SLMS Leadership Conference

From August 2 -4, I was fortunate to attend the NYLA SLMS Leadership Retreat on the Cornell University campus in Ithaca with my friend and colleague Renee. Starting my third year as a library media specialist, I find this annual conference to be particularly useful. Kudos to the library media specialists who organize this event, always featuring a noted speaker from the information and education fields. I attended last year when the featured presenters were Barbara Stripling and Gail Dickinson, who helped us process the new AASL Learning Standards.

Photo: McGraw Clock Tower on flickr.com by rdesai

This year we worked with Carol Koechlin, who along with David Loertscher and Sandi Zwaan, has been a leader in instructing teachers and teacher-librarians about the inquiry process. She taught us the importance of getting our kids to learn how to learn by asking deep questions. We learned "questioning is cross-curricular." With curious, observant minds, our kids will soar. It's not a matter of some kids have it and some don't: we must teach this mindset. (A fascinating recommendation from Carol: read Mindset by Dweck. A quick read - I highly recommend it.) How do we as library media specialists do this? We need to start by building a community of learners, reinforcing observation skills, modeling effective questioning, and creating a desire to know. A strong reminder resonated with me: I need to model strong questioning more with my young students. Their natural curiosity and enthusiasm does not automatically transfer to deep thinking, though there's a natural progression there to be supported.

Toward this end, Carol supported us in extending our own questioning skills, reviewing three levels of questioning which she attributed to Manzo (1969):

• on the line - it's clearly stated in the text
• between the line - inferring from multiple references in the text
• beyond the line - it's not there; students must do further study and connect to prior knowledge

Carol shared wonderful exercises to deepen our questioning. We closed the day by linking questioning to the AASL Learning Standards. The second day focused on applying questioning to learning. Carol left us with The Big Think, from her work with Loertscher & Zwaan. When students complete the unit project, there is more work to do...we need to reflect with our students on what the content and process mean to us ("so what?") and to ask ourselves "what next?", helping students to go beyond the basic questions and to continue the learning journey.

Recommended Professional List:
Beyond Bird Units! Thinking & Understanding in Informaton-Rich and Technology-Rich Environments by David V. Loertscher, Carol Koechlin, and Sandi Zwaan

Brain Matters: Translating research into classroom practice by Patricia Wolfe

Guided Inquiry: Learning in the 21st Century by Carol Kuhlthau

Learning to Question to Wonder to Learn by Jamie McKenzie

Librarians as Learning Specialists: Meeting the learning imperative for the 21st Century by Allison Zmuda

Mindset: The new psychology of success by Carol Dweck

QTasks: How to empower students to ask questions and care about answers by Carol Koechlin

LHRIC Tech Expo

I was fortunate to attend the LHRIC Tech Expo last Friday. The morning keynote speaker was Sarah Robbins. She shared relevant facts about today's young learners (e.g., this is the first year that 99% of students will have had internet access their entire school career.) She made really interesting connections between gaming and learning. This is not a new topic to librarians, yet her comments led me to a great discussion with my eight year-old son about how he learns a new game on his Nintendo! She addressed the "prosumer" component of the web, as consumers participate in creating new content (example: 12 year-old Kevin Lin' s Youtube video of video special effects). She reminded us to facilitate, not "teach"; to "grow" our students in a garden instead of a flowerpot. And most impressively: she's completed requirements for her PhD while being mom to young triplets!

Marco Torres gave the afternoon keynote. His enthusiasm and love for his students and instruction were completely contagious. He showed how through digital storytelling, he teaches students to organize and classify their ideas. (His 4 P's: Plan, Produce, Present and Pheedback.) This is a lifelong skill; I use visual graphic organizers with my primary students to plan their writing. They get it. I asked him about video projects for the little ones, and he shared a project where third graders created a superhero story with illustrations and high schoolers animated the film. It was a beautiful collaboration. (He also mentioned that he prefers the quality of the Kodak Zi6 to the Flip camera.) After showing how technology supports the challenging work his students do in school, he closed with a hilarious segment on how technology is often used to support the teacher rather than student learning. Marco Torres reminded us to concentrate on the verbs, not the nouns.

Quick tip from Heidi Lappi, science teacher from Clarkstown: create a form in Google docs for students to input their collected data. Embed the spreadsheet in your wiki and they will see updated results as they continue their research projects.

Overall, a great day with wonderful ideas, large and small.