AASL National School Library Standards Shared Foundations: Curate

 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 Jeri Rogers. We discussed "curate".

Similar to my first interview, we started our meeting by comparing our definitions of "curate" with the AASL's definition. The AASL defines curate as, "making meaning for oneself and others by collecting, organizing, and sharing resources of personal relevance". We both agreed that while that is a good definition we would change a few things. Mrs. Rogers describes "curate" as adjusting her teaching content to what would work best with the students that she is teaching in each lesson.

Mrs. Rogers implements "curate" by meeting with teachers before teaching lessons to merge the best of their ideas together. She understands that she doesn't see students as much as their classroom teachers so she relies on them to represent what the students need. After these meetings, she creates lessons that will best reach the students. Mrs. Rogers uses a gamut of resources to implement "curate". To start with the basics she teaches students how to use the Follett Destiny Discover system to find books. From there she used different levels of books, manipulatives, videos, games, and STEM activities. She has the ability to try a lot of fun things that her students will buy into because they are elementary. I wish that my high school students got as excited when presented with a new activity.

Curate relies heavily on working with classroom teachers and Mrs. Rogers is anything but afraid to collaborate with other staff members in the school. One challenge that both me and Mrs. Rogers (and probably 98% of librarians) face is lost time. There simply isn't enough time in the day to meet with all the teachers that we need to meet with and we also wish we had more time with the students.

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