AASL Standards in Practice: Inquire

I have had the very good fortune to spend five days over the past few weeks with Paula Boston, school

librarian at E. Rivers ElementarySchool in Atlanta.  Paula’s library is vibrant and full of kids from the moment it opens until the end of the school day.  These pre-K to fifth graders are BUSY and full of questions!  So I thought it only appropriate to sit down with Paula to talk about AASL SharedFoundation I: Inquire.

Foundation I is all about facilitating curiosity, questioning, and research, and these activities are ongoing in the E. Rivers library.  Even the set-up of the library – with a chalkboard wall, centers for game play, Lego wall, and iPad table in addition to the traditional storytime rug and bookshelves – encourages children to seek information.

To encourage children to ask questions, Paula poses questions on the chalkboard wall and encourages students to add their thoughts.  She will also often display selections of books with a question for students to explore. 

And students from kindergarten up are regularly learning about the inquiry process through library instruction.  Paula recommends using the strategies from Making Thinking Visible by Ron Ritchhart, Mark Church, and Karin Morrison and the SOS strategies from Discovery Education.  She shared how she used “See Think Wonder” to get kids thinking about an artwork showing the signers of the Constitution.  Students added sticky notes to large sheets of chart paper to share what they saw, what they thought, and what they wondered about the image.  She got great questions (like “I wonder why there are no women”) to spur conversations with and among students.

As an IB school, E. Rivers places emphasis on research.  Teachers spend time in their PLC groups focusing on research, and fifth graders complete a capstone research project.  To support this instruction, Paul loves using GALILEO, the Georgia Virtual Library, to help students practice their inquiry skills.  She pairs the databases available in GALILEO with the WISER strategy:

• Wonder
• Information
• Synthesis
• Express
• Review/revise

She also recommends Facts4Me, a database created by librarians that costs $50/year, for kindergarten to second grade students.

To get teachers on board with inquiry instruction, Paula uses organic networking with teachers, often stopping them in the hall to ask “What are you studying right now? What activities are you doing?” and then bringing teachers in to have their classes engage with choice boards that foster development of inquiry skills.  She also offers a menu of choices for teachers!

While I was there, a class of second grade students were sharing Jamboard presentations they had created after asking lots of questions about extreme weather phenomena (tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, and more) and then digging in to books, GALILEO, and Facts4Me.  It was so much fun to see the kids in action!