AASL National School Library Standards Shared Foundations: Collaborate

According to the AASL National School Library Standards for Learners, School Librarians, and School Libraries, there are six shared foundations and key commitments. Those foundations are; inquire, include, collaborate, curate, explore, and engage. Everything that is done in the library falls into at least one of these categories. I've had the pleasure of working in a library and working with other librarians in my school district so I am able to have conversations about what happens in our libraries. Over the past few months, I had the opportunity to interview four librarians to discuss how they use the shared foundations. In this blog post, I will be referencing an interview I had with Sherri Alston. We discussed "collaborate".

We started our conversation by talking about what the word "collaborate" means to us. I think this is important because "collaborate" may mean different things to different librarians. In this case, we had the same idea of the word. We define "collaborate" as working with others to reach a common goal. Mrs. Alston shared that she implements "collaborate" in her library program by working with multiple classes, both English and History courses. We also work with students to create a more inviting environment in the library. I do similar things with my space. I think this is to be expected because we both work in the high school. Mrs. Alston mentioned that they rely heavily on the Google Suite for most of their collaboration. For most collaboration projects they use a combination of Google Slides, Google Calendar, online databases, print sources, Google Sites, and Canva.

Most of the collaboration that Mrs. Alston and I do in the library is with teachers. This year she hasn't been able to collaborate a lot with teachers due to the fact that she doesn't have an assistant, but last year she worked with over 40 classes. The biggest challenge Mrs. Alston said that she faces is making schedules match up. It can be difficult to find a time that classes are able to come in the library to work. As a librarian, it is easy for the first teacher who wants to work with us, but past that, you have to be very careful not to overlap classes and to make sure you don't overload the space, the students, or the teachers. Mrs. Alston and I completely agreed with this and discussed how much time and space management goes into being a librarian. Collaboration is one of my favorite parts of working in a library. So far this year Mrs. Alston and I have already done so much to work with teachers and I'm so excited to see what else we can do this year to collaborate with students and teachers alike. 

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