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All students deserve to see their stories reflected in the books they read. When you fill your classroom library with a rich variety of inclusive titles that represent your students and their experiences, along with books depicting situations that they never see or hear about in their everyday lives, you help every reader feel welcome and accepted. You also teach your students to celebrate the differences that make each of us unique.
Why It’s Important to Evaluate Your Books Regularly
Building an inclusive classroom library takes time, thought and effort. It’s important to regularly evaluate the books you offer and remove outdated titles and books that feature stereotypical representations. It’s also important to incorporate recently published titles and introduce a wider variety of experiences and perspectives whenever possible. In addition, if your student population changes yearly or you move to a new school, re-examining and refreshing your classroom library is an effective way to ensure the books reflect your current student population.
General Things to Look for as You Evaluate
When analyzing your current books and choosing new books to add, it’s important to consider many different types of diversity, including:
Gender
Race
Ethnicities
Sexual orientation
Abilities & disabilities
Socioeconomic status
Global perspectives
Incidental diversity
Inclusive images
With so much to consider, you might feel overwhelmed. Let us give you tips and tricks to consider as we pull back the curtain to show how Booksource builds a Classroom Library.
Booksource helps educators across the country fill their classroom libraries with books that promote diversity, equity and inclusion. Also, we have created several free tools and resources to help you.
Analyzing Your Library with Booksource Classroom®
Part of our job is to make your day-to-day easier. That’s why we created Booksource Classroom®, a free online tool that can help you organize, manage and analyze your classroom library. One of its greatest features, LibraryLens®, can be instrumental in auditing your classroom library.
LibraryLens® automatically evaluates the books in your classroom library, identifies gaps and suggests the right titles to fill those gaps. This means you can perform a digital diversity audit on your own classroom library!
To get started, use these directions to create an account and create your library. You can also check out our blog on 5 Steps to Setup Your Booksource Classroom Account.
Head to the left toolbar and click “LibraryLens” to access our audit feature. You’ll see sections denoting the following:
Achievements: Things you’re already doing well
Suggestions: Ways to improve your library
Issues: Items that need immediate attention
Here, you can learn valuable information like what percentage of your titles feature general diversity, as well as more categorical statistics like the number of books in your library that feature:
Diverse authors/illustrators
African American characters
Asian American characters
Latin American characters
Native American characters
Middle Eastern characters
Immigrant experiences
Refugee experiences
International authors
International characters
Jewish history & culture
People who identify as LGBTQ+
Women’s history
Autism spectrum
Physical disabilities
Neurodiversity & neurodivergence
We will even suggest some new titles to help enhance your library!
If you’re still not convinced, here are some more reasons why you should create a Booksource Classroom account.
Filling in the Gaps
Now that you know the categories of your classroom library that could use some added representation, it’s time to fill in those gaps. Fortunately, we not only have the tools to analyze your classroom library, we also have the books to fill it! Browse diverse and inclusive book collections carefully curated by our Collection Development experts to ensure your students feel represented and excited about reading.
Additional Resource
What if you haven’t created your free Booksource Classroom account yet and would like to complete a classroom library audit? You can download and print our Inclusive Classroom Library Checklist for an easy non-digital way to evaluate your classroom library for gaps in representation and identify the types of books you need to add.
What other tools do you use to analyze your classroom library? How often do you refresh? Tell us in the comments section below!