All the Way to the End Zone

Ringwood, Jessica

Snethen, T., & Cornelius, A. (2010). All the way to the end zone. Teacher Librarian: 38(1), 20-23.

Summary: In this experiment teacher librarians used Microsoft Excel to chart and document what information literacy skills students were exposed to by attending workshops with their teachers in the school library.  It sounds like a tedious task, but the final spreadsheet showed the librarians who was not coming to the library and then they set out to address those populations (AP and Special Ed classes).  They changed their strategies and reported on the results of their efforts to assess what students learned – a couple of times they mentioned using The Big Think strategies.

Evaluation: I felt the most important thing for teacher librarians to learn from this article is that the authors argued that collaborating with classroom teachers and constantly inviting teachers back into the library with their classes for more projects is the only way to promote information literacy skills with success.  They argued that one visit is not enough, and if we really think about it,  that is generally the case for lots of things because learning is gradual.  The other thing I think is worthwhile for new librarians to think about is to run a similar excel sheet so they have some data to look at at the end of a semester – otherwise how will they know how they impact the community?  I just wish in California we had the funding for more help to do this.  At this Kansas high school they had 1500 students, two teacher librarians and two library professionals.  At my current high school we have 2500 students and one librarian.  Not an easy task for one.