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8th Grade Propaganda Project: Student Interview

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Last month, I interviewed Sara Baquero-Garcia, our 8th grade Social Studies teacher, about her propaganda project. For this month, I decided to interview one of Sara’s 8th grade students about the Animal Farm project and propaganda to see whether the learning actually landed with them—to understand what they really took away from the project. Many thanks to Phoebe for taking the time to answer my questions; here are her thoughtful answers.

Question: Can you describe the Animal Farm propaganda project?

Response: Phoebe described it as “an amazing way to understand how to effectively incorporate creativity and an interesting book with lots of complex themes—such as propaganda, manipulation, peer pressure, totalitarianism, and the corruption of socialist ideals—into a poster. It required examining one theme, and then finding a story and a person to help explain that idea. What was so cool was that everyone chose something different and made personal choices that really helped differentiate their poster from others.”

Phoebe’s poster

Question: What kind of research did you need to do for the project? What types of sources did you use, and where did you find them?

Response: “I researched different types of propaganda techniques and ensured I looked into both historical and modern examples. If I only looked at the first websites to pop up, I would have been making [biased] decisions. I used class materials such as books, articles from educational websites such as Britannica, and Gale, and examples of posters from previous years. I also thought that some advertisements, and political campaigns online, provided me with some information to help me with this project. I also compared multiple sources to make sure the information was accurate and to understand how propaganda can be used in different situations.”

Question: What do you understand now about propaganda that you didn’t before?

Response: “I understand now that propaganda is not always obvious, [and it doesn’t always appear] as a negative tone at first glance. Before this project, I mostly thought propaganda was just old war posters or political messages, but now I see that it can appear in my social media, advertisements on websites, news, and even entertainment. I also learned how propaganda often uses emotions, repetition, and persuasive techniques to influence people’s opinions or actions.”

Question: How do you think you can apply your new understanding of propaganda to our current world?

Response: “I think I can apply my understanding of propaganda by being more critical of the media and information I see every day. Instead of immediately believing something online, I can look at the source, consider the purpose behind the message, and recognize persuasive techniques being used. This can help me make better decisions and avoid being easily influenced by misleading information. Especially in a world of AI, many reels are inaccurate and make up all sorts of stuff so it is important to understand how to notice inaccurate vs. real.”

Question: Anything else you’d like to say about the project/propaganda/etc.?

Response: “Overall, I thought the project was interesting because it showed how powerful communication and persuasion can be. It also made me realize how important media literacy is today, especially because people constantly see information on a daily basis through social media and the internet. The project helped me pay more attention to how messages are designed to influence audiences.”

Closing Reflection

What I appreciate most, reading both Sara’s vision for propaganda literacy and Phoebe’s reflections on her project, is seeing how well the learning took root. Sara set out to help students become critical thinkers who understand not just propaganda as a historical curiosity, but as a living force shaping their choices, their beliefs, and their daily lives. Phoebe’s answers show that she’s internalized this—not as abstract knowledge, but as practical wisdom she’s already applying to the information she encounters. For school librarians, this is exactly why partnerships with teachers like Sara matter so much. Together, we equip students not just to consume information, but to interrogate it, to understand the forces shaping it, and ultimately, to think for themselves.

Another 8th grade propaganda poster, from D.

Note: I used Flint for light copy-editing, drafting the transition between the two parts, and the conclusion in part two. Everything else is human-written, and it’s all human-edited!

8th Grade Propaganda Curriculum

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Our 8th grade social studies teacher, Sara Baquero-Garcia, is a font of knowledge when it comes to propaganda. Having been impressed by her students’ Animal Farm projects, and by helping her find resources for another part of the project, I decided to interview her about her overall propaganda coverage with the 8th grade. Her wide-ranging explanations covered many different types of propaganda, how they interlink with each other and with the modern world, some aspects of the projects, and more.

For length, I have divided the post into two, with the first covering project background and types of propaganda. Part two, coming in June, will cover her Animal Farm project, and offer a student’s insights into the project and what she learned.

Now, on to part one!

Project Purpose

Sara’s propaganda project evolved from wanting students to “explore the media around them,” the images and messages they see and hear every day. What do these images and messages mean? What do they omit? “Those things that are not said are often the most important ones,” says Sara. “And if they are said, how are they being said?” Digging deeper, she wants students to consider “how we come to believe what we believe, and how we come to assume the things we assume.” The goal is for students to “become critical thinkers, so that they can make their own conclusions.”

Project Background

Sara has been teaching propaganda for decades, starting at The American School in Japan, in the 1990s. “We were revamping our curriculum at the time, and I had the freedom to do this media literacy project,” she says. In the 1990s, “in Tokyo you could walk anywhere and it was like you were bombarded by Times Square type of visuals,” which at once brought propaganda to mind and inspired the unit. Sara used to teach it as a two-month unit, which she felt was “totally worth it,” but the kids got propaganda-ed out. That prompted her, over time, to “separate the parts of the project” and run different parts “when they are beneficial for whatever we’re talking about.” It’s a “mammoth” project, so a one-block lesson was never going to suffice!

One non-negotiable part of any project Sara does is student choice. “The kid has absolute choice within the resources that we either give them, or that they find in something that they are connected to,” she says. “That is crucial.” While assigning a broad topic, like a big news event, for an initial activity is fine, “it should never be the piece that they have to do” for the main part of the project. Says Sara, “I think it’s really important to give them agency. And as they’re looking for their favorite piece, they’re looking at so much more, and so that’s where the research can be super rewarding for them. …They’re starting to think through the lens of the researcher.” They are doing the analyzing Sara looks for, and focusing on something of interest helps them “really zero in” on not just that topic, but on propaganda in general.

Types of Propaganda

Ideally Sara addresses four types of propaganda: political, commercial, news, and entertainment. While each might have different purposes, they use similar strategies students can recognize in any situation. “I usually use twelve techniques [of propaganda], not because they’re the only techniques, but because they’re ubiquitous,” Sara says. She asks her students to “really reflect” on the common elements inside these techniques. Here is Sara’s general description of the project itself, and, here is the list of the techniques Sara uses with the students.

