Adapting Dewey: The Ups and Downs

 If you're reading this blog post, you're likely already aware of some of the downsides of the Dewey Decimal System, like how often people bring it up when they find out that you're a librarian. 

Other downsides include, but are not limited to:

• Eurocentrism
• Bigotry
• Confusion
  
• Lack of forethought (cramming the whole internet into the 00s)
• Significant portions of US history shelved in the 300s instead of the 900s because they relate to "social issues"

The list goes on. If you're looking for more in-depth information on this topic, I highly recommend Kelsey Bogan's Ditching Dewey blog posts (post 1, post 2, post 3). 

Aside from those larger Dewey issues, I have also struggled as a librarian trying to help students find things organized by the traditional DDC. I lost track of the number of times I would get asked for World War II books and say, "Well, you'll check here, and here, and here... " Or students students to the 600s for books on dogs and cats, but telling them to head back to the 500s for other pets like fish. And as someone who studied comparative religions in college, I was driven absolutely batty by the 200s. The 000s made me so crazy I made a TikTok about it. (I actually made a handful of Dewey-related TikToks.)

 Our library has tall shelves that line the walls and form a bit of a frame around the main space of the library, and couched within them is a section of short shelves. Previously, the tall shelves held non-fiction while fiction was crammed on the short shelves. 

During the lulls of the 2020-2021 school year, my colleagues and I slowly undertook the process of genrefying our fiction collection. As part of that reorganization process, we decided to move fiction to the tall shelves (and I am so glad we did; we get so many compliments on how inviting our color-coded genre labels make the library look) and non-fiction to the short shelves. 

And, being the masochist I am, I thought, "well if I'm touching every non-fic book to move it anyway, why not just reorganize Dewey while I'm at it!"I am glad I did it. It makes so much more sense to me, and I think it's easier for my students to navigate.  But the way I did it was arduous, especially with a non-fiction collection that hovers around 8,000 items.

I knew I wanted to keep a decimal system, so I started with a spreadsheet.  My primary goals were to make it make sense, to keep the hundreds-level categories as similar as possible, and to keep to an absolute maximum of 3 numbers after the decimal. I took every book in a hundreds-level category off the shelf and put them all on tables, tops of bookshelves, the floor-- I was doing most of this work when our students were taking finals, so they weren't using the library-- and then tried to put them in groups that made sense (if they weren't already sensical; Dewey's system wasn't all bad). As you may imagine, some areas were easier to work with than others.

My overarching categories ended up as such:

• 000s Information & Computer Science 
• I devoted the entire 000s to information technology, leaving plenty of room for growth. And thank goodness, because hello AI!
  
• 100s Traditions, Folklore, and the Unexplained
• I kicked philosophy to the 200s (ways of understanding existence) and psychology to the 600s (health and wellness), then scooped the unexplained from the 000s and combined it with traditions & folklore out of the 300s.
  
• 200s Mythology, Religion, & Philosophy 
• This section was where I really got to put my BA to good use. I tried to give each belief system equal weight and respect. 
  
• 300s Society & Social Issues
• I hated the 300s. I still kind of dislike them, honestly, but I did my best. I moved military to the 900s (with war, so that makes sense), and I tried to contextualize "social issues" based on their historical and current arguments in a way that (hopefully) doesn't reinforce marginalization, because a person's identity is not, in and of itself, a social problem.     
• 400s Languages      
• I basically left the 400s alone. As they exist, they're incredibly Eurocentric, but my collection really only contains books in the languages our school offers (currently German, French, Japanese, and Spanish), and they're not in high demand. 
  
• 500s Math & Science
• A lot of the 500s stayed the same. I did add a section (my 560s) specifically for climate and environment because our Bio classes have a climate research project. I also put all the animal books in the 590s regardless of domestication status. 
  
• 600s Health, Wellness, & Self Help
• I look at our revamped 600s as the "take care of your physical and mental self" section. Medical information flows into psychology flows into mental health flows into self-help flows into life after high school. I also love that physically, this section wraps around a common hangout area in our library, so students can see these resources without having to dive into shelves and dig around.        
  
• 700s Arts, Hobbies, & Recreation  
• Our 700s became the "what you might do in your spare time" section, including the usual 700s things like art, music, and sports, and adding in cooking, gardening, pop culture, and fandoms. Sidenote: our graphic novels had long-since been broken out of their 741.5 DDS category into a GN section.
  
