 Hello I'm Jen Laredo. I'm the teen librarian at Los Gatos Library and I'm here today to tell you about a program we've launched called Reverse Required Reading where together with the teens of Los Gatos we ask adults in our community to read and report back on a popular teen novel. So I'm going to give you a rundown on the mechanics of our program, tell you how it works, how we share our feedback, and then I'm going to tell you a little bit about some of our surprise success stories and give you a few of our lessons learned. But before we get started you guys have been sitting here all day. If you were teens in my teen room I would bribe you with candy at this point but we couldn't have food in here so I'm just going to do a little survey to kind of get you thinking about teen services and connecting with teens in your community. So raise your hand if you have read a teen novel in the last year. Okay put your hand down. Raise your hand if you've read a teen novel that wasn't The Hunger Games, Divergent, or The Fault in Our Stars. All right keep your hands up, keep your hands up. Put them down if you're a teen librarian because you rock but I mean that's kind of your job. Okay you guys are awesome, fantastic. Raise your hand if you wish you knew more of your teen library users by name. Yeah, okay. How about raise your hand if you'd like to strengthen your relationship with your high school teachers, your junior high school teachers, your coaches, your administrators. Yeah, okay. Raise your hand if you'd like to have a few more positive interactions with your teen patrons. Yeah, all right. Okay you guys are we're in the same place. You should stick around. Good work. So Los Gatos library we are located two tenths of a mile from our high school and really I feel like Google is overstating it here. I feel like it's probably less than a tenth of a mile and we are definitely an after-school destination for our high schoolers and this is a super new thing for us. We opened this beautiful new building that's our teen room that you're peeking into on the second story there in 2012. In our old library we had no teen room, limited seating generally, and on a busy day we would have about 12 teen patrons. In our new building we have 100 teens on a regular day. We start to consider it busy when we get over 125 and on a day recently we had 175 teens in our building at 2.30 in the afternoon. So since we opened our building we've had to pretty much reimagine absolutely everything about the way that we work with teens, which is a super exciting challenge for us. So we started with sort of crowd control mechanisms. We created noise zoning in our library so patrons would know where they could expect a quieter experience and where they could expect more noise. We brought in a community services officer to help us staff our teen room and to really strengthen our relationship with the police department. We revised our progressive discipline policies and when we got all those things done and we had things running smoothly you know more or less we noticed that what we wanted to focus on next was really developing a connection with our teens and a connection between the library and the rest of the community. We wanted to give our teens a little bit of a public relations boost because they needed one and we wanted to remind the community how stoked they were to have such a vibrant teen population in our library. They needed reminding. We were in the middle of working on describing our services and goals using those developmental asset terms that we're all familiar with and Los Gatos teens for the most part live in a really asset-rich environment. They have adults in their lives with very high expectations. They have a lot of responsibility. They're very scheduled and they have a lot of different kinds of adults in their lives. We wanted to demonstrate that we were a part of that community, that we had high expectations for them, that we were invested in them, that we were interested in their well-being but mostly that what happened at the library wasn't necessarily separate from what happened at school or what happened at home or what happened on the sports field. One day I said to Heidi who isn't here today but she is our other co-town librarian and I was just kicking ideas around. I said wouldn't it be great if some random Tuesday afternoon when the teen room is totally packed and half of the football team is here waiting to go back to practice if kind of out of the blue the football coach walked in and was there to get a book and was sort of like hey football team, hey librarian Jen like maybe we'd have our own special fist bump you know who knows but that he was there to get a book and wouldn't that say such amazing things about how the community values our teens and how the community values literature and how the community values the library. I'm saying this to Heidi and she says you mean Andy the football coach he's my neighbor he would totally do that for us and so Andy became our first required reader he's the football coach he's an English teacher he's a new Jandy Nelson fan here he is reading The Sky is Everywhere and he is you may or may not notice observed dressed up as one of the characters from The Sky is Everywhere so reverse required reading is a really simple program you take local grownups you ask them to read a teen novel report back on the results and boom there you go that's it I asked the readers to send me a photo of themselves enjoying their book and I asked them to answer four simple questions for me I have them describe the book in a sentence ask if they liked it ask them how is this different than you expected and that becomes really important and I'll tell you a little bit more about that later and I have them do a little reader's advisory for me if someone enjoyed this book they might also like and this is a little bookmark that I tuck in with the books I have them take a picture of themselves of the book send it to me that's it we started our reverse required reading over this last summer with a group of willing adults that we sort of hand selected