New AASL Standards: Help On the Way

If you have no idea what to make of the newly released standards from the American Association of School Librarians (AASL), have no fear. Help is on the way.

AASL’s “Standards for the 21st-Century Learner,” which offers a complete revision of 1998’s Information Power, will be accompanied by a new set of learning assessments and indicators to help librarians incorporate the tools into their daily lessons, says AASL President Sara Kelly Johns (below).

The standards, released in October 2007, describe how today’s kids conduct research and draw conclusions—and their goal is to help media specialists tailor programs to better suit their students. But, instead, the standards have left some librarians struggling to figure out how to include them in their curriculum—and convince administrators that they really work.

“I have come to wonder, are the new standards a step forward to a more holistic and comprehensive view of learners, or a misstep that will serve to marginalize our profession?” asks Sharon Grimes, supervisor of Library Information Services for Baltimore County Public Schools.

A task force headed by Kathy Lowe, executive director of the Massachusetts School Library Association, is currently hard at work developing the learning assessments and indicators to help librarians incorporate the standards into their lessons, says Johns. “Part of their process will include an opportunity for input from the field.”

“Nobody is expecting anybody to use the new standards exclusively at this moment,” says Johns, adding that the new indicators, benchmarks, model examples, and assessments will support and expand the new standards and “should clarify much.”

It’s still unclear when the task force’s work will be complete. But in the meantime, Johns suggests that school librarians “look at what they’re doing this year, examine the standards, and see how they fit together” so that when the final document is released media specialists will already have a feel about how the new standards relate to their programs.

So what happens to Information Power, the original set of information literacy standards, now that a new set of standards has come out? “It becomes a reference book and shows part of our progression” in the profession, says Johns.

AASL is also revising its program guidelines, which will describe what a high- quality school library program looks like.