Susan Ballard and Sara Kelly Johns

Steve Thomas: Susan and Sarah, welcome to the podcast.

Susan Ballard: Thanks, Steve. Happy to be here.

Sara Kelly Johns: We’re glad to be here. Definitely.

Steve Thomas: Before we start talking about the book, how did you all get interested in the field of librarianship in the first place? And then what drew you to school libraries in particular?

Sara Kelly Johns: Well, I grew up in a household where my mother taught first grade. She loved teaching students to read. The other part of my household was that, I lived in a very small town, and Tuesday nights and Friday nights, the social center of the town was the public library. We could take out three books each time and I would read them and go back.

When it came time in college to decide where I was going with my liberal arts English degree, my mother told me you belong in a school library because she did two summer school sessions for the librarian who was having babies, and she said if I were going back for degree right now, it would be in libraries. I had some very nurturing people in my college who said, yes, please come do an independent study in the library and see what you think. And I fell in love with it. I fell in love with working with students, helping them decide what to read, how to research. And then it was off to library school.

Susan Ballard: Well, this is Susan. I’m trying to distinguish myself because you have two guests here. And my pathway was very similar to Sarah’s. Grew up in a household where both parents were avid readers. We visited the library frequently. I never really thought of a career in libraries until I was in college and surrounded by Ed majors. I was also an English Lit major. Sarah and I have many similarities in our background. But at any rate I knew I did not want to be in a classroom, but I took Ed psych and philosophy of Ed and I found myself kind of almost getting a minor in education and thinking, well, what can I do with this? And suddenly, one day, it just dawned on me: maybe librarianship was a pathway. As it happened, unbelievably, two other people that I knew, the three of us, all decided to apply to grad school at the same time, we were accepted, so off we went to Simmons in Boston, and had a great year there, and two of us went into school librarianship, and one into public librarianship.

I think Sarah and I are unusual in the fact that we decided very early on we wanted school librarianship, whereas most school librarians come to it later, after teaching, being in a school environment and realizing that they love to have a variety of resources to work with kids, and that, you know, there’s a different sort of vibe in the school library. So then they begin a second degree to go back and become school librarians and/or they’re recruited by other school librarians to say you have the gift that we see you in a school library.

So coming to school librarianship is usually through the classroom. But in our instance, it was straight out of college.

Sara Kelly Johns: Yeah. And right now I teach those teachers who are becoming school librarians. I teach for Syracuse University and my current class of 21 are New York City teachers who have been recruited, who are having an IMLS grant to get their degree in school libraries, and they’re pretty excited. They’re Science, a lot of them are ELA teachers, English Language Arts, every kind of background. And that’s also part of the lure of being a school librarian is that you get to work with every classroom teacher and get to work with every level of student.

Susan Ballard: And all the disciplines as well. That’s cool. You begin to learn a little about all of them, and it’s an exciting place to be. I think the school library is the best spot in the building. I’m sure that all my school library and colleagues agree with me. It’s a great job.

Steve Thomas: A lot of the school librarians listening may already know about these, but just for the whole audience, can you tell the listeners a little bit about the National School Library Standards for Learners, School Librarians, and School Libraries, and how you tie those in with your book?

Susan Ballard: Oh boy, can we ever, because both of us were intimately involved with the development of the current standards. I was on the writing team and Sarah was on the implementation team. We were at this work for what, four, five years building off previous sets of standards. But these standards are designed, I don’t want to simplify it too much, but they’re almost like a cookbook that delivers on these best practices and strategies and common denominators for school libraries to say, if you follow this recipe, you’re going to end up with a great end result.

Now, I’m a cook and so I modify recipes all the time to my own taste. So there’s room to tailor them to your communities and to your specific situation, but you want to keep that baseline recipe to make sure that, you’re baking an apple pie, it ends up an apple pie. You can do a little deconstruction along the way, but you want to make sure you follow the baseline recipe because it will lead to success.

 Again, that’s an oversimplification because they really are founded on deep scholarly work in our field. There’s a framework that we follow that’s not unlike the framework that ACRL uses for the development of their standards and in which we have shared foundations and we identify various domains, learner domains, school library domains and competencies, and school librarian domains and competencies. They’re broken down along a framework, but I think they’re very representative of the best thinking of your peers. To say this is what these are the components that go into the development of a school library. And maybe Sarah can speak to how the implementation team helped the field to begin to use the standards.

