Norris School District

On Friday, we received great news at Norris High School.  It came in the form of Nancy Martin’s e-mail to faculty that we are ready to start checking out books to students.  The efforts of Nancy and her team should be hailed as they have worked so diligently to get the Media Center back into a functional space after suffering massive water damage to the contents and casing.  We should also feel grateful that although the Media Center is far from completely restored to its previous condition, Nancy is fully aware of the importance of Media Center accessibility and wants to invite you back in and make the space available to students as quickly as possible.  As Keith Curry Lance pointed out in his 1994 meta-analysis on “The Impact of School Library Centers on Academic Achievement,” reading and information literacy go hand in hand, and they are highly, positively correlated to academic achievement.  We’ve got a media center now, people!  We are better able to encourage information literacy and the enhancement of content-specific background knowledge in our students than we were just a month ago!

As the Media Center opens, I also hope many of you recall Rhonda Burbach’s statement to middle and high school faculties at the block schedule staff development at Southeast Community College in August.  Rhonda suggested that every student should have a book with them at all times and that the book should be a choice reading book.  Why a “choice” reading book?  Because, as Marilyn Reynolds notes in her book I Won’t Read and You Can’t Make Me, textbooks should never be the sole source of relied-upon information and choice reading enhances motivation to learn.  She cautions us to “beware of weapons of mass instruction.”  In Rhonda’s comment, she noted that choice reading maximizes time on task but also enhances the reading fluency (rate + comprehension) of students.  She’s absolutely right: Rhonda’s statements are in accordance with the International Reading Association’s position statement on Adolescent Literacy.  The position statement emphasizes the importance of access to a wide variety of reading materials that are of interest to students.  The acquisition of background knowledge from choice reading materials connects back to the information literacy skills, language skills, and content knowledge that helps students achieve at greater levels on measures as diverse as classroom-based assessments of objectives and norm-referenced tests like the ACT.  So getting your students into the Media Center to give them a chance to grab a book --- or simply encouraging them to bring a book for independent reading from home --- is a great means of enhancing achievement.

All of the above is also meant to serve as a reminder that although we have a “bye” year for the official NCA School Improvement cycle, reading remains a profoundly important life skill and it remains essential for each of us to model effective reading practices and infuse those into our instruction whenever the opportunity avails itself.  Have a fantastic week and I hope you get a chance to send some kids to our Media Center soon!