\n
Imagine a media center full of students and teachers doing the usual
\n“library things,” plus up to 40 other students engaged, totally engaged, at
\nlearning resource centers. The concept was brought to the Fort Benning,
\nGeorgia, schools by principal Del Hicks 11 years ago. After a couple of
\nyears of testing at one school, it went system-wide in 1987.<\/p>\n
What is a learning resource center? Each of our six elementary schools does
\nits centers differently, but the basic program allows small groups of
\nstudents to come to the media center to use games, filmstrips, educational
\nmachines, read-alongs and other activities that reinforce what the teacher
\nis covering in class. The teacher can work with smaller groups back in the
\nclassroom, thus avoiding the workbook\/ditto sheet dreariness for all groups.
\nThis happens in an “open library” with no weekly scheduled “library period,”
\nalthough library skills classes are given as needed.<\/p>\n
Speaking from my experience, here are some of the conditions that should be
\nin place to implement the program:<\/p>\n
Support at the top. Explain to the principal that the concept will give you
\na method of supporting the teachers’ instruction on a daily basis, will give
\nthe students a chance to use the media center often, will appeal to many
\nlearning styles, and will make the media center a dynamic hub of the
\neducational program.
\nSupport of the faculty. Don’t try to convert all the teachers at once. Some
\nwill question the wisdom of such a break with the traditional concept of a
\nschool library. Involve willing teachers in selecting materials.
\nAn aide and resources. At least one full-time aide is essential to running
\nthe centers. Ask the principal to let you sit in on interviews of applicants
\nand look for someone who loves to stay busy, can think on her feet, can
\nlisten to eight conversations at once, and loves working with children. For
\nstarting up, it would be nice to get at least $1,000 to buy games and other
\nmaterials, but you can do it with less.
\nThe scheduling, organization of materials, and procedures should be designed
\nto fit your personality and organizational style. What follows are
\nsuggestions based on seven years of refining the concept at Edward A. White
\nElementary School. Use what works for you.
\nGetting Ready
\nStart planning a year in advance. Explain the concept at faculty meetings in
\nterms of what it will do for teachers. If you have a teacher from a school
\nwhere the program has been done before, you’ll probably have a strong
\nadvocate. For schools where the library is treated like a special area
\n(along with art, music, and physical education), the first reaction of many
\nteachers will be, “What! Give up my planning period!” Work with the
\nprincipal to offer an alternative to “library period,” so the teachers will
\nstill have a planning period.<\/p>\n
Meet with teachers at each grade level to see what skills they teach that
\nwould lend themselves to center activities. Take inventory of the materials
\nand equipment you have already. You’ll need several sound\/filmstrip
\nprojectors with headphone jacks, cassette tape recorders with headsets, and
\nas many teaching aids as you can find.<\/p>\n
The most successful activities in our program have been board games that
\nstress specific skills, such as getting the main idea, cause and effect,
\nsequence of events, and library skills. Most of these games can be found in
\nschool supply catalogs, and are a bargain at $20-25 each.<\/p>\n
When selecting games and teaching aids, consider how well the item will hold
\nup with heavy use, whether it is self-checking, how much time you will need
\nto spend explaining it, and how appealing it is to the students. Avoid
\nflimsy folder and table games and battery-operated machines with probes and
\ncards. (Students tend to mark that correct answer with the probe.) You won’t
\nbe able to watch every activity all the time. Machines that give an audible
\nresponse to incorrect as well as correct answers encourage students not to
\nguess.<\/p>\n
Process the games and teaching aids. Mark the accession number on all game
\npieces. You’ll be finding pawns, dice, cards, and other strange pieces all
\nover the place, or in the wrong box. Without the accession numbers, you
\ncould go crazy trying to match them up. Buy some extra pawns, dice, and
\nbingo markers.<\/p>\n
Don’t put out the original copy of the directions and answer sheets – they
\nwon’t last a week. Rather, make a photocopy and laminate it. Reinforce the
\ncorners of game boxes and put game pieces in self-closing plastic bags with
\na list of the pieces.<\/p>\n
Scheduling
\nOur schedule gives us 20-minute blocks for center activities. We allow ten
\nminutes to set up for the next groups. If teachers want a full 30 minutes
\nwith their groups back in the classroom, the center groups must spend the
\nlast ten minutes checking out books, reading magazines, using the computers,
\nor looking at displays. (We have a glass-enclosed bee hive in the room.) The
\nfirst-grade teachers have three reading groups and rotate them between the
\nclassroom, the computer lab and the centers.<\/p>\n
On the schedule, the numbers in parentheses indicate the number of groups
\nthe teacher is sending at that time. A “group” for learning resource centers
\nconsists of no more than four students. (Many of the games we use are
\ndesigned for four players.) When electronic teaching aids are scheduled
\n(such as GeoSafari), I assign two machines to a group, with two students per
\nmachine.<\/p>\n
Looking at the schedule, you can see that at 8:45 on Monday we have 10
\ngroups (40 students) from five different classes. The next period,
\n9:15-9:35, we have only eight groups, from the same classes as the earlier
\ngroups but with different students.<\/p>\n
Fifteen of our 18 classroom teachers send all or half of their class to
\ncenters four to five days a week. Our physical and staff limitations require
\nus to schedule no more than 12 groups (48 students) at a time. The schedule
\nis on a spreadsheet and easily changed as teachers adjust their classroom
\nroutines. The teachers should give you a roster showing group assignments.
