What happens in the library

After making a quick escape from my first session in order to avoid someone I recognized but did not feel like reminiscing with (based on seeing her in action in the session, I could tell she was pretty much the same as she’d been in college, which was as much as I needed to know), I headed to Ballroom B for the AASL’s Presidents Program, which featured Allison Zmuda. She was a great speaker—lot to take in, and I’m glad she offered to share her PowerPoint slides, as there was a lot to read and take in and I know I missed a lot.

One of the ideas that really resonated with me, however, was the idea that while we may have limited sphere over which he have control, we need to do what we can to really exert our influence within that sphere—in fact, it’s imperative that we do everything we can to exert the influence that we can.

I spent a lot of time at ALA (and in the past ten years) thinking about and having discussions about the education system as a whole, battling the “it only matters if it’s tested” mindset (and that the only way to make something matter is to create a way to test it), the seeming decline in critical thinking, the “no one reads any more/death of print” storyline, etc., and the discussion always revolves around what we can do to change, you know, everything. Which we can’t do. As Zmuda spelled out, there are things we can’t control, things we can influence but not control, and things we can control.

And while I think it’s important to keep having the discussions and exerting the influence we do have on the “big picture” stuff, for me that idea really drives home the importance of being active on the local and state level, even more so than on the national level; that is where our influence is really felt, and that is where momentum builds.

But even more than that, it speaks to the control we have and must exert in our own libraries, particularly when it comes to instruction. You can’t say, “I had to do this project/assignment, because it’s what the teacher brought me.”

Often we do it with the best of intentions—it’s a way to make less willing teachers feel comfortable, it’s easier to coordinate when you don’t have to start from scratch. And oftentimes teachers will come with a fully formed unit plan and just want you to show students “the research part.” Even when the research assignment they’ve written looks nothing like something you would create in order to teach the skills students need to develop. Such unit plans also often keep the librarian out of the creation of the final project; and, as I wrote yesterday, we need to stay involved for the information integration part of the process.

But going along with a. . . not necessarily “bad” plan, but not necessarily a good one either, is a cop out. And I say this with full recognition of the fact that I’ve done this. A lot, particularly in my first year. When you’re new and someone comes to you with a project they’ve been doing for ten years (which, yikes) it’s more than a little awkward to try and tell them to change everything. But if we want to truly be collaborating with classroom teachers—and not just be a drop-in lesson on skills that seem disjointed from the lesson—it means taking ownership and having challenging and productive (if sometimes awkward) conversations with our colleagues about creating and teaching units that integrate information literacy skills.

We don’t want what happens in the library to just stay in the library; the skills we teach impact not only other academic areas, but areas outside the school walls. And if we want what we teach to have an impact beyond the library, we have to take full control of what happens in the library.

How do we teach students not to put tomatoes in fruit salad?

Now that I’ve been home for a week, and ALA has been over for even longer, I suppose it’s about time that I finally write about everything I saw there. I’m going to try to break it into multiple posts covering different sessions, both in order to pace myself and to avoid a post the size of a book.

Saturday morning I went to a session on sequencing instruction from kindergarten through college, which seems like a pretty difficult task. Even if you manage to keep students in one school district for K-12, ensuring they go through a complete information literacy curriculum, it seems that the channels of communication to post-secondary schools are not always great, never mind the different expectations different colleges have (or the disagreements between—or within—different departments at the same school).

While I am working to prepare my students for college (and try to stay familiar with general info lit trends at the schools my students frequently attend), students arrive at my school from all sorts of different backgrounds. Some have had excellent research instruction; some have had almost none. Which is one of the challenges in writing and implementing curriculum; there’s no one I can coordinate with on K-8 instruction.

Rather than attempt a cohesive narrative (my brain’s half on vacation), I’m going to bullet point ideas that resonated with me, and explain why.

Dr. David Loertscher started the session with an overview of what we’re trying to do.

• Information literacy instruction used to just be about the research process; now, it’s more about critical thinking and content creation

Students need to be doing more than simply trying to absorb a lot of information; it’s getting to be a trite observation by now, but the ability to memorize and recall facts is simply not as useful or impressive a skill in the Google age. The skills students need are different—can you locate the information, can you assess it, can you make sense of it, can you integrate it into what you already know, can you build upon that knowledge and share it? It’s way more complicated than remembering a set of tasks in sequence

• “You only learn 21^st century skills in order to deepen your content understanding.”

