Designing a VLLC to engage at-risk learners and promote literacy beyond the four walls of the school library
By Lindsay Reid
Introduction
“The benefits associated with good library programs are strongest for the most vulnerable and at-risk learners.”
— Curry and Kachel, 2018
The primary focus of this inquiry was to establish best practice procedures for creating a virtual library learning commons (VLLC) for a specific school demographic. This narrowed focus targets the needs of a number of schools in the Surrey School District (and others) with an inner city population, high ELL enrolment, refugee students, and learners that are generally below grade level in literacy skills across all grade levels. The term inner city, can be difficult to succinctly define, as the Surrey School District sees it as fluid designation given to a school after considering its composition and unique needs. This process allows the district to provide specific support in the form of necessary funding, additional specialized teachers and programs to support learners (Langelaar, 2019). In the case of the sample school, socioeconomic factors such as high levels of generational poverty and subsidized housing in the catchment area play a key role in the school’s inner city designation. The students are considered at risk for a number of reasons including poverty, lack of proper nutrition, unstable home lives, transiency, and inconsistent support with academic and social-emotional growth at home.
This document will help teacher-librarians create a VLLC that will engage their learners and support literacy beyond the four walls of the school library. This report is meant to be shared with teacher-librarians and/or administration in schools of the same demographic as the sample school.
The specific inquiry question and sub-questions that drove this research were:
What features of a VLLC will help engage an at-risk school population (inner city, high ELL, refugee students, generally below grade level in reading), and promote literacy beyond the walls of the physical library space?
- What features of a VLLC will best support the target school demographic (inner city, high ELL, refugee students, generally below grade level in reading)?
- How can a VLLC be used to support literacy in the classroom and at home?
- How can the school community be engaged in the use and creation of VLLC content?
This report combines scholarly research with web design best practices, expert advice, real school statistics, and interviews with teachers and teacher-librarians.
Sample Statistics from a School within this Demographic
Sample statistics from a single school within this at-risk demographic were used to drive this inquiry. While specific numbers vary from school to school, the types of needs addressed in this report are shared among a number of Surrey schools.
Sample school statistics:
- Number of students: 405
- Percentage designated ELL students: 52% (this number does not include students who have “graduated” from the mandatory 5 years of ELL service and reporting)
- Percentage of refugee students (only those designated, the actual number is higher as many are listed only as permanent residents): 3% designated, actual estimate is 5-7%
- Percentage of grade 2-7 students below grade level in literacy scores: 65%
- Percentage of grade 2-7 students being serviced by LST teachers in ELA (based on the high needs in the school only students 2-3+ grade levels behind qualify for LST): 33%
- Percentage of grade 2-3 students classified as non-readers:57%
- Percentage of grade 4-7 students at a kindergarten to grade 1 reading level: 8%
Identified Needs and Goals of the VLLC
“The Virtual Learning Commons needs the same attention as the physical environment. It is an organized but collaborative space for learning. It is not a replacement for the physical LLC but an extension of it to make the LLC available to students and learners 24/7.”
— Leading Learning, 2014
During my time working at the sample school, and through interviews conducted with classroom teachers, learner support teachers, and the school’s teacher-librarian, the following needs regarding a virtual space have been identified:
- Icons and recognizable graphics for non-readers
- Simple, easy-to-navigate pages (kid-friendly as parent involvement and support is not a guarantee)
- A portal for the web tools most commonly used in the classroom (navigating to websites has been identified as a huge area of difficulty and deterrent for teachers to use web based tools)
- A showcase of student work to hook both students and parents, as well as celebrating the successes of the school community
- Collaborative spaces
- An emphasis on promoting reading
- Some content available in multiple languages for ELL families
- A community effort (involvement of students, teachers, and parents) to create content and influence the design of the space
Based on a combination of research on the purpose of a VLLC, the statistics from the sample school, and the identified needs listed above, one long term goal and four immediate/ongoing goals for the VLLC have been identified.
Long term goal: Overtime, the VLLC will assist existing programs to increase school community engagement in literacy, and reduce instances of non-reading or significantly below grade level reading students.
Ongoing goal 1: The VLLC will create an online hub for literacy, learning, and collaboration that will impact teaching and learning in the classroom as well as continued learning outside of school. “A Learning Commons is about changing school culture, and about transforming the way learning and teaching occur” (Loerstcher and Koechlin, 2011).
