The Different Faces Of School Librarians

Posted on February 15, 2019 by Barbara Paciotti

At first glance, we may seem to have an easy job, but a School Librarian is actually the busiest teacher in the school! Yes, teacher, indeed. School librarians are grade level or subject educators with the same education, training, and certifications as any other teacher, and must have specified years of experience before they can pursue additional education to earn a Masters degree in Library Science, then pass a test to become a K-12 school librarian. Why? Because we believe that as a School Librarian we can impact a greater number of students than teaching in a single classroom. We are often the only staff member who works with every student and every staff member in the school.

For librarians, the day begins with getting the largest classroom in the building ready for students. Depending on library use and custodial support, we may have housekeeping duties, but 2 tasks are a given: turning on (and perhaps logging in to) the library computers and shelving books returned the day before. Once students arrive, elementary, middle school, and high school librarians spend their days very differently.

ELEMENTARY LIBRARIANS Denise, May, and Dan

Denise (Nebraska), May (NYC), and Dan (Maryland) are elementary librarians, Pre-K/Kindergarten through grade 5. They are on a fixed schedule, that is, they are part of the rotation with music, art, and physical education that gives classroom teachers a planning period each day of the week. This is common for elementary librarians, so Denise, May, and Dan have 6 classes throughout the day during which they teach their own library lessons.

Denise has book check out, silent reading, then a fiction or non fiction read-aloud, followed by computer time with an activity that relates to the read-aloud. She also teaches a multi-literacy project with each grade level.

May has a 7-week unit on Appropriate Online Behaviors with all grade levels beginning in October, and then does a variety of other library lessons. She also is assigned to pre-k classrooms during their naptime 2 days a week.

Dan has taught on flexible, semi-fixed, and fixed schedules, lately with a fixed schedule teaching 28 classes a week. Like Denise and May, he has to come up with a ton of lesson plans!

In addition to their regularly scheduled classes, many elementary librarians, like Denise, have a before school reader’s club, or, like Dan, squeezes in an after school book club between school duty 3 days a week.

Dan offers us a great overview of the pros and cons of scheduling dynamics:

	PROS	CONS
Fixed schedule	Equity. Everyone in all grades gets a media lesson on the same schedule with the lessons I want to do.	No time, especially with intermediate grades (3-5), for student-driven inquiry projects. Lack of time for library administrative tasks.
Flexible schedule	Plenty of time for student-driven inquiry lessons. Time for administrative tasks.	Difficulty of coordinating library lessons and visits with teachers. Classroom teachers make or break flex scheduling format: if they are supportive, it works great; if not, for whatever reason, it’s not equitable for their students.
Semi-flex schedule	Pre-K/K-2 get fixed schedule lessons weekly or biweekly, and intermediate grades (3-5) can have student-driven inquiry with teacher collaboration. This is my preferred format because everyone wins; everyone gets something they want and need.	None that I’m aware of!

5-6 LIBRARIAN Melissa

Melissa (Missouri) is the School Librarian in a 5-6 grade building on a semi-fixed/flex schedule. She sees ELA classes regularly, and other subjects are flexibly scheduled as needed. Melissa has set up her ELA library visits so teachers conference with half the students while she does a small instruction lesson with the other half. Then they switch students. That way the conferences and the instruction are both more effective.

Melissa designs library lessons based on what teachers want her to focus on, in addition to her own library research skills lessons, such as citations and source types. She also plans whole school Project Based Learning lessons for half days and a STEAM parent night. Her school is semi-hi tech, with Chromebook carts in the teachers’ rooms, and Melissa has a Makerspace in the library that’s used during RTI time with students who don’t need math and reading help.

HIGH SCHOOL LIBRARIANS Susan and Julie

Susan (Tennessee) is currently a high school librarian, but also has 12 years experience in elementary libraries. Her experience was similar to Denise, May and Dan—fixed schedule, no planning time, no aide, and serving after-school duty—plus she hosted book fairs, wrote grants, promoted reading programs with the public library, and served on committees.

