Gail Dickinson: Yes, the Standards are different… January 31, 2008
Posted by Sara Kelly Johns in : Community , 2 commentsPosted for Gail Dickinson–Sara
Now that the Standards task force work is over, the “so….now what….” is probably right up there on everyone’s mind. I have great hopes and confidence in the two task forces hard at work on implementation, but have been never shy about my opinions. These are just my opinions as well. I was co-chair of the task force who worked very hard on them, but this opinion is truly my own. Here are my points:
The standards are different. Yes, they are, and are meant to be. They reflect the future, not the past. They also more completely cover the work that school librarians do in schools, not just a narrowly focused information skills approach but are a more global direction.
The standards are not a curriculum. Nope, they’re not. If they were, they would not be standards. Now work has to be done to write curricula from these standards. Both state-level activity and university preparation activity has to start now. Over on the ELMSS list, there is occasionally some discussion of how we are going to revise coursework to include these new standards. That discussion has to happen at a deep level for states and school districts.
These are not “plop-n-go”. We can’t just pull out references to Information Power standards out of existing lessons and replace them with these standards. And even if we can, it’s not the first step. That’s kind of like picking all of the mushrooms off the pizza and replacing them with pepperoni. We need to re-think the dinner that we serve. Maybe it will still be pizza with the lingering taste of mushrooms. Maybe, though, it will be a different type of meal.
Implementation will lead to the end that we are willing to work to achieve. If we are going to simply pull out the old references and replace with the new, we will only have the end that we are have now. I have been thinking about implementation since Reno. Here are my very beginning thoughts.
First, implementation has to start with beliefs. We need to talk deeply about our beliefs, why we have them, what they look like in action and who else in the school community shares those beliefs.
Second, we need to wipe the slate clean of old references and begin to delve into curriculum again, both to write the learning curriculum for the school, and to integrate standards into the curriculum from other subject areas.
Third, then, we need to re-think our instruction, both in the sense of formal teaching opportunities, informal instruction, and in the way that we teach indirectly, such as our arrangement of the library, our establishment of policies and procedures, and our work in our many roles as school librarians.
Fourth, we need to assess what we do. This includes making use of the range of assessments and indicators that prove our value in the education of each student, and it also means having a logistically feasible and instructionaly sound way of informing each student and parent of learning progress.
There is no designated driver for learning. Sure, we could have handed over the keys for information skills learning to ACRL/AASL for their standards, and handed over the keys for technology literacy to ISTE’s NETS. Maybe then our love of reading could go somewhere else, then media literacy to wherever, and pretty soon we are left to ride along to other people’s destinations.
These standards help to define us. I think the guidelines will as well. A clear definition of who we are helps all of us in the educational arena to work and play well together.
So anyway, my thoughts.
Gail Dickinson
249-6 Dept of Educational Curriculum and Instruction
Darden College of Education
Old Dominion University
Norfolk, VA 23529
gdickins@odu.edu
757-683-6683
January 28, 2008
Posted by Sara Kelly Johns in : Community , add a commentKnow any one in Washington state? Below is a link to an ALA news story about the efforts to rescue school library positions in Washington, an effort led by the “Spokane Moms.” They are looking for 6380 (the number of the Senate bill) signatures by Friday from Washington state residents.
http://www.ala.org/ala/alonline/currentnews/newsarchive/2008/january2008/washingtonskills.cfm
I found out about this effort through a Google news feed and then quickly received a nudge from Doug Johnson. After I sent the news story to ALA Director Keith Fiels who had promised to get ALA’s support of school library position cuts when there was a community group to work with, ALA and AASL ramped up the Advocacy Office and the Public Information Office (PIO). AASL Executive Director Julie Walker has been talking to and e-mailing with the Spokane Moms almost every day!
Julie, ALA President Loriene Roy, staffers from the PIO and Advocacy Office and I will all be on the scene on Friday at a rally at the state capital in Olympia. You can help by contacting anyone you know in Washington who could sign the petition–some may ask others to join the effort.
Here is the link to the Fund our Future Washington web site and the petition:
http://www.fundourfuturewashington.org/index.html
If you click on the “Rally” link, you will see what we all will be doing on Friday–grassroots action.
