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!
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