Now, as a high school librarian for over 1100 students and 65 teachers, Susan has a flexible schedule which allows everyone to visit the library at their time of need. She must coordinate library use with testing and events, but she also has a conference room that is used for small group meetings for social workers, recruiters, and professional development.

Susan begins the year with a QR code scavenger hunt orientation, then teaches classes about Internet safety, website evaluation, and creating newsletters. She works throughout the day with individual students who need help with papers and projects. Susan promotes as many literacy-related programs as possible: National Library Card Sign-Up Month, Teen Read Week, Banned Book Week, National Library Month, Read Across America, Read for the Record, Drop Everything and Read.

Susan hosts a teacher library orientation session to get teachers on board with library use, and collaborates with teachers by attending department meetings. She is her school’s onsite technical coordinator, maintaining the library webpage, where she includes scholarship information for students and surveys for students & teachers to submit requests of books to order for the library.

Susan serves on the school improvement plan committee, writes grants, is a book reviewer for the School Library Journal, is involved with her state’s professional library organization, and connects with other librarians through online networks and listservs.

Julie (Tennessee) serves in a 9-12 A-B block schedule high school. She begins her day with a 10-minute homeroom group of students, then has a flexible morning schedule. In the middle of the day, Julie has a 45-minute RTI class, with whom she does a novel study and a unit on digital literacy & reading the news. Then the flex schedule continues until the last period, when Julie covers a 9^th grade ELA class.

After her orientation scavenger hunt at the start of school, Julie schedules anybody that wants to use the library and is open to whatever teachers want to do, like ELA teachers who bring classes in for about 30 minutes to get a book and read. Julie also works with various teachers to develop research projects. A typical research project takes about two weeks, every other day, during that teacher’s regular class schedule.

Julie’s library also offers a makerspace with knitting, friendship bracelets, board games, Little Bits, coloring and drawing, and origami. It serves as a reward, but Julie walks a fine line with teachers about students participating in unscheduled activities.

While having a flexible schedule may seem ideal, Julie also has to work around testing and special events that use the library, such as guest speakers or parent meetings. In her library, flexibility includes the physical facility: the furniture can be rearranged for different uses and the technology is laptop carts, so when students come in to do research, they can get a laptop and a few books and pick a cozy spot to work.

Julie has a book club after school once a month, with snacks based on the book. She also has an ever-growing group of readers at lunchtime who sit in the library and read, where it’s quiet, including some seemingly unlikely participants:

A few weeks ago, it was School Library Media Day and I posted some pictures of library activities that day. A couple of guys had snuck in here and were reading SLAM and ESPN magazines, and I caught them reading and put it on Instagram and Twitter. These two guys are in trouble a lot, but somehow in the photo they looked like fine young scholars, and they liked that. Now they come every day, sit by the window, geek out about basketball, and stay out of trouble. And they have brought friends.

MIDDLE SCHOOL LIBRARIANS Kim and Pamela

Kim (California) and Pamela (West Texas) are middle school librarians, serving grades 6-8. Middle school can be challenging in trying to accommodate both the structure and the freedom requested by the teachers.

Kim’s school is 90% ELL, with about 80% on free or reduced lunch. The library is the newest one in the district and has room for 2 classes, one in the seating area and one at computers, although she has had 3 classes at a time. Kim begins her morning before the first bell, when at least 100 students visit the library for reading, working on assignments, playing board games, using the computers, or just visiting friends. Fortunately, Kim has an assigned duty teacher during this time to help manage the group.

Kim has a fixed schedule for English Language Arts classes, who visit the library every three weeks for book checkout, with one grade level each week, so she has a “6th grade week,” a “7th grade week,” and an “8th grade week.” At the start of school these classes get a few structured lessons, then the rest of the year she offers booktalks, and about half the time the classes remain for SSR (structured silent reading).