AASL has long put together resources and training for advocacy, marketing and promotion of strong school libraries and each of us needs to include those as part of our work, but passionate parents and students are the most powerful advocates we can have. We see this action as the basis for a national model and encourage other states to seize and create opportunities for rescuing and strengthening school library programs–to the benefit of the students we teach.
So…know anyone in Washington?
I Love Libraries Valentine’s Day Campaign January 24, 2008
Posted by Sara Kelly Johns in : Community , add a commentThe Joint Youth Legislative committee (AASL, ALSC and YALSA) have created a campaign to support library legislation with ideas and talking points around Valentine’s Day…take a look and get involved!
I Heart Libraries, Sara Kelly Johns, AASL President
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The time is now to advocate for libraries! To celebrate this Valentine’s Day, have your teens, parents, children and library supporters flood federal elected officials’ district offices with Valentines that express love for your library and its staff and ask for support for important legislation.
The ALA Youth Divisions - AASL, ALSC and YALSA - are sending out a call to action to library workers to have teens, children, parents and library supporters in their community send “I Love My Teen Services Librarian” or “I Love My School Librarian” Valentine cards to their U.S. Senators and Representatives, and to ask their elected officials to co-sponsor the SKILLS Act &/or support LSTA funding for libraries. Currrently only about eight Congresspersons have signed on to co-sponsor the SKILLs Act. A major grassroots effort is needed in order for this critical piece of library legislation to get passed. Please consider participating in this campaign. For more information go to http://wikis.ala.org/yalsa/index.php/I_Love_My_Librarian_Campaign .
Thanks for all that you do to ensure your community has access to wonderful library services and resources, and thanks to the youth divisions’ Legislation Committees for creating this campaign!
Excitement at Midwinter’s All-Committee meeting January 16, 2008
Posted by Sara Kelly Johns in : Standards , add a commentIt was so exciting for me to go from table to table on Saturday at Midwinter to see the work of our association being done by volunteers from all over the country gathered right next door to the extraordinary jazz violinist Regina Carter, the Arthur Curley lecture performer this year. She may have been incredibly melodious, but the murmur of voices and frequent bursts of laughter was music to MY ears.
Making appointments is probably the hardest work of the president-elect and president but it was obvious that people with passion and expertise were “taking care of business” as they worked on tasks they care about. Some were new task forces like the Promotion and Maketing TF, others were long-standing committees like Research and Statistics or Publications. Bylaws reviewed the charges and functions of committees as part of their ongoing work and began to review the charges of four new task forces: diversity, outreach to parents, international relations, and role of reading position statements.
ESPECIALLY noteworthy were the people working in the Learning Standards Implementation TF and the Learning Assessment Indicators TF; there will be an implementation plan by the June report with some interim steps and there will be opportunities for both input of standards-related lessons and units and opportunities for comment about the indicators and assessments. As I said in my comment on Sharon Grimes’ posting about the standards, there is much more coming! And major steps were taken last Saturday.
Thank you to everyone who is serving on AASL committees and task forces whether you are a newbie on your first one or are an experienced AASL worker. Our profession will make a difference because of you. Those new task forces? They need volunteers. I have some names but would love more. How? Go to the AASL home page, click on “AASL Committees” and submit the online form, especially the “special interests” section which is very useful for task forces. President-elect Ann Martin will be filling committees that start after Annual conference in June and I am still filling some openings and creating new task forces. It’s a real chance to give back to your profession whether you are at the next All-Committee meeting or a virtual member. You will learn as much as you give, I promise. Think about it!
Reflections on AASL’s new Standards for the 21st-Century Learner January 4, 2008
Posted by sgrimes in : Hot Topics , 12 commentsIt’s been a little over two months since I returned from Reno and the unveiling of AASL’s Standards for the 21st-Century Learner. In that time I’ve mulled over the implications of the new standards; compared them to the mandates of NCLB; tried to align them with NETS-S and the national curriculum standards for science, reading, math and social studies; and struggled to translate them into the behavioral objectives required by our school system…but still I do not feel that sense of empowerment and excitement I felt when I first read Information Power: Building Partnerships for Learning. Instead, I have come to wonder: “Are the new standards a step forward to a more holistic and comprehensive view of learners, or a misstep that will serve to marginalize our profession?”
