My name is Jennifer Peterson, I'm really excited to be here to host today's webinar.
A couple reminders, today's session will be recorded, and I will send you all an email later today once that is available.
And I'll also point out, because I know many of you are here to learn about the new Supercharged Storytimes course, all of the learning in our catalog is free and available to all.
So know that any other learning that you're interested in, you just need to log in and -- create an account in the catalog, and you can have access to all of that library-related learning.
I will send you all a certificate for today's session within a week, but you can also access certificates for learning in the WebJunction catalog.
And thank you so much to OCLC and state library agencies across the country for their support of this offering to you all.
And if you're not yet subscribed to "crossroads," our newsletter goes out twice a month, it comes to you in your email in box and it's an excellent way to stay up to date on all things happening at WebJunction, new resources, new courses, great stories, and learning for the library world.
So be sure to subscribe.
You can do so on that link that I posted to chat.
All right.
I'm going to go ahead and get our recording started here.
I'm going to welcome our presenters for today.
We have Saroj Ghoting, who comes to us as the early childhood literacy consultant and the curriculum developer for Supercharged Storytimes.
Also here today is Betha Gutsche, she's the WebJunction programs manager, also one of the folks behind this awesome course that you're going to hear about today.
And we also want to welcome and give a special shout out to Brooke Doyle, who is going to be active here in chat.
She's the WebJunction project coordinator for Supercharged Storytimes.
Welcome to all of you, and I'm going to go ahead and have Betha get us started.
Welcome, Betha.
>> Thank you so much, and welcome, greetings to everyone.
We're here to tell you about exciting new ways you can super charge your story times.
Judging by the number of people who registered, I feel like you're ready to get supercharged.
So we're going to go over first a little bit of background so you understand what we mean by Supercharged Storytimes.
Then talk about specifically the self-paced course and what to expect from that, and then for the last 10 minutes of the webinar today, we're going to talk about a very special facilitator training opportunity for supporting learners in the self-paced course.
But I definitely want to mention that Supercharged Storytimes, there's an instructor-led training that's being offered in a select number of states, and these are states who worked with us to go through the Supercharged Storytimes training the trainer program back in may and June.
So if you are in Utah, Tennessee, New Jersey, Alaska, Minnesota, New York, or the southeast Florida library information network, you may be having the opportunity to have special instructor-led training on this curriculum, and if you're there and want to know more, contact Brooke and she'll put her email into chat and you can find out more from Brooke about those opportunities.
Storytimes have a strong connection to children's early learning and early literacy development.
And libraries are in this unique position to reach children very early in their lives, literally almost from birth, and to connect with their parents and caregivers at the same time.
So we know you already provide great storytimes that are changing the lives of children and families in your communities and we hope that you can learn things to supercharge your charge and take it to the next level.
Before we dive into our main content, I want to find out a little bit about who's here in the room.
So we're going to do what we call a white board activity with annotation tools.
So if you hover over -- mouse over the presentation slide, that should cause the also row of round icon buttons to appear on the bottom of your screen.
Oh, okay.
Actually, J.P. you may need to help me.
You should see that lozenge shape on the left side of the screen.
That top squiggle will give you access to the annotation tools.
And it looks like some of you are finding them.
So you look for that open square, not the square with the color, but the open square and the  drop-down menu, select a check mark and you are totally welcome to start practicing and fill this little screen with checks so we know that you are finding your check mark and ready to go for our activity.
I love this.
Okay.
And at this point I will ask you to restrain yourselves and hold your check marks until we move to the next slide where we're going to have the activity.
Are you ready?
Here we go.
Okay.
This is where I'm really interested to know who is here today.
So I would ask you to put a check mark next to the role that is your primary role.
You may have more than one role.
If you don't see your role listed or if you're not able to access the check mark because of various technical barriers, you are welcome to enter in chat what your other roles might be.
And you are also welcome to enter in chat anything you want to tell us and each other about yourselves and whyer here.
And hopefully you will get very comfortable with using chat, because we welcome your questions throughout this webinar.
Yes have a graduate student, that's great.
Outreach liaison, librarian, there's some great titles out there in library world.
