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!

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!