Political Propaganda

Political propaganda is often the natural starting point. Because of the fall election cycle, Sara tends to start the year with politics. “That’s a great time to explore the topic of political propaganda and the effect that it has on the electorate,” she says. “You’re looking at the campaign process. You’re looking at how people vote. You’re looking at the system of gerrymandering. …There’s so many things to look at when you think of campaigns,” including “how propaganda connects to our understanding of politics.”

For researching this aspect of the project, Sara relies on some resources we post on her class LibGuide, like The Living Room Candidate—”The absolute best source for presidential campaigns.” She also makes use of local advertisements and mail-delivered pamphlets. One year, Sara had her students study major initiatives on the ballot, one initiative per group. They examined pros and cons, viewpoints from either side, etc. By the end, she felt that in addition to having a “blast” doing the project, “these kids knew more about those initiatives than any adult that you would ask out in the street.” Sara liked watching how they came “to the understanding that you don’t need this flashy situation of presidential campaign in order to be engaged within the system of what’s happening in that election.”

Another way she approaches political propaganda is the historical context, which she finds vital because it shows “the power of political propaganda.” She says, “Of course, you can’t do a historical propaganda examination without looking at the Nazi propaganda of World War II, and the campaign[s] against Jews,” Communists, Romani, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, etc. “The intensity of what that meant with the eventual Holocaust.”

For students, Sara wants them to explore questions like, “How could I, a normal every day German citizen, come to believe that it’s OK for [my] Jewish neighbor to just disappear? How does one get to that? How do people get to a place of complacency with the status quo when something like that is happening around you?” She turns facile answers, like “they were evil” or “they were ignorant” or “they didn’t know,” back on the students. “How are we complacent, or how are we ignorant, or how are we unaware, or how are we being brainwashed?”

To help answer these questions, Sara recalls to students the techniques of propaganda, which include fear and scapegoating. “Did the Nazis use fear? Absolutely—they had a whole movie of connecting Jewish citizens with rats,” she reminds students. “And that film made people so afraid of even being touched by a Jewish person, so then it became OK to separate Jewish kids in Jewish schools, and to not have Jewish colleagues at your job, because they were equated by the propaganda as vermin.” “Being told again and again to believe in something can have a powerful effect on the receiver of the information, and if people in power are the ones giving the information, it can be a very powerful tool in convincing people to follow an ideology without thinking critically. That is always a dangerous result and that is a major reason for students to learn how to question what is being told to students through propaganda.”

Commercial Propaganda

Sara tends to do commercial propaganda at a time that coincides with Christmas, “because we have so commercialized that holiday. I want kids to examine what they have, what they want, what they’re asking for, how their behavior as consumers has been shaped by propaganda, by commercials, by trends, by social media.” She calls those messages out for using “the same propaganda techniques” they’ve studied before, “to get us to thinking some way.” Especially Sara pinpoints influencers telling students “what they should look like and what they should buy and what’s cool.” She wants to get the students thinking about the cycle of trends like Stanley Cups, which were cool but now are not. “Every trend requires an expenditure, and every expenditure is benefiting someone,” Sara says, “benefiting some company or some business, and there’s things attached to that.”

If her time is limited for covering commercial propaganda, Sara might have her students look at commercials through the lens of the techniques used by political propaganda. For example, the fear technique used by the Nazis to target Jews gets used by commercials through the threat of being uncool or not accepted if you don’t have, for example, a Stanley Cup. Or the technique of promised happiness as shown by, say, Coca-Cola commercials. “You look at a Coca-Cola commercial and…everything is glittery. You know it’ll be better to be happier with Coca-Cola, right?”

Sara adds, “a commercial needs to do two things: it needs to give you what you should want, but it also needs to give you why you should want it and how not having it makes you less happy, less whole, less..something. The goal is to always make you feel less, unless you purchase whatever it is the commercial wants you to have.” When Sara sets the students free to look at commercials, “they can’t believe that the teacher is OK with them looking at commercials; how fun is that?” But through the laughter and sharing, they also start to analyze and think. “So having that fun session where they’re looking at all of these fun things, it’s not a waste of time; it’s actually helping them really zero in, and where they are in that part in that culture.”

Says Sara, “for most kids, what’s really interesting,” after they start studying commercial propaganda, “is that now they have the vocabulary to speak to what is happening to them. What are the influences happening to them?” Once they have the vocabulary, and that “intricate understanding,” students can say something like, “Wow, I did not realize that they were using XYandZ to get to me.” This also gives students the tools to understand what types of propaganda work best on them personally, as well as the understanding that “most successful pieces that use propaganda use more than one technique” for that reason—to appeal to many different people.

A tie-in for this part of the project is Annie Leonard’s video The Story of Stuff, which explores the system that brings us material products. It covers the process from extraction to manufacturing to disposal, including everything and everyone affected at each point along the way. Sara points out that Leonard, being an environmentalist, approaches the topic from a negative point of view—”commercialism can be really bad because it’s killing the environment.”

Then she shows students the other side of the coin through documentaries made by a media executive from the 1960s. These show “how industry is so great for jobs,” the economy, and taxes, “and we’re civilized, and we have all these amazing things, and…everything is looking hunky-dory because we now have skyscrapers.” As Sara shows the students, this media executive shows “the power of propaganda in a very positive way… It gets us to be civilized. It gets us to make the better product. It gets us to be able to choose the better product because now we know about it.” The video is called: Advertisement, What’s it Doing to Your Life” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lz_q4PxZFxA

After watching both videos, students must “choose one product that [they] have purchased….and [then] look at six of eight components that are not a part of what the commercial told them.” This work takes the students two to three weeks, because they must really dig into it. Often, “It’s really hard to find information…[for example], you know Nike isn’t going to tell you where the plastic for your shoes came from.” Sara urges the students to think laterally in those cases. “When you have plastic manufacturing, where is it usually done?”

Thus, students learn “to infer from research into industries, research into health scenes, research into…the commercial aspect of it. Research into labor issues with the company or the product or the materials, issues with resources and where they come from.” Sara adds, “There’s a variety of things you can do, and then that’s where I’m really excited about it, because kids are seeing the big picture.” They are seeing, “Oh, every time I purchase something I’m making a choice of what to support, and it’s a minute choice, but I’m not the only one making it.” As Sara says, there are “thousands, perhaps millions of people, making that same choice,” and that’s where the power of commercial propaganda comes in.

