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Future Ready Librarians Challenge

The Future Ready Librarians® (FRL) Challenge is an ongoing series of bite-sized professional learning activities to help you develop new tools and strategies, focus your leadership, and connect with fellow librarians to share ideas and solutions. With these activities, you’ll stay professionally grounded by connecting your librarianship to the Future Ready Schools® framework and building your librarian learning network.

Bookmark this site for regular updates and challenges as they are released. While each challenge launches with time-specific activities, all challenges and resources will be archived to allow you to explore the challenges on your own timeline either this year or in the future. Updates and challenges also will be posted on the Future Ready Librarians Facebook page and Twitter.

FUTURE READY LIBRARIANS® CHALLENGE #3
READY FOR A STORM: BUILDING YOUR MATERIALS CHALLENGE TOOLKIT

One day you come into work to learn that a parent, teacher, or community member has concerns about a book on your library shelf, a video viewed in a classroom, or a topic that is being taught in health class.

This Future Ready Librarians Challenge is focused on library and instructional materials challenges. Like natural disasters, these challenges are unexpected, unpleasant, and require a team effort to respond. But in the same way that you can prepare and plan for a hurricane or a wildfire, Future Ready Librarians can also ready themselves for the day when someone has a concern with a library book or other learning materials.

Your Future Ready Librarians Challenge activities include building a toolkit to help you respond effectively, professionally, and confidently to a materials challenge in your school or district. You also will compile policies and documents, understand your school and district processes, and know how materials challenges are managed when they occur.

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Activity 1: What are your school and district policies?

Knowing your existing school and district policies and procedures is a simple first step. Having these in hand when a challenge occurs will help you know how to effectively and professionally respond.

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Activity 2: What's in your school and district policies/procedures?

Now that you know what your policies are, let's look at them a little more closely and take a deeper dive into the implication of them on challenged materials.

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Activity 3: Who are your partners?

No one in schools or districts enjoys dealing with library or instructional materials challenges. To address challenges, partnerships need to be formed and cultivated throughout the district and within the school. From the central office to the principal's desk to the classroom or library, you’re all in this together.

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Activity 4: Understanding the Hazards

While materials challenge cannot be predicted, simple steps can be taken to be ready when one occurs.

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The Future Ready Librarians strand is generously supported by Follett