The new AASL Learning Standards, 2007, ask teacher librarians to guide stuent research beyond just a step by step process of what to do. They ask us to cultivate responsibility, attitude toward learning, and self-assessment. These are areas we notice in the students we teach and probably address without thinking, but as we look toward creating world-class learners, we need to think more deeply about and take consistent action. Costa pushes us into the world of habits of mind and metacognition to examine what we and our students are doing and how the entire school can become a true community of learners. We think about the many books on the market that describe first-year teachers who meet their classrooms full of hope at the beginning of the year but fall prey to total disruption and have little support from either administrators or colleagues who are struggling themselves. We think of teacher librarians who know they are suppose to be collaborating but find barriers so high, they are blocked from what they were taught was their role. Costa covers a number of topics about promoting a whole-school learning community. There are many checklists, rubrics, recommendations, and examples from real schools. This is not a book to read in one setting. Rather, read and think about a chapter at a time and its implications. Perhaps use selected chapters as the basis of a serious discussion in a professional learning community meeting. For teacher librarians, we are going to need a different kind of professional literature if we are going to go beyond the teaching of research skills alone. Highly recommended.

The authors have revised their previous version of this book to update a number of chapters. We find, however, that the book is dense reading and not likely to be used by a professional learning community that needs a shorter, more practical approach – what we can do without a semester of academic study. Not recommended.

Alan Pritchard

(Paul Chapman Publishing, 2007, 132p. $_____, ISBN: 978-1-4129-3095-6)

One opens a book of this title with great expectations expecting to find great ideas about the use of technology and high-level learning. Well, as it turns out, the author has tested a number of software packages available on the Internet with actual classroom teachers and watched the teaching method used  by the teacher, the responses of the students, and the results. Most of the packages are of the kind that kids are set busy on while the teacher is doing something else – a kind of substitute teaching or at least some coaching by the teacher as individuals or small groups interact. The results are predictable. Some students enjoy the packages, others don’t. Occasionally, the teacher assesses the result, but not always. Our author wants these packages to fit into the latest theoretical findings of the benefits of technology in education and is trying to fit them into constructivist principles. It doesn’t quite happen. It doesn’t quite happen because these are side events, not the main attraction. Supplementary, not central. And, there is no mention of a technology specialist or a teacher librarian anywhere in the vicinity. One presumes a classroom with a few computers and programs that tend kids when something else is happening with rest of the class. Our hopes are dashed with the potential of this kind of technology. No mention of web 2.0 applications. So, pass this one by.

Grace Sammon

(Corwin Press, 2007, 227p., $_____, ISBN: 978-1-4129-3790-0)

The small learning communities described in this book are smaller schools within a school using the school to work philosophy. Sammon has lots of experience in setting up, monitoring, and data gathering with these types of smaller groups within a larger entity and provides extensive planning materials and descriptions with examples to help put this organization into place. She describes the creation of a collaborative team that is composed of administrators, lead teachers, regular, and counselors. Thus, this team becomes a closely-knit professional learning community. Our beef with this book, as with many others in the general education literature is that there is really no mention of a library or technology. No mention of a team member steeped in resources and networks to join the instructional design team and help make the learning activities, particularly for the target student group this book focuses on. The focus is on helping students shadow various careers and this is wonderful, but when actually in class, the traditional tedium of boring without the help of a librarian/instructional designer is unthinkable. So, if you are into this type of school design, and it is one pregnant with possibilities, you will have to again fight for a foundational team member who will add the essential spark this idea needs.

As an outgrowth of Library Power (a major school library initiative of the 1990s), Boni Hamilton, the library media specialist, the faculty, and others in the district, realized that the collaboration model of integrating the library into the classroom was a good model of integrating technology as well. In their elementary school in Denver, Colorado, a model collaborative structure was set up so that teachers planning for a unit of instruction could expect not only full support from the library and the technology lab, but could expect partner teachers who were interested in high-level learning while integrating both the library and technology agendas. The result has been incredible in this oft-visited school by outsiders. Technology is not worshiped for the glitz it adds to projects and units, but for what it is actually contributing to learning. Hamilton has a book here tht describes the integration and the collaborative process between specialists and the faculty. Then she describes and demonstrates how to integrate and raise the expectations for various technology systems such as presentation software, word processing, drawing, and desktop publishing software. If you have noticed that library and technology departments in your elementary school(s) are going their separate ways, then this book is a great piece to read together as a specialist staff as a foundation for building a collaborative program. Unhappily, the full compliment of library collaboration was cut from this book by the editors, but enough remains that an exemplary program can be constructed in additional conversations with the author and others in the school. Highly recommended.