It looks like we have a lot of people who are children's or youth services practitioners, which is great.
Quite a few library directors.
One lonely training coordinator, that's fascinating.
Okay.
Quite a few others.
And quite a few head or lead of youth services.
Wonderful.
This is great.
I'm always thrilled to know who is here.
But now it's time to move on.
Hold back your check marks and before we get into the details of what is Supercharged Storytimes, I think it's going to be clear about what do we mean by early literacy.
So early literacy is what children know about reading and writing before they can actually read and write.
It encompasses all of a child's experiences with conversations, stories, both oral and written, with books, with print, starting from birth all the way up before to the time they enter school.
So it's not teaching reading, it is supporting the skills that lay a foundation for children's success with reading.
And with that, I'm going to turn it to Saroj Ghoting to tell us some of the background on Supercharged Storytimes.
Saroj.
>> Hi.
Welcome one and all.
So great to see you all here.
So what is a Supercharged Storytimes and where did that term come from?
So we're -- it came from the VIEWS2 study, and that's the basis for Supercharged Storytimes.
Researchers at the University of Washington information schools research project, called valuable initiatives in early learning that work successfully, VIEWS2, conducted a four-year study which was funded by the institute of museum and library studies.
And they selected 40 story time providers at 40 libraries in Washington state.
So they were rural, suburban, and urban libraries.
And they divided the 40 storytime providers into two groups of 20.
A control group, and a treatment group.
And the treatment group received training on early literacy and tools, and the control group did  not.
The researchers observed and videotaped six storytimes of each of the 40 storytime providers.
Three storytimes before the training, and three storytimes after the training of the treatment  group.
While looking teg videotapes, researchers noted early literacy strategies by the storytime providers and early literacy behaviors in the children.
They found that there was no statistically significant change in the control group, but the treatment group of storytime providers who were trained on the VIEWS2 tools had a statistically significant increase in the amount of early literacy concepts they included in their  storytimes.
The VIEWS2 research found that a purposeful focus on early literacy concepts and storytimes makes a difference in the program and in the children's early literacy behaviors.
So when we are intentional about including early literacy strategies in our storytimes, with an interactive approach, we see corresponding, increased early literacy behaviors in the children who attend.
Supercharged Storytimes is the name given to the practical application of the VIEWS2 study.
The first instance of Supercharged Storytimes was developed by OCLC's WebJunction program in 2016.
Now, some of you may be familiar with the every child ready to read initiative and programs.
These are aimed at parents and caregivers.
They confirmed that attending early literacy workshops changes and increases the early literacy behavioring of parents and caregivers with their children.
The VIEWS2 approach embody Supercharged Storytimes offers aids to storytime providers to  intentionally incorporate early literacy strategies with children and families in their storytimes with which increases children's early literacy behaviors.
So one looked at the impact of our intentionality on adults, the other on children.
Every child ready to read and super charged story times both compliment each other.
So now that we know that Supercharged Storytimes makes a difference, what was it in the VIEWS2  training for storytime providers that made a difference in children's early literacy behaviors?
There are four key pillars involved in supercharging your storytime practice.
Interactivity, intentionality, assessment, and community of practice.
You may find you are familiar with some of these or with some aspects of each pillar.
We hope that you'll recognize what you know as well as gain new insights during the course.
So interactivity looks at ways for participants, both children and their adults, to engage in storytime content in what you are sharing.
Children learn best when they're engaged and involved.
Interactivity takes place between you, the storytime provider, and the children, between you and the parents and caregivers, and between the parents and caregivers and their children.
The second pillar is intentionality.
Intentionality is purposely connecting storytime activities to early literacy skills and  development.
And there are two subcategories or spinoffs to intentionality.
Scaffolding, and early literacy tips.
Scaffolding is adjusting our level of activities and interactions to children's abilities and interests.
Stretching them to support learning.
Early literacy tips are a sentence or two directed to the adults to help them see how what we are doing supports children's learning.
So when we have enough early literacy knowledge to be intentional, we are better able to scaffold our activities and we also become more comfortable sharing early literacy tips with parents and caregivers.
The third pillar is assessment.