The rest of Kim’s scheduling is flexible and revolves around collaborating with teachers whose students will be using the computers: researching, finding and vetting websites, and writing citations. Her school is becoming a Google Classroom school.

Kim has a makerspace for students to use during lunch periods. Students have learned to sew on a button and do a few other stitches, make a green screen video, and lately they’re doing hat-making, thanks to a teacher who donated a huge stack of head-sized paper bags.

Pamela has a completely flex schedule in a huge middle school—1400 students! Pamela’s school library is very popular, especially the makerspace, with students coming in before school, during lunches, and after school.

Students come into the school with strong library skills from structured library lessons in elementary school, so Pamela’s lessons are mainly about using online subscription databases and other Internet lessons.

Pamela’s school is high tech with many computers, both desktop and laptop, and teachers come to her all the time about using technology in their classrooms. She’s the main technology support person in her school, for students and teachers, as well as the webmaster for the school and library websites.

As busy as she is, Pamela makes time to serve as a judge for the Cybils Young Adult Book Awards, and she’s well-known in professional circles for her book review blog & column for the local newspaper, and as a book reviewer for two professional journals. The time spent is well worth it: publishers send Pamela books to review (and keep), so she’s built her school’s print collection into the largest—and the best—young adult collection in the city!

THERE’S MORE TO THE STORY…

Whether fixed schedule or flex schedule—or something in between—school librarians spend plenty of time with students, either teaching library-related lessons or helping them find the perfect book to read. We also spend time collaborating with teachers to integrate library skills and technology into class projects, and have to juggle our schedule to accommodate the planning periods of the collaborating teachers.

But we also have many “invisible” administrative tasks to make sure the library meets the needs of the school. If you see us alone in the library—reading, talking on the phone, on the computer—realize that we aren’t taking a break, we are:

Developing curriculum maps of all subjects to determine what library materials are needed to best support classroom activities, and creating library lessons to make the best use of those library materials for the designated project.
Reading book reviews and meeting with vendors to prepare book lists according to professional guidelines, and creating purchase orders to procure books from the best-value vendors in order to maximize budget constraints.
Processing newly arrived books for student/teacher use, including printing and affixing barcodes, adding protective covers, inputting to the library automation system, and placing on shelves.
Researching and evaluating online materials by phoning or meeting with vendors to determine the highest quality that best match school needs.
Uploading software to computers or mastering online services, and creating lessons to show students (and teachers) their best use in the library and in the classroom.
Repairing damaged print materials, and troubleshooting technology and online resources.
Periodically inventorying library materials—print, digital, and equipment—and possibly classroom materials and textbooks.

These administrative tasks must be planned and completed between all the other activity in the library, and many librarians run their school libraries alone. For example, Dan has an adult aide only for a couple of hours in the morning, and none of the others have an aide; with no assistance in their libraries, Pamela, Julie, and Susan often have to squeeze eating lunch in between students checking out books!

The life of a School Librarian is challenging, demanding, and unrelenting. But ask any School Librarian who has been on-the-job for awhile, and we will tell you it’s not only a rewarding career, but it’s also the best place to be in the school!

A Personal Management Strategy for School Librarians

Posted on November 15, 2017 by Barbara Paciotti

Making the most of our time is difficult when we’re pulled in so many different directions. My first two years as a new school librarian I tried applying what I’d learned in library school, but I was overwhelmed by all the “stuff” in a library besides books on the shelves—documents, equipment, supplies, tools, furniture—as well as “things I had to do” to serve students and teachers. I needed a way to organize that which was not already organized by the Dewey Decimal System and the class periods of my school day.

My 3rd year as a librarian a new principal—an organizational genius—suggested I first develop a Personal Management Strategy as a step toward managing the library program. So I asked myself, ‘What personal strategies can help with library management?’ and I determined 3 areas for personal management: content organization, time management, and personal philosophy.

