AASL National School Library Standards Shared Foundations: Inquire

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 Jenny Prete. We discussed "inquire".

As always, we started discussing the definition of "explore". The AASL defines "inquire" as "building new knowledge by inquiring, thinking critically, identifying problems, and developing strategies for solving problems". Jenny is a former elementary librarian and she had a clear idea of what "inquire" means to her, discovering new information through exploration. I found this interesting because it seemed to combine several foundations. Mrs. Prete used "inquire" in her library by using reading centers with her students to teach different topics. Each center/table would have books on a specific topic like architecture, crafts, geography, etc. and students would be assigned to a specific center where they could learn something new.

Mrs. Prete used several resources in her library program to implement "inquire" including pulling books (fiction, non-fiction, reference, maps) depending on the topic. She would also use coloring supplies and craft materials to allow students to build some of the things they were learning about in their centers. In the computer lab, her students would be encouraged to research the topics found in the books.

Mrs. Prete worked at Discovery School which had a year-long theme (International, STEM, Local History, Core Knowledge) each year and she would collaborate with each grade level on their specific theme topic.  Each grade would be assigned a country or two in the years we did International.  In years they did core knowledge - each grade level would have a literature component - nursery rhymes (K), folklore (1), Greek/Roman mythology, Norse mythology, etc. She would work with teachers on pulling together programs that fit their specific topics and could carry what they did in the library (research) back to their classrooms to implement.

 

One of the challenges Mrs. Prete had with centers was having enough time to rotate all the students through all the centers - be that a single rotation during a class period, or a weekly rotation schedule.  She mentioned that her library was extremely small so it was difficult to have enough variety to keep the students engaged over a period of weeks. Mrs. Prete also emphasized that she thinks it's easier to address the "build new knowledge" portion as a librarian, but harder to see an idea through the rest of the stages (identify, strategize, solve problems) part of Inquire.  Lots of times you start something cool in the library in collaboration with teachers, but then the teachers run with it and finish it and you don't always see the final results.