- Hi everybody, I'm Brett from Heinemann.
Welcome to our Booktalk Live with authors
Tammy Mulligan and Clare Landrigan,
authors of It's All About the Books:
How to Create Bookrooms and Classroom Libraries
That Inspire Readers.
Now it might seem obvious, but to create a life-long reader,
we need to start with books, good books.
Books that are the heart and soul of teaching literacy
and our tools to develop lifelong readers.
So how do we organize books across entire school community
to support student choice and instructional goals?
How do we do this on any budget?
Tammy and Clare join me live now
to talk all about this and more.
Let's start with this: What did you see in your work
that led you to write this book?
- Well, Clare and I have the privilege
of working in so many schools in New England
and we drive to schools that are in rural communities,
suburban, urban communities.
And we saw a pattern.
And pattern was there weren't enough books in schools
to support all kids in every classroom.
And lots of times if a classroom did have books,
it was due to the personal financing of a teacher.
So, this book speaks to that.
We feel it's so important that every classroom
in every school have books that kids can read
and want to read and excites them.
- Yeah it seems so simple, right?
You would think that, upon visiting a school,
that you would just find lots and lots of books.
That's what we're doing in elementary schools
is to teach kids how to read, and yet,
we just kept finding again and again that
teachers didn't have enough books.
And you could see that visually,
but then there was also the issue of,
we always ask whenever we're in a school,
"Can you show us the books that were bought by the school?"
Not necessarily teacher-purchased.
And then, it even, the amount got smaller.
So you would see like certain classrooms,
certain people, certain groups that would have books,
but, again, this was coming out of teachers' budgets,
personal budgets, not a school line.
And it just seemed like, you know, it's not that expensive
compared to other things we're getting in schools,
and it seemed like something that
we need to start advocating for.
- And in the book, we show like all different classroom
libraries, and so you can see, you know,
how teachers can bring vibrant classroom libraries to life.
And teachers were kind enough to let us take photos
of all of their classroom libraries
to show all different ways to organize books.
- And I'm just gonna show off a couple of pictures, here.
You know, a little bit more of
what you were just showing there, Tammy.
And that's actually really a good place
to sort of segue to next.
I want to talk about, the book is very, very visual.
As, hopefully, people can kind of see
from the pictures here.
There's a lot of pictures in the book.
There's a lot of focus on layout and design
in how the book is organized, but also you talk about
layout and design in the book rooms
and in the libraries themselves.
You know, how do we design these rooms for access?
- Well, when we think about, you know, giving kids access,
and we think about teachers' instructional goals
and how kids choose books,
we start to think about a balanced literacy model.
And we want our classroom libraries and school book rooms
to reflect all the different parts of reading.
So we want great texts for read-aloud
and we want exciting books kids can read
with partners or in book clubs,
and we want large baskets of independent reading books
so that children can choose by genre
and author and topics of interest.
And so we created the book in a visual way
so that teachers can see different aspects of
classroom libraries and school book rooms.
- We began to think about how
both of these spaces could work together.
Often, when we're sitting with teachers
and planning and thinking about how to
bring their vision to life in a classroom,
we start to have a conversation
and we move immediately to the classroom library
to see, well, what kind of books can we do that with?
Often, you know, we're always looking for
the perfect words in a lesson
or the perfect instructional goals
and how we're gonna model something.
But at the end of the day, it often comes down to
the right book at the right moment for the right kid
can make all the difference.
And we find again and again that
not every teacher has the book
to meet the range that's in their classroom.
So we began to think about, while we wanna think about
classroom libraries first and foremost,
we know those have to be there,
but can this book room be a hub, sort of, of literacy,
where people can go and get what they need
and be constantly rotating and thinking about
how to design both with the other in mind.
And really starting to shift what we saw
in most book rooms in most schools.
In most schools we go to, they're a little dusty.
They are in like Ziploc bags or rubber bands,
six-pack books, and people aren't using them
because they don't work with
the design of a classroom library.
So we began thinking about, how do we take a step back
and reorganize what people have to sort of
increase the volume of choices that kids can have
to do the work they need to do
within a gradual lease of responsibility.
- So you'll see in all the photos in the books
of the classroom libraries and school book rooms,
you'll really see books in baskets
where teachers can go in and grab baskets of books
and kids can flip through baskets of books.