CONTENT ORGANIZATION

I began organizing content by analyzing AASL and my State’s standards and guidelines for school libraries. That may seem an odd way to start, but those documents helped me encapsulate what I do and why I do it. As a result, I created 6 organization categories: Budget, Collection, Facility, Lessons, Library Promotion, and Professional Development. These categories became the structure for my thought processes, my filing systems (digital & print), and my library program.

I color-coded each category and articulated what belonged in them:

Budget (hot pink) = budget/funding documents, purchasing information, and booklists for purchase.
Collection (blue) = cataloging, circulation, inventory, and book labels.
Facility (tan) = aides, bulletin boards, reading promotion (including book trailers & bookmarks), makerspace, physical layout, and signs/shelf labels.
Lessons (green) = lesson planner, standards documents, library info lessons, and other lessons with school subjects.
Library Program Administration (red) = informational handouts, presentations, reports, and library administrative handbook.
Professional Development (purple) = meetings & trainings, and state/district appraisal documents.

These categories fit nicely with the 5 facets of a School Librarian: as information specialist, as instructional partner, as experienced teacher, as program administrator, and as education leader. I even purchased paper, file folders, and binders in these colors to make it easier to identify print materials on my bookshelf and in my file drawers.

To keep my content and decisions about it organized, I created an administrative handbook, an annotated Table of Contents organized by my categories. My expandable document grows to meet my needs. If you need a handbook like this, you can find it in No Sweat Library, my TeachersPayTeachers store.

TIME MANAGEMENT

A busy librarian needs a time management tool to prioritize daily actions and meet deadlines. For me, lists bring order to chaos faster than any other tool, and spreadsheets are flexible enough to create different types of lists for different time management needs. I created a “Librarian Checklists” spreadsheet document with a worksheet tab for each different list.

BEGINNING OF YEAR Tabs
At the beginning of the school year I have many tasks to prepare myself and the library before teachers and students arrive on campus. A chronological list is perfect to organize everything and help me accomplish it in a timely manner. In my Librarian Checklists I have one tab for my ‘alone’ days before teachers arrive and another tab for the week of staff development when teachers (but no students) are on campus. Here’s an example of what’s on those two lists:

BOY ABCs (before teachers arrive)
- Records Day – list of updates to all records for teacher/room changes in automation system, library Website, library passes, maps; update teacher information documents & reprint.
- Teacher Materials Day – list of library items to check out & deliver to teacher classrooms; troubleshoot, clean, recharge library & teacher AVD equipment.
- Library Day – list of tasks to arrange library, update signage & bulletin boards, process summer magazines & new books, update substitute folder & aide materials.
BOY 123+ (during Staff Development Week)
- Update yearly goals/objectives for library program & PD.
- Troubleshoot/recharge student A/V/D equipment (calculators, cameras).
- Schedule with ELA teachers for orientations & book exchanges; schedule w/ teachers for student checkout of calculators for Algebra & cameras for yearbook.
- Prepare PPT announcements for new school year (cafeteria menus, clubs, etc).

TO DO Tab
Another Librarian Checklists tab is a “To Do” list of tasks I want to accomplish during the year, such as facility changes, collection tasks, and other library or school goals as detailed in my Strategic Planning document. I use an Eisenhower Matrix (devised by Steven Covey from a quote by former President Dwight Eisenhower) to classify tasks into color-coded quadrants based on Importance and Urgency.

LIBRARY USE Tab
My Library Use tab is my Library Schedule. It’s a calendar of the school year, listing week numbers and dates for each grading period down the left, and a cell for each day of the week across the top. In the cross cells I record who will be in the library (or if I’ll be gone to a district meeting). I add Comment boxes to give details of lessons or library use, and I also insert Comments to remind me of timely tasks or events, such as sending my Media Minute email each month. This quick email of library news is sent to the whole staff and can be read in 1-minute or less, with a single link to additional information.

