]]> http://www.thedigitalshift.com/2013/09/ebooks/e-its-complicated-how-two-schools-are-riding-the-transition-to-ebooks/feed/ 0 http://www.slj.com/2013/08/early-learning/design-to-learn-by-dynamic-early-learning-spaces-in-public-libraries/ http://www.slj.com/2013/08/early-learning/design-to-learn-by-dynamic-early-learning-spaces-in-public-libraries/#comments Thu, 01 Aug 2013 14:00:13 +0000 Sarah Bayliss http://www.slj.com/?p=54606

Roger Mastroianni Photography

A design revolution is reinventing the children’s room in public libraries and changing the way young children learn.

The movement involves colorful spaces with mirrors, soft edges, and things to climb on. There are items to play with such as “sentence makers” and audio-based toys. A farmer’s market, cash register, automobile, or airport may be involved. Most importantly, the areas are embedded with tools and features that get kids ready to read.

This new breed of literacy-packed play spaces in libraries is inspired by children’s museums and the developmental theories that drive them. “You can call it interaction, you can call it theme design,” says Sharon Exley, a designer and president of Architecture is Fun, a firm that has conceived spaces for both libraries and children’s museums. “We’re creating architecture in a way that children understand,” she adds. “The underlying story or framework is always literacy, and how you make it fun and playful.”

Bite-sized children’s museums

Tracy Strobel strived for a rich learning experience that would keep patrons coming back when she was conceiving new children’s areas for the Cuyahoga County (OH) Public Library (CCPL), now in the midst of a system-wide rebuilding and renovation project. Strobel, deputy director at CCPL, imagined “bite-sized pieces of a children’s museum” that kids and their caregivers or parents would visit weekly or once a month. They would be “destinations for families much in the way that a children’s museum is a destination,” she says.

The garden-themed toddler area at the Evanston (IL)
Public Library has ample seating for caregivers.
Photo by Doug Snower Photography

While planning the nine new children’s areas, each at roughly 8,000 square feet, Strobel zeroed in on what they needed to offer children educationally. The designs, she notes, had to be “related to the six early literacy skills” identified by literacy experts and adapted by educators: developing vocabulary, print recognition, print awareness, narrative adeptness, letter knowledge, and phonological awareness. Strobel handed potential architects and designers a sheet outlining these and other key requirements. At the same time, she adds, “we try really hard to have a variety of elements at the different spaces.”

Enter the design firm RedBox Workshop, which is conceiving, fabricating, and installing some of the new areas at CCPL. “You’re basically teaching experiential learning through play,” explains Tony LaBrosse, partner and director of design and project management at RedBox. The company has also created play areas at museums, zoos, and hospitals.

In the libraries, at least, books still reign, but the heart of the project was “applying an aesthetic wrapper to early literacy objectives,” says LaBrosse. Many CCPL spaces are built around themes from children’s books. The Warrensville branch environment, for one, was inspired by Ashley Bryan’s book Let it Shine: Three Favorite Spirituals (Atheneum, 2007), with its vibrant, cut-paper illustrations. The library walls, decorated with dancing silhouettes like those in Bryan’s book, do indeed create a vibrant sense of play that riffs on the heart of the literature in the room.

An Evanston patron with cushions
that double as a classic stacking toy.
Photo by Doug Snower Photography

A centerpiece of the new features is an enclosed “crawler space,” as Strobel calls it—a safe, enclosed play pit for the littlest patrons, stocked with stimulating, brightly colored motifs. Nearby, a light board allows pre-literate kids to assemble stories with different Colorform shapes, honing narrative adeptness. A sound board spells out words broken into syllables. When a child pushes a button, he hears an individual syllable pronounced. In a nearby mirror, he can watch himself forming the syllables.

A “sentence maker” also builds print awareness with elements that kids can spin or move up and down to reveal random words forming “wacky sentences,” says CCPL marketing and communications director Hallie Rich.

Elements like these, LaBrosse explains, are about “meeting the individual or group where they’re at on any given day.” He says, “We don’t try to set up an experience that is ‘you will learn this today when you go do that experience.’ We’re not here to judge their learning experience. We don’t have an outcome. We’re not grading.” The designs also “try to create age-appropriate risk” such as exploring—and probably taking a tumble—without getting hurt.

The children’s area at CCPL’s new Mayfield branch takes inspiration from Denise Fleming’s Caldecott Honor book In the Small Small Pond (Holt, 1993). Adopting the idea of wetlands exploration,the space incorporates “science work related to tadpoles or microscopic science with early literacy,” says LaBrosse. There’s a microscope, an insect observation center with large bugs on view, and a soundboard.

Other spaces are purely thematic. At Garfield Heights, it’s all about cars. There’s a garage and a gas pump, levers and pulleys to play with, and toy spark plugs, all of which can be manipulated to boost STEM skills, a priority of the local school system, says Strobel. The Fairview branch takes on the concept of travel, with world landmarks, a play airplane hangar, and control tower. There’s a ticketing and baggage area, along with places to sell food, and a cash register. The environment “allows kids to do all this imaginative play with time, tools, and small motor skills,” says Strobel.

Lamaze and play-based pavilions

The best way to engage early learners, says Exley, is through “literacy-rich and play-based pavilions that allow children to explore” and navigate the world of reading.

She and her partner at Architecture is Fun, husband and architect Peter Exley, kept these child-centered questions in mind while conceptualizing a renovation for the 14,500-square-foot children’s area for the Evanston (IL) Public Library in 2007 and a new, nearly 16,000-square-foot space for the Fountaindale (IL) Public Library in 2011.

Developmental theory is always at the forefront of Exley’s mind. While dreaming up spaces for very young children, she thinks about psychologist Abraham Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs,” a theory of psychological health. The basic idea is that a fundamental feeling of safety and security enables relationships, esteem, and creative potential.

For Exley, this translates into crawler spaces offering stimulation and security. “Sensory gardens, little padded landscapes, things on the ceiling to focus on” are key elements for the youngest library patrons, Exley says. The soft, colorful elements also offer “Lamaze-style iconography.”

At Evanston, the “garden of early learning,” like Warrenville’s crawler spot, is such a place. It is an enclosed area with playful plant and flower motifs—gingko leaves and stylized roses based on a Charles Rennie Macintosh design. Inside, oversized cushions function as a “classic stacking toy, but we’ve done it as a giant soft sculpture,” says Exley. “If a child is learning to walk or stand, it gives them something to hold on to.”

Elsewhere at Evanston, where the Exleys’ elements were fabricated and installed by RedBox, is a little collection of “storytelling sticks,” resembling garden signs, that can be written on. “Very often preschoolers tell a little story to teachers who write it down and parents get this at the end of the day,” says Exley. To build on kids’ articulation skills, “parents can jot down a thought shared by their child.”

A game pavilion at the Fountaindale (IL) Public Library.
Photo by Doug Snower Photography

For older children, the Exleys conceived tables with built-in bins for art supplies and play items such as LEGO. Branching columns rise from the tables, a nod to architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The overhanging limbs are outfitted with holes that librarians can suspend things from—origami, artwork, globes, or whatever else may be related to the project of the moment. The art area has a built-in sink for washing up. This place is made for action.

The Fountaindale children’s area took its cue from a children’s book, Dragon Tree by Jane Langton (HarperCollins, 2008). With lots of room to move, the team created a “mini-park” with stylized trees arranged to “call out these areas of adventure or discovery,” Exley says.

Those areas include a spot for playing global games, with real globes and one painted with blackboard paint, so kids can draw their own world. A “garden of technology” has informational monitors suspended from trees. There’s a crawler area here, too, and a space for the chess club. In the art area, the trees are equipped with clips for displaying completed art projects.

Exley stresses that libraries considering play-centered areas should be mindful of designing one they can manage. You want an area that “the staff can afford” and maintain. Fountaindale manager of children’s services Wendy Birkemeier says that because of graffiti issues, she doesn’t usually leave chalk out in the library. Her staff puts out washable crayons instead.

More conceptually, Exley returns to the central exploratory aspect of such early learning areas. “You don’t want to have an interactive environment that’s push-button,” she says. “You need something open-ended.”

“Family Play and Learning Spots”

The Hennepin County (MN) Library (HCL) launched its first early literacy play area in 2010, when the Minnesota Children’s Museum received an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant to explore the idea of designing early literacy play spaces within libraries. HCL has adopted two of these spaces so far, geared to children ages two to six, at the Hopkins and North Regional branches, with another opening this fall.

“The idea was that children’s museums have great ideas about exhibit design and ways for parents and children to interact around play,” says Maureen Hartman, coordinating librarian, youth programs and services at HCL, of the new 400- to 700-square foot areas. “That’s a really different direction for libraries.” She adds, “We have supported our staff with play training that the children’s museum has offered us.”

On any given day at one of these play spots, you’ll find children busily working in a fabricated garden, made of two pieces of leather with cotton underneath, planting imaginary seeds in a row. One might plunk an illustrated sign reading “carrot” into the ground, cook toy carrots in a play kitchen, and serve them up at a mini café table. Nearby, at a toy farmer’s market, children can sort, count, and identify more vegetables. All this fun is bolstering their vocabulary and reading and honing narration and numeracy abilities.

To inform and support caregivers, “directions and cues to parents” are posted at the early literacy spaces, Hartman says. HCL also produced a document for adults outlining five simple things that they can do to help get kids ready to read, based on the Every Child Ready to Read (ECRR) principles issued by the Public Library Association (PLA): “talk, sing, read, write and play together.”

A play kitchen and mini theater at the North Regional branch of the Hennepin County (MN) Library. The Hennepin system’s early learning spots are oriented to children ages two to six and resulted from a collaboration with the Minnesota Children’s Museum.
Photo Courtesy of Hennepin County Library

“Playing is how kids learn,” the document tells readers. “Playing in a space like this helps kids use their imagination to solve problems—it also helps them learn to work with others and prepares them to learn and read.”

For now, HCL is calling these new areas “Family Play and Learning Spots,” according to Hartman. HCL is working with the Minnesota Children’s Museum and the Minnesota Center for Early Education and Development on an evaluation of the impact these types of areas have within libraries. “I’m really interested in a pre- and post- test,” says Hartman. “What does engagement look like between parents with children in a regular library vs. one that’s more thoughtfully planned?”

Answers to that question, and others, will be revealed when the study is completed this fall. Hartman says she will use the findings to leverage support for more play spaces.

In the meantime, the people who help conceive and build these educational hot spots never stop wondering how spatial design can better support literacy and development. “Some designers look at things in two dimensions, like how long you want your desk to be,” Exley says. “We like to think in a four-dimensional way. We come in to add the experience level—in 4D.”

Sasha, a three-year-old girl with light brown hair, is trying to get Elmo back to Grover. It’s 12:35 p.m. on a Friday in early April, and she’s dragging one-inch pieces of virtual railroad track across an iPad screen in an effort to link the two characters. But Sasha is having trouble understanding how to make the pieces connect. Courtney Wong, a research specialist with Sesame Workshop and designated “child whisperer,” encourages her to try again.

“Okay,” says Sasha, now attempting to make the digital Elmo move across the screen—to no avail. Frustrated, she stabs at the image. “C’mon, c’mon, Elmo.”

It’s just a regular day of app testing at Sesame Workshop. Located in two rooms on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, these offices might seem a world removed from the TV show street featuring Oscar’s trash can, Gordon’s stoop, and the ever-cheerful presence of Big Bird. Those enchanted icons are about 20 miles away, on a sound stage at the Kaufman Astoria Studios in Long Island City, in Queens, NY, where Sesame Street—now in its 44th year—is filmed.

In this office building, a new kind of magic is being crafted: Sesame Workshop’s digital content. Here, and at other locations, the Workshop has run more than 76 tests over two and a half years to understand how children, ages three to five, adopt and adapt to touch devices in their learning. The brand wants to ensure Sesame Street’s continued success—in a new media world.

A young tester puts an app through its paces at the offices of Sesame Workshop.

Capturing the digital audience

Competition for the pre–K digital audience is stiff, with networks from Disney Junior to Nick Jr.—both nonexistent when Sesame Street launched—vying for the opportunity to educate young children with apps. Mickey Mouse Clubhouse and Dora the Explorer are deep in the game.

So are Ernie and Bert, since Sesame Workshop considers its digital incarnation to be crucial to its original mission. “The goal has never changed from back in 1969, which is to reach children where they are to get them ready for school, and also to reach underserved children,” says Jennifer Perry, Sesame Workshop’s vice president of worldwide publishing. “Anything that becomes a destination for parents, we have to be there.”

In 1969, that destination was TV. Most families had televisions in their homes when Sesame Street first went on the air. Cocreator Joan Ganz Cooney’s idea of using TV for early learning was revolutionary at the time. For decades, Sesame Workshop and its groundbreaking show owned the block on educational television.

Given that history, the Workshop’s entry into digital involves seismic changes for the organization. While TV and books aren’t disappearing, tablets, smartphones, apps, and ebooks are increasingly drawing preschoolers’ attention. Sometimes it’s Dad handing off his Android during a long wait at the doctor’s office. Other times it’s a school media specialist launching a series of iPad literacy apps for kindergarteners.

Surveys confirm that devices are pulling people away from TV, and devices also tend to be cheaper. Americans spent about 127 minutes a day using mobile apps in 2012—up from 94 minutes a day in 2011—compared to the 168 minutes a day they spend watching television, according to Flurry Analytics, an organization that follows mobile app trends. Today, smartphones are practically given away with many mobile plans. Revenue from app sales generated about $15 billion globally in 2012, and is projected to rise to $25 billion by the end of 2013, according to Gartner Inc., a tech research firm.

Sesame Workshop’s digital earnings are up, too. The organization has seen its digital revenue grow from 5 percent of its total in fiscal year 2011 to 13 percent in fiscal year 2012. According to Sesame Workshop, digital is projected to comprise 15 percent of its overall revenue by year-end June 30.

Making the Workshop’s digital content stand out is crucial, given the direct competition and the vast number of apps for sale—more than 300,000 iPad apps in the Apple store alone. On a recent day in April, Nickelodeon held the third and fifth spots among the top paid iPad apps in Apple’s iTunes education section. Disney had eighth place, with Sesame Workshop’s Potty Time with Elmo at number 41. Among paid iPad books, Disney held three of the top 10 slots, Nickelodeon had two, and Sesame Workshop’s The Monster at the End of This Book by Jon Stone (originally published by Golden Books in 1971) appeared at number 11.

Designing for limited attention spans

Those charged with building the next generation of Sesame Workshop educational tools are doing so with as much thought and research as Cooney invested in the show. But now, more than ever, a three-year-old’s attention waits for no one.

“We have to be nimble,” says Betsy Loredo, editorial director of Sesame Workshop, who is part of the team charged with re-inventing the Sesame Street brand for the digital domain. “Incredibly nimble. That, in some ways, is the antithesis of how we’ve been doing business for a very long time.” Traditionally, that process has been about “testing, testing, testing, and don’t put it out there until it’s perfect,” Loredo says.

“What we are now grappling with is how to balance this thoughtful approach with the incredible speed with which innovation and technology shifts are changing the landscape for kids,” she explains. “I think that’s a struggle every creator of print books currently faces. It’s just compounded for us by this heightened commitment we have to testing and to being a standard bearer for a fun and educational ‘safe space’ for preschoolers.”

An ongoing challenge is figuring out how to make learning fun so that a child doesn’t lose interest and tune out along the way. With that in mind, Sesame Workshop is constantly thinking about how app instructions are delivered to kids. A particular consideration is how long a child must wait before she can launch a story, a game, or any of the 75 live apps the Workshop has available in the marketplace.

“We used to have longer instructs and longer types of prompts,” says Mindy Brooks, Sesame Workshop’s director of education and research. “But now, we’re in this age of immediate responses.” She hits her finger repeatedly on the table, mimicking how a child might interact with a touch device.

Brooks and her colleagues are well aware that if children are comfortable with other apps, they expect to be able to navigate Workshop apps easily, too. They come to the apps thinking, “I can do this,” says Loredo.

“And it’s not responding,” adds Brooks.

“Then it’s broken,” concludes Loredo.

That isn’t the experience Sesame Workshop wants to deliver to the 16.5 million kids and parents it reaches on digital platforms every quarter. As of April, 35 Sesame Workshop book apps live on platform devices including iOS, Chrome, Windows 7, HP, Symbian, and Kindle Fire. And nearly 155,000 book apps have been downloaded so far in 2013, with 1.8 million downloaded since Sesame Workshop launched its first book app in December 2009.

Partnerships with big tech

Sesame Workshop’s dive into digital is aided by partnerships with third-party technology firms, including a $1 million pledge from the software company CA Technologies. That company is working with Sesame Workshop to develop a package featuring videos, lesson plans, and games, including the one three-year-old Sasha was testing, for a future STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) hub on SesameStreet.org.

Another recent partnership, with mobile outfit Qualcomm, focuses on augmented reality tools. For today’s children, this kind of cutting-edge technology is taken for granted, allowing them to play with and explore their surroundings.

At Sesame Workshop’s Upper West Side location, Loredo and Brooks launched a recent smartphone prototype that resulted from the Qualcomm relationship. On a smartphone screen, a grocery list appears for Big Bird. Eggs, carrots, and cereal are items on the list, and the child is charged with finding those same printed words in her environment. Holding the smartphone, the child selects a word and then aims the device at words he or she sees displayed in a grocery store, a restaurant, or wherever she is at that moment. When the phone’s camera sees the right word, such as “milk,” Big Bird exclaims, “Milk, mmm milk.” The screen then pulls up a word tree, providing the child with more context and definition.

Previewed at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the app is expected to launch this fall. It’s already gone through two formative rounds of testing and recently completed a month-long study with about 200 children in a few Head Start Centers in rural Idaho. Sesame Workshop wants to ensure that three- to five-year-olds can enjoy the app without frustration.

From book to app

Sesame Workshop’s ebookstore carries more than 160 titles, with approximately 100,000 ebooks downloaded to date. But print books still sell far more—to the tune of 27 million copies in 2011 alone.

Classics like The Monster at the End of This Book have been refashioned for today’s burgeoning reader, who may encounter his first title in electronic form—still, likely, while sitting on a parent’s lap. Almost prescient in its interactivity, the original version of The Monster at the End of This Book features Grover warning the reader not to turn the next page because of the monster at the end. Of course, the curious child turns the pages anyway, tearing down brick walls and infuriating Grover, who, at the book’s closing, reveals himself to be the anticipated monster, albeit a “lovable, furry old” one that the child adores.

In app form, the reader still pages through the story, sliding fingers along the corners where digital pages flap audibly. The on-screen Grover reads each word, but now we see him tying and nailing the pages, building a brick wall and complaining as the child breaks knots and smashes bricks, animated for today’s young digital users.

Molding future tech

Looking ahead, Sesame Workshop is planning to innovate far beyond book- and TV-derived experiences. A team of employees is analyzing cutting-edge technologies to see what learning experiences they might best support—and they’re even pushing developers to tune their new tech to children’s needs. Miles Ludwig, managing director of Sesame Workshop’s Content Innovation Lab, leads a five-person research and development team in pursuing technologies they expect will become available globally to children of all economic levels. Recently, Ludwig shopped a prototype application to firms working on voice recognition. His hope is to partner on a tool that children play with in which they give Cookie Monster clues to guess what animal they’re thinking about. Since voice recognition software is currently optimized for adult men, says Ludwig, it’s not ideal for the high-pitched musical tones and particular pronunciation that can come from a child’s mouth. Sesame Workshop hopes to change that.

