For a librarian with an innovator's mindset, inquiry can be a collaborative strategy for continual growth. When a librarian innovates with their community, radical, human-centered change is possible. According to the author, school librarians see the needs in the communities across grades, content areas, and demographics. The best advocacy is…

Synergy may be defined as the collaboration between two or more parties to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate parts. That is exactly what happened in Denton, Texas, when all types of librarians collaborated on a community reading initiative. In 2007 Denton Reads--a One Book, One Community organization--was formed with…

In this article, the author discusses the transformative power of care. In the interest of achieving some modicum of clarity, the author begins with a definition of the word "care." For each of the different school constituencies, there exist categories of actions through which educators demonstrate care. Broadly, these categories include:…

Learning in the library should present opportunities to enrich student learning activities to address concerns of interest and cognitive complexity, but these must be tasks that call for in-depth analysis--not merely gathering facts. Library learning experiences need to demand enough of students to keep them interested and also need to be…

There has been a significant spike among school librarians in talk about the process of learning since the 2007 release of the "Standards for the 21st-Century Learner" by the American Association of School Librarians. How do children really learn best? The AASL Standards make it clear that 21st-century school librarianship is not just about…

The study's purpose was to investigate the views and opinions of librarians about the implementation of Web 2.0 technologies into library operations and services. The Delphi technique was chosen as the method of inquiry in this study, in which a group of panelists graded the desirability and probability of a list of statements. Thirty-nine…

Some of the author's most valuable experiences as a library media specialist (LMS) were not in a school library. Rather, they were on the streets of Chicago, in community gardens, and on the rooftops of buildings in Humboldt Park, where she was hired by the University of Illinois Community Informatics Initiative as a graduate assistant and LMS in…

Providing time and guidance to students as they "sift and sort" background information on a potential inquiry topic is important at any level of investigation, from grade school to graduate school. As the inquiring student moves through new information, discusses ideas with teachers and peers and, most of all, has time to reflect on the initial…

Discussion of the role of the media specialist as a teacher summarizes 10 major elements of the inquiry approach to teaching and learning and seven areas of the school media center's commitment (networking, flexibility, cooperation, concentration, financing, community, and encouragement). Discovery learning research and program implementation are…