2016 Back to the Book

New York Library Association Section of School Librarians

2016 Carol A. Kearney Educational Leadership Institute

School Librarians: Getting Back to the Book

Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

July 28 & 29, 2016

Presenter: Olga Nesi

In September of 2015 Olga became the librarian of Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn. For the four years prior to returning to a school, she was a library coordinator for the NYC Department of Education Office of Library Services. Her career in education started with teaching for seven years at the middle school level and was followed by eleven years as a middle school librarian. In addition to having written articles for School Library Journal, School Library Monthly and Knowledge Quest, she wrote Getting Beyond “Interesting” – Teaching Students the Vocabulary of Appeal to Discuss Their Reading and contributed the chapter entitled “What is the ‘Core” of the

Common Core State Standards?” to the title Inquiry and the Common Core: Librarians and Teachers Designing Teaching for Learning (both published by Libraries Unlimited). In a very distant life, she managed bookstores in Manhattan.

Institute: Thursday 7/28 1:00pm to 5:00pm; Friday 7/29 8:30am-3:00pm

Does the vision you have for school-wide reading match how reading is “done” in your building?

Do you get the sense that you are promoting reading in isolation?

Are you the reading “voice in the wilderness?”

How is a strong reading culture established and maintained?

What specific part can school librarians play in implementing meaningful school wide reading initiatives?

What steps can we take to “prime” our schools for meaningful reading culture change? 

While reading motivation is often a one-on-one activity, transforming the reading culture of a building requires multiple partnerships to be gradually and thoughtfully developed: The more partners that are involved in motivating students to read, the more reading students will do. The more systematically and intelligently students discuss their reading with each other, the more encouraged they will be to read. School wide reading culture change cannot happen without our commitment to consistently meeting the needs of the various constituents in our school communities. Join us for a deep exploration of the questions and a sharing of immediately implementable strategies for transforming the reading culture of your school.