Good afternoon on behalf of the American Federation of Teachers, I'd like to welcome you to today's webinar on Ban Books. I am so with our common sense, common sense education. My name is Kelly booze. I'm the proud director of our American Federation of Teachers. Share my lesson and I am thrilled to be the moderator today for this important topic. Before we begin, I'd like to thank today's virtual conference sponsor. Oh shoot, I'm sorry guys, I want to thank our conference sponsor, Carnegie Natural History Museum for all of your support. That we have. We couldn't do those virtual conferences without your support, and we're just so so proud to have you here today. I'm gonna go ahead and share a quick video on how you can use the platform better. Hello everyone, welcome to our 2022 share my lesson virtual conference. My name is Kelly Booze, director of the American Federation of Teachers. Share my lesson before we begin. We'll go over a few housekeeping items. For those of you who have joined us many times before, you know that we make our webinars as engaging as we possibly can. So to get us started, please open up that group chat box and tell us where you are from and why you are joining us today and what interests you about this particular topic. In addition to the group chat, if you're joining us live, you will be able to provide some different reactions throughout the webinar today, so let us know what you're thinking and throughout the webinar, whatever reaction you want to give, share it with us and share it with your fellow participants. At the end of this webinar, we will be facilitating a question and answer session. Use that Q&A widget to submit any questions that you want us to ask the presenter. If you have any technical issues, please also use a Q&A widget and one of our share. My lesson team members is there and ready to respond to you. If you would like a copy of the slide deck or any of the related materials, you can find those in the resource widget. For those of you who want professional development credit, you will be able to download a PDF certificate at the conclusion of this webinar verifying your participation today, you do need to answer the poll questions that you will see throughout the webinar. To access that certificate now, let's turn it back over to your moderator who will put up a sample poll question for you to try. The poll question is located directly in the slides. You can answer your question. And then hit submit. From all of us at share my lesson. Thank you for joining us today. Enjoy your webinar. I'm mute sorry, I just did that. You're on mute. Story of our lives, right? So I just put up the sample poll question and you can. You should be able to find that poll question directly within the slides where you'll see the PowerPoint slides. So go ahead and submit your response. If you have a day off all to yourself, no obligations. What do you do? Solo Road trip sleep, curl up with a book? Do some quality TV bingeing and you know go ahead and I see a lot of folks are already using the group chat box, which is great. Feel free to add any other options that you might do. And if you're taking some time off to yourself, I am going to attempt to take some time off tomorrow on Friday, and I think I will be doing a combination of some sleeping and crawling up with a book likely, so that's that we go with our response is it looks like we got almost everybody has responded so far which is great. Again, your ability to get your professional development certificate is tide to responding to those cool questions. So do make sure that you respond to those. Alright, so we got a lot of curling up with a good book, so I'm curious if anybody is reading a good book should go ahead and share that book within the attendee chat and I think it's great that we're, you know, talking about books during this session that you wanna curl? Absolutely, yeah so. That's fantastic. Alright I am gonna go ahead and turn this over and welcome our speakers today. Our speaker today. Sue Thoughts is the senior program manager with Common Sense Media and Comms sense education. We're so thrilled to have you here, Sue. I know you guys had mitted a different proposal for this virtual conference and we kind of had some back and forth with you saying like hey, do you have anything that you can talk to us about? You know banning books because we know that that is a? A big conversation that's in the news right now. I live in Virginia that has certainly been a bit of a conversation in terms of, you know what? What books can be taught or not taught? You know, in censorship of of different books, and so I'm thrilled that you guys could tackle this conversation with us. So Sue, go ahead and take it away. And I know Jennifer is here too with the common sense, and she's going to be responding and sharing some stuff in the the group chat box. If you haven't opened that up, please be sure. And for those of you who are sharing. Yes, those of you who are sharing your book gloves in the chat box. Thank you for thank you for that. Alright thanks sue. Yeah, thank you so much Kelly. I am so thrilled to see all of your book lists down there and thank you so much for joining us today. I I appreciate that you requested this because I think it's just kind of the shove that we needed. We had intended on doing something about news and media literacy and using some of those skills, but reframing it around banned books really made us think about the ways in which we could help teachers engage in this subject. And it's really. It's not. I not only prepared these slides for. In this talk for today, but it has sparked a lot of conversation where generally with the teachers that I work with to find out how it is that they are addressing this issue of banning books. And so today I'm going to be framing this a little bit differently, perhaps, but before we begin, I want to think about what the issue is, right? So let's just define what it is that we're talking about here. As you might know, as many of you have sure