Yeah, there you're showing the book room, as well, right.
- Sorry, I just opened the first page to baskets, and I.
(laughing)
Well, you know, we've gotten
a couple of comments already about budget,
and I know that you've both thought a lot about,
focused a lot about.
You know, it first, there's always a question about budget
when it talks about acquiring books for your room.
And you mentioned before, I think you both mentioned it,
that sometimes it comes out of the teacher's own pocket.
So how do we do this on any budget?
(both talking at the same time)
(laughing)
- We're gonna answer it this time.
- Exactly, yeah, last time we didn't answer the question.
- We didn't answer it like three times.
- Right, and we're gonna try.
So, well Clare and I have been working together for 24 years
and we remember, we used to go to this store,
Buck-A-Book, in Somerville, Massachusets,
to get all our books for the classroom.
And when we think about, you know, schools,
and as we said, we wanna make sure that
every classroom has books, we think about,
you know, what can we do on a budget?
And so whether you're an individual teacher
or a grade-level team or a school
or even a district purchasing books,
what we've done in the book is
put together a sample ordering guide,
so that you can use that to prioritize
what you have and what you need
and then use that to develop a budget
and then begin shopping.
And several of the online resources
give lists of vendors and publishers
and places to look to find wonderful texts.
- When we think about budget, right, I think we,
a lot of the book is about working together, it really is.
I think we get more bang for our buck
when we sort of think together.
So we have examples of, you know,
many teachers do get a budget line for their year.
And so when they put that budget line together
and they share, that's one way they can increase the amount.
We see teachers writing school foundation grants to fund,
we've seen Title One grants used for this,
we've seen PTO, scholastic points, lots of different ways.
Even one school, we have a story in there,
that used box tops to begin funding it.
And then once it starts, it kind of just
takes on a life of its own.
So what we find is, year one,
we're often, like, doing everything we can.
Reorganizing what's there, inventorying what we have,
making what it is, like, we would dream of,
and then really advocating with school systems
to say, like, where's the budget line for books?
And when you start to look at
how much we're spending on other things,
books are often far less expensive
than any other material that are on budget lines.
So people start to prioritize it
and they switch how they're spending their money
and spending things in different ways.
Less consumables, less workbooks, less text-y books,
and using things that kids can authentically read
and use as mentor texts for writing in the classrooms.
- And in all the years we've done this work,
we've never been in a school or district
that hasn't found the money to find books.
They've always found the money or a way,
by hook or by crook, to find those books.
Really, it's amazing.
- And we have a few stories in the book from administrators
sharing, you know, once they went ahead and did this,
actually realizing how much money it saved them.
- Right. - Yeah.
I want to, the foreword is is written by Jen Sarravallo,
the amazing Jen Sarravallo, and I wanna read my favorite--
- We're so grateful.
- Yeah, and I, my favorite part of the foreword,
I just wanna read this real quick.
"When Tammy and Clare begin consulting work in new schools,
"they find themselves saying, fire us and buy books.
"Because they know that access to
"an inclusive collection of high-quality books and texts
"that students can and want to read
"is one of the most significant equity issues schools face."
So, Clare and Tammy, why is that
the phrase that you kind of lead with,
"fire us and buy books"?
- We joke we're not the best in marketing.
- Exactly. (laughing)
- Not the best business model ever.
But it's truthful, right?
That kids need to read books to get better at reading
and if we don't have books that engage them
and excite them and that they can read,
then we can't teach reading.
We need our tools and those are our resources.
- And in terms of professional development,
especially a lot of the work we're doing,
we're coming into schools and, you know,
pulling teachers out of classrooms
or joining teachers in classrooms
and we take that pretty seriously,
to disrupt the classroom, to pull a teacher out
or to go into a classroom and disturb what's happening.
While we think that's the best type of
professional development,
we do also, ethically, take it seriously
and we don't want to start that work
if people don't have what they need
to actually do what we're showing.
Right, if we start, if someone's hiring us to make change,
we need to make sure that people have
the resources to do that change.
So they would be better off, like, firing us,
just choosing not to hire us, waiting a few years,
getting the books, then bringing us back.
But often that is the first step,
they need the books to do the work or kids can't practice.