Ongoing goal 2: The VLLC will assist classroom teachers in utilizing web-based tools with their students, especially in the areas of literacy and research skills.
Ongoing goal 3: The VLLC will give students 24/7 access to quality reading material that can be customized to the students’ needs (read-to-me, e-book, audio books, multiple reading levels, fiction and non-fiction).
Ongoing goal 4: The VLLC will assist the physical LLC in engaging the school community in collaborative and life-long learning, especially in the area of literacy.
VLLC Design Elements
“This new paradigm extends the boundaries of the library’s information ecology and calls for a restructuring of services and physical and virtual space focused on the learning needs of our user community.”
— McMullen, 2007
Leading research on VLLCs identify five “portals” that should be present in a VLLC. These portals are summarized in Loertscher and Woolls (2013), and will be used as a base model in planning and organizing the various features of the proposed VLLC in the sections below. The information center portal is essentially a homepage, and therefore the face of the entire VLLC. Leading Learning (2014) suggests that you “consider your opening page and plan to invite students into the VLC with an interesting item such as a video, challenge, or questions to engage interest.” Ease of navigation, attention to aesthetics, and engaging features to hook users are of utmost importance here. This portal contains access to all other portals, and to information that users may need quick access to like school calendars and the library catalogue. Including a feature from the school culture portal (see below for more details under the heading Features to Engage Learners) on the homepage of your VLLC is an excellent way to hook both students and parents, encouraging them to go deeper and to return to see new school culture images.
The finer points of how the site is designed are highly variable depending on the school demographic and the goals of the VLLC. With so many non or below grade level readers, the VLLC needs to be highly visual, and Buerkett (2014) suggests putting the most important (think most used) links at the top of the page as students may not scroll to look for them. The Surrey School District Library Helping Teacher, Andrea Langelaar, also suggests keeping the pages very simple. She responded to my queries about supporting at risk school populations with a VLLC by saying the following about site design: “I know we often want to make a colourful and impressive content dense VLC, but with an inner city audience I think the value is in simplicity. Four to five pages max. Two or three items per page. Big buttons with easy to read titles and loads of graphics to support the text.”
Simple, goal driven content that caters to your school demographic is likely not enough to produce a quality, well-used VLLC on its own. Aesthetics matter. A comprehensive study of website design features by Schmidt et al, (2009) discovered that “users are willing to sacrifice technical performance to some extent for a more aesthetic interface.” Colours, fonts, graphic quality, and layout all matter, and should be play a big role in the planning a design stages of VLLC creation.
Features to Engage Learners
“A Learning Commons is a common, or shared, learning ‘space’ that is both physical and virtual. It is designed to move students beyond mere research, practice, and group work to a greater level of engagement through exploration, experimentation, and collaboration. A Learning Commons is more than a room or a website. A Learning Commons allows users to create their own environments to improve learning. A Learning Commons is about changing school culture, and about transforming the way learning and teaching occur. ”
— The Virtual Learning Commons (2012)
The “school culture” portal of the VLLC (see VLLC portals above under the heading VLLC Design Elements) is one of the primary factors in engaging the school community. The school culture portal is “the living school yearbook of the school” (Loertscher and Woolls 2013). This is a space to display student work and to promote school activities or achievements. Buerkett (2014) supports the idea of including school culture elements in the following statement: “Whenever possible, the school library website should include photos and videos of students. Children are developmentally narcissistic, and they love to see themselves online! Opportunities to see themselves can be a big draw to the site for any age group.” Keeping the target demographic of this report in mind, the school culture piece is one element of the VLLC that will keep students and parents checking back in on the site to see what is being posted. Parents and students alike want to see authentic student work (especially their own or their child’s) displayed. This section of the VLLC, while not necessarily related to literacy, is a foot in the door for reluctant users that may entice them to explore more of what the VLLC has to offer.
Highly visible information about library promotions, school contests, battle of the books events, or literary award participation/voting information (such as Surrey Schools Book Award Programs) will engage users both in literacy activities and LLC events. School wide reading contests or incentives should also be visible to remind students and parents, and to highlight the ways that literacy is supported in an engaging way through the LLC and VLLC spaces.