As new technology develops, Ludwig and his team are also considering other places around the home where they could potentially interact with children—for instance, on screens that may be in an oven door or on a refrigerator.

“One of the things we’re thinking about now is embedded devices connected to the home, these sorts of concepts of the future, and what does that mean to us,” says Ludwig. An example might be when “Abby just shows up on this refrigerator screen and communicates something about healthy eating.” Another scenario could involve the Count helping a child count the eggs in a refrigerator, an activity based on the “Number of the Day” from that morning’s Sesame Street TV episode.

Delight in learning

As Sesame Workshop focuses on its longevity, its educational stronghold—the pre–K years—remains its primary focus. Back in the testing room, Sasha is on the iPad, tickling a swimming trunk-clad Grover; she sees him holding lightweight objects like flip-flops instead of heavy ones like metal keys. Sasha’s goal is to get him to let go of objects at the right time so the light ones float into the center of an inner tube. Sasha can’t quite time it right—and the objects end up floating outside the target, missing the goal. Wong offers encouragement.

“Let’s try to aim for that tube,” says Wong.
“I will try,” says Sasha. “I missed!”
“Uh oh, did that float?” says Wong, as Sasha selects a heavy object instead.
“Oooooh,” Sasha exclaims.

From another room, the researcher and show producer laugh, watching as Sasha navigates the game with a toddler’s intensity. She slides her finger once again over Grover and—success. She squeals.

“Look Mom!” says Sasha, immersed in the game. A child’s delight, delivered. Sesame Workshop hopes it’s a learning moment, too.

Photo by Michael J. Okoniewski /Getty Images for SLJ.

When Tamora Pierce found out that she had won the 2013 Margaret A. Edwards Award, she was initially speechless. Murmuring too softly for Jamie Watson and the rest of the award committee to hear, Pierce wondered, “Has anybody

mentioned I have a bit of a problem with potty mouth?” Fortunately, nobody on the committee heard this remark, and the secret has been safe until now. While choosing a person “with a bit of a potty mouth” might make for an entertaining Edwards speech, Pierce’s selection as the 2013 Edwards winner honors several decades of writing feminist fantasy featuring kick-butt female protagonists who appeal widely to both male and female readers.

Pierce’s writing, however, has never won the Printz or Newbery awards. In fact, her “Song of the Lioness” series, honored by the Edwards committee, was initially conceived of as an adult novel. Fortunately, she says, that much different (and horrible) version does not exist today. She credits her transformation to beloved teen author to the time she spent telling stories as a house-mother in a group home for teen girls. Since her first book, Alanna the Lioness, came out in 1983, Pierce has been quietly writing exceptional and thoughtful fantasy that serves as a beacon for young readers who want to see themselves as heroes. This year, the Margaret A. Edwards Award, sponsored by SLJ and administered by the Young Adult Library Services Association, honors her lasting and significant contribution to readers of all ages and both genders with a tribute that many claim is 10 years overdue.

In Pierce’s shoes, I might be tempted, in the face of all the attention showered upon Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games) or Veronica Roth (Divergent) and other wildly popular authors of fiction featuring strong female characters to scream, “BUT I HAVE BEEN WRITING ABOUT WEAPON-WIELDING FEMALE HEROES FOR YEARS!” Pierce, however, welcomes the company.

“Actually I’m just glad it ain’t so lonesome out there anymore,” she says. “I like to read it, too, you know. Some of them are like guys in drag, but not Suzanne Collins and Kristin Cashore. When Graceling and Hunger Games came out in the same year, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. It made me so very happy.”

As for the current meme lamenting the lack of action-packed boy books? Even over the phone I can see Pierce’s eyes roll as she instantly names authors and titles, only stopping because her website lists many such titles for those who mistakenly insist that somehow boys are not served by recently published books, to say nothing of the fact that her fans include many boys, including this one.

Pierce lives with her “Spouse-Creature” in Syracuse, New York. This interview was conducted on International Women’s Day—I’d love to say that it was intentional, but it was just serendipity. On that cold, winter day we enjoyed a warm discussion of her writing and the issues and themes she regularly addresses in her fiction. She even offered men the absolute best advice for how to nurture the innate hero in their daughters.

A person with a misspelled name is obviously destined to become the winner of the Margaret Edwards Award for significant and lasting contribution to young adult literature, right?

What you said about me not having won any previous big awards, like a Newbery or a Printz? That sort of piles up. So when you do win a big one, you’re sitting there going, “I could have sworn he just said I got the Edwards Award.” It’s sort of not sinking through. It’s just too unbelievable.

My mother wanted to name me “Tamara,” but the nurse who filled out my birth certificate had never heard of such a fancy name (we are talking Pennsylvania coal country in the 1950s), so she misspelled it, and I legitimately became Tamora (pronounced like “camera”). I actually like it better than Tamara, which means “graceful” and “a palm tree,” and is the name of a Russian saint. I am none of these things.

I had started my fantasy-writing career in college. I had written a lot as a teenager, but my adult career didn’t really begin until college. I broke through the short-story-to-novel barrier in June of 1976. Five months later I had a dream. I woke up, and by the time I got to the typewriter and sat down and started to write, I actually only had a fragment left. I don’t retain dreams very well. And I only had an image left from that dream, and I never included it in the finished book.

But somehow that dream or that fragment unlocked something in my head, that same story that I’d been attempting to tell all along of a girl who disguises herself as a boy in order to become a knight. I wrote the first scene in which the father tells his twins that he’s arranged their lives for the next eight years or so, and I wrote the next scene and the scene after that and the scene after that. I sometimes call it my string-of-pearls novel because for the first and only time, I just kept writing the next scene until five months and 732 manuscript pages later I had a finished novel. I got the title from my boyfriend. He said, “How about The Song of the Lioness?” And I said, “Sounds good to me.”

Then you split that one book into the four books?

I was sending it around to adult publishers, and my life was sort of going up and down. I was out of college, living with my dad and stepmother in Idaho. I had gotten the only job that I ever was educated for. I became a housemother in a group home for teenaged girls. The girls wanted to read my book, and I wanted them to read it because I didn’t want them to think I was shining them on when I said I was a writer. When the director found out it was an adult novel with sex and violence and drug and alcohol use in it—and since those were the things that had gotten the girls into the home in the first place—he didn’t want them reading about them in a book by an authority figure, which is what I was passing for at the time.

So every afternoon, when I was on shift, the girls would come home from school or before bedtime and literally drag me to the dining room table and give me the binder I had the manuscript in, and they would say, “Pierce, tell us more about Alanna.” And I would sit there with the binder in my lap and I would retell the story to them, suitably edited. Well, apparently not as suitably as the director of the home would have liked, but if he wanted it more suitably edited he should have been there.

I moved to New York after I left the home and went to work for a literary agency. The agent took a look at my manuscript and said I should turn it into four books for teenagers. I knew it would work because I already had the girls’ reaction. So I had to rewrite it. We tried it on three publishers, and Jean Karl at the third said, “No,” because of the number of pages, so Claire Smith, my agent, talked her into meeting with me, and we talked about the changes she felt the manuscript needed. I rewrote it again, and Atheneum took me on as a writer.

“Protector of the Small ” is a very different series!

Yes. Well, I’d sort of done Alanna a disservice by making her a mage, a wizard, and a knight, and I’d been thinking that I really wanted to try the idea of a girl knight. And these books just caught fire.

Alanna is such a hothead and Kel is so grounded—I always feel like I am reading about real people.

I try to do that. I try very hard to make it so that people can feel they can turn a corner and find my characters there and hang out with them. I base a lot of characters on either people I know or actors or characters they play, but the important thing is they have to feel as real as humanly possible.

Your early books are all around 200 pages and then we get to Trickster’s Choice and the page count doubles and almost triples with “Beka Cooper.”

Ever since they took us off that cursed 200-manuscript-page limit, I just spread out a little, and I don’t have to do four books anymore.

When you think back to “Song of the Lioness” or “Protector of the Small,” now that you have a little more word freedom, what changes would you make?

Well, Song of the Lioness in particular, I look back on it now and I think, “Oh, I wish I hadn’t jammed so much plot into every book. I wish I’d spread out a bit.” But I couldn’t do that to my fans. They’ve fallen in love with those books as they are, each and every word, so I would not touch them. I would not dare to touch them. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Mark Reads. He will record himself reading and reacting. He’d just finished the Alanna books, and it was through his reactions and his audience’s reactions that I discovered that, even though I could see all I would improve, I actually had some good stuff in there.

Do you have a writing routine, an average day?

I have multiple book contracts. So these days by the time I sit down to actually work on a book, I’ve been generally thinking about it at a minimum for four to six years. I’ve been turning the material over in my head. I’ve chosen whoever I’m going to base the characters on. I always try to start—it may not end up that way in the final version, but I try to start—with us meeting the main character, and he’s doing or she’s doing something that tells us something about them. In my first chapters I introduce the main characters, the secondary characters, the main plot, the overarching themes for the book. And if you know me at all, you know my endings are fairly simple. There’s a forest fire, an epidemic, a war, the ground opens up, the palace collapses inside, and the rats reign supreme over all. Then I get to writing, and I’m toggling along, and I hit chapter four or five, and all of a sudden I hit that vast wasteland that I have not outlined for because I don’t outline really. And I realize I have no idea what’s going to happen then. I’ve got to line up my ducks to fetch up the earthquakes, forest fires, ground opens up, palace, rats.

That’s when I scream for my husband.

You and your husband created Sheroes, an online hang out for young women. How did this evolve?

I had fallen into conversation online with a very new to YA writer named Meg Cabot. We were talking about how hard it was for us to find female heroes when we were growing up, real women in the real world. We basically wanted to cover anything that would get girls and young women to talk about female heroes and real-life ones and Meg’s books and my books and anything else that came along. I left in about 2006, because my life sort of exploded, too, but I think it’s still running.

Sex, GBLTQ issues, racism, class warfare, social justice. Have you had any backlash about any of these elements in your work?

Not really. Once or twice in person, usually on the sexual aspects. Twice—once in a county in Oregon and once apparently in North Carolina—Alanna got challenged for sexual material. That’s it.

Is it because it is fantasy writing?

I have no clue. I think it was in SLJ, in an article on YA romance writers getting challenged, someone said, “I don’t get it. Tammy Pierce writes every bit as much sexuality as I do, and nobody ever says anything about her.” I laughed, but it’s true. All that stuff about Harry Potter and witchcraft, and I have been writing plain old paganism ever since 1983 and nobody has said diddly-squat.

What new words may readers expect from Tamora Pierce this year and in 2014?

Well, right now it’s Battle Magic, which is the “Circle Universe.” I’m crunching every day finishing the second draft. Briar, Rose-thorn, and Evvy are caught up in a tiny country fighting off a very much larger and bigger China-like country. I’m almost done with the second draft. My poor editor is working away, and I’m just sending her chapters. It’s very dark, but there’s a lot of really crazy stuff. I don’t know what happened to me, but somewhere along the line when I was writing it, parts of the landscape started to come to life. That’s unusual for me. I usually like to keep the organic stuff organic and the inorganic stuff dead. But it had its own opinions.

Tell us about problems young women face today.

There are just so many traps out there for girls and women. There is the domesticity trap, there is the sexuality trap, there is the intellect trap. If you say too much, you could get called this; if you do too much, you could get called that; girls don’t do this; it’s rude if you do that; if you talk about this, you’re weird; if you talk about that, you’re a slut. I talked too loud and was hushed up. I was interested in boy things and was told to be quiet. I wrote to the FBI to see about becoming an agent and was told that the only option for me was secretarial work. And then I got to college and went to work with a feminist, and got told that because I had a sense of humor it was wrong, and because I was straight I was wrong….

You just can’t be right!

Yeah. It just seemed like judgmentalism is something that women and girls smash into all the time. Writing ways to deal with that and writing ways to say, “Well, here’s who I am”—that seems to be the thing that people take away from what I do. And it doesn’t matter what sex they are, they seem to take away that you do what you want to do with your life, you become who you want to be. It’s going to be a lot of work, it’s going to be really hard, but you can do it if you want it badly enough. But you have to want it badly because the world sets up so many barriers for young people in general. I mean, even for boys.

What advice would you give me and other men to nurture that inner hero of the young women we know?

Be determined and dare to be stupid!

Ed Spicer (edspicer@me.com) teaches first grade at North Ward Elementary School in Allegan, MI. He was a member of the 2013 Margaret Edwards Award committee, as well as the 2005 Printz Award committee. He reviews teen literature for the Michigan Reading Association.

In my heart, I will always be a children’s librarian.

Speaking at the New York Public Library about the heart and soul of our profession is both an honor and a delight for me personally.

Today we are talking about power and leadership. Everyone here is a leader. As librarians, we don’t always recognize our power, our influence.

However, one thing we do know is the power of the book to stir the imagination. For those of us in this industry, we know that the book is a work of art. The power of books is profound. What we don’t always realize or acknowledge is the power of the librarian. That power starts in the children’s room. When we connect children with books, ideas, and experiences, we are introducing them to the world.

No matter where you grew up, most likely you’ve had the experience of building a tree house, fort, tent, or tunnel to make a space that you owned. Recently, our five-year-old grandson, Owen, spent a snowy day with my husband, transforming a room into a tunnel room. Owen decided that he wanted to take a nap in one of the tunnel spaces, bringing in a pillow and a blanket to keep warm. The idea of making that magical space is a common one. Years ago at the Denver Public Library, we did focus groups with children when we were designing the new central library. When asked what kind of space they wanted, children talked about two types: one was collaborative, and the other resembled our tunnel or tree house. One young girl drew a picture of her preferred space. It resembled a submarine bubble, complete with a lamp for reading and a little table for snacks.

I suspect we all built such a favorite space as kids. What did yours look like? What did you do in that space, and how did it make you feel?

When I was a kid, I loved to climb trees, perching on a branch either to read or to daydream. I would look out over the horizon and invent a plan, a scenario, and a world. This was my version of a tree house. It was a place where I was in charge, where I had the power to invent my life. In my world, anything was possible.

Maurice Sendak’s Really Rosie captures that feeling of power that resonates with many of us. Rosie and the characters from The Nutshell Library live on Avenue P in Brooklyn, New York. They are bored on a hot summer afternoon, and Rosie decides to create a movie where she is the star:

Yes, my name is Rosie
I am a star
I’m famous
And wonderful
Everybody loves me
And wants to be me.

That feeling of being a leader, of being in charge, relates to that sense of power we all felt when we were in our own space, tree house or not. I want you to summon that feeling of being in charge, of being a leader. Take a moment to center yourself. I’d like you to think of yourself as that leader, the person who can make anything happen, and decide on one thing that you would like to accomplish in your work world. You can think big or think small. Now, write a note to yourself of something you want to accomplish for your library when you return from this leadership day. Whatever your goal, hold yourself accountable for this. When you are finished, on the outside date it one month away from today and make sure you review this goal then.

Years and years ago, I made a list of 10 things that I wanted to accomplish when I was the children’s manager of the Denver Public Library. I don’t know how I found the courage, but I asked to see the director, Rick Ashton. We talked about my list and he said to me, “This is going to take you 10 years,” and he was right. It took all of us 10 years, but we accomplished everything and more. The key to this exercise is viewing yourself as a leader with the power to make things happen. It always starts with an idea, a dream, a vision.

Empowerment

Let’s talk about that feeling of power. Empowerment comes from that daydreaming place we might correlate with our special space that could be a tree house, and if libraries were tree houses, then that feeling starts with a small interaction at the library. We might not realize how our work affects the lives of people. Introducing ideas, connecting the dots, creating pathways, opening the door to the world is like being an architect of dreams.

“From Awareness to Funding,” an OCLC study published in 2008 and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, revealed that there were a number of key factors in why voters support funding for libraries. These include interacting with librarians who are passionate about their work and having a transformative experience at the library. Right now libraries are positioned more closely with the data/research experience; however, the transformative experiences of listening to music, reading a poem, or viewing a piece of art are powerful indicators that create strong positive connections with our community and their tendency to vote for increased funding.

With the rise of the Internet and ebooks, libraries are having a bit of an identity crisis. Over 100 years ago, John Cotton Dana focused on a key purpose that still holds true today. “The public library is the center of public happiness first, of public education next,” he said. He believed that libraries were about creating happiness and learning.

Dana began his career in Denver in 1889 at the first Denver Public Library, which started as a joint school-public library. His views were in many ways revolutionary in librarianship. He believed that the 19th-century library was a warehouse, an ornamental building that hoarded books and strove to keep them from the general public. That old-time library was simply a storehouse of treasures with the librarian as the chief preservation officer. Books were to be protected and used carefully only by a select few.

The 20th-century library, the progressive library, he posited, would throw its doors open to all and encourage them to come in and join in the building of a community cultural center. He set out to make the library into a democratic institution and is responsible for many innovations that are now standard library services. He ended closed stacks, made it easier to get a library card, and expanded hours. Later, when he was the director of the Newark Library and Museum, he believed in checking out pieces of art—a definite heresy.

Most librarians in that era saw children as an uncomfortable fit for libraries. Their exuberance and lack of sophistication made them undesirable. Dana saw children as full members of the community, and welcomed them with open arms. He created one of the first children’s rooms in a public library, complete with appropriate furniture, art, and flowers. He believed that the children’s room should be uplifting and inspirational. If an attendant in the children’s room interfered with children’s learning or access to ideas, he believed it was better not to have an attendant at all. It was better for children to have unfettered access to reading material. Once children outgrew the children’s room, Dana believed they should be allowed to jump into the world of adult reading.

Dream come true: The Anythink approach enables patrons to play, create,
and participate on many levels—outside and inside, hands-off and hands-on.
Photos courtesy of Anythink Libraries.

Places of discovery

Libraries should be a place of discovery. Winnie the Pooh’s “100 Aker Wood” is a terrific first road map. Creating a sense of discovery and open access has been central in designing the Denver Public Library’s central children’s library, and our Anythink libraries. The library should be a place of discovery and joy. Learning is an exploration and an adventure. Breaking down barriers and making the library experience delightful is another key goal.

We have taken Dana’s ideas a step further, eliminating fines and dumping Dewey. We created a library that was all about the customer experience from when a person walks through the doors. I think people should experience a metaphorical hug when they enter the library.

At Anythink, we take great care to incorporate natural elements in our spaces to enhance this experience. We wanted to have tree houses to instill that iconic sense of imagination, that symbolism of discovery, of self-actualization. Tree houses, however, proved to be a challenge with building codes, so we integrated trees to create inspiring natural spaces. As much as we wanted to bring the outdoors in, we’ve extended the learning and discovery out to our exterior spaces.

Our first “Explore Outdoors” garden (left) opened last fall at the Anythink Wright Farms library. There children of all ages spend time interacting with nature. Planting gardens, making music, staging theater, and playing with an old-fashioned water pump all give families simple tools to explore, interact, and imagine. Research shows that people who spend time in nature lead healthier lives and feel a sense of responsibility for and connection to nature.

Experiences are learning opportunities

When we began planning our libraries, our team and library board chose what we call the experience model to help guide the vision for the district. Using the OCLC research, our goal was to foster those small transformations. The key role of the library is to create an experience, an interaction with content or an idea. Sometimes these experiences are quite simple and fun, like a community valentine, for example, where customers simply wrote what they loved on a Post-It note and added their contributions to build a wall-size love letter.

Sometimes this interaction is a little more sophisticated. With the Jelly Roll Morton exhibit, people could learn about Jelly Roll, listen to his music, learn to play a Jelly Roll Morton song on the xylophone, and check out additional materials on the topic. Anythink’s goal is to create these little marketing, learning, creative moments where people can interact with content. We call them experience zones.

