We are having the first (hopefully only!) global pandemic. And that has meant a lot of challenging things for your library. Yes, it’s an understatement.
But, one of the great parts about being in the library profession is that we are great at sharing! So, of course there are a lot of great places to go where we can find all kinds of great material you can use.
Pandemics are tough on us all. Obviously: wear a mask all the time, be safe and respectful.
And then work your way through some of these resources from the American Library Association. Your library services need to be available in a variety of formats. We are here to help you!
“Strong libraries — and a well-supported library workforce — are essential to the recovery of communities devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic. This collection of tools, developed and updated by units across the American Library Association, will help communities, library workers, and library supporters plot the best course forward for their libraries.”
You don’t have to be here long to know we are BIG fans of school libraries! And really – we aren’t alone in that.
Every research study shows how valuable a well-run school library can be for a good education. Far more than just a place to check out books, a good school library provides materials, instruction, and programs to ensure kids leave school with the skills they need to move forward.
So I was delighted to see this very nice article about good school libraries! We are sharing an excerpt below, to give you some ideas about how valuable school libraries are. You can read the whole thing right here.
“As an educator, I will always remember a particular moment during the unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic. It occurred in the midst of the daily shutting down of the pillars of society when teachers were pivoting rapidly from face-to-face to remote teaching. We were desperate for information, and we began drowning in options…
Someone needed to bring order! Someone needed to collect all these ideas and put the best ones in a central place so that they could be easily searched and found.
That’s when I realised that person was me.
You see, I am a teacher librarian. This means that I’m a qualified teacher AND a qualified librarian. I know about information management (how to categorise things), about teaching and learning (what will work best for the curriculum, for our particular students and our particular teachers), about reading (for fun and for information), about differentiation (how to support those who struggle and to extend those who need it) and about quality assessment (how to find out what students know in a way that they can’t Google the answer). I know how to create useful services — how to figure out what people might need and to give it to them in a way that they find useful without making them feel bad for seeking help. People come to a teacher librarian when they are stuck. We are a human version of the “Room of Requirement”. [For non-Harry Potter fans, this is a room that magically appears to satisfy the specific need of a person walking down a certain corridor].
Teacher librarians know how to look at the needs of the whole school as a community as well as the needs of the individuals within it. The best way to use a teacher librarian is for them to team-teach with classroom teachers. Unfortunately, many principals, caught in the vice of ongoing funding cuts, have cut the role altogether. However, just focussing on the financial cost of the staff member belies the fact that with a highly skilled teacher librarian, you actually get a school leader for the ‘price’ of a classroom teacher. It’s not an exaggeration to say that high-quality school library services positively impact every lesson in every classroom every day….
It’s been fantastic, actually. Without the physical library space, teacher librarians were able to let all our other services shine just at the time when our communities needed them.
But here’s the bitter pill that most parents don’t realise: most schools don’t have us. Most students and teachers just had to wing it through that chaotic time as they’ve had to wing it before COVID-19 without our services. Too many people think that teacher librarians are just shushing book stackers. Please!
Here’s the bitter pill: most schools don’t have us.
Every year, when I read about falling literacy outcomes, falling trust due to fake news and falling mental health of teachers and students, I feel so frustrated because I know what can help reverse those trends. Now, with the Grattan Institute’s COVID Catch-up report recommending urgent intervention to help disadvantaged students catch up after the lockdown, I’m thinking about the long-term answer to the achievement gap which already existed at “about 10 times larger” than what grew during the COVID-19 lockdown.
Sure, there’s no magic pill to completely fix all those things in a blink, but there is a living, breathing, walking, talking ‘Room of Requirement’ that can (and should!) be available in every school. As we’ve seen during COVID-19, it’s the school library people, not the place, that matter most. All students need school libraries run by a teacher librarian and qualified library staff.”
Welcome back! Let’s find some new books this week.
We are the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, a multitype system serving all types of libraries.
This season we are suggesting books you might enjoy for our Goodreads group: Armchair Travel to Minnesota State Parks. We give you a prompt connected to each state park, and you find a book to fulfill the challenge. You can use one of our suggestions, and you should feel free to read any book!
Rice Lake State Park was another park established in 1963. While tribes are not harvesting rice here today, wild rice is an important Minnesota crop for indigenous people.
So, meet this week’s challenge by reading a book with farming or gardening.
We give you links to each of these books on our show notes page, taking you to Amazon.com. If you click on any of them, and buy anything at all – including a nice book – Amazon will send us a small percent of the profits they made on these sales. Thank you for supporting CMLE!
Join us next week to look at another park, and more books.
