Now is the time to prepare for next year and to start, take the time to craft a mission statement.  The mission defines your purpose—what you and your library program do.  It should highlight what makes you unique and vital to the educational community and expressed in words laymen can understand.  You can start with the mission AASL gives in Empower Learners: Guidelines for School Library Media Programs (ALA, 2009).

The mission of the school library media program is to ensure that students and staff are effective users of ideas and information.  The school library media specialist empowers to be critical thinkers, enthusiastic readers, skilled researchers, and ethical users of information (p. 8).

How it is done is included, but that’s not part of a mission statement which needs to be succinct, between 25 and 50 words. AASL’s statement is 32 words beginning with the word “to.” The reason for the brevity is so that it is easily remembered and can be framed and hung on the wall of the library for all to see.

That mission was written six years ago. Today we recognize an important part of what we do is ensure that students are also empowered to be producers of information.  Despite that important addition, the mission statement should be recognized for its use of strong words. Ensure and empower carry much more weight than “support and enrich” or even “foster and nurture” which frequently appear in school library mission statements. Avoid “can” as in “so students can…”  It will be stronger if you go directly to the next word.

You can borrow wording from the AASL statement and add other ideas important to presenting what you do and how it adds value to the school community.  In lower grade levels, love of reading leading to lifetime readers is a prime focus. While it is equally necessary at middle and high school grades, those you want to see why you are vital do not usually consider it as significant as student interaction with information.  You want to promote what you do but do it in such a way that your stakeholders recognize they need your contribution to the educational program.

Play around with the words you think are important.  Search under “school library mission statements” to find examples others have written.   Are there phrases you want to use in your statement?  Make sure you keep it in the present tense.  Review it.  Are the words powerful?  Does it show how you are unique? Once you get it within the length requirements, start memorizing it.  Print it and find a frame for it.  Proudly hang your Mission Statement on your wall for all who come into your library to see it.  And if you want help… send me an email at hilda@slworkshop.net

Next week – Vision Statements.

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What does this have to do with libraries, librarians and your program?

Most of us have become goal-directed.  Certainly our jobs require it. Writing Student Growth Objectives (or whatever terminology your state and/or district call it) demands you focus on reaching set outcomes to demonstrate your contribution to student achievement. Aside from those, you may have a strategic plan –written or mental—designed to improve your program. And then there are personal goals—for fitness, weight, home improvement, financial, or any other target important to your life.

When we set those goals, they may seem distant and at times unattainable.  We picture completing them as having reached the finish line with metaphorical crowds cheering out victory.  Yet the truth is – life goes on.  There isn’t a finish line until the very end.  What we attain when we achieve a goal we set is a milestone, not a conclusion.

The Common Core has all of us focused on benchmarks indicating what students are expected to be able to do at the conclusion of a grade level.  When they reach it, they have not arrived at the finish line but are moving on and using what they learned to achieve the next one.  Beyond the Common Core—having proved themselves “college and career ready” – their learning and growth can never stop or we and they have failed.

In preparing students for lifetime learning, we as librarians need to take on the challenge of going beyond Common Core (as unsettling as that may sound).  Critical Thinking is not an end, it is means, and must be paired with Creative Thinking if students are to become the innovators.  The first is convergent in its focus, the second divergent.  Where they overlap, is where new ideas are put into action.  Two circles and the wheel turns and repeats.  There is no finish line, only milestones on a life journey.

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The tasks won’t go away, but they, and your time, can be managed better.  Instead of going through life with a fire extinguisher and duct tape – putting out fires as they come up and patching problems – look at your life and tasks as a whole.  Divide your responsibilities and interests into two –family and friends, and your job.  In both cases you need to remind yourself of your priorities.  List the two or three top ones.  More will drive you crazy.

This is what works for me.

Before you go home each day or first thing in the morning—whatever works best for you—create a list of what needs to be done. (For some this is best done on a weekly basis, for me it’s usually for today and tomorrow.) Pen and paper or digital doesn’t matter.  Again, it needs to meet your needs.  Subdivide them by area.  For example, it might be classes (teaching and preparing), communicating (updating website, blogging, reports to administrators), and, hopefully, outreach (group or person you are targeting for collaboration and/or building a relationship leading to advocacy.  Your personal list covers shopping, time with family (homework with kids, dinner out with spouse), and self-care (exercise, TV-watching, or whatever relaxes you – many of you know of my solitaire addiction).

Place an asterisk next to the two most important items on your list.  Then start your day.  Although you might not get to them immediately, knowing they are most important, you will attend to them. You probably won’t get to everything on your list in the time you allotted.  As noted earlier, too much to do, and too little time to do it and new things are always popping up.  You are likely to find that some you didn’t get to become a high priority a bit down the road.  That’s fine. If you need to, note what got in your way—a teacher or student needing immediate help that takes more time than expected or a crisis at home. Life has a way of upsetting our best plans.

Don’t beat yourself up for what didn’t get done. Look at what you did accomplish.  My life is filled with deadlines.  I have accepted the fact that no matter what I do there are only 24 hours in the day.  I do need to sleep and being sleep deprived makes me less efficient.  Some days I am lazier than others, and that’s OK.  I am human.  And the most important lesson I have learned, is “everything important will get done—it always does.”

Do you have a system that works for you?

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What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

© Langston Hughes http://www.cswnet.com/~menamc/langston.htm

I always loved the poem not ever seeing how it applied to me.  An avid reader from my early childhood, I dreamed of someday becoming an author myself.  Perhaps you share that dream as so many readers do. I was ecstatic when my first book, co-authored with Ruth Toor, The Elementary School Librarian’s Almanac: A Complete Media Program for Every Month of the School Year (The Center for Applied Research in Education, 1979, 256 p. 0-87628-299-0) was published.  It was followed by fourteen other books for school librarians.  The latest being School Librarian’s Career Planner (ALA, 2013, 126 p. 978-0-8389-1178—5).  I am proud of all of them, but this wasn’t the writing career of my dreams.

In 2004, I retired as a high school librarian (obviously, that’s all I retired from) and the following June when I would have been working, my daughter took me with her to International Women’s Writing Guild’s summer workshops then held at Skidmore College. Along with lots of other writing I did during those five days, I started a novel in one of the classes.  I completed it in fits and starts thanks to the gentle (and not-so-gentle) prodding of others.

Six drafts later, a hunt for an agent proved fruitless.  (I may not have been sufficiently diligent.) Then a small independent publisher began a separate company for young adult books and accepted Woven though Time.  On October 9, my dream of so long ago became a reality.  In the opening of the “Acknowledgments,” I say, “Sometimes it takes a village to make a dream come true,” and conclude, “never lose sight of your dream, and share it with the people who care about you.  They may very well be the ones who help you make it come true.”

Do you have a dream you think will never be realized?  Try sharing it with others and find a plan to make it a reality.  With a few weeks to go before the end of the year, now is a great time to put things in motion.

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