Last year we expanded this concept in an exhibit of Thomas Locker’s work. You might be familiar with some of his beautiful picture books. Fulcrum Publishing loaned the library 12 pieces from this American landscape painter’s collection. Over months, the staff created experiences that included listening to sounds of nature, painting classes, a river quilt for children to interact with a river (even fishing), and an opportunity to hear Thomas Locker’s son talk about growing up with a master artist who spent his life looking at nature with intensity and translating it to canvas.

Our customers were surprised and delighted. One wrote, “…to visit Wright Farms recently and by chance encounter this exhibit, I find it hard to express the surprise and delight and awe I experienced. Wow! I return often now to re-immerse myself in this richness before it is taken down.”

This exhibit is just one example of how our staff creates learning opportunities for our community. We create connections. We create opportunities to know the world.

The MIT Media Lab’s Seymour Papert talks about literacy in The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer (Basic Books, 1993). “Letteracy” is the mechanical skill of reading words made up of letters. Papert suggests that we substitute the term “literacy” for ways of knowing. Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Friere asks us not to confuse “reading the word” with “reading the world.”

“Becoming literate means thinking differently than one did previously, seeing the world differently,” Papert writes in The Children’s Machine.

Libraries are about exploring and knowing the world. Libraries are about helping people to live their most abundant lives.

One of the most popular learning opportunities at Anythink has been an embryology experience zone at most of our branches during the past two years. Watching baby chicks hatch is both mesmerizing and educational. Staff, children, and adults have fallen in love with this educational exhibit. People photograph the chicks, name the chicks, blog about the chicks. Then we return them to the 4-H club, and they give them to young people to raise.

There is a significant interest in urban farming in Denver, and zoning now allows people to raise chickens, bees, and goats in the city. One staff member became so engaged in the chick project that she decided to raise chickens on her own. Using library resources, she learned how to build a chicken coop; purchased five hens; began feeding, caring for, and watching her chickens grow; and then started gathering their eggs. She says this project has changed her life.

Anythink has two community gardens and is adding a third this season. This project connects the library with local experts and the community. We have worked with Denver Urban Gardens, whose mission is “growing community, one garden at a time.” The gardens are on Anythink property, but the community makes all the decisions about the gardens. Not only do people grow healthy vegetables, they also get to know their neighbors and come to rely upon each other for advice, taking turns watering each other’s gardens when they are on vacation.

Everyone is creative

“Play is our brain’s favorite way of learning,” wrote the author Diane Ackerman. People who work with children are familiar with creating opportunities for children to learn through play. Adults need a little more nudging. At Anythink, we have expanded this philosophy to the entire community by creating experiences for them to learn through play as well.

Creativity and innovation are two of the most important assets to success, but as a culture, we have few places that actively nurture creativity. Josh Linkner, author of Disciplined Dreaming: A Proven System to Drive Breakthrough Creativity (Jossey-Bass, 2011),talks about research on creativity. When children enter kindergarten, 98 percent think of themselves as creative, he asserts. When they graduate from high school, only two percent label themselves as creative.

At Anythink, we believe that everyone is creative. We support the creativity of our community and our staff. Libraries are places filled with ideas and curiosity. We are a perfect organization to foster creativity.

At Anythink, we hire people who are creative, optimistic problem solvers. We nurture and grow our team on a continuous basis. We have regular staff training days that support our culture and expand the talents of all of our staff. This year’s TechFest training day expanded our sense of creativity and our digital skills. Teams of 10 worked with mentors and, within about four hours, each created a digital product ranging from videos, podcasts, and even an ebook. One example is a short video titled “Fifty Shades of Yellow or Death by Bananas.” Another example is the stop animation team that created a series of animations. See below for videos.

Death by Bananna-42

Tech Fest Stop animation

This experience set the staff thirsting to learn more and gave them self-confidence; it’s amazing what happens when you are given a challenge, the right mentor, and a set of creative tools.

Our skills as a team are growing and our own knowledge is expanding. We now describe our library as a participatory library, borrowing ideas from Nina Simon’s The Participatory Museum (Museum 2.0, 2010). She defines a participatory cultural organization as “a place where visitors can create, share and connect with each other around content.” This is a very different library from the one that is centered on the object or the book. This is a library that focuses on growing the capacity of its citizens and its staff. This is a library that has the power to change the world.

Library as studio

We have branded this concept The Studio. It takes the shape of a teen digital learning lab with a recording studio, a green screen with film and editing equipment, and spaces for gaming and collaboration. As part of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation-IMLS YouMedia grant, we are researching, learning, and exploring how we can support expanded digital learning with teens. The grant calls it “geeking out.” We are working with local artists in residence to mentor our teens.

When Anythink staff returned from a first visit to the Chicago Public Library where they got to see the YOUmedia project in action, they stormed into my office with their key insight: the project wasn’t about the computer equipment. It was about creating an environment where teens could grow sustained relationships with mentors, and over time develop an interest or talent. Through writing poetry and performing at poetry slams or making short movies, the teens discovered that the library was a relevant partner in their lives. Amy Eshleman, creator of the YOUmedia project, notes, it “gives libraries an opportunity to own the learning space in a unique way.”

At Anythink this project starts with our teens, but it is our intention to grow it into an intergenerational experience.

The Studio at Anythink Brighton is a makerspace that includes LEGO-robotics, a 3-D printer, a photography studio, and a textile arts center.

Children’s librarians are superheroes

We are reminded daily that the success of our libraries is closely anchored to the contributions and interdependency of our community and our staff. At Anythink Brighton, the team suggested the idea for a makerspace, wrote a LSTA (Library Services and Technology Act) grant, and had the initial project up and running within 90 days of the award of the grant. The manager of the branch, Dara Schmidt, is a former children’s librarian from LA County.

At Anythink Wright Farms, branch manager Suzanne McGowan is a former children’s librarian as well. Our Studio guide Mo Yang has recently evolved his role as a teen guide. He is leading the coordination of our artists in residence, connecting with talented community members who want to share their skills with the teens.

Children’s work has always been centered in transformative experiences. Children’s librarians not only influence children in their formative years, they open doors for curious minds. Our future depends upon the children’s room. Our power lies in creating learning spaces, influencing lives, and creating community. Our children are our gifts to the world, and the way we care for them says everything about our values as a culture.

You may not realize it, but you have the power to transform the lives of children, the library, and the community. You have the power to open doors, to nurture ideas and imagination. You have the power to change the shape of our world. You are the architects of dreams.

Pam Sandlian Smith is director, Anythink Libraries, CO. This article was excerpted from her keynote speech at SLJ’s first Public Library Leadership Think Tank, held April 5, 2013, in New York City.

Illustration by Brian Stauffer

Back in 2007, two high school science teachers in Woodland Park, CO, decided to try a “crazy idea.” “We said, ‘What if we stopped lecturing and committed all our lectures to videos?’” says Jon Bergmann, now the lead technology facilitator at the Joseph Sears School in Kenilworth, IL. He and fellow educator Aaron Sams posted their short films—15 to 20 minutes long—for students to watch at home. (Parents could also look and say, “Oh, I see how the teacher wants it done!” says Bergmann.) Their goal? “Do what’s best for your kids,” says Sams, who went on to coauthor Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day (ISTE, 2012) with Bergmann.

Flipping the classroom lets school become a place for talking, doing group projects, and getting individual help from teachers—and lets home become a place for watching instructional videos. “The class time that would have been spent on the stand-and-deliver lecture model is now spent working on problems,” says Robert Adhoot, a math teacher who started YayMath.org videos four years ago. “The teacher walks around and helps everyone. It’s not a get-out-of-jail-free card for teachers not to teach.” It’s also not a way for kids to get out of doing anything at home. “Flipping what the kid does means they do the work ahead of time, come to class, and debrief,” explains Michelle Luhtala (aka the Indispensable Librarian), head librarian at New Canaan High School in Connecticut.

Aside from the technology involved, it’s not necessarily a new idea. “In the 1970s, when I was a classroom English teacher, I flipped my classroom, and I didn’t even know it,” says Doug Johnson, the director of media and technology for the Mankato Area Public Schools in Minnesota. “I’d ask my kids to read the text at home, and then I’d use the class time to discuss the lesson. Now, instead of asking kids to read, we’re asking them to watch videotape lessons. I sense this is something like old wine in a new bottle.”

Ideally, flipping the classroom gives kids “a personalized learning experience,” says Wade Roberts, CEO of Educreations, which makes a free iPad app that more than 150,000 teachers are using to make interactive video lessons. “The end goal is personalized education. The flipped classroom is just a means to that end.” Students can use the videos to learn at their own pace—any time or place, says Roberts. “These students can replay their teacher’s explanation of a new concept as many times as they need to without fear of holding up the rest of the class.” (Educreations’s website includes a feature that notifies teachers when kids ask questions.)

Making class time count

Librarians help teachers flip the classroom—and the media center. Pat Semple, a librarian at Bullis School in Potomac, MD, gives students videos, Web pages, and screenshots about the nuts and bolts of the library, which frees up more time to devote to their research projects. She knows that these online options help kids who are absent, too. “Invariably, students are sick, or there’s something else going on in the school that they aren’t there,” she says.

“The idea is to use technology to make sure that the time in the classroom isn’t spent on lecturing. Instead, the students can actually experience some of the stuff at home and then come into the classroom and have meaningful discussions with their teachers,” says Nick Glass, founder and executive director of TeachingBooks.net, which offers a database of resources for K-12 schools. “This is playing right into the librarian’s strength.”

Of course, just because a librarian or teacher posts a video doesn’t mean students will watch it. “In the middle school, where we have a lot of issues with apathy, some of them aren’t going to go and do something, even if you beg them,” says Tiffany Whitehead, a library media specialist at Central Middle School in Baton Rouge, LA.

And not everything is flippable. “Nothing is going to replace the experience of being a member of an audience that has a group discussion or debate,” says School Library Journal blogger Joyce Valenza, a teacher librarian at Springfield Township High School in Pennsylvania. It’s important for students to be together in person to simulate coming to Ellis Island and being thrown out for possible diphtheria, she says. The same holds true for debates about which late-20th-century president was best. “You can do it on Google Hangouts, but it’s just not the same,” she says. Another hurdle: answering students’ questions about videos they watch in the wee hours of the night. “It’s unrealistic to expect the teacher to work 24/7,” says Valenza.

Teachers can create their own videos and also refer kids to already existing ones. “Leveraging already existing content makes total sense,” says YayMath’s Adhoot. “It’s more efficient, it alleviates the technical stresses inherent with filming and publishing, and it saves time for teachers to do other crucial administrative tasks.”

“What people respond to first is the time-savings aspect,” says Lodge McCammon, project director of the Institute for Educational Innovation at North Carolina State University and a former AP economics teacher. “The traditional concept of lecturing is completely obsolete now. It doesn’t work any more…. The inefficiency of the classroom knocks people over. I would give the same 70-minute lecture three times a day to my students—210 minutes of lecture on the same topic,” he says. “If you film that same lecture, it ends up being between 8 and 10 minutes.”

Another benefit of a video lecture? A student can decide at home whether he needs to replay a point, but the whole class doesn’t have to sit through it again. “Our little tagline: ‘Life is too short. Stop repeating yourself,’” says Chris Ming, an assistant principal at Marine City High School in Michigan, who made his video lessons public when he was a chemistry teacher in Georgia. “You walk into the classroom on the first day and say, ‘I’ve published everything there is to say on this topic. Google me. This class is not going to be about me standing up and repeating myself and being inefficient.’”

In the past, teachers were idealized people who possessed information in their heads, says McCammon. “Then the Internet changed everything. That teacher is no longer the master in the room. Google is the master. That changes the whole dynamic…. You’ve lost that mystique. It makes it harder for teachers to sell this idea of ‘I’m the expert, I’m the master.’” On the other hand, the flipped classroom lets teachers publish their own content, and offers them “a way to become the masters again,” adds McCammon.

Sure, some kids will ignore the video. “The same kids who don’t currently do their homework will not watch the lecture,” says McCammon. “But as you start making your class more engaging, kids who don’t usually do their homework will start doing it because they want to participate in the class.” Kids write questions down while they’re watching the video, and then the first 10 minutes of class is for discussion of what they’ve seen. Then kids spend the remaining 50 minutes working in teams of four to solve problems.

First things first

Content is still king, and topic videos are still supreme. Graphing the equation of a line will remain the same, whether a teacher is using the Common Core or not. The innovative system helps all teachers—both good and bad—get better. “Better teachers need to be efficient, reflective, and really good at building and strengthening relationships with students and parents,” says McCammon. “The cool thing about flipping the classroom is it’s a sales pitch to get people to do that.” Bad teachers can go online and search their area of content and watch a great teacher teach—and then film their own version of the lesson. “Now all of a sudden, that teacher is a great teacher,” says McCammon. “Now that teacher is the master in the eyes of their students. They’re published. They give great lectures. And they have more time to be more personable.”

Teachers need to figure out what they want to get out of a flipped classroom, says Marine City High’s Ming. “What’s the purpose of doing it? Is it because you’re looking for more time in your curriculum to do hands-on activities?” An AP government teacher told Ming the best part of teaching his class was holding class discussions. The flipped classroom helped him get through the material with time to spare for conversation.

Ming himself posted new videos for students and parents to watch at home—and gained more time for small-group lab projects at school. By the end of the year, students were designing their own experiments and running them, “because I was able to take a 40-minute lecture in class, reduce it to 10 minutes at home, 5 minutes in class,” he says. “I probably built in an extra five, six days of block-scheduled, 100-minute classes through doing the classes at home through the flip.” He used only his own material, but he understands why it’s good for students to also hear from others—perhaps on Educreations or Khan Academy, where they can “hear it explained differently,” he says. “You don’t have to start from scratch.”

The Khan Academy is the most well-known user of the technique. “What the Khan Academy has done is to make using audiovisual easy,” says Brad Baird, chief revenue officer of Schoology, a platform with 1.8 million users that lets communities like Flipped Classroom record audiovisual material and lets teachers monitor discussions.

Khan, which offers free how-to videos, doesn’t completely embrace the term “flipped classroom.” “Just the term ‘flipped classroom’ is something that makes us really uneasy,” says Maureen Suhendra, a member of Khan’s school implementation team. “The flipped classroom in the traditional sense is that teachers are assigning videos for homework, and they’ll come to class and work out problems together. Students are still all moving at the same pace. Khan Academy is much more about a customized learning experience—working on different math exercises at a different time. It’s a vision of a self-paced, customized learning experience.”

The current educational system is too much of a “one-size-fits-all model,” says Suhendra. Not the Khan Academy. “If you have an art history teacher who needs something on a particular decade, it’s very easy to find that on our site. If you have math students who are saying, ‘I’m failing my math class,’ here are different videos that tell you a different way of solving the problem. In essence, Khan Academy can become a personalized tutor for students.”

Still, there’s no guarantee that kids will actually view the videos. To make sure his students watched his, Ming sent out a reminder when he posted a seven-minute lesson that he had created. Then he posted a question on the board the next day: What are the signs of a chemical reaction? “If I get the impression that not many people watched the lesson, I always have a quiz ready,” he says.

Ming spent 5 or 10 minutes of class time answering students’ questions about what they watched at home. Then he offered follow-up activities in which students predicted what would happen if the chemicals that they had just studied reacted. How did the new setup affected his classes? “The time flies by because students are the ones leading the learning,” he says.

Steven Spielberg-quality videos are not the goal. “You’ve got to get over the fact they’re not 100 percent perfect,” says Ming about his films, which have inadvertently included the sounds of his dogs barking and his kids, now two and a half and four and a half, saying “Daddy,” in the background. His students’ reactions? “They thought it was funny,” he says. He has made all of his videos public through Educreations.

Leveling the playing field

The flipped classroom also faces a far more serious challenge than shaky sound editing: teachers need to figure out how to overcome the “digital divide”—and accommodate kids who don’t own a laptop, iPad, or smart phone, or who don’t have Internet access at home. “I made my room available before and after school and also during lunch,” says Ming. “If they wanted to eat and watch while they were eating lunch, that’s fine.” He suggests school librarians help out by making computers available, too. Other teachers can put materials on flash drives for kids or even burn DVDs that kids can watch on television.

Gwyneth Jones (aka The Daring Librarian) is also sensitive to the need to bridge socioeconomic gaps. “I have kids coming from million-dollar houses, and I have kids coming from homeless shelters or whose parents are working hourly jobs,” says Jones, a librarian at Murray Hill Middle School in Howard County, MD, who posts tutorials on topics such as how to teach Wikipedia (called “Wikipedia Is NOT Wicked!”). “When flipping the classroom, one has to take into account the digital divide. It’s unfair to require a homework component that some kids won’t be able to do at their houses because the technology is not there or the Internet access is not there. Some of our kids’ parents cannot take them to the library.” That’s why Jones believes in the “partial flip”—using videos to enrich activities. “It won’t be where they’ll be penalized or can’t pass the test because they didn’t see a certain video at home,” she says. “I worry about technology crazes fanning around the country that leave out the poor kids. But I also, being a change agent myself and a person on the edge of technology, want to incorporate all those cool things.” Students in parts of the country that aren’t as technologically advanced can be left out, too. “There are places like Iowa, Montana, or Appalachia, where it would be very difficult to get a free wireless signal to everyone,” says Jones. Even preloading flash drives with videos assumes kids own a device at home to plug the flash drive into. So she likes the idea of operating the mobile lab out of the classroom.

The “home” portion of the flipped classroom can be too passive for many educators’ taste. “Some of the most effective ways that students can learn are by doing, not by watching other people do,” says Lisa Nielsen, author of Teaching Generation Text: Using Cell Phones to Enhance Learning (Jossey-Bass, 2011). “Listening to a lecture is nothing new. I just don’t believe it’s the most effective way to learn,” she says. “I believe the most effective way to learn is to do work that’s meaningful, not to sit and watch someone else do something. This is not revolutionary,” she says. “If there’s a video that can help someone understand something, that’s great. I just don’t think that should be the be-all and end-all.”

Another problem? “The kids are all watching the same videos,” says Nielsen. “There’s no differentiation other than when they watch the videos. There’s no discovery. They’re all going down the same narrow path and choosing the same goal.” She calls it a “one-size-fits-all, canned path that someone else chose for them.”

Screen time and other potential pitfalls

Watching videos also means more sitting in front of devices. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends kids limit “screen time” to two hours a day because too much exposure has been linked to obesity, irregular sleep, behavioral problems, violence, and less time for play. But not all screen time is created equal. Nielsen, who opposes “scapegoating screening,” says it depends on how the tools are used. “You could be writing, creating, changing the world from your laptop,” says Nielsen. “In countries like Egypt, we’ve used screens to start a revolution.”

The flipped classroom can also be too noisy for some educators. “A school shouldn’t look like a factory,” says Nielsen. “It should look kind of chaotic. We want these vibrant environments. We want schools to be places that if kids weren’t required to attend, they would still want to be there.” Carpeting to deaden sound isn’t always an option. A science lab, for example, can’t have it because it could catch on fire, says Bergmann.

The flipped classroom’s buzzword? Curation. Many teachers use a combination of their own materials and those of others. Although “it’s best practice to use your own videos,” says Bergmann, “it’s not always practical.” Recently he visited a Detroit school where kids read at anywhere from a third- to a tenth-grade level. “It’s not practical for them to make all their own videos,” he says. And some times kids who struggle—and who lack parents at home who know how to help with problems—will become the class clown, says Troy Smith, educational product manager for TechSmith, which makes apps that help teachers create videos. “It’s this downward spiraling.”