News Propaganda

“With news,” Sara teaches, it’s “really important to differentiate between fake news and media bias, because fake news is fake news…it’s not true. But media bias is that much more powerful because it is ‘true,’ but it is also biased.” Think of how someone like [Dan Rather] on CBS would report on the Gulf War differently than someone like Wolf Blitzer on CNN. [Rather] might report, “At such and such time, this happened.” Whereas Blitzer might report “with the visuals, and the drama of the droppings, and…precise hits.” From this, Sara says, the viewer knows “this is terrible,” and now he’s adding “a lot more information that is or isn’t validated, but it’s what CNN is telling you.” She wants students to think, “OK, what in that is factual, and what is interpretation of what’s happening?”

This is the struggle, she says, “with all media right now….There’s so much of a blur between what is…news factual versus interpretation.” And once interpretation is involved, so is bias, “because we’re all interpreting in some way…leaving some things behind and highlighting others.” Sara wants students to explore the question of, “why do we do that?” Also questions like, “Who is behind that interpretation? Is there a company that doesn’t want you to highlight one thing or another? Is there a government telling you to highlight this? Is there a boss that has interest in XYZ and doesn’t want those interests to be harmed by the [news] piece?” She adds, “Or maybe it’s just bad reporting” by people who “have no idea what they’re doing, or maybe it’s an AI bot…the news has become such a mire…” Students getting their news from social media is a case in point. Says Sara, that’s even more biased, and the algorithms set your news on repeat “so you’re totally missing these other parts.”

When Sara addresses media propaganda, students work with the same propaganda techniques, “but now it’s really important to look at different media outlets, and how they’re reporting the same event.” She assigns students to choose a current news story and explore the ways different media outlets report the same story. “What is common and what is different?” One visual she’s appreciated using is the [Fontes] Media Bias Chart, “which is a fantastic visual.” Once students understand how much bias exists in media, they “explore how the reporting of that affected the outcomes politically, and/or, at the moment. So it’s all connected.”

Entertainment Propaganda

Entertainment propaganda, Sara says, may be “the most powerful type when it comes to culture. What kind of culture do we create? What kind of community do we build, and how does that community of that culture get built?” It’s about “why we do the things we do as people.” As an example, she mentions teen slang, like the now-ubiquitous “bro.” “Where did that come from?” she asks. “Who started that?” And why? The same goes for the “67” phenomenon. “Kids went crazy, and nobody knows what it means, but everybody’s having fun…so it becomes a part of that cultural trend.”

As Sara says, we live through trends like the “ice challenge” without ascertaining “how that came to us and why we follow it.” She wants her students to examine past entertainment and trends that derived from books or songs, and now social media. “Where do kids get [the idea] they should… eat Tide Pods?” she asks. “How does a kid get to choose to do that?” The students might say, “Oh, it’s fun,” but “why was it fun? …What made you think that that was fun?” The entertainment realm is particularly prone to people posting and reposting pieces, because they think the pieces are fun or funny, or they “wanted to be part of the fun.”

Moving on from trends, Sara looks at the multiplicity of messages in films and songs, like Pink Floyd’s “We don’t need no education…” or the Beatles “Imagine all the people.” What do those songs mean? Or, what is a movie like The Matrix telling us to “think about ourselves, the future, the place of technology, what to fear, what to not fear?” Every song, movie, book, etc. “has a message.” Sara wants kids “to explore critically, what are those messages? How do they affect you?”

Despite its importance, though, Sara often “sadly” lacks the time to cover entertainment propaganda as fully as it deserves.

Librarian’s Note

Our library team has long had the privilege of supporting Sara’s work by helping curate resources for her project LibGuide and collaborating on source evaluation strategies with her students. These kinds of partnerships—between teachers and librarians—strengthen students’ ability to think critically about the information landscape they navigate every day.

Stay tuned in June for information about Sara’s Animal Farm project, and student insights!

Note: I used Flint for light copy-editing, drafting the transition between the two parts, and the conclusion in part two. Everything else is human-written, and it’s all human-edited!

Process, Not Product: 7th Grade Research Projects

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By Rebecca Moore and Connor Middleton

I have been fortunate to work with many, many social studies teachers who put together thoughtful research projects for their students. I love helping teachers find resources to give the students a good, reliable start to their research, and I love that teachers then let me work with the students on citations for the project. Assessing citations through NoodleTools lets me help the students asynchronously one on one, and I can also spot unreliable sources and help the students understand why they need to find better sources—and help them find those sources if necessary.

              One grade I work with throughout the year is 7th grade social studies, as those students complete several yearly research activities. Past undertakings include studying endangered languages and researching Middle-Eastern locations and professions to create a Moth-inspired story “from” a fictional resident. The 7th grade’s current teacher, Connor Middleton, is no exception in creating interesting, thoughtful, and thought-provoking projects; projects that not only improve students’ research skills, but improve their understanding of how the world works and why they should care about it. Because I so admire his research activities, I thought I would interview Connor about them. With the help of Flint AI, I turned my interests into focused questions for him. Connor’s reflective answers are below, with minor edits from me.

Topic: Coming Up With Projects

Question: What’s your process for designing a new research project? Where do you start?

Connor:I usually start with a concept or question that I want students to delve into. For African Geography I ask students: “How do we justify buying products that we know come from exploitation?” The related concepts include globalization, economic interdependence, and geographical based exploitation. This leads me to building an assignment in which students learn about the history of the rubber trade in the Congo under King Leopold, and compare it to modern companies’ involvement in the country as they seek the cobalt needed for smart phones and electric cars. We engage in research, discussions, and projects from there. The starting point is always asking: “What is the bigger meaning? Why does this matter?” I always aim to make my projects feel meaningful in that way. I want them to be the kind of lessons you remember as mind-blowing moments during your growing up that helped you see the world in a new light. 

LibGuide for Connor’s Africa project.

Question: How do you know when a topic will work well as a research project versus other types of assignments?

Connor: Research projects usually lend themselves to topics with multiple viewpoints. Finding quotes, reviewing claims, evaluating sources for credibility, and seeing multiple perspectives to an issue are often key in researching these topics. While sometimes a topic does not produce as great a project as I’d hoped, when it does, it usually contains one or more essential questions that lend themselves to finding the answer, rather than being told the answer through lecture. 

Topic: Research Topic Selection

Question: What criteria do you use when choosing research topics for 7th graders?