that we could easily badger into participating in this program and in the first batch I chose the titles and I was really particular to choose really excellent teen literature and to kind of tailor these suggestions to the reader Andy the football coach took a stack of great books and handed them out to the other coaching staff and was like here you're going to read these it's going to be great we asked our town manager that's Greg Larson in the middle there he's read shipbreaker that's our vice mayor all the way over on the right she also read the sky is everywhere this is our former CSO she read Graceling she read it digitally look at that she's even doing a little ebook promotion on the side our entire library board read for us and some more local teachers read for us as well and when we sent out these original requests we were kind of over the top effusive in the language that we used letting people know how lucky they were that we had considered them for this great honor so here's a typical example of an email we would send out dear so and so you have been hand selected to be a part of our teen reverse required reading program at the library because of your significant place in our community we would love to have you join us for this fantastic event aimed at getting teens to read for fun this unique program pairs local well-known community members with one of our most popular teen novels if you choose to accept this honor your job would be to read the novel selected for you by Jen Laredo our teen librarian we would love to have you help this make help us make this a true community event please let me know if you're interested and not shocking I mean how could you turn that down everyone agreed and they were also chosen because we suspected they would agree but more shocking was that everyone loved the book that they read and they wrote the most amazing things about their assigned titles so here's a few more of our readers this is our library board Tom up there read Amy and Rogers epic detour he probably wouldn't have stumbled on that book on his own kitty red fly girl Lynn read the brides of raw rock island and sherry red revolution for us and how often in your library do you provide your library board a chance to help with teen programming I think this was definitely a first for us here's some local teachers there's Tonya McQuaid again you remember you may remember her figuring prominently into Henry's presentation earlier so Tonya's definitely a library supporter she's an English teacher she's the mother of a teen she's holding the fault in our stars there this is the first John Green novel she ever read which I consider just absolutely shocking and horrific we're changing the world we're changing the world Judy in the middle there she's the kindergarten teacher that everybody had and loves and honks that on the streets and stops in the store she read Dairy Queen that's another one of the football coaches down there he read if I stay which he thought was going to be about a couple working through some marital problems yep big shocker for him and the two on the bottom these are from our second batch this is mrs. where she read unearthly and that's mrs. Edwards over there she read since you asked and that's Claire the student who nominated her I'm going to get to that nomination piece right here so in august when school started and our teams came back we turned the nomination process over to them we passed out forms asking them to pair a book that they enjoyed with an adult in their lives and they really responded positively once the teens were involved the nature of the book selection really changed which is what we expected because of the huge thrill of requiring a teacher to read a book that maybe they're not going to like so much so suddenly we had a run on copies of the selection by Kira Kass and every single Twilight book so here is mrs. Rigby she is reading this selection by Kira Kass while her drama class does what drama classes do I assume I'm not positive I think they may be acting out pivotal scenes from the selection although I don't know about the girl in the far right on the floor I don't I don't know what that is I don't know what that is you can see on the stool there she's also got grave mercy by Robin the fever Lily who's the student kind of just standing in the back here on the left recommended that she read grave mercy and she wrote me back and said I would absolutely love to help you out with this project but I cannot read anything scary I'm a big chicken so I went back to Lily and Lily said okay how about this election so there she is one of the things I love about the request is you can see how much the kids are loving their teachers as they do this I'll read you a little bit of these one of the says I love you mr. G this one in the middle says we love you and my absolute favorite is all the way over there that says mr. Burns you are the best teacher alive and I love your dance moves and mr. Burns AP physics teacher is currently reading Twilight for us so as I emailed the second batch of folks and let them know that they had been now that they were part of this exciting program they had heard about it from our first batch of readers and they were excuse me really excited to be part of such a hip event so with this project we discovered there's quite a few ways to measure success and some of the areas in which we feel like we've made the largest gains are sort of the least countable but here are some of our countable stats we're about three months in we've asked 35 adults to read for us 21 of those have agreed to read 15 of them have completed their assignments to date we're sharing our results on instagram we have about 50 instagram followers we have more than 60 nominations and kind of an ongoing interest in nominating teachers and other community members and loads and loads of goodwill has been generated so we share our results on instagram and if you're an instagramer and you want to pull out your phone and add us and follow us i totally won't be offended and while you do that i'm going to channel my own inner john green here