TLA – Wednesday, school administration mini-conference
TLA stands for Texas Library Association. Their annual conference was April 15-18. Electronic handouts exist for most presentations. Handouts will be added to those presently posted.
Wednesday, April 16th I was able once again to participate in the “Strong Libraries, Strong Scores School Administrators mini-conference that was inspired by the White House Conference on School Libraries in 2002. As usual we had nationally known speakers many who spoke at the White House Conference. We were privileged this year to have Anita Givens, Deputy Commissioner welcome us and stay for the whole day.
Keith Curry Lance gave another great state of the research on School Libraries. Everything still points to good Libraries correlating with good achievement scores.
David Loertscher banned the bird unit and took us into higher order thinking questioning. And he introduced some of the thoughts garnered from the AASL conference about iGoogle and other web 2.0 stuff.
Gary Hartzell, a school administrator and not a Librarian had a great message for high school administrators.
Marla McGee again did an excellent job of bringing everything together for all types of administrators. Her chart as to what Librarians should do more of and less of was inspirational and her book Principal’s Guide to a Powerful Library Media Program is still the best around.
The Strong Libraries, Strong Scores mini-conference for School Administrators has occurred mostly the same for the last 4 years. I think it is time to look and see if wee need to make any changes. We did allow Librarians to come with their administrators this time, but I think we need to ask the basic question, “What do we want administrators to hear now”?
If you have any ideas, please comment.