Connor: Personally, I see most global issues as suitable for 7th grade. This is a time of life when students test boundaries, explore new freedoms, and want to share their opinions on the world and be heard. So my usual criteria involve finding topics that are somewhat high level and hold high expectations for students to meet. My criteria is often: “Is this something I would have been interested to learn about in 7th grade?” 

Question: How do you incorporate current events or relevant issues into your research projects?

Connor: As we complete regional studies, we often study the current issues of each place covered. In some shorter research assignments students evaluate a current event, with our most recent being the bombing of boats outside Venezuela, as part of our South America unit. We always take some time in each regional unit to explore events happening in the area today, and do research to better understand particular issues. On the other side, I usually identify some key concepts for each region that serve as the spine of each unit. For example, European key concepts include expansion and supranational organizations with the EU, and Latin American key concepts highlight globalization and economic interdependence. 

Topic: Essential Research Skills

Question: What are the most important research skills you want 7th graders to walk away with?

Connor: Identifying AI, identifying bias, evaluating multiple perspectives, and finding reliable sources they can use for their own continued learning of the world.

Question: What do you see as the biggest challenges students face when learning to research, and how do you address them?

Connor: AI and mis/disinformation. This is a monumental challenge, one that I as their single social studies teacher in one lone school year cannot entirely fix. The world is only worsening with the flood of ever-increasing content and misleading “news,” to the point at which I worry how students will grow into their adult lives with a sense of common truth or reality. While this is all a little doom and gloom, the true effects of what is currently happening are hard to accurately gauge in terms of potential negative impacts. I try to address this by showing students the inaccuracies of AI, the business models of news corporations, and the bias of algorithms. 

Topic: Balancing Process and Content

Question: How do you balance teaching research methodology with ensuring students learn the historical/social studies content? Do you find that one reinforces the other, or do you sometimes have to make trade-offs?

Connor: I often feel they serve one another. Students tend to dislike “stand and deliver” instruction. Giving them the task of taking on their own learning often provides a good step in increasing their knowledge of historical or social studies content, within the guidelines, expectations, and skills we give them regarding research. I also would rank research skills, or skills in general, in a higher category of importance than content knowledge. Especially with middle school, students can forget much of the content we teach, but repeated skills and habits stick much more strongly. It is there I want to invest more of my time. 

Topic: Reflection and Impact

Question: What’s been your most successful research project, and what made it work so well?

Connor: The Human Rights Portfolio. I partner with my English 7 colleague and we have students pick a particular human rights issue and compile multiple projects in a portfolio to end the year. We combine skills in each class and work together to help our students actively choose a topic and become an expert (of sorts) on it. It works so well because we collaborate on the different skills we want students to exhibit, and the extra class time and student choice allows for more buy-in and less stress. 

Question: How have your research projects evolved over the years?

Connor: They have mostly evolved in the ways I try to limit unnecessary work for students, such as work that overvalues product over process. Students have different amounts of time, help, resources, etc. available to them, and I want to help make it a more equitable process; a process in which students focus more on learning and less on producing a product to achieve a high grade. This can be somewhat difficult. Creating awesome projects is part of the fun, but I also try to balance that with my rubrics, to focus more deeply on the real skills at hand and less the on the “flashy project.”

Question: How do you see these research skills serving students beyond 7th grade?

Connor: I hope students take their research skills and feel confident moving into the world with their own claims and opinions. I want students to be open minded, to learn from others and not jump to judgement, but also to hold the line on what they value. I want them to use their skills to question what they hear, and get to know the world around them through their own work and process, instead of simply accepting what others tell them.

Conclusion

Many thanks to Connor for taking the time to write such detailed, well-thought-out responses!

Spoiler alert: Maybe don’t start with medieval history

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Good morning! This is just a brief update to introduce you to what I hope to have great news to write about later.

Last spring, I was lucky enough to attend a Bay Area Independent School Librarians meeting at which Brian Thomas, of Saint Mary’s College High School, introduced us to using roll-playing games, specifically murder mystery parties, to let students experience history.

His school schedule (they have a week-long, all-day elective that allowed travel and more) was different from mine, but the idea lit my imagination. I immediately proposed to our new seventh grade History teacher that we try it out, and she was willing.

So began my journey to find a medieval world history topic with enough primary sources to create a unit assessment for seventh graders.

I look forward to sharing this journey, but today happens to be the launch of the project. So.

Cross your fingers and wish me the best.

We will see how this goes, and next time I will share the challenges and triumphs of this endeavor.

Solutions Journalism: A Happy Habit, A Happy Use-case for Information Literacy

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Please see comments for a stream-of-consciousness update on how the lesson went and my faculty and students’ responses to Solutions Journalism. TBM 01/10/2025

Happy new year!

Fortunately, I am getting to start my new calendar year at school with Global Week, our ever-inspiring intersession. This year, our theme is “Bridging Divides: The Art of Listening, The Journey of Learning.” Overall, this topic means we are learning how to fight polarization.

To my great delight, I was asked to run a class on Solutions Journalism ahead of our final speaker, who works in that field. I’ve long been interested in this style of reporting, and was delighted to have a reason to learn more about the concept. As the child of an old-school journalist, it is exciting to see a movement trying to shift away from “if it bleeds, it leads” (the historical version of clickbait, one might argue) and instead look at news focused on positivity and hope.

It is fascinating to dig into what that premise looks like in practice. A far cry from human interest and hero-worship, I am finding Solutions Journalism to be an approach that allows room and provides methods for difficult discussions, while drawing on the evidence-based standards that I value from growing up discussing my father’s work.

As articulated by the Solutions Journalism Network, the four principles of the approach are:
“1 Response: Focuses on a response to a social problem — and on how that response has worked, or why it hasn’t;
“2 Insight: Shows what can be learned from a response and why it matters to a newsroom’s audience;
“3 Evidence: Provides data or qualitative results that indicate effectiveness (or a lack thereof); and
“4 Limitations: Places responses in context; doesn’t shy away from revealing shortcomings.”

What I like about this framing is that it leaves room for hope. Even when programs go wrong (which the method encourages journalists to write about), the goal is not to assess and place blame, but to analyze what we have learned so we can do better next time.

