2006 SLJ/Thomson Gale Giant Step Awards School Library Winner—Research High

Debra Lau Whelan -- School Library Journal, 5/1/2006

It's a sunny spring morning, and Tom Brennan's history class is in the Middletown (NJ) High School South library, researching the Cold War. But you won't find his kids turning to Google as their main source of information—media specialist Cecelia Freda has made sure of that.

These juniors are navigating the online catalog, scanning the Sears Book of Subject Headings, and rifling through books and periodicals to complete their assignments. Meanwhile, Freda is walking around the room with a satisfied grin on her face. Why not? She has a lot to be proud of. By the end of the day, more than 11 classes and several hundred students will have passed through the library, each independently engaged in the research process that Freda has taught them. "Do you know what it means when teachers and students don't need my help?" she asks a visitor. "It's evidence that the library is working so well and proof of the amount of work we do behind the scenes. This place is a living, breathing entity."

Just three years ago, most of Middletown's teens were clueless about anything having to do with the library. "These kids didn't know one thing about the function and use of a library," says social studies teacher Charles Riddle. "They were as lost as a tourist in a foreign country." One would expect that students at a high-performing school like Middletown, in a mainly upper-middle-class New Jersey suburb, would have a firm grasp of basic research skills. But Freda quickly discovered that wasn't the case.

Now they readily search through print materials and know what pathfinders are. They even know about cross referencing, Boolean searches, and periodical indexing. In fact, all of the school's nearly 1,500 students are required to master a list of 25 in-depth information literacy skills before they graduate, courtesy of Freda, one of this year's School Library Journal/Thomson Gale Giant Step winners for the most improved library and the recipient of a $5,000 check for her media center.

Tossing and Buying

Freda didn't inherit a terrible library when she arrived in October 1999. It just wasn't great. The problem had nothing to do with the way it looked. In fact, it's a beautifully renovated media center with soaring 25-foot ceilings and a row of windows outlining its perimeter. The library is also situated on the second floor across from the cafeteria so that students can look up into the 3,500-square-foot, glass-encased room. The problem was that the library didn't have much to offer. There were serious gaps in its 20-plus-year-old collection. Poor cataloging meant many titles just sat on the shelves because no one could find them. There weren't any databases or audiobooks, and periodicals and computers were sorely lacking. Apart from a smattering of English and history classes, no one came.

Freda knew that things needed to change. But where to begin? The logical answer was with research. But first, she needed to get her library in order. Working methodically, Freda started to revamp virtually every area of the library. She updated her 17,000 book collection, devoting almost half of her $22,000 annual budget to books, and vastly expanded periodicals in all subject areas. Online databases such as EBSCOhost, ProQuest, and Gale now account for 40 percent of her budget.

Freda also launched a special interlibrary loan program with the Middletown Public Library so students could easily access its collections, secured a $5,000 grant from the Middletown Education Foundation to purchase books and adaptive technology for students with special needs, and started a new audiobook collection. She relentlessly negotiated with Follett, Grolier, and other vendors on print and nonprint purchases, resulting in significant discounts that amounted to nearly $100,000. And although Freda has two highly qualified library assistants, Lisa Green and Elaine Gross, as well as a full-time volunteer, Sharon Meredith, to help carry out her mission, she initiated a library volunteer program that includes parents and community members. To top it off, Freda expanded freshman orientation in the library from a single period to a three-day intensive program that starts off with an introduction to the library's offerings and ends with a collaborative project that tests what students have learned.

After all that work, Freda's library was ready to take on any research initiative. "I was working so hard, and things were so much better, but they still weren't good enough," Freda says. "I needed a giant change."

Colleagues Lend a Hand

The turning point came in the spring of 2003, while she was standing in a checkout line at a local grocery store. A librarian at nearby Brookdale Community College walked up to Freda and said, "What are you guys teaching these kids? They don't know how to do anything in the college library."

A lightbulb suddenly went off. "She was absolutely right," Freda now remembers. "After I arrived, teachers were complaining that their students' research was reduced to Google and Internet searches." In short, kids were going to their favorite search engines, typing in poorly constructed searches, and sorting indiscriminately through the thousands of hits they got. "I said to myself, 'That's the last time I'm going to hear someone say that to me.'" Freda reached out to the same people who had criticized her students—academic librarians—to ask if they would meet with Middletown's teachers to outline the specific research skills that their high schoolers were lacking.

Freda's timing couldn't have been more perfect. It turns out that a group of librarians from nearby Monmouth University, Georgian Court College, and Brookdale Community College were interested in collaborating with two area high schools on this very subject.