that's why you're here. You're well aware of the fact that you know in the United States, this battle over banned books is starting. This has been heating up over the last few months with politicians and parents who are demanding the removal of certain types of books from libraries and from our school curriculum and many of the books that are under fire are ones that had been placed in libraries or placed in curriculum as a response to this nationwide movement to diversify and to increase representation of students of color in these in our libraries and in our curriculum, and so with that I you know, with all this heating up, I had a really great conversation. With a couple of librarians here, I live in Los Angeles and here in California, we were talking and I invited them to. If you're not familiar with the Twitter space, Jennifer just dropped this Twitter space link in the chat and we had this conversation with librarians who have been dealing and tackling this. You know, head on in terms of they've been doing banned books for a while, and one of the things that they've been doing was really responding by giving advice around what they as librarians are doing. Whether it be holding a, you know, a banned book banquet and really talking about the history of banned books and what it means and asking questions to predict why. Asking students to predict why some of these books have been banned and doing a lot of researching with their students on the topic. And my other thing, the couple of things that came up was having a policy in place at your school and in that conversation there was this great idea that all folks should already have a policy in place. And there is model. Policy that was put forth by the, you know, at least here in California, the California School Librarians Association. So all of these tidbits from librarians were referenced in that talk, and it was. It was really insightful to me, but I was wondering, you know, as many of you might be classroom teachers. You know who are also dealing with this. I wanted to address the topics that that you all are dealing with in your classroom from a classroom perspective, not just a library perspective. So I wanna know how many of you are dealing with banned books. In your district or at your school or at your library right now? Do you have an active ban already in place? We've passed it and we got these books pulled out. Do you have a potential ban that has been proposed? Do you see it? There's conversations coming down the road? Or are you like, are you breathing easy? Right now? I feel like I'm in the clear for right now. This is kind of that wave is passing over us. So where are you in this topic at your school and you know with your teachers with. Your parents with your school board. With your librarians, you know where? Where are you in this potential debate? Where do you sit? So I see that many of you are already presenting and I think Kelly. I have a question, do I present the poll results or oh I see? I think if I advance my slide once I get folks in here, I'm gonna give you another 20 seconds to submit and I will then advance my slide and you will see all the results and we'll all see where we're at. Alright so I'm curious. Here we go. I'm going to hit it or or now or never right. OK so here we go. I see it coming down the road is is number 1 here for us right? Some of you have an active band or a potential band that has been proposed. Very few of you. I am glad to see and many of you say I'm in the clear right now, right? But just because you're in the clear doesn't mean that you do not need to be here, right? Doesn't mean that you can't advocate for others or that you cannot be proactive and have some sort of preventive policy and teach your students about how to stand up for this, right? So many of our teachers. See the importance of having discussions when it comes to you know potentially controversial issues, right? And many of our teachers wanna have these conversations, but they don't quite know how to do this in this particularly heated political environment and in a way that discusses current events that that doesn't get letters back to them or doesn't have parents coming in and and and having these conversations and being angry about or their school board, right? So my question to all of you right now. Is when it comes to this discussion around ban books or even other potential political topics. Or, you know, are you comfortable discussing these current events in your classroom. So you either you know we discussed current events in politics all the time, my classroom and I do this with in my sleep, or we have these discussions occasionally, right? We pulled these in every once in awhile. If something really important comes up, I hope to have these in the near future or not with a 10 foot pole I can't even. Imagine the thought right now, right? So where are you at? Just as we move forward, I just wanna get a sense of of what is the political comfort that you have? Yeah, yeah. I see I'm trying to see them trying to watch at the same time I have Jennifer watching the chat for me so that I'm not distracted but as many of you are you know are trying to do your submissions here. I just want to get a sense of the skills that you might need in order to be able to have some comfort discussing these issues in your classroom. So I'm gonna give you about another 10 seconds. So hit it now, alright. And then I am going to move forward with these poll results alright 54321. OK, oh goodness, why aren't you? You guys should be teaching this webinar right now for me, right? You should if you're discussing current events all the time, give us your favorite tips. And yeah, some of you may not have students that are willing to share, especially post pandemic right? We might have had this, you know, shutdown of of some of the ways in which our students communicate, and so it might be harder now post pandemic and so you know you if you have these discussions occasionally, you know I just wonder like I saw that couple folks