Assessment helps us take a fresh look at our storytimes to see what's going well, how we might improve them, and whether or not we're seeing the outcomes we planned for.
Assessment can take a variety of forms, including self-reflection, sharing ideas with peers, and  getting feedback from those who observe your storytime.
We also take note of what early literacy behaviors we may see in the children.
So is observing children's early literacy behaviors gives us an additional level of assessment, outcomes, and strengthens our ability to articulate the value of our programs and to advocate for our services.
The Supercharged Storytimes course will give you the tools to do all of these.
Then the fourth pillar is community of practice.
This is building a community of peers, which can be library staff, whether in your own library or elsewhere, or people coming from partner organizations, any opportunity that allows you to share ideas and get feedback to build a learning community.
>> Great.
WebJunction definitely wants to make the tools and strategies from this research-based approach to storytimes available to as many storytime providers as possible.
So we created a self hitch paced course which is now available to anyone, any time, anywhere, and it is actually really free.
As in free.
No cost to you.
The course topics really provides a thorough coverage of that Supercharged Storytimes approach that Saroj was just talking about.
So it covers six early literacy components and the intentionality for incorporating those into your storytimes.
Really important, talking about how to engage with a parent and caregiver because the library has that wonderful opportunity to have the parents and caregivers there with the children, so they can all learn these early literacy skills and behaviors at the same time.
And then talking about that assessment pillar, ways to reflect on your own storytimes for continual improvement, and to assess the impact of your storytimes and get a picture from your patrons of how they're experiencing it.
And then how to approach your library story times through an equity lens.
So for anyone who may have taken the previous version of this course that was in the WebJunction catalog, you'll find that this expanded content gives you an even stronger preparation to supercharge your early literacy intentionality.
And just a quick look at how the course is designed, if you enroll and go to the landing page, this is what you'll see.
It's a course in six modules, and each of these modules is in itself modular, so the learning is really chunked into those smaller bites of short, instrungsal videos.
The sequence of topics built around that planning, delivery, and assessment cycle, so after you learn each piece of the supercharge approach, we really encourage you to take time to apply intentionality in the way you plan your next storytimes, how you incorporate these new strategies in the delivery, and then reflect on what works and how you can take the next step.
So this means allowing some time in between viewing the instructional videos and looking at the resources, but allowing that time for the application, reflection really will strengthen your learning, because learning really isn't learning until you apply it at work.
And that whole span is about an eight to 10-week duration for really experiencing the course in the best way.
So six modules, instructional videos, each video has a learner guide to accompany watching the video and lead you through some interactive pieces of that.
There are many ways, guidance for how you apply learning, and yes, you will be awarded a certificate of completion if you meet all the criteria for getting through the course.
And Saroj now can tell us more about intentionality, which I see is a very strong and durable pillar of this whole approach to storytimes.
>> Right.
So we're going to look now at a couple of the pillars of a Supercharged Storytimes, and you'll of course get more information and go into more in-depth in the course.
Intentionality is really the backbone of supercharging your storytimes.
So here just what is intentionality?
It's knowing the early literacy components or skills and being aware of what you do to support them.
So intentionality is about being mindful about planning our storytimes, being purposeful about including early literacy in our storytime delivery, and reflecting on our storytimes with regard to supporting early literacy development.
According to the VIEWS2 study, when we are intentional around the early literacy skills, we increase children's early literacy behaviors.
So let's look at intentionality and how we can become more intentional in our storytimes.
Our storytimes are already full of early literacy, but knowing the early literacy skills helps us to become more intentional.
And you can be intentional around really any early literacy structure.
You may be familiar with early literacy structures such as your own state early learning guidelines around learning and literacy.
The skills, the head start language and literacy domains of child development, or the VIEWS2 study domains.
So no matter what structure you use, the skills are the same, no matter how they are organized, or what they are called.
You can be intentional using any research-based early literacy structure.
We are using the early literacy structure based on the second edition of every child ready to read.
These are the early literacy components or prereading skills that we are using as the foundation of our intentionality.
Oral language.
So listening skills, speaking skills, and communication skills.
This is the foundation for all later language.
Phone logical awareness -- fon logical awareness -- print awareness, knowing that print has meaning.