We have shared a lot of library experience in our Linking Our Libraries podcast. (Subscribe in any podcast app, or stream on our website!)
In our upcoming Season Seven, we want to share some stories of your pandemic work in your library.
What happened when your school closed down? How did you think about reopening? What did you do to provide online services? How did you work to reach out to your community? What are some of your plans for the upcoming school year?
Things are weird. This is our first global pandemic, and sadly nobody has as really cool handbook with all the rules written down. So we don’t know the best way forward.
But sharing our stories, collecting ideas, and working together to keep providing library services is probably the best way for all of us to succeed.
We are looking for stories from anyone in a library, who is doing anything at all there.
So, what do you do to participate? (Spoiler: it’s pretty easy!)
Send us a couple of days and times you are available to record. It will take about 20-ish minutes to chat, and a few minutes to get things set up.
Have a microphone. It can be an actual mic, or a set of headphones. Not a phone, not the mic hidden inside your computer. We want to be sure you sound good!
We’ll set up a date. We will chat. It will fun.
And, that’s it!
We like to keep things moving, and to keep it all positive.
Come ready to talk about the good stuff, the harder stuff, and your plans for the future.
If you have any questions, or you want to chat about some ideas you have, let us know!
Making the best decisions always, always requires good data. So it was wonderful to see this report issued from the University of Minnesota, with survey data from PK-12 educators across the state. Taking this time to learn from the experiences we have had during the first part of the pandemic can be useful in making good decisions for handling school this fall.
“Relationships Matter Educators’ number one worry was relationship building and the ability to socially connect and engage with students and families. Educators cited: • Concerns about successfully engaging students in distance learning this spring and being able to do so in the fall absent pre-established relationships. • The inability to reach some students and families, which leads to concerns about a lack of equity in learning outcomes and the safety and well-being of their students. • A desire to be part of the planning and to be heard by leaders. • A strong need to collaborate among one another to support each other and students.
Technology is Important Technology was a significant concern for educators. It was the most frequently mentioned topic in the qualitative responses in the areas of needed supports and professional development. Educators cited: • Hardware, internet connectivity, and tech support needs for students/families and teachers to facilitate equity. • Basic and advanced training needs in tech-based learning platforms as well as professional development in creating engaging online learning. • A need to reduce the multitude of online learning platforms within districts, which caused stress amongst educators and families. • Training and tech support needs, like a helpline, for families with regards to the technology being used.
Educators are Worried Educators were significantly worried about many factors related to learning in the 2020-2021 school year, from how they will build relationships in distance learning to how they will be able to stay healthy in in- person learning.
Students • Educators reported great concern about whether they can meet students’ needs academically, socially, and emotionally through distance learning. They were particularly worried about students receiving special education services, multilingual learners, and traditionally marginalized students. • Educators were concerned about all that students have lost (e.g., social connections, access to essentials that schools often provide, and curricular opportunities that cannot be recreated online).
Families • Educators wanted to both engage with and support families, as well as receive support from families in holding students accountable. • There was a great deal of empathy for everything families were juggling. Educators expressed concerns about whether or not families are getting enough support and how they could access support beyond the school system.
Themselves • Educators were apprehensive about the unknown and uncertainty; specifically about coming back to schools and getting sick or making family members sick, and of hybrid learning, where they believe they will have to teach both in person and online. • There was a great deal of concern about continuing distance learning, as some reported they did not feel successful teaching in this format.
Learning Occurred for Educators While distance learning presented many challenges, educators also reported that there were lessons learned and skills acquired that they will carry with them into whatever the fall brings, and eventually their classrooms. • Educators reported that distance learning provided them an opportunity to learn about how issues of equity affected students and their families. • Educators reported partnering with families in new ways. • Some educators reported a feeling of surprise and delight at realizing some students who previously struggled in traditional school (e.g., shy, anxious or even had behavior issues) thrived in distance learning. • Educators also reported acquiring new skills in relationship building, engagement, and technology use that they will use moving forward.
Summary Overall, there seems to be an ongoing and internal tension for the educators who responded to this survey. They recognized that learning as it was pre-COVID-19 is not what we will return to in the fall. Many even cited the potential positives that could come to education as a result of this time. However, the multitudes of unknowns, the lack of feeling efficacious this past spring, and the challenges that lie ahead seemed to have left educators in multiple places. The open-ended responses to the survey appear to group educators into three categories:
educators who appear to be emotionally exhausted, highly stressed, and uncertain;
educators who appear to be embracing the future, viewing last spring as a learning opportunity for improvement; and
educators who appear to be deeply concerned not only about themselves, but their students and families and the stresses and trauma they have endured since March.”