Even more consistently, the method gets away from all the messiness of the (broadly misunderstood) notion of “objectivity” of media, which carries not only a history of enabling limited perspectives in storytelling that glossed over social ills (like racism) but which also somehow got us to this idea that we have to pick two sides (no more, no fewer) and give them equal weight. It does not call for pro-and-con retellings, but asks journalists to look at a tried solution to a problem and see strengths, admit weaknesses, and embrace nuance.

The mindset is, in and of itself, about bridging divides. The foundational attention to complicating narratives rests, in part, on the notion that accepting common pro/con narratives on a topic are standing in the way of our gaining real understanding of what is going right or wrong. There is a sense of transcending political boundaries to ask larger — perhaps even more real? — questions and get at what can actually be done to improve a situation.

As a research skills educator, I find the ways evidence is defined and used in this type of reporting to be deeply meaningful. The standard is whether evidence helps the reader understand why something happened the way it did, rather than simply, “here is someone saying something angry/happy/tearful about our topic.”

As an educator of growing humans, I am profoundly grateful that there is a way my students can engage with societal problems that focuses hard on the potential for a better world.

If you want to check out some articles, the Solutions Journalism Network has a number of ways for you to approach finding examples, from their annual round-ups of favorite articles, to their international database of examples (warning: short reads are not the same as quality reads in this method), to their collections of examples such as heroes not hero worship and constructively reporting on failures.

OK, so, um. The whole idea of this form of journalism is to write about tried solutions, not ideas. I have read about the method, but am only using it with students for the first time today. If you have worked with Solutions Journalism in your school, would you let me know in the comments or by email?

May this new year bring many positive solutions into your world.

A new way to record (and share) library statistics

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Of course one can track stats on various elements of library life…but what kind of audience and attention do they actually receive?

In July, I wrote about embracing joy — tracking everyday joyful experiences with a simple quilting, paint, or paper craft project — as imagined and shared by Kitty (@nightquilter), the founder of the Quilt Your Life Crew aspirational data visualization project. In addition to tracking joy, members of the group pick something to track for a period of time (usually a year) and we support each other in designing an effective visualization. They can be simple patterns, or more complicated tangible or abstract designs, as well. A favorite of mine tracked what kinds of tacos a quilter ate over the course of a year.

I tend to track something from my work life. For the 2023-2024 school year, I chose to track the library’s instructional collaborations:

A brief legend of what each square represents. This pattern, “Renew” by @jitterywings, was perfect to convey a very complex data set. To see a lengthier legend, click here.

I worked hard to complete and compile the sixty-nine blocks of the quilt face and also the legend before returning for our new school year. (I have been told to communicate that construction lasted through 10 audiobooks + 7 seasons of the Great British Baking Show + a weekend-long quilting retreat + a live SF Giants game + the summer Olympics.)

In our opening days, before students officially returned to campus, I displayed the front and back of the quilt outside the library.

The work paid off! Many of my colleagues stopped to look it over, to try to identify their block(s), and — in at least two cases — note: “Oh, I did not have you in my class very much, did I?”

And now? I am in their classes on a regular basis this year. I believe that the collaborations here (across all departments and all grades) normalized the idea of having research skills instruction for some colleagues.

Another fun outcome is that the colleague from maintenance who helped me hang the quilt commented that it might be helpful for him to make a visualization of the work orders he undertakes for the school. I offered to help him (though not to make a quilt), and am looking forward to the rather unique collaboration that will spring from that conversation.

Of course, being a librarian, I felt it important to cite my sources, and I think I will try to do this for any quilt using new fabrics in the future! (Most fabrics have an edge, called a “selvedge,” that gives the title, creator, and manufacturer of the fabric.)

The bibliography for the quilt, showing what fabrics and pattern were used in its construction.

Not everyone can — or wants to — spend a gazillion hours making a quilt, but as the Quilt Your Life Summer Joyfest has proven, there are many ways to undertake such a visualization. Pick a medium that works for you! It is, however, helpful to find a nontraditional form of visualization that will engage your colleagues and make them want to stop, look, and engage.

What might you want to track for public consumption? How might you like to construct a data visualization?

Help me build a fantasy search lesson: Search instruction from popular fiction

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While you might be surprised at how passionate I once was about Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, you will become less surprised when you hear why. Below you can find a little post I wrote on my very short-lived blog back in 2010, entitled: “A Searcher’s Review of Twilight: Book Vs. Movie Through the Eyes of a Search Geek.”

Originally, I only had one idea for a research skills lesson analyzing search choices in MG and YA literature. But then, several years ago, I came across this little gem in Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles, in which Scarlet is trying to figure out what the deal is with Wolf:

…

(Scarlet, p. 171-172)

So — new fantasy: What if we had a dozen or more research-related quotes from popular novels and could design a class where students picked one and came up with a short real-world lesson based on the fictional account?

My ask: Can you think of a brief passage from a book in your collection that speaks to or demonstrates thinking about research skills? If you email me directly or put them in the comments below, I would be most happy to compile a list of useful passages for the group.

In case we do not get to this new lesson, here is what I wished I had a class to teach to back when I read Twilight:

A Searcher’s Review of Twilight: Book vs. Movie Through the Eyes of a Search Geek

Well, it is that time again—the Twilight New Moon video is now part of our lives. Pre-teens and teenagers spend untold amounts of time mooning over Bella and Edward… providing, believe it or not, a great example of better quality, iterative searching.

Of the books’ strengths and weaknesses, what annoyed me most wasn’t the endlessly repetitive conversations, or the thousand uses of the word alabaster, but rather Bella’s very poor online search skills.

Bella, the heroine, tricks a member of the local Quileute tribe into telling her about love interest Edward’s secret:

In her agitation over this revelation, Bella naturally decides to hop online to verify the vampire claim. And that is what she searches: [vampire].

Bella reads though the site, “looking for anything that sounded familiar, let alone plausible,” (134) and comes up blank.

Meanwhile, my mind is fairly screaming, not about the revelation of Edward’s true identity, but rather about the fact that her friend gave her a perfectly good, highly specific and potentially powerful, search term, [cold ones], and it does not even occur to her to use it.  By sticking with a more general term, she not only opens herself up to many irrelevant hits, but fails to uncover pages that might have information matched to her specific information need. Like searching for [plant food] when you want to know what to feed your Venus fly trap. She ends up frustrated by her search process, feeling that it taught her nothing of use.

By contrast, movie-Bella has a search style that is worlds stronger.