I wrote “YES!” next to this when I was taking notes in the session. Too often I see people talking about “21^st century skills” (by which they usually mean the latest technology) as an end in and of itself. Sorry, but learning how to build a wiki, or record a podcast, or write a blog or use an e-reader are not ends in and of themselves. Unless they are coupled with real content, they’re just toys. Technology divorced from content (i.e. context) is just as meaningless as try to teach content without context.

• Understanding how Wikipedia happened will help us solve the dropout problem

Okay, I left out a few steps in his logic, but for me that was the basic point. We need to center our work around engaging with real problems and involving students in knowledge creation. Students who have a voice and an audience and see the real-world context and application for what they’re learning are students who stay engaged in what they’re learning. And engaged students stay in school.

• Knowing how to research does not mean you know how to think

Word.

So how do we change research so students have to know how to think in order to be successful? And how on earth do you teach someone to think?

• Once students find information, it’s now up to teachers to show them how to do something with it; we need to put ourselves back in that process.

This goes to the root of the whole “research is not thinking” issue; we need to be working with teachers on the WHOLE process, not just send them back to the classroom once they’ve gathered information.

• K-12 schools and colleges/universities need to work together; better trained teachers create better undergraduate students.

If nothing else, naked self-interest means that librarians in K-12 schools need to communicate with colleges about what new teachers (many of whom are not information literate themselves) need to know.

• You are no longer amazing just because you taught a kid how to use a database

Students can find information. That part of the process keeps getting easier, frankly. What they do with the information? That part will never be easy.

I also really liked several of the points Valerie Diggs of Chelmsford High School presented.

• It is very difficult to move teachers away from “information regurgitation” projects

So, so difficult. Part of that is because that’s how they’ve always done things, and part of it is, I think, because teachers think students need to master “the basics” before they can do more “advanced” research. Except a) students are bored to death by these projects, and so b) they don’t learn anything either basic or advanced. So we do another “information regurgitation” project. . .

• We need to focus less on finding and evaluating sources, more on how they use the information they find

This was reassuring to hear, and I think ties into the point Dr. Loertscher made about teaching kids to use a database. Finding an evaluating sources is important, but it can’t be the core of what we do.

The final presenter was Ellysa Stern Cahoy, a librarian at Penn State.

• We’re teaching skills students think they already know

Anybody who has ever tried to teach anybody anything can relate to this idea. No matter how little they actually know, students are convinced they know everything about the research process (and sometimes everything about the topic they’re researching). The challenge of over-confidence is particularly tricky, as researching requires resiliency, and you need some confidence in order to be resilient enough to make it through the research process—never mind sharing what you’ve learning with a larger audience.

• How does the research make it into the final product? Students find good information, but they don’t integrate it

I cannot tell you how many times a student has told me that it doesn’t really matter if the information is correct on the five other sources on their Works Cited, ‘cause they got all the information from one source. In order to get students to integrate information , we need to rethink the entire research process; right now each step is not clearly tied to what comes next in a causal way. It’s find your sources and then evaluate them and then take notes and then etc. In a way we need to take students to the final project and then show them how to scaffold back to where they need to start; they need to see how each part ties into every other part, rather than viewing each step as discrete and disjointed.

• How do you keep the fun of technology from interfering with the critical thinking process?

I’ve seen students spend more time selecting images for the cover page of a report (a cover page that is rarely if ever required) than doing the research for that report. I’ve seen them spend more time on backgrounds and text effects for a PowerPoint than creating actual content for the slides. Add in the possibility of video clips or sound effects and critical thinking goes right out the window.

The title of this post is a reference to a quote I recently discovered (and have been unable to find authoritative attribution for): "Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad." This, as I see it, is the big shift in information literacy instruction at every level of schooling. Finding out that a tomato is a fruit is no longer the point; knowing what to do (and what not to do) with the tomato is the point.

You Shall Know Us By Our Totebags

I spent my first day at ALA doing a lot of non-ALA type things. I decided not to do the Independent School Tour (it was more than I wanted to spend), and instead spent some time at a couple Smithsonian museums. I did come back in time for the “Conference 101” session run by the NMRT (New Members Round Table; on a related note, there are two solid pages devoted to deciphering acronyms in the Conference Planner. Just sayin’). It was good, but not exactly what I was hoping it would be; I wanted some real strategy-type tips, not just “yeah, there is a lot to do” speeches. However, given that the session is for so many different types of librarians looking for so many different types of things, it does have to be rather general. Perhaps there should be opportunities for one-on-one (or small group) guidance for new conference attendees; I know I got my best information from my colleague/roommate, a conference veteran.

