Learners COLLABORATE

Deb Fowler is the librarian of 19 years at Powdersville Elementary School, serving grades 3-5. She and I took a close look at the AASL Standards, Shared Foundation of Collaborate and how it is implemented in her library program.

This standard foundation can get a little confusing since we use the word collaborate to refer to librarians working with teachers as well as students working with students. Deb promotes collaboration of students through her library program quite often -- the 5th grade gifted/talented class is working in groups on a Black Plague research assignment and 4th graders are working on extreme weather research projects in small groups. The library program has been a part of that group work both directly and indirectly. Students have been allowed to visit the library in small groups and work independently and classes have also visited the library for direct instruction or group work.

The school is 1-1 with iPads so there are a lot of apps that encourage collaboration between students and teachers as well as between groups of students or students in groups. Deb says that one thing that has been important for her library program is keeping the media collection up to date; as students work in groups, they make decisions about what they need and the library needs to be able to provide that.

The main challenges Deb finds at her school is meeting the needs of everyone while she is only one person with no assistant. She has a flexible schedule which is great for allowing her to be flexible to collaborate with teachers and be what they need, when and where they need it. But it becomes difficult to manage entire classes visiting the library, students working in small groups, and individual students coming in for book check out all at the same time.

One main take-away from my conversation with Deb is that the standards are best practices. She doesn't look to the standards to determine what she needs to be doing. She does what the students, teachers and school need and in the meantime, competencies in the standards are met because they are just simply best practices in education.