Students need to feel as though their teachers are guiding them to the best materials, not merely giving them a list of videos to watch, says Valenza. And teachers (and state tests) still need to assess students. “If our students are learning collaboratively, should we then assess them collaboratively?” asks YayMath’s Adhoot. How does it fit in with the SAT and ACT tests, GPAs, AP tests, and the college-selection process? “Teachers work for administrators, and administrators work for districts, and districts answer to the powers that be that for many reasons are resistant to change,” says Adhoot. For her part, Valenza expects that almost every textbook will be on an electronic device within the next 5 or 10 years. If nothing else, the flipped classroom will make for lighter backpacks.

“One of the responsibilities of the librarian is to be concerned about equity and be concerned about resources in general,” says David V. Loertscher, a professor of library and informational sciences at San Jose State University. It’s also to find the right materials for each child. “The job of the librarian is to flip for every kid,” says Loertscher. “If one little tutorial doesn’t work, we’ve got 10 others in the wings. There are all kinds of learners, all styles of learners.” To find the best materials, librarians should “use the same criteria they’ve always used for printed materials—authority, interest, accuracy,” he says. They shouldn’t just fall in love with the latest trend.

They also shouldn’t just swallow the flipped concept hook, line, and sinker. “Teachers should keep posing the ‘why,’” says Bob Schuetz, the technology director at Palatine High School in Illinois. “Why am I doing this? Why is it beneficial to students?”

Karen Springen teaches journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. Her last feature for the magazine, “The Big Tease” (July 2012), examined some terrific ways to use trailers to hook kids on books.

Photograph by David Paul Morris
(Getty Images for SLJ)

In 1993 a certain New York Times article caught author Katherine Applegate’s eye. The piece, called “A Gorilla Sulks in Mall as His Future Is Debated,” focused on the B & I Shopping Mall in Tacoma, WA, where a 500-pound gorilla languished while the humans around him determined his fate. Something about this ape named Ivan lodged itself deep into the crevices of Ms. Applegate’s brain. It wasn’t until more than a decade had passed that she returned to it. During that time, she’d written a pair of Harlequin romance novels, the enormously popular “Animorphs” series (Scholastic), a multitude of books for children, and the verse novel Home of the Brave (Feiwel & Friends, 2007). After agreeing to write two novels for HarperCollins, she rediscovered Ivan’s tale. “I found it so tragic and so compelling, but honestly, I was not sure it would work as a book,” she says. “I really had my doubts.”

Now the newest winner of the Newbery Medal for the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children, Applegate’s The One and Only Ivan has brought new attention to an author who has worked tirelessly on books for children for decades. At 56, she and her husband, fellow novelist Michael Grant, live with their two children (Jake, age 15, and Julia, 13), a cat named Lightning McQueen, and a dog named Stan (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Bob, the dog in her Newbery winner) in Tiburon, CA. Says Applegate, we “can see San Francisco, Alcatraz, and Angel Island from our porch, unless it’s foggy.”

Funny and modest to a fault regarding her recent Newbery victory, Applegate spoke with me less than a week after her historic win.

What was the first thing you ever published?
I really made my way up through the trenches, and the first thing I published were psychology quizzes in YM magazine—I think it was called Young Miss. It was kind of like Seventeen magazine. So I did a lot of that, and the first book I published was a Harlequin romance. I’m almost certain that I will be the first Newbery winner to have published two Harlequin romances.

That’s a scoop!
You know, I’ll tell you something. They are very hard to write. You follow the formula. It was a really steep learning curve. And after that, I did a bunch of ghosting. So again, I was learning to write to a specific formula. I did, I think, around 17 “Sweet Valley Twins” [books].

Was following a formula valuable?
I think it’s a little like basic training. It taught me the discipline part of the writing. The stuff you want to get away with and you can’t, the continuity errors, and the inconsistencies in characterization. I think for me, it was a very helpful tool. The one thing I never really learned well was how to meet a deadline.

Did it feel natural to you to write for a gorilla?
Well, I have to say, I’m fascinated by animals, and I’ve always been fascinated by animal communication and experiments with primate communication, but I’m not a gorilla person. I’m much more comfortable with your basic Labradors. [Gorillas are] not cute and cuddly, and I think they’re profoundly intimidating because of their size and their strength. And that pensive sort of impenetrable gaze of theirs.

So I went into it not knowing. I didn’t know a thing about gorillas. I had had a gorilla in “Animorphs” that we’d use occasionally as one of the characters. That was back in the day before the Internet, and oh, man, it would have been so much easier to write with Google around. So, I’m sure it was rife with inaccuracies, but I had this nonfiction library that Michael and I used to try to keep track of data bits about animals. But we were writing a book a month, and the time frame for doing a lot of research about any given animal was pretty limited.

Did you consider writing Ivan as a nonfiction book?
Well, I tried—my attempts at nonfiction have not been entirely successful. Once I attempted a book about elephants on the savanna, and I got maybe two chapters into it, and I realized I was starting to make things up. [Laughter]

I was grossly unqualified to be writing nonfiction. So I pretty much knew going into Ivan that there was no way I should go near nonfiction per se. But I could follow pretty precisely what actually happened, and I did go to the Tacoma Public Library archives—they were so helpful—with my kids in tow, and dug through old clippings about Ivan. It was fascinating. I went back to the strip mall where he had lived, and they have this semi-shrine there. Once a year, they open up his cage, I think, on his birthday and let people walk through, and there were tons of clippings and tons of touching pictures from little kids and that sort of thing. So I got a pretty good picture of what his life was like.

Why did you decide to write the story in a sort of prose poetry form? Was it just to give Ivan a believable voice, or was there another reason?
I am not entirely sure. I tend to look at structure before I look even at plot, which is probably why plot is a struggle for me. I think about what the book looks like and how it feels. Maybe that discipline is helpful for me in terms of finding the right words.

But when I look at big sprawly novels, sometimes… my husband just finished [writing] 500 pages. I marvel at it, because it’s so symphony and I’m so chamber music. I just don’t think that way, and it seemed really appropriate that since I was working with an animal voice that it would be small and poetic.

But that’s kind of how I write anyway, left to my own devices. That’s why I love Twitter. That 140-character thing I can deal with, but Facebook to me is like, “Oh, my God, that’s so much more work, I can’t go there.”

Do you see yourself writing another novel in the same style?
You know, I think that there’s a danger in writing the same thing. Home of the Brave was definitely free verse, and I’ve done a couple of picture books where—well, you know yourself, picture books by definition are poetry.

They’re the haiku of children’s literature, yes?
I think I lean in that direction, but I don’t want to be redundant. I’ll have to see how it evolves. Right now, the book I’m working on is in sort of choppy blocks… bigger than Ivan, but smaller than a typical middle grade [novel].

You chose to put this story in the first person, which has made all the difference, I think, for your readers. Did you also consider other ways of telling the story?
Oh, yeah, I tried everything. I definitely wrote it in third. It seemed too distant. I wrote it in different kinds of first-person voices. I wrote it in big blocky narrative pieces. That seemed like too much. Name another way I could have written it, and I bet you I did it.

Was Anne Hoppe always your editor at HarperCollins?
Yeah, and you know Ivan would not be Ivan without Anne. Honestly, it was the most collaborative and fun adventure I’ve ever had with an editor. I was working on another animal fantasy, actually, and struggling with it. Anne finally looked at me, and she said, “You know, you really want to write that gorilla book, don’t you?” I said, “Yeah, I really do.”

I attempted to be very journalistic and follow the true story of the real Ivan, but it was a pretty passive story. There wasn’t a lot happening. When I had originally submitted the concept to her, I had envisioned a fictionalized element, and Anne said, “Look, why don’t you go back and try it, because right now it’s really short and I’m going to have a hard time selling a template.” So, I went back to my original idea, and it really fell into place. Anne loves words the same way I do, and so we could go back and forth for three days trying to get a sentence just right. I love that. She’d say, “No, that’s not quite right.” “OK, we’ll try again.” And when you have that experience with an editor, you just feel so lucky.

The real Ivan passed away on August 20, 2012. It must have been kind of bittersweet publishing Ivan the same year that he died. I know you didn’t get a chance to meet him, but you attended his memorial.
Oh, that was so touching! And I almost didn’t go because, you know, announcing to the family that I’m jumping on a plane to go to a gorilla funeral can be met with a certain amount of concern. But it was really amazing.

There were maybe 100 people. There were people from all over the country. His keeper was there and a primatologist who had been vital in getting him moved and people who just loved him. People came who had grown up seeing him in the malls when they were little kids going in every Sunday and seeing him, high-fiving the glass….

They had a big wall with letters of tribute, many from children. His photo was in the middle and people talked about their experiences with him. He was apparently quite a quirky guy. Ivan hated to get his feet wet. He did not like dampness, and when he went outside, one of his quirks was that he would take a burlap coffee bag, which were regularly supplied to the zoo by a local coffee supplier, and put it under his butt and under his hands. He would slide around on the ground and get around that way.

So hanging up was a burlap bag to signify his passing. It was lovely to see that a gorilla whose life had been so tragic in so many ways still had brought together all these humans.

I was looking at the villains in your novel and in this year’s Newbery Honor books, and I have to say, they’re usually very black-and-white. In Splendors and Glooms, the bad guy could not be more evil. In Three Times Lucky, the villain is pretty bad. And in Bomb, he’s Hitler. But Mack, who’s Ivan’s keeper, is the least black-and-white. He’s got the most gray. He’s the most human, I’d say, out of all the baddies. Where did he come from?
I really, really struggled with that, and thought about that a lot because I have not met the real live people who were involved with Ivan’s life. But I am convinced from what I’ve read that the feelings about him were very complex. It was a nuanced and complicated affair. I think they probably loved him very much in their own way.

I know that one of Ivan’s caretakers, who had worked there for quite a while, traveled to see Ivan when he was reacclimated at Zoo Atlanta because she was a figure that he knew. And, you know, I think kids are very capable of understanding nuance and of grasping that life is more gray than black-and-white. It was so important for me to get that across.

One of the things that I’ve heard about your book is that it’s an animal book for people who hate animal books. And Nina Lindsay, who blogs at SLJ ’s “Heavy Medal,” even went so far as to say of it, “the animal’s gestures feel true and vivid and consistent so that I believe in each character as the animal they are.” Did you turn to anything for animal inspiration? Did your pets sneak into the story in any way?
Well, Bob, a dog who is a small sarcastic sort of sidekick to Ivan, was inspired in part by my own little lap dog. I used to have big galumphy mutts around the house and this dog, who in my home is known as Stan, is a little Chihuahua mix with a deformed paw. And he’s kind of bratty and yappy—all the things you would expect from a little dog. He actually served as a wonderful inspiration for Bob.

Do the illustrations of Bob resemble Stan?
That was what was so remarkable, the sketches came back from Patricia Castelao, and I thought they were so wonderful! I loved the way she managed to make Ivan substantive and accessible and almost cute because, let’s face it, that was not an easy task. But when I saw the dog, I went, “Oh, my God, that is Stan!”

Had she seen pictures of him?
No, no. It was just a remarkable coincidence.

So, the story everyone wants to hear is the story of getting “the call” from the Newbery committee.
Well, I was in a Residence Inn in Richmond, Virginia. My sister had just turned 50, and we were celebrating. My daughter Julia was with me and she had a really lousy bug and a fever so I had decided to stay over another day. I was busy Googling Expedia, trying to figure out what I was going to do plane-wise, and I looked over and the phone rang. It was around 9:30. I saw Seattle, Washington, on my iPhone, and I thought, “Seattle?” And then it clicked and my heart sort of stopped, and I picked it up and when they said “Newbery Medal,” honestly I thought there must have been some clerical error. I think I said, “Are you sure?” I was just sort of stunned. I’m not sure how long I sat there silently just blinking in disbelief. But I finally said, “This is the coolest moment since I gave birth to my son and adopted my daughter,” and there was a long pause, and then I forgot that I hadn’t mentioned marrying my husband. I quickly added that. There was some laughter. Then they said, “Are you sure there aren’t any other life events you want to add?”

You weren’t even aware it was that day?
I hadn’t really—I think it was probably a nice thing to have been traveling and doing other things because it had sort of left my radar, which made it even more of a shock. I don’t think I’ve quite absorbed it. That it’s for real.

Actually Michael, I believe, tweeted after the announcement: “I am married to the 2013 Newbery winner who will now make me do dishes for the rest of 2013.” True or false?
You know, it’s funny, someone read that to me in an interview I was doing. I hadn’t seen it, but I was thrilled and delighted. And I have to tell you, I came home last night and did the dishes. So there you go.

Elizabeth Bird (fusenumber8@gmail.com) is a children’s librarian at the New York Public Library and blogs at “A Fuse #8 Production” on SLJ’s website.

Illustration by Jean Tuttle

After 20 wonderful years as a teacher librarian, I’ve gone over to the dark side. I’ve become a suit—an administrator—and the very worst kind, a district IT administrator! (Cue Darth Vader’s theme song.) Before you turn away in horror and disbelief, here’s a quick tell-all from the Evil Empire. I’m going to share some shocking (and instructive) secrets from the Death Star of Administration, explaining why principals should be your best friends and colleagues. I’m also going to stop using Star Wars metaphors.

My fade to gray didn’t occur overnight. I have worked as an instructional technology facilitator in Vancouver’s (WA) public schools since 2008. During the first three years, I was also Skyview High School’s full-time teacher librarian. Then, in 2011, my role changed: I spent half of my time in the library and the remaining half in the IT department. Depending on the day of the week, I was either “The Man” or I was working for him. And despite enjoying the opportunity to blame myself for whatever was wrong either with management or with teachers, in 2012, I was finally asked to make a choice between those two options. I think you’ve heard about receiving an offer you can’t refuse….

While I still see myself as a teacher librarian, last July, I became a real-live administrator with a spiffy title—manager of instructional technology and library services. During the last few years, I’ve been able to reflect on many of my own beliefs and assumptions about working with administrators. As a former teacher librarian, I’m also well aware of other perceptions that teachers have regarding management. Speaking now as a teacher—and not as a manager—I’ve come to realize that the reality is far more complex than a simple equation of us vs. them. Teacher librarians have far more in common with principals than we realize. I’d like to share some ways to find common ground with our friends in the corner office.

When I was in grad school, Joyce Petrie, my wise and now long-departed professor at Portland State University, explained in detail how library administration and building administration are a lot alike. She was right. Now, speaking from experience, I teach my University of Washington graduate students that school librarians often have more in common with principals than with their fellow teachers. Why is that? Like principals, we manage budgets, purchase materials, evaluate employees, and make executive decisions, ranging from selecting materials to determining instructional outcomes. Unlike many teachers, we know virtually everyone in the school by name and maintain positive working relationships with all of them. We also excel at putting a wide variety of district policies and programs into practice. Most importantly, like principals, we’re often the only ones in our schools who do the jobs that we do. I often hear teacher librarians say that they feel misunderstood, isolated, and even lonely in their positions. Empathy check: Do you think principals just might feel the same way?

If it hadn’t been for my many wonderful teaching colleagues, I wouldn’t have been the 2012 Washington State Teacher of the Year. But it all began with my Skyview High principal, Kym Tyelyn-Carlson. Over the course of five years, our professional friendship evolved beyond library advocacy and became a two-way exchange between educators who both cared deeply about the success of our school. We discussed everything from staff socials to strategic planning. When she called me into her office in May 2011 and told me she was nominating me for teacher of the year, it was less about my librarianship than it was about her perception of me as an educator. Well beyond my library role, I had become a trusted confidante, consigliere, and colleague. Kym isn’t an exception. I’ve enjoyed good and frequently great relationships with the six principals I’ve worked with during the last two decades. I’ve always seen them as allies rather than adversaries.

Before addressing the opportunities for media specialists to connect with principals, I’d like to dispel some common misconceptions. First, there’s a widespread belief that building and district administrators always think the same way. More often than not, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Get a principal to talk off-the-record, and you’ll find out for yourself. Despite the mysterious district meetings and the inscrutable binders on their shelves, principals struggle with translating district policy into practice as much as we do. In more than one meeting, I’ve heard them express frustration, uncertainty, fear, and powerlessness in the face of the same issues that teachers confront. Like other educators, building administrators are concerned about daily challenges such as poverty, student readiness, literacy, fear of violence, and assessments. In addition, many district policies and programs are often created with insufficient input from or consultation with building administrators. Like many teacher librarians, principals are the ones who must explain and train faculty in the policies and practices created by managers like me.

And what of the conspiracy theory that administrators are “all in it together”? Ask any superintendent: they’d retire and die happy if they could only get their administrative leadership teams to plan, work, and lead based on an authentically shared set of values and priorities. Even the highest-functioning educational administrations grapple with issues of nurturing and maintaining social capital—communication, relationships, leadership, and sustainability. Just like individual schools, district programs and departments work with specific challenges, leadership models, and cultures.

Are there bad principals? Yes. And bad teachers? Of course. Are there tyrannical administrators and administrations? Yes, probably. Do administrators circle the wagons when challenged? Yes, in the same way that teachers and librarians do when they’re threatened. Do administrators meet in secret to devise evil plans? Unlikely. I have found that most district conspiracy theories are often conflated with honest mistakes, incomplete planning, imperfect implementations, and/or poor communication. Speaking for my district, our leadership team cares deeply about students and it respects and values teachers and staff. We work very hard to get it right. Sometimes we do. Sometimes we could have done better.

This is where teacher librarians come in. By cultivating strong relationships with principals and even district administrators, we can strengthen library programs, not to mention improve schools and districts. I am wearing a suit because of relationships with both teachers and administrators, built on shared work, planning, and success. Here is a quick list of ways to create those relationships, even when you’d think it might be impossible.

Seek out win-win opportunities. Identify what keeps principals up at night and then offer to help. Right now, three big trains are barreling down the tracks—Common Core, new teacher and principal evaluation systems, and 21st-century student skills. In addition to running a school, principals are accountable for these vaguely defined and game-changing reforms. Choose one, learn as much as you can about it, and then offer to help your boss. Join them on district or regional teams. Offer to provide leadership in your building. You’re likely to be surprised at just how enthusiastically they say yes.

Give before you receive. Teacher librarians often conceive their relationships with principals as quid pro quo, beginning with the question “What will you do for me?” rather than, “What can I do for you?” Pay it forward with the goal of building trust, rapport, and a valuable relationship. Many years ago, I took up an offer by our former chief information officer to lead our district’s library automation project. I had a vested interest in the job being done right, and she wanted the implementation to go smoothly. Thanks to our partnership, the project was a success. A few years later, she asked me to join her team as an instructional technology facilitator.

Bridge the gap. Because of our hybrid roles, teacher librarians can effectively bridge the artificial divide between teachers and administration, and promote communication, collaboration, and advocacy between and across various roles and functions. In the same way that my recent leadership role blurs the definition of “The Man,” teacher librarians can provide unique building and even district leadership. Teachers often grapple with crossing a line by appearing too supportive of administration. As a teacher librarian, I never saw a line because my job was different. I necessarily had to see things from a systems perspective that included not only building administration and teachers, but also district interests. That’s why some of our teacher librarians currently lead a district task force to develop a digital citizenship program. They are working with administrators to develop a systemic digital content strategy, and they’re participating in state and district groups connected to the Common Core. Like principals, the best teacher librarians see the big picture and can build partnerships that ensure success.