dropping resources in there of some of their favorite things that they're using. So please share in that chat what it is, the tools that you're using, your topics and and with your other your fellow teachers in there. We are all here to learn from each other. I am just going to be sharing some skills today and when it comes to political topics like banned books or you know anything that maybe you know anything racial justice or anything that you guys are talking about in your classroom. So you hope to talk about. I wanna think about you know sharing these skills with you and some of these topics that we have at common sense. One, they're all number one I guess. I I didn't mean to put them all as but they really are number one. All of these are at the top of my list. Civic engagement, right? We're going to talk about how to take a stand when you see something that is something that you strongly believe in, right? We want to encourage our students to be upstanders right? And to be able to take stands for issues that they feel strongly about #2 or #1. Here civil discourse. How do you engage in dialogue with folks that don't necessarily agree with you that don't have the same perspective as you? How do you engage in a productive dialogue where it is about learning from each other rather than just attacking each other personally? And the third piece that I have up here is media literacy. How do we have our students understand that we all hold our own biases? We all have a perspective and experience that we come from, and when we are learning new material that those biases that we hold sometimes could get in the way of us, seeing the perspective of other people. So these are the three three skills than three, you know, kind of lesson approaches. I'm gonna be sharing today. And you can see how they all apply to a debate on something like banned books. So at the beginning of every conversation that you have with your students, you should always be establishing norms. I'm establishing some norms here. Today I'm going to model a bit for you and you know some of these norms. I. I think you know I pulled these from facing history, but these are, you know, listen for understanding. If you are in that chat and somebody says something that you do not necessarily agree with, try to understand what they're saying right before you rush to judgment. Talk about these statements using I statements right, not you know you. You did this. You're horrible, terrible person. I heard this and this is how it made me feel. Right? Think with both your head and your heart. If someone says something that hurts or offends you, don't attack that person. Acknowledge that comment right and not necessarily the person that and how it hurt you and explain why. So these are just some ground rules that I've just, you know, courageous conversations, excellent facing history, excellent. These are all great places for you to begin and establishing norms with your students. Right? Trouble I I hear you, I'm in trouble all the time, alright. Civic engagement, let's start there. You and me Susan, we're together in this I know we're gonna begin by using a tool, a lesson here or type of lesson that we have at common sense called take a stand and this is what we call as a thinking routine and what it does is it really explores perspectives about digital dilemmas you know related to Community life, online communities and and civics, right? So with this, take a stand routine, then I'm gonna show you you can, you can. You know, apply this. Take a standard routine to many different types of situations and what with this routine, what you start with is you ask your students you know what do you think right? What's your initial response? You know, explain your perspective. Take a step back and listen to other perspectives that are in the room and then look back at your original response. And maybe there's something that you just read or just heard that has shifted your perspective a little bit. Something that you hadn't thought of yet, right? So the idea is that we all are able to all of mine are showing up as one. I promise you these were 1234. I'm sure you all know how to count. You'll be fine. And then in that in that routine, the last part is how does this dilemma that we just talked about connect to my life right in the real world situation? And so Jennifer posted this guide that we used to look at some controversial topics. So the one that I chose for today for us to practice on is called the protest, right? This is this is one example of something where you know we are just going to examine a situation and perhaps this is about. A protest maybe about banned books? Alright, we can imagine so. Absolutely Valerie. Thank you so much for that suggestion. I was thinking about that and I really like that. Yeah alright, she just wrote in there. In case you didn't see it, she said take a position so I'm gonna make that suggestion to change some of our language. So with this one in this I want you all to consider the situation at a protest people were chanting and rallying to express hate for another group of people. Right or express outrage in some way. Someone later gathered pictures from that protest and started sharing them on social, asking people for help identifying those protesters. Once those protesters were invited, identified people publicly shamed them for their hateful views, and pressured their employees to fire them. So the question I would pose this question to my students, and if we were all in a room together, we could physically, you know, spread out between, agree and disagree in the room and figure out where your students are positioned along that line. In this case, we are all virtual. And you are all my my students in my virtual classroom. And so I'm gonna ask you to to use imenti. So I'm gonna try this and see how it works. Jennifer is gonna drop Imenti link in the she just dropped it in the chat. I want you to click on that men T link and I am going to try to share my screen. Let's see if I can do this. I'm