School Libraries

The American Association of School Librarians and the National Head Start Association are praising the early learning dollars included in this week’s federal budget. However, both say challenges to funding remain—and the budget comes too late to help the 57,000 children cut off from Head Start last year.

I met Barbara Braxton when I was traveling in Australia a couple of years ago, but I’ve admired her voice for so many years. When I think about it, she may have been the first of the truly networked librarians. An ACTIVE member of LM_NET from the beginning, she continues to be both visible and active on [...]

President Obama honored 10 educator Champions of Change in November. As a grateful recipient of that award—and the sole school librarian in the group—Carolyn Foote feels even more inspired to bring librarians and educators together online.

I was extremely flattered and newly inspired by Library Girl, Jennifer LaGarde’s thoughtful perception flowchart, in response to my last post. (In fact, if you haven’t read her blog, or seen the eloquent way she visually transmits concepts, please stop reading and take a trip there right now.) Jennifer reminds us:  Your work has to [...]

School Library Story from joyce valenza on Vimeo. I’ve been wanting to tell this story for a long time. My very talented student friend, Walter Lynch, offered to help me tell it. A day doesn’t go by when I am not inspired to action by the inventive ideas I discover from my generous teacher librarian colleagues who [...]

Thank you, Eric.  Thank you for sharing your vision for a library program, as well as some concrete examples of a teacher librarian’s contribution to a school’s learning culture. In a blog post yesterday, Eric Sheninger, the highly-respected, highly-networked principal/leader of New Milford (NJ) High School, shared how to search for, how to court, and how to empower a teacher librarian/change agent: In [...]

Among the dozens of concurrent learning sessions at the American Association of School Librarians' National Conference last month, a popular theme was that of intellectual freedom. “What Do I Do If? Intellectual Freedom Dilemmas in School Libraries” stood out for its scope and its round-robin style approach to problem-solving.

Finding new and innovative ways to implement the Common Core was one of the hottest programming themes during the recent American Association of School Librarians conference. During the event, the nations' media specialists showed they have the will and the knowledge to lead the conversation on academic rigor.

How do you get tweens and teens to be interested (and stay interested) in reading?