In the film, instead of revealing Edward’s hidden identity, Bella’s friend darkly hints that Edward is somehow related to an old Quileute tribal legend, but refuses to say more. Bella then undertakes an iterative search process, in which she reads for search terms and folds them back into her search process to get more specific. In this example, Bella takes stock of what she knows, and goes online to find a more information (search: [Quileute legends]). She finds a book on Quileute myths, and homes in on the term cold one, which she then takes back online as her next search. Using this specific term, she finds precise information, which in fact allows her to build a list of attributes that she has recognized in Edward—speed, strength, and cold skin—and leverages that knowledge to add new ones—immortal, drinks blood—confirming for her that Edward is a vampire. A much more successful and satisfying search experience, if a weaker execution of the plot. This type of iterative searching is one of the key skills that I teach students, educators, and parents in my classes.

With the second movie in the Twilight Saga selling like crazy, and two more to come over the next two years, both the Twilight and the search lovers in your class can enjoy the opportunity to dig in.

My take away: No one wants to hear they have to run multiple searches to find information. So, use something kids do want to hear about to get the point across!

Location, Location, Location . . .

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A January email to the AISL listserv posted by Matt Ball sparked my interest. In it, he asked several questions relating to students and database use and if you’re interested in how some of your peer schools answered, be sure to check the Google Sheet linked an email on this topic by David Wee. As part of the process of thinking about teaching students how to identify and find the information they need, I spend a lot of time thinking about how I can help them discover and access that information in our databases. Many of us lament our students’ reliance on Google—their aversion to using databases for research unless required by their teacher is almost like a religion for them. “You can lead a horse to water, but can’t make them drink” comes to mind.  Dave’s question, “How do you organize your databases on your library page to get kids eyeballs on the right databases?” begs another question: can our students even find our databases when we aren’t specifically leading them there? 

Where Are Your Resources?

Let’s face it—most databases are expensive and in an effort to get the most from our budget, we spend a lot of time evaluating specific ones, implementing trials, and encouraging our faculty colleagues to help us choose ones that meet the needs of our students and support our school’s curricula. From a return-on-investment perspective, when budget time rolls around, usage statistics often help us make data-driven decisions. But what do those stats really tell us? Do they pinpoint access pain points that keep our electronic resources out of view? Do they help us re-evaluate our instructional programs, or take into account how we integrate our resources in our learning management systems or LibGuides? Not to mention the impact of COVID-19 on trying to evaluate anything related to how our library programs are going. Before we can dismiss the value of any particular resource based solely on usage stats, first we need to make sure we’re doing everything we can to make them discoverable. For a start, I’d like to answer how we organize our databases (and other electronic resources) to make it easier for students to find the resources they need. 

LibGuides A-Z List to the Rescue

Here at Kent, we use LibGuides CMS and their A-Z Database List makes organizing databases and other electronic resources a breeze. But, and here’s the caveat, unless you have enough time to provide instruction on individual databases so your students know each of them by name (seriously, who has that kind of time?) you’ll need to somehow organize your list. Fortunately, one of the features of the A-Z List is it gives you the option to easily organize your resources by database type, subject, and vendor.

To create database types and vendors, choose Content >> A-Z Database List from your menu on the admin panel of your guides.

From the landing page you can begin to organize your databases by database type and vendor. For inspiration, I find the LibGuides Community site to be invaluable. I spent time exploring other K-12 and Academic libraries using LibGuides to get an idea of the variety of options for this. 

A-Z Database List

Choose Your Types Wisely

When deciding on database types, I thought about how we teach source types here at Kent and the common language of research we use. If there’s one piece of advice I can give at this point, it’s don’t go down library lane and start wading in the weeds, trying to come up with as many types as possible. Keep it simple; we humans have only so much mental space for decisions. You don’t want your students to get hung up on having to sort through so many database types that they’re worn out before having to choose which one of those databases to search.

Remember: the goal is to make finding the right database easier.

For a number of our resources, the source type (primary) and database type are synonymous, but for others, such as our image databases, I needed to decide if I wanted to assign them an additional type aside from primary source. You’ll see above, we decided to create an Image Collections type as our students frequently create presentations and this makes it easier for them to find images that are rights-cleared.

The A-Z List is flexible and allows you to add multiple database types so I applied the Primary Source and Image Collections types to ImageQuest. So whether a student is looking for a primary source map from the Colonial Era or an image of a bee for a science presentation, they will be directed to ImageQuest.

Best Bets and Popular

Think carefully about checking the Best Bets and Popular boxes when adding or editing databases. Too many Best Bets, and the ID loses its meaning—aim for 3 at the most for each subject—same with designating a database as popular. Best Bet databases will appear in a highlighted box at the top when filtering by Subject on the A-Z Database List and popular resources will display on the sidebar with a heading of the same name.

Finishing Up the A-Z List

Next, I added our vendors. This filter mostly serves to help us as we review our databases, but I occasionally show this to the student who is interested in strengthening their research muscle and wants to understand the inner workings of our guides.

Some of Our Database Vendors

Subject Headings

To create subject headings, choose Admin >> Metadata & URLs from your menu on the admin panel of your guides. You apply these subject headings to your guides as well as your database assets.

A Partial Listing of Our Subject Headings

Access Points

Finally, a link to the A-Z Database List was added to the Research column on our library website Quick Links menu. You’ll see I also added several direct links to other databases: Source Reference, JSTOR, and the A-Z List sorted for Primary Sources as students are frequently looking for background information, journals, or primary sources.

Link to the A-Z Database List on the library website

Next Time . . .

Another of Dave’s questions was on instruction: “Do you teach kids to use different databases at different points in their research or do you pretty much just recommend databases based on the topic?” Although our A-Z Database page has gotten over 950 views this year, most of our databases are accessed through the LibGuides we create to support research in specific classes as well as our EDS searchbox. But that’s a topic for another post. Until then, happy searching.