How to handle a book, the direction of text.
Letter knowledge.
Exploring letters.
And the beginning concepting here are recognizing shapes and also visual similarities and  differences.
Vocabulary is recognizing words and knowing the meanings of words.
And background knowledge.
This is prior knowledge, what does the child know about the world before they enter school?
So let's look at some examples of intentionality that start from making little or no change to what we're already doing.
So here's a book.
"Beep! Beep! Go to Sleep!"
Written by Todd Tarpley, and illustrated by john Rocco.
So I always say the author and the illustrator when I read a book.
I haven't done anything differently.
However, I now know through training that making a note of the author and illustrator develops children's print awareness and print concepts.
So in recognizing the connection, I have become intentional.
I might make a small change, so to support vocabulary, I could help children see the distinction between weeping, and wailing.
There are different ways I could do this.
I might just say the words in a way that suggests the meaning.
Llama llama, red pajama, weeping, wailing for his mamma.
Will his mamma ever come?
Mamma Marquama, run, run, run!
Or before turning the page, I might say, he's weeping, he's crying.
Or I might say he's wailing.
He's crying so hard, it's almost like shouting.
Or I might make a big change.
I was -- say I was reading "something from nothing" by fee 53 gillman.
This is a fun story with lots of repetition.
I realize that having children retell the Stover helps them understand how stories work.
Story structure.
This is one aspect of background knowledge.
So I added a flannel board, and after reading the book, I had the children retell the story with me as I put pieces on the flannel board.
I also gave them this pattern as a handout so they could retell it at home.
So this is a big change, because I read the story, and then I had them retell the story with the flannel board, so in effect, I did this story twice.
This was a big change for me, and I had to even cut out another book because I did this story twice.
You can also be intentional around a new idea.
So a new idea for me regarding letter knowledge was to have the children make the shapes of letters with their bodies.
Like a C in "Chugga-Chugga Choo-Choo," or an O, and an H.
And I had them do it first on their own, and then with a partner.
So that was a new activity that I added.
As we become more intentional, we can share what we know with parents and caregivers through the use of early literacy tips.
Storytimes are valuable in and of themselves, but to supercharge their value we can help adults who are with the children every day, to continue to support early literacy at home.
The VIEWS2 study showed that our increased knowledge of early literacy increases children's early literacy behaviors.
This does not mean we are turning storytimes into classes.
You are still choosing the books you love, the books and activities you think children will like and respond to.
And ones that work well in a group.
It does mean we are better equipped to show how the enjoyable reading and language activities we do support early language and literacy development, making the storytime experience richer for  all.
>> And something that we had not covered in our earlier version of Supercharged Storytimes  self-paced course is an element that we feel is very important to consider, and this is thinking about Supercharged Storytimes through an equity lens.
And really thinking deeply about centering communities who may not be able to, or not currently  taking advantage of storytimes, and bringing them into the arena of really engaging them around early literacy.
We had the pleasure, and you'll see this in the self-paced course, of working with the early  learning program manager at the Seattle public library, I think it's the Seattle Public Library is really exhibiting thought leadership in this whole area of not just around Supercharged Storytimes, but really connecting with the community in ways that are around a real deep understanding.
And that's all embodied in this piece of the course, and I feel like it's a really exciting expansion from our earlier course.
So we know that there's a wealth of research, there's evidence everywhere about the impact of the disparities that exist in early learning and early literacy.
So children from Live Oak families, children of color -- low-income families, children of color, are disproportionately limited to early learning opportunities.
Libraries, and I think I'm preaching to the choir here, but we know libraries are an important part of that early literacy landscape, and are uniquely positioned to provide the quality  experiences really beginning from birth when babies come in for baby lap sit storytimes.
The key here is that it's really important to genuinely understand the communities you want to connect with.
And this is a process that she leads our learners through in the course, and part of it is understanding that there are gaps in the ways libraries connecting with certain communities, but those gaps are not seen as deficits, they are seen as opportunities to expand your  library's reach and to build collaborative relationships, very strong emphasis on building relationships here, as really critical to that centering of the community.