To complete my time management tool I have 3 additional Librarian Checklists tabs:

School Schedules Tab has a copy of our master class-schedule chart, customized with color-coded teacher-conference and subject-PD periods so I know when I can visit a teacher in their classroom for lesson collaboration.
Weeding & Inventory Tab has a chart of Dewey Subjects/Classes and Fiction Subjects with adjoining columns that show a time frame for weeding: date of last weeding, date for next weeding, and date of last inventory.
EOY (End-Of-Year) Tab for the last month of school is another chronological list of procedures for collecting library materials from students and teachers, and closing the library for the summer.

I tend to be a procrastinator, but these 7 worksheet lists keep me on-track and it’s very convenient to have my time management lists compiled into a single spreadsheet document.

The Librarian Checklists is part of my Librarian Administrative Tools product in No Sweat Library, my TeachersPayTeachers store.

PERSONAL PHILOSOPHY

I also needed to re-clarify my own Personal Philosophy about the library program. I decided that students are the reason I am where I am, so my personal philosophy became “keep students, not the library, as the priority, and everything else will fall into place.” My personal philosophy helps me make wise professional decisions (as library director Dr. Salerno put it) that have a positive impact on students.

One of my wisest library management decisions was to eliminate overdue book fines. They just didn’t serve any positive purpose:

Kids don’t return overdue books because they can’t pay the fine in order to check out a new book, so kids weren’t reading and books weren’t circulating.
Even with regular book exchanges, the due date passed, and teachers didn’t always allow kids to leave class to return a book. Our kids rarely had time to go to lockers between classes.
Poorer kids stared at their coins, trying to decide if they’d have money for lunch (or dinner on the way home) if they paid the fine; well-off kids didn’t care—they’d bring a $20 bill for a 20¢ fine and expect me to make change.
Offering “fine forgiveness” incentives to get books returned is totally unfair to kids who’ve been paying fines.
In my case, our public library doesn’t charge fines, even for adults, so why would a public school charge kids?
Collecting fines was time-consuming work with little benefit, especially if an entire class is checking out books during the last 10 minutes of a period.

I don’t think fines “build responsibility” in students and I’m adamantly against fines to “raise money for the library.” That is an adult responsibility, not one for kids. And according to my personal philosophy, a kid is more important than an overdue fine. My principal agreed with all of this, so we quit charging fines for overdue books.

I have effective ways to get back overdue books, and here are some of them:

When a students says they returned the book, I have them check the shelves to see if it’s there, because sometimes I do miss checking them in (and of course I blame the computer!).
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In our automation system, we use a field in the student’s profile for their ELA teacher. For regular Book Exchange visits near the end of a grading period, I run overdue notices by grade and sort by teacher. When the first class arrives I give teachers their notices, and they distribute them throughout the day just before kids browse for books. Many kids have their overdues in their lockers so they retrieve and return them during their browsing time.
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I have kids put an overdue notice in their shoe. (This great idea from a student.) When they get home and take off their shoes, they see the note and it reminds them to put the book by their shoes to bring back the next day.
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I write down the overdue book title on a funny bookmark so every time they open their new book to read, it reminds them to bring back that overdue one. (Yes, they can still check out a book with an overdue. A kid is more important than a book.)
I give kids the library phone to call their home or mobile phone and leave a reminder message. (They think this is hilarious when I tell them that’s how “Ms P” reminds herself of things!)
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For severe cases I have them call their Mom. (This is especially effective if they have to call her at work—she’s not happy, but the kid’s in the doghouse, not me!)

I’ve never regretted my “wise professional decision” to eliminate overdue book fines. It builds better PR with parents and students, and simplifies considerably the daily demands on my time and sanity.

Looking back, I can say that developing my Personal Management Strategy was an important step to better library management.

Once I’d organized my field of work, directed my daily activities, and confirmed what’s important to me as an educator and a school librarian, I had a method to make smarter decisions faster in order to achieve my goals.

Only after clarifying my Personal Management could I turn my attention to fully conceptualizing the management of my school library program.

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