Making Connections with Virtual Museums

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Museums are fascinating places. The curation and design of a museum display has the potential to captivate viewers and engage them in looking closely, thinking critically, expanding perspectives, and building empathy. For me, an epiphany moment occurred at the Frist Art Museum in the hands-on Martin ArtQuest room. One activity contained a blank map of Gallery Rooms, a collection of art reproductions on magnets, and the invitation to “Be a Curator!” This became an intriguing exploration of ways to organize the artwork in the empty gallery rooms. Should one curate by time period, art movements, thematically, or even as a comparison/contrast of artists? How would Van Gogh’s expressionistic field of iris dialogue with the abstracted desert landscapes by Georgia O’Keefe or the thrilling iceberg and volcano landscapes romanticized by Frederic Edwin Church? A 2019 visit to the National Museum of the American Indian provoked a different type of response as I viewed an expansive wall of merchandise, posters, commercials, and movies that throughout history had “branded” indigenous peoples to sell an American product and a perspective about these people. Part of the power of this display was the opportunity for viewers to linger with the images that they felt compelling and invite them to make their own meaning.

Curation is an art in itself, calling upon skills of discerning relevancy and critical thinking, and AASL recognizes this in the Curate Standard, part of which states that “Learners add value to a collection of resources by organizing and annotating them.” This school year provided an opportunity to immerse students in curation. As part of a Civil War investigation, 7th graders are being challenged to use their research notes to create a digital presentation (a virtual museum) of primary source images, historic documents, and analysis paragraphs. Though this type of multimodal exploration could be done in GoogleSlides by linking content to slides within the slide deck, these 7th graders will use ThingLink. With Thinglink, interactive tag markers can be placed on locations in an image to allow viewers to link to additional text boxes, images, or media (audio, video). Here is one example of a ThingLink by the Smithsonian Institution:
Fort Sumter Telegram. The organization of this ThingLink invites close analysis of a single primary source document.

Virtual Museums

For our students, the goal is to simulate the experience of a museum so that viewers can explore the students’ own thinking about the Civil War. Making Thinking Visible, a book describing Harvard Project Zero’s research, offered several helpful routines to deepen students’ thinking. One thinking routine, Generate–Sort–Connect–Elaborate, delineated the type of thinking students would use in this curation of a virtual museum.

Generate
In the note-taking phase of student research, students generated several ideas as they researched questions about the Civil War.

Sort
Students used the NoodleTools note card feature and titled note cards with brief descriptions. These note cards were used in the sorting process. Students sorted main ideas and supporting ideas; or gathered notes in groups for a comparison/contrast or cause and effect organization. This diagram shows an example of sorting into main and supporting ideas for a discussion of Civil War Technology:

Connect
The next step is to connect ideas and explain connections. Here is an example of how the sorted ideas would be connected in Thinglink. Note that links are not active on the following screenshots.

Example of ThingLink Link 7 that expands to a discussion of strategy. (See next screenshot.)
Strategy: Civil War Band Music
Discussion of how military band music was used by General Grant as a strategy to conceal the sounds of troop movements. Note that an additional link on the slide accesses an audio clip of the band music (links not active on screenshot, but you can click this link to hear the music).

Elaborate
A final text box (indicated by Star tag) links to a paragraph that elaborates on connected ideas and shares insights (see following examples). The more information tag on the ThingLink (indicated by an i tag) links to a bibliography of sources.

Example of elaborating on connections with own insights.

This is just the beginning phase as our students curate their research. It will be exciting to watch their thinking evolve as they generate, sort, connect, and elaborate their ideas in ThingLink and share with an audience their insights about the Civil War.

Adjust Accordingly

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Remember Marie Kondo? I don’t know about you, but it seems like a lifetime ago when I watched her Netflix series and then bought her book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and then actually tried to KonMari my life. I think fondly back to that pile of clothes I collected, holding up each item waiting to determine if this sweater or that pair of pants “sparked joy” and boy, in retrospect, the days when those were my biggest concerns seems unrecognizable. Even my husband got into the act, and we spent several days embracing our clothing, blissfully unaware of what the future held for all of us. 

Adjust Accordingly

Some of you may be familiar with the author and illustrator Dallas Clayton—he’s a big hit with the elementary school crowd—his biggest super-power seeming to be the ability to affirm children and spark joy during school visits.

I came to know about him from my days as an elementary school librarian and while I’m a good number of years and several thousand teens away from the lovely Shepaug River Valley and Rumsey Hall School, I still have a poster of his on my wall with this simple message. I believe I’m pretty good at the first three parts—it’s the adjust accordingly that I still need to work on.

Farewell to the 2021 School Year

Due to a fortuitous decision by our Head of School to power through Winter and Spring terms without any breaks, our school year is over, our seniors have graduated, our end-of-year meetings are complete, and most of our faculty have headed off for a well-deserved break. I have several more weeks of work before my summer vacation starts and will spend some of that in housekeeping activities—the behind-the-scenes tasks that might not spark joy, but are necessary to keep a library running smoothly and ensure a smooth opening in the fall: shelving books, cleaning study carrels, removing old signage, doing inventory. 

Once these tasks are finished, I’ll turn my attention to thinking about what I consider the heart of my work here as a librarian and that I personally get the most satisfaction from: how might I connect more fully with my community, what lessons can I change or adapt to make my New Student Seminar (NSS) more relevant to and meaningful for my students, and how can I create and nurture collaborative relationships with our faculty?

“Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast”

From emails on our listserv and posts on our blog, plus conversations with AISL colleagues, I’ve realized most of us expend a good deal of our time and energy strategizing how to forge connections with our faculty, especially those of us in middle and secondary schools where formally scheduled visits to the library are no longer part of the academic day. We middle and secondary school librarians need to make connections with faculty who are willing to collaborate with us on projects big and small and who allow us the opportunity to work with their students on critical thinking skills and the nuances of research. 

Although “show don’t tell” is frequently associated with writing, I see its application in the teacher/librarian relationship. There’s a distinct difference, I believe, between teachers telling their students to come see us vs. showing students our value by inviting us into the classroom. Without an invitation, we must rely on students reaching out to us for support on their own or planning optional programming that we know will not reach every student—and often not reach the students who need us the most. I recognize that the ability to self-advocate is an important skill for our students to develop, but I believe that sometimes students don’t know what they don’t know, especially in regards to understanding the myriad types of information they encounter on the internet. Management consultant Peter Drucker posits that “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” and from my vantage point this highlights precisely why we need to incorporate embedded librarians into the culture of the school as one of the best ways to support the mastery of core competencies associated with information literacy and research skills. 

What Sparked Joy?

Now that my school year is over, I’m starting the process of looking back, seeing what I accomplished, what I didn’t accomplish that I wanted to, what I’m willing to let go of, and what I would like to hold onto as we reset for the fall.

