Less Than Awesome

One of my biggest goals for this year has been to make sure I did something really cool with the kids at least once a week. To step outside of my comfort zone or try something new. To build on something I've done before but make it better.

Up until this past week, I've succeeded at that goal.

This week I didn't.

We didn't have school Monday in observance of Veteran's Day.

Tuesday I had scheduled for us to do a massive pull-out for Learning Ally to get all of our students who qualify set up and make sure they knew how to use it. Due to some miscommunication, we weren't ready for that and instead spent the day as a team cleaning up accounts. We deleted duplicate accounts and made sure every kid who needed an account had it and printed their log in information. Learning Ally is a really amazing tool for students who struggle with reading for a variety of reasons. It gives them access to something like 80,000 titles of audio books. It is really incredible.  It was a day full of doing things that needed to be done, but not what I was expecting. I did get a phone call from Follett and they want me to present at a national conference next year. That's pretty stupid cool but the deadline for my application is coming up in a HOT minute so I really need to get on it.

Wednesday I took the day off because I was feeling really worn down from all the things I've been doing and I had my interview to be considered for Teacher of the Year for Brevard County in the afternoon. I knew I'd be much better prepared if I was well-rested. I didn't sleep in because I still had to take my kids to school. I spent the morning tackling a "to do" list instead of resting like I should have done. Right after my interview, I got several missed calls from my daughter's school saying she was sick. One Urgent Care visit later and we found out she had Strep.

Thursday = no school to stay home and take care of a sick kiddo. I also delivered some food to my kids's school to help contribute to a Thanksgiving Feast for the teachers and staff that the families of our church put on each year. I thought I could get some school work done from home but that did not happen.

Friday I could have been on an awesome field trip to the Miami-Dade Book Fair to see Jason Reynolds with our Reading students but I didn't know if I'd need to be with Ansleigh (my daughter) so I didn't go. My husband stayed home with her so I wouldn't miss another day of school. I thought I'd have a day of scoring 20 Book Challenge responses and working on my conference presentations (coming up soon and the new one requested by Follett) but instead I was asked to cover for a teacher because we were short on substitutes. I brought them all to the Media Center and let them check out and read. It was an early release day and they all needed books so that's what we did. I also had a meeting with someone to help her with research she's doing on how Media Specialists choose resources to promote diversity.

I literally didn't do anything cool with the kids this week except share what book I was reading with some students who were curious why I was so into my book when I sat and read with them. I'd love to share something incredible but I just don't have it.

I would like to tell you about my TOY Interview. I promised I'd be transparent about it and I want to.

My interview was blocked off for 30 minutes in the afternoon. There were 10 other secondary teachers being interviewed for the south area of our county (where I teach) and 8 of them went before me. When I walked into the room, it was my former principal who always runs this committee and hosts the interviews plus last year's south area finalists. I expected to see more people so I was kind of relieved that there were only four people plus me. I was told they'd ask me 10 questions and I could take a few minutes to look over the questions before we got started. What a gift! Although, honestly, I was so worried I'd run out of time answering the questions that I didn't want to spend a lot of time looking at the questions. I read through each one quickly and tried to think of a quick response I could give when they got to that question. I didn't spend nearly enough time on it. Once they started asking the questions, I tried my best to speak from my heart and not repeat the same answer over and over again but I honestly don't know what I actually said to them.

They asked me why I chose to go into teaching which gave me an opportunity to talk about my dad, which then lead me to start crying right on my first question. It wasn't ugly crying but I definitely teared up a lot. I was able to share his story of how he grew up and how he always impressed on me how important it was to be there for these kids. I also got to share how he passed away right as I was starting as a Media Specialist (literally, he passed away during pre-planning) and how hard I've worked to make him proud. I think I did well on that question.

