Thanks to all the participants who attended the spring regional workshop!

Don't forget to add in your thoughts and reflections to our Flipgrid: https://flipgrid.com/eadb06.

Defending intellectual freedom for students starts with examining your policies at the district or school level. Can you locate the district policies that relate to selection and reconsideration of school library materials? Have you read them? These should be your guide for the procedures you use in choosing materials (print and non-print) for your collection.

Planning for NCSLMA Conference 18 is well underway! We have an exciting slate of preconferences, and the Call to Present  has gone out. Be thinking about the AMAZING things you do in your library and submit a session idea.

Bitsy Griffin
[email protected]

Play with Words: Motivating Students to be Creative Writers

An explanation of the research question and objective of the project:
What happens to my students’ writing when I incorporate new instructional strategies to teach poetry and give students more time write poetry in a stimulating environment?
1.What happens to students’ motivation to write?
2. What happens to how invested they are in revising their work?
3. What happens when they revise their work with their peers?
4. What happens when they share their work with an audience?
5. Does their writing get better?

Reaching the Reluctant Reader: What We Learned Through Our Read 2 Succeed Grant

Overview: As a high school librarian in Davidson County and recipient of a 2016 Read 2 Succeed Grant, I partnered with English teacher Krysta Perkins to support her Sustained Silent Reading initiative. Our goal was to engage reluctant readers by purchasing several high-interest books that would appeal to varied interests and reading levels, and to ensure we had multiple copies of popular titles available to students. By reaching out to reluctant readers in this way, we hoped students who avoided reading in the past would come to embrace it. Although we hit some snags along the way and not every student responded to reading the way we hoped they would, we did find some success in reaching reluctant readers.

The Read 2 Succeed grant provided by NCSLMA greatly improved instruction and student learning at Nags Head Elementary school this year. The grant funded a project called “Making Money in Media: Entrepreneurship & The Lemonade War”. This was a collaborative effort between Chelsea Brantley, Media Coordinator, and Katie Blanchard, 3rd grade teacher.

This grant helped teachers improve students’ digital competencies, while also teaching the 3rd grade math and social studies curriculum. There is a need for more collaboration between the media coordinator and classroom teachers, and this project demonstrates student success with these individuals working together. Both parties wanted to extend the 3rd grade study of The Lemonade War to include components beyond Language Arts and Social Studies. So, the teachers planned a unit that turned their students into young entrepreneurs.

Come see Action Research Grant recipient, Karen Maxon at #NCSLMA16 from 3:00-3:50 on Friday in "Terrace 3"

Do you ever wonder how to really help students in the research process?  It seems that I am always wrestling with this professional goal.   My most recent grapple has been the 2015-16 NCSLMA Action Research Grant Rugby Raider Researcher, How Does Your Brain Grow.  The grant focuses on using the cognitive demands of the research process as an avenue to help students develop a growth mindset.  My objective is to investigate if applying a growth mindset will increase students’ emotional resilience during the research process.  My hope is that students will show increased persistence and adaptability in the pursuit of information when completing projects that require depth in their learning.

As I mentioned, it is a professional passion of mine that “research” be synonymous with the process of focusing topics, developing questions, seeking, evaluating, and citing credible sources, and synthesizing information into something that is uniquely a student’s own creation.  I fervently want research to mean more to teachers and students than Google searching, copying, and pasting, none of which requires any meaningful engaged “think time” or ownership of synthesizing information.