This teaching idea was submitted by Joanna Drusin, a librarian at Brooklyn Technical High School in Brooklyn.
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School librarians are a bit like secret agents. We’re always quietly listening — scrappy and spontaneous — waiting for just the right moment to share helpful tools and ideas, and gauging places and projects where we might be especially impactful.
That might look like recommending a great new young-adult fantasy novel for a reluctant reader while waiting in line for the bathroom. Or, in the crowded hallway right before the bell rings, telling a student how to gain access to their favorite science magazine. Or having conversations on the dingy vinyl couches in the faculty lounge that might lead to opportunities to reach an entire grade level.
As librarians at Brooklyn Technical High School in Brooklyn, one of the largest public high schools in the nation, with more than 6,000 students in one building, our team of three spends thousands of hours helping our patrons find the perfect books, working with classes to teach research skills, ordering thousands of titles to add to our collection and promoting our myriad resources, such as curated e-book collections, the latest technology tools or even an available-for-loan ukulele.
Last school year, though, we set our sights on a new task: helping students participate in The Learning Network’s Open Letters Contest and running our own related in-school writing competition.
As the contest opens for its second year, I’ll show you how we acted as visionaries, co-teachers, connectors and architects to make this project happen at our school — and how you might try it, too.
If you’re a librarian, I hope this work will sound familiar and generate some new ideas. If you’re a teacher, I hope it will inspire you to look at your school librarian as a bountiful resource and skillful collaborator. And if you’re an administrator, I hope you’ll appreciate how we were able to do this work thanks to a flexible schedule and a deeply supportive supervisor who allows us the creative freedom to take on projects like this one.
Last year, I was thrilled to learn that five English teachers at our school were planning to have their students participate in The Learning Network’s new Open Letters Contest. The contest asked participants to write, in 500 or fewer words, well-researched, public-facing letters to people or groups about issues that mattered to them.
Librarian Brain: This is an opportunity for collaboration! Teachers might be able to use some support getting a handle on this new genre. How can we help with that?
I was also struck by the fact that, with five teachers teaching this contest, 200 or more students would be participating. If you’re reading this article, you are no doubt aware that Learning Network contests are prestigious and hard to win. Last year, the Open Letters Contest received over 8,000 entries from around the world, and a little over 150 students were honored. Not all our students were going to be Learning Network winners, but we still wanted to shine a light on the strongest pieces.
Librarian Brain: How can we celebrate and support student voices within our own community? Getting selected by The Learning Network would obviously be each student’s goal, but having local recognition would be both valuable and more attainable!
That’s where the idea for running our own internal Open Letter Contest, alongside The Learning Network’s, came from.
Many librarians, like myself, have years of classroom teaching experience and can be helpful sounding boards in unit or lesson planning, and, of course, can teach lessons themselves.
Here’s an example of how we did that to support the Open Letters Contest.
Katrina Kaplan, one of my librarian colleagues and a seasoned educator, collaborated with JoAnna Bueckert-Chan, a ninth-grade English teacher whose mix of general and special education students were participating in the contest.
Ms. Kaplan noticed that Ms. Bueckert-Chan had scaffolded the open letter into a graphic organizer. Ms. Kaplan said she was thrilled to see that it “incorporated a lot of the library research skills that we teach, like our foundational skills on evaluating online sources.”
That’s right, as school librarians we have our own academic standards we work to help students meet. In New York State, they’re set forth in the Empire State Information Fluency Continuum alongside the New York State Next Generation Standards for English Language Arts. They include skills such as evaluating “digital information for authority, credibility, accuracy, comprehensiveness, point of view and bias” and using “advanced searching strategies (Boolean operators, truncation, domain and format filters, analysis of URLs, relational searching) to broaden and narrow searches and locate appropriate resources.”
Librarian Brain: Students will need these skills to do research for their letters, and searching a database is quite different from searching on Google. It’s also crucial that students cite their sources. How can we support that work?
In a class of students with diverse learning needs, Ms. Bueckert-Chan was aware that some of her students would need more one-on-one support and differentiated instruction. Ms. Kaplan stepped in. She guided students through generating keywords for their topics. For example, she taught them how to conduct their database searches using synonyms, broader terms (“economics” vs. “gross domestic product”), controlled vocabulary (“absenteeism” vs. “students skipping school”) and proper nouns. Then she showed them how to properly gain access to our databases and use the search tools. She also helped students practice evaluating resources they found online and determining which ones were reliable and relevant.
