What's It Like to Be on the Geisel Committee #3

Today's post comes from Jackie Partch. Jackie is a School Corps librarian at Multnomah County Library, where she does outreach to K-12 students. She was a member of the 2012 Geisel Committee.

In January 2011 I arrived at the first meeting of the 2012 Geisel Committee, feeling a mix of elation and nerves. It was my first experience on an ALSC award committee, something I'd been curious about for years. That day I met my fabulous fellow committee members and learned about the Geisel criteria. As I mentioned in a previous blog post on Guessing Geisel, I felt pretty confident judging literary quality and child appeal, but evaluating the elements of book design was totally new to me.

After the conference, I started reading previous Geisel winners in detail. In the past, I'd been curious why particular books won. Sometimes my favorites weren't recognized, and books that I didn't enjoy as much were winners. After immersing myself in the criteria, I found it easier to see why many of the books had been honored, even if they weren't my personal favorites.

At ALA Annual conference, our group practiced book discussion. I've been fortunate to be in a children's literature book group with other librarians, teachers and children's book aficionados for years. We use the CCBC Book Discussion Guidelines to simulate the way ALSC committees discuss books, so I felt prepared in that sense. But I realized that the notes I'd been taking on my books weren't arranged in the best order. I kept having to scan the pages to find that great comment I remembered writing, and I felt like my contributions weren't always oriented to the award criteria. So between Annual and Midwinter, I revised my note-taking scheme. I tried to arrange the notes by specific criteria and include sections for positive and negative comments.

In the fall, once I had a good selection of eligible books, I needed to get some opinions from kids themselves. Since I regularly do school outreach as part of my job, I arranged to work with two second-grade classrooms. I can't stress how important this was! There were many books that I loved that didn't grab the kids at all. The demographics of the two schools I worked with were very different, so when I found a book that both classes loved, I knew I had found a hit!

Finally, it was time to pick our winning titles at Midwinter 2012. As I'm sure Guessing Geisel readers already know, committee discussions are confidential, so I can't share details about those. However, I can say that it's important to enter into the discussions with an open mind. We all have our favorite books for whatever reason: we find them humorous, they make great read-alouds, or they resonate with us personally. But in committee discussions, you're most persuasive when you show how your favorite books meet the award criteria. And other committee members may have seen something you missed. When it was all over, we had a winner, Tales for Very Picky Eaters, and three honor books: I Broke My Trunk, I Want My Hat Back, and See Me Run. Serving on this committee was a fantastic experience and one of the highlights of my professional career.