So the module, this module starts by clarifying the distinction between equity, inclusion, and diversity.
It's very likely that your library, many libraries are already building inclusion and diversity, so the focus here is on leading for equity, which means really recognizing the individual and distinct needs of the community and designing your programs accordingly.
And the course provides a series of tools, so you can -- you're led through that process of really understanding of how to best engage with the community in that deep and sort of enduring way, and then how to pursue a pathway to equity through that community engagement to actually  creating programming that is meaningful for everyone involved.
And then a tool that's around a library checklist, and I'm really excited about this piece of the course, and I'm looking forward to some feedback and how it's received by the learners who go through it.
And I see there's a reminder in chat, if you have any questions, because after this next piece about assessment from Saroj, we're going to take a brief pause to answer questions that have come up so far about the course.
>> Okay.
Great.
So now as we look at assessment, this is a strength of the Supercharged Storytimes course, really giving us some tools to look at assessing our own storytimes.
And in so doing, we can articulate better the impact that they're having, which in turn can help the library's value become more visible in the community.
So here are the three types of assessment.
Single-family-reflection, which is thinking about our storytimes, what went well, what we might be able to improve, peer sharing, which is simply sharing ideas with colleagues, and then peer observation, so observing each others' storytimes and giving constructive feedback.
Supercharged Storytimes offers several tools to help you with each of these approaches.
You can find the process and tools that work for you.
There's no one-size-fits-all, and you may use different tools at different times for different situations and stages of self-reflection.
Assessment takes place as we are both planning and delivering our storytimes, and as we take a step back to look at our storytimes as a whole, over weeks or months.
And we can also look at outcomes that we see in the children.
You'll be introduced to project outcome, this is a free tool kit designed by the public library association to help public libraries understand and share the impact of their programs and services by providing simple surveys and easy -- in an easy-to-use process for measuring and analyzing outcomes.
So project outcome also provides libraries with the resources and chain ever training support needed to apply your results and confidently advocate for your library's future.
Supercharged Storytimes will joyfully knock your storytimes up a notch.
You will feel affirmed in what you are already doing, and through a heightened awareness of the VIEWS2 research and use of the research-based tools to support intentionality and assessment, you will grow your storytime practice to more fully support early literacy development for children and their families in enjoyable ways.
We hope you will take the self-paced course to build on the storytimes you already do and make them supercharged storytimes.
So to register, you can enroll in the free self-paced course whenever you're ready.
It's waiting for you right now.
If you don't already have an account for the WebJunction course catalog, you will need to go to that first URL that was now in chat, to create the one-time free account, then go to the link for Supercharged Storytimes, and enroll.
So go for it!
>> Okay.
Actually, do we have any questions?
Anything that has come up?
I'm actually going to back up a bit so we can linger here for questions.
I do want to acknowledge all of the amazing subject matter expertise that went in to developing the curriculum, so in addition to Saroj, who really does that thorough, wonderful coverage of the early literacy components and the interactivity and intentionality, and assessment, we also worked with Emily to help our learners understand that project outcome use that wonderful free tool for assessing the impact on our patrons, and we worked on the equity piece and Mari who contributed some wonderful expertise around parent and caregiver engagement.
So a lot of wonderful thought and knowledge really went into developing this course for you.
>> It says here, what kind of a time commitment for the course, how long will the course be available, how long does it take to get through the entire course, and is there a time limit.
That kind of thing.
>> A lot of questions about time, yes.
So as I mentioned earlier, well, I'll say this explicitly -- there's a little over six hours of instructional video content.
So theoretically one could just march right through that, say I'm done, but for me that would totally miss the essence of the way this course is structured.
It's structured around that planning delivery assessment cycle, and we really, really strongly encourage learners to allow an expansive amount of time so that you learn, let's say you take the first module, look at those instructional videos, look at some of the resources, and try it out.
Apply to your storytimes so that you can practice that planning, practice the delivery, practice the self-reflection for the next module and the next round, and so if you do that, we're looking at about eight to 10 weeks to really get through the material in a way that the learning is going to be more authentic and is really going to stick with you and will really result in you being supercharged.
The course will be available for as long as I can see into the future of WebJunction.