- Well, and one of the big messages
that you have in the book, that, you know,
we wanted to sort of take a moment to talk about tonight,
mind the cat, sorry. (laughing)
- Walking back and forth, into the screen, I love it.
- Yeah, determined to get on the keyboard, as all cats do.
One of the biggest messages in the book is about
the misunderstanding or the misuse of levels.
What do you want readers to take away about levels?
- Thinking about levels, especially for
the early emergent and emergent readers,
there's a lot going on right now
about levels and not leveling students.
And we completely agree with that.
We level books, not kids.
But we are concerned that we have spent
the beginning of our careers watching kids sit
in front of frustration-level texts.
And part of access is being able to read a book.
And Ellington's research that we really adhere to
shows the importance of kids having lots of volume,
of reading books that they can read easily
and comprehend well.
So we wanna make sure that we have a balance
and begin to think about, especially in our K,
first, second-grade classrooms,
how do we make sure that we're honoring
both the identity of a reader and
the instructional trajectory of a reader
and that levels don't have to be restrictive.
Right, there's, it seems as if levels have become
a conversation of what you can't have,
as opposed to showing kids
all the options that they do have.
And how do we organize our classroom libraries
and our book rooms to help teachers do that work?
Because these are the teachers who've got
20-something kids who don't read.
And so it became sort of this intent versus impact.
Tammy, you wanna talk about that?
- Yeah, and so what we decided to do was
change the way the baskets are labeled.
And you can see on this page in the book
that we used to label baskets
with the text complexity right on the front.
But now what we do is, we label baskets with
the things that readers use to choose books.
We put laugh out loud when readers want funny books
or we label the basket realistic fiction for genre.
Or we label the basket cool books, cool facts.
And so what we want kids to do is to find the books,
first choose what kind of book they want to read.
And then, within that basket, in K and one classrooms,
there are a band of leveled texts within there
so that children are looking at books they can read,
but they're first thinking about
what kinds of books they want to read.
- The design that teachers kind of brought to life
really did make sense.
They were trying to support students in having choice
within a band of text complexity,
while also trying to pull small groups and assess kids.
Right, there's a lot we're asking of
teachers in the classroom.
So when they organized their classroom libraries,
they started to put levels on the baskets
so kids knew, right, about where to go.
We were giving them choice.
Often teachers have 150 books
within a band of text complexity,
but what the kids started to do was say,
when you said, like, what kind of books do you like?
They would say, level D, or level E.
They were starting to identify more with the level
than with the type of text.
So the level kind of morphed from a basket label
to a student label on that stickiness principle.
It started to, you know, it doesn't feel good
to sit next to a reader, a young reader, especially,
and say, so talk to me about what you love about books,
and they say, I'm a C.
Right, and that's not what we're looking.
So we found a huge difference by simply
shifting the way we're talking about books
and what's on the basket.
We're now hearing kids say, as Tammy's saying,
authors they love, genres they love,
and types of books they love.
And those words will stay with them for a lifetime.
Because levels really, you know, once you hit third grade,
and even second grade, they're not looking as much
to those bands of text complexity,
they're not quite so finite.
- And they're better at choosing.
They get, they learn.
They learn how to find things they love.
And we want what they love to stick,
not necessarily the level.
- Absolutely, I just, I just ran into that with my nephew,
who's seven years old, the other day.
I said, buddy, what books are you reading
in school right now?
And he blurted out with pride what his level was.
And I said, no, I'm, what are you reading?
What are you interested in?
And it was, so.
- And we worry that teachers are owning that.
And no one did this to level kids, right?
They were truly just trying to survive.
Like, they're trying to do so many things in the classroom
and to us it made perfect sense.
It was this intent versus impact.
And so now we're trying to, you know,
just shift it a tiny bit without causing a ton of work.
Because trying to organize all this stuff
in the chaos of a day in school,
you can imagine, is hard to do.
So we're trying to find ways to make it manageable, as well.
- We've got a little bit of time left,
so I want, we've got a lot of people
with some wonderful comments on here.
But if anybody has any specific questions
they would like to ask Tammy and Clare,
feel free to pop those in the comments.
I'm looking at your comments now.
There's phenomenal conversation happening here.
