Thank you for choosing this textbook for your students! The authors have put together the following resources to use while teaching this course. Please use the menu on the left hand side to download discussion questions for each chapter. 

Welcome Professors,

Whether you are a newly hired adjunct or assistant professor or a seasoned veteran, we thank you for choosing our textbook to use with your class. If you are an adjunct, you may find a syllabus waiting for you from the colleague you are replacing who is on leave. You may be a newly-hired faculty member whose predecessor left a file behind, or you may be an experienced faculty member who offered suggestions to us as we created this new edition. Most of you will be teaching in a master’s program and that means you may have experienced teachers of K-12 students as students in your class.

For those of you who are just beginning your journey, teaching at the graduate level means your students will be ready for a taste of the real world. They may have spent most of their education in programs where skills were assessed by testing with a “paper and pen” test and where “knowledge” was assessed by number of correct answers. This may be the format in the school where they now teach, but they need to have their master’s program reflect a curriculum that teaches them to think, to work in groups, to propose and carry out meaningful projects which will help them when they accept a position in a school library. It will lead them to model that teaching style in their workplace.

In the real world, school librarians will find their on-the-job grading “score” the number of students and teachers who use the library both during those assigned class visits and then the “extra” visits to get more information or materials or just because the library is, as Frances Henne described, “…a friendly place where the librarians are eager to help.”

You, as a professor in a higher education institution may be “graded” by students who are asked to rate their professors at the end of the term. You will be pleased when you observe students as they leave class in small groups continuing to talk about what they were discussing in the class. Your long-term high score will come when former students greet you happily at conferences and tell you what they are doing in their school. For some professors who teach totally online, it may be a glance at your name badge at a conference and then a smile of recognition followed by an excited list of they are doing in their schools.

This textbook was created to provide information for students to read before class so that they would have absorbed the basic information. It will provide you with the outline for a syllabus. Depending upon the number of weeks in the semester, you can double up on chapters if you have a shorter term or split one chapter into two if you need an additional week of classes.

School librarians wear many hats. They are there to encourage students to read and read widely for information and for recreation. They are there to teach students all the different literacies with emphasis on how to locate and evaluate information. They are there to help teachers teach and students learn. On top of this, they must manage their collections of materials and equipment to make sure the school library inventory is up-to-date, appropriate, available to students and teachers, accounted for to the community of taxpayers who provide the funding for schools.