They asked me several others about how I differentiate instruction, how I am part of school-wide initiatives and what leadership roles I have in that, how I collaborate with others and how I used project-based learning, how I participate in professional development (participating and leading) across the district and state, and how I involve the community. I honestly don't know if I even really answered their questions. It's so hard to tell. I spoke about the specific things they asked me and tried to give them new information for each question they asked. I tried my very best to impress up on them how much teamwork it takes to make any of this happen and how it isn't all me. I tried to make everything about the kids and what they are doing. I saw a lot of head nodding but couldn't really get a feel for how receptive they were. They were definitely hard to judge.

They asked me two other questions that I felt good about. They asked me something about stakeholders. I don't even remember what the question was but I got so excited. I started sharing with them how we have involved the community in our 20 Book Challenge, our City Councilman who participates in our Project Lit Book Club, the Mayor and our School Board Representative being at our event, the authors I share with on a regular basis, and how I use social media to share with the companies of products we are using (Nearpod, Ozobot, Follett, etc.), publishers of books our kids read, and other teachers and librarians across the globe. I even got to share about flying to New York to be on Bookish to share with not just our stakeholders, but Kwame's stakeholders as well, how awesome our kids are, how hard they are working, and how much they love his books. I told them that all of those people are ALL stakeholders because our kids have the power to change the world and all of these companies and authors are involved in that process. I was so excited to share my passion about why I work so hard to let the world know what we are doing. I may not have answered what they asked, but goodness gracious, I gave them an answer!

The other question I felt really good about was when they asked me if I could tell them about a specific student who had been impacted by what I do. I thought of S.C. who had never finished a book in his life until 8th grade and *almost* finished the 20 Book Challenge. He read every book we had by Kwame and Jason Reynolds. I thought of T.W. who hated to read and then started reading Kwame's books and in a few months his Reading Plus scores jumped several grade levels. I thought of A.C.T. who came to us as an English Language Learner and didn't like reading. I gave him The Red Umbrella in Spanish and asked him to read it for me and let me know if it was worth putting in the library. He loved it so much he asked for another copy to send to his family. He read all of Christina Diaz Gonzalez's books and finished our 20 Book Challenge in ENGLISH!!!!!! I didn't tell their stories though. I knew once I started telling those stories, I wouldn't be able to stop and all of those kiddos are in high school now. Instead, I told the story of M. B. who is a 7th grader right now. Her sister reads more than I do (and that's a lot!) and her mom mentioned that I wouldn't probably see M.B. as much because she never reads...ever. She's been trying for YEARS to get her to read and she doesn't like it. I convinced her Reading teacher to start the year reading The Crossover as a class and since then, homegirl can't put down a book. She's logged 9 books so far this year! 9!!!!!!!!

I ended up answering all of their questions with some time to spare (which is a miracle straight from Heaven because I'm always long-winded) and I was able to take a few minutes to talk about the state of our Media program when I took over and what kind of work we had to do to get it from where it was to where it is now.

I left not really sure of how well I did or if they cared at all about what I had to say. I do know that I had the opportunity to share how our students shine and how I get to be part of that.

The next step in the process is that they will choose three finalist and notify those three somehow in the next two weeks or so. The committees will go watch those teachers teach in December or early January. Beyond that, I'm not really sure what happens. I'm not too worried about it. I have no expectations to make it any further than I already have. I'm just thankful I got the opportunity to sit in that seat and represent my school to the best of my ability.

Author Visits

When I first became a Media Specialist, I heard about other schools having authors come to their schools for a visit. My immediate thoughts were that it would be awesome to do that but...

1. How do you know these authors/get in touch with these authors?
2. How do you pay for a visit like that?

Some schools or districts may work differently, but in my school in my district, I am given funds from the state to purchase materials that circulate (books, maker space materials, etc.) but I can't spend it on anything else. Any other funding needed for things such as basic supplies, processing materials, prizes, promotional materials, events, etc must be fund-raised.

