School libraries are most successful when the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) standards are seamlessly incorporated into everyday practice. Although each of the AASL standards are vital to the success of a library, there are four competencies that I believe are especially important:
Inquire & Grow: Learners continually seek knowledge, engage in sustained inquiry, enact new understanding through real-world connection tools and resources, and use reflection to guide informed decisions.
Collaborate & Create: Learners use a variety of communication tools and resources, establish connections with other learners to build on their own prior knowledge and create new knowledge.
Include & Share: Learners engage in informed conversation and active debate and they contribute to discussions in which multiple viewpoints on a topic are expressed.
Curate & Grow: Learners perform ongoing analysis of and reflection on the quality, usefulness, and accuracy of curated resources, integrate and depict in a conceptual knowledge their understanding gained from resources, and openly communicate their curation process for others to use, interpret, and validate.
For my first interview, I chose Mrs. Rachel Caughman, the school librarian at R.H. Fulmer Middle School. She has been in this position since 2018 and was an ELA teacher at Fulmer prior to taking this position. One way Mrs. Caughman incorporates these standards into her library program is through lessons with different content areas. She has some lessons that she keeps “on hand,” so to speak, and other times she creates lessons with teachers. For example, she has a lesson that she often teaches a few times a year to different classes on proper MLA citation. She also has an eighth grade science unit that she uses each year in collaboration with the eighth grade science teachers on DNA and forensics. I think it’s a great idea to keep some lessons in your back pocket that will be applicable every year; this could be especially helpful to new teachers who aren’t sure what collaborating with the school librarian looks like and might need some ideas.
During these lessons, no matter the content or grade level, students are often contributing multiple viewpoints. Mrs. Caughman mentioned that the eighth grade forensics unit ends with a Socratic seminar where students engage with debate and deliberation. Students are also communicating and collaborating with others regarding their interpretation of the project. This doesn’t just happen during larger unit plans like the forensics unit; Mrs. Caughman mentioned that this sort of conversation often happens during book talks, too. (And since I work at the same school as Mrs. Caughman, I can confirm that these sorts of conversations do in fact occur during book talks). This demonstrates that she has created a safe, collaborative, and creative environment in her library if students are comfortable sharing their thoughts on a regular basis.
To implement the stated competencies, Mrs. Caughman uses a variety of resources. Depending on the project, students use magazines, print books, or SC Discus (or a combination of the three). If the project involves a book tasting or gallery walk, print materials are often used for students to physically engage with. This allows students to deepen their knowledge and engage in sustained inquiry. For some projects, particularly presentations or essays, students may more heavily rely on SC Discus. This allows them to think critically about the sources they’re using and their usefulness relevant to their project.
Suffice it to say, nearly all these competencies involve collaboration with classroom teachers. If a lesson is going to take most or all of class, Mrs. Caughman makes sure it’s directly aligned with that content’s standards. This helps students make new connections with their classroom content. English and Language Arts classes are used to going to the library, but science, social studies, and math classes aren’t, so when Mrs. Caughman is able to partner with non-ELA content areas, it’s especially fruitful for the students to see the library in that lens.
That being said, there aren’t always other content areas reaching out to collaborate, which is one of the biggest challenges Mrs. Caughman faces. She said that teachers who already work with her are great about regularly reaching out, but teachers who haven’t collaborated often don’t reach out. She acknowledged that she could do more self-advocacy and show teachers how valuable her role is, but she also wishes others would reach out first.
My biggest takeaway from my interview with Mrs. Caughman is that collaboration and group work accomplishes a good deal of the AASL competencies. When teachers collaborate with the school librarian and when students are collaborating with one another during that experience, it naturally promotes the other foundations of inquiry, inclusion, and curation. Students learn far more when we as their teachers reach out and collaborate with others and when they get to work with other students.
I imagine that as a school librarian, I will also struggle to a degree with getting teachers to work with me. For lack of a better way of putting it, there are some teachers who are simply “stuck in their ways” and don’t want to try new things. I want to be prudent about self-advocacy, but I am sure there are times it will be difficult for me. I really appreciated getting a behind-the-scenes look at my own school librarian’s thought process, and I am looking forward to taking bits of her knowledge and experience with me in my own future career.
References
American Association for School Librarians. (2018). AASL standards framework for learners. AASL. https://standards.aasl.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/AASL- standards-Framework-for-Learners-pamphlet.pd
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