• 800s Literature
• This was another section that I attempted to make a little less Eurocentric. Rather than subdividing by geographical origin, I subdivided by literature type or topic. Now all our poetry is in the 830s, plays are 840s, etc. 
  
• 900s History & Geography
• I spent so much time deliberating over how to organize the 900s. I knew I wanted all the WWII books together, so I gave the 910s to military, weapons, and major wars (defining "major" as wars my students would be aware of, which is inherently US-centric but also best serves my population). But beyond that, should I turn it into a global timeline? Or keep but tweak the geographical categories and subdivide those chronologically? I ultimately went with the latter option, making sure to leave room for the 21st century and beyond.                                                                                                                                    
  

Upsides: 

• it's easier for students to find what they're looking for without having to hunt in multiple sections
• the spine labels are easier to read and reshelving is easier because the decimals only go out 3 places max
• there's less bias in the system
• there's more room in this system for future-facing topics 
• my brain feels better when I think about the system
  

Downsides: 

• it's wholly my own system, so whoever replaces me (in the distant, distant future) is going to hate me (but at least there's a spreadsheet!)
• I can't rely on others' cataloging for my non-fic
• my bias is built into the system, but hopefully I kept it to a minimum by trying to best serve my population
• we had to replace nearly every non-fiction spine and barcode label in our library (the 400s and some of the 500s didn't change)
• it took a loooong time, including nearly every day in the summer of 2021
• trying to figure out how to redo the 300s and the 900s broke my brain a little bit
  

If you are considering adapting or ditching Dewey, I would definitely recommend it! I would only caution you to research a few different ways of reorganizing your non-fiction and really ponder what will work best for you and your library population. And finally, make sure you have plenty of time! 

CRIT: An updated approach to Information Evaluation for Research

 I have always been passionate about information literacy and getting the facts straight. I used to get in trouble as a kid for talking back, which was usually just me trying to correct an adult's factual error. In high school, I wrote a strongly-worded letter to one of our local journalists because he misidentifed turtles as amphibians in a piece about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I screamed myself hoarse when people in powerful positions started using phrases like "alternative facts". In an ideal world, I would teach a compulsory course at my high school that is solely devoted to information evaluation. So when, in the fall of 2022, I learned about the shortcomings of that long-touted librarian tool, the CRAAP test, I went straight to work with my colleague Nadia to come up with something that would be more effective, but still suit our students' needs.

 

We combed through a number of alternative methods for information evaluation, including Mike Caufield's SIFT (the four moves), the book Developing Digital Detectives, the book Fact vs. Fiction, and lessons from The News Literacy Project and the Digital Inquiry Group's (formerly Stanford History Education Group) Civic Online Reasoning (COR) course. These are all excellent resources, but none of them independently satisfied everything we were looking for. We liked the acronym aspect of CRAAP, and felt that SIFT was good for general info evaluation but didn't quite tick all the boxes we wanted for school-related research. So we invented... 

 

4 letters that pack a punch. I always start CRIT lessons with a terrible joke-- "this will help you think CRIT...ically about the information and media you encounter"-- that will hopefully help my students remember to apply this lens to all the media the come across, whether it's for school or not. Then we dive in and break down each letter. 

 

Full disclosure: I usually only get 90 minutes to do what I'm about to describe (we have block scheduling). Ideally, we would break this lesson down and take at least one class per letter so we would have ample time to practice each skill, but c'est la vie. Maybe next year. 

Credibility. 

What is it? How do you determine whether a source is credible? This is a crucial skill for both academic research and personal knowledge building. Here we have conversations about 

• web domains ( .orgs have been available for anyone to purchase since 2019, y'all, and top-level domains [TLDs] are an ever changing beast)
• the open web versus databases (Check out Dr. Kristen Mattson's blog post "Academic Databases are the Netflix for Nerds!" if you struggle to teach this concept to your students) 
  
• how human psychology predisposes us to trust information shared by people we know, and how social media blurs the lines between people we actually know and people we feel like we know.

This is also where we learn about and practice Lateral Reading.  If nothing else, learn about and teach lateral reading. This is a totally transferable skill that is used by professional fact-checkers and will serve our students (and everyone, really) well in our increasingly online worlds, even as we ramp up interactions with generative AI.