Identify successes. Most teachers hesitate to call attention to their work or to be praised for it. But principals always want to be able to share good work with parents, peers, and their bosses. When teacher librarians see innovation, creativity, and greatness in the classroom, they should share those stories with the principal. Principals appreciate the ability to see and value success in others. More importantly, they value hearing about good things beyond the library program. In addition to building rapport with your principal, everyone wins. Teachers get the recognition they deserve. The principal better understands the great work that’s going on. And the school may well get some praise at the district’s next meeting. As a proponent of creativity in the classroom, I made it a point to highlight innovative teachers who dared to emulate Apple and its slogan “think different.” More often than not, Kym would nod in agreement. In those moments, we were of one mind, not about libraries, but about great teaching.

My friends and colleagues keep checking up on me and asking how I like my new job. I tell them it tastes like chicken. To me, the only significant difference between what I’m doing now and what I’ve done for years as a teacher librarian and an instructional technology facilitator is that there’s a different title below my name. Sad as it might seem, that changes a lot in my relationships with others, both among teachers and administrators. To many teachers, I’ve gone over to the dark side. To some administrators, I’m now part of the club. But here’s the reality—there’s no dark side; and there’s no key to the executive washroom. Thankfully, my teacher librarian colleagues still see me (and themselves) for what we are—occasionally lonely, frequently misunderstood, and loving the jobs that we do. Just like principals.

Mark Ray (Mark.Ray@vansd.org) is the manager of instructional technology and library services at the Vancouver (WA) Public Schools.

Marcus Lowry, teen librarian, Ramsey County (MN) Library and
Leslie Yoder, digital literacy and learning specialist, St. Paul Public Schools.
Photograph by Thomas Strand.

Last spring, when school librarian Leslie Yoder heard that young adult author Francisco X. Stork was available to visit Boys Totem Town, a residential program for incarcerated teens in St. Paul, MN, she pounced on the opportunity. Although Yoder lacked the necessary funds, she instantly knew who to turn to—her partners at Ramsey County Library.

For the last two years, Yoder, a digital literacy and learning specialist with St. Paul’s public schools, has teamed up with Ramsey’s teen librarians—and the outcome has been a win-win for both the librarians and the kids whom they serve.

Thanks to Ramsey teen librarian Marcus Lowry, who found the funds for Stork’s visit, the acclaimed writer spoke at a local high school and to dozens of Yoder’s enthusiastic students about his novel Behind the Eyes (Dutton, 2006), which deals with a reform school. “Our students don’t get to meet the people who write the books,” says Yoder.

When Lowry and fellow young adult librarian Amy Boese visit Boys Totem Town, they are weighed down with bags of books and eager to do what they do best—booktalking and spearheading a weeklong technology workshop. “It’s really energizing for us to go there,” says Boese, who also works with three other school districts. “They are always superpolite and have good questions.”

Although the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the American Library Association’s (ALA) Public Library Data Service Statistical Report don’t keep track of the number of joint-library projects, Yoder, Lowry, and Boese are among a small group of school and public librarians nationwide who regularly work together. Like many rewarding collaborative projects, theirs usually begin with a modest idea, in this case, offering booktalks to kids in a correctional facility. But behind every successful school and public library partnership, explains Lowry, there’s also a strong personal connection and a shared vision. “It almost always has to start with one personal connection,” he says. “It’s the one person that sees that mutual value—that we serve the same kids.”

Teaming up in Minnesota: Aaron Blechert, a media specialist at Irondale
High School, and Amy Boese, a teen librarian at Ramsey County Library,
with students in the school library.
Photograph by Thomas Strand.

It’s also sound fiscal sense for school and public libraries to pool their limited resources, says Jeffrey Roth, the New York Public Library’s vice president of strategy and finance. “We’re in an era that institutions need to look and see who they can partner with and strategically use each other’s assets,” he says.

That’s a strategy that the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) and Nashville Public Library (NPL) have worked to perfection. Although sharing public library collections with public schools is fairly unusual, that didn’t stop these two creative partners from thinking outside the box. During the 2011–2012 academic year, when Nashville’s budget-strapped schools were hurting for resources, the public library reached out a helping hand and loaned the city’s 54 middle schools and high schools 97,000 items—everything from books and DVDs to CDs and Playaways to entice reluctant readers and struggling English-language learners.

As a result of the impressive partnership, which is called Limitless Libraries, Stephanie Ham, NPL’s project coordinator, says the public library’s circulation stats have soared by an unprecedented 60 percent. And on the school side, MNPS’s lead librarian, Kathleen Bennett, couldn’t be more pleased. “This model is just fantastic and the benefits are great,” says Bennett. “What the kids get is wonderful open access to lots of resources.” (For more on Nashville’s Limitless Libraries, click on this link.)

The relationship between schools and public librarians is a critical one. Even before the recent recession, few school libraries could match the buying power of a large branch or a mid-size public library system. And during these troubled economic times, school librarians and their budgets are often among the first items scratched from public school budgets. That’s a compelling reason why Wisconsin’s School District of La Crosse and the La Crosse Public Library are exploring the possibility of sharing school and public library databases. “From a fiscal perspective, we’re starting to balance our resources so we are not duplicating online services,” says Vicki Lyons, the district’s director of technology and library services.

Still, successful school and public library partnerships can be a tough act to pull off, say many librarians and educators. Some of the typical roadblocks include a lack of time, vision, or resources; difficult personalities to deal with; and a scarcity of support from higher-ups. That may explain why less than one-third of school and public libraries coordinate book and other material purchases, according to School Library Journal’s first public library spending survey (see “It Takes Two,” May 2012, ow.ly/gekWY). When it comes to homework assignments, only nine percent of public libraries work directly with schools.

The emphasis on standardized testing can also be a barrier to working together, especially when kids are pulled out of the classroom to visit a public library. If the benefits of a joint effort aren’t obvious, says Rachelle Nocito, a content specialist for the School District of Philadelphia, many teachers and principals begin to worry that these activities will negatively impact test scores. “School districts are judged on our students’ achievement,” explains Nocito, whose district is piloting a program with the Free Library of Philadelphia. “It’s really important that when we step out of our building to do anything, its purpose definitely aligns with the reading program and social studies curriculum or science curriculum.”

But that doesn’t mean that school and public libraries should hesitate to work together. Susan Ballard, president of the American Association of School Librarians, a division of ALA, encourages school and public librarians to reach out to one another and other community groups. “No one can do anything on their own anymore; it’s simply not possible,” Ballard says.

At the moment, ALA’s Interdivisional Committee on School/Public Library Cooperation is working on ways to bring media centers and public libraries together on issues such as preventing “summer slide”—when kids lose many of the reading gains made during the school year—and implementing the Common Core standards. “If you’re not collaborating, why aren’t you collaborating?” Ballard asks. “The end result improves services for kids and makes them better researchers and lifelong learners.”

Students, of course, aren’t the only ones who benefit from a collaborative program. “Great partnerships let you reach out dynamically and work with a wide variety of partners within the school and public library,” says Marge Loch-Wouters, coordinator of youth services at La Crosse Public Library. She should know. Loch-Wouters has been building partnerships with local Wisconsin schools for more than two decades. “Great partnerships don’t put you in a box,” she says.

Buffy Hamilton doesn’t need to be convinced that joint-library ventures make a world of difference. Hamilton is so bullish on them that she recently left her post at Creekview High School, in Canton, GA, where she ran an award-winning library program, and joined the Cleveland Public Library’s (CPL) staff. School and public libraries “have much more in common with their visions and goals than we might initially think,” says Hamilton, who will be CPL’s liaison with Cleveland’s public schools. “We’re working on these parallel paths, and we can find a way to interact and pool our collective resources and talents to accomplish those goals.”

The following collaborative projects are a sampling of what’s happening around the country. Each of these dynamic programs has its own distinct approach, but they all have one thing in common: they’re making a genuine difference in kids’ lives and in the communities that they serve.

Denver, CO

In 2006, when residents of the Mile High City voted to raise the sales tax to support full-day kindergarten and early childhood education, the Denver Public Library (DPL) and the Denver Public Schools (DPS) knew it was the perfect time to extend their partnership, which, at the time, primarily placed library volunteers in the classroom to read to kids. With the help of a two-year, $476,000 Library Services and Technology Act grant, the two organizations banded together, in 2007, to teach children’s librarians, media specialists, and teachers about the latest advances in early childhood education. Children’s librarians who specialized in infant and toddler brain development shared their knowledge with teachers, and educators, in turn, brought public librarians up-to-date on the workings of the adolescent brain. “It was a new way to collaborate,” says David Sanger, DPS’s director of library services. “We formed professional learning communities, and those have still continued.”

Although the grant ended in 2009, the partnership is still going strong. These days DPL, DPS, and local nonprofit groups and agencies, such as Head Start, are working together on a number of projects for children from poor families. School and public librarians are also sharing their respective approaches to improving literacy and serving the city’s many English-language learners, who make up 34 percent of Denver’s K–12 students. Both groups are also discussing how best to share their resources, including, says Sanger, how to get their catalog databases to “talk to each other.”

Their efforts haven’t gone unnoticed. Denver’s 5 By 5 Project, which was created to support early childhood development, was inspired by these school and library partnerships, says Carol Edwards, DPL’s comanager of children’s and family services. The nonprofit organization, whose goal is to make sure that young kids have at least five cultural experiences by the time they start kindergarten, provides free admission to the city’s top cultural venues, such as the Denver Botanical Gardens and the Colorado Ballet, to nearly 3,000 Head Start and Early Head Start families. Plus, the library also offers free after-school camps for children of families in need. “It’s something that wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t been talking to each other,” says Edwards.

This month, DPL joined communities, such as Louisville and Boston, where one card serves as a student’s ID and library card. My Denver Card will also give kids free access to city parks and recreation services, and there are plans to expand its benefits to include the city’s transit system, says Jennifer Hoffman, manager of DPL’s books and borrowing. Hoffman says she anticipates issuing 30,000 cards. “We’re just trying to make it easy for a student to access us,” she says.

Portland, OR

To reach out to parents and students in east Portland, Multnomah County Library’s (MCL) Midland branch staff worked with educators at the Fir Ridge Campus (FRC), the David Douglas School District’s alternative high school. Their mission? To find teens who were eager to become library tour guides.

But these tours aren’t your average orientation sessions—especially when they’re conducted in Russian, Vietnamese, and Mandarin, the languages spoken in many of the young volunteers’ homes and neighborhoods. The aim of this innovative school-library project, says FRC’s librarian Deb Wheelbarger, is to attract parents who live in east Portland’s diverse and poor neighborhoods to bring their kids to the library and introduce them to its resources.

Student-guided tours are just one way that MCL has teamed up with its five area school districts. Another outreach program, Multnomah’s School Corps (staffed by Jackie Partch, Kate Houston, Peter Ford, and Gesse Stark, all of whom have MLIS degrees), offers local teachers curriculum support, which includes issuing them special library cards (so they can check out more books for longer periods of time), school visits to talk about research skills and library services, and “Buckets of Books,” which, as its name suggests, come brimming with books on commonly taught subjects, such as Oregon history, Pacific Northwest Native Americans, and insects and spiders, says Suzanne Myers Harold, MCL’s adult literacy coordinator. The library also brings visiting authors to local schools and works hard to bring students from the county’s high-poverty areas to theater productions and special events, including an awe-inspiring visit with the Portland Trailblazers, the city’s National Basketball Association team. “Through this collaboration with Multnomah County Library, we’re able to speak for them, and they for us,” says Wheelbarger. “I love the Multnomah County Library. It’s one of the most accessible libraries in the country.”

New York, NY

When the New York City Department of Education (NYDOE) realized there was a great way to work together with the New York Public Library (NYPL), Queens Library, and Brooklyn Public Library to get more learning resources into teachers’ and students’ hands, it couldn’t wait to get started—and MyLibraryNYC was soon launched.

Funded by a $5 million grant from Citigroup, the four-year pilot program, which gives students and teachers access to literally millions of additional materials, lets kids search their school and public libraries’ catalogs simultaneously from any computer that has Internet access. From the very start, the program, which began in 2011 with 84 schools and 50 NYPL branches, opted to take a potentially risky tact: to encourage kids to take advantage of their libraries, students would not be fined if they failed to return materials on time.

A recipe for disaster? Not at all, says NYPL’s Roth. In fact, almost 100 percent of the borrowed items have found their way back onto the library’s shelves. Best of all, students are scooping up more books. “The kids in the pilot were three times more likely to have a book checked out from their local library, and school library circulation essentially doubled,” says Roth. “The New York Public Library and the Department of Education already had a great relationship, but this has taken it to another level.”

Now in its second year, MyLibraryNYC reaches 250,000 students in 400 public schools, offering them access to 17 million books, videos, and recordings. And by 2015, the program hopes to include all 1.1 million of the city’s public school students, says Richard Hasenyager, NYDOE’s director of library services.

As part of the pilot program, NYPL will deliver books and other materials that meet the Common Core State Standards to participating schools. Groundwork is also being laid in all three public library systems to work more closely with school librarians and curriculum specialists so that their collections will support the state’s Common Core Standards.

NYPL estimates that MyLibraryNYC will cost $6 per student annually in direct and indirect costs, which include shipping the materials to schools and library branches. The public library systems pay for shipping and staff training, and the every school pays the roughly $800 annual fee charged by library resource vendor Follett for its Destiny catalog and BiblioCommons, which developed the catalog’s software and online interface. (Follett is giving those school libraries a $150 discount on Destiny.) School libraries that haven’t joined the pilot will pay $650, says Leanne Ellis, NYDOE’s coordinator of library services.

This year, the pilot added the Queens and Brooklyn public libraries and expanded to 207 school libraries that now serve 296 schools, says NYDOE. Although schools have to foot part of the bill, when you stop to consider what kids are getting in return—access to “the greatest books ever written by man,” says NYPL’s Roth—it’s a real deal.

Queens Library sees MyLibraryNYC as a launching pad to expand its librarians’ ongoing work with schools in the borough. “What can be done to help the kids, to support the teachers, to ensure kids have a strong start in reading and literacy and a place to go and their parents, too?” asks Bridget Quinn-Carey, the library’s chief operating officer. “Those are the wonderful things that libraries can do.”

Monterey High’s freshmen take advantage of computers in the Monterey Public Library teen zone as part of a joint venture between the school and library.
Photo courtesy of Monterey Public Library and Monterey High School.

Monterey, CA

To help its incoming freshman beef up their critical thinking skills and boost their tech know-how, the Monterey High School (MHS) turned to a familiar partner, the Monterey Public Library. The two teamed up to create a class called 21st Century Learning Skills. Aaron Sanders, the MHS history teacher who helped kick-start it, and Ben Gomberg, a librarian formerly with the Monterey Public Library, worked together to create the course’s project-oriented assignments, which have included creating websites that explore the coastal town’s history and comparing employment information that kids found on Craigslist with data provided by the U.S. Department of Labor. Supported by a $5,300 IMLS grant, their aim was to give 130 to 150 freshmen (out of a class of 1,100) the skills they needed to succeed in school and in life, says Sanders.

As part of the class, students made four separate visits to the public library (located just a block away), and Gomberg, in turn, made the same number of classroom visits, offering presentations on topics such as copyright and privacy, evaluating websites, and using library resources to prepare for college and careers.

How’s the new course working out? According to MHS’s principal, Marcie Plummer, students who took the class had fewer D’s and F’s, absences, and discipline issues than their nonparticipating peers. Roughly half of the kids in the class reported using the public library in their free time and about a third of them also used it to do schoolwork from other classes, says Gomberg.

Students in the pilot program have also learned how to be advocates for their own learning and how to evaluate their approaches to school so that they can improve their academic performance. “Personally as a teacher, I saw them having huge gains in that area,” Sanders says. “They were not afraid of having conversations with their teachers.”

Philadelphia, PA

How do you improve 146,090 kids’ information literacy and critical thinking skills? If you’re the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) and the Free Library of Philadelphia, you join hands to create a dynamic pilot program that pairs third-grade teachers with children’s librarians from nearby branches.

How does the program work? Six times during the last two months of the school year, instead of taking part in their school’s daily requirement of 90 minutes of reading, about 200 third graders take a short walk to their local public library, usually no more than a couple of blocks away. The purpose of the visits? To research the history of Philadelphia and their neighborhoods.

Upon returning to their classrooms, groups of three or four students dive headlong into the resources they discovered at the library and begin to create their own projects, says district content specialist Nocito. Although it’s impossible to predict what these inspired students are likely to cook up, one thing’s for sure—it’s always interesting.

Sarah Stippich, a children’s librarian at the Blanche A. Nixon/Cobbs Creek Library, remembers the day when the Free Library’s 25-foot-long, state-of-the art Techmobile visited Anderson Elementary School and its third graders were introduced to iPads. “They were digitally mapping our neighborhood,” says Stippich. “They were really into that, not only the technology part of that, but being able to look at their neighborhood and say, ‘Oh, that’s where I live.’”

Some classes combine their walks to the library with physical education, and their students strap on pedometers to count their footsteps, says Betsy Orsburn, the Free Library’s chief of the Office of Public Service Support.

Although it will take at least three years to gather enough data to evaluate the pilot, says Nocito, the initial assessments indicate that students are making connections between their schoolwork and library resources. Their teachers also reported developing moderately strong to strong informative partnerships with public librarians.

Nocito would like to improve on the instructional aspects of the pilot program. Ideally, she’d like to see a 10-week local history project that touches on different curriculum areas, such as science and language arts, and then follow up with an assessment to see if students’ gains continue on in fourth grade. “We’re under scrutiny,” she says. “Our students are going to be held accountable for their visits to the Free Library.”

The pilot program originally began in 2011, when the Free Library offered to help city schools that didn’t have a librarian or a school library, says Joe Benford, the Free Library’s chief of the Extensions Division. “It really is a way to try to cement library instruction and information literacy in the school district curriculum,” says Benford. Although more than 100 of Philadelphia’s 249 public schools have school libraries, only 46 schools have certified librarians. “The school librarians are almost nonexistent,” says Benford. “What we’re trying to do is prove this works and works as a model for the future. We just wanted to see if we could collaborate with the school district, and we have.”

Even though the pilot program appears to be working, there are limits to what it can accomplish. Stippich, who works with three third-grade teachers at Anderson Elementary School and with seven other schools and 12 child-care centers, says it’s impossible for her to offer everyone the level of service that she gives to those in the pilot program. “I can’t be the librarian for everyone,” she says. “This has just convinced me even more that they need more school librarians.”

Freelance writer Marta Murvosh is an aspiring librarian who often writes about libraries and education. You can find her at www.facebook.com/MartaMurvosh.

Meet the latest tech superheroes: school librarians. According to School Library Journal’s 2012 School Technology Survey, media specialists are leading the charge to bring new media, mobile devices, social apps, and web-based technologies into our nation’s classrooms.

So far, the results have been pretty impressive: 87 percent of school librarians report that they’re in charge of their library’s technology, with 60 percent adding that they’ve also introduced it into the classroom. Furthermore, 44 percent now serve on their school’s tech team, and in these budget-troubled times, when many library positions are on the line, that role may mean increased job security. In fact, 55 percent of the elementary, middle, and high school librarians that responded to our survey say that their tech skills have increased their value in administrators’ eyes.

What are many librarians’ biggest challenges? Not surprisingly, money and time—from the funds necessary to upgrade existing technology to the time needed to teach students how to use these tools. Case in point? Erica Braverman, a media specialist at Lindenwold School 5, an elementary school in New Jersey, says it’s tough to find time to make sure kids know how to use the latest technology competently. “Students need to learn how to use technology before they can effectively create with it,” writes Braverman. “It’s like learning to drive a car: if they don’t receive the proper instruction on how to drive, they will crash! We don’t want any Web-based crashes! But the time to teach students how to use the tools is limited, and classroom teachers have so much to teach as it is, it’s very challenging.”

