we had that would be suitable to take on camp for reading aloud
  • My staff who worked like trojans to get the library looking wonderful for the start of the year – including cataloging piles of books that arrived during the summer “because the students would like to see something new”
  • The HOD who spoke up during a meeting to support the idea of reading aloud for at least 10 minutes before the start of all and any lessons (including the ones where teachers said “even in my (XXX) subject?”
  • People like Buffy Hamilton and Pernille Ripp who blog continuously and consistently about making reading and writing work in the Middle / High School classroom. Including admitting with humility when things don’t work.
  • People on twitter who engage in conversations about why students post-primary have stopped reading and how to re-ignite the passion for reading.
  • Departments and teams who think it’s not only necessary but normal to include the librarian in planning units.
  • Fellow librarians who are keeping in touch over long distances to brain storm how we’re going to make this a great year of engagement for our students and fellow faculty.

Happy Monday morning everyone – hope you all have a great week and a great year of sharing and reading.

How to WINN in the new school year

Part of my vacation time is usually spent doing personal learning and preparing for the new year for both my students and for how I can impact teaching and learning for teachers. Last year was my first in a new environment – both in terms of level (middle school rather than primary) and country/school (Beijing, China). This year I’m preparing with somewhat more hindsight and the fact that we have 12 new teachers starting. This post I’m going to focus more on how I hope to support teachers.

Last year, my predecessor very kindly typed up a long list of answers to my 100s of questions to help guide me in the new position. It’s something I refer to from time to time even further into the year. This year I compiled a “newbies” guide with the help and input of all my fellow (last year) new teachers, and the rest of the staff on the nitty-gritty things that we wish we’d known before starting. We sent it out into the world and based on the feedback added additional information. It seems to have had some success with 1,282 views since it was created in May. But it’s a lot of information to digest.

Today I stumbled on the videos (and book) of Nick Shackleton Jones via a tweet on a blogpost of his (yes, rabbit hole – but this time a good one). This has definitely changed my whole view on how to approach supporting teachers, and perhaps even how to work with students.

A brief summary of the takeaways of the videos

Part 1 – distinguish between content dumping (my newbie Libguide – and other Libguides) and performance support. In order to give performance support you need to understand / analyse what people are trying to do and provide resources that have DESIGN & UTILITY.

Find out from your audience WHAT I NEED NOW (WINN).

Part 2 – this session is particularly interesting for on-boarding and knowledge sharing. The basic elements are things that people need immediately (how to use the computer); advice from peers, understanding how things connect together; factsheets; one page guides; checklists.

Part 3 – discusses the affective (emotional) context of learning and how to alternate between providing resources (when the audience has a strong emotional response to the information) and experiences (when the emotional response / interest is lower). The 5Di design process is introduced (define, discover, design, develop, deploy & iterate). Of particular use in my context was the CONCERN-TASK-RESOURCES model. I think that is a great way of deciding what resources to focus on by working out the concerns of the audience, relating them to tasks and then providing the resources that can help with the tasks.

I can see this working really well for designing learning experiences for our Day 9s to ensure that they are student need rather than teacher driven.

So, what I thought I’ll do is during the newbie week and first week of teachers back have daily debrief sessions on a pop-in or digital basis called WINN where teachers can quickly and briefly address what their concerns or tasks are that they need immediate help with and to build up the resources they need. Pop in is easy enough, for the digital I’m thinking of using our “ask” function of Libguides that I just started populating at the end of last year, so that the questions can accumulate into a knowledge database.

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Here is a longer video on “how people learn” worth the 29 minute investment – and a link to the book “How People Learn : Designing Education and Training that Works to Improve Employee Performance” I have a small gripe on the “employee performance” part of the subtitle – as I think it’s pretty universally applicable – but I guess that’s his background.

Header Photo by Felix Staffler from Pexels