It is in the WebJunction catalog, along with our other amazing self-paced and free learning  resources.
So accessible any time, anywhere for the foreseeable future.
The certificate of completion will award -- indicates that you completed 10 hours of content.
So that means watching the instructional videos, and some expectation that you would apply learning and complete a final quiz and complete a final evaluation survey.
And that will result in a certificate of completion of 10 hours.
Ways to integrate technology into storytimes, it does not go into that level of detail.
I think this is -- for me technology, you can use whatever technology or lack of technology you  want, and apply intentionality to it.
So it's really that core of how you deliver and use books and stories, and play.
It's the how, and it is really sort of agnostic as to what device you use to do that with.
Interesting question about a challenge of embracing the change from storytime -- storytelling as entertainment to an educational model, and educational is kind of a scary word in the library world -- especially around library story times.
You don't want to feel like you're a teacher.
And we've heard that many times from providers.
And I would say this is not leaving the entertainment quality behind at all.
It really -- you can maintain the fun in the story times, you want it to be fun and engaging, if you're not having fun and the children and families are not having fun, then you're losing that essential quality.
But once you've understood the learning from this course, it's very possible to augment that early literacy skill development with this intentional set of strategies.
So you don't lose the entertainment, you just augment it.
And I don't know, Saroj, do you want to say something to that?
I think that's a really important point.
>> I think that if you've lost the enjoyment, you've missed the whole point.
You -- that storytimes are sharing that enjoyment of storytelling, of sharing books, other language activities, and if you turn your storytimes into something that you consider not fun, you've lost the whole point.
What we're doing is supercharging our storytimes so that as we understand the connection to early literacy skills, it just boosts our own enjoyment, our own ways of sharing things, like, for example, in just with the -- adding the flannel board to something from nothing, I was telling that story, but when I added having the children retell it, that was something that I added as a result of the training.
So -- and they had a great time.
So I don't think it takes away anything, and that's really one of the wonderful things about the public library, is that we are informal, we are a bastion for informal learning.
That is what we're about.
Lifelong learning.
So lifelong learning can be fun, we start from wherever the people are at, we're not judgmental, and we can enhance what we're doing.
And the reason why we do this is because we see a lot of times children come to school without the early literacy skills or other skills, school readiness skills, for that matter, that they  really need to be successful.
And I think the sorriest thing is a parent comes to kindergarten round-up and says, if I had only known, I would have done it.
That's a sorry thing, how are they supposed to find out and we can show how this can be done in enjoyable ways throughout their day.
So I really think that we won't have to make it an either/or.
It is entertaining, and it's also learning.
>> Exactly.
It's not an either/or.
So the quick question, is the course split down different age groups?
 yes, it does.
How you approach each of those age groups, and it's really built around this amazing tool that Saroj helped us develop, or Saroj did develop called the early literacy planning tool, and you'll see when you get into the course how that really provides a backbone that allows you to just increase your intentionality one step at a time, one little strategy at a time.
And get to a point where you start to feel comfortable.
I also want to just call out some of -- somebody said, do you ever have parents read to their children?
I think this course takes it further.
The ways you can engage with the parents and caregivers in the storytime, after the storytime, suggesting things they can take home, that's really going to boost early literacy development in children, because parents and caregivers are with the children all day long.
And you have them for an hour or 90 minutes.
Saroj, do you want to add anything to the parent and caregiver game?
I feel it's a really important piece of this whole approach.
>> Yes.
It is one of the important points of the course.
In part because we want parents to be engaged, we know that when they are engaged with their children they're more likely to do these at home.
Read together time during the storytime is one of the suggestions, or one of the possibilities that you can offer as part of storytime, so they get the gist of how it feels to read with their children.
I know a lot of them already do read with their children at home, but once you become intentional, you can help point out different ways that they can really support their children's engagement around books and reading, in so many different ways, that either we haven't thought of before, or that parents haven't thought of before.
So this is a really great way to explore ideas with your colleagues, and also good food for thought for different ways that you can engage parents with their children in lots of different ways.
>> Yeah.
And we're really aware that this is uncomfortable or new, or some storytime providers feel shy about engaging with the parents and caregivers.
