AASL Standards in Practice: Engage

It’s me again, back to talk more about the AASLNational School Library Standards for Learners, School Librarians, and School Libraries and how librarians in the field are putting the standards into practice every day.

It’s time to share about my chat with Brian Montero, librarian at Midtown High School, about AASL Shared Foundation VI:Engage.  This foundation challenges school librarians to “demonstrate safe, legal, and ethical creating and sharing of knowledge products independently while engaging in a community of practice and an interconnected world.

As the person in charge of managing Midtown’s technology, both hardware and software, Brian is involved daily in the interconnected world of high school students, teachers, and families.  How does he navigate helping students develop critical ethical decision-making skills when it comes to finding, creating, and sharing information?  Brian says that a key step is to “position yourself as the support person for providing as much resources beyond the classroom as possible.”  He starts by working with “excited teachers” who come in to the library with their classes and leverages those relationships to promote sharing ethical practices throughout the school.

A number of school resources go into Brian’s daily practice in support of Shared Foundation VI, including Schoology, the school’s online learning management system, and GALILEO, the Georgia online library, which provides reliable resources for student research.  In particular, he finds GALILEO to be a fantastic tool for teaching students about the benefits of reliable sourcing.  During orientation and throughout the year, he reminds students about the databases that GALILEO provides and the value of using peer-reviewed resources from academic journals found in those databases.

While the school’s status as a 1:1 school where each student has a device is a benefit, it does create a couple of challenges for helping students make ethical decisions with information.  For one thing, “now that we’re 1:1, we lose some of the natural contact and opportunity for training [students on ethical practices] because they are not coming in to the library to use the computer.”  Brian finds that he needs “much more of an online presence to plug in library resources” and uses the Schoology platform to share information on ethical information practices. 

In addition, Brian faces the challenge of “making the library relevant” for students accustomed to doing everything online.  He notes that lately he has been “reintroducing the library [to students] because they haven’t been in a physical library space for a while” due to COVID.  He used the annual orientation as a time to re-engage students, spends time engaging students and teachers with one-on-one readers’ advisory to meet their needs, and also looks for opportunities to be an instructional collaborator with teachers and get them into the library so students can learn those critical ethical skills.  In addition, Brian is working to collaborate with the public library’s electronic resources librarian to maximize the value of the Schoology platform with the resources provided through the school district and public library partnership, ClassPass. 

On the whole, though, Brian notes that while things change, our biggest asset is our reading culture, and keeping the focus on literacy is the best way to engage!

Stay tuned as I share a final discussion with another school librarian about how they are putting the AASL standards into practice every day!

 

 

AASL Standards in Practice: Curation

I’m back to talk more about the AASL National School Library Standards for Learners, School Librarians, and School Libraries and how librarians in the field are putting the standards into practice every day.

 This past week, I got to work with not one but two school librarians and chat about the school librarian domains and competencies!  Today, I’ll share with you highlights from my conversation with Christen McClain about AASL Shared Foundation IV: Curate, and then I’ll be back in a few days to dish on my chat with Brian Montero about AASL Shared Foundation VI: Engage.

Christen is one of the librarians at Midtown High School here in Atlanta, which is the high school that my middle school students at David T. Howard Middle School go on to attend.  I have had the extremely good fortune to volunteer with Christen for almost a decade at our children’s elementary school and then to work with her for two years at Inman Middle School (our school’s former name before we relocated).  I know that she is a whiz at curation!

Foundation IV is all about making meaning “by collecting, organizing, and sharing resources of personal relevance” (AASL, 2018, p. 50).  As Christen explains, curation involves making information “user friendly,” and this means that knowing your community is critical!  “You have to be aware of your students’ preferences and pay attention to requests,” she notes.  You then use that information to organize your collection in a way that is logical and sensible to them as well as to make appropriate purchases for your collection.  It’s all about giving students the tools they need not just to find information but to create – to curate – their own learning!

One cool curation project that Christen has managed is using color coded labels to help students locate titles of interest.  As she explains, students often request information by category or subject –

          “How do I find a good horror book?”

                        “Where are the mysteries?”

“I love politics. What do you have?” 

And I have definitely experienced the same as Christen when students then “look at us funny when we say the books are arranged by author!”  Using colorful labels allows all the books to remain in the collection organized by author but also allows students to easily find materials of interest. 

Christen began work on this project when we worked together at Inman, and a library intern and I recently completed the labeling.  Christen is now planning to use the same basic color-coded system to label books at Midtown.  That way, students leaving my library at Howard Middle will walk into the library at Midtown and instantly feel a sense of familiarity with the curation system!

Photo of us back at Inman - our coworker Deborah on the left, Christen in the middle, and me on the right

Colorful labels for the project

Labeled books on the shelf at Howard

A guide to using the labels & finding books

This curation activity supports Domain A: Think by “designing opportunities for learners to explore possible information sources” and by modeling a way that students can organize their own information.

Christen and I also discussed that sometimes the challenge of curation is just not knowing about available resources, or, as she puts it, not “being informed on the depth or features” of tools that are available.  We had a great discussion of how I am using resource lists in Follett Destiny – the library management software used by both of our libraries - to curate information for my readers.  Look at us librarians - learning to curate from each other!

Stay tuned as I share more discussions with school librarians about how they are putting the AASL standards into practice every day!