going to try to share a screen and show you would like to record. Of course yes please. Oh boy OK maybe this is going to be more difficult. Alright Kelly I'm going to ask you to share that. Mente, oh, maybe I won't be able to do it. Here's what I'm gonna do. I'm just gonna do this. I'm gonna examine where you guys all are and then I will tell you where you are in that in that position right there. So we have. I will tell you along the lines of strongly disagree to strongly agree Kelly, I'm gonna drop this link into our team chat here and I'm going to have you share it for me. Perfect. That is where I don't know if you need to sign in. That's the only question. I will tell you in one second. Or I wonder if I could do this so I'm just trying to share some results here. I don't so let me share my screen. I love it. Thank you mentimeter. By the way, if you've never used mentimeter before, this is a very handy tool for Quick, Anonymous polling, so these are great. It's also a free tool up to so many two questions so Kelly can share her screen. Excellent and you'll all see where you are. Do you agree with the practice of calling out protesters identities? Is this working for you, Kelly? Yes, can folks confirm that they can see the screen? And what you should see is something that looks like this, except it has actual numbers on it with people you know, it'll show you where people are at. Oh yes. Starting to look like something. Oh yes, OK. So here we go. If you'll see if you see what I see, you'll see that you guys are kind of strongly right in the middle. It doesn't get a whole lot more middle than two point 6 out of five about. You know some of you strongly disagree. There's a huge hump in the middle, and then there's a strongly agree on the right hand side and you folks are evenly distributed across the entire space. Now I'm going to ask you to stay in that same link. I'll go ahead, Kelly. No, I was gonna say Soo I don't. I don't think the share screen is working for me either but that I did not have to log in. So if you wanna just give this main link that you gave me. You could put that in the chat and then everybody could see where you're landing. Yeah, you're so smart, so here's what I'm gonna do instead. I just described it to you and then now I'm gonna I'm gonna move my slide and I'm gonna ask you to answer the next question that comes up to that mente link the one so there's a next question that comes up that says share your rationale for why you agreed or disagreed and then I will show you all. I'll give you the link so that you all can see that. Yeah, so there is a link to the question that Jennifer posted and the question is share your rationale. For why, for why you agreed or disagreed right? And so the next question on the mentee asks that, and so you guys should be able to see. That question on your mentee link. I mean it won't work and we might have to just go with the chat. I'm sure nobody has ever experienced something like this happening in your classroom. So here is the next question. Share your rationale for why you agreed or disagreed. Let me see if I can get any. Oh OK, hold on. Oh it didn't push. Hahah OK so I'm gonna start reading some of these. Yeah I'm seeing it Soo so you're good. OK fantastic. So it says it opens up protesters to abuse. I'll just read somebody's. I don't think shaming people changes minds. It makes people defensive and even more aggressive. I hate for a group to to to step toward as oh hate for a group as a step toward genocide so it should be discouraged. However, shaving folks might not change hearts and minds. Depends on the issue. If someone has been attacked because of racism, then it's helpful to call them out, right? If they're the ones being racist then you know. It may be that you might feel differently about right. I don't know. It feels we were very ambiguous about what they were protesting. I feel like if someone did something wrong they should be punished. However, ratting people out and blasting in social media, it may not be the best way. Yeah, so it interferes with freedom of expression and speech shouldn't be doxing people for their views. It's not appropriate practice to call out students in front of the whole class, so we should probably model the same practice as adults. Excellent, I am loving these responses by all means. You know, feel free to continue to share your rationale in there, but I think part of it is like we not only want to see where you fall, you know in your position on the agreement or disagreement. But we also want to have an understanding of why you feel that way right, and so this is just these are these questions are intended to be kind of open and ambiguous, and you know when we share our responses, we want our students to learn from each other, right? Was there something in there that you had not originally considered? Right out of those responses that I read on there on that minty, there are some fabulous responses there, right? And maybe there's something in there that you learned from out of that process and hopefully we can do this in a civil manner and you can ask. Of course, any situation, any question here and absolutely why is shaming not not appropriate right then? So having this discussion with your students, give them the practice that they need in order to be able to engage in a way that is civil and maybe productive. Right, what we want here is we want people to understand each other and and to make change toward toward the better, right? So so, here's a you know that's comes from our common sense lessons and our lessons are, you know, based in a topic called what we call digital citizenship. And it covers these lessons here so that that comes from the common sense free digital citizenship lessons. If you're ever looking for ones, you know these are the topics that we cover in these free lessons. And that was an example. Something that came out of our content so it. And of course you can follow that model Jennifer gave you that link to you know to that that protocol and you