This entry is the second in a series of four. This series reflects on interviews I held with various Teacher Librarians in Southern California. We spoke about the National School Library Standards for School Librarians. Each entry will discuss how a single librarian implements a particular Shared Foundation in their program. Since the interviews were conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, we discuss both how their program typically addresses the standards and how that has changed during the pandemic.
Miss B (not me! 😜) is a current middle and former elementary school librarian. We discussed how she implements the Shared Foundation I: Inquire in her library programs. The Key Commitment for this Foundation is to ask questions or identify problems and to create strategies to find answers.
Miss B helps students take charge or their learning by allowing student choice. While she provides boundaries and structures, she makes sure that students have freedom within them. For example, in a lesson on databases or information retrieval, she may decide which database to use, but allows students to formulate their own search terms based on their own curiosity (A.1). Or to support a lesson on informational text, she allowed students to choose from three current events she anticipated the students would want to know more about: the pandemic, elections, or updates on a famous K-Pop group. She may also activate prior background knowledge through think-pair-shares, small group activities, or -- especially on ZOOM-- whole group discussion (A.2).
After admitting she currently does not do much to address the Create domain in this Foundation, she then offered suggestions for how she could. She suggested students could create a flyer in Canva or film a FlipGrid mini-book report (B.3). This was one of many moments in the interview where Miss B demonstrated reflection and a strong desire to create a high quality library program.
Like Mrs. C, Miss B positioned collaboration as integral to implementing the AASL standards. She described librarians as not roster-carrying teachers, but co-teachers. Getting teachers to collaborate is one of the greatest challenges to implementing the standards. She also pointed out that a librarian's teaching needs to be relevant to the teacher.
Of all the interviews I performed for this series, Miss B had one of the most robust library programs. She had adapted quickly and thoroughly to the pandemic. She had bulked up her digital presence, was going into classrooms, and hosting virtual programs for students. She was knowledge-able about best practice and could even articulate ways to differentiate for learning on ZOOM. That said, her interview shared similarities with Mrs. C. While she implemented a lot of the competencies, she did not implement all of them. This may be in part due to the bulk of the standards or the depths of the standards. It may also be that the standards are not discussed often out in the field. Miss B was clearly keeping up with conversations around school libraries, so why are those conversations not more focused on the standards? It is an interesting question, but unfortunately, I don't have any real answers.
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