Providing links to preferred digital tools and educational games will create additional engaging hooks for students to want to visit the VLLC. The teachers interviewed for this inquiry expressed the need to have a space where links to commonly used web based tools all resided in the same place. Having this space would make navigating to web tools much easier, and make it more likely that teachers would use them in their classroom. Additionally, these sites can be accessed at home, promoting learning beyond school hours, and creating additional traffic and awareness on the VLLC. Engaging sites used at the sample school include Prodigy, Hour of Code, Khan Academy, Math Playground, ABCya!, and Sploder.
Features to Support Literacy in the Classroom and at Home
“Help students and staff become wise consumers and literate citizens through the information you provide and the way your web site communicates. That is the work we do.”
— Warlick 2005
The long term goal of the VLLC identified for the sample school is to assist existing programs to increase school community engagement in literacy, and reduce instances of non-reading or significantly below grade level reading students. Features of design and engagement play into promoting VLLC traffic, creating easy access to web based tools, sharing LLC promotions/activities, and displaying school culture. All of these above mentioned features should exist to support the ultimate goals of the VLLC, in this case the primary long term goal being literacy engagement and skill development.
Loertscher and Woolls (2013) define the VLLC space where “all types of participatory activities connected to reading, writing, speaking, listening, digital citizenship, technology literacy, etc.” take place as the literacy centre portal. To support a school population that is typically low and not necessarily supported at home, the VLLC needs to have a robust literacy centre that includes 24/7 access to quality reading materials that are accessible to all learners. Leading Learning (2014) encourages teacher-librarians to “design spaces to foster independent reading” and work towards building a reading community. Our district has a subscription to Tumblebooks and some teachers use Epic! which should both be featured prominently on the literacy centre page. Both sites give students access to e-books, audio books, and read-to-me books so that all learners have access to reading materials.
Andrea Langelaar suggests that with a high ELL population, content that is available in multiple languages is a must. The Surrey Public Library has a great deal of content available in multiple languages, so links to the SPL page and relevant content should be included. To make the content more accessible to ELL families, a description of the services offered in multiple languages could be posted on the VLLC in English plus some of the most commonly spoken home languages of the school. Any content that offers multiple languages could be identified in the same way.
Information literacy is another key factor in developing a student’s ability to access, use, and create digital content. Loertscher and Woolls (2013) propose separate portals for literacy (defined in their article as reading, writing, and speaking) and knowledge building (research and information literacy). They further identify the information centre as the space to link database subscriptions. To clean up the look of the main page, and connect students to both quality online books and digital information in a streamlined manner, online reading services, databases, and other information literacy sources could all be linked to the same page. It would be a one-stop-shop for all things reading and information. Databases like National Geographic Kids are full of non-fiction e-books that really engage learners and should be available alongside other sources of reading material in the VLLC. Having quality research information clearly linked to the VLLC will normalize these spaces as good sources of information. As Valenza (2005) states, “librarians can tame information chaos by providing interfaces that create order as they offer instruction.”
It is important to make databases easily visible on a main page of the VLLC. Not only do these sources provide great non-fiction titles and provide good research sources, but Valenza (2005) asserts that linking databases to the VLLC “is an equity issue; all students should have easy access to these learning resources. An interface must, at the very least, point students to these resources if we expect them to look beyond commercial search engines.” Additionally, this space should “connect students to the tools that they need to see their way through the research process” (Brooks Kirkland, 2010). Spaces to mind map (such as Popplet or MindMeister) and tools for organizing information and creating evidence of their learning should be readily available.
Collaboration, or as Loerstcher and Woolls (2012) put it, “participatory” culture is another integral component of the VLLC. Collaborative promotion of literacy can take the form of digital book clubs, online components to a battle of the books poll, or special online book promotions for students to take part in. The above mentioned tools to see students through the research process should also focus on tools that students can use collaboratively in class or at home.
Engaging Learners and the School Community in the Creation and Maintenance of the VLLC
“Librarian Joyce Valenza taps students to upload photos of Springfield life, including coverage of sports and school club events to the library’s Flickr page and Pinterest board. Student artwork is also archived on the library site, because, says Valenza,“The library curates student life and the students helped do it.” Students set up Skype sessions with authors and poets through their virtual book club; they lead discussions during town wide community reading events; they organize poetry slams; and they post school projects to the library’s website in a Student Project Guide.”