I did not begin with these misgivings; instead, I initially felt the faint stirrings of excitement when I first read the “Common Beliefs.” For me, the nine belief statements that preface the standards encapsulate the ideals that both guide and inspire our profession: reading is a window to the world; inquiry does provide a framework for learning; and school libraries are essential to the development of learning skills. But doubt crept in when I noticed what is missing from the belief statements and what is not translated into action in the standards. My misgivings solidified as I considered how to teach the skills, dispositions, responsibilities and self-assessment strategies. And I was moved to write, when I realized the implications not only for teaching, learning and collaboration, but also for how school libraries and by extension school librarians will be perceived.
As AASL President Sara Kelly Johns notes in another context, “In a time of budget cuts and confusion about the role of library media specialists,” now is most emphatically not the time to fail to embed in national standards for students’ learning the critical importance of equitable access and school libraries; nor is it the time to fail to reaffirm the vital role of library media specialists. Unfortunately, only the belief statements state the critical role of school libraries and library media specialists to student achievement and belief statements are not standards. Standards drive instruction and assessment, not belief statements.
Another problem is that not all of the belief statements have been translated into teachable and assessable standards and indicators. Common Belief # 2 states: “Inquiry provides a framework for learning. To become independent learners, students must gain not only the skills but also the disposition to use those skills, along with an understanding of their own responsibilities and self-assessment strategies.” “The disposition to use those skills” is difficult and I would argue in some cases impossible to either teach or assess. For example, Standard 1.2.6 states, “Display emotional resilience by persisting in information searching despite challenges.” How do you teach/assess emotional resilience, especially at the middle and high school levels when library media specialists see students sporadically and to complete a specific task?
Unfortunately, the problems with the Dispositions in Action do not end with the twinned problems of assess-ability and teach-ability. Other problems with Dispositions in Action include that it:
· Prescribes the teaching of character traits
· Usurps the role of parents
· Not only usurps the role of parents, but also may directly contradict the culturalvalues and mores of many of our minority students; for example, Indicator 1.2.4 states, “Maintain a critical stance by questioning the validity and accuracy of all information,” which is most distinctly a white American value
· Can not easily or effectively be taught, measured and assessed although certainly any teacher worth his/her salt already discusses and illustrates the value of persistence, curiosity and teamwork to name but a few of the dispositions; the difference is that the second occurs naturally, in situ.
· Teaches dispositions that are not specific to success in information literacy
While possession of the dispositions is certainly desirable, our role is not to mold character, but rather to educate minds to employ the higher-order critical and creative thinking skills that are not only critical to our students’ successes, but also to maintaining the stability of our democratic society.
In addition to teaching students how to use higher-order critical and creative thinking skills, we must also prepare our students to use the information literacy skills that are so critical to their success in the 21st-Century; to do that we need a clear definition that provides guidelines for instruction. Instead, Common Belief #6 states: “The definition of information literacy has become more complex as resources and technologies have changed.” Neither the belief statement nor the standards answer the question, “What is the more complex definition?” Based on the promise implicit in the title, Standards for the 21st-Century Learner, I expected a definition that encompassed the 21st-Century Literacies most would agree are “crucial skills for this century,” but found that the only literacies mentioned are visual, textual, digital, and technological – all of which are of course essential - but so too are mathematical, scientific, cultural, and economic literacies (to include but a few of the critical knowledge bases our students will need to succeed).
Even if you argued – and I of course would not – that mathematical, scientific, cultural and economic literacies are not the domain of the library media specialist, where is media literacy, not only an area traditionally taught by library media specialists, but an ever more increasingly important medium for delivering information? Or is media literacy subsumed into digital literacy? If that is the case, then, we have several problems. The most widely cited definition of digital literacy is that provided by Microsoft, yet their definition encompasses only entry-level technology skills. I assume we mean much more than the ability to use word processing software. Should we then create a glossary that defines what librarians mean by digital literacy, or should we seek to use a common vocabulary with our colleagues in other disciplines?
Let us – just for the sake of argument – dismiss the concerns raised in the previous paragraphs as questions related to minor differences in semantics. Let us further assume then that the belief statement does include the full range of literacies our students will need to succeed. Even if we make these two leaps of faith, we are still left with the same inconvertible truths: standards, not belief statements, drive instruction and, unfortunately, not all of the belief statements have been converted into standards. Two of the most important – at least to ensure the future of school libraries – do not appear at all: “Equitable access is a key component for education” and “School libraries are essential to the development of learning skills” which is more than unfortunate because as Christopher Harris notes in School Library Journal, “School libraries are becoming marginalized by state and federal regulations. The No Child Left Behind Act, for example, does not recognize librarians as teachers. Moreover, the ‘65 percent solution,’ an education budget formula being enacted by many states, also jeopardizes library funding. Add to this the ‘Google effect,’ which has schools questioning the relevancy of libraries in an online world, and we are in real trouble” (June 2006).
