Week Eight Reading

Week 8 reading

AASL Definitions of advocacy, PR, and marketing

I’ve always thought of public relations as a two-way street. We are showing the customer what you can do and making them happy. We find out what makes them happy through their input and responses do what we do and say. Maybe I’ve been confusing that with marketing?

AASL School Library Health and Wellness Kit and AASL Crisis Toolkit

What a great resource! It’s good to know I don’t have to reinvent the wheel if I am ever put in this situation. Thoughts I’ve taken from it:

BE PREPARED!

The more effort you put into constantly maintaining your “health and wellness”, the better off you will be in a crisis.

1. Be irreplaceable

2. Be active

3. Have my advocates mobilized and ready to go

-identify stakeholders in advance

-know what our goals are

-determine how they will be informed

4. Figure out who the decision makers are

-know their timeline

-don’t piss them off

5. Remember you’re not trying to save “your job”, you’re trying to save a valuable resource for the students

-have data ready to prove this

-share this message through multiple means

6. Don’t be afraid to ask for help from multiple sources

-local: parents, PTO, union

-state and national organizations

You don’t have to defend the fort on your own, but you need to be ready to mobilize the troops if the need arises. Keep tabs of your library’s “health” at all times. “Constant vigilance”- to quote Mad-Eye Moody;)

Fontichiaro, K., & Mardis, M. (2009). How does a culture mean? Common beliefs in an elevator ride. Knowledge quest 37(5), May/June, 98-101

I feel my whole life is one elevator speech after another! How are you feeling? How are the kids? How’s school? I have this constant feeling that I am defending my life and my choices at every turn and I have developed not only an “elevator speech” for each topic, but an “elevator speech” for different types of people who might be asking me about a specific topic; friends, acquaintances, potential employers, etc. Because of this I believe we will (as school media specialists) need to prepare multiple speeches for the same topic depending on our audience; parents, teachers, administrators, etc. Then we need to have the different types of speeches ready to go on multiple different topics and tuck them into our health and wellness kit, so that we can pull them out as the different “injuries” present themselves. I better get myself to an elevator and start practicing.