Freda sought out Principal Mark Kelly and Assistant Principal Bob Busler to get the go-ahead for a mandatory faculty meeting with the university librarians. Again, the timing was fortuitous. Middletown was in the process of renewing its national accreditation from the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools and needed to come up with two objectives for improving student performance. And there was Freda offering one of those goals—library research—on a silver platter.

"We would have never gotten the district's approval for [mandating library research skills] if it wasn't for the Middle States," Busler says, grateful that the school was seeking reaccreditation, a seal of academic excellence that many secondary schools covet.

In April 2004, Freda, along with a group of college librarians led by Monmouth University's Dawn Popoff, finally met with administrators and more than 100 Middletown teachers from all subject areas two hours a day for six consecutive days. Equipped with PowerPoint presentations, charts, and lists, they methodically went through all the necessary college-level information-literacy skills that kids were missing. Their primary concern? "There were periodicals, journals, encyclopedias, and wonderful books that students weren't using," Freda says, adding that kids' Web searches were also seriously flawed, consisting of natural language searches rather than Boolean connectors, which lead to more relevant information.

Freda's teaching colleagues didn't need much convincing—they were just as frustrated as Freda over their students' inadequate research skills. Plagiarism had also become a serious problem, because following the Internet explosion, many educators were required to use the Web in their lessons—without knowing anything about online research themselves. In a further sign of their allegiance, more than 30 teachers attended a voluntary follow-up summer workshop offered by the academic librarians.

With buy-in from the entire staff and administration, Freda was able to embark on a long-term project that would forever transform Middletown's students' research skills. She was well prepared. That's because Freda, who graduated in 1990 with an MLS from Rutgers University, is a disciple of the venerable library science professor Carol Kuhlthau, author of Seeking Meaning: A Process Approach to Library and Information Services (Libraries Unlimited, 1993), which outlines practical ways to teach information literacy skills across the curriculum.

Using Kuhlthau's work as a starting point, Freda extensively researched comparative models and devised an exhaustive list of 25 research skills—everything from selecting and focusing on a topic to gathering information in a variety of formats before organizing it to complete an assignment. Then, to gauge how proficient students were in those skills, she handed out a basic research assignment to seniors in Douglas McKenzie's honors history class, Tom Murphy's history college prep class, and Kristina Harwell's English class, without giving students any prior instruction. "The results were eye-opening to say the least," Freda recalls. Not one student could perform even 80 percent of the skills, which was quite a shock since these are the kinds of students who tend to score way above the national average on reading, math, and SAT tests, and 97 percent of them go on to college.

College Knowledge Early

It's hard to measure the effects of Freda's schoolwide research program since it's still a work in progress, but students and teachers say the change is visible. Sixteen-year-old Lindsay Kligman says Freda "opened us up to the non-Google world so that we won't be clueless when we step into a college classroom." In fact, Kligman and her friends Katelyn Goodman, 16, and Emma Varvaloucas, 15, are confident that they could complete a college assignment if given one today, even though they have two more years of high school. And believe it or not, sophomore Jake Ehrlich was so inspired by Freda and her staff that last year he wrote a song about them and started a club called Future Librarians of America.

English teacher Eileen Stroever says Freda and her assistants are "one of the best" library staff she's encountered in her 20 years of teaching at Middletown. Most recently, Freda helped Stroever tweak a research assignment comparing the issues of physical abuse and neglect portrayed in The Secret Life of Bees (Viking, 2002) by Sue Monk Kidd with Anna Quindlen's novel Black and Blue (Random, 1998) in a way that makes it impossible to plagiarize. Stroever says Freda's strength is her collaborative efforts with teachers. "Teens are masters of wasting time in an environment that's not as controlled as the classroom," she says. "But there's no time to waste in the library. There's a cart of books, pathfinders, articles, and journals ready for them to start their research from the moment they walk through the door."

History teacher McKenzie, who teaches the school's brightest kids, brings his classes to the media center all the time. Last year, he even replaced classroom textbooks with library resources and watched the experience open a whole new world to his students. "[Freda] has allowed me to introduce my students to library research in a manner and degree that I never thought possible," he says.

This month, McKenzie plans to bring students to Monmouth University's library to engage in a college-level research project. How will they perform? Let's wait and see. But one thing is clear, Stroever says, "They've certainly been given every opportunity to learn, and they've certainly had the instruction. Whether they retain it and use it afterward is up to them."

Debra Lau Whelan is SLJ's senior news and features editor.