After the NMRT session (which I left a little early), I headed over the Convention Center in order to get a good spot in line for the opening of the Exhibits Hall. Wow. I’d spied on the Exhibits Hall under construction the day before (which was sort of like seeing how food is made) in order to attempt strategy development. My colleague told me to head for Random House and Harper Collins first, as they typically did the best giveaways; I also looked up the publishers for two books I was interested in, so I could be sure to get my greedy little hands on the Advanced Readers Copies if they were available. It’s all about strategy. And throwing elbows.

This ended up being a good plan, since right as I walked in to the Harper Collins booth I saw someone I thought I recognized, though his face was obscured by a video camera, so it was hard to be sure. But as I got closer, I was sure: it was John Green! I would like to say I was super smooth in introducing myself and talking to him, but I think it would be more accurate to report that I was a stammering fangirl. Still, it was pretty awesome. He has several readings happening over the course of the weekend, all of which are happening at times I have to be somewhere else, and I was bummed that I wouldn’t get to see him. So meeting him in person worked out pretty well.

All in all I collected about 18 ARCs, including Patrick Ness’s Monsters of Men, which may or may not have made me squeal for joy. I also scored E. Lockhart’s new book, Real Live Boyfriends and Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares, the new book by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan. I am beyond excited about these books, but I know I can’t start reading them until after I get back from Denver, because if I start them I won’t want to put them down.

I do need to go back to the Exhibits Hall and really check out the vendors; by the time I’d gathered all my ARCs (and, thankfully, a couple more totebags) I was suffering from a severe case of Totebag Shoulder and was in no condition to have productive conversations with vendors. Mostly I would talk to them just for the opportunity to put my bags down for a while; I should be able to go back during lunch tomorrow while I am slightly less weighted down by stuff.

After that it was off to Affiliate Assembly, which I am still trying to get a handle on. I didn’t participate a whole lot, but I’m still just trying to get the lay of the land. I did go out for drinks with a couple of my fellow Region 1 school librarians afterwards, which was great. The whole evening (and being in here in general) has me thinking a lot about leadership and involvement and state-level vs. national-level involvement in a way I can’t really articulate this late at night after a couple glasses of wine, so I’m going to hold off on that for now. I have a long day lined up for tomorrow, so I really should get some sleep.

Nerdapalooza

I wrote the previous post while on the train on my way to DC for ALA, and from there on to Denver for ISTE; I have (I hope) everything I will need for the next seven days packed into a carryon suitcase and my shoulder bag. I packed my clothes based on the assumption that I won’t, at any point, spill something on myself and need to change mid-day; we’ll see how that plays out.

I'm psyched about the next six days; these two conferences combined promise to be pretty geektastic. And, of course, many of the things I want to see and do are happening at the exact same time. I just checked in and picked up the conference program, which is not helping, a) because I'm finding even more things I don't have the time for but want to do and b) it is very big, and sort of confusing. Also, I checked in too early, and the totebags haven't arrived yet. What's a library conference without a sea of matching totebags?

We're (me and two colleagues from CASL) staying at the Renaissance Hotel, which is only a block from Convention Center. This is especially convenient because I was able to come here and use the wireless rather than being charged $13/day at the hotel.

I don't have much going on tomorrow until late in the day; I was going to go on the school tour being hosted by the Independent School Section, but I wans't interested enough in the schools on the tour to justify the cost. I'm going to spend some time at the Smithsonian and National Portrait Gallery instead. I lived in DC my first year out of college, and remember how to get around remarkably well for someone with my sense of direction. It would be even easier getting around if it weren't 8 bajillion degrees outside.

My plan is to write/blog throughout ALA and ISTE, rather than try and remember and summarize after it's all over. I know I'll be taking in a lot over the next several days, and I know taking the time to write and reflect while it's going on will help me remember more of it. I will try to only post things that might of interest/are coherently written, but I make no guarantees.

I'm going to go explore the Convention Center and see if I can get the lay of the land; it spans three city blocks, so I hope they don't mind if I leave a trail of breadcrumbs.