and i'm going to instagram you guys so if you don't want to be on instagram like look away the teens will know that i'm not just ditching them today there you go okay cool awesome so this is one area of the program that didn't take off quite like i expected it to um i had a really really high hopes for this like i was going to be insta famous and opera was going to come back and bring her show back and want to interview me and everything um and we're not there we're not there but we're doing okay um i didn't start out as an instagram user so there was a adjustment period and a learning curve for me luckily i had the help of an insta wizard in the form of this is heidi's daughter kaya and she was great about letting me know when i was doing instagram totally totally wrong for instance i started out posting all of the text of the reviews people were sending in in the instagram comments which is really really wrong you should never ever do that she woke up her mom in the middle of the night tell jen she's doing it wrong she's got to stop but i did have to put those reviews somewhere and so um i added them to our the teen area of our website and i linked them up on facebook for a little bit of extra promotion uh the area that probably gets the most hits is the display in the on the wall in our teen room um it's great to point to it when teens are doing the nomination so that they can see yes you make a nomination and yes your your teacher or the adult in your life will possibly read the book and report back it's also a great tool for readers advisory i had a teen come in with his mom a few weeks ago and he needed a book for his english class and of course what he wanted was the maze runner and of course all of our maze runners are checked out and so i'm going through his other options you could read little brother you could read in karsaron you could read the dead you could read ship breaker and he was kind of on the fence about it and i was like well mr crail really liked this book see he's literally giving it a thumbs up like there he is mr crail's uh varsity football coach so this is a this is the full text of his display which is posted on the wall in our teen room and the teen said well okay if mr crail liked it which you know for a teen is a total glowing recommendation i also consider the number and the variety of nominations we receive as a marker of success each piece of this nomination process represents a series of represents a connection point and kind of works together um so the teen fills out a form and you have an opportunity to talk to them oh did you read this did you like this have you read the sequel i see you're nominating the track coach do you run track and then you get to email the adult and give them the good news and for a lot of folks the conversation starts out with hi you don't know me but i'm jan laredo and i'm your teen librarian and good news there's a teen in your life who's so excited that you share this book with them and then if they choose not to ignore me and they write back then um you get to have a little conversation like oh i already read this book with my son or um i can't read scary books you're gonna have to try again and then uh there's an opportunity for the teen and the community member to connect i don't require that the teens own up to these nominations but i do encourage it i um usually let them deliver the book if they feel comfortable with that and i'm not there for that piece of the interaction but i'm really confident that it's sure of like really heartfelt observations on literature and how awesome the library is and things like that and then we're finding that community members are really connecting with each other over this project andy you remember our original reverse acquired reader was talking about his book at a barbecue because he was so excited about the sky is everywhere and the other people there were like well can i read this book and how do i get to be nominated and the teachers i email now are all saying that they've heard about it our town lawyer came by and asked for a teen book because he felt like he was running out of things to talk about in social situations and so could i have a teen book so i could talk about it yeah totally stand here let me take your picture and even if the adult never reads the book you're still generating these connection points in our first batch of assignments we asked our chief of police to read the maze runner for us and to be totally fair he was about three weeks away from retirement when we asked him to do this for us and so potentially like this didn't float to the top of his list of things that he needed to do but he took the book and he said it on his desk and he told us this story he had a mom and a teen come in to talk to him about something and at the start of this conversation which was probably going to be a little uncomfortable you know the teen was like oh you're reading the maze runner and he was like well no i'm not but i'm supposed to be you know yeah and so right at the beginning of this you know potentially difficult conversation they had this connection points and so we never got a report back from this reader in fact we never got the book back from this reader but we're still considering this a success story one of my secret goals with this project was to raise awareness about the awesomeness of young adult literature in our community and sort of in so doing raised the awareness about the awesomeness of the teens in our community because even with the success of some recent teen titles still when most people think of teen literature they don't think of great literature they think of something that's kind of a throwaway book or they think of twilight almost universally i'm a big twilight fan i'm not dissing twilight i'm really not almost universally when answering the question how was it different than you expected adults replied with some form of it was way better than i expected so i didn't expect the book to cover as many serious issues as it did i did not expect to encounter such mature references that were made throughout the novel i