Another trend we spotted? The number of schools creating one-to-one programs, in which each student is issued a tablet, a laptop, or some other digital device, has risen from 21 percent in 2011 to 27 percent in 2012. The use of tablets has especially soared, with 26 percent of librarians using them with students and teachers in 2012—more than double the 10 percent that reported using them in 2011. “We are in phase one of a one-to-one initiative putting netbooks in every student’s hands,” explains Laura Schachet, a media specialist at Webber Middle School in Fort Collins, CO. “They also make videos using flip cameras in a Web 2.0 class.”

Kids are also taking advantage of free Web-based resources, including Animoto, Google Docs, and Wordle; video equipment and software; digital subscriptions; and interactive whiteboards; plus photo equipment and software. And in the coming year, media specialists expect to see even more tablets, ereaders, apps, and ebooks on campus.

The use of ebooks, in particular, continues to climb, with 47 percent of media specialists saying they’re currently using them, up from 31 percent last year. Students are also reading digital books on a variety of devices—whether that’s the 63 percent who are perusing titles on library computers, the 17 percent who are reading on tablets, or the 21 percent who are fans of dedicated ereaders.

Mobile devices are also playing a larger role in learning, as 23 percent of schools are now allowing students to use their own devices in school—compared to a measly 13 percent in 2011. And in high schools, where students are more often encouraged to whip out their smartphones, the use of mobile devices has spiked from 29 percent of schools in 2011 to 49 percent today.

Nearly half of all schools have turned to social apps for classroom learning. The top app? Edmodo, a site that enables students and educators to network, share, and collaborate online. Launched in 2010, the platform is now used by 18 percent of school librarians to support teaching and student learning, followed by Google+, Delicious, and GoodReads. Where’s Facebook? Dead last, with a mere seven percent of respondents using the social network with their kids.

School librarians are also having an easier time gaining access to websites and apps. Sixty-nine percent have successfully negotiated with their administrators and school district to unblock YouTube, 66 percent have gotten the green light on blogging sites, and 30 percent managed to get Twitter unlocked. Only eight percent of media specialists report that their school’s filtering program “is severely restrictive.”

With purse strings still tight in most places, 78 percent of school librarians have opted for free apps—almost double the 42 percent who were using them in 2011. They are “the number-one tool used by librarians with students and teachers,” according to our survey, and an additional four percent of media specialists plan to incorporate tools such as Google Docs, Glogster, and Prezi into their lessons next year.

Not only do many media specialists find these apps budget-friendly, but also many, like Sabrena Wetzel, a librarian at Chicago’s Josephine Locke Elementary School, have noticed that their students have fun using them. “I used an online continent site to review where we wanted to send Flat Stanley, and…they had to figure out the continents,” writes Wetzel, who uses popular stories and technology to help her second graders learn about geography. “They really enjoyed it.”

And that may be the best outcome of all.

Illustration by Victor Juhasz

Join the authors for a Twitter chat, Thursday, October 11, at 9 p.m. EST hashtag: #sljdewey

Pushing between snack time and reading group, Zack, a third-grade boy, ducks into our school library while another class is beginning to check out books. “Sue, do you have anything about making stuff with paper?” asks the third grader.  Around him, a dozen nine-year-olds independently browse different sections that are marked by large, kid-friendly signs, such as “Scary,” “Animals,” and “Adventure.”

With only a moment to spare, the librarian suggests that Zack look above the shelves for the big “Making Stuff” sign, and then search the labels under “P” for paper. A few minutes later, he’s grinning at Sue, holding not only a book about origami, but also one on sewing that he snatched from a nearby shelf. “That was easy!” he boasts. “And I found more things I want to do, too!”

Zack’s “Aha!” moment is the kind of discovery we like to call orchestrated luck—and it’s the inspiration for a unique system that we’ve developed to encourage more independent and empowered seeking in our library. Here at the Ethical Cultural Fieldston School, a private preK–5 school in New York City, we’ve gotten rid of the Dewey decimal system and created a new library system that’s tailored to the needs of our students, staff, and curriculum. Thanks, in part, to whole-word labeling, child-friendly categories, and visually compelling signs, our kids are now amazingly optimistic about finding what they want. In fact, they keep telling us, “Wow, you’ve really organized the library!”

Our post-Dewey system, which we’ve affectionately dubbed Metis (after the clever, crafty mother of the Greek god Athena), puts things together in a way that encourages kids to move easily from one idea to another. Zack’s natural and simple segue from paper craft to sewing would probably never have happened with Dewey: it would have entailed a jump from 735 to 646. That’s a big reason why a small but growing number of school and public libraries—from the Perry Branch Library in Gilbert, AZ; and Burke High School in Omaha, NE; to the newly opened Carmel Elementary School in Clarksville, TN; and Darien Library in Connecticut—have ditched Dewey, or at least have escorted the 136-year-old system partway out the door.

Has Metis made a difference? Absolutely. During the past year, in our middle-grade library (for kids in grades three to five), we’ve seen dramatic increases in circulation—including around 100 percent or more in our “Sports,” “Countries,” “Humor,” and “Mystery” sections, and a spike of 240 percent in “Machines” (which includes the military and transportation). And in those always under-used sections like “Languages” and what we now call “Community” (sections of the 300s in Dewey), we’ve seen a jump of more than 300 percent. The early grades library, for preK through second-grade kids, has seen similar gains in areas such as “Humor” (87 percent), “Scary” (148 percent), and “Adventure” (110 percent).

Students aren’t the only ones who are enjoying the ease of navigating our collection. “I love your new system!” exclaims one of our kindergarten teachers. “I can find what I need for my classes in no time,” says another. And parents are also appreciative. “My child loves choosing a book to read with me every morning,” reports the mother of a young boy. “We usually start in ‘Machines’ and can find what we want without help. He’s even begun to branch out a bit and is asking for books about space now!”

Winter of our discontent

Certainly there was no lack of order back in the old days, in 2010, when we still used the Dewey decimal system: our shelves were labeled and organized; the online catalog was accessible; students were taught the basics of searching from the earliest grades. So what made us switch?

Our discontent with Dewey arose after years of confronting train books in the 380s and transportation items in the 620s; crafts scattered throughout the 600s and 700s; pets stuck next to cooking; and double-digit Dewey numbers for our extensive folktale collection. More important, we had the sense that for all the energy that we and our students were spending on teaching and learning Dewey (all those scavenger hunts and online library games), even our most advanced students still struggled to navigate smoothly from their initial request through the catalog to the item’s correct place on the shelves. So much effort was expended on this process that we felt as if our library was focused on finding materials rather than actually using them, and at odds with the emphasis on inquiry and critical thinking skills found in the American Association of School Librarians’ “Standards for the 21st-Century Learner.”

Once our objections to using Dewey became clear to us, the problems we’d been working around for years became intolerable and we began questioning everything. “Is Dewey and the curriculum focus that it demands leaving us behind in the 20th century?” we asked ourselves. “Why are we using decimals in a children’s library, when they don’t learn that until fourth-grade math? And why are our picture books arranged by author, when most children are more interested in the content than in who wrote the book?” By January 2011, we knew it was time to say good-bye to Dewey.

Ditching Dewey

With a palpable sense of terror and excitement, we set about creating a new system. We knew the task was huge, and we had no idea if we were up to it. The process involved a great deal of thinking, talking, and pushing at one another’s arguments to try to find flaws in them. Questioning our long-held assumptions generated a wave of almost superhuman energy that propelled us into the massive undertaking ahead.

With some sleuthing, we discovered the work of Linda Cooper, a professor at New York’s Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Science, who had researched the way that kids categorize information. Taking a cue from her methodology, we asked our fourth and fifth graders to brainstorm the contents of their ideal library in terms of categories or topics. It was from a request during one of these sessions that we got the idea for and name of our new crafts category, when a student innocently asked, “Can you please make a section on making stuff?” These sessions helped us hone our 26 “main categories,” counterparts to Dewey’s 10 main classes.

We also gave small groups of third and fourth graders carefully selected stacks of books and asked them to organize them in a meaningful way, and then to explain their reasoning. We discovered that many students wanted books on flying animals to be lumped together, and almost everyone wanted items on aquatic animals to be grouped together—penguins with sharks, dolphins, and seashells. Ultimately, after consulting with our science teachers, we decided to adapt their terminology, and we formulated animal subdivisions that approximated scientific classifications, while making some exceptions: “Aquatic Animals,” “Birds,” “Bugs,” “Reptiles,” “Mammals,” and “Prehistoric.”

Our kindergarteners and first graders were asked to make some sophisticated choices about sports biographies and animal books by moving to one side of the room or another in response to specific questions, such as, “Does Derek Jeter belong with famous people or sports?” or “Should this book on whales go with the mammal books or with books about other aquatic animals?” (Jeter sensibly went with sports, and whales with aquatic animals, despite the fact that our students were aware that the Yankees shortstop is famous and that whales are mammals.)

We also measured some of our young library users’ attitudes. We asked our first and fourth graders how they felt while they were searching for a good book, and how they felt when they had trouble finding a title. Our first graders didn’t hold back; their responses were emotional and surprisingly succinct. “When I can’t find what I want, I feel aginy [sic],” wrote one young boy. He wasn’t the only one, affirming that we had to make our students’ library experiences much better.

Articles of belief

As we worked on developing ideas about categories and subcategories, their order, call numbers, and visual labels, we kept a few principles in mind. These principles became our navigational tools. Our system had to be…

Child-centered: it had to start from a student’s point of view and use appropriate language for our users.

Browsable: the order and the sections and subsections had to be clear not only to librarians, but also to students, faculty, and parents.

Flexible: it had to be capable of being adapted for use by a range of ages and be capable of evolving over time, as the world changed and our collection grew.

We also knew that we wanted a system that allowed our students to be as independent as possible—and that meant our spine labels needed a major overhaul. For starters, we wanted to make sure that the labels had a strong visual component, so that students could easily tell what section they were in—this was especially important for our youngest learners who may lack reading skills. To accomplish this, we hired a graphic designer to create a subject label for each main category—for instance, a tennis racket hitting a football for “Sports” and an image of gears for “Machines.” These labels are a huge hit with everyone. They clearly identify what the book is about, and they’re so visually engaging and child-friendly that they’re often the first things our patrons comment on.

We also knew that the use of any kind of code had to be minimal, if at all. Consequently, we decided to use whole language in our call numbers and on our spine labels. So, for instance, instead of 793.57 GUT, a corresponding label now reads “Sports–Baseball,” and 818 HAL has become “Humor–Jokes.”

The grand plan

After several months of dissecting ideas and piling books into groups, we started to see the big picture and established the following plan:

Primarily, we’d use alphabetical order. Although younger students struggle with this, it’s a skill that’s taught in the earliest grades, and reinforced in classrooms, with print dictionaries and encyclopedias.

Because alphabetizing the main classes by name would result in an order that wasn’t very helpful (as in “Adventure,” “Animals,” and “Arts”), we decided to assign a single letter (A-Z) to each of our main categories. This is the only code we use in our system, and it has enabled us to create a flow and logical order for the entire library space, with, for example, “Machines,” then “Science,” leading into “Nature,” then “Animals” and “Pets.”

Within our main categories, we use mostly an alphabetical arrangement for the subcategories, which gives students a clear, intuitive order when browsing, and allows for maximum flexibility and adaptability in terms of future changes to and the expansion of our collection. In a few cases, alphabetical order wasn’t helpful, and we opted to place a number before the subcategory so that the shelves have a logical order. For instance, in “Countries,” we’ve arranged books by eras: “1. Ancient,” “2. Medieval,” and so on.

Fairly early on, we made the crucial decision to give up the idea of creating a system that classifies books as precisely as Dewey does. Instead, we opted for something we call “categorization,” based on some of the ideas developed by England’s East Sussex County Library in the 1980s. We’d put books in helpful categories, like “Languages” or “Mystery,” and dispense with author Cutters on the spines. After all, most students don’t care who wrote a book on volcanoes, they just want to find the topic, so the writer’s name isn’t especially helpful. (Putting the first three letters of the author’s surname on the call number is useful if you want to know exactly where a book is on the shelf, but it’s unnecessary if you keep your subcategories browsable.) Overall, this meant that many times we’d have more books—say, 15 books in “Nature-Disasters”—with the same call numbers than we did with Dewey. We figured it was our job to keep those categories manageable and of a helpful size. We did use author Cutters in “Picture Stories,” “Fiction,” and “Verse,” where subcategories are larger or the author’s name is an important factor in selecting a book, especially for students and teachers in the upper grades.

While we were at it, we also decided we’d break some rules when it came to dealing with fiction and nonfiction. Since we often talk to our students about evaluating online information and critical thinking, we thought that mixing together fiction and nonfiction titles would lead to some interesting teaching opportunities and conversations about books. In addition, it would help us categorize the growing number of books that occupy that grey area between the two. (For years, we’d been trying to explain to kids why the “Magic School Bus” series was in nonfiction when it’s obvious to any five-year-old that Ms. Frizzle isn’t real.) We decided that, particularly in the lower-grades library, we’d interfile fiction and nonfiction, and clearly indicate the difference on the spine by using a red dot for “imagination” or a blue dot for “information”—our terms for fiction and nonfiction. A lot of students, who love being able to find all sorts of items on the same shelf, also urged us to add a purple dot to identify books that straddle both categories, but so far, we’ve resisted that temptation.

Springing forward

Over the next several months, we had time to test, ruminate, and get a good feeling for what would work as separate categories. We consulted with the science department about our animal classifications and with the guidance department about the best word to represent learning differences, as well as disabilities such as blindness, so that our terminology aligned with our curriculum. With summer 2011 rapidly approaching, we decided to test some of our theories while we still had a captive audience.

We put “Holiday” picture books and nonfiction books together and every title we found that fit the notion of “Scary” into separately labeled areas. (This arrangement turned out to be a huge kid-magnet, and we couldn’t keep those shelves filled.) In the upper-grades library, we already had our Dewey fiction area labeled by genre, but now we separated the titles into smaller sections, such as “Adventure,” “Fantasy,” and “Sci-fi.” Kids who’d previously had trouble choosing a book for independent or pleasure reading loved this new and easier-to-navigate arrangement.

During spring break, we tore apart the nonfiction sections (300s, 600s, and 700s) and worked on creating subcategories for “Machines,” “Community,” “Ourselves,” and “Making Stuff,” putting stacks of books on carts, and reorganizing the shelves in a rough way. Some of the first categories we worked on were synthetic, in that they gathered together books from various parts of Dewey. The “Mystery” category, for example, includes books about spies (327), puzzles (793.7), crime (360), the unexplained (001.9), and codes (650), and “Making Stuff” features books on models from the 620s, cookbooks from 640, books from many sections of the 700s, and guides for writing poetry from 808. Our circulation immediately soared, especially in the noncurricular areas, such as “Making Stuff.” And even with the old Dewey labels still on our books and rough signs on shelves, one of our third graders, who’d asked for help in the last few moments of class, had no trouble finding a magic book, because she understood how to look under “M” for magic in the “Making Stuff” section. “That was so easy,” she declared, “I don’t know why I even needed to ask for help.”

Summer of love

The end of the 2010–2011 school year found us pulling apart the shelves. With our alphabet floor mats strewn across the rug, we began piling up picture books in the lower-grades library, and dissolving what remained of the Dewey order in our upper-grades room. We ordered custom picture labels for each category and laid in a stockpile of dots, stars, and spine-label protectors. Book by book, we determined whether it was fiction or nonfiction. We wrestled with the problems inherent in making some of the longer whole-word designations (such as “USA–African Americans–Civil Rights”) fit on a spine label. Then, after the books had been assigned to their new categories, it was time to reassign call numbers in the catalog, print labels, and relabel every single item in the library. We sorted all day and reclassified all night, getting the next section ready for relabeling.

Fortunately, we had a lot of help from our community. Several high school students came back to work on our assembly lines, stopping briefly, every now and then, as they came across one of their old favorite novels. More than three dozen volunteers, including parents, faculty, administrators, and kids, helped out. They joined our family members and a few stalwart friends in removing old layers of labels bearing years of Dewey workarounds. It took us six weeks to tackle our 20,000-volume collection, but it was truly a cleansing experience for all of us.

A new beginning

As September 2011 approached, we made posters using our subject-picture labels, put up shelf signs, introduced our faculty to the new system, and got ready to roll it out to our students. Some teachers preferred just a printed outline, while others worked with us to get a feel for the new sections. In our introductory student sessions, we encouraged kids to explore the system. While a handful of students who had been relatively comfortable with Dewey expressed some discomfort with the new arrangement, the vast majority was thrilled by the change.

During their very first class in the upper-grades library, our third graders were easily able to find humorous fiction, scary fiction, basketball, and animal fiction on their own, leaving the librarian free to talk to students about fractured fairy tales and whether or not Gail Carson Levine was a good choice—and then quickly help another student find an appropriate audiobook.

Since then, we’ve seen kids navigate the new system with ease and speed, locating materials independently with just a sentence or two of explanation from us. Students who’d struggled to find a good book to read independently are suddenly choosing books from multiple sections with simple prompting. Books on inventions, science experiments, and children’s play scripts that had languished for years are now flying off the shelves. And nowadays, we spend checkout time talking to kids about the next book they might like to read rather than helping them find a joke or magic book.

Parents are also thrilled with the new setup. They’re now able to help their kids find books, and that sense of accomplishment has translated into a greater appreciation of our library and its services.

The faculty response has been positive, too. While teachers who knew exactly where to go to find their old favorites were at first a little disconcerted by the changes, they soon discovered that the new system provides opportunities to quickly find new resources. That probably explains why teachers are now visiting the library more frequently. It’s not uncommon for one to rush in during a prep period, looking for picture books on bullying or sharing (topics that were formerly scattered all over the picture book and nonfiction sections with Dewey), and walk out with everything they need within a few minutes, rather than spending a half hour or more moving from catalog to shelf and back again.

Where to, next?

Is there really a “happily ever after”? We think so. We only just finished up the “tale” end of cataloging our collection, and we still have some rather ungainly call numbers in some of the history sections. We’re working on improving our signage, and we’re finding new ways to fine-tune the services we provide. We’ve also set up a website at www.metisinnovations.com to encourage our colleagues in the library world to share their ideas.

Change is hard, but the new system has been a boon for our students, faculty, and parents, and it’s boosted the library’s standing in our school and community. Having moved away from an old system of organization that demanded that a significant portion of our teaching time was spent on simply finding books, we’re now able to concentrate on talking with our students about books, as well as teaching them critical thinking and assessment skills. In this 21st-century world of rapidly changing technology, we want our library to play a central role in our school and community. We’re finding that our new system supports the library program so well that we are better able to collaborate and support the schoolwide curriculum. We know our new system isn’t perfect, but we’re definitely on the right track. And to think it all started when we waved good-bye to Dewey.

From the left: Librarian Tali Balas Kaplan, Assistant Librarian Andrea K. Dolloff, Librarian Sue Giffard, and Technology Librarian Jennifer Still-Schiff teach at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City.

Illustration by Travis Jonker; Photography by Craig van der Lende.

Last year, we rolled out an ereader lending program in my fifth and sixth grade school library, and I plan to share here the ups, downs, and what-to-look-out-fors we encountered along the way. We’ll talk planning and implementation of the program—but first, a bit of background. Let’s hop into the librarian time machine (fashioned from an old card catalog I found on Etsy) and go back to August 2011….

