Buffy Hamilton's Blog, page 12

Revisiting Book Tasting to Support Readers

My colleague Jennifer Lund and I have been working with some of our ninth grade teachers this week as part of a unit they are doing with students to give students an opportunity to select a book and engage in self-facilitated reading. As many of you may know, I used a strategy, “book tasting“, during my time at Creekview High to support inquiry and literature circles. Jennifer and I decided to adapt it for this unit, but our challenge was tweaking it for eight sections of classes, a variety...

Twitter Chat + Socratic Circles

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A few weeks ago we co-facilitated write-around text on text conversations with Emily Russell’s Language Arts classes in the library. The activity was such a hit with students and Ms. Russell that we decided to take our collaboration to the next level by combining a Twitter chat with Socratic circle discussions as the culminating conversation for the reading of The Glass Castle byJeannette Walls. I shared Ellen Hampton Filgo’s write-up of her experience as an embedded l...

Literacies of Contemporary Civic Life Speaker Series-Metanarratives of Literacy Practices: Libraries as Sponsors of Literacies

I would like to thank friend and colleague Dr. Antero Garcia and the Colorado State University Department of English for the opportunity to participate in “The Literacies of Contemporary Civic Life” speaker series here in Fort Collins, Colorado. I appreciate everyone who came out to hear the talk in person; we also captured video of the talk through a Google Hangout. The joy in these experiences is not only having a chance to contribute to a conversation, but to also learn from others—my thi...

Informational Text Write Around Text-on-Text with Biology/Chemistry Classes

My co-librarian Jennifer Lund and I are continuing our efforts to introduce written conversations strategies to students and teachers across content areas here at Norcross High. Yesterday we had the pleasure of collaborating with Science Department Chair Logan Malm and her 9th Accelerated Biology/Chemistry students. Logan teaches three sections of this course that meets for approximately an hour and half daily. Our collaborative efforts began when Logan, who was in the library working on a v...

Collection Weeding as Dendrochronology: Rethinking Practices and Exposing a Library’s Sponsors of Literacy

The Impetus to Weed our Print Collection

Since early September 2013, my colleague Jennifer Lund and I have been working on a large-scale and aggressive weeding project for our entire collection. This initiative was driven by two factors:

1. We recognized our collection was dated in many areas, and we also knew other areas were in demand and might need to updated, replaced, and/or expanded. We also have been working with faculty and students to foster a greater inclusion of reading choice for s...

Writing Around Text on Text Effort 2: Unplugged Conversations for Inquiry, Participation, and Social Construction of Meanings

This past Friday, my fellow librarian Jennifer Lund and I had another opportunity to help facilitate written conversations about texts using the strategies we learned in the Harvey Daniels workshop we attended in December 2013. Emily Russell, a teacher and Language Arts Department Chair we’ve collaborated with regularly this past year, and her students have been reading the memoir The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. When she came to us for ideas for helping students transact with the text a...

First Efforts at Written Conversations Strategies: Write-Around Text on Text

A collaborative post by Darrell Cicchetti, Jennifer Lund, and Buffy Hamilton
Background

Original photo by Buffy Hamilton

Earlier this month, my colleague Jennifer Lund and I attended a half day workshop sponsored by our Gwinnett County School District. We spent a Saturday morning with the smart and funny Harvey “Smokey” Daniels, who engaged us in a variety of strategies for helping learners transact with text more deeply while building writing fluency. Through his presentation as well as our han...

New DMLcentral Post: Questions for Auditing and Peeling Back the Layers of Ways Libraries Function as Sponsors of Literacies

Libraries as ‘Sponsors of Literacy and Learning’: Peeling Back the Layers | DMLcentral via kwout

In my newest post for DMLcentral , I share a list of questions libraries (academic, public, school) can use to “audit” the kinds of learning experiences and opportunities privileged as well as silenced within their institution. I see this working script as a springboard to conversations that can help a library take an ongoing stance on their literacy practices. The “audit” is designed to address a...

Librarians as Instructional Designers: Strategies for Engaging Conversations for Learning

CC image via http://bit.ly/1aG707c

School, academic, and public librarians often cite collaborative partnerships as one of the greatest challenges of the profession—how do we invite collaboration, how do we nurture and sustain those partnerships, and how might those efforts translate into additional endeavors? Identifying common goals and cultivating trust are two fundamental building blocks in this process, but libraries and librarians being sensitive to the needs of the community, whether it...

A Visit to the Lovett School Story Studio: Redesigning Learning Spaces, Rewriting Narratives of Learning

Yesterday I had the opportunity to visit the Lovett School Story Studio Project in Atlanta, Georgia. This project, which I have been following since its inception a little over a year ago, began with these seed questions:

What might be a classroom of the future?
How can we design existing space to be more dynamic?
How might a space support different learning styles?
How can we be more intentional about this “third space”?

The original pilot (Phase I) began with a secondary Language Arts teacher do...