love that the characters were intelligent and articulate that they made literary references am i allowed to say that it was much better than i expected yes that's kind of the whole point you really are allowed to say that i thought it was well written and the characters and themes well developed i was surprised at how well written it was i loved this book for its emotional depth and though i had to continually suspend my disbelief that was what made it more fun so by exposing adults to the things teens are reading you're exposing them to the awesomeness of the teen experience in a way sometimes we all make assumptions about the about people based on what they find entertaining right have you ever gone into someone's house for the first time and made a beeline for their bookshelves to like find out like who they really are right so with reverse required reading we're showing adults in los gatos how rich and complex teen literature is and we're letting them know that teens are thinking and reading about a wide variety of topics way more than vampires and they're reading and thinking about these things critically and making amazing connections and that the stuff that they're reading and thinking about is pretty varied and amazing so some lessons learned work your connections definitely number one like i said that first batch of readers was basically folks that heidi knew or folks that we could easily badger into helping us out and then the second group we were able to say see look at all the amazing people who've already done this so it's a great way to make new connections but you have to have kind of a core group to get started I found and also be open to a variety of success markers Oprah may not come back and reopen her show just to talk to you about reverse required reading store up some responses before you start so I had about 12 responses from over the summer and I got really excited to have all of those up when the teens came back for school so I posted them all and got them excited about nominating but then there was about a month of time when nobody else knew had read a book or was ready to share so if I had metered those out a little bit it would have been better um think a little bit about the photos because a big component of this is kind of that visual moment of the adult holding a teen book we do want it to be easy so I allow I ask people to take a picture of themselves but then sometimes the quality of the photo you get back is a little bit squiffy think about the reports whether you want to assign them or not and who will read them and where for me this is a really key part partly because I don't just want someone to stand there and hold a teen book and take a picture and email it to me and be done but also because it really mirrors the experience a teen has when we assign them books for school and things like that they have to read it and they have to write about it and think about it so I kind of want to mirror that experience in a scaled down way for the adults in the community but um sharing that information with the teens is maybe not quite as important the Instagram place was not the place to share it but we are sharing that um on the web and on Facebook which really tends to be more where the adults go to look for information and some things that I'd like to try next with this program so when we asked the teens to nominate an adult in their lives to read a book I was shocked and stoked that many of them nominated their own parents to read a teen book and I definitely want to celebrate that and honor it but I also can't email people's parents out of the blue and say hi I'm the teen librarian so I'm thinking about like a letter or a bookmark or something so the the teen could take the book home to their parents and let them know that we are doing this project and that they do want them to participate I'd love to see us do photo nominations where the kids could take pictures of themselves a little sign I want so and so to read such and such book groups we have a lot of local book groups in Los Gatos I would love for them to take on the challenge of a teen novel a way to work in local businesses we have a youth commission that has a really active youth friendly business program where they designate certain businesses in our community to be especially welcoming to teens and it would be great I think to walk into the yogurt shop and be like oh the yogurt lady lady read whatever we have started incorporating volunteers sort of in the management and the instagraming pieces of that and then some sort of mystery spot type branding you know the mystery spot bumper stickers where everybody in the Bay Area knows sees them and knows that they are so coming up with some way to acknowledge that people have completed their reverse required reading assignment that could become sort of ubiquitous so again maybe in the Oprah zone of ideas but it's out there it's my own 49ers stadium cool there how about any questions I do have a slide with my contact info if you're interested but that's the end of my presentation and I can feel any questions you might have so you said that you put a bunch out right before the summer and then you had a time where you didn't have any to post what would you suggest would be a good amount of time to in between to post like once a month once I'd love to see him like once a week right but I think that sort of depends on how how willing you think you the adults in your community are going to be to kind of keep you know keep supplying these for you I've I've assured the adults that I've already asked that I won't go back to them over and over again to keep you know asking the same question so I think if I had saved up four you know at the end of the summer I could have gotten through September and then we had we've had more in the second batch probably rolling in in October I put a due date on the bookmark which some people choose to ignore and some people choose to honor but you know again it's that kind of modeling that assignment piece I told you it's a really simple program it doesn't take a lot of explaining super intuitive