Read the title out loud and it makes sense. You’ve probably heard at least the first half on more than one occasion. How do we hear the second half more often? I have a few ideas.
My school has a very diverse population of learners. In the library we try our best to make every student feel comfortable and strive to create a safe, welcoming environment. Due to the layout and room configuration, we are in the heart of the school, with lots of traffic all day long. It’s a study hall, a hangout spot, a computer lab, and a safe place for many of our students.
To encourage a culture of reading, there is a school-wide D.E.A.R. period (drop everything and read) everyday for 10 minutes after first period. In the library, work to bring in books students want to read and monitor circulation statistics to see what’s in demand and take all this into account when placing orders. We regularly change book displays to reflect holidays, school events, and other community activities. We have online audio books available to all students and actively promote the resource to students and teachers. We also just received 10 iPads so we will be encouraging students to try out ebooks. Making connections with teachers is also important. I have put together many resource lists for various curricular areas and regularly pull materials for teachers to use with their classes.
In my library, I would like to see more connections made with teachers, encouraging more resource-based teaching and collaboration between the library and other staff. I am slowly trying to build relationships, but find many people are just happy to continue as they always have or feel they just don’t have time to try anything new due to heavy curriculum demands. Relationships with students are also key to promoting reading in school. I love talking with students about what they are reading and encouraging them to try different genres or authors. Once our digital library takes off, I think having a “virtual book club” would be great. With the right license, an unlimited number of students could participate via blogs or forums.
I would also like to see more connections made with local authors and other writers. Every year we have the Young Authors’ Conference which brings students together with professional authors for workshops and readings. This is another example of how building relationships can encourage a stronger reading (and writing) culture within my school.
In the future, we will be a mostly digital facility (not all of the books are going thank goodness!). I think we need to proactive now in figuring out how to best encourage students and teachers to learn how to use technologies effectively when it comes to the reading experience. As mentioned above we just received iPads for student use. As I’ve discussed in previous posts, there are a myriad of uses for the iPad that can accommodate students with disabilities (see the Melissa Fortson Youtube clip). One article I found interesting, titled “Exploring the use of the iPad for literacy learning” by Hutichison, Beschorner, and Schmidt-Crawford, was based on a case study of a grade 4 classroom using iPads in the classroom. The authors found may positive aspects to using the devices which included encouraging collaboration among students, ease of adapting lessons to meed individual student needs, students used prior knowledge of the technology (didn’t need a lot of support in operating the iPads), and practical benefits such as easy storage. The authors did point out a few downsides, such as the inability to do word-processing with ease, the inevitable “teacher-as-troubleshooter”, and the difficulties in using the touch screen and manipulating text and images (Hutchison et al. 22). The student response to the technology was positive and engaged them in the literacy activities the teacher set out. I think these types of lessons could be very useful for “reluctant readers” and also could encourage more students to seek out books for pleasure, thereby strengthening the reading culture of a school.
Finally, I think that having a more dynamic web presence could enhance the reading culture of my school. If students had an appealing, user-friendly site with information, links, and forums for discussion of library activities, new books, and other related school topics, I think it would be beneficial to our program. It is definitely a challenging, time-consuming project to design, build, and maintain a great site, but with the right promotion and collaboration with teachers, it could become an important part of our school community.
I’m including a short clip from an elementary school in New Zealand that has created an incredible culture of reading through staff collaboration, technology, and encouragement of student choice, independence, and ownership of the space. The principal also mentions that because of the success of the library, the reading scores school wide are higher than average, including those for student groups considered at-risk on a national scale. The enthusiasm of the staff and students is very evident and encouraging.
References
Fortson, Melissa. “Emerging technology as assistive technology: the iPad, accessibility, and libraries.” MSU Emerging Technologies Summit 2011. Mississippi State University Libraries. August 25, 2011. Lecture. Web January 26, 2014.
Hutchison, Amy, B. Beschorner, and D. Schmidt-Crawford. “Exploring the use of the iPad for literacy learning.” The Reading Teacher. 66.1 (2012): 15-23. Web. February 6, 2014.
National Library of New Zealand. “School libraries: the heart of a reading culture – Hurupaki school.” uploaded April 25, 2011. Web. February 5, 2014.
We speak up for children (organization). “Illustration of kids reading books while lying on the lawn.” Web. February 9, 2014.
Well done post that highlights all the great things you are doing already, plus honest discussion of some of the challenges and roadblocks that you are working to overcome. Your ideas are excellent, and your discussion of leveraging new resources and formats to engage even more readers is very insightful. Well crafted blog post that has labels, images, links and media embedded. Great work!
Interesting points Claire. Have you considered how this relates to climate change and the proposed LNG pipeline? How can students be engaged in reading with these things weighing heavily on their minds? I could never get into a book about invisible immortals if I was worried about the rainforest. I wish you all the best with your “making reading cool” but I don’t think we will ever be cool again with global warming going on. #freetheikeamonkey
I find reading on an iPad to be a great tool. There are so many options like having text read aloud or being able to highlight individual words to look up in the dictionary. The highlighting and note-taking features are handy too. In terms of typing, you might want to get some protective cases that also have keyboards attached to them.
Hi Claire, Great post about creating a reading culture. It sounds like you are working hard to make sure that the students love coming to the library!
I liked your point about building on your school website. This is really important, and I’ve seen a big difference in use of online resources and sharing in our District since the creation of a District Wide learning commons website. All of the elementary schools in our District have the same site/with the same resources but we can individually add to it as well. For each grade we have links/videos etc. for common topics of study. For example, under grade four there are links for explorers, the Inuit etc. It works well because all of the teacher librarians in the District screened these resources to ensure they were a good reading level, and had accurate and appropriate information. It has been used a lot so far by the students and teachers. It takes a definite commitment at the school and district level, but is definitely worth it in my mind!
We also have a standard site for all schools, which we can personalize to a certain extent. The common complaint is that that is it really boring! It looks like a web page from a decade ago, not appealing at all. We use Destiny, which offers the Destiny Quest option for searching etc. but it is too juvenile-looking for a high school setting. This has been an on-going discussion for my TL colleagues. Our options for website hosting are restricted and we have a district staff whose sole responsibility is Destiny and the school sites, so should we be reinventing the wheel individually?