\nThis prevents confusion when a student forgets his group or decides to try
\nto join a friend at a more interesting activity.<\/p>\n
Planning
\nI try to get to the teachers’ classrooms during their planning periods to
\nselect the activities for the learning centers. I feel this is cooperative
\nplanning at its best. It can take from two to four hours a week at first,
\nbut much less time is required after the system is running and the teachers
\nare used to the process and the materials. The teacher may have some
\nactivities in mind, or she may ask for suggestions. In either case, I feel
\nit’s important for the teacher to make the final decision.<\/p>\n
Each teacher is given a printout of learning center resources and another of
\nall other software. These lists help us make the most appropriate choice.
\nAlso, I prepare a monthly list of seasonal materials (filmstrips about
\nholidays and events) that are on reserve and can be scheduled by the hour
\nfor use in centers or in the classroom.<\/p>\n
Some teachers plan for one week at a time, others for two or more. Some
\nmembers of teaching teams will each make a plan and then rotate the plans.<\/p>\n
Try not to schedule many activities that take a long time to explain or
\nrequire close supervision. Instead, try to come up with a mix, including
\nfilmstrips, easy-to-learn games, and read-along books. Some excellent games
\nfor the upper grades need detailed explanations. You can go to the classroom
\nbefore the first group comes and explain the game to the entire class,
\nthereby saving start-up time in the media center.<\/p>\n
Running the Learning Resource Center
\nIf shelf space allows, lay out all the materials for the week by class. If
\ntwo classes are using the same material at different times, I note this on
\nthe weekly plan.<\/p>\n
Have a set procedure for students to find out what center activity they’ll
\nbe doing when they come to the media center. Make a rule that students will
\nroll the die or use the spinner to see who goes first in the games. We have
\na house rule that, after determining who is first, we always go clockwise in
\ndeciding who goes second, third, and fourth.<\/p>\n
To help us keep on schedule and to maintain our sanity, we also have a rule
\nthat nobody leaves the table until an adult checks that all parts of a game
\nare put away, the filmstrip is rewound, and so forth.<\/p>\n
Because many of the games cause excitement among the players, the noise
\nlevel can become a problem. Try to separate games which require talking from
\nthe area where students are listening on headsets. Use back rooms, study
\ncarrels, and isolated areas for noisy activities. The worst thing we can do
\nto students for excessive noise or misbehavior is to give them time-out.
\nThey love doing centers!<\/p>\n
Ask the primary teachers to send an aide or parent volunteer to the media
\ncenter with the very young. These workers will know the children by name,
\nknow which ones need special help, and can explain the games and supervise
\nthe activities.<\/p>\n
Have “sponge” activities in case the filmstrip is only 12 minutes long, or
\nsome bright students whiz through the game faster than expected. Puzzles and
\nother such activities work well. Buy them cheap at yard sales.<\/p>\n
Often the library aide can supervise the centers alone. During especially
\nbusy times or when there are games that need extra explanation or
\nsupervision, you’ll need to jump in and help.<\/p>\n
Establishing learning resource centers is not simple. It takes a basic
\nreorientation of the media program, support from administration and faculty,
\na little money, some hard work, careful organization, and the ability to
\nhandle an active media environment. The rewards make it worth the effort.
\nTeachers will love the way centers support their instruction and allow them
\nto work with small groups. Students are eager for the change of setting and
\nthe fun of games. Parents find their children are more excited about
\nlearning and get to the media center more often for checking out books and
\ndoing research. And you’ll be content in the knowledge that your media
\ncenter has become the heart of the school.<\/p>\n
Owen Ditchfield has been the Media Specialist at Edward A. White Elementary
\nSchool in Fort Benning, Georgia, for seven years. Before that he was a
\nlanguage arts teacher.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Imagine a media center full of students and teachers doing the usual “library things,” plus up to 40 other students engaged, totally engaged, at learning resource centers. The concept was brought to the Fort Benning, Georgia, schools by principal Del Hicks 11 years ago. After a couple of years of testing at one school, it …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1507,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[126],"tags":[192],"class_list":["post-1506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-126","tag-media"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/informaticsjournal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/informaticsjournal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/informaticsjournal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/informaticsjournal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/informaticsjournal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1506"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/informaticsjournal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1506\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1512,"href":"https:\/\/informaticsjournal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1506\/revisions\/1512"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/informaticsjournal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/informaticsjournal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/informaticsjournal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/informaticsjournal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}