I was a public school educator, of one sort or another, for over 20 years. During those two decades, I sat through a lot of "Back To School PD." With no shade intended towards anyone in particular, like a lot of teachers, I spent most of those workshops wishing I was working in my classroom or library instead. As a young/new teacher, I remember not understanding why veteran educators seemed to hate back to school PD so much, but I soon figured it out. Even if you love learning and hunger for new ways to best serve the learners you're responsible for, it's tough not to be resentful of the hours you could be spending readying your learning space for those very kids - especially when the mandated back to school PD feels more like a very long meeting that could have been an email, than like a day filled with practical strategies for making school more meaningful and relevant for the learners you serve.
All of that weighs heavily on my mind whenever I'm asked to lead those dreaded back to school workshops myself. Of course, I have learning goals in mind as I plan back to school PD, but if I'm being perfectly honest... more than anything else, at the end of our time together, I want the educators I'm working with to feel that the time they're spending with me, instead of in their classrooms or libraries, has been time well spent. What's more, I'm very transparent about this goal at the onset of these workshops. As I told the educators I worked with this week in Bethel School District, "I've sat through a lot of back to school professional development where the only thing I left with was the sinking feeling that those were hours I would never get back. If I accomplish nothing else over the next two days, I'm going to work hard to make sure you don't leave feeling that same way."
DAY 1: THIS IS A SCHOOL LIBRARY
During our first day together, the teacher librarians (plus some tech and district level folks) and I focused on what it means to create library spaces that privilege discoverability over searchability. I'm guessing many of you will recognize the visual theme of the slide deck I
used to guide this conversation as being based on the picture book This Is A School by John Schu and Veronica Miller Jamison. I'm so grateful to John and Veronica for giving me permission to use their beautiful book as an anchor text for this presentation. Not only did we read This Is A School together as a way to kick off the discussion, but everyone who
attended also got to take home (at least!) one copy of the book thanks to John Schu's generous heart! As an aside: although I didn't take any pictures once they were set up, I gave away over 300 books during the first day of our back to school PD. Plus, everyone received a Bookelicious tote bag to carry their spoils back to school. This terrible picture was taken as I was loading my car for the journey.
After we read This Is A School together, I ask participants to share words that best capture the idea of school as depicted in the book. Their responses formed this word cloud.
I love this activity, because it gives us the opportunity to think about the aspirational nature of our work, while also then considering what words our students might use to describe school. The conversations that follow are sometimes hard, but they are worth having. If there's a vast difference between the word cloud above and the one we think our students' description of school might generate, (and spoiler alert: there always is), we have to reckon with both why that is and what we're going to do about it.
It's from this jumping off point that we can dive into the work of thinking about who libraries are for and how we might create policies and practices that center the needs of our most vulnerable learners RATHER than policies and practices that force us to make exceptions for the kids who need libraries most.
This work is deeply personal to me and has been the focus of much of my work both as a librarian and as someone who now supports library workers. That said, I also recognize the heft of it. Change is hard, but also knowing that the stakes are high for our most vulnerable learners and patrons adds a sense of urgency to shifts that can already feel unwieldy. One of the ways I try to infuse joy into work that can feel heavy, is through game play and game based learning. For this workshop, I updated my This Is A School edition of Jenga - the popular party game in where participants try to keep their tower standing, but in my version there's a twist. With each block pull, players also have discussions about the very practices that are foundational to creating discoverable library spaces and policies
I LOVE breaking out the jenga sets and watching teams compete. But even more than that, I LOVE listening to their conversations. This week, I was particularly moved by the thoughtful way Bethel librarians reckoned with library policies that feel like they are more about protecting books than they are about protecting readers. It can be jarring to acknowledge that some library policies don't support our core values as librarians. These acknowledgements are important though, because it's tough to dismantle systems that we haven't yet faced.
Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that another way that we talked about connecting readers (especially those with negative or dormant reading identities) with the life changing power of story, was through the building of Bookmojis. If you are not familiar with Bookmojis, they are an AI tool, created by Bookelicious, to match kids to books based on the features and characteristics that they prioritize when building their own Bookmoji. Put another way, kids get to create an avatar, and then Bookelicious curates a custom bookshelf just for them. Creating a Bookmoji is free and so much fun, but I love the way this tool helps kids, who may not yet identify as readers, (but who do identify as athletes, skateboarders, artists, etc), discover books that are connected to other things that they love. I adored watching Bethel librarians create their own bookmojis while chatting about all the ways they might use this (free!) tool with their own readers.
DAY 2: DEVELOPING DIGITAL DETECTIVES
On day two we focused on information literacy. Together with the district's Tech TOSAs, the Bethel Teacher Librarians and I took a deep dive into what it means to help today's learners navigate our revenue biased, influencer obsessed information landscape. If the work we did together on day one is the work of my heart, then day two is the work of my head, or maybe it's more accurate to say that this is the work of my central nervous system, as this is definitely the work that most triggers my anxiety! I feel a true sense of urgency around the need to help learners (of all ages) be smarter, safer and savvier online. In many ways, this feels like the most important work we can be doing right now and I didn't hesitate to share those feelings with educators in Bethel as we explored new ways of approaching this monumental task.
Because everyone received a copy of Developing Digital Detectives, but most had not yet read it, I spent the day unpacking the four lenses and giving participants a preview of the resource website that serves as a companion to our book. One of my favorite parts of this work is when we explore memes as both a potent form of communication and an unsung hero in the work of information literacy.
One of the ways we do this is through a game of Three Truths and a Lie. Can you guess which of the memes (about memes!) above is the lie?
That said, one of the reasons I choose to focus on memes as part of this work (in addition to the fact that they are GREAT tools for teaching kids how to evaluate content) is that I've seen far to many information literacy approaches that dismiss memes as "not being news." I find this problematic. I worry that when we dismiss the sources and platforms that our kids use most.... when we tell them that the tools and resources they most rely on aren't legitimate sources of information... what we're also doing, (however unintentionally), is telling them that those platforms and sources aren't worthy of scrutiny. Put another way, if TikTok isn't a legit source of information, why should kids apply the information literacy skills they've been taught to the stuff they find there? Similarly, if "memes aren't news," why would kids ever try to evaluate them for credibility?
See where I'm going here?
I think we dismiss specific formats and platforms (like memes or TikTok) at our peril, but I'll save the rest of that rant for another day.
In the meantime, I also got to unveil the (nearly?) finished version of an updated poster Darren and I have been working on in preparation for this fall's Developing Digital Detectives Book Club through Bookelicious.
Darren and I believe that understanding the motivations of those who use the internet to influence, manipulate and cause harm is a vital part of this work. Additionally, we feel that strengthening our ability to empathize with those who share or create mis-,dis- and mal-information online can help us both:
develop strategies for knowing what to do when we come in contact with each, and...
know what to do when WE are the source of misinformation.
Anyway, this poster is only one of many new and/or updated resources that I'll be sharing during the upcoming 3 week book club. I hope you can join us!
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED?
I'm grateful for the thoughtful and serious way that the educators I met this week approached our work together. I left Bethel School District feeling (tired and) unbelievably grateful. Among the mountain of other challenges facing educators this year, there's also the persistent (and politically motivated) narrative that teachers and librarians are somehow conspiring to cause harm to the young people they serve. I didn't need to spend two days working in Bethel to know those narratives are a particularly nefarious example of disinformation. However, spending time with these exceptional and dedicated educators did remind me of just how much they deserve our support. It's a privilege to be able to be a part of their journey and I continue to hope that they emerged from our time together feeling as though the work we did was worthy of their time.
With that said, I received a couple of notes the day after our two days together that made me feel like maybe, just maybe, I achieved my goal. I've got my fingers crossed anyway.
PS: I removed folks names to protect their privacy.