Background

Each year, my school district offers an Innovation Grant to employees. Teachers interested in implementing a project, using unique or innovative components and with the goal of benefiting students, are encouraged to apply. For my secondary school colleague Amy Huyck and me, an ereader lending program was a no-brainer. Our reasons were these:

• It would allow all students access to this fast-growing form of technology, especially those who would not otherwise have access due to socioeconomic status.

• It would generate excitement for reading. A bit of hype never hurt, right?

• Ereader features (adjustable fonts, highlighting, note-taking) would benefit all students, and particularly those with visual impairments.

• Other schools were seeing positive reactions to their ereader programs.

We outlined these benefits in our program goals, put together a time line for reaching them, and sent the whole thing to the powers that be.

If this were a cooking show, this is where I’d put the grant application in the oven and pull out another application with the word APPROVED written on top. That was an exciting email to receive. Now might be a good time to mention that if you’re an educator looking for grant opportunities, FableVision has a nice list you can subscribe to for free.

The grant allowed us to purchase 10 ereaders, warranties, cases, and a selection of ebooks to spread among our fifth and sixth grade and middle and high school. I would have three devices under my watch. While this isn’t a huge number, it gave us the chance to get a handle on things before expanding the program.

Planning

Let’s move on to a headline: “Ownership of E-Readers, Tablets Almost Doubles in One Month.” Last holiday season, in the span of 30 days, we went from 10 percent of the population to 19 percent of the population owning some form of ereader. The digital reading explosion is staggering to consider. If the whole “ebooks eliminate cover shame” thing is true, the time to get into the trashy romance novel biz is now.

OK, so you’re feeling like you’re ready. You want to start offering ereaders to students. First, some things to think about.

Research

• Georgia school librarian Buffy Hamilton has been sharing her valuable ereader program insights on her blog: Here and here.

• ALA Techsource posted the slides from an excellent webinar on ebooks in K–12 libraries (hosted by the aforementioned Buffy Hamilton)

• School Library Journal published Audrey Watters’s article titled “The Truth About Tablets.” For my money, it’s a must-read on the topic.

• No Shelf Required 2 (edited by Sue Polanka, ALA Editions) is also an excellent way to learn more.

Grade levels

Before beginning an ereader program, you should ask yourself which grade levels the program is for. I work in a district where grades are grouped by building, so I have a K–2, a 3–4, and a 5–6 school. Considering the limitations of the device, the cost, and the intended use, it seemed like beginning with fifth and sixth graders was the place to start, along with middle school and high school students.

Cost

When looking at a program dependent on electronic devices, dollars and cents immediately come into play. If no grant opportunities are working out and your library budget is tight, write up a proposal and submit it to your administration. Those looking to stay current may be willing to fund your program.

The beauty is, the prices of standard ereaders are coming down so quickly, cost is fast becoming a nonissue. Folks are already wondering if the Kindle will be free in the near future. For a while, Nook was free with the purchase of a digital subscription to the New York Times.

Basically, the day is fast approaching when you’ll be getting ereaders as junk mail. “Not another ereader!” you’ll moan. A national Do Not Send Me an Ereader list will be created to fight off being bombarded by ereader-device spam in your mailbox.

But however you ante up the funds, don’t forget to factor in the following costs when budgeting:

Permission

We require a permission slip signed by a parent or guardian before checkout (email me for a copy of the one we use). From a school district standpoint, this is especially important if the device has Internet access (folks tend to get very permission-y when the Internet is involved). We’re circulating Nook Simple Touch ereaders, which don’t have an advertised web browser, diminishing this issue. Work with your school district technology director to see what’s acceptable. Permission slips can turn into legal jargon in a hurry, though, so push for clarity and brevity.

Accessibility

Before they started circulating, we made sure to turn on password protection for downloads. Each device is tied to a credit card, which makes it easy for an individual to order books but could be a problem when offering them for general checkout.

Once the ereader is checked out, where are students allowed to take them? Some options:

Teachers

Aside from individual students checking them out, another possibility is to load up some books for use in classrooms for literature circles. It’s likely if you did this you’d want to get enough to outfit a whole classroom. If one or two groups have ereaders and other groups do not, there could be mutiny.

But, which device to choose? (See “The Devices,” below)

Ebooks

So, with planning complete and the device chosen, now comes possibly the most important piece—what books to offer and how to get them on the devices?

For me, the trickiest part of the program is in the management of ebooks. If there’s one thing that would open up more libraries to lend ereaders, it would be a way to manage any number of devices from one account. Frustratingly, that’s not the current reality.

To manage devices individually, you need a separate account—with a unique email address—for each one. Should librarians really have to create shell email accounts just to offer Kindles or Nooks to eager students? The alternative—which we went with due to lack of a better solution—is one account for up to six ereaders, sharing books across all devices. Barnes & Noble does offer a “managed digital locker” program, but you need to purchase 25 or more devices to qualify and then have to work through B&N to manage the ebooks. Not ideal.

If appointed Ereader Czar, my first actions would be to eliminate Digital Rights Management (DRM) that blocks ebooks from working across platforms, and then demand that ereader makers offer the ability for users to manage all their devices from a single account.

Adding to the complexity are traditional book jobbers and publishers offering their own ereader platforms. Follett has Follett Shelf, Baker & Taylor has Axis360, and Mackin has VIA. All of these offer on-demand access to ebooks for iPads and other tablet computer-style ereaders. OverDrive, the popular public library ebook provider, also offers a school library solution—for a princely sum. My school district will be kicking off a 1:1 initiative this year at the middle school and high school level using iPads, and we are experimenting with Follett Shelf. It will be interesting to see how this affects the circulation of our traditional ereaders.

Looking at traditional ereaders like those we have, you can go a couple of ways with how you offer ebooks.

Something else to consider is giving students the ability to check out books from the public library on the device. This is an excellent way to strengthen the partnership between school and public libraries while also giving students more freedom in what they choose to read.

Whichever option you choose, one thing we realized early on is that we wouldn’t be able to track individual ebook checkouts on our Nooks— there just isn’t a good way to do it. Our approach is to catalog the device and not worry about which titles are being read. The ebook platforms I mentioned earlier (Follett Shelf, et al) do allow for ebook checkout data—another aspect to consider when creating your program.

In the wild

This is the best part—sending the ereaders out into the world. As permission slips came back and the wait list grew, it became clear that we needed more devices, so I added two, bringing our total to a larger yet still modest five ereaders. Be sure you don’t forget the hype. We set up a display in the library announcing the new program. I got on our school’s daily video newscast for our school and let students know how to sign up. We offered a stack of permission slips front and center, alongside a page showing the covers of all the books they would have access to.

It had to happen. About three weeks in, we had our first damage—the power port at the bottom of one ereader was broken, making it impossible to charge. With the protection plan, this was not a problem. I brought it to the nearest Barnes & Noble, explained what had happened, and left the store 10 minutes later with a replacement. It’s a beautiful thing when you expect a hassle and you are met with nothing but smooth sailing.

One trend we noticed was that the ereaders were in much higher demand in my fifth- and sixth-grade school than they were at the middle school or high school. We noticed that older students often already had ereaders.

After the first round of checkouts, we received some questions about how the things worked. We decided to create a simple, one-page how-to for students checking out ereaders. This helped to address student FAQs immediately.

We made the executive decision to not circulate power plugs. With a one-week checkout, battery life has held up—and in cases where it didn’t, students could bring the device to the library for a couple of hours during the school day to top it off. Just be sure to do a full recharge before sending the device out again.

Looking back on the year, I know a couple of things. I know the goals we outlined in our grant application—providing access, generating excitement, and offering a more customizable reading experience—were all met. I know we encountered more difficult decisions than anticipated. I also know we’ll be looking to expand to lower grade levels this coming school year. A modest beginning is still a beginning. I’m glad we started.

This article, modified from a series of posts on Travis Jonker’s blog 100 Scope Notes is just a glimpse of the smart thinking Jonker shares there. We’re pleased to announce that Jonker and 100 Scope Notes will be joining SLJ’s blog network, which includes A Fuse #8 Production by Elizabeth Bird and Joyce Valenza’s NeverEndindSearch. Coming soon!

Illustration by Janet Hamlin

Over the past five years, I’ve returned to the New York neighborhood in which I met the children whom I first described in Savage Inequalities, Amazing Grace, and other books I published in the 1990s. The neighborhood is called Mott Haven. It’s the poorest section in all of the South Bronx, which is the poorest Congressional district in America.

I wanted to answer the questions many readers ask: What happened to these children? How many were unable to prevail against the obstacles they faced? How many have survived? And, among the ones who did survive, what were the ingredients of character—and what were the opportunities provided by their schools—that made it possible for them to win some glorious and unexpected victories?

Not surprisingly, easy access to good books—and, more to the point, a plentitude of books to satisfy the curiosities and stir the latent interests of the very wide variety of children that I met—turned out to be decisive. And this, of course, is where libraries come in.

In my new book, Fire in the Ashes, I catch up with all those kids, many of whom I came to know when they were only six or eight years old. They talked to me about the struggles they went through, which were often hardest in their adolescent years. Most are in their twenties now. As they look back on their formative years, they speak repeatedly of books that first awakened their appetite for reading—by which I mean real books, books that children read for pleasure, as opposed to the mind-dulling textbooks and those dreadful pit-pat phonics books, “aligned,” as the experts compulsively remind us, with state examinations. Most of the kids found those books immaculately boring.

No matter their level of education, the most successful of these children had, I think, much better taste than those adults who set the rigid standards that have been imposed upon our public schools (and with the most severity, upon our inner-city schools)—standards that require emotionless and robotic modes of learning but don’t open children’s minds to our culture’s treasures.

These kids instinctively rebelled against the narrow test-prep regimen that, even before No Child Left Behind, had started crowding out a love of learning for its own sake. Few of them did well on state-imposed exams, but many read voraciously, and became proficient writers as a consequence; the books they loved, however, weren’t the ones mandated by the number crunchers who were caught up in the labyrinth of the testing mania.

In their early years, many tell me, they were drawn into a love of reading by the soft and tender writings and lovely drawings, so much like pastel tapestries, of one of the greatest and most subtle children’s authors of our time, Eric Carle. (They weren’t attracted to Dr. Seuss. Their preference was for beauty over cleverness.) Before long, those kids who were the most exploratory started reading charmingly enticing books like Kevin Henkes’s Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse and, a few years after that, Lois Lowry’s beautifully transcendent works, including Gathering Blue, which remains a favorite among many of those children to this day.

One of the kids who captured my attention from the start, to whom I’ve given the pseudonym of Jeremy in my latest book, told me he was writing his “first novel” at 13, and that he was “circling” Charles Dickens, but wasn’t certain he was “ready for him yet.” I thought he was. So he made a deal with me. He would read A Tale of Two Cities if I would read Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. We both kept our promises. He conceded later that he got the best part of that bargain.

His favorite author at that age was Edgar Allan Poe. He loved the narrative poem “The Raven” and quoted from it whimsically and playfully. When a large bird flew above our heads one day, he pretended to be frightened. “Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore,’” he solemnly intoned. He also liked Poe’s stories. He told me the plot of “The Tell-tale Heart” and was astonished to hear I’d never read it.

Where did Jeremy find these books? I wish I could say he found them in his middle school’s library, but this, alas, was not the case. His middle school, underfunded as many inner-city schools are, had nothing that a good suburban school would consider a real library. (This governmental parsimony at the cost of libraries is even more the case today, in the wake of two recessions, when one of the first steps taken by our cash-strapped inner-city schools is to lay off school librarians.)

Jeremy found the books he loved, not in a school library, but—he was blessed in this respect—in the private library of a neighborhood poet, who recognized his special gifts and let him dig into the books that filled his living-room shelves, from floor to ceiling. The poet tempted Jeremy, moreover, to go beyond what his school, on the basis of his test results alone, regarded as his “modest reading level” by introducing him to snippets of the poet’s favorite writers, which included British authors as imposing as John Milton.

Most of the other kids weren’t so lucky. A few of them attended schools that had decent libraries and full-time librarians. Others were fortunate enough, after slogging through the literary wastelands of their mediocre middle schools, to win scholarships to good New England boarding schools in their later secondary years. These were schools where rich and ample libraries were viewed as indispensable and were also pleasant and inviting places with soft lighting, comfortable chairs, and little nooks and crannies where a student might curl up at one end of a sofa and delve into a book he liked for hours.

Jeremy was one of those who got into this kind of school in his 10th-grade year. The first close friend he made there, a talented woman with a gift for reaching out to adolescents, was the school librarian. Before long, he was working part time as one of her assistants.

By this point, he was reading works by John Keats and William Wordsworth, Robert Browning, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, and the 17th-century metaphysical poets. In the following years, he read the plays of Strindberg, Ibsen, and O’Neill, after having read O’Neill’s great predecessors in the Greek tragedians. In his senior year, he galloped through Shakespeare’s plays, and he questioned me a lot and teased me when he came upon a character I’d forgotten.

“You wrote your college thesis about Shakespeare, and you don’t remember Bolingbroke?”—or Falstaff, or whomever it might be.

He went on to a first-rate college, not the kind that has now replaced the arts and letters with “practical” job training, which is too often deemed to be appropriate for youngsters who have grown up in the ghetto. He immersed himself, not in the utilitarian, but in what he loved the most. Literature and the modern theater was his field of concentration.

This was a boy who hated tests in public school and managed to fail most of them. A neighborhood poet and a school librarian and, later, the Barnes & Noble in New York’s Union Square, which he liked to frequent, were Jeremy’s salvation.

What does this story and the others in my new book tell us about libraries and, in particular, those within our public schools?

First of all, no matter what the economic ups and downs may be at any given moment, public school libraries in destitute communities need not just sufficient but extravagant funding. If there’s a single thing our state and federal governments could do to stir up a love of learning in our poorest children, it would be to take a good big chunk of the massive sum of money that’s now being wasted on the testing industry and use it, instead, to flood our students’ lives with the joys and mysteries of authentic culture—and not only Western culture but, in the case of, for instance, Hispanic children, their culture, too.

I don’t mean to suggest that history or science should be shortchanged, or books of practicality, or writings that are simply fun for kids to read even if they have no literary value. But if we care about the children of the poor as much as our own children, we ought to emphasize the highest possible aesthetics. Kids who live in grim and dreary neighborhoods have an even greater need for all that can endow their minds with grandeur than children who are privileged enough to live in grand and lovely places. Exalt their minds. Don’t cheat them with banalities that simply “keep them reading.” I can hear a lot of little girls in fifth grade screaming at me when I say this, but I still feel a pang of sadness about kids who grew up on “The Baby-Sitters Club” series but to whom no one ever introduced The Secret Garden.

This brings me to librarians again. If I had the power, I’d redirect another big chunk of the money that’s now enriching testing corporations and make certain that every inner-city school has its own full-time librarian, and one whose passion about books is contagiously exciting to young people. Jeremy shouldn’t have had to go to an affluent school to find a sensitive librarian who was paid enough and given the resources to spend hours of her time leading him to books, and tempting him with others, that didn’t simply give him data for his assignments, but expanded his horizons by nourishing his literary yearnings. School librarians like that woman would be celebrated in a wise society, and no myopic politician with a fiscal knife in hand would dare say they’re extraneous to learning.

Finally, I think school libraries ought to be delightful and congenial places. I wish that we could get rid of those plastic chairs and overhead fluorescent lights that make too many of these rooms in low-funded schools about as intimate as Walmart. School libraries for wealthy children frequently resemble living rooms. When I walk into the libraries of inner-city schools and see a group of children filing in beside me, I often get the sense of something “dutiful” about it all instead of something joyful and exalting. I wish the kids could sit at maple tables with reading lamps that have lampshades made from handsome fabrics. I wish the space were beautiful. If we think of libraries as places where we give our kids a feast of learning, the place we serve that feast should be worthy of our offerings.

I’ve said this before to school librarians, and recently to a convocation of school architects: aesthetics count. Beautiful surroundings refine the tastes of children. Flat and mechanistic settings bleach out their mentalities.

“Well, of course,” the bureaucrats will say (they’ve said this of me many times before), “Jonathan’s a dreamer. He thinks that poor kids ought to get what the sons of presidents and daughters of important business leaders get when they go to private schools like Andover and Exeter. He thinks that inner-city kids deserve that kind of money. He thinks that they’ll be grateful for those maple tables. He thinks they’ll dig into those books and be excited by the opportunity to read them.”

It’s true. That’s exactly what I feel. I don’t think this nation plans to give that kind of opportunity to more than a handful of the children of poor people at any time in the near future. It would take a sweeping change of attitude about potential, and too easily unobserved precocity, among the children who are viewed today as outcasts of American society. It’s just a dream, and I frankly doubt that I will see it realized in my lifetime. Still, I like to fantasize that someday we will turn that dream into reality.

Jonathan Kozol’s new book , Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America, will be published by Crown on August 28 .

Illustration by Giselle Potter

It was 2001 and I was a year out of college, my dream of becoming a photographer neatly scrapped due to the slightly sobering fact that my photography skills, not to put too fine a point on it, stunk. Library school seemed a given at that point in my life, and I was determined to follow what I had always thought was my lifelong ambition: becoming an archivist. I wanted to conserve books. Never mind that I’m as gentle with rare materials as a cat with a dead mouse; I was determined to see it through.

That resolve lasted until I took LIS 721 Library Materials for Children on a lark. Despite the fact that I was pretty sure I didn’t like kids (a suspicion that proved to be poorly founded), just a couple of classes with Professor Heidi Hammond were enough to turn me off the wayward path of conservation and onto my true calling—children’s librarianship. After graduating in 2003, I left the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, MN, and soon discovered that New York City was the place to get hired.

At the time, landing a children’s librarian job was tricky but surmountable. These days, of course, it’s significantly more difficult. Between budget cuts and systems that reinvent the very definition of what it means to be a librarian, the word of the day for us must be “flexibility.” Still, in the end, it’s entirely worth it. Children’s librarians are the very backbone of the public library system, creating the readers who’ll grow up

to support the system with their tax dollars. As for school librarians, they’re often the first and sometimes the only librarians whom children will ever encounter, providing services for comers of every background.

I’m going to go out on a wild limb here and assume that many SLJ readers have a pretty little ALA-accredited library degree tucked safely away in their closet. But for those of you who don’t or hope to have one soon, let me guide you through the profession’s trips and traps. Let’s look at what you’ll need to know, where you’d like to go, what you can expect in terms of pocket change, and what the future holds. Everyone else, come along for the ride.

Where would you like to work?

As a children’s librarian, your choices basically boil down to four possibilities: working in a public library, a private library, a public school library, or a private school library. Librarians in each work with children but serve them differently. A school librarian’s days are chock-full of classes, leaving little time for her own work (and what little time remains is often booked by teachers who think the media specialist has nothing better to do than help them). A public librarian must balance storytimes and other programs with class visits and the after-school rush, as kids with working parents race through the door to claim computers and table space.

The public vs. private school question is an ethical and a financial challenge. Recent Pratt library school graduate Allison Bruce put it best when she explained that for her it comes down to working “for an impoverished population and risking failure and burnout, or continuing to serve a population that I don’t feel particularly needs my skills.” To some degree, children from families of every income level need a librarian, but those with fewer advantages particularly benefit from having one in their lives. Then there’s the question of hiring. While public school libraries often require additional education degrees, private schools don’t have such restrictions and can pay more. Hiring practices in public libraries vary according to location. While big cities like New York, Toronto, and Los Angeles have put the brakes on hiring, right now, suburban library systems seem to be advertising for new librarians. As for private children’s libraries, they’re rare but wonderful beasts. Imagine working for a children’s library housed in a museum or a private children’s literary collection that’s owned by a university. It can happen, but you have to be open to the possibility.