Sara Kelly Johns: One of the things that the implementation team looked at was the fact that so much of using these standards, you have to understand it, but the people that you work with every day need to understand that we have standards. Part of the collaboration process within a school library is that you’re working with the subject content standards of the other people in the building, and the fact that you can easily cross walk them with what they are doing, it’s advocacy for the profession, but it’s also very practical in terms of making sure that the students are successful. Because the bottom line is the student success.

So when we broke out the standards, we wanted to make sure that this was very clear to everyone in the profession who had to make some changes, because every iteration of the standards comes with some change and absolutely should. So there were a lot of explanations, a lot of graphics that could make it really clear because not only we have to understand it but our administrators need to know what it is that we are trying to do. It’s really about clarity. It’s about making it clear that the instructional side of our profession is extremely important. We are certified teachers, and we understand that science has to meet this and social studies has to meet that and math has their own scaffolding to build on. So that’s definitely what the implementation team wanted to ensure. It’s student voices. Whatever standards that other people in your community are using, we can integrate.

Susan Ballard: And they were developed to an alignment with other professional association standards. This is a whole alignment of professionals in schools, making sure that the services and the instruction that they deliver are best in class and that they are founded on serious research theory and the best thinking of the profession. They’re critical to us, and throughout the book, we are bringing the concepts that we are talking about in terms of branding back to implementation and use of the national standards to make sure that you’re constantly developing your program to be in alignment with them so that you can look at your community and say I’m not making this stuff up.

Sara Kelly Johns: The fact that the shared foundations go from the learner standards to the librarian standards and the library standards, for us, we were really looking at the librarian standards and the library standards, because when those are strong, when you are meeting those standards, the learners are going to benefit. And so it’s like, is your library where it should be? What’s missing? What needs to be more emphasized? How can you strengthen all that you do and the perceptions of who you are?

Steve Thomas: Right and that’s really what you’re talking about in the book because I mean I know brand sometimes is like, oh that’s businesses or celebrities or whatever, but how do you see brand behavior in the context of the school library?

Susan Ballard: Well it means everything, in terms of when somebody hears “school library” you want them to evoke a positive association with that term and with the people who are working in the school library to benefit the school. So, brand is not confined to individuals or entertainers or businesses and a lot of our book looks at taking business examples, though, and lessons from the business world to ensure that people understand everything you do, every transaction you have, is a reflection of your brand and brand behavior should be always in favor of a positive user experience. We can all think of examples in the business world where someone says they do something, so I’m going to use the example, fly the friendly skies, and then the skies aren’t so friendly to consumers anymore, you know, people lose their luggage, or their pets are lost, or their flights are delayed or canceled, so that’s bad brand behavior when things go awry like that. We want to make sure that school librarians and school libraries are good brand behavior, that people won’t say, I’m never going to the library again because, or that librarian is a terrible person because. We want people to realize you can mitigate that by always trying to keep a focus on making sure that the brand is positive.

Sara Kelly Johns: We did sit back and look at the business community. We really felt that much of what the business community needs to deal with, we can learn from them. We don’t have to make this up. It’s not inventing a new wheel. It’s like, Oh, this works for us. This part works for us. It’s definitely a focus that Susan and I particularly took, and the perceptions are so varied. There were students who wouldn’t read a book unless I handed it to them because they had a perception that I knew what book they wanted to read, and there were students who wouldn’t take a book out unless their friends were also reading it because they trusted them and so it’s about trust, it’s really about trust.

Susan Ballard: Yeah, it’s also about integrity, making sure that when people hear your name or your school library, they think, boy, yeah, that’s a respected, trusted entity for me.

Steve Thomas: And you can use those standards you were talking about as a way to help guide to what that brand should look like if they were having trouble articulating it or putting it in a certain way. One of the tools that you talk about is using personas. What are those and how do those help engage in user centered design principles?

Susan Ballard: I’m going to let Sarah tackle that because those personas were first used by the implementation team, and they migrated into our book because they were so effective.

