A thought from President Clinton at Masie

The Masie Learning 2011 conference was an amazing experience! It was a privilege to be able to spend three days with some of the most thoughtful and influential learning professionals around, soaking up ideas and making connections.

The Monday night keynote was by former President Bill Clinton, who's a truly talented and engaging speaker. He had a lot to say about the difference between putting the inquiry before the answer, and putting the answer before the inquiry. The former is what allows us to learn and make progress; the second admits of no information that doesn't confirm what we already "know."

This brings to my mind the question -- what in libraries are we so sure we "know" that we don't pay attention to what the data actually say? What are our blind spots, the places where we need to work on putting the inquiry before the answer?

Only four more days...

...until I leave for the Masie Learning 2011 Conference! I'm so excited to go and pick up new training and learning ideas!

Kids Are Customers Too!

Last week was an interesting one-- I'd been signed up to go to the SLRC tour on Wednesday, but wrecked my car on the way up. I was okay, as was the other driver, but the car wasn't going to the tour, or anywhere else other than the junkyard, alas.

I did, however, make it to Kids Are Customers Too!, the signature event of the Children's Services Division here in Maryland. The event has been an annual tradition for a decade and a half, but this is the first time I'd actually had the chance to attend.

It was a good experience! There were author talks (I particularly enjoyed hearing Melissa Thomson) and discussions about school readiness standards and children's reader's advisory. But I think my favorite part was the book sharing, where I got to talk to more than a dozen other librarians about their favorite math and science books for kids. The list isn't up yet, but every title discussed will be posted on CSD's Handouts page very shortly!

Children's Services: Partnerships for Success

Today I finished reading Children's Services: Partnerships for Success, an anthology edited by Betsy Diamant-Cohen, who came in September to Kent Island to give us training in her Mother Goose on the Loose program. I found the book to be a really good description of a wide variety of partnerships between libraries and many different types of community organizations, and an excellent tool for brainstorming. I particularly enjoyed reading about the Maryland State Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped and their children's area, which they completely redesigned with the help of Lindsey Muir, who at the time was a student at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

We are adding this book to our professional collection at ESRL, so have a look and check it out! I'm sure you'll come away with many interesting ideas for prospective children's partnerships!

Engaging Adolescent Readers Workshop

This past Friday, Jessica Beck and Amy Gonzalez from John P. Ojeda Middle School in Austin, Texas came to talk to a group of librarians at the Kent Island Branch, Queen Anne's County Library, about engaging adolescent readers. Ms. Beck is a reading teacher, and Ms. Gonzalez is the school librarian, and they had excellent advice to give.

Here are a few of the things they discussed that stood out most to me:

1) There's no substitute for actually getting to know the teens in your library, and for actually reading the books in which they might be interested. Personal, firsthand knowledge dramatically increases the degree to which you can be helpful to teens.

2) It makes a huge difference if you talk about books using "real" language, rather than the vocabulary of book reviews, assessments, and other authority figures.

3) Especially for teens, reading can be a social experience, not a solitary one, and the more ways in which you can facilitate that process, the more engaged your teens will be.

I thought it was an excellent training, and I really appreciated the opportunity to think about how best to reach these library users.

Unconferences

There's been a lot of talk lately about unconferences, including library unconferences. According to Bill Boorman, "An unconference is a gathering of minds, experiences and opinions where the attendees (or active participants) lead the conversation."

I recently read an excellent book on the subject, Library Camps and Unconferences, by Steve Lawson, and it got me thinking -- we should really have a library unconference here on the Eastern Shore sometime in the reasonably near future. So I've started work on planning one, probably for May or June of next year. Everything is in the extremely tentative stages right now, but I'd really like to have an opportunity for library professionals here to talk and share ideas about the ideas that they think are important and want to learn about and develop.

So watch this space! And if you have any ideas about this unconference, or unconferences in general, please chime in!

Book Club Training with Nancy Pearl

On September 20, I had the chance to go to a training on running library book clubs with the legendary Nancy Pearl. Back in my days at the Carroll County Public Library, I ran the Mount Airy Branch's Senior Book Club for several months; I never felt like I quite got the hang of it, so I was very interested to hear what she had to say.

Here are a few of the tidbits I gleaned that most stood out to me.

1) Some sample questions, which I wish I'd had back when I was doing these discussions. “Why did the author choose the title?” “What’s the lesson, and who learned it?” “What’s the overarching theme of the book?” “Who should the narrator have been?”

2) Although these are good starting questions, Nancy pointed out that the moderator doesn't have to have all the questions. She suggested asking each person in the group to come up with one questions; these can then be written down and placed in a hat and drawn at random to guide the flow of the discussion.

3) A good book club book should be complex or compelling enough to sustain discussion; simply being good or enjoyable aren't necessarily the right criteria to use. Nancy suggested books where the main character has a decision to make, books with ambiguous endings, or books with "elastic realism." When making lists of the books for the future, it's important to avoid choosing "twelve books by white women of a certain age," as she put it. Diversity in authorship can help ensure diversity of conversation.

What tips or tricks have helped you when working with book clubs?