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 third interview, I spoke with Brittany Bundrick from Cayce Elementary School. Ms. Bundrick began working as a school librarian in the 2020-21 school year, so although she’s still relatively new to the position, she’s had a lot of unique experiences considering she began this position at the peak of Covid.
Cayce Elementary is unique compared to other elementary schools in Lexington 2 in that they’re the only school whose library is on the related arts/specials rotation. Ms. Bundrick said she knows many librarians don’t like being on this sort of schedule, but she doesn’t mind it. There are some benefits to this schedule when implementing the aforementioned competencies. She said that since they see every class once every two weeks (Cayce’s related arts classes rotate on an A/B schedule), they are often able to incorporate what the students are learning in class with their library lessons. This promotes collaboration and inquiry. She also promotes inquiry through students brainstorming and researching ideas for a grade-wide service learning project. Students typically get to engage with a choice board during library lessons, and there are often options related to STEM activities, which promote creativity. Ms. Bundrick feels like curation is an area she struggles with, and that’s a competency she’s still figuring out how to implement. She does give students lots of opportunities to share; for example, she does a lesson over The Lorax that involves a Socratic seminar.
Ms. Bundrick said they are fortunate to have a large space in Cayce Elementary’s library, and this also gives students lots of options. Large, wide spaces allow for the inclusion of students with disabilities, and they also have flexible seating in the form of wobble stools. These attributes related to their physical space allow for the implementation of the inclusion competency. Other resources in the library include Promethean boards which can access digital resources like Destiny, SC Discus, and e-books. Since the Promethean boards are large enough for multiple students to use together, this promotes the competency of collaboration.
When it comes to collaboration with classroom teachers to promote the competencies, Ms. Bundrick said that being on the related arts schedule is a blessing and a curse. On one hand, it allows them to regularly see every group of kids and time to incorporate classroom material into library lessons. On the other hand, it is basically impossible to collaborate with teachers outside that time, so it makes it difficult to execute the competencies in that way. However, it can happen with some creativity; recently, Ms. Bundrick has been collaborating with a third-grade teacher via email and patchwork planning sessions for a combined unit on fairy tales around the world. She wishes she had more time to reach out to teachers about collaboration, but she has to mostly rely on them to make the first move.
Time and schedule conflicts are definitely one of Ms. Bundrick’s biggest challenges when implementing the competencies, but student behaviors also play a large role. She works with kindergarten through fifth graders, and the difference in abilities between these groups is vast. She also feels that the AASL standards, while helpful, are written more in the language of middle and high school than elementary school. Cayce Elementary requires all teachers, including the librarian, to post standards every day, and she often struggles to put the standard and objective in kid-friendly language. She wants students to know what they’re supposed to be learning how to do, but the language of the standards isn’t really on the level of most elementary schoolers.
I learned a lot from Ms. Bundrick. Since I am coming from a secondary/middle grades background, I have never really considered the fact that AASL standards aren’t really written with an elementary school audience in mind. Should I end up in an elementary school, I might find it useful to break down some of the competencies into more elementary-accessible language, as that would benefit myself, other teachers, and our students.
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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