Sara Kelly Johns: Well, what we found when we were designing the tools that the people in the field could use to improve their use of the standards was that if you set up a series of personas of who your users are, who the people are that are connected to you, that you could then measure you can balance the changes you want to make against, does this really fit who’s in our library? It’s a little bit too confusing, too hard to say. Well, I’m not sure that George is gonna like this. I’m not sure that Harry’s gonna like it too, or that we can let Lucia give us some feedback. That comes later after you study after you’ve already made a lot of decisions.

So when you come up with personas, which are definitely a business practice, when you come up with the personas of who the people are that you want to use for your own evaluation… these people are not actual people. Do an evaluation of who’s in your school community and develop a few personas that can typify, that can explain who they are that you’re looking for.

And those work their way into the actual standards book, because we were able to develop a series that, and I will admit we had fun naming them. You know, Patty, the Parent, the learners, the new teacher, the teacher who’s a little bit skeptical, the administrators, the educators, all were like the examples that we needed to consider. They’re a way of measuring what we are considering doing or what we’re already doing for best practices. It’s a process that is used in the business world and the academic world and in the school library world. It’s well worth taking the time. We have a template in our book for how to set that up that we developed. We tried it out a few times. Well, more than a few times. We tried it out several times to make sure that it was something that would actually stand up to the scrutiny that we need to give ourselves.

Steve Thomas: What are some of the common challenges that school librarians face when it comes to brand behavior?

Susan Ballard: Well, it could be as simple as the way your facility is laid out. We talk about in the book, everybody should spend a night in their home guest room to see what a guest feels like, and it’s important for you to take a look at your facility to see, how do your users see it? Sometimes we get used to the way things look and don’t realize it could be kind of scruffy or it may look messy or it may not be very inviting, that the signage is turning people off when they see “don’t don’t don’t don’t” all those kinds of things. That’s a challenge. You know, budget is always a challenge in I think any kind of situation for any kind of library.

Challenges such as your website. Is it friendly? When you go to a school website, sometimes the school library gets buried deep within the website. So it’s important for people to take a look at their school’s homepage to see how many clicks does it take to get to us? And would that be off putting to somebody looking to find out about a school library? Just had this experience yesterday. I was trying to track down some folks and went to their school websites and had a difficult time finding the school library. So that’s those are many of the challenges that impact your brand.

Sara Kelly Johns: And if you’re too deep, ask for user statistics. When we were redesigning our website in my school, they were very surprised to find out that the library website was the second highest number of clicks, of uses. And that was because that had the student assignments on it, and they needed to get there out of school, when they’re not in the library. So they move that up on the hierarchy. And if students have access, one of the things you want to look at is circulation fines. Is that a problem in your district? Is that holding back your students? How easy is it to make exceptions when they’re needed? We talk about being exceptioners and not enforcers, making it easy for students to learn. How do they get there, the access to the library when they’re in school? All of those are reflections on how can you make a difference?

Susan Ballard: And even the fact that you’re in a school with a captive audience, let’s face it. They don’t have any other choice. The kids have to be there. We have compulsory education in this country. It’s not like an academic library where they’ve chosen to go to school or a public library where they choose to come into the public library. Sometimes kids are reluctant users. They act out or something, and the challenge for school librarians is we want them to see the school library as a friendly, safe, welcoming, inviting space that everyone is welcome in. So your challenge is to make sure that your brand is so embedded in their concept of those warm, fuzzy things that they will want to be and you need to take a look around your library and say, is this where I would want to be? Is this a place I want to spend my time? So that’s a challenge to us, as well as sometimes our teacher colleagues who if we want to say, open up book borrowing policies by saying the kids can take the books that they need rather than imposing a capricious, you can only have two books and you can only have it for two weeks. Take what you need and keep it as long as you like. Teachers go nuts over that because they think we’ve got to teach them responsibility. They’ve got to bring their stuff back, and we say, yeah, but for the greater good, we’re trying to create readers here, and the way you do that is through letting them read. So those balances have to occur and can occur when you have good two way communication between you and all the other entities that have a vested interest in the school library.

Steve Thomas: Our school district here this year just past summer, just decided to do the kids can take books home over the summer and just keep them over the summer and then bring them back.