I wanna also really quickly plug Fran McVeigh,
Dr. Mary Howard, you guys are both, and Clare and Tammy,
you're gonna be on their Twitter chat on Thursday night,
in a couple of nights. - Yes, we are.
- Yeah, we can't wait. - 8:30 p.m. Eastern.
It's hashtag, G2, great, the number two, G2great.
8:30, it runs for about an hour.
And it's gonna be all about the books.
So, and that's gonna be happening Thursday.
And Mary usually posts the questions ahead of time
and everything, so you can check that out.
There are, you have so many online resources
that come with this book.
Tell us about the lists that you put together.
- So, on the online resources,
we try to organize the lesson different ways.
There's some lists that show sort of
how we find out about books.
We wanna create baskets of books in classroom libraries
that reflect the diversity in our world.
And so there's lists of how to find books
to support a diverse classroom.
There's lists in there that show
how we learn about new books, right.
What are some ways to learn about new books?
And then there's lists of some tried and true
texts that we love, series, and authors,
and high-interest books that,
non-fiction series that we have in there.
Teachers and administrators are trying to
sometimes purchase lots of books.
And we wanted people to have some options to look at
for, here's some ideas to get you started
with finding the books that you want.
- We wish we could include every book that we love.
'Cause we clearly love books.
And Heinemann, you didn't let us do that.
(laughing)
And it was like a struggle of how,
because on the one hand, we are with teachers
who are so busy and they have so much going on
and they want some supports of how to get started.
But on the other hand, I think as we work in schools,
and teachers who work with us will say,
we often are saying,
don't run out and buy the books right away.
First, see what you have.
See what you love.
Because you may not love every book on our list.
At the end of the day, it's also about
what books teachers love.
So we're trying to give enough range in these lists
that we're hoping people say, like, oh, I know that book.
I have a book that's like that book.
And then there might be some new books, too.
But what we want teachers to do is to know that
their professional voice, what they love,
what makes them run to school every day,
and what engages their kids
is gonna be what's most important.
So we're hoping that these lists are scaffolds,
but people don't feel like, if I don't have these books
I can't do this work.
So we try to find that balance, to be supportive
but yet not like, you have to have these.
- And we wanted to make sure we had, like,
these lists that were text sets,
that incorporated traditional text and digital text
and even lists that kids had put together.
And we're hoping that by sharing some of these lists,
that teachers will share the baskets
that they create with their kids.
And so that we can all learn from each other
of new ways to organize books to engage kids.
- And when teachers come together
to talk about books and how to use books,
it's the best professional development.
- Got a good question here from Mary Brofe.
She says, trying to decide if we should
get rid of our book room and put the books in classrooms.
Is there a reason to keep a book room
if no one is using it?
- That's a really good question.
We always say, an empty book room is a great book room
because it means people are using it.
I think we would suggest keeping it and re-organizing it
and thinking about talking to teachers
about why they're not using it,
figuring out which books might go in to the library.
But how do we, we show sort of
a step-by-step process in the book
of how to take a step back and see what you have
and how do we re-organize this
in sort of grab-and-go baskets.
Right, teachers are busy.
So they don't wanna have to go through
and pick out lots of different six packs.
Instead, there are some six packs,
and we would keep some there
for the ones that teachers wanna use in small groups.
But if we take those books and re-organize them
so teachers can come and get different types of baskets
and put them right in their classroom library,
it's almost like an extended classroom library
that you can go to at any time
to rotate and refresh what you have
in your actual classroom at that moment in time.
- And if we could start by figuring out
what the teachers have in their rooms and what they need,
that will help, you know, them to know then
what to put in that book room, right?
How to support teachers.
- You can never have enough books in any one classroom
to support the range that we're seeing in schools right now.
It's impossible.
So if we try to just fund classroom libraries,
I think we're gonna have to keep funding every year
because your range of students is going to change,
not to mention their interests,
their passions, and what they love.
So the book room makes the books supply
seem endless in the eyes of a reader.
But we agree that most book rooms that we first encounter
need to be shifted in how they're designed.
- Right, that re-organization makes all the difference.
- Getting a bunch of questions now.
I wanna ask this one from Kim, which feels really important.
Quantity or quality?