My first year in the Media Center I connected with a local author named Jaimie Engle and we brought her in for Literacy Week. We paid for her to come for the day and we ran four sessions of kids through the Media Center. We worked with our Culinary Department to feed her a nice lunch and used our Young Author's Club to work the event for us.  It was a great event and the kids enjoyed the visit a lot but I think they would have enjoyed it a lot more if they had read her books before the visit. It was still a really awesome day and a great way to get my feet wet.
                                       
Last year, my second year in the Media Center, I met Christina Diaz Gonzalez at our annual FAME conference. She has several books out that are amazing but her book Moving Target was one of our SSYRA books for last year. It is SUCH a great book and my students loved the series so very much. When I started planning our 20 Book Challenge celebration day, I reached out to her to possibly schedule a visit. She lives in Florida so that definitely helped with the cost. Christina was so gracious and incredible with us. We got to have a special author lunch with Christina and all of our finishers and then we did an author session where I brought in other students as well. Even better, I was able to share her with another local school and we were able to split the cost. The students absolutely loved her and it was so much fun!

This week, in my third year as a Media Specialist, we were able to host Newberry winner Kwame Alexander, the DAY his new book Swing launched. If you've read this blog at all, you know how much our students LOVE his books so this was a really big deal.

Kwame and I met years ago when he was the Keynote speaker at a small conference I helped with. He had just published Acoustic Rooster and His Barnyard Band and He Said, She Said was about to come out. P.S. He was just as dynamic then as he is now. We met again at my first FAME conference and he remembered me. The Crossover was an SSYRA book that year and as my students fell in love with it, I began to share that with him on social media. We continued to run into each other at conferences and I continued to share with him on social media. I was able to get on the launch teams for Solo, Rebound, and Swing. Kwame is such an awesome guy and he truly loves kids and wants to make the world a better place. When the opportunity came up to start the tour at our school, I knew I had to make it happen. He has been so gracious with me and so good to our students.

In just two days I was able to find enough support and raise enough money to fund the visit. TWO. That is how much our staff believed in this and wanted to make it happen for our kids. This is the biggest thing I've ever tried to pull off. Ever. I was so nervous and so worried about all the details and not letting anyone down.

We decided the visit would be in the Media Center and we'd put 200 students in there. We've never tried to put 200 kids in there but my Head Custodian is amazing and said he'd help me move all the furniture out and we'd make it happen and that's what we did. We announced to the staff he was coming and Follett and our awesome rep, Sherri Smith Dodgson, donated 100 copies of Kwame's books to our school. I handed them out to teachers like they were Halloween candy. Then, we announced to the students that he was coming. I told them that the first 200 students who successfully logged one of his books in our 20 Book Challenge would get to be in the Media Center. The rest of the school would get to watch through a live camera feed.

His books stay checked out anyway but we had kids coming in every day looking for them. We had two teachers do read-alouds with it and gave their students the opportunity to log the book. My team and I scored these responses until we were blue in the face. I did lessons with the classes on how to answer a prompt, what a response that wouldn't be accepted looked like, what a good one looked like, and how to fix their response if they didn't actually tell me anything about the book. I was up until 1 in the morning many nights scoring responses and giving these kids individual feedback so they'd know if they got in or not.  Monday morning we published the list and the visit happened Tuesday.

I decorated the Media Center to reflect the themes of the new book. We got copies of the book for all 200 kids. Our Art students made incredible banners to welcome Kwame and Randy to the school. Our Show Choir kids created a routine and performed "Be a Star" at the start of the event. We got the Mayor there, lots of important District people there, and District Communications came. I had more volunteers than I've ever seen before and it was THE BEST DAY EVER!

Days later, our whole school is still taking abut it. The kids loved it. Every single student I asked said it was way better than everything I said it would be. It was also such an incredible learning experience for me. I got to work closely with his booking agent, Carmen, who is awesome and I also got to work directly with his publishing company to make sure our books would be there in time. I got to meet the marketing person for a local independent bookstore and she is amazing. I planned and coordinated with another Media Specialist, Ana Woodbrey, who went in on the visit with me. I got to bounce ideas off so many people. The greatest thing I learned is how much support I truly have from the entire community and how much our staff believes in me to do good things for our kids.

The photos and videos from the event are so incredible. Rachel Horst, one of our District Communications people, did an amazing job capturing the pure joy on the faces of these kids. It will be something I will always remember.