Susan Ballard: Isn’t that great? That’s the kind of thing that embellishes the brand. I mean, that’s good brand behavior. That’s saying we want to make sure you don’t have learning loss over the summer either. You have something to read that you want to read. That’s great brand behavior on the behalf of your school district.

Sara Kelly Johns: And what happens if one of those gets lost? Oh gee. Maybe there’s some ways of dealing with that. Look at your policy for lost books. Look at your policy for late books. What really matters? If the students are reading, that’s what matters.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. And a lot of, and we were talking about the website earlier, that involves a lot of communication too, because usually as the school librarian, you’re not in control of the website generally, so you don’t get to decide what you have to communicate with the administrators and the I. T. Department and whoever actually is in charge of it. And getting the input, getting the stats, that’s an important thing. It was like you said, you got to move up because you were hiring the stats.

It reminded me of a it’s a university library, but of a XKCD cartoon that had, like, what people at the university want to have on their website and then it’s like a Venn diagram and then what people who are coming to the website actually want, and then like the only way it overlapped was name of school, and like that’s the only thing that both sides wanted, so you need to put on there what people want on there. Like people are coming to find the address of the school, put the address of the school on there somewhere, put the phone number for the school on there somewhere. Think about how people actually use these things. And that I think ties in with what you all are talking about too, with the school library, of making sure to make it match the needs.

Susan Ballard: We also talk about the power of observation to watch how your users want to use the library. If you see kids and teachers pulling tables together, and they want a bunch of people working together, let them do that, as opposed to only four people at a table.

We cite a wonderful study done by the University of Rochester when they hired an anthropologist to come into their library and actually watch the students and teachers using the space and that led to a whole new layout of the facility, a brand new web design, because as you said, Steve, they did not like the way the website was, they weren’t using it the way that the library thought they should use it, they wanted to use it in a different way. So that that observation is a key element in making sure that you’re really providing a space that users want to engage with and a program that users want to engage with.

Steve Thomas: Community input is really important in just about every part of it, of developing policies, programs, collections, space, all that kind of stuff. Are there other ways of getting that community input from students, parents, teachers…?

Susan Ballard: We talk about having continuous feedback loop, making sure that you’re always dip sticking, how are we doing, how are we doing? And you can do that through providing an opportunity for people to send you feedback on your webpage. You can conduct focus groups with students. I think one of the best things I ever did was with a group of kids, after an instructional unit that they had participated in, we asked the teacher, give me every fourth kid on your roster and ask them to stay behind.

We’d been working on this project for a month and they had a lot of time in the library and the kids who are selected to be a part of this focus group at first thought they were in trouble. And we said, no, no, no, we want your feedback here. So we asked them a few pertinent questions. Did you understand what we were asking you to do when we gave you this assignment to begin with? And they all say, yeah, yeah, I basically got it. Or, I had a little confusion, which helped us as we redesigned the instructional unit for the next time. Their input really helped us to refine it. And then we asked, do you have enough resources? And they really let us know, no, we didn’t have enough resources. We needed this, this, this, and this, which helped us with some collection development. Then the final question we asked them was, did you have enough time? And to a kid, every one of them said, no, which told us that, and we couldn’t do anything about that, because time’s that elusive element, we smoosh things in a contrived environment that school is. We have a finite amount of time, and we try to cover so much in that time. But it was enlightening to us to know that how can we make sure that we give them a little more time to get this work done.

 Focus groups are a wonderful thing, especially with kids. They love to give you their opinion. Surveys that people can participate in. There are all kinds of ways that you can keep collecting and having that conversation with people about how you’re doing and making sure you can do it better next time.

Sara Kelly Johns: And another avenue is an established advisory group, or maybe two of them. Maybe an advisory group that has people from all roles in the in the process, parents, teachers, administrators, students, and / or you can have a student advisory group or club, I had library club for years. They were the ones who did the bulletin boards and worked on special programs. They administered the suggestions for the suggestion box for new resources or new services. That is something that we talk about as well is the importance of not just listening to yourself. You have to do self-reflection, but don’t just listen to yourself, find ways to listen to others.