Another factor that might serve to marginalize the importance of our profession in the eyes of others is the move, clearly evident in Standards 1 and 2, from problem-based to inquiry-based learning. The implications and potential outcomes of this shift are many and varied:
One important distinction between problem-based and inquiry-based learning is that inquiry-based learning explores questions in much more depth for a greater period of time, possibly an entire semester. Given the time constraints imposed by the test-driven environment created by NCLB, are we ignoring reality?
1) Inquiry-based learning may or may not result in a product that can be evaluated which has clear implications for assessment. In an era of data-driven decision-making, the lack of clearly quantifiable data marginalizes what we do in the eyes of administrators and other decision makers.
2) Many of the information seeking process models in wide-spread use, like Big6, are problem, not inquiry-based. As a result, new models will need to be created and/or existing models modified to include inquiry-based learning. The question then is who will do this and when will the model(s) be available?
3) The distinction between inquiry and problem-based learning is not clarified in the standards, nor is the level of inquiry-based learning (clarification/verification; structured inquiry; guided inquiry; or open inquiry) the standards hope to inspire.
4) NETS –S is clearly problem-based so the alignment that existed with ISTE’s standards is now tenuous at best. NETS-S is also clearly aligned with the requirements of NCLB and national curriculum standards. The alignment between AASL’s new standards and NCLB, national curriculum standards, and NETS-S is only evident at the skill indicator level, not at the standard level.
Why not a more realistic statement that it is not an either/or; both inquiry-based and problem-based can form the basis of valid information-seeking process models?
Another area of concern is that some of the Responsibilities like 2.3.1, “Connect understanding to the real world,” are skills that need to be taught. The ability to transfer knowledge is not only a higher-level skill, but also one that must be carefully considered and incorporated into the design of the lesson(s). The same can be said of many of the Self-assessment Strategies, like “Interpret new information based on cultural and social context.” (4.4.4) Perhaps, how and when students will be taught the prerequisite skills prior to their assumption of these Responsibilities and Self-assessment Strategies will be made clear in the Scope and Sequence.
Finally, it wasn’t until I read the indicators for Standard 4, “Pursue personal and aesthetic growth,” that I realized that concealed within this standard were some of the skills necessary to the development of reading comprehension and fluency. Like Standards 1 & 2 which could have been used to build partnerships with technology and content area teachers, this standard could have been used to build collaboration with reading teachers and specialists. As I have argued in Reading Is Our Business (2006), for too long library media specialists have abdicated our rightful position as critical partners in the development of reading comprehension. As a result, funds are being diverted from school libraries to purchase classroom libraries, library media specialists are being replaced by instructional assistants and when certified librarians are employed, they are not viewed as instructional leaders or as full partners in the learning process.
While the consequences for our profession are dire, the repercussions for our students are even grimmer. The correlation between poverty and low reading achievement is well documented. Of people with the lowest literacy skills, 43% live in poverty, and 70% of prison inmates read at the lowest proficiency levels (U.S. Department of Education 2000). Equally well researched is the link between passive readers and poor comprehension skills. Passive readers are not engaged in meaningful ways with the text. Disengaged readers will never choose to “Pursue personal and aesthetic growth.” Nor will they ever discover that “Reading is a window to the world” because these less-than-engaged readers do not know how to utilize comprehension strategies to increase either understanding or engagement. Collaborative partnerships must be forged with reading teachers and specialists if we hope to transform passive readers into actively engaged members of a community of strategic readers and thinkers, yet only two indicators, 4.1.1 and 4.1.2, allude to reading.
In conclusion, much must be done before the promise from the AASL website, “‘Standards for the 21st-Century Learner’ offer vision for teaching and learning to both guide and beckon our profession as education leaders. They will both shape the library program and serve as a tool for library media specialists to use to shape the learning of students in the school,” is fulfilled.
posted by Sharon Grimes, Supervisor of Library Information Services, Baltimore, MD