One of my favorite lateral reading thought experiments with our students is talking to them about how to lateral read a social media post. People speak with such confidence on TikTok, YouTube, etc... how do you know you can trust what they say on a topic? How do you investigate the user behind the username? We've gotten to put this into action in a really cool assignment for World Literature I (the brainchild of my colleague, Kirsten Reed) wherein students are actually required to use some type of social media as a source. The feedback from the students has been overwhelmingly positive, and it has the twin benefits of transferring this skill to their real online lives and forcing them to understand how to construct a properly formatted citation by hand (I have yet to find an automation for generating a citation from a TikTok URL). 

Relevance. 

What is it? (I always start with that question to make sure we've operating from the same base). How do we determine what is relevant? This question is definitely geared more toward school-based research (some of what we felt was missing from the SIFT approach), but it also offers an opportunity to talk about how the current iteration of the internet works. 

I saw a demonstration of Google searching at a professional workshop a few years back that Blew. My. Mind. So of course I replicate it for my students whenever I get a chance! I usually do this in Google News, but a regular old Google search works too.

1. Perform a search while logged into my work account. 
2. Open a window in another browser and perform the same search while logged into my personal Google account. 
3. Open an Incognito window and perform the same search without being logged in to a Google account. 
4. Show all 3 windows side-by-side.  The results are always different, though sometimes the differences are subtler than others.

This is a segue into a discussion about the algorithms that personalize everything we experience online, from our Google searches to our social media feeds to our streaming media recommendations. We talk about the dangers of echo chambers, how important it is to recognize our personal biases, and some strategies for doing good research in spite of this (using library resources, naturally, but also using Incognito windows and comparing search results with friends).

That's just level one of Relevance. 

Level two is mostly subconscious: if I'm writing about high-speed rail, do a search for "trains", and there's a result about training animals, my brain filters that out for me automatically.

Level three is more intentional: I'm writing about high-speed rail, do a search for "trains," and have to choose between an article about existing train systems in the US and existing train systems in Japan-- I'll probably need to look into those sources to decide which one is more relevant to my topic. This is a great place to dive into search strategies that can help dial in those investigations to return a limited number of results that are most relevant to your topic. (This is really a whole lesson in and of itself.)

Level four is what students seem to struggle with the most: they have a good source, but they need to pull out the most relevant quote to support their argument. As this is a little more English teacher territory, I usually do a short practice with my students so they know where it fits, then move on to the next letter. 

Intention.

What do we mean by Intention? How do we determine the Intention of whoever created this information/media? And why does Intention matter? 

Most of my upper-level students have encountered the media intention (or purpose) acronym PIE- Persuade, Inform, Entertain- but I like to use the News Literacy Project's breakdown of six intentions to dig a little deeper. (You will need to create a free account to access the link above.) NLP proposes that the six primary intentions of media are

• to Document (raw footage or audio with little to no commentary; primary source)
• to Inform ("news" in the traditional sense; straight-forward reporting with some added context)
• to Entertain (self-explanatory; sometimes overlaps with media in other categories)
• to Persuade (to change someone's mind)
• to Sell (to persuade you to part with your money)
• to Provoke (to persuade you to react strongly; to persuade you to take a certain action)

This is a great place to talk about misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation (and to once again plug the benefits of using vetted library resources) and tie back to any classroom discussions students may have had about propaganda. If the intention behind media or information is difficult to determine, this is also a good place to call back to and practice lateral reading. 

Additionally, we can talk about what types of sources are appropriate for school research when, covering the differences between Scholarly vs. Trade vs. Popular sources, and when it might make sense to use social media in school projects-- for example, you would not cite an Instagram post, even one meant to inform, as factual evidence on its own, but you could cite it as an example of the cultural opinion on a topic. 

Finally, we come to 

Timeliness.

What do we mean by Timeliness? How do we determine publication date, and when/why does it matter?

 

Nadia and I felt it was important to include a piece related to publication date (the C in the ol' CRAAP test) because our students are assigned a variety of projects-- some are historical, in which case students need to be cognizant of whether their sources are primary sources from the time in question or secondary (or even tertiary) reports and analyses, and some are focused on current events, in which case our students need information that may change literally minute-to-minute depending on their topics.