While I've only been through three author visits, I feel like I've experienced and learned a lot. If you are looking to host an author visit for the first time here are a few tips:

1. Don't be scared to try!
2. Reach out to authors. They are AMAZING! Really. They love kids and they want to come to your school. 
3. If you can plan well in advance, do it. 
4. Do all the fundraisers all the time so you have money in your account for times like this when a crazy opportunity comes up.
5. Believe in yourself and your abilities to organize and run an event.
6. ASK FOR HELP! 

Y'all. It took a village to make this visit happen and I'm so very thankful for everyone who helped. It makes everything better when we all work together. 

The SWMS 20 Book Challenge

The #swms20bookchallenge has taken off and spread across the country which is pretty freaking exciting. I've presented several times at conferences and Professional Development days and it has spread across our district and even our state. Recently I began getting emails or direct messages on social media asking me questions about it from all over the country. It's a great program but it is so hard to explain in a brief way, especially in 140 characters or less.

So here ya go...the basics.

How We Started:
We needed something that would really, truly get our students to read. SO VERY MANY of our students come to us significantly below grade level in reading or they've just lost their love for books. Let me be clear, not all of our students meet this description. We had some students who are high-flyers and tons of kids who have always liked to read but we have a large number of students who really struggle. I was a brand new Media Specialist and our Literacy Coach at the time was also brand new to her position. Our school doesn't have Reading Counts or AR. Our school had tried some school-wide reads of a single book but that just wasn't really working anymore. One of the greatest reading teachers of all time, Diamelia Christie, came to me and said she'd been reading Donalyn Miller's books and wanted to do a 20 Book Challenge with her students. She asked me if I could help her with it and help them find books that fit in those categories. After looking at it and talking about it with our Reading Coach and English Department Head, we decided to try and make that our school-wide read for the year instead of just doing one book for the masses.

We took it to our administration and they told us we could try it but they seemed a little skeptical. We took the categories of the books and we ran with it. Within two or three weeks we had it ready to roll out to the whole school. We wanted some accountability so we built a Google Classroom and had a Google Form for each category. The students had to log in and "log" their book by completing the form with a short response question that would tell us if they read the book or not. Once the students logged their book, we read their response and either gave them credit or asked them to resubmit their response. Let me just add, that our ELA Department Head, Katy McGregor, is the Queen of all things Google and she totally rocks my socks off. She makes my life SO much easier. She builds all of our Google stuff and makes us all look smart. 😜

Our Reading Coach at the time, Brandy Griswell, is a rock star of epic proportions (who has since been promoted to an Assistant Principal of Curriculum at another school) and she called ALL the local businesses and got donations for us to give away as prizes. Once a month we'd go into the cafeteria and draw names. The more books logged, the more times your name was in the drawing. We gave away prizes like gift cards to the local Chick-fil-a or the local ice cream joint. The kids really started getting into it. Prizes are not something Donalyn Miller would go for but it works for us. It started out as an incentive and helped motivate the kids to get started.

In December, she started pulling their data and showing it to the team teachers and they were blown away. The students who were actively participating in our challenge had HUGE reading gains in just 3 months. Once they saw the data, the rest of our staff got on board and our admin team really became believers and started promoting the program as hard as they could.

We themed everything around the challenge so it was literally school-wide. I tagged the books on the shelves for which categories they could count as, set up book displays for some categories, and even tagged all the books in the book fair. We made Florida Literacy Week into The 20 Book Challenge Literacy Week. We printed posters and banners and hung our propaganda all over the school.

Results:
We ended up having a ton of books logged (2,828 to be exact) and had 25 students who finished the challenge. We built them swag bags with prizes and new books and then they all got to go to a local restaurant and have lunch with our principal and get to order whatever they wanted on the menu. I'm going to be really honest. We thought the prize was super lame but we couldn't afford anything else. I was blown away by how much the kids loved it and how excited they were to be able to pick whatever they wanted on the menu. We kept them out of class all day and then pulled all the kids who had logged 10 books or more into the cafeteria for a giant ice cream sundae party. They had a great time!

