Thing 23: The New AASL Standards

I'm vaguely familiar with the new AASL standards, so I figured this would be a good activity to explore so that I could become more familiar. My biggest takeaway after looking over the various resources is that, similar to the NextGen Science standards, the new AASL standards revolve more around student-led learning rather than teacher-led. This resonates with me because I have always tried to create my library program around student-led learning.

The other thing that stood out to me the most was that the standards are the same for all age levels. There are no separate standards for high school and elementary school. Because of this, I couldn't help but think "how are these at all possible for my three year olds?" How is a three year old going to curate accurate information on a website? They aren't. But when I thought more about it, I realized many of the lessons I already do with my pre-k students can fit into these standards. For example, under 'Engage,' "acknowledging authorship...," by talking with my pre-k students about who the author and illustrator are in the books I read them, I am teaching them that authors and illustrators matter and it is important to acknowledge them when reading a book.

I found Paige Jaeger's highlighting activity very useful (although I did make it more 21st century by not printing the chart and highlighting with Preview!). My chart turned out to be fairly equal in terms of which colors were represented. My strengths are inquire, explore, and engage, with explore having much more green than the other foundations. This does not surprise me since explore is the foundation that lends itself most (in my opinion) to reading for fun, coding, makerspaces, and creating in general. Curate and include had the most red, which is, again, not surprising since those foundations struck me as the most "high school" type foundations. I will have to look at them more closely and find elementary friendly activities that will still use them.

Most, if not all, of the tools in this workshop would lend themselves well to these new standards. The Scratch coding project I mentioned in my previous post also hits on many of these standards. It was student-led, encouraged collaboration and creating, and allowed students to become the "experts," rather than me.

I am very happy to see that these standards encourage coding and creating, but still encourage reading for fun. It's great to see libraries keeping up with the 21st century, but we still need to be the place where kids go to find that perfect book that will make them lifelong readers.