follow that there's a bunch of examples in there beyond the protests. There's lots of different kinds of topics that you could cover or make up your own right. This is just a way of thinking. It's just a protocol, so there's more in these digital citizenship lessons and I'm going to try to move on to another one, right? So that was the first one about like finding out where people are and listening to each other, right? This next one is about how to engage in dialogue. In a way that that provides some sort of civil communication, and so with this one, this comes from, you know, that let those lesson examples that I just showed, and this particular lesson. It's designed for 12th graders and it's called we are civil communicators, right? And this is what is civil discourse, the definition we give here is. It's a conversation that involves respectful sharing and debate of ideas. Just a very quick, simple definition. And in this lesson we we watch a video. By a student of our former student from Parkland, which was a school that had a very large mass shooting a few years ago, Cameron Caskey became an activist so that you know that context is shared in this video, and I kind of skip over that in the little clip that we're watching now. But what he talks about is the way in which he he engaged with others as a result of his activism and some of the things that he regrets. So I hope I'm going to try this video clip, let's see. Oh yeah, there is a video clip here. I don't know how to make it happen. The one lesson I wish I had learned before all this started was that the Internet, while it's not real life, is becoming a part of it. It's all about remembering that the social media exists to supplement personal connections and not replace them behind every single account on Twitter, unless they're a bot, there's a human being typing, and that person might not realize just who they're interacting with, so you feel like it doesn't mean anything, and you feel like the people who see your comments aren't affected by it. We are now a part of this large ocean of connection and it's now our job to be responsible. We need to hold ourselves accountable so somebody else doesn't do it for us. I used to look down on people I put myself on a pedestal, and I encouraged a lot of my friends to do it as well. I treated people who disagreed with me like they weren't as good human beings as I was. I did a town hall debate at CNN. Emotions were high and just a week ago people that I loved were killed. I went up and asked my senator Marco Rubio if he would stop taking money from the NRA. Can you tell me right now that you will not accept a single donation from the NRA? And I wish I had stopped it there, but before that I compared him to the likeness of the shooter for my school. I became part of the problem because I went up there on that debate to make another human being look bad as a human being and not as a politician because I wanted to go up there and embarrass him. I wanted to ruin his career. I did not do that to benefit the conversation. I did not do that to benefit our discourse as human beings. I did that to make another person look bad. I learned a lesson from it and I I'm. I'm thrilled that we went out there. And I'm thrilled that we were able to make this conversation. Is such a national topic? But at the end of the day, I'm never going to do something like that again. That's where we can stop this. Right? So so I'm gonna see I'm gonna see if I can push back to the slide before can I push back to this to the Cameron Kasky slide again? How do I get there? I wanna go to this one. Yes thank you so you know we we show this video we show the entire video that's just a clip of it but the whole thing is about 6 minutes long and we ask our students what ideas stood out to you about Cameron Kasky right? What? What did he say that stood out to you and I showed you my favorite part of it. But he also also goes on to say how he had a conversation with you know. Was one of the people who he's you know opposed to right? Like who's on the other side and the way that that interaction took place in real life really changed his idea right? And they there's activities that are part of this that are part of this lesson, and I've also included these in this slide to those links to some of the, you know, the quick activities. And so the the links to all the quick activities that are associated with many of the videos that we have in our curriculum. So this one I thought was particularly you know, appropriate for today. And you know, I just want students to have this. I mean, I'm sure if you any of you work with middle school high school, you know when he talks about like I put myself on a pedestal, right? Like any of us, I don't know if you remember, maybe some of you are not quite so. You know, when you get caught up in believing something so strongly like you think that you are right, you know that you are right and you wanna just like make other people feel wrong in a way right? And I I think that our students need to have a little bit of humility sometimes right? And. Be able to stand up for what they believe in, but also be able to listen and be able to have these these conversations, and so I think this is when it comes to banned books when it comes to any of these political topics. How do we teach them to have these conversations and this discourse so that they may positively engage in some way and actually make change, right? So I am going to push for a little bit to our third. Our third lesson folks, sorry. Yes, that was the one lesson I wish I had learned. Alright Cameron, sorry we don't need to hear you again. He was lovely though. Wasn't he? OK, so let's we should be on. Oh yeah. Media literacy, understanding confirmation bias. This is the last piece here and this one here. I just wanted to give an example of a lesson. Jennifer put it in there about challenging confirmation bias and what we mean by confirmation bias is a tendency to interpret information in a way that affirms what we already believe. I'm