Steve Thomas: As people are doing speaking and writing books and whatever, certain people can have some notoriety or they can get known themselves, so you can have your personal brand, but you want to have a school brand. How do you counsel school librarians who have a personal brand to navigate that to be separate but also intertwining? Like, Mission Impossible is a brand, but Tom Cruise is also a brand, but they’ve got to work together, so how does that work? Less stunts, presumably, in school librarianship than in Mission Impossible.

Susan Ballard: Yeah, it is a balancing act. It really is. There are some folks who do it extremely well, and I think that the baseline thing that they have in common is that it’s genuine. You sense that they genuinely are there to help people in the profession. First of all, they want to make sure that their learning community is served, and we have said, you don’t need to be a rock star in the world at large, as much as you need to be a rock star at home, that the people that you work for value you and think you are the best. It’s nice to be able to step out of that and have a personal brand that your colleagues admire, and I think the people who are balance it well are those who say, I want to share what works for me, and maybe you can use it too. You can adapt it, you can adopt it, you can modify it, but they don’t do it for personal recognition, they do it out of a sense of altruism to give back to the profession and I think we have some folks out there who do that very well. I think of a woman named Diana Rendina, who is in Tampa, Florida. She’s a middle school person. She has the brand Renovated Learning. I really like that term because it implies that we’ve got a basic building block of learning, but we can tweak it. She also is widely admired in her home community. So I don’t know how Diana does it, but she does it. It balances well. You know she’s the real deal. She says what she does. What happens in her library is reflected in her personal brand, but she’s able to keep it separate, but does a good job of it.

Sara Kelly Johns: One of the people that I work with very closely on a state level is Sue Kowalski, who is at Pine Grove Middle School, outside of Syracuse. Her brand is absolutely student and community centered. She not only has middle school students who are perfectly capable of meeting a dignitary at the door and doing a tour of the library while Sue is teaching classes, but she’s ski club advisor. She’s visible in the community. Her students, she runs a program that is whole school where students can come in at Christmas time and buy gifts that have been donated for their families. So that’s whole school. We see a lot of them. And unfortunately, in today’s attitude towards school libraries by people who are very persuasive to other parents they lose track of the fact that there is such good work going on that benefits their children.

Susan Ballard: The phrase that I associate with Sue Kowalski and she uses it, “moments that matter.” One of the things we talk about is you’re creating memories for people and you want them to be positive. And that’s exactly what Sue’s brand is all about. Moments that matter. Positivity.

Steve Thomas: She’s not in my area of the county, so I don’t work directly with her, but Cicely Lewis is in the school district of where we are, so I don’t get to work directly with her, but she’s well known.

Susan Ballard: She’s the same kind. She’s got the same DNA. She really does. All three of these folks, Diana, Sue and Cecily, are people we invited to make some contributions to our book to tell us how they balance that. So they are people we clearly respect.

And there are some folks who, and I’m not casting aspersions, but they kind of have an edge to their brand, that it’s exclusively theirs, and they’re the only one who should be able to speak on a certain topic. That’s not how collegiality works. We need one another.

Steve Thomas: And now we’re going to name those people. So it’s, no, not that kind of podcast.

So after they’ve done all this work, how can school librarians measure to make sure that what they’ve done actually worked? Like, how can you tell I’ve improved my perception?

Susan Ballard: Well, we like the use of evidence based practice and data that you can collect. Of course, there’s your traditional library data: the number of circulations, how many transactions you had in the library, how many students and faculty used it. We share a level of collaboration rubric in our book about, as you’re working with teachers, at what levels are you working so that you can document, they just came to the library to use the resources all the way to, I co taught and I co assessed the unit of instruction.

And there are, community data. You can look at test scores sometimes to see, did the fact that we took the blocks off circulation and allowed kids to take out more books, was there, it might be just a correlational thing, but was there a rise in reading scores? Those things are important to look at, and the more you can gather that evidence and then share it with decision makers: principals, superintendents, the school board. Student testimonials are another way just to ask the kids, did the library help you when you were working on this project and do, with permission of course, little video recordings of them saying I couldn’t have done this without this wonderful resource that’s been provided to me by the community. People love to know that that their tax dollars are helping somebody, that they’re making a difference as opposed to hearing bad things about school. So all of those things can help to assess that you’re making a difference, and we think that school libraries do make a big difference.