 

This explicit reminder to check the publication date seemed too important to let go of. How many times have you encountered an article shared by a friend on Facebook accompanied by an outraged caption and a call to action, only to realize the article was published four years ago? Surely I can't be alone in that. This is the easiest piece of evaluation to accomplish.

Conclusion

I have been covering CRIT with students for a year and a half now, and they seem receptive to it. My English teachers love it, and we are working on making it an acronym that travels outside of library lessons to infiltrate classroom vocabulary as well. We also have a handy CRIT graphic organizer (I LOVE a good graphic organizer) for students to use as they are researching (one page covers a single source). I am always looking to update and improve, and I'm sure this concept will expand as we use more and more generative AI, but this is working for us for now. 

Hopefully this was helpful! Feel free to copy & modify any of the resources linked below as needed, and leave suggestions in the comments!

• CRIT lesson slides
• CRIT graphic organizer 
• Search strategies overview & graphic organizer
  

 

Revamping Historical Fiction: A Meditation on Genrefying, Dynamic Shelving, and Representation

 We genrefied our fiction and adapted Dewey in our non-fiction back in 2021 (another blog post about that process is forthcoming), and by and large we've been happy with the switch. But Historical Fiction, in spite of its bright yellow spine labels, seemed to be generally overlooked. So after kicking the idea around for a few months and seeing no major drawbacks, we decided to give HF a facelift and further subdivide by era! 

before (well, actually, mid-process, hence the empty shelves and table piles)

Step One: Analyze collection to determine optimal era breakdown

What this actually looked like: piling HF books on tables in a very rough timeline so I could see how narrow or broad my categories needed to be. I weeded about 20 books, switched the genres of a few, and ended up with roughly 600 books subdivided into 8 categories. 

Step Two: Design era signs & determine how to indicate

The section I struggled with the most was 1600s - 1860s, which includes the Salem Witch Trials, American Revolution, the French Revolution, Regency novels, most of Dickens, the American West, and the American Civil War. In our collection, though, all of that only spans 6 shelves, and I didn't want to have a new era on every shelf, so... I reserve the right to recategorize at a later date if necessary. 

A note to anyone who (like me) feels a little nauseous seeing the 2000s included in Historical Fiction: As of right now, most of the 2000s novels that we include here are based around a historically significant event like the September 11th attacks. Since 2001 was well before my high school students were born, it only makes sense that they would look for those books in the Historical Fiction section. We do still have some early 2000s novels in our Realistic & Relationships section as well, but only if they don't have time-specific references. 

Era indicator signs were designed by me in Google Slides and are sized 5x5" to fit our acrylic magnetic picture frames. Those have been around longer than I have, so I have no product link.

To update the organization, we used these prelaminated 1/4" dots from Demco and matched the dots for each era to the font & frame color on the era signs. As of right now, we are not planning to further update Sublocation or Copy Category in Destiny-- these will remain Historical Fiction unless a need arises to get more specific. 

 

Step Three: Reshelve, but make it dynamic

Since we were taking every book off the shelf anyway, we also figured: why not employ dynamic shelving when we put them back? Let's breathe ALL the new life into this section! 

We've dabbled in dynamic shelving before, but this time it feels like we "got" it. We'll continue to adjust with book stands and book ends to keep things upright, but the difference in vibe is palpable.We ended up adding two more shelves at the very bottom to make room for everything because I couldn't bring myself to weed too much. I am in love with the way this looks!

One super important thing to keep in mind when switching to dynamic shelving (and displays, and posters, and collection development) is balanced representation. I weighed a few factors as I was choosing which books to face out in this initial process: 

• Books with multiple copies: Often (but not always) my faceouts have multiple copies. This means that if one is checked out, there will be another behind it to maintain the structural integrity of the display.
  
  
• Books with interesting covers: The purpose of dynamic shelving is to draw the eye, so I tried to select faceouts whose designs would appeal to my students
  
  
• Books in a series: I like to stack books #2+ in the series horizontally and display #1 as a faceout in front of the series stack.
  
  
• How many faceouts I can fit on a shelf without it looking overwhelming: 2-3 seems to be a good balance on my shelves
  
  
• What messages the covers were sending: I tried to maintain a balance of gender, skin tone, and couple types across the whole section, and we'll keep that in mind as books circulate. 