just confirming my own beliefs, and so when I'm scrolling through. My YouTube videos. My you know my tick tock if there's something in there that makes me say ah yeah, of course I knew that right there that is something that I will have a tendency to glom onto rather than an opposing view. It's a matter of identity. It's a matter of of really trying to affirm what I believe and cognitive bias in. In this lesson we explore this idea of cognitive bias and the way that our like. It's a neurobiology lesson, you know essentially and about the ways that our emotions really limit our thinking. Because we are perceiving the information that's coming at us through our own personal experiences, preferences, biases, right, and and so, how do our students have this understanding of the way in which our brains sometimes trick us into really falling for the information that that we already believe, right? And again, there is another video in here I won't play this one, but believe me, this one is fabulous and it comes from our partners at KQED, and the video is titled what would it take to change your mind? About something you really believed and it you know it goes through that neurobiology and you know. And then the question there are the essential question in that video is why does confirmation bias make us more likely to be fooled by you know what we call fake news right? And so it's really, you know, kind of a news, literacy media literacy type lesson, but it it helps us understand the way that we perceive information. And it teaches us how to just cool down a little bit right to not like immediately be triggered by what we see in there emotionally. And say Oh yes, yes yes. I'm gonna share this out right? Like this must be good stuff because I believe it so it helps our students understand kind of the way that these confirmation bias pieces really push us forward. There was a notes tracker for some of the resources in this lesson and it gives not just that video, but there are additional. You know articles and videos that are showing us, you know some information and we have our students read through or or experience some of these other pieces of information. So that lesson I feel like is also an essential part of understanding current events and interpreting the whole band book space, right? So what I just kind of want to, you know, pull this all together a little bit and say I've shown you you know one way to just ask your students about questions and and take a position. Thank you Susan. Take take a position about what it is that they believe in, how to engage in civic dialogue and then also you know that piece there about about cognitive bias and. So this this piece here when I'm when we're thinking about banned books and the things that we want our students to believe in, we want them to be reflective. We're essentially trying to slow down and be self reflective. We want them to be able to seek facts and evidence about the banned books, information that that they are. You know, what are the facts around the history of banned books right? What are what is the evidence that we have here that is pushing? You know these folks who are who are really pushing for this legislation, right? And you know how do they consider the perspectives of the people who are pushing these issues. So if someone is pushing for a ban, why right? How do we listen to them? How do we engage with them in conversation and dialogue in a way that allows us to have an understanding of what their fears are? And how do we address that? How do we envision options together, right? That is, you know, what options do we have and how do we then eventually enact one of those options and take a stand? So this is just kind of a general set of dispositions that we at. Common sense believe that, I think applies here to the situation. This is about activism. This is about civic engagement and this is really about helping our students develop the ability to be, you know, to be active, but also be compassionate, right? I think that's the biggest thing here is is helping our students be compassionate in their activism? So I guess you know more generally when it comes to you know the idea of you. Know engaging in current debate. Current events and topics. You know how are you? I hear many of you. This is a terrible question now because I already already many of you said you're already doing it right. I'm gonna, I'm already doing it. You automatically get a right. I'm ready to try it next week. For those of you who maybe has said, I don't make this a regular practice, you know, is this something that you need more support in? And how would you gain that support through, you know, for me, it's through my professional learning network. I have a group of folks who helped me, not just my colleagues but people. Outside of my of my work situation, who helped me think about these issues and there are people who I meet with regularly to have these discussions about current events and the ways in which we're approaching this so you know, I, I think that you know if you you know if you are in need of that support, there are plenty of folks out there that are right there with you. I am not sure maybe you're you're like I don't know if I'm really gonna do this or if it's like no way still 10 foot pole. I am not jumping in it's way too difficult. To to start so anyway, so here are some some poll questions here and I'm gonna give about 10 more seconds to to finish submitting and and here we go right here you go. So ready to try it next week. Thank you. Feel like I need a bit more support, right? That is what we do. It is a matter of practice, right? I just came from a conference in which we were practicing analyzing videos, analyzing tick tock videos right and a lot of the conversation that we had was about establishing a foundation of good strong, you know, civic engagement and media literacy in our classrooms. Still not sure. And then I still got one more. No way right? No way sorry, we couldn't help you today so. We will do our best alright so I'm gonna I'm gonna I don't know if Jennifer I don't know if we're gonna continue if we're gonna have folks take a survey, we'll we'll skip this for now. This is our common sense survey. It is absolutely a gift to us at common sense. I'm sure you have feedback through through. Share my lesson and all the work that you're doing there. So this one is a gift to to us. If you have any commentary, it's directly to common sense. Feel free. Otherwise, I'm just going to take a pause and say thank you for listening and take some some very difficult questions. I'm sure that many of you have right so, so by all means, let's see what we can do here. Yeah, now terrific. So this is a really good time to do. You open up that cute in a widget? I see there's lots of activity happening in the chat box. That's great if you have a question. Put it that in that Q&A widget so that way we can ask those questions. 