What it all boils down to is the fact that you’ll have to look in a variety of places. New York Society Library children’s librarian Carrie Silberman found her position through the American Library Association’s (ALA) website. Though she’d studied to be a school librarian, her new job allows her to “create a modern children’s library within this historic institution.” The trick is staying flexible about where you end up. As another new graduate from Pratt, Danielle Kalan, says, “This job market requires it…. I’ve noticed a trend away from total specialization in library school, since students want to be more broadly employable.” So while you may prefer working with children, stay open to young adult librarianship, archival librarianship, or working with adults. The job you get today may just lead to the job you want tomorrow.

Mad skillz

Which is to say, there are classes that you’ll be glad you took. I’ll level with you. In grad school, I took a total of two classes directly related to children’s librarianship. These consisted of a class on literature (the one I credit with my vocation change) and another on programming. At the time, I had no idea that many of the other classes I happened to take would prove useful, including:

Reference and online services. Recent Pratt graduate Mahnaz Dar says, “The most important course I took was Information Services and Resources, which taught me how to reference sources and conduct reference interviews with patrons. It seems like the one skill that almost every librarian will use, and it was extremely valuable to me to really think about evaluating reference sources. Because I want to work as a school librarian, helping students conduct research is a big part of what I’ll be doing, and this course taught me to think critically about sources in a new way.” These classes sometimes offer help with managing a children’s reference desk, which may come in handy when you’re faced with a tow-headed five-year-old who wants to know where he can find “the orange book.” As Professor Hammond says of the skill that they don’t teach but that we all wish we had, “Mind reading would be helpful.” In lieu of that, try a reference course.

Management of libraries and information centers. Managing a library system may be the last thing on your mind when all you want is to just get hired. Yet you’d be amazed how easily a children’s librarian can slip into the role of manager. Why’s that? Jill Rothstein, manager of New York Public Library’s 67th Street Branch, says, “The same skills that make a good children’s librarian—dedication, energy, innovation—are important, along with understanding how to communicate with different personalities in staff and management, the ability to motivate others, and the ability to keep track of lots of balls in the air.” Remember, keep an eye on the future, even as you try to find a job in the present.

Cataloging. Don’t believe me? Then take it from newly minted school librarian Allison Bruce who says, “I wish I had taken a class devoted solely to cataloging…. I am finding that I’m teaching myself a lot of cataloging on the job and am sure that there are major elements I’m missing as I go.”

Serials management. Whether it’s dealing with the latest print issue of Ranger Rick or the digital edition of Kirkus, a course in serials will give you all the information you’ll need when deciding how to allocate your limited budget and what formats to consider.

Law. OK, I’m kidding here. I’ve found the law librarianship class completely useless. Sorry, law lovers.

While you’re considering potential courses, don’t shy away from those that test your prejudices. Whether it’s taking a class on young adult literature when you’re sure all teens are the devil’s spawn or a graphic-novel course when you couldn’t care two bits about the comic format, taking courses in areas you dislike or fear can only allay those worries and give you the preparation you’ll need. Consider, too, taking classes outside of your graduate program. As Steve Zampino, a teen librarian at Stamford, CT’s Ferguson Library, points out, “Being able to speak Spanish, or another foreign language used by a significant number of a library’s patrons, can be a big help on the job.” These days, multilingual librarians have a significant leg up on the competition.

Also pay attention to what’s new. Today’s innovation just might be tomorrow’s norm. Professor Hammond recommends keeping up with ebooks, ereaders, iPads, and apps, as well as social networking sites and cyber safety. New grad Danielle Kalan says the information technologies class, a core requirement when she attended Pratt, is extremely relevant to her work, especially the basic Web-design skills she learned. “These are the skills that are going to set recent graduates apart as desirable applicants, skills that those who were library students even 10 or 15 years ago won’t have,” she says. They’ll also give you the ammunition you need to justify your job. And when it comes to applying those skills later, find librarians in the field that you can look to for guidance. For example, if you want to be a public school librarian and you don’t currently worship at the altar of Buffy Hamilton, a. k. a. The Unquiet Librarian, now’s the time to start.

It’s all about personality, baby

My mother always said that they should give out degrees in social work alongside degrees in library science to folks going into public library work. Basically, if you’re going to deal with the public, you need to consider how your personality gels with the profession. Work in a public library and you’ll find out some valuable things about yourself. When asked what makes a good children’s librarian, Steve Zampino suggested that “diplomacy and empathy…can be very helpful when dealing with kids, teens, parents, and teachers in a variety of situations.” Don’t feel particularly diplomatic or empathetic? Have a short fuse? Figure out now what might cause you trouble later.

Surprisingly, the rewards outweigh any unpleasantness. Helping a tiny tot find a copy of Strega Nona will get you through an irate mom who demands that you burn your copy of In the Night Kitchen any day of the week. Above all, know thyself. If merely answering the phone gives you stage fright or you don’t much like people, any people, then perhaps front-desk work isn’t for you.

What’s the going rate these days?

Naturally, you’re going to want to know how much your average children’s librarian makes. I don’t think I’ll shock anyone by noting that few folks retire in their 40s, thanks to a lucrative life behind a reference desk. According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2010 the median salary for any librarian was $54,500 per year or $26.20 per hour. (For more information, see SLJ’s first public library spending survey and Library Journal’s 2011 “Placements & Salary” survey.) Here’s the good news and bad news about job prospects. The bad news is that while the “employment of librarians is expected to grow by 7 percent from 2010 to 2020,” that’s slower than the average for all occupations. The good news is that while there are limited positions available in the early part of the decade, the prospects will sharply improve as older librarians retire. That’s all well and good, but how does it look for children’s librarians? Well, according to SLJ’s 2010–2011 school library spending survey, librarians who work in the educational field also have a good and bad scenario. Tiny budgets, additional duties, and limited hours are some of the problems you might encounter. On the plus side, the survey showed that media specialists’ salaries went up by 10 percent, book collections have grown, and it appears that painful budget cuts are at last ebbing.

Finding a job

Happily, in spite of every economic downturn, library jobs still exist. Unfortunately, the number of applicants per position is sky high. That means you’ll need to explore unconventional places for employment. “I try to keep up with various listservs,” says Mahnaz Dar. “For example, there’s Pratt’s listserv, and I’m also on the Hudson Valley Library Association’s [an organization for librarians working in independent schools] listserv. However, most of the actual jobs I hear about are from people I know who have told me about opportunities at their libraries.” Joining a library as an intern, a page, a clerk, or a volunteer can give you first dibs when a job opens up. Plus, librarians will sometimes bend over backward for an employee they know over an unknown applicant.

Connect!

The children’s librarian who works in a bubble is just asking for trouble. If you think you can ignore networking just because you work with preschoolers, think again. With public library cuts looming and school boards axing media specialists, the time to meet, collaborate, and learn is now. Public librarians need to reach out and meet up with local school librarians, public and private. Build relationships with these people, and you’ll get your hooks into students who might otherwise never have stepped foot in a public library without a gentle little push. Likewise, a school librarian who connects with a public library can discover that the relationship yields all kinds of unexpected rewards. For example, one Manhattan public school of my acquaintance cultivated a partnership with its local public library. When the school librarian fell ill and was out on leave for several months, the public library sent multiple children’s librarians to the school to read to the kids on a regular basis. Build a bridge, and you’ll have many reasons to cross it.

Another way to connect is by joining a professional organization consisting of like-minded folks. There are the usual suspects like ALA, the Public Library Association, and the American Association of School Librarians (AASL), which all help you find your tribe. Consider thinking outside the box—join organizations that connect to your world but in ways you’d never imagine. For example, I’m a member of the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators as well as the United States Board on Books for Young People, both of which give me insights into the crop of new books for children in the States, as well as children’s books found worldwide.

It can be done!

No matter how daunting the outlook seems, there’s hope. Maybe it’s ridiculous, but I believe that even if all other forms of librarianship were to crumble to the ground and wash away with the tides, children’s librarians would remain standing. New parents and children appear every day. They need your opinions, your thoughts, your recommendations, and your help in finding the best books, websites, apps, and materials out there. Some people say that where there’s a will there’s a way. I say that where there are children there will be librarians, by hook or by crook. Now go out there and help those kids, tiger!

I’m on my way to visit Susan Cooper on an unseasonably warm day in mid-February. As my car cruises along, about 45 minutes south of Boston, low tide reveals miles of untouched marshland. I drive across a short causeway, creep down an unpaved lane, and suddenly I’m staring at the exquisite home that Cooper built a couple of years ago. My first thought is that I’ve stumbled upon the Grey House, the setting of Cooper’s first children’s book, Over Sea, Under Stone. With its soaring cathedral ceilings and wraparound windows that frame the wetlands, the space is filled with warmth and light even on a winter’s day. It seems like the perfect place for the 77-year-old writer to conjure up some more of her magic.

In June, Cooper will receive the 2012 Margaret A. Edwards Award, an annual lifetime achievement honor sponsored by SLJ and administered by the Young Adult Library Services Association. It’s about time. Cooper’s books have beguiled young readers for more than 40 years, and the award committee singled out for praise her most popular work, “The Dark Is Rising,” an epic, five-volume fantasy series comprised of Over Sea, Under Stone (1966); The Dark Is Rising (1973); Greenwitch (1974); The Grey King (1975); and Silver on the Tree (1977, all S & S/Margaret K. McElderry Bks.). The settings are contemporary England and Wales, and Cooper draws on Celtic and Arthurian legends to portray 11-year-old Will Stanton and his friends as they struggle against the terrifying powers of darkness. The series features two of Cooper’s trademarks—beautiful writing and superb storytelling—and if you haven’t read it, be forewarned: once you start, it’s nearly impossible to put down.

Cooper was born and raised in Buckinghamshire, in southeast England. While working as a reporter and feature writer in London for The Sunday Times, in the late ’50s and early ’60s, she spent her spare time writing Over Sea, Under Stone, which quickly caught the attention of legendary American editor Margaret K. McElderry. The two became lifelong friends and worked together on the “Dark Is Rising” series and many other books. Cooper began to write screenplays in the early 1980s with actor Hume Cronyn, and the two married in 1996.

I talked to Cooper about her remarkable journey as a writer, and later, with her daughter Kate, we looked at some of McElderry’s photographs and papers. As executor of her late editor’s will, Cooper was getting ready to ship the collection to its new home at Princeton University’s Cotsen Children’s Library.

What did you like to read as a child?

Assorted folktales and myths, I think—and John Masefield’s The Box of Delights was the enchanted room that I could go into and shut the door. I read E. Nesbit and Arthur Ransome, but this was wartime, so I was driven to what was on my parents’ shelves, and that included a 20-volume set of Dickens in very small print. Bad for my eyes, but very good for my sense of story.

What did you study in college?

I went to Oxford, Somerville College, and did a degree in English language and literature. We had lectures by C. S. Lewis on Renaissance literature, and Tolkien on Beowulf—he’d always start his series with a great shout of “Hwaet!” in guttural Anglo-Saxon. The two of them managed to halt the Oxford English syllabus at 1832, so there was a huge emphasis on early works by Spenser, Chaucer, Sir Gawain, the mystery plays, Malory and all his sources, above all Shakespeare. I soaked it all up like a sponge; I didn’t miss the Victorians a bit.

Were you working on your own stories?

I was already writing short stories. I edited the university newspaper, and decided a writer could only earn a living in journalism, so I went knocking on doors on Fleet Street and was lucky enough to get a job as a reporter on The Sunday Times—initially for Ian Fleming, who had a column called “Atticus.” Ian had just started writing the James Bond books; he was tall and handsome, with sexy hooded eyes, and a long cigarette holder in which he smoked far too many cigarettes. I was scared stiff of him because he was so sophisticated, but he was lovely. So was my life as a reporter, interviewing anyone from dockers to prime ministers and stars like Gary Cooper and Cary Grant. Great training for a writer, all that variety.

I lived alone and wrote in the evenings. I wrote a heavily autobiographical novel and an agent told me I should think of it as “apprentice writing”; and although I wanted to kill him, he was absolutely right. So I wrote a futuristic adult novel called Mandrake, and after that I found that Ernest Benn, who had published the E. Nesbit books, was offering a prize of £1,000 for “a family adventure story.” I hadn’t intended to write children’s books, but since I was earning about £800 a year at the time, this sounded great.

Tell us a little about the story.

I invented three children, Simon, Jane, and Barney Drew, and put them on a train to Cornwall, where they were met by a tall uncle with gray hair, their Great-Uncle Merriman. But by chapter three the book had become a fantasy, with Merriman as a Merlin figure, so it became useless for the competition. I didn’t care, I was having such a good time with it. Everything I was soaked in starting pouring into the book—the early literature, the Arthurian legends. I called it Over Sea, Under Stone. It was published by Jonathan Cape, but by that time I was living in America.

Why did you move here?

My newspaper sent me here for four months in 1962. I met a professor of metallurgy at MIT called Nicholas Grant, 20 years older than me, and he started turning up in London. We were married in 1963, to my editor’s horror, and off I went at 28 to be the stepmother of three teenagers in Massachusetts.

Did you keep writing?

I went on writing, but mostly nonfiction—first a book about the USA, Behind the Golden Curtain, which led to the only time I shall ever have my picture in Time magazine. They hated the book. Then a biography of the English writer J. B. Priestley, who was an old friend.

How did you meet Margaret McElderry?

Margaret had bought the American rights for Over Sea, Under Stone from Cape, so we’d corresponded. I wrote a novel called The Camp, based on my wartime childhood, but my agent couldn’t sell it. I sent it to Margaret and asked what was wrong with it, and she wrote back, “Nothing, but it’s a children’s book, and I want to publish it.” So we met for lunch in a Greenwich Village restaurant with a tree growing up out of its basement area, which I shall never forget, and she published the book as Dawn of Fear.

You wrote The Dark Is Rising, the second title in the series, eight years after the first book. That’s a long hiatus. What made you pick up the story again?

Nick and I were cross-country skiing one day in the woods, branches sticking up out of the snow looking like buried antlers, and I suddenly wanted to write a book set in snow like that, but in England, about an 11-year-old boy who wakes up one day and finds he can work magic. Sitting up in my study in Winchester, Massachusetts, for some reason I reread Over Sea, Under Stone, and I thought, Hey, this new story is linked to Over Sea—and Merriman is in it—and there are five books… And I wrote down the next four titles, four very rough outlines, and the last half page of the very last book, which I actually used when I got to Silver on the Tree. The next six years were wonderful, professionally. I knew where I was going.

I was very homesick, and every inch of The Dark Is Rising is where I grew up. Sometimes I sat in the sunny British Virgin Islands, where we had a little holiday house, writing about snowy Buckinghamshire. It doesn’t matter where you are geographically, of course, because you’re living in the landscape of your mind.

Did you send Margaret ideas for books or finished projects?

I don’t send things till I think they’re finished, but I never know whether a manuscript is any good. With The Dark Is Rising I sent her a nervous letter saying, “This is a very weird book, I’m afraid, it’s called The Gift of Gramarye and it’s rather long.” She wrote back saying that she loved it, but that we should change the title in case children thought it was about grammar. My editor at Chatto and Windus in England told me that The Dark Is Rising was the longest book they had ever published. It was only 216 pages—imagine.

Of course, fantasy novels weren’t the flavor du jour back then.

Margaret was a wonderful, supportive editor. We trusted each other. We did have huge battles about punctuation, and I drive copy editors mad to this day. I punctuate as if the prose were music, for the rhythm and sound of it. So when proofs came from Margaret with commas and semicolons altered, I put them all back again. Margaret would sigh and say, “Have it your way.”

Before long we became close personal friends. I miss her. She would sometimes turn something down, but if she knew there was a book I wanted to write, she would wait until I had finished it. She had an almost mystical respect for the imagination, and that gave her writers tremendous artistic freedom. “Whatever time you need,” she would say.

You’ve also written adult books, essays, short stories, and screenplays. You’ve never allowed yourself to become pigeonholed.

I was, and am, happiest writing the books published for children, but, well, I was just a writer. We were in the British Virgin Islands after The Dark Is Rising came out, and I was told I had a phone call. So I got in my little boat and went over to the island that had a phone, and Barbara Rollock at ALA told me that The Dark Is Rising was the only Honor book for the Newbery Medal. I’d never even heard of the Newbery Medal. I went back and said to Nick, “Nothing important—my book just missed winning some prize.” Then Margaret called, so I went back in my boat and she told me the facts of life.

The Dark Is Rising was the only Newbery Honor winner in 1974, and two years later, The Grey King won the Newbery. Suddenly, loads of people wanted to talk to you, but you rather adroitly avoided them.

I’m a shy person—if I’d been born more outgoing I’d have rejoiced in the talking. After Nicholas and I split in 1980, I was on my own with joint custody of our two children, Jonathan and Kate, and I needed to earn more money than children’s books will give you. But I didn’t have to go on the road because I became a screenwriter, by accident. I’d met the actors Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, and after I finished Silver on the Tree Hume and I collaborated on a play for the two of them, called Foxfire, set in Appalachia. Hume was making a film with Jane Fonda and she read the play. One day when I was visiting the set she said, “Have you ever read a book by Harriette Arnow called The Dollmaker?”

I said, “How funny, my editor’s been trying to get me to read that for years.”

So Margaret didn’t disapprove when Jane hired Hume and me to write a screenplay from that wonderful big Appalachian novel. I enjoyed it; respectful adaptation of a novel is carpentry, reshaping an existing story for the new medium. I did rewrite the ending, which made me deeply nervous until Jane got a letter from Ms. Arnow saying, “The ending seems to me entirely natural.” The Dollmaker became a three-hour TV film; Jane got an Emmy, Hume and I won the Humanitas Prize and an Emmy nomination. So everyone thought I was a screenwriter, and for the next 10 years I wrote screenplays and children’s books alternately, and was solvent.

You also did some writing for baritone and early music pioneer John Langstaff and his Christmas Revels, which are now performed worldwide.

Yes. Margaret was also Jack’s editor, and one Christmas when she was staying with us we went to the magical, myth-haunted Revels and she took us backstage. Jack shook my hand and said, “But I’ve read your books! You should be writing for the Revels!” So I did, for the next 20 years—songs, plays, poems, you name it. Jack was a marvel—I miss him, too. Candlewick just published a book I wrote about him called The Magic Maker.

But the books were my real love, all this time—my two Boggart books, which were great fun, a string of picture books, one of them with my dear friend Ashley Bryan, and most recently two time-shift fantasies, King of Shadows and Victory. Margaret had retired, so I worked on Victory with Emma Dryden, equally happily.

What compels you to write?

Telling a story—that’s what we’re all about, isn’t it? Every chapter should make you want to know what happens in the next. A novel is a necklace of linked beads. Just the way it was for the earliest storytellers, trying to keep the audience listening around the fire and not wandering off.

What does winning prizes like the Edwards mean to you?

I have mixed feelings about prizes, because the choice is inevitably subjective and there are always a dozen other books or people equally deserving. But I’m deeply grateful. It changes your life, that wonderful reassurance that you’re doing the right thing and that you know how to do it. An award is a life belt; in any rough seas, you have it thereafter, keeping you afloat.

So can we hope to see another book soon?

It’s called Ghost Hawk, I just finished it. I haven’t a clue whether it’s any good.