So I feel that's really embedded in the curriculum to help you move through that to a level of comfort, and we have some wonderful demo, really short demo videos so you can see our practitioner in practice.
So you get an idea, this is what it looks like.
I feel like there's a lot of support of encouragement to get over that hump of, I don't know how to do this.
I'm going to move ourselves forward, because I want to make sure we have time to -- oops, I just went backwards.
I want to talk about the facilitator training which uses the self-paced course as a foundation  and -- but we really encourage storytime providers or any learners to take the isolation out of the self-paced learning and to learn together as a group so we're offering a one-month online training free in how to be caption window effective facilitator to lead a group of your peers through the supercharged course material.
There are a lot much reasons, a lot of advantages to learning as a group, learning together.
One, you keep each other motivated and on track.
You share ideas and insights that you wouldn't necessarily have if you were just learning alone.
And you can answer each others' questions, you can reflect together on how things went and how your progress is through the course.
You can expose each other to new perspectives and come up with solutions to challenges that members of the group might encounter.
You can form these bonds, social connection is a really important aspect of learning, it actually boosts motivation and sort of increases a readiness to learn, and that's part of feeling like a community.
You can boost each others' confidence, so if you go through this planning, delivery, and reflection process, if you're reflecting together or even practicing together, you're going to boost confidence in a way that is harder to do when you're just by yourself.
And then overall it's about setting achievable and attainable goals together so that's that motivation piece, and connecting the learning to practice.
And having somebody to really share how it went and think about how you might do things differently as you go through the course.
Now, the facilitator role is a very important and distinct role.
This idea of learning together in a learning group is going to be most effective when you have someone who assumes leadership for guiding the group through the course.
Sort of sets the structure and the pace of how you're going to experience the course material together in a coordinated way.
So the kinds of things the facilitator might do is just convene the group.
Help figure out who is going to be the best or good people who want to come together and they would invite or promote and gather the group in the first place, and then do the coordination.
So coordinate the logistics of how -- when is the group going to meet, are you going to meet in person or meet virtually?
What's your schedule for meeting, sort of laying out that time line for how the group will progress together through the course.
Really important role is to foster those group connections, so to create the atmosphere that allows those social bonds and those community boards to ripen, including just starting with creating a welcoming space, whether that's in person or online, you can create a welcoming atmosphere online.
And creating opportunities for the members of the group to bond as a community.
Sort of building that into how you structure the group discussions.
Really important role, these are all important roles.
This is why a facilitator is really so key to a successful learning group.
Having somebody to guide discussions, and I didn't say lead, I said guide discussions.
It's really about encouraging everyone to participate, so allowing maybe the people to hang back to speak up and share what they're thinking and doing, and to keep discussions on track so that you are helping people move through the material that you've kind of agreed -- meeting those attainable goals.
But often doing more listening than talking.
And I think that leads to this fourth point, this training is not about preparing you to be a supercharged trainer.
So there's no expectation that the facilitator would have a teaching role, and there's no expectation that the facilitator is the more than has the right answers.
It's about guiding and learning with your peers.
Really important things.
>> I just want the to say, because you had mentioned before about the presentations that are there, but you might want to also mention about the manual that you provided for everybody, whether it's the facilitator or the participants.
They all have that manual available to them.
>> Oh, we are developing a facilitator guide for --
>> but also like there's the guide in the course, the self-paced course also to help figure out activities and so forth as you go along.
>> Yeah.
That would be in the self-paced course.
So anybody who takes the self-paced course has these learner guides that are companions to watching the videos.
But that's -- I think a point I want to make about the facilitator training is that these facilitation skills are broadly applicable.
We're going to talk about the course in the context of how you would lead a group of pierce through the Supercharged Storytimes training, but really the basic skills for facilitating a group learning are very -- are broad.
And general.
And you could apply them to other topics, other subjects.
Somebody asked does the facilitator have to go through the training?
Not necessarily, and I think that has to do with some of the different roles, like who could be a facilitator.
It could be somebody who is a training coordinator and wants to provide this professional development opportunity for staff in their library system, or you might be a state library coordinator, regional coordinator.
