My Backstory: Brand New in the Media Center

I was hired to be the Media Specialist at The Great Southwest Middle School after having taught Language Arts and Reading for 9 years. The position had always appealed to me but I was afraid. I was afraid I wouldn't be knowledgeable enough. I was afraid teachers wouldn't want to work with me. I was afraid the students wouldn't respond well to all the ideas I had tucked away.

The Media Specialist before me was retiring after serving our school for 28 years. She was there when the school opened.

The first thing I did after it was announced that I would be taking over is that I sent out two surveys school-wide. One for teachers and one for students. It was so encouraging to see that many of the things teachers and kids wanted were the exact things I was planning on implementing. But there were several things that deeply saddened me. 60 % of the students who responded said they were uncomfortable coming to the Media Center for anything. They marked that they hated coming and that they only came when their teachers made them.

I made this my number one priority for my first year. I needed to make my Media Center approachable. A place where kids and teachers wanted to be.

The other thing that posed a challenge is that our collection had almost 20,000 books in it and over 14,000 of them were out-of-date, obsolete, or just plain gross and old...like with dead bugs in them. There was no comfortable seating at all, not much space for anything, and no color. In my first year, my assistant and I weeded ALL the books that needed to go, were able to clear out 3 large areas of shelving we no longer needed, and I found all the comfortable seating in our school and claimed it as my own. We even cleared all the primary source documents off the wall and painted it the most beautiful shade of bright aqua.

I wrote several grants to get us maker space materials because the other schools in our district were passing us by. Moment of honesty here: most of the maker space stuff were things I had no idea how to use but I figured I'd get there or someone could teach me. I just needed to get it in the building.

I scrounged up a lot of old board games and started putting them out in the morning for the kids to come in and hang out. I put out fancy coloring books. Opened up the computers for homework use. Most importantly, I opened the doors and smiled a lot.

Teachers were so excited to bring their students in for classes and the kids were starting to come on their own. SUCCESS!

But now I found myself with a new problem. Many (not all!) of our students come to us below grade level and are struggling readers. In past years our school had offered a school-wide read of a particular novel but participation had been slowly decreasing. We needed something new. One of our Reading teachers brought me an idea of a 20 book challenge she wanted to do with her students based on Donalyn Miller's The Book Whisperer. The Literacy Coach, our ELA Department Head, and I decided we should just do that as our school-wide read so we started our school wide #swms20bookchallenge. I'll be posting more about this soon in case you have questions about our book challenge.

From there, I started rolling the challenge our to our kiddos, we did a HUGE book fair where I dressed in costumes, the whole Media Center was decorated with the theme, and we had stations. The kids loved it so much. Then, they started reading.

In my first year as a Media Specialist, we cleaned up the collection, made it look like a completely different space (as much as we could), and did all the literacy events we could come up with. We had 64% of our entire school participating in our reading challenge. It was such an incredibly successful year.
  

As I was reflecting back on it, I couldn't believe how much we (not just me)  were able to accomplish in one year. I was amazed....and very tired.

Year two was last school year (2017-2018) and we just took what was already working and ran with it. We made adjustments to our reading challenge to build excitement and participation. We added more events including an author visit with Christina Diaz Gonzalez, Banned Book Week, a book launch party for Kwame Alexander's book Rebound (our kids can't get enough of his books!) , a 64 Book March Madness School-Wide Book Tournament (Kwame won), and Book Bash. I wrote more grants, ran more events, and we got even more kids reading. 82% of our entire school participated in our reading challenge.

I write this so you know where I started. I started as someone who was terrified of failure. I started as someone who had a big mess to clean up. What I've learned in two years as a Media Specialist is that no idea is too crazy, you can do anything with some great teacher friends and admin to support you, and that whatever big thing you hope you accomplish at your school can be done. You just have to find a way. 

This year is going to be amazing! Already we have become a Project Lit Community School, I'm working on some BIG author visits, we have refined our reading challenge even more, and I'm excited for a big year.

The whole purpose of this blog is to share some of these adventures with you. A place where I can share our successes and our failures. A place where you can see students learn to love reading and learning. A place with great book recommendations. A place of encouragement and a place that provides how-to's for all the insane things we come up with. I hope you will follow along on my journey and share any encouraging words or great ideas with me!