We have already had more students browsing the Historical Fiction section and it's only been finished for a day. I'm looking forward to seeing our end-of-year circ stats! 

refreshed!

 

The Evolution of our Library Cafe

2019-2022- starting out, stopping for Covid, and starting again

Equipment: 

• (2) 45-cup coffee urns 

• Bulk Coffee (started with donations from a local coffee place; switched to Folgers Classic Roast)

• Bulk Swiss Miss hot cocoa

• ¼ cup measuring scoop (for hot cocoa)

• Assorted tea bags, packaged individually (recommend surveying your population for tea flavors)

• 10 oz paper hot cups with lids & sleeves (recommend buying sets so your cups and lids always match)

• Individual coffee creamers 

• Classic, French Vanilla, and occasional seasonal flavors

• Individual sweetener packets

• Sugar and Stevia have been most popular in our building

• Stirrer sticks

• Napkins

• Cash box & coin wrappers

• Hand sanitizer

• Lysol wipes

Logistics:

• available for students before school only; available for staff throughout the day

• our library is open for 40 minutes before the school day begins

• located at the Circ desk

• benefits: allows for library staff oversight & "water cooler" chat with staff

• handled by library staff (1 FT librarian & 2 FT library assistants)

• one staff member rinses urns & resets everything at the end of the day

• urns are plugged into a power strip, so the first one in each morning just has to turn on a power strip

Pricing, etc:

• $1.00 per cup (hot)

• easy to remember, easy to make change

• Cash only
  Funds deposited regularly to an ECA account associated with our Library Club

• money used to replenish makerspace supplies, purchase props for library escape rooms, and to provide prizes for reading challenges

• Pre-paid punch cards available for staff

• up to $20; library staff keeps the cards and marks them off as credits are used

• Reusable mug reward cards available for staff

• library staff keeps the cards and marks them off

• after 5 uses of a reusable mug, staff earns a card redeemable for a free beverage

• free bev. cards can be used by the staff member or given to a student as an incentive

• library staff use free bev. cards as prizes for reading challenges, etc.

• All cards were designed by me and printed on different colored index cards by our in-house printer, but you could easily print them on cardstock and cut them. Just make sure there's something distinct enough about them to discourage counterfeits!

2023- added iced coffee & student volunteers

We were so busy in the morning with library & IT-related responsibilities that we decided to turn the cafe over to some student volunteers. Everything was still set up next to our Circ desk so we could oversee operations, but we rearranged some tables so our volunteers were not inside the Circ desk with us. Our volunteers earn service hours.

Then in the spring we wanted to try selling iced coffee with minimal investment to see how our students responded. They LOVED it. Here's how we approached it.

Additional equipment:

• 2 ice cube trays (I'm not linking the ones we started with because they were terrible silicon hexagon trays that were very cheap and took forever to freeze)

• we borrowed freezer space from a faculty break room freezer and replenished ice every day

• a large plastic bowl that we already had 

• we stored excess ice cubes in gallon ziploc bags that sat in this bowl

• (2) empty gallon water jugs

• an ice scoop

• 12 oz plastic cold cups with sipper lids

• we opted for sipper lids rather than straws to help reduce the amount of plastic we were using

• Torani flavored syrups: French Vanilla and Caramel

• French Vanilla Concentrated Creamer

• Measuring cups

• Funnel

Logistics: 

• Make bulk batches of iced coffee concentrate 2-3 times a week (depending on demand)

• this gets poured over a full 12oz cup of ice

• recipes linked; try and adjust to your taste- we had several student taste-testers

• Store unused iced coffee in refrigerator; discard after 3 days

Pricing, etc.: 

• $1.00 for hot drinks

• $2.00 for iced coffee

• All staff cards still in operation

• Free beverage cards can be exchanged for a hot or iced drink

Fall 2023- changed location & staffing

With the addition of iced coffee in the spring of 2023, we had too many students crowded at the Circ desk to manage successfully, so we borrowed some furniture for other places and created a Cafe nook that was still close enough to keep an eye on. Our student volunteers run the mornings entirely, and library staff continues to provide the behind-the-scenes support.

