Katy Ackerson

I have struggled during my entire career as a teacher librarian to balance my main roles of “reading enthusiast and advisor,” and “teacher of 21st century skills.” I have generally fallen heavy on the skills side as I watch my colleagues labor in teaching and feel that I, too, should be fretting over the acquisition and mastery of skills. Reading books, talking to students about books, and helping kids find books that match their interests and reading levels just seems too good to be true in education’s world of assessments, data, and accountability, so it must not be important.

This year I have taken the opportunity to scale back the skills teaching, working in tandem with Language Arts teachers to get the right books in the hands of readers. I have let myself believe this year that this is the most important thing I do – being enthusiastic about books and reading, and guiding my students to books that will excite and challenge them, too.

One of the more engaging events that I have run was the brain child of Darilyn Sigel, a fellow librarian in my district. Coinciding with the NCAA March Madness tournament, we selected 32 great books from a variety of genres and at a variety of reading levels. We paired them with similar books and presented the Battle of the Books, or Reading Madness, a bracketed tournament. Students could vote, using an online Google form, on any pairs as long as they had attempted to read both books and had a true sense of which one they liked best. After the first round of voting, students were given time to read the new pairs, and so on until a final reader’s choice winner was announced. This was a fun way to encourage students to step outside of their normal genre of choice, to expose both some new titles and some forgotten favorites, and to inspire conversation between students about which books they liked better than others and why.

March Reading Madness