AASL Standards Shared Foundation: Engage

School Librarian Domains and Competencies:

1. School librarians promote ethical and legal guidelines for gathering and using information.

2. School librarians act as a resource for using valid information and reasoned conclusions to make ethical decisions in the creation of knowledge.

3. School librarians promote the responsible, ethical, and legal sharing of new information with a global community.

4. School librarians support learners' engagement with information to extend personal learning.

Photo by Adam Winger on Unsplash

To address the Engage shared foundation, I spoke with Hope Shirley on a day I observed her elementary school library. Hope has a full schedule from start of the day to finish. She spent some time reviewing the standards before I arrived and came prepared with some ideas of what they look like in action in her library and how she instructs. Having the opportunity to observe 4K through 12th grade over the course of this semester has shown me that the way the standards play out at each level may look very different and the schedule and the school's needs themselves can dictate how they are addressed.

Some examples of how Hope implements the Engage competencies in her library program include teaching her students to use Discus instead of Google and encouraging the teachers in her school to use Discus with their students in their classrooms as well. Our school district as a whole requires students to use a program called Neptune Navigate which teaches lessons on digital citizenship and safe practices online. This is required for all students using technology in our schools. This is another way Hope, and the rest of the district addresses ethical use of information. Hope also uses and teaches this vocabulary to her students, even the youngest in the building.

Hope has collaborated with teachers in the past on research projects for fourth graders, as well as a fifth grade project using Book Creator. Projects like these give students a chance to demonstrate and apply what they have been taught about the ethical use of information and how to use that information to create something new within legal parameters. They have been taught to use the citation feature in Discus which makes documenting sources easy enough for their grade level and lays a foundation for the future. We are very fortunate in South Carolina to have this as a resource for our students.

With a fully packed schedule in a library that runs on the related arts schedule, sometimes time becomes a challenge in applying these standards. When each class is only given 40-45 minutes of library time and part of that must be used for checking in and out books, They may only be left with 20 minutes to complete their lesson. Hope also felt that sometimes the differing ability levels of the students can make implementing the standard challenging at times. With such a wide variety of students it often requires finding a creative balance in order to challenge all the students and to keep from leaving anyone behind. This has been the struggle for classroom teachers from the beginning of our current education system I am sure.

Doing these four interviews this semester, gave me a lot of different examples of the AASL Shared Foundations in action and what they can look like across all grade levels. Often times these standards are things we would already be doing intuitively if we have spent any time in a classroom or working with students, but they can also lay a good foundation for lesson planning to begin with. I am anxious to implement some of the ideas that I have witnessed in my own library in the near future.