About Us: About us...

about

The NNHS LLC is a physical and virtual community learning hub where reading, inquiry, thinking, imagination and creativity are central to students’ learning.

Learners come together in their pursuit of knowledge and understanding in an environment that encourages curiosity, civility and persistence in academic and personal interests.   

The Newton North Library Learning Commons is centered around you, the learner.  To support you, we provide resources related to the entire school curriculum in many formats.  We teach and collaborate with your teachers and peers in all departments.  We offer and promote books that we think you'll love to read.   It's both a physical and virtual space where you, either by yourself or as part of a group, question, investigate, problem-solve, innovate, and create.

Meet your Library Teachers:

  Annette Tate 
  Library Teacher, Community Outreach, Research, Collection Cataloging and Maintenance
  B.A., Wake Forest University, Education
  M.S.L.S., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  Fun facts: Ms. Tate was an English major in college but what she really loves is math; also she lives in a college dorm!
  [contact]

  Erin Dalbec
  Library Teacher, Website and Technology, Research Assistance, Collection Development
  B.A., Worcester State College, Communications
  M.S., Suffolk University, Media and Philanthropy
  M.S.L.S., Simmons College
  Fun facts: Ms. Dalbec loves playing bass in a rock band, mountain biking and watching the N.E. Patriots!
  [contact]

  Lauren Italiano
  Library Teacher, Readers' Advisory, Research Assistance, Collection Development
  B.A., Elementary Education, College of New Jersey
  M.S.L.S., Florida State University
  Fun facts: I love to cook, I have a turkey fryer, and I'm not afraid to use it!
  [contact]

School librarians are impresarios.  We make connections between people and resources within and outside the school community.  We listen to students and faculty and offer ways to scale, promote, produce, and sometimes even fund, their ideas.  We organize events within and outside the library.  We bring together teachers who might not even know each other.  We see common threads and connect disciplines.  

School librarians are curators. We select and organize material with the specific learning goals of students in mind. We teach others how to be curators too, focusing on how to ethically borrow and collect with the purpose of creating new knowledge.

School librarians are design-thinkers.  The skills of human-centered design, rooted in empathy, begin with interviewing, improv, seeing multiple points-of-view, and then brainstorming and prototyping toward real-world solutions and new knowledge.   These skills are central to our training and our work as connectors of people and knowledge.  The school library, in its role as learning commons, is  a center of innovation and creativity.

School librarians are specialists in literacies.  We teach how to be critical readers.  We teach that reading is fun.   We also focus on the “new literacies” in their many forms, including financial, visual, cultural, spatial, scientific, mathematical, political, and media literacy.  Assessing, comprehending, and interpreting skills are keys to any of these literacies. However, as some scholars have pointed out (1), our purpose is not simply to teach literacies in all these many new forms, but rather to foster the mindset by which to adapt to any new technology.  We model how to learn.