Sara Kelly Johns: Yeah, and then there is some promotion and marketing that is part of this. Do parents, do other students, know that the number of books that were read in the library this month is higher, that everybody in so and so’s homeroom were able to finish their projects in no time, sending them out in newsletters that can go home, via paper or be on your website. Again, drawing traffic to your website so that that people know that this is effective. Do you have a Facebook? Do you have an Instagram? Do I know what book was read to my grandson’s class in first grade at his school? Because I follow his librarian on Instagram, but I’m not the only one where the parents do, the kids do, and it helps them talk about it with their parents so yeah, you can have a good program but it’s not going to be great unless people know about it.

Susan Ballard: Right. And you also have to keep your principal, or building level administration, informed and so a monthly communication with them, one page because these folks are busy and they don’t want to know, this is what it takes to get a book on the shelf. They want to know how many books left the shelf, how many kids, how many teachers were in the library this month, what kind of exciting projects are going on? So they have that at their hand when they go to see the superintendent and they can say, Oh, by the way, did you know this is happening? So they can help champion the work that you’re doing when they have that information. So you want to keep them informed, but do it in such a way that is not onerous to them, that is engaging.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and a good principal will be your champion and will be helping you out.

What do you kind of see as the future of school libraries, especially now given current attacks, and we talked earlier, maybe before we started recording of how building these brands can help be a proactive way to fight off people who are maybe not aware of what the library stands for, or wants to change what the library should stand for. In the face of those kind of attacks, how do librarians stay hopeful about the future for school libraries?

Sara Kelly Johns: Yeah, there still is the dependability of having a positive school library brand that overcomes so much of the negative. If someone starts questioning what is happening in their school libraries, if a parent or teacher or students can say, not in my library, my library is strong, my library is crucial, my library is indispensable. So, building up that reputation, that credibility, that dependability, is going to carry you through and that is the fun of the job. That is what keeps us enriched. So much good learning is happening. So much literacy is happening that school libraries are the undergirding of literacy. That is what gets us excited, that and the fun of the students saying this is the first book I read all the way through and you suggested it to me.

Thank you. Whoa!

Susan Ballard: Sarah and I have joked a couple times about the fact you said the future of school libraries. And if we make that an acronym, it spells F-O-S-L: fossil. We have talked about that on numerous occasions, because we don’t want to go extinct. We really don’t. Think about the dinosaurs when that big comet was coming at them, they did not prepare for impact, but we can. We have comets coming at us right now that could potentially be very harmful and lead to an extinction level event. We don’t want that to happen.

We want our colleagues to make sure that they truly understand that our national standards are a place for them to stand and that if they think of their school library as a franchise. If they think of it as a franchise and their job is to make sure that everybody who comes in has a similar experience, a similar positive experience that we can, and that’s the title of our book, we can elevate the school library beyond where it is right now. It’s under the surface. It’s kind of like putting something minimizing a program on your taskbar. It’s running there, it’s running there, and it’s running there, but you don’t realize the power until you bring it up, make it come to life on your screen, and that’s what we need to do. We need to have user experiences that are so positive that people start saying, why doesn’t my kid have a school library? Where are the school librarians? I demand some action because they realize that we really can be a game changer, that we can really help level the playing field and make the experience of every kid a positive one, and every learner matter when they come to the school library.

So that was kind of the why behind why we did this. We are both at a point in our careers where we can look back and say we’ve got something to share with you, a message to share, that we think will be helpful as you look forward, current school librarians, to making sure that we resonate and that we matter in the world at large.

Steve Thomas: You wanna energize those people who love you too. Like you said, the people who are those comets, those are the small, small, small, small, small, little minority, but they’re really loud, so we need those people who love us to talk, too.

 Susan Ballard and Sarah Kelly Johns, thank you so much for coming on the podcast to talk about your book. I recommend people go out and get it. It’s available now, Elevating the School Library: Building Positive Perceptions Through Brand Behavior. Thank you all for coming on. It was a great conversation.

Susan Ballard: Thank you for having us.

Sara Kelly Johns: We’re very pleased to be able to talk about that which we love the most in our profession.

Susan Ballard: Happy to hear from you.

Steve Thomas: Have a great afternoon.

Sara Kelly Johns: Thank you.

Susan Ballard: Thank you.