Do I fill the classroom with $50 worth of
poorly written stories on cheap newsprint pages
or a few Caldecott winners?
- Yeah, we're with you on quality.
When we go into a bookstore and we want to find
a book that we want, or we look online,
we want books that kids fall in love with.
And we wanna make sure that we pick books
that children can see themselves in
and they can learn about others through.
And so we always believe that it's better to have
quality books that kids can't wait to get a hold of
and there's a wishlist to read,
versus lots of books that just sit on the shelves.
- And we see teachers actually
spending time photocopying books.
I mean, I know I probably shouldn't say that,
but they're doing it in a way that they're allowed to
'cause they have a program that allows them to,
and that's how hard they're working
to make sure their kids have access to books they can read.
They're spending hours doing this.
So, but they'll always say, this isn't,
they're not engaging, right?
The books aren't engaging when you're copying them.
So I do think, when you're asking readers, right,
to do work as part of their curriculum,
that they should have engaging texts to do this work with.
So we would and we try to include a lot of vendors
who we've found to be, you know, high-quality vendors.
And we'll often suggest to use lots of vendors
'cause you wanna have a balance of the types of books
that you have in your classroom.
So that kids aren't only getting, like,
one sort of diet of a type of a book,
that they get a range of different types.
- Right, it's also hard, teachers, we all love books.
And so it's hard to get rid of books,
but sometimes we have to week the garden, so to speak.
And those moldy books, old, ripped books,
sometimes they're ready to be replaced
because people aren't reading them and loving them.
- Getting a lot of questions now.
I'm gonna see how many here I can kind of get in.
One consistent theme I'm seeing among the questions is,
I know the book, the grade range for the book,
we're talking more elementary, but we're getting
a lot of questions about middle and high school.
Can any of the ideas that you've put in the book
be used for middle and high school?
And that's a generic version
of a lot of the questions coming in.
So I apologize to the people watching.
- I think most of the examples that we're showing are,
you know, through K through sixth grade.
I think we are in some schools
where it happens to be a middle school
because we go through sixth grade.
And I think in those settings,
we're seeing it work in middle schools.
High school, we have high schoolers.
(laughing)
But I have to be honest, we haven't really taught there.
I would imagine that, but you know,
I think that would be a great question,
like, probably for Penny or Kelley,
who are doing this work in high schools.
- Yeah, it'd be lovely to see how
someone who read the book with that lens
thinks about the interests of their readers
in their classrooms and how they organize it.
I can't imagine, we advocate a lot in the book
about children being part of organizing.
Imagine, you know, how teens might organize
you know, a collection of texts.
It'd be interesting to see.
- As a parent, going into high schools,
you know, when I go to parent night,
there are classroom libraries in all my kids' classrooms.
So I would imagine the same system would work.
That the could be rotating out different types of texts.
Or, you know, they often do a whole class
sort of study on something,
but then they're reading other books within a text set.
I could see that working because they have
a range of learners, as well.
- Okay, I've gotta quickly put my sales hat on,
so I apologize to Clare and Tammy for this,
but we are getting a lot of questions
in the comment box about this.
The book is on sale right now on Heinemann.com.
We have a discount code from ASCD, our ASCD conference code.
If you go onto their page on our Heinemann.com website,
which, we're shipping now from Heinemann.com,
if you click on that, there's a code you can enter
and it gives you a discount on the code.
That code is available through the end of this week.
So, getting a lot of questions
about where we can buy the book.
Because we are Heinemann,
I'd love for you to buy it from Heinemann.
But yes, you can get it at Amazon.
But if you buy it from Heinemann this week,
it's actually on sale.
So go check that out.
Okay, back to the editorial-type stuff.
Few other questions here.
I just wanna scroll through, here.
We're getting so many great questions.
And we're gonna wrap in a minute, here.
This, I'm gonna ask you this question.
I don't know if this is, if this really reaches
the grade level that we're talking about,
but in general, there's two halves of this question,
I think the first half is probably better.
How can we get colleagues to buy into
the necessity of classroom libraries
when whole-class novels and trade books are pushed instead?
So I throw that out there to you.
I don't know what the best way to answer that is.
- I think we would recommend Kate Roberts' new book,
A Novel Approach.
And I think, you know, her talking about that there may be,
right, so the classroom library
would have trade books in it, right Tam?
