Reading Well(s)

Finally, I found a Michigan librarian who knows and uses the AASL standards. She does not use them in every lesson, but she uses them when she sets her goals for the year.  Catherine Kerns is the only certified teacher librarian in the district where I work. Her job is vast-running both the middle and high school libraries, checking out Chromebooks to every student in both schools and controlling textbook check out in the high school. She is a past president of MASL (Michigan Association of School Librarians) and has served on numerous committees. She came to the interview carrying her post-it marked book of the new standards.  For this interview, I chose the foundation of inquire. Most of this foundation she implements through collaborations. She mainly collaborates with English teachers. She teaches research skills, introduction to databases, noodle tools, and note taking. What she tells students is that she has completed any assignment that they have. She shows them the steps she go

 The domain I decided to focus on for this interview was collaborate. I interviewed Terri Ahlers from Swan Valley High school in Saginaw, MI. The idea to interview Terri came from the shock of reading about her school in a Knowledge Quest article in ISCI 720 (Wejrowski & McRae, 2013). Seriously, there are three certified librarians in my area, how could one of them have all these awards and I didn't know about it? It turns out, the librarian in the article, Kay Wejrowski, no longer works for Swan Valley High School and neither does the principal who partnered with her. But the position still exists. Based on article, I expected there still might be a collaborative culture there where the librarian "demonstrates the importance of personal, social, and intellectual networks. "  Just like my last interview with Amy Hermon, getting answers to any of the required questions proved difficult. Once again, Ahlers does not know the AASL standards, and they do not play a role i

  There are not many "famous" school librarians. In my head, Amy Hermon, host of the podcast School Librarians United is one of them. School Librarians United had its first episode in 2018, this week marks episode 210. As Amy mentioned multiple times, only one of her episodes mentions the AASL standards. "There just isn't an interest," she claims.  The shared foundation I wanted to focus on for this interview was Engage. And in the sense that we problem solved, respected others viewpoints' and created new knowledge, we engaged. I really don't know how Hermon engages her students at school. She had a lot to say, none of it good, about the AASL standards and the state of libraries in Michigan. Even I asked direct questions where I defined the engage foundation and asked if she thought she did any of this, she didn't really answer the question. Most of this post will focus on questions 4 & 5.   4.  What are some of the challenges that you face when

Assigned reading This week we had to read nonfiction. My favorite genre as a school librarian is nonfiction picture books. I love using them with 3rd grade and above, even with high schoolers. They are such a wonderful introduction to a topic that kids often do not know about. I need to book talk and share these to get them into the kids hands because they can get overlooked. Considering nonfiction picture books from a storytelling perspective, changes their usefulness a bit.  The books I read this week are on the left. I could envision using the picture book biographies for storytelling without the book and then showing some of the pictures afterward as Green and Del Negro suggest in our text (2010). Other books like How to Swallow a Pig won't work for storytelling without a book, would even be hard for a read aloud due to the broken up text. In this book the info is divided into short 2-3 sentence paragraphs with images scattered across the page. Kids love these kinds of informa

 As I've explored blogs on storytelling, I am amazed at how many of them are nonprofits with storytelling workshops. They are localized, not international. Consider the Young Storyteller 's group in CA. It looks like a super successful program that is mentor based. Or Patchwork: A Storytelling Guild based in PA, that seeks to promote the oral telling of stories. At first, I was confused by the locality of these sites, why not serve the whole country? Then I remembered that storytelling promotes community. Web of who appears to recognize the value of storyte lling  I also noticed that the organizations that did offer storyteller workshops often had testimonies from participates. Participates range from big name companies like Google or Nike to pastors, non-profits, and insurance sales teams. I kept wondering, why, until this class, has storytelling never been taught to me? As a high school English teacher, I would think storytelling would be taught. Why are businesses and non

Students as Storytellers: Let's begin with a bit of background. My only experience with a storyteller who told stories orally, without a book, was with my grandmother. When we visited, each night should would put me to bed with a story. She told stories of my dad and his siblings growing up. I loved bedtime at grandma's house.  t I still remember some of them: my uncle wearing his rain boots into deep mud and getting stuck-for hours, my dad setting the curtains on fire. I remember her as a wonderful storyteller. It gave me an appreciation not just for storytelling but of the way stories can connect us to our history.  Second bit of background, I homeschooled my daughters for seven years. We used a curriculum that followed history. So art, history, literature, music history, some science etc. all radiated from a certain time period. It was cool and exhausting as a teacher/parent. For three of those years, we were in a co-op. At each meeting, three kids had to present a research