'cause we do have a little bit of time right now so a couple questions. Do you have a list of commonly banned books to share and how are they related to? I'm sorry. How are they rated on the common sense site? Yeah, so some of you know that we are at common sense. Some of you know us as parents and we have ratings and reviews for books, television shows, movies, websites, video games and those are all at at commonsense.org and you know we rate them from a child development perspective, which is why I think like we take a strong position on banned books and we we've had, you know some information about that. On our on our parent side. And so when it comes to. You know why your kids should read banned books? There is one article, Yep. And then Jennifer popped in the list of like frequently challenged books. So you know, you will see that some of these books that are on there are ones that have been historically banned. And maybe nowadays we don't necessarily see them as as that big of a deal. So those are we just put in a couple of resources there for you specifically regarding some of the books that have been more challenged and why your kids should be reading them, which is what I think a lot of our librarians might say, too. Yeah, anybody else have any? Any questions, yeah? And you know. Just along those lines are kind of follow up on that. You know the so you guys take a strong position on the banned books. I mean what? What could we be doing more as educators? You know us that the American Federation teachers and share my lesson. I mean, we obviously you know, really believe in teaching honest history and you know we're not censoring. You know some of these important topics so you know. How can we also help get the message out? Right, I think the one of my favorite. I'm trying to think about the hashtag is oh, it's the freedom hashtag. Have you seen it? Like I don't know if any of you are on Twitter like Twitter is my. That is where I meet with my with my professional learning network. That's where I get ideas. That's where I spread information. So if you are an educator Twitter I think is a great place to at least begin getting ideas and also just collaborating with folks. So so there is this #f. READOM this is the the freedom hashtag which I feel like you know when it comes to banned books. There are a lot of teachers especially who are unifying under this place and then a lot of your your school librarian so it you know in we have CSLA here.org here in California and so I know if you have concerns and issues your librarians are already on it right? So yeah Jennifer just posted in like the freedom fighters right? So the school librarians I feel like I write the forefront of this. And if you want to see what kind of model policies and ideas that they have going, man, they I feel like they are. They're doing a great job. So I jump on their on their coattails if I can. Now that's super helpful and I just opened up the the link that you mentioned, so I will follow that shortly from my Twitter account. Yeah yeah, yeah yeah, and in fact I will mention to that our keynote that will be at 5:00 Eastern Time is going to be talking about teaching on U.S. history in the topic of book banning it will will be part of that conversation that's coming up in 5 Eastern Time and basically an hour hour and hour and 15 or hour and 20. So do alpha register for that, OK? Another question, the these lessons say they are for high school grades US 12. Can you use them with younger grades? So a lot of the lessons or the lesson plans you know we have. We have a whole scope and sequence kindergarten through 12th grade, but a lot of folks ask us, you know, like this one says grade 12. Is this appropriate? Can I use this elsewhere? And so with with that, we always suggest like any of these lessons can be used with your students. You know? Just read through it and make sure that it's appropriate, right? You can adopt, you know, we say, like you know what comes like a sexting lesson, right? If you need it at 6th grade instead of waiting till 8th grade, by all means, pull that sexting lesson. Make sure that you know. Read through it and everything and you know. Just make sure that everything in there is appropriate for your audience. We try to make these lessons appropriate for them. Kind of the middle of the road, right? These are these are used nationally and internationally and kids in Iowa mean it be the same as the kids in New York may not be the same as the kids in Arizona, right? So we just say take the materials, adapt it and that goes for editing any of those student situations. Any of the slides, any of the lesson student handouts? Those are all editable and so you change them to fit your needs and your situation. Change the names. And make sure you know if we say tick tock and you on Instagram, put it in there, right? So these are all adaptable for the needs of your classroom. They're just less than suggestions. Great. Yeah, no thank you forgot in Carlo right now has been pushing re pushing some of the poll questions 'cause I think some people miss some of the polls. So I think he's gone through a