Additional / Updated Equipment:

• 1 mini fridge with freezer 

• 2 ice cube trays & stacking ice cube bins 

• (4) 2-qt mason jars with pouring lids

• different color lids to distinguish between flavors

Notes and other thoughts:

We started with the coffee urns, bulk coffee, and bulk hot cocoa rather than K-cups because we wanted reduce the amount of waste generated in the library. It has meant more oversight in the process–our volunteers have to scoop the hot cocoa and fill the water rather than just letting a student grab a K-cup, for instance–but it meant a lower starting cost. And now when we need to make our iced coffee, we just make a larger amount in the urn and let it cool rather than requiring an additional coffee pot or using a ton of K-cups. 

We have done additional fundraisers with knit and crocheted coffee cozies ($2.00) to some success. 

It has been over a semester since we moved the cafe away from the Circ desk. I love that our students have largely taken ownership of the morning operations, but I do miss those opportunities to chat with colleagues while they fill their coffee cups. 

Interactive Cell Posters with Makey Makey & Scratch

In the weeks following Thanksgiving, I had the pleasure of being part of one of the coolest curricular projects I've ever seen. Yes, it was so cool I had to put that in bold.

Before I get ahead of myself, I want to give a HUGE thank you shout out to Cassie Wallace and Katie Mueller for being excellent collaborators and being willing to try something none of us had ever done before. You rock!

The background: Cassie & Katie approached me a few months ago with the desire to upgrade the cell organelle identification project they do with their Biology classes. After some discussion, we decided to incorporate Physics & Computer Science into this Bio project by having students create an interactive cell diagram using Makey Makeys and Scratch.

What the heck are those?

A Makey Makey is, essentially, an external keyboard. It plugs into a computer via USB. To use it, though, you have to have a basic knowledge of electrical circuitry (like, really basic), hence the Physics. The creators of Makey Makey designed it to be safe and entry-level-- not too much power running through it, and everything connects with alligator clips or jump wires. In this project, the Makey Makey served as the intermediary between the poster and the computer program.

Scratch is a block coding language developed by a group of people at MIT, also designed to be entry-level. Instead of having to use syntax to code (those intimidating-looking text files), Scratch offers its users LEGO-like blocks that they can drag into the work area and "snap" together. Scratch is free to use (an account, also free, must be created in order to save your work) and works seamlessly with the Makey Makeys.

So, the assignment?

Students were divided into groups-- we quickly discovered groups of 3 worked best-- and were given a type of cell and a list of 10 organelles to identify. Each group had a Google Doc to fill in with research about their organelles, and the Google Doc was to be turned in as part of their grade.

Within their groups, students had three possible roles:

1) The artist, who would draw their cell model on a piece of cardboard, then communicate with the group what each organelle looked like.

2) The electrician, who would learn the finer points of the Makey Makey and how to wire it to the cardboard cell model.

3) The programmer, who would use Scratch to record audio files (definitions & functions of each organelle) and code the project.

Students were able to choose which role they preferred, and there was rarely any squabbling. This was a great opportunity for them to tap into some different talents and learning styles.

We split each class into stations based on their role within their group, and they were off to the races! I stayed with the electricians, showing them how to hook their alligator clips to the Makey Makey and test whether their circuits were complete, then let them test various things around them for conductivity. They also had to cut and strip 10 wires, and cut 10 piece of copper tape.  

The artists went to work creating their drawings on cardboard using Sharpies. Some sketched in pencil first, but it is very important when doing a Makey Makey project not to let your pencil lines touch-- graphite is conductive, so it will complete the wrong circuits if things are connected by pencil line. 

The programmers created their Scratch accounts, watched a short intro video explaining how Scratch works, and created the blocks for their very simple program. Then they began recording the audio files that would explain each organelle when it was touched on the poster-- but I'm getting ahead of myself. 

On the second day (we took two 90-minute blocks to complete this project), the electricians and artists combined their work while the programmers continued working on their recordings. They poked small holes in each organelle on their poster, labeled it on the back side (organization is key!), and stuck the small wires through. On the front of the poster, they taped the exposed wire to the cardboard with copper tape. On the back side, they connected the exposed wire to their Makey Makey using alligator clips. Then they connected the whole wired poster to a computer using the USB that's included in the Makey Makey kit and were ready to test! 

Final thoughts & lessons learned:

• Two 90-minute blocks is definitely enough time... if the students have done their research & written their audio scripts in advance.

• Organization is key. The programmer needs to program the inputs to match the way the Makey Makey is wired to the poster. Even though they had seen my example, the students didn't seem to totally understand how it should work at the end. More time to explore the prototype might be helpful.