Changes for Year 2:
In the first year, our principal was very clear that the reading should be done outside of the classroom. He didn't want instructional time to be missed. Now, I could spend a solid 4 hours writing about the value of independent reading and discussion in the classroom and how it would meet all the standards and then some but that is another post for another day. We took what we could get in year one. In year two, the students were allowed to read during class for independent reading or as the assignment for when they had finished their work. The students were also given opportunities to log their books during warm up activities during class.

We changed our categories to be more flexible and meet the needs of our students. We found that many of the students who didn't finish the first year, didn't stop reading, they stopped logging because they found books they loved that didn't fit into the categories. We wanted to still challenge the kids but we also wanted to allow them the choice they so desperately crave. We wanted them to read what they love and be able to squeeze it into the challenge.

We worked to adjust the prompts to more closely mirror what they'd see on state tests but still feel like they are just talking about a good book. We wanted the skills tested to shine through with a text they enjoyed. Now let me be clear, we aren't trying to drill the kids to death. We use these prompts and logging their books as a conversation between them and us about the book they read. It isn't a grade or an essay or a test. The students write about the characters, the things that surprised them what they loved or didn't love. We prompt them to think and then respond and then we respond back to them.

We changed our feedback method and started using Google Classroom's grading feature to send individualized feedback to each student and really help them see what they were missing from their responses. With increased participation also came the need for additional grading so both of us (Literacy Coach & Media Specialist) took on that role.

We also added to our list of literacy-based events including Banned Book Week, Book Fair, March Madness Book Tournament, Book Bash, Book Launch Party, etc. and really worked to increase the hype.

We didn't give out any prizes throughout the year. We just had a HUGE celebration day.

Results:
We thought we had huge results for year one but they were just a drop in the bucket compared to our year two. We had the same numbers in December  (year two) as we had at the year's end of year one. We had 38 students finish and 12 teachers too. We scored over 10,000 responses and broke Google Classroom. 82% of our ENTIRE school willingly and actively participated in our challenge. Our students had books with them all the time and not just the ones you'd expect. I could share countless stories of students who had never seen success with reading that finished our challenge this year including students who struggled with English as their second language.

Our celebration day included jump time at a local trampoline park, a catered author lunch with Christina Diaz Gonzalez, an author session with her for all the students who logged 11 books or more, each finisher got an amazing t-shirt and they got a brand new book of their choice.

Changes for Year 3: 
Coming off of year two, the students are excited and so is the staff. We needed to solve some of the issues we found during year two so this year are going from one massive Google Classroom with the whole school in it to two Google Classrooms, one per grade. Katy is a genius and decided we should make one Google Form with 20 sections instead of 20 different Google Forms. This will help us cut down on students logging the same book for more than one category (be it on accident or on purpose). It will also help the students see which books/categories they have credit for and makes the whole process more streamlined for us and the students. We also have new categories that I'm SO excited about. We tie our Sunshine State Young Readers Award (SSYRA) books into the categories and our students can use our Project Lit books for this as well.  My favorite categories for this year are probably A Book Written in Verse, A Diverse Book--meaning a book about someone who is very different than themselves, and A Book You've Previously Abandoned. We are working to push the kids from thinking of reading as school work and seeing it as something they want to do and discuss.

We really love this program and what it does for students. We love the choice the kids have and how it has pushed them so far outside of their comfort zones. When one program can get so many students who come to us below grade level to be excited about the amazing books that are out there, you know you have something magical on your hands. 

This program can be adapted for a single classroom, a grade level, or for your particular school. It is being implemented in about 12 other schools in our district, several across our state, and a few in other states as well. If you aren't ready to start your own challenge but want to join us, please do! Just tweet out your books with our hashtag and tag me on Twitter. We'd love to see it! Currently NYT Best-Selling Author Tiffany Jackson is participating with us because she wants one of our shirts. 

Please feel free to contact me with questions about our program, how it works, or really just anything else. Also, make sure you follow our #swms20bookchallenge hashtag to keep up with all the great things that are happening.