In why every school needs a real librarian and in guest post, what a school librarian can do for teachers, I touched on roles performed by a certified School Librarian. Then, in a post about leadership, I specified the 5 facets of a School Librarian: experienced teacher, curriculum integration partner, information specialist, program manager, and education leader.
In this series of blog posts I’ll examine each facet individually, to elaborate on it and to offer how we can best fulfill that role. This first post explores what I consider our most visible and powerful role, yet the one often overlooked, which is the school librarian is/as an experienced teacher.
THE CERTIFIED SCHOOL LIBRARIAN IS A TEACHER
All 50 U.S. States require a certified School Librarian to have a teaching certificate/license and at least a year of teaching experience. (My state, Texas, requires 3 years experience as a classroom teacher.) The reason for this requirement should be apparent: we have close personal contact with every single student in the school, so if we haven’t already had experience working with students, how effective could we possibly be?
Additionally we need the respect of our education colleagues, and we’ll only get that if they see us as an experienced teaching peer. So, whether elementary or secondary, a certified School Librarian is an experienced teacher, just like other teachers in the school.
As a secondary School Librarian, I observed that most SLs had been English Language Arts teachers. It occurs to me that, since literature and books are their forte, it’s why there’s so much talk among School Librarians about promoting independent reading for students and finding “just the right book” to hook them into becoming a reader. If this is the only input other educators get, it might be why they only view us as the person who checks out books.
Perhaps that limited view is also why certified School Librarians are being replaced by paraprofessionals with no education nor experience as teacher nor librarian—often in schools that most need the benefits of a certified School Librarian. So, we must ask ourselves, what can we do to affirm our role as an experienced teacher?
THE CERTIFIED SCHOOL LIBRARIAN AS A TEACHER
I’m a secondary School Librarian with a science, social science, and technology background, so—as I’ve said before—I view pleasure reading as a hobby. Consequently, I believe our goal as a School Librarian has to be supporting reading literacy by teaching students how to read with purpose. That is what students will need to do in their future to accomplish such tasks as:
- Completing schoolwork in higher grades and after graduation, whether vocational school, community college, or university.
- Filling in important life-based forms, such as a driving license test, a job application, an income tax form. (Have you seen the 1040 instruction book?)
- Seeking information from a health plan, an insurance policy, a corporate newsletter, a political action brochure, or any kind of website.
To make “reading with purpose” apparent to everyone in the school, School Librarians need to be seen teaching students as often as possible. We need to have frequent library visits with short, simple lessons that include a student activity which supports and enhances their classroom content learning.
With so many resources at our disposal, it’s really very easy to incorporate “reading with purpose” into a library lesson. Here are some strategies I use that can help you do that:
Make each visit a complete, stand-alone lesson with a single focus, ideally something which students are learning or practicing in that teacher’s classroom. Even a 10-15 minute lesson needs to be thorough in order to be relevant. Use my Library Lesson Planner Template to ensure you meet Standards and lesson flow.
linespace- Use the full range of textual formats as reading sources: picture books, chapter books, short stories, speeches, informational nonfiction books, print and online magazine and newspaper articles, online subscription services including encyclopedias and e-books, hand-picked content-related websites.
linespace - Teach students to always ask themselves while reading, ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘when’, ‘why’, ‘who’, ‘how’. These cues help them look more deeply at what they’re reading and they provide a quick way to create a summary of the text.
linespace - I’m a big fan of graphic organizers for lessons. Teachers also love graphic organizers for library visits because it gives them concrete evidence for a daily grade when visiting the library. It’s also our proof of assessment for our lesson when professional evaluation time rolls around!
linespace - At each grade level, begin with a simple source and task that activates prior knowledge, then use each subsequent lesson throughout the year to scaffold toward more complex sources and skills.
This may seem to be a lot to cope with for a simple, short lesson, but as I began being more comprehensive with lesson planning it became much easier to plan for even a short visit. If you need some ideas or guidance, here are some of my efforts.
TEACHING EXAMPLES & INSPIRATION FOR YOU
I’ve written about several ways to implement classroom learning into library visits. Here are a few:
- 5 Essential Literacies for Students: Part 1 Reading Literacy
- How a School Librarian Can Teach Online Subscription Services
- How to Coordinate the School Library Collection & Lessons with Subject Curricula
Here are successful lessons I’ve presented that are available in No Sweat Library, my Teachers Pay Teachers store.
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Creating a Book Quick-Talk for Accountable Talk in the School Library Students review classroom learning about the 5 elements of narrative fiction–setting, characters, plot, conflict, theme–as they use a 3×5 index card to enter descriptive phrases and put them together to create a 30-second booktalk to share with other students as accountable talk while browsing for a new book to check out. |
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Exploring Dewey Informational (Nonfiction) Books This lesson is perfect to begin the ELA study of expository text and teachers appreciate the support of both reading and classroom learning. Students get an historical glimpse at informational books for youth, then use a worksheet to explore the organizational features of informational books, followed by an activity supporting inference. |
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Exploring Print Magazine Articles with Citing & 5W1H Summarizing Summarizing is consistently low on our State Reading test, so teachers appreciate any lesson to address this. For this lesson, students choose a print informational magazine and learn the research skill of citing a magazine article. As they read, they practice their classroom learning on summarizing informational text using a custom graphic organizer to record what, where, when, why, who, and how phrases from the article, then summarize from the phrases. |
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A School Librarian‘s most purposeful endeavor needs to be as a teacher, which is why classroom experience is needed to become certified. Yet that is not the only role we are called upon to perform. Read my next blog post in this series, which looks at the Certified School Librarian Is and As a Curriculum Integration Partner.
