Spring ISD libraries are dedicated to empowering students to become lifelong and enthusiastic readers and learners; to become safe, competent and ethical users of information and technology; and to develop skills that promote creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and integration into community.

In case you didn't know it, we modern librarians are not the same old shushers you see in the movies or maybe had while growing up. We are teacher-librarians. In fact, we call ourselves Literacy Information Technology Educators. Lessons I teach include how to do research, how to document sources, how to select good sources, how to evaluate sources, how to be safe and responsible online, and how to create products for assignments using technology. I also collaborate with teachers on their lessons.

My philosophy is based on sound reading research:

The Importance of Reading for Pleasure

Our students will enter a working world that demands complex and sophisticated reading skills. The greatest things we can do to improve our students' reading skills are to allow them a wide variety of reading materials, allow them to choose books for themselves, allow them time dedicated to silent reading, allow them opportunities to talk about what they are reading, and create a pleasant reading environment. This is the most important task we have in education. Please join us in creating lifelong lovers of reading.

For information about creating readers, please read Stephen Krashen's research results summarized in an easy read resource entitled The Power of Reading: Insights from the Research which analyzes years of reading research. Two other excellent resources for creating and empowering readers are Donalyn Miller's The Book Whisperer and Reading in the Wild. Everyone is welcome to check these books out of our library.

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WHAT'S WRONG WITH AR?

AR does not achieve the goal we are striving for: to create students who love to read and who really comprehend on a higher level.

Accelerated Reader was introduce in the 1990's as a method of testing whether or not students had read a book. The quizzes check for recall of details. We know that reading strictly for details is not what makes a lover of reading. It also does not indicate whether a student has read the book. It merely tests for their recall of details. And, as much as we hate the culture of "the test," the state standardized tests do not measure recall of details. That is a lower order question. The goal of instruction as well as the state tests is for students to be able to answer higher-order thinking questions. That means a student who is reading for quality comprehension may recall theme, characterization, mood, tone, and a host of other subtleties of a book and completely miss the tiny details. We prefer them to come away from a book with growth in their minds and characters.

AR can be a roadblock to our goals.

Our main goal is to create students who love to read. Someone who loves to read will read a lot. When we read a lot, we improve our reading. To borrow a comment from Teresa Schauer, a great librarian, "AR, when used incorrectly, can and many times does, literally become a tool of torture that we use to inflict pain on kids."

When AR is in place for a long time for students, it has a tendency to do the opposite and create kids who do not love to read. I can attest to this with my own family. My great readers who were always wanting more books and recommendations were very discouraged by being limited to a certain level or by being required to attain a certain number of points. One of mine finally resorted to reading Lord of the Rings every year over and over, just to reach his point requirements for his teacher. He then stopped having an interest in new books. He still reads only what he has to read. And this was the kid who always asked me for books by title. My girl who hated reading (sad to say) hated it even more after AR. In fact, she is now grown and is only just recently interested in my book recommendations once she sees her own children have started to love reading. It can take years to undo the harm or it may never be undone.

It does not agree with sound pedagogy and psychology research.

Another reason we don't like AR is that it was never meant to be a requirement. It was meant to be a motivational tool. Using a motivational tool such as this with extrinsic rewards flies in the face of psychology research on motivation. What we have in all of the research on psychology is a sound conclusion that attaching a reward to an activity that is meant to be pleasurable will actually backfire once the reward is removed. In other words, if we push AR on students and try bribing them with small trinkets or grades, they see the once pleasurable activity as a chore. Once the rewards are removed and we expect them to love the activity, they instead see it as a chore they no longer have to complete.

Reading levels have little meaning outside of beginning reader instruction.

A very important reason not to love AR is that the reading levels and point system do not align with the actual age or interests of the students.

For instance, we would want a high school student to read challenging literature about more mature topics, but a book aimed at middle school students may actually have more points or a higher Lexile level attached to it. Then two bad things could happen:

1. The student who is in middle school who should read the book due to age and interest will be discouraged from it because he will think the Lexile level is too high. But if students are interested enough, they will struggle to read something a bit challenging. And/Or
2. The student in high school will be required to read a book that is immature in content and has no appeal to him just so he can reach his points or Lexile level. Meanwhile, he is growing more discouraged about the joy of reading and is missing out on some great literature that is aimed at his interests and maturity level.

Examples of this folly would be that War and Peace and a book for a middle school audience may have the same Lexile level. So the high school student is forced to choose between options that he does not like just to satisfy an arbitrary goal.

Peter Rabbit is rated at a high level that indicates an adult should read it to a child, yet it is aimed at very young children. Why? Because Beatrix Potter refused to replace one word with an easier word. She knew children would infer the meaning of the word from context and refused to dumb it down to satisfy her publisher.

Students will miss out on books they might love!

Another reason is that all books do not have AR quizzes, so students will often refuse to read anything that has no quiz. In this way they miss out on some very good books that they might read if not for AR. This plays havoc with ordering and balancing a library collection, limits the librarians' choices to those with quizzes only because we know the books without will sit on the shelves in spite of their merits, and reduces the quality of the library collection.

For many reasons, librarians do not label books. It is unprofessional.

The American Library Association has a position statement about this which we follow. We do not want to label kids because we have labeled books.

It's expensive!

There is a huge reason not to invest in AR: money! It is an expensive program to buy into and expensive to maintain. We prefer that the money be spent on books and qualified librarians rather than on a canned program.

It's not the best use of highly qualified human resources.

The following statement is from Dr. Judi Moreillon, Associate Professor for the School of Library and Information Studies at Texas Women's University, and this states the case so well that I don't want to change a word.,

If the school librarian is the only one on campus managing AR and spending a great deal of time doing so, does she/he have sufficient time to meet her professional responsibilities? Is there enough time in a busy schedule to meet with teachers to coplan and coteach standards-based instruction if one is managing AR?

School librarianship is a complex leadership position on campus. Setting priorities for one's work is essential.

If your school is using AR, it would be my hope that your principal would assign the clerical aspects of AR to a paraprofessional so that you, the state-certified school librarian with a Master's degree in library science, can reach your professional capacity to positively impact students' learning and teachers' teaching.