- Yeah.
- And there may be a whole-class novel,
but there's also times where kids,
within that gradual lease of responsibility,
are also reading on their own or in
small groups or book clubs.
And that's where the classroom library,
you could begin to explore some of those ideas.
Tammy, you wanna add on to that?
- Yeah, I think that when someone is using
a whole-class novel, and Kate talks about this in her book,
we can bridge that to getting students more practice
by perhaps a next step being book clubs.
So we might look at, you know, organizing the room
based on that whole-class novel
and then moving to book clubs with small-group sets.
And then eventually transitioning to
even more independent reading.
But I think we can gradually build on what someone's doing
to then increase the amount kids are reading.
- And again, that range is gonna be important.
Once they move to book clubs, then it needs to be a book
that they can read, in following that Ellington research.
So, again, yes classroom libraries,
but you could also envision
in a high school and a middle school,
if you have a range of readers, going to a book room,
or within a team, having a range of
different options for kids to select from
so that continue to explore whatever topic
or text structure or genre that you're studying as a class,
but being able to access a book
in terms of decodeability and comprehension.
- Right, as Clare mentioned that choice is so, so important.
So no matter what the structure, we wanna make sure that
kids have lots of options to choose from.
- Again, lots of great comments.
I think there's so many wonderful things here.
I'm just, forgive me, I'm just sort of scrolling through
and trying to keep up with everybody's
questions and comments, here.
I just had one and I lost it.
I do wanna mention about Book Love donations,
the Book Love Foundation, I should specifically say.
We have a whole writeup about how this book is connected to
the Book Love Foundation on the Heinemann website.
But proceeds of the book are going to
the Book Love Foundation.
Do you both wanna speak a little bit about that
for just a second?
- It's hard to write a book about books
and the need for books, and not do something about it.
So I think, as we were putting this book together
and using the stories of so many teachers and kids,
we really wanted to be able to do something about that.
And Penny was so generous to allow us to
sort of join the Book Love Foundation
and begin to use the proceeds of this book
to help fund elementary, sort of,
bridge or broaden that scope of Book Love
to fund elementary and middle grade classrooms.
- And we're excited to be a part of the Book Love Foundation
and help teachers to get more books in their rooms
so that every time someone buys this book,
they should know that the proceeds go to
giving classroom libraries to a teacher.
- It also puts us in a better position to advocate,
honestly, because if we can do that, then, right,
other people can find that in school systems.
That we believe in it that much, that we're doing that.
And we're not math people, for those who know us,
but we started to do the math, and I think for like
every almost like thousand books we sell,
we fund an elementary classroom.
We haven't funded one yet, but it looks like,
as we look at how they do it,
we will fund an elementary classroom.
So, as Tammy said, you buy a book and you're gonna be
helping other teachers get books.
- Well, I think that is the perfect note to go out on.
So, thank you Clare and Tammy for your time tonight.
Thank you to everybody who's been watching.
We've gotten a few questions.
This video will stay up on our Facebook page
once we've concluded.
And then later tonight or tomorrow
I'm gonna move it over to the Heinemann blog.
So if you have friends who are not on Facebook
and aren't able to watch, we'll give you a link
so you can watch it elsewhere, as well.
- Thank you.
- So, again, the book is All About the Books:
How to Create Bookrooms and Classroom Libraries
That Inspire Readers.
And again, it's shipping now from Heinemann.com.
It's on sale on Heinemann.com.
It's on sale the rest of this week, I think through Friday.
The details are on the website,
so definitely go check that out.
Thank you, Clare and Tammy, for writing this book.
Thank you for doing this interview with us tonight.
And we're just so excited that
this book is out in the world.
- Thank you so much. - So are we.
Thank you. (laughing)
- And definitely, again, just one more quick plug,
make sure you follow the Twitter chat Thursday night,
hashtag G2great, chat with Mary Howard, Fran McVeigh,
happening over on Twitter, starting at 8:30 p.m. Eastern.
And check out our podcast that the three of us did together,
which is up on Heinemann right now
or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.
You can just check it out, the Heinemann podcast.
So, all right, that is it, we are wrapping up.
- All right. - Thank you, everyone.
Have a good night. - Good night, everyone.
- Bye.