The Ready for Success Project started in 2021 and the plan was always to culminate in some form of regional conference day to share our experiences and to provide a forum for discussing research skills at the high school level. In the early days, all of the grant team’s efforts were so focused on designing our approach, recruiting a cohort, coordinating through many on-site visits and Zoom meetings that the idea of the Summit seemed part of a very distant future.
Well, the day finally came and went, with the Ready for Success Summit taking place on Friday, March 15th at Stony Brook University. By the numbers, over 100 people attended from over 40 school districts on Long Island. We convened not only high school librarians, teachers, and administrators but colleagues from higher education, public libraries, and one professional genealogist. It was a full day and a fruitful day, with many ideas (and bags of library swag) shared among educators.
Dr. Brenda Boyer’s keynote set a strong foundation, highlighting her research with colleagues from Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information no first-year college students and their preparedness for academic-level research. She also shared her experiences with and strategies for engaging students in the classroom as a high school librarian.
Over two panel sessions, the grant team laid out the steps of the Ready for Success Project and how a cross-disciplinary cohort of teachers and librarians can learn and work together. The goal was never to implement a strict, top-down curriculum but to let each teacher find the areas in their lessons that could be strengthened with information literacy concepts and activities. Themes that emerged included slowing down, avoiding the “dreaded research paper,” and finding smaller-stake, distributed exercises that could be practiced throughout a student’s career. Research, in short, is not just for English class.
The afternoon was spent in workshop mode as tables of attendees tackled a number of discussion prompts geared towards generating practical ideas. How do we embed research skills into more classes? How do we make research more engaging? Where can teachers, librarians and administrators talk about these things? We’ll leave for another blog post the “draw your ideal school library” prompt but suffice it to say, the conversations were thoughtful and wide ranging.
We want to thank everyone who attended and added their energy and enthusiasm to the day. It was truly beyond the reception that we would have anticipated back in 2021. There is without a doubt an interest across the Island in figuring out how to strengthen student research skills. Right now the grant team is deep in assessment mode, compiling the last of our data and writing up results for eventual publication but we’re committed to furthering the goals of the grant. You can subscribe to this blog for future updates and we look forward to future collaborations!