• When the three pieces of the project all came together, there was inevitably some trouble-shooting. We were careful to let students work out programming & conductivity problems on their own, guiding lightly only when absolutely necessary. I think this is where most of the learning happened.

• Absences make this project difficult. Since each group member played such large roles, everyone had to do their work. And most students did, but when someone was absent, the groups had to meet up later to get the project done.

• This was easily one of the most engaging projects I've ever seen. Students who are normally disengaged were really into it, especially those with more mechanical aptitude. A great way to get students involved.

• Interactive posters can be adapted for just about every subject. Any time you would normally do a diagram, consider an interactive poster instead!

• Since we introduced this first semester, Katie, Cassie, and I are working on a way to incorporate a similar project into second semester so that the students can capitalize on these skills they just learned. 

Station Rotation for Secondary Research

I mentioned in my first blog post that my best PD session of 2018 was an hour spent listening to two of my colleagues talk about using Station Rotation in secondary classrooms. Here, I'll explain why it was so darn good.

Being married to a former elementary teacher, I am no stranger to the concept of Station Rotation (or "Centers," as they're calling it in the elementary world these days). I had even been to a session on Station Rotation prior to this one, which is part of the reason I signed up for Katie & Cassie's:I knew there was a way I could use stations in the library, but I didn't quite feel like I could crack it. I hoped listening to them and giving myself another hour to sit with the idea would shake something loose-- and boy, did it! This is how my Station Rotation Research (SRR) approach was born.

As a high school library media specialist, I spend a good deal of time talking to classes about research. How to determine whether sources are credible and sufficiently academic, how to cite sources, how to navigate databases, how to use the library catalog to *gasp* find a book on a given subject.... The sessions are never quite the same, always tailored ever so slightly to meet the needs of a given research or inquiry project. What they all used to have in common, though, was a largely lecture-based approach that resulted in my unending frustration (answering the same questions during independent work time, watching students ignore everything I had said and pull information off a Google results page, etc.).

Enter my Station Rotation breakthough, which I have used (so far) with Health classes researching STDs (one of my favorite projects of the year) and English 10 classes doing Decades research. It goes like this:

• Before I meet with the classes, I pull relevant books and have them on a cart so they're handy.*
• I do a whole-class spiel that includes information on how to locate & navigate our databases, how to generate (or find) citations, and anything else that is relevant to the project (sometimes talking about the differences between databases & websites, primary & secondary sources, etc.). 
• I physically break the class into three groups and have each group rotate through each of three stations. These take one of two forms:
• a database station, a website station**, and a book station; or
• a digital station, a print station, and an instructional station to learn a new digital tool such as a particular presentation software
• Each group gets 10-15 minutes at each of the three stations, and they must conduct their research using the station's designated resource type. With the time remaining at the end of the class, they are free to conduct the rest of their research using whichever resources best meet their needs.***
• I do make them get up and physically move from station to station (in spite of their protestations). I think the act of moving helps get the blood flowing and the brain working, and it helps them mentally transition from one type of resource to the next. 
• Limiting their time and frequently reminding them that their time is limited seems to help keep them more on task.
• I circulate through the stations as I am able to help guide their research.

Thanks to this approach, I have seen an huge increase in students using books for their research. Last year my carefully pre-selected books stayed ignored on their cart while students opted for easily searchable databases (or worse, unfocused Google searches). This year I've actually had students ask if they can keep using the books, and some have even confessed that they prefer book research! You could have knocked me over with a feather. 

You better believe with student responses like that I'm going to keep doing this. 

Some possible future tweaks/goals:

• students at the book station using that time to actually search for their own books using the library catalog (for more individualized research projects).
• students at the website station completing a source evaluation exercise (maybe filling out a CRAAP graphic organizer) and learning about advanced Google search techniques.
• students at the database station learning which databases are best for what types of research and determining what best meets their specific research needs instead of my telling them which databases to go to.

Bring on the new semester!

*I was already in the habit of pre-selecting books for these projects.
**Many of our classes use pathfinders of predetermined web sources
***We have 4 90-minute blocks a day, so I'm fortunate enough to have time to do all of this in one class period. If we were on a regular period schedule, I would probably do the class spiel on day one and the stations on day two.