Beyond simply being helpful, Ms. Kaplan’s work was good standards-based instruction. This open letter assignment was a great example of inquiry-based work, in which students were the ones leading the questioning, investigation and discovery.
Librarian as Connector
Librarians often have a sense of what is happening in the school. This means that, from their bird’s-eye view, they can spot patterns in the kinds of support teachers need and that, with their “librarian brains,” they can help make connections across different classes and grade levels to facilitate cooperation and resource sharing.
One of my favorite collaborations, for example, was connecting two classes of seniors for a science fiction assignment. One was a class of physics majors (my school uses a major system) who had expertise in the science side. The other was an English class studying speculative science fiction, with expertise in the literary side. Pairs of students — one from each class — worked together to write a work of fiction, and their pieces were deeply enhanced because of one another’s expertise.
Working collaboratively not only improves everyone’s work, but also is more efficient. “Teachers may feel like they’re looking for resources in a silo,” said Joy Ferguson, one of my librarian colleagues. “Why not work together to find the best and most accessible resources for our students?”
Librarian Brain: What opportunities are there for classes to work collaboratively in the Open Letters Contest? If students are working on the same topic, can they share resources and ideas? How can we connect teachers who are participating?
For our internal school contest, that connector skill also came in handy. As we started to think about how we might honor the winners and offer students an authentic audience for their writing, I reached out to Tom Wentworth, a social studies teacher and the faculty adviser for the school newspaper, to see if publishing some of the student submissions was a possibility. He was excited to speak about the contest, and even able to gain his staff’s permission to publish the winning articles on the newspaper website.
This connection also initiated an ongoing conversation with him and all the English teachers involved. Ms. Bueckert-Chan, who had not known Mr. Wentworth before this project, is now looking for ways to collaborate in the future. She later said to me that she felt librarians “are sometimes the glue between staff members.”
This is just another way that collaborating with your school librarian can be powerful and deeply supportive of what is happening in your classroom, and can even strengthen connections across the school community.
Librarian as Architect
After coming up with the idea for a schoolwide competition, I reached out to see if the participating teachers would be interested.
They were — so, working with them, I helped to establish the following framework:
Teachers will read their classes’ essays and nominate five “honorable mentions” from each section.
A judging team made up of a librarian, a teacher and a literacy coach will read these honorable mentions and select about half as semifinalists.
From the semifinalists, the judging team will select 10 to advance as finalists.
The school newspaper staff will judge the finalists and select the schoolwide winners.
The winning entries will be published on the school website!
Ultimately, teachers, along with the judging team, selected five finalists. We found that the strongest pieces were ones that blended passionate reasoning with good research.
As The Learning Network did with their previous student winners, I interviewed our winners about the experience, and a talented student library monitor helped me edit the footage into the four-minute video above. Teachers plan to use it this year to inspire the next set of student writers, and one is already asking all her students to make reflection videos based on ours!
As promised, our school newspaper published both the winning pieces and the student video. They even created a new section on the site just for student work — which will pave the way to celebrate future contributions.
And, in the end, two of our students were recognized among the top entries of The Learning Network’s contest! Aila Woods, who wrote “To the Mothers of the 9-Year-Olds in Sephora,” was a runner-up, and Santiago Vira, who wrote “To the 3-D Printing Industry, Let’s Fix This,” was an honorable mention.
As we prepare for this year’s competition, I’m planning to push into more classrooms to assist with research and urge students to add more personality to their letters.
Librarian as Ms. Universe
Librarians often have to win everyone over. Ms. Kaplan reminded me that every time we work with a new group of students, we think: “How do I immediately establish trust?” And “prove to them that the time they’re going to spend with me is going to be really valuable?”
Working to win over teachers can be even harder. In my experience, classroom teachers tend to collaborate with librarians at specific moments in their careers: when they’re just starting out, when they’re new to a school or when they need to learn about a program or curriculum they’ve never encountered before.
But it doesn’t need to stop there. While some people still see librarians as the guardians of the books and glorified “shush-ers,” in this project we taught best practices of research and connected teachers across departments. We came up with a way for more student voices to be heard and created a program, start to finish, to celebrate their work. Your school librarian has these skills and more, and is so happy to assist you and enhance the hard work you do.
Librarian Brain: If you are reading this, consider this your opportunity to go chat up your school librarian! What big idea do you have for your students? How might your librarians help you envision, plan, teach or share resources for it? Share what you’re working on and I’ll bet they’d love to find a way to collaborate.
