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.
No comments:
Post a Comment