number of those. It will maybe put put one more backup will push that back up. OK cool. So if you had the day off, yeah yeah. Well let us know we do have a session coming up in May. Jennifer and I are hosting on our edweb community and so I do want to just put a plug in. We do have one specifically on the topic of banned books that one of our librarians, the one that's in that Twitter space that we promoted at the beginning. Well, these two librarians are coming in and talking about what they do to, you know, with their school around. Their band book banquet and their civil action projects their their social justice projects that they have with their students who are engaging in Community Action around this topic of banned books. And so it's an ongoing project right now. And so we've asked her to come in in May, and Jennifer just dropped a link to that event page which will contain eventually the link to that edweb in May and will be posted next week so you know if if that's something that that you are a topic that you are interested in. Look out for that because Mia Gitlin is is going to be joining us. She is one of my favorite people and she is so knowledgeable about specifically as a librarian about, you know, talking about ways to get our students reading and about the topic of of banned books. So, so she yeah, she's amazing. And we're so honored to have her join us, so that will be coming next week. That's great. OK, well I think they Mr I saw one question in the chat and then you know do you get those questions in because we'll be closing out soon, but I I don't know if you guys go into the stair, it's it's sometimes it's hard when it moves fast can you? Can we write a policy statement to give to our elected representatives? Now I don't know if that's kind of something that that common sense media gets into in terms of writing policy or recommendations or advocacy or not. I don't know if you can speak to that soon. So I think what what we recommend is that you have a policy at your school district as it really. It's. It's a proactive way so that nobody can just come in and say, you know, hey, you should come in, you know, here's my here's my complaints against this book. I want to ban it, right that you already have a protocol in place. Instead of saying you know, oh Gee, well that book, right? Like so that you're you're treating your treating the process as something that is not like, oh, I really do not like this parents. And therefore we're going to push back on this. Or you know, oh, you know I, I really like the way that they want to ban this book. Therefore, you know, yeah, sure, come on it, right? You have a policy proactively in place at your school district level about what to do when books are challenged, or when material and curriculum is challenged. Are you proactively already engaging in that? And that's something that we talked about. Oh oh, I know, hold on. Here it is. Oh, here it is. The intellectual fruit I already have here. Look at this. This is a place where you can get model policies for that. It's at the CSL, a.net. I put Oregon in there before CSL. A.net intellectual freedom resources. So I think you know that is a way that you can do that specifically at your school site. Whether you should be making model legislation to push, you know to your representatives. That's something that I'm going to leave for our advocacy team, because that is something I'm not sure if it's just like. What you mean about, you know, are you trying to like say that no books can be challenged, and therefore we're going to write legislation around that something like that? But I'd suggest you start with your own space and having policy in place. That's great great. OK, well I'll tell you what sue or or Jennifer if there's anything else that you guys want to add or any other points we could do that. And then we'll be closing this out shortly. This has been super informative. I'm really glad we talked tackled this topic and I would love to know about that upcoming webinar to see that amazing library or librarian that you have me a yes on Twitter. Thank you. Absolutely. I just saw her at our big conference last week. So yes, by all means, feel free to to follow them and we will have more to come. You know, in the future, this is just the beginning. You know our specialty is really around digital citizenship and and civic action is is going to be coming as well. So we hope that we can support teachers who are in the classroom. You know, not just on this subject, but beyond right to engage beyond. Grace. Yeah alright Kelly. Yeah, no, thank you so you know thank you again so much for being here. Really appreciate this information and I feel like we're, you know, we're all kind of aligned and in in there together in terms of making sure that we're providing the the best education for each student and and making sure that you know we're not censoring, you know resources for students. So I've put up on the screen some upcoming professional development opportunities that you can take advantage of. We've got in addition to wrapping up our virtual conference that if you're joining us live, thank you so much for being with us right now and then. For those of you on demand, I've great and there's plenty more webinars that you can take advantage of. And then we also have our reading opens the World Literacy Series that we're doing through June. We'll have our summer educator Academy in July and will also be doing another online virtual. Web and R series is part of our summer of learning series coming up so and I'm sorry my dog in the background puppy in the background is barking away. So with that I'm going to show our closing video and then hopefully you will join us for the upcoming keynote in about an hour and 10 minutes and let me. I'll put the link to that in the chat as this video is playing. Alright bye now. Thank you so much. Hi everyone, Kelly booze rejoining you again. I hope you enjoyed today's webinar as much as I did. 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