[LM_NET] Summer FNO - Power Reading and the School Library

[Jamie McKenzie <fromnowon@EARTHLINK.NET>]

 From Now On
The Educational Technology Journal
Vol 14|No 6|Summer|2005

This summer's issue can be found for free on line
at http://fno.org

The summer article first appeared in the February 2005 issue of Library 
Media Connection.

You will find a brief excerpt below . . .

----- Power Reading and the School Library -----

Should the media specialist be the most capable teacher
of comprehension in the school?

I. The Comprehension----Literacy Link

While we have always known that a thriving library program is central 
to the success of a school’s reading and learning programs, “The times, 
they are a-changing,” as Dylan would put it.  What once was central is 
now urgent.

NCLB  has created a cocktail of pressures, risks and opportunities that 
impact dramatically on the roles of media specialists.  The LMS is now 
a critical factor in a school’s survival, especially as the staff works 
to strengthen reading comprehension across all classrooms and 
disciplines.

If the teacher-librarian becomes the most capable teacher of 
comprehension skills in the school, the prospects for a strong school 
and a thriving library program are enhanced dramatically, especially 
when the teacher-librarian has the ability to transfer skill and 
effective practice to all colleagues.  The teacher-librarian promotes, 
models and empowers the success of all in making comprehension a school 
priority.

We are now capitalizing upon a natural match between the information 
literacy goals of Information Power and the comprehension needs of the 
school. The notion that reading comprehension is tied to information 
literacies is relatively novel, since the two have been treated as 
nearly separate domains in the past, but we can no longer afford such 
an artificial separation.

Literacy is about wrestling understanding from chunks of information, 
whether those chunks be numerical, textual, visual, cultural or 
artistic. Comprehension, on the other hand, has traditionally been more 
narrowly defined as the understanding of paragraphs and passages; but a 
marriage of the two seems well timed as the NCLB testing juggernaut 
thunders across the nation.

Continued at http://fno.org . . .



Jamie McKenzie
Editor, From Now On - The Educational Technology Journal
http://fno.org
Editor, The Question Mark
http://questioning.org
mckenzie@fno.org
360-647-8759
500 15th Street
Bellingham, WA 98225

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