AASL National School Library Standards Shared Foundations: Explore

  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 Michelle Martin. We discussed "explore".

As always, we started discussing the definition of "explore". The AASL defines explore as "Discover and innovate in a growth mindset developed through experience and reflection". It took me reading this definition to make me realize that I couldn't really define explore without saying "explore" or "discover", but Mrs. Martin pushed me to think about the fact that you can have exploration without discovery and in fact, I was hindering myself by focussing on the destination and not the journey.

Mrs. Martin uses "explore" by allowing students to be independent and guide their own learning. Although she is in a middle school she allows a lot of responsibilities to be on the students similar to what I do at the high school. Over the years she has shifted her goal to be in the exploration rather than the final product. This has made a huge difference in the way the students approach the library. She uses several resources to encourage exploration including, but not limited to;  DISCUS databases, Destiny Online Catalog, Google Translate, Canva, Piktochart, Google Suites, and  Destiny Discover Collections.

Mrs. Martin works with several teachers to help their students explore new resources, but she also works with students before school, during lunch, and after school to guide their own exploration. The challenges that Mrs. Martin faces is in the mental block that I had with the definition of "explore". Understandably, in classrooms, the final product is the most important because of test scores and pushing students to the next grade level. But Mrs. Martin wants to spend more time in exploration than she is often able to.

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