In that case you would not necessarily be taking the Supercharged Storytimes course yourself, but you would be looking at it to the extent that you would understand the structure and the flow and the sequence of topics and be able to keep the discussions on track.
So it's sort of a little bit, yes, you'd have to sort of wade into it enough to be able to guide discussions, but I think another essential thing about group learning, the group, the peers support each others' learning.
So you are learning from each other.
You're not being led by an instructor or subject matter expert.
You get that in the self-paced course material, that subject matter expertise is embedded in the self-paced course, and then you discuss with each other, and our experience in our earlier trainings with the pilot program of Supercharged Storytimes is you Supercharged Storytimes, you're so full of ideas and resources and ways to do things, and finding solutions, and when you do -- when you go through this course together as a group, you really tap into that power.
So other things, other people -- any library storytime practitioner, if you want to get some group of your peers together and go through this, you can be the facilitator.
If you're willing to take on those roles of sort of being that person who organizes and coordinates.
Or maybe you're looking for a professional connection with storytime providers who may be scattered geographically, you can do this virtually and get people together who are across geographic boundaries.
So how do you respond to questions during the course?
Well, this actually will be an important topic that we will discuss in the facilitator training.
It's a bit too complex to go into right now.
For an independent learner taking the self-paced course, there are forum questions  that are mostly reflections that self-paced learner can post in a forum contained within the self-paced course.
And unless they're the very first person to take the course, they will probably see comments shared by course takers who went before them.
That said, the facilitator has other opportunities to guide their group through discussions and reflections on the course.
And we goal into that in detail in the facilitator training.
And I want to make sure we have time to at least cover this important question -- information, and then we can take more questions.
The application deadline is October 19th, and the facilitator training is free and it's open to anyone who is interested in becoming that facilitator person, but the space is somewhat  limited.
So we will be closing applications on October 19th, and we'll notify you by October 26th.
Then the training time line, we will open the learning community at WebJunction to the facilitators on October 30th, and then there will be three live online sessions, all on Tuesdays, so November 6th and 13th, one week apart, and a two-week interval which has Thanksgiving in the middle of it, and then our third live session will be November 27th, the learning community stays open beyond that for you as facilitators to have your own learning groups, and to share your plans and questions.
So with a little bit of time left, maybe Brooke you could pull out any questions that I am not able to follow in chat.
>> I think we've covered most of them, either you've addressed them or I've addressed things in  chat.
Everyone, feel free to question away in chat and we'll see what we can get to, or I can also email you afterwards if you need it.
>> Yes.
You're definitely invited to email Brooke.
There's her email address on the screen.
And maybe you can pop it into chat just for extra convenience.
If you have any questions about facilitator training, I want to emphasize, this is again, this is not training you to be a teacher of Supercharged Storytimes.
It's training for facilitators and this one-month facilitator training course does not walk through all the content of the Supercharged Storytimes course.
So it's really focused on the facilitator skills so you can masterfully guide a group of your peers or storytime providers in your system through their own experience in the self-paced course.
The timing is 11:00 Pacific time, so that would be 2:00 p.m. eastern time.
Sessions will be recorded, and Brooke, if you could push out that link again for where to apply to facilitator training, the link will take you to -- she's putting the link in the survey monkey so you can go right there and put in your application.
And becoming a trainer, yes, it's part of your own time.
Hopefully this is something that is important to your system or your library, or you as a learner who wants to really amplify the story times in your library and among your peers.
Mary is asking about your -- you're a director, you're welcome to sign up for the facilitator  training and go to that link.
We really, as I went through the number of roles available, we really do welcome a variety of  people, and it's going to be very interesting cohort as we move through that.
Here we are, we're running up against the hour, we just ran through the questions, and definitely email Brooke with any specific questions that weren't answered here.
And I will turn it back to J.P.
>> There was one question that came through about -- so each facilitator would put together his or her own group?
>> Correct.
As part of the facilitator training we'll talk about how you might select those folks as colearners to participate in your group.
So, yeah.
>> Exactly.
Great.
>> Thank you all.
I can't wait to see you either in the self-paced course, or in the facilitator training.
>> Thank you.