Current IRA members are invited to become Team Leaders for Children's Choices. Qualifications for the project, and instructions on application procedures, are below.
Becoming a Team Leader
Would you like to become a part of this exciting project? You must have access to 2,000 children, in grades 3 and 4; 500 are readers in grades 5 and 6. This balance is fixed so that each team has the same number of participants at each reading level. The figures are firm. Ideally, readers should be heterogeneous, representing a variety of communities and socioeconomic populations.
Team Leaders must have the following qualifications:
- Membership in IRA, with no current involvement with any other IRA or CBC book-listing project
- Ability to commit to a two-year term as a Team Leader
- Knowledge of children's literature
- Interest in helping teachers use children's trade books in the classroom
- Access to 2,000 students (as described above) willing to participate in the project
- Support of the administrators of participating schools
- Ability to raise modest funds to underwrite the cost of making or purchasing project-related materials
- Excellent organizational skills
- Ability to work to deadlines
At each IRA Annual Convention, a special session on Children's Choices is held and attended by convention registrants interested in learning more about Children's Choices. Continuing and retiring Team Leaders make brief presentations and answer audience questions. Prospective Team Leaders are encouraged to attend.
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Team Leaders' Responsibilities
Each Team Leader must commit to do the following for each of the two years of his or her term:
- Meet with teachers, librarians, principals, and curriculum supervisors to implement the program
- Receive and inventory approximately 2,400 books (four copies of about 600 titles)
- Assemble an effective team of teachers and others to handle distribution of books to participating classrooms
- Distribute books at each site and rotate the books throughout participating classrooms
- Collect student ballots and send rating scores for each book to the Children's Book Council
- Report periodically to the CBC on the progress of the project
- Annotate one-fifth of the books selected for the Children's Choices list
- Publicize the project as broadly as possible
- Participate in the activities related to the project at the IRA Annual Convention, including Team Leader sessions in both years of service term and at the Convention following the final year of service
- Remain in close communication with CBC and the other Team Leaders via e-mail, telephone and/or fax
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Submitting Your Application
The IRA-CBC Joint Committee considers numerous factors in selecting Children's Choices Team Leaders, such as geographical representation, number of students, type of population, knowledge of children's trade books, leadership and professional involvement, attendance at IRA conventions, and interest from and support of selected schools.
Considerations of geography alone may put a prospective Team Leader's application on hold for a number of years. The Joint Committee does keep a file of all persons who have let IRA and/or CBC know of their interest in this project. The file is periodically updated; if we have a completed Team Leader Information form for you in our files, we will ask you if you are still interested in participating whenever the file is updated.
If you would like to become a Team Leader, please download an application.
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