This was posted in the Marshall Memo 905 on October 5th. 

6. How School Librarians Can Maximize Their Impact in Unsettled Times

            In this article in Knowledge Quest, Kristin Fontichiaro (University of Michigan) and Wendy Steadman Stephens (Jacksonville State University) suggest 40 ways that school librarians can maximize learning in a time of uncertainty. A selection:

-   Realize your leadership potential – what Ewan McIntosh describes as “agile, whole-school interdisciplinary work that is needed to create the exceptional learning experience our young people deserve.” 

-   Define success by the impact you make, not by how busy you are, leaning into the influential, urgent, critical tasks in your building role.

-   Replenish your “surge capacity” by carving out time to connect with others, exercising, practicing hobbies, and living your faith.

-   Retool your website so it works for students who are learning remotely.

-   “Go spelunking” into a database to find advanced features, tuning into webinars, and updating assignments with new tools.

-   Reconsider punitive overdue policies – for example, letting items auto-renew, permitting students to renew on their own, and ending fines.

-   Adapt online lessons for offline students, partnering with special educators to keep lessons accessible for students with learning differences. 

-   Do a diversity audit of your collection and adapt selection criteria to reflect the richness of a global society and a multicultural community.

-   Remember that parents are watching, with some ready to pounce on cultural differences between home and school; anticipate these conflicts and mediate a new level of family involvement in the curriculum. 

-   Consider taking on the role of supporting families as they master virtual connections with the school.

-   Tune in to school board and public library meetings.

-   Teach students how to explore multiple perspectives on the news, including Freedom Forum’s collection of front pages.

-   Curate e-books available to students at home, creating “bookshelves” of hand-picked titles.

-   Explore how you will address widespread misinformation and disinformation – for example, by using Rand Corporation’s Media Literacy Standards to Counter Truth Decay.

-   Explore and share Google Scholar, a powerful search tool to find scholarly papers.

-   Evaluate your media diet and that of your school with tools like Ad Fontes Media and AllSides.

-   Build in some time for students to wonder, using digital resources like livecams or remote locales, Google Arts and Culture, and digitized museum collections. 

-   Do one thing you’ve put off. “You’ll feel relief and accomplishment,” say Fontichiaro and Steadman. 

 

“Pushing Forward While Treading Water” by Kristin Fontichiaro and Wendy Steadman Stephens in Knowledge Quest, September/October 2021 (Vol. 50, #1, pp. 42-48); the authors can be reached at font@umich.edu and wstephens@jsu.edu. 

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