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