A Measure of Respect

Hang around Katherine Bassett and it's easy to understand why this irrepressible librarian was named New Jersey's 1999–2000 Teacher of the Year. As Ocean City Intermediate School's media specialist, Bassett single-handedly masterminded schoolwide reading programs, enticed hundreds of locals—everyone from finicky chefs to hardboiled war veterans—to share their skills and stories, and managed to become an indispensable resource for her principal and teaching colleagues.

Two years ago, she left the school where she had worked for the past 24 years to help the Educational Testing Service (ETS) create an evaluation process—one that would enable librarians to become nationally certified educators for the first time.

Bassett's mission was an offshoot of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), a nonprofit organization of teachers, school administrators, higher education officials, and business leaders that has been raising the bar on national standards for classroom teachers since 1987. The premise behind NBPTS's endeavors makes perfect pedagogic sense: the better the educator, the better the chance to spike student learning. With that in mind, about four years ago NBPTS began developing a rigorous set of advanced standards for school librarians. Two years later, ETS recruited a select group of media specialists, including Bassett, to develop an appraisal process for those librarians ready to take the national certification plunge. The demanding process—think of it as boot camp for high-achievers—takes at least one year to complete and consists of two basic components: a performance-based section that requires candidates to submit a portfolio demonstrating, among other things, proficiency in collaborating with classroom teachers, and a more conventional knowledge-based section that tests one's grasp of information literacy, technology, and other essentials of a school library program. We recently spoke to the self-effacing Bassett about the significance of the National Board assessment and her experience as a longtime library media specialist.

Why was it so important to develop national standards and an assessment for school librarians?

The fact that an assessment for library media specialists has been developed validates our role as teachers. It includes us in the National Board certification process, which to me is key. It recognizes that we are teachers; we are part of the teaching family. Secondly, it gives us a set of standards that we can measure our own performances by. It gives us a personal chance to look at what we're doing and how we're doing it, and how we can do it more productively.

Is the certification process tough?

It's a very rigorous assessment. It should be very rigorous. It's measuring accomplishment. If you [become] a National Board Certified Teacher [NBCT], you are recognized by your peers, by your superiors, by your state, by the federal government, as an accomplished practitioner. People who know the National Board recognize that, yes, you're a teacher; and if you're an NBCT in library media, you're a damn good one.

How many librarians have already applied for the program?

Out of 20,000-plus candidates across all [teaching] certificates, library media had roughly 800 [applicants], which puts us as the fifth largest certificate in the National Board family. I think 800 in our first year is certainly a significant start.

What was your greatest challenge in developing the assessment?

The greatest challenge for me personally was learning how to sit in a chair. I have been in the classroom for 24 years. If you've been in a library media center for any length of time, you know that the library media specialist never sits down. Also to be in an environment with no children, that was very, very difficult for me.

The learning curve, in terms of learning how to develop an assessment, was incredibly steep. I had to learn all kinds of new concepts that I had never even thought about, things like how to avoid bias in an assessment. Our certificate goes from pre-K through 12th grade-plus. So children ages 3 to 18-plus are the breadth of our certificate. To write a certificate that would fairly treat candidates in all of the different developmental settings, that was a difficult task. To incorporate technology in a way that would not unfairly advantage [librarians] who are working in technology-rich situations, as opposed to people working in technology-poor situations, was a challenge.

What advice do you have for those librarians who would like to become nationally certified?

The first thing that I would recommend that they do is to tap into whatever candidate-support networks there are within the states in which they live. I would recommend that they tap into the candidate-support listservs. I would recommend that they talk to [National Board Certified Teachers]—even though there currently aren't NBCTs in library media because this is our first year. NBCTs who are certified in other content areas can be extremely helpful, just in helping candidates figure out how to organize themselves. How to organize their time and how to organize their materials. There's a tremendous amount of paperwork involved in this process, and I know from reading the listservs that sometimes that alone can be mind-boggling for candidates.

I would also suggest that [candidates] bone up on their content knowledge and stay extremely current with issues and trends in the field. If they go to the National Board Web site, which is www.nbpts.org, they can find out what kind of support networks there are within their states. There are also very formal support systems through various colleges and universities. There are colleges that offer courses on how to prepare yourself for the National Board process.

Why did you get involved?

I got involved in this because during my year as New Jersey Teacher of the Year, I became a true advocate for public education and particularly for library media specialists and public education. I just developed a passion for promoting that as a viable part of the professional education community and that we are indeed teachers. When I was approached by the Educational Testing Service to be the teacher in residence for this certificate, my initial reaction was, no way. No way am I going to leave my school, my kids, my library, my books, my computers, and all the things that I fought so hard for, to go and sit in an office building somewhere for two years.

When I sat down and started to look at the materials that they had sent me, I became a huge fan of the [certification] process. In my opinion, it is without question the best professional development tool that I have ever seen. I do not believe that anyone can go through this process and not come out of it a better teacher, whether they certify or do not certify. You cannot do this and not improve your teaching practice.

Talk about your own experience as a library media specialist? What are you most passionate about?

Taking the library media center outside the walls into every classroom in the building and into the community—bringing the community in.

How have you managed to do that?

I've created a series of schoolwide reading motivation programs. I can give you some examples that also involve the community. For example, every year, on Read Across America Day, obviously we do a lot of activities to promote reading. One of the ones that we do in our building is we bring our senior citizens club in Ocean City into the building and we put a senior citizen in as many classrooms as we possibly can to not only read with the children, but to talk about what it was like to be a young child when they were [growing up].

On Read Across America Day we also kick-off our read-around-the-building campaign every year. Like many schools, we read our way around the building using paper cutouts. Every time that we read a book, we post a cutout. But we do it with a theme.

[One] of the themes that I was most—I can't even think of a word—moved by—one year we read in honor of victims of the Holocaust, and our cutout was a butterfly. Every member of our school family received a little card with the name of a Holocaust survivor or victim and every time that we read a book, any book, we would fill out a butterfly with our name, the title of the book that we had read, and the name of the person in whose honor we had read it.

What a powerful program.

While we did that, our entire school focused on the Holocaust. Our art department had the children creating butterflies out of plywood. Three-by-four-foot butterflies out of plywood, based on some of the poetry from I Never Saw Another Butterfly [edited by Hana Volavkova (Schocken Books, 1994)]. They had them build papier-mâché cocoons and caterpillars, and these were put in our courtyard and gardens out in front of the school. The science teachers helped [the students] with the butterflies, with how to color the wings. The liberal arts teachers had the children reading Holocaust novels. In social studies, they were studying the 1940s. In math, they were doing cross comparisons from the 1940s to the 1990s. It was truly a schoolwide event.

At the end, we brought in a Holocaust survivor. And she was able to go through the building and see the hallways just covered in butterflies, some of which of course included her name, and that was extremely meaningful to her.

What do you think school librarians need to do to become essential players in their own schools?

They need to be good communicators, and they need to learn to reach out to their community. When I say community, I'm including the school—the school community. [Librarians] need to learn to touch not only the lives of the students when they interact, but they need to reach out and touch their colleagues, their parent community, their larger community. I have to tell you that working with so many library media specialists over the past two years, I think we do that.