From the ILA Exhibits

I spent some time in the exhibit hall. One stop was at the Renaissance Learning booth. You may know this company as Accelerated Reading (AR). Now I am not a big fan of AR, but many of our schools do use it and we had one new librarian that needed training so I stopped to see what they had online. There is training available www.renlearn.com click on the training center, then professional Development.

Now I should note that the program itself is not a bad program but my concern is that the program is not being used as it was designed. This is an incentive program, not a reading curriculum. As an incentive program it is not appropriate to limit students to narrow areas of reading levels or to require earning so many points that the students are burnt out on reading.

If you are at a school where staff has not been trained in the proper use of AR or AR is being used inappropriately, I suggest that you go to the training center on the website and see where training is being offered. Good Luck.