Curating new resources to support our DEI initiatives
I am fortunate to have been able to work closely with our Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion on a number of initiatives and resources to support social justice. This work and my relationship with our DEI Director cemented my belief that while much of the work of the library happens within its four walls, we also need to reach beyond those walls if we want to be relevant in the life of the school. The resources in our LibGuide on Race, Racism, and Anti-Racism are used as a shared foundation for discussion on race in our Courageous Conversations among faculty and staff. As a living document, additional resources were added in response to the violence against the AAPI community. There is a tremendous value in this resource to our community as its pages have been accessed over 14,000 times since it was published last summer. I’m a numbers geek, so for me I see a great return on the investment I and two of my colleagues put into the creation of this guide. The Lunar New Year guide was created to support the joyful aspects of AAPI culture and the Black American Studies guide provides useful links to resource for a new course offering.

LibGuides for our community on Race, Racism, and Anti-Racism, the Lunar New Year, and Black American Studies for a new course offering.

Working with our peer tutors
A value-added program that isn’t directly library related but is sponsored by our library is Peer Tutoring. Normally our 30+ peer tutors work out of the library during the 8-10PM study hall block Sunday – Friday evening. Due to COVID restrictions limiting one student per table, we had to completely rethink how we would offer tutoring. Student-driven suggestions resulted in a successful program offered over Zoom, in dorm common rooms, and toward the end of the year once again in the library when a change in restrictions allowed two students per table. Peer tutors who were studying remotely joined on Zoom from as far afield as China, Egypt, and South Korea. It was a wild year and scheduling was a challenge, but one the tutors met with grace and enthusiasm. It was an honor to coordinate the program and work with this committed group of young people to meet the challenges presented by COVID. Each week they collectively devoted over 50 hours in service to their peers and the school while juggling their own school work, sports, and other commitments. Three cheers for youthful energy and their ability and willingness to think outside the box!

Our Spring Peer Tutoring Schedule, a combination of online, in-library, and in-dorm locations.

Teaching New Student Seminar to a cohort of 4th Formers (10th grade)
Over the summer I took the Design Bootcamp course at Global Online Academy and adapted the curriculum of my NSS course to accommodate our newly hybrid learning environment. I designed as many lessons as I could to be self-paced with choice boards that encouraged engagement and student agency – a kinder, gentler curriculum. Using a combination of traditional formats and ed tech tools for assessment, I discovered my students were more engaged with the material and enjoyed sharing their thoughts and ideas with each other. Moving forward my focus will be on the social and emotional well-being of my students as they learn the skills this course covers to help them get off to a solid start.

A Choice Board for students to explore resources on time management prior to posting on a discussion board.

Supporting U.S. History Research
This is one of my favorite activities—collaborating with teachers to support our 5th Formers as they do a deep dive into a topic of their choosing for their long-form research paper. This year I worked with a number of U.S. History teachers and provided a range of instruction. Often I’m asked to meet with a class once at the start of a research project to cover the resources and skills students need to write this graduation requirement. These one-shot lessons—or research bootcamp as I have come to think of them—generally provide the least return on investment. I feel pressured to cover too much information in too short of a time and end up feeling that I have overwhelmed students. I’m sure they’re overwhelmed—I’m overwhelmed just thinking about it. I recall reading a post by Dave Wee where he wrote about no longer offering this as an option to teachers and I believe that if I “adjust accordingly” that’s where I’m headed next year.

On the opposite end of the spectrum I also teach the research process by scaffolding multiple lessons. This year I was fortunate to work with two teachers who chose to use this approach. One teacher brought both of his U.S. History classes in for 5-6 sessions over the course of the Winter Term affording me the time to break down the research process into manageable chunks. For these I gave a quick instructional session at the start of class and worked individually with students for the remainder of the block. Students had a week or more between each session giving them enough time to complete tasks and come for additional help if needed.

I’m also fortunate to have worked with one of our APUSH teachers on a fairly consistent basis throughout my three years at Kent, and we frequently collaborate on unique project-based assignments which are great fun for me and engaging for his students. This year we collaborated on three projects: for the first project, students focused on mining a bibliography to determine the author’s bias and present their findings that they supported with additional research; for the second project I joined the two APUSH sections he taught each day they met during our two week remote period in December. I followed the same scaffolded approach described above—the main difference being this was accomplished remotely on Zoom and was the only project the students worked on for that two-week period. Again, this allowed for in-depth instruction introducing more nuanced skills required for advanced research; for the third project students chose images from nine distinct eras aligning with those on the AP U.S. History exam that reflected a self-selected theme. I love this project as students learned how to analyze, interpret, and think deeply and expansively about primary source images. Plus, it culminated in terrific end-of-term presentations using Adobe Spark, which are alway great to explore. Needless to say, the return on investment for these types of projects is high, not only for the skills students are able to master and the opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of their topic, but also for the solid relationships I’m able to develop with students that only comes from actively engaging with them.

My AISL Colleagues
I would be remiss if I didn’t include being part of this wonderfully knowledgeable group of AISL librarians. This group has been a life-saver: from our first Zoom sessions in March and throughout the summer where we shared our lemons and lemonade (thank you to Claire for your calm presence and tech abilities) to our annual conference to our book groups. We learned to be as kind to ourselves as we were to each other. We kept reminding each other of how hard it was to deal with shifting spaces, quarantining books, keeping programs going, and students coming to the library. Amazingly, with Past President Christina Pommer’s guidance we were able to pull off our first virtual conference – no small accomplishment in a year filled with firsts. I can’t stress enough, AISL has been a life-saver.

Final Thoughts

It’s going to take quite some time to process all of the mixed emotions and experiences I’ve had over the past nine months that we’ve been back at school. When I look back on all that we’ve been through and all that we’ve accomplished, when I put all of these experiences in a pile and hold each one up to see if it sparks joy, it’s hard to believe all of this was possible while living through a pandemic. I admit, I was terrified about returning to school in-person, but the view from the other side gives me an incredible sense of accomplishment and feelings of gratitude for everyone who worked tirelessly to make it happen. At the end of the day, when comparing the lists of things that are under my control, I must say there aren’t too many things I need to adjust accordingly. Oh, and yes, when holding them up to see how they make me feel, most of them have sparked joy!