Four years ago, at the 2019 AASL conference, I attended a session about a 20 book challenge in a middle school library (you can find a webinar by the originator of this idea here). It was a great idea, and I know I was one of many who took that idea back to their own school and ran with it. We did a shortened 10 book challenge in spring 2020, and even with the world shutting down, had a quite a few students totally finish the challenge. We’ve done a new 20 book challenge every year since in our middle school, and have adapted the basics, based on student feedback, for a much more flexible challenge in our upper school.

The challenges are quite a bit of work for us as librarians, but I’m starting to see a change in how our students approach reading. Last week, I went into several freshmen classes to help them pick out a choice reads book. Choice reads is an initiative in our English classes to have students read anything they’d like for 15-20 minutes, once or twice a week, during class time, with the only rule being that the book needs to be in print. Usually, I have several students tell me they’ve never ever read a book for fun when we go to start choice reads checkouts. but this year I only had one student say that, and it was a student who is new to Webb this year. You see, my current freshmen who came up the hill from our middle school have always had a reading challenge. In fact, many of those same freshmen already had a book they were reading at home and wanted to bring in. I saw the same thing happen in several of my of the older students’ classes as well. Even the students who are more reluctant readers, and there are still plenty of them, could tell me about books and authors they liked or didn’t like so that we could find a good fit for them, a big change from the reluctant readers who looked askance at anything that resembled the written word.

The upper school book challenge has become a beast of it’s own as well. Students can submit any book they read outside of class, including their choice reads since they’re not read together as a class. Over the summer and for the first 3 quarters of the year, the grade that submits the most books gets an out-of-uniform day, and the competition for those days has become very fierce. The class of 2023 had won every single quarter since we started this tradition, so there was a huge opening for a new powerhouse grade as we began the new year. I made summer submissions due a few days into the new year, and I had over 200 submissions during the final day. When I announced the summer winner in our daily assembly, after having several students bug me about it in the days leading up to announcement, the cheers from the winning grade lasted a full minute.

The book challenge isn’t the only thing we do to encourage a culture of reading, of course. All teachers in the middle and upper school have a currently reading sign on their doors to share their current reads. We prioritize student voice in our collection development. We share books on social media, send out a weekly library newsletter to students, and host annual author visits and book fairs. And I know that BookTok is a contributing factor based on the number of book challenge submissions that start with “I saw this on BookTok.” But I can’t help but feel that the constant celebration of reading across our campus is making a big difference in how our students see themselves as readers, and it’s really nice to see all that hard work pay off.

I’m getting this in just under the wire because the American Library Association Annual Conference started today with my favorite part – the independent school tours! I love the school tours because I get to see the libraries in action. As much as I learn from you all in blog posts and the listserv, it’s different to see your libraries in person and see all of the little things that make each of our libraries unique. So I thought I’d share some of the things I loved at each.

The Kovler Library at the Francis Parker School is doing really great collaborations with between literacy, tech, and curriculum by working with their edtech team across all grade levels – and yes they serve pre-k through 12. The book recommendation vending machine was the result of one of these collabs – 4th graders created book recs for the 3rd graders, and now the vending machine lives in the library.

We also visited the libraries at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools and the Catherine Cook School, and both have amazing in-school book awards that are run by their students. At the UC Lab Schools, a committee of 6th graders works to create a list of nominees, which the 3rd – 5th grades then read, evaluate, and vote on. Winners are announced at a giant awards ceremony, complete with a winning author or illustrator from the previous year. The awards process is also cross-divisional – 5th graders make posters for the nominees in the style of their illustrations each year, and the posters from previous years cover the walls of the library (middle picture above)!

I didn’t get any pictures of the school awards at Charlotte Cook (just one of the cozy nooks in their storytime room), but they have each grade 1st – 4th do their own mock version of a major award. They also do a giant awards ceremony at the end, and students present the nominees and read selections.

The next chance for the tours will be at the AASL conference in October, so if you’re coming to AASL I highly recommend you join me on the school tours! If you’re at ALA this weekend, here are a few more sessions I’m planning to attend – say hey if you’ll be there too!

• Asking for help makes me nervous: high school to college library experiences
• 40+ sure-fire ways to spark a love of reading
• Birds aren’t real: how students can work against misinformation and advocate
• BookTube, Bookstagram, and BookTok: Understanding the online bookaverse as tool for professional development

We are currently in the middle of switching from Follett Destiny to AccessIt, so my brain is a mess of to-dos about data to check and settings to update and things that I need to make sure work before students leave (our seniors only have a week left!). So, here are some short and sweet things that have worked well for me this semester. The first is very practical, and the last two deal with how we help students relate to and understand the research process. I hope you’ll find these useful, and if you’ve had any small successes this year, please share them in the comments!

Zip Ties are the Secret to Successful Charging Stations

I wanted to create a charging station for students – partly because I knew it would be useful and partly because I was tired of students unplugging my things in order to plug in their own. I bought a cute little wooden device storage thing and all the necessary cords for laptops and smart phones, set it up, and within 2 days both of the iPhone chargers had walked away (Android users are not so immoral as to steal the charger, it seems). Despite many pleas, the cord never walked back. So I bought a new, completely wire stand, a few new cords, and a giant pack of zip ties. Now all the cords are not only labeled but also zip-tied to the station. It’s been a few months and nothing has walked off. It’s not as pretty as my original idea, but I’ll take the functionality any day. I still have a few laptop chargers students can check out, but students also know they can leave the laptop to charge when they go to lunch.

Working Knowledge & The Great British Bake-Off

I talked in my last post about using the 1 minute test to see if students had a working knowledge of a topic before we move on to deeper searching. I still use that, but I’ve realized that students need an example of what working knowledge is and why it’s important. So I’m comparing it to the Technical Challenge on Great British Bake-Off. In order to complete a technical challenge for, say, cookies, the bakers have to know at least the basic steps and ingredients for baking cookies – they need a working knowledge of cookie baking. This working knowledge doesn’t mean they are experts in cookies, but they can at least pull from their basic knowledge in order to move forward. Research is a technical challenge – you have to know some basics before you can start putting pieces together to search.

Databases are Your Friend Who Only Posts Memes

We’ve all been dealing with the concept of container collapse and our AISL colleagues have shared lots of useful activities to help students understand containers, so this is just one more to add to the list. As much as I talk about it, my students (and even a few teachers) still have trouble seeing databases as aggregators and not creators of information. So like much of my instruction in recent years , I found myself pulling from social media to create an example again (subject headings are the OG hashtags, anyone?). Databases are that friend of yours that never posts anything original on their social media and only shares memes. Your friend didn’t even create the memes – they just found them somewhere else and posted them because they wanted others to see them too. Databases are not influencers – they are not content creators who come up with the new TikTok trend. All they do is share it when it comes along, and they just happen to be sharing things from newspapers, magazines, journals, books, and encyclopedias.