October 25 Reading Log

In today's education world, promoting technology, nonfiction, and research is one of the most important aspects in the classroom and library media center. As mentioned in "All aboard!: Implementing Common Core offers school librarians an opportunity to lead," the Common Core Standards are requiring that teachers implement more nonfiction into students reading. Students should be reading 70% of nonfiction by their senior year of high school and have databases to back up their reading in order to make it more solid and interactive.

This requires the library media specialist to step up into a leadership role. This includes using web 2.0 tools such as blogs and wikis to inform parents, students, and administrative staff for them to see what is going on in the library. Librarians also need to make the school library a place where both teachers and and students can feel safe and feel like learning can become productive and tangible. In the article "Today's School Library Media Specialist Leader," I found the list of 10 easy leadership ideas to help school librarians become leaders on their campuses to be especially helpful. Things like meeting with the principal regularly, be on curriculum development committees, and collaborating with teachers and staff are especially helpful because without becoming active in the school environment, media specialists have no hope in advocating the importance of the library in the Common Core. Time and budget may be an issue, of course, but shouldn't we at least make an effort to promote our library for the students? Even parents like the ones mentioned in Tough Mothers would be an asset to the school library. If you can get the parents in on working with the library and getting people to recognize the hard work in the library, more media specialists would have a better time integrating what students need in the library and even possibly gaining funds for the library.

Collecting data/evidence of what's being done in the library is probably the most obvious way to show what's being done in the library, but according to "Can you find the evidence-based practice in your school library?" most media specialists use circulation and other related statistics when asked to bring them. Instead, media specialists should be using statistics like how much they helped a student with research or homework, helped the student when not in class, and helping them in general. These kinds of statistics seem to be more tangible, solid, and realistic to me than just basing the library use off of circulation. After all, most books don't get checked out, but are used in the library on a consistent basis. How do you account for those books that don't show up on the circulation records?

Creating evidence, collaborating with teachers, parents, and the principal are many of the ways in which library media specialists need to help promote the library and integrate it into classrooms and teaching. School Libraries are important, and therefore should be given the proper acknowledgement that it needs. But it won't help the students if we don't even make the necessary steps to ensure its survival.