— Schaffhauser, 2014
The VLLC has huge potential for student and school community creation and maintenance of content. In addition to the inclusion of the school culture portal and links to activities to increase VLLC traffic, allowing students to create and maintain content for the VLLC provides another hook. Student creation and maintenance of content also gives students ownership of their learning and a feeling of deeper connection to the LLC both physically and virtually. Teachers and parent volunteers can also take part in maintaining the VLLC. Parent involvement has the potential to increase VLLC traffic at home as those parents will be invested in the VLLC and know more about how it can support their children at home.
Specific ways that student creation and maintenance of the VLLC can support literacy include student maintenance of online book clubs (see the Schaffhauser quote above), posting student book reviews, and featuring student writing. Santos et al. (2015) describe the impact of students creating and maintaining book blogs on the VLLC space as well. In Santos et al.’s report, students described the aspects of the book blogs they liked best, with a number of students stating “It [the blog] makes you more interested in reading books” – which of course, is exactly what we’re hoping the VLLC will do.
Final Thoughts
This report is by no means an exhaustive plan for a VLLC, but rather focuses on promoting literacy for an at-risk school population. Other features, such as the experimental learning (a space to test out web based tools) and the knowledge building (sharing lesson plans and teaching resources) portals are integral spaces in the VLLC, but do not specifically fit in with the goals of this report.
Creating a VLLC and sharing it with students during library classes is likely not enough to achieve the desired long term effect on school wide literacy statistics. Like the LLC, the VLLC should be a hub for learning at the very heart of school culture. Teachers will need to be on board with using and promoting the features of the VLLC in class, and promoting its use at home. The VLLC exists to extend the LLC into the classroom and homes, and to provide constant access to quality reading material, research sources, web tools, school culture, and collaborative spaces.
Works Cited
Brooks Kirkland, A. (2010). The Virtual Library as a Learning Hub. Literacies, Learning, and Libraries, 3(1), 21-23.
Buerkett, R. (2014). “Where to Start? CREATING VIRTUAL LIBRARY SPACES.” Knowledge Quest, 42(4), 23.
Canadian School Libraries. (2018). Leading Learning: Standards of Practice for School Library Learning Commons in Canada. Retrieved from: http://llsop.canadianschoollibraries.ca
Curry Lance, K. & Kachel, D.E. (2018). Why School Librarians Matter: What Years of Research Tell Us. Kappanonline.org, Retrieved from http://www.kappanonline.org/lance-kachel-school-librarians-matter-years- research/
Langelaar, A., personal communication, November 8, 2018.
Langelaar, A., personal communication, January 24, 2019.
Loertscher, D.V., et al. (2012). The Virtual Learning Commons: Building a Participatory School Learning Community. Salt Lake City, UT: Learning Commons Press.
Loertscher, D. V. & Woolls, B. (2013). The virtual learning commons: A facility designed for students to experiment with meeting the challenges of everyday life and learning. International Association of School Librarianship, 405-410.
McMullen, S. (2007). The Learning Commons Model Determining Best Practices for Design, Implementation, and Service. Sabbatical Report.
Santos, I.M., et al. (2016). Students as Co-Designers of a Virtual Learning Commons: Results of a Collaborative Action Research Study. Journal of Academic Librarianship 42(1), 8–14.
Schaffhauser, D. (2014). Will this Website Save Your Library (and Your Librarians)? Education Digest 80(1), 37.
Schmidt, K.E. et al. (2009). Webpage Aesthetics, Performance and Usability: Design Variables and their Effects. Ergonomics 52(6), 631-643.
Valenza, Joyce Kasman. (2005) The Virtual Library. Educational LeadershipDecember 2005/January 2006, 54-59.
Warlick, D. (2005). Building Web Sites that Work for Your Media Center. Knowledge Quest 33(3), 13.
Lindsay Reid is currently a grade 2/3 teacher in the Surrey School District, and completing her graduate diploma in teacher-librarianship from Queen’s University. She is passionate about exploring ways to make education impactful for the at-risk students she works with. In her spare time she is an avid reader, movie-goer, and gamer (both video and board games), but also enjoys spending time outside camping and geocaching.