With our trailer in tow, our family racked up 3,700 miles and visited 15 different cities in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Florida, North Carolina and Georgia this past summer in an effort to educate our girls about the world outside of Rome, Ga.
Although trailer traveling is not glamorous, our family spends many evenings playing cards, cooking out and meeting campground neighbors from far away places when we travel with our trailer. Not only do we see a lot of the country this way, but we also have uninterrupted communication time with our girls for days on end. Whether talking in the truck as we travel or chatting by a campfire, our conversations and laughter are what I treasure most from our travels. I wouldn’t trade the invaluable time we have with them for anything and I imagine my daughters will feel the same, as they get older. (If you ask my younger daughter now, she’ll tell you our trips and our togetherness are torture for her.)
In addition to my family travels, I attended the Association of Independent School Librarians Summer Institute in St. Louis, Missouri after receiving the Thatcher Faculty Development and Research Award. Dr. Michelle Shira Hagerman, the Director of Graduate Certificate Programs in Educational Technology and Online Teaching and Learning at Michigan State University, led our group of 40 librarians from across the United States through a two-day discussion of information literacies in a class entitled At The Center of IT All: Scaffolding Advanced Information Literacies for K-12 Students in School Libraries.
Through our class discussions and our guiding essential question, “How should we teach students to develop the advanced literacies skills that will allow them to thrive in a complex and ever-changing landscape of literacies,” we explored the complexities of learning and improving reading comprehension abilities when studying online materials. We recognized that advanced literacy skills need to be taught through lessons that include synthesis of texts using techniques such as think-alouds.
This effective technique requires teachers to model the synthesis of two passages with their classes first and then guide their students into deeper meaning. Although think-alouds are not new to education, technology adds a new component that requires students to think about how to approach online passages, how to navigate and negotiate Google searches, how to monitor and evaluate information that is found and then how to synthesize and respond to their search results while circumnavigating many distractors like popups and ads.
I relished our discussions and learned a great deal about teaching students to become successful learners in our technological world. However, I most enjoyed the opportunity I had to network with other librarians. Through our class homework and projects, I bonded with several librarians I’d not met previously and I reconnected with those that I see often at our yearly AISL conference. This professional time with my peers afforded me creative opportunities to discuss ideas I have on my mind for our libraries and to see what has worked and not worked in other libraries. Without the Thatcher Award, I would have missed out on this professional opportunity and thus am greatly appreciative of this generous grant.
