Hewing to a New Standard: Are your lessons fit for 21st-century learning?
RSSSpring is for research papers and, not to mention, those endless rounds of testing. So in schools, spring cleaning is often relegated to the summer. This year, with the release of the common core standards (www.corestandards.org) and increasing pressure to prove our worth in the face of budget cuts, it’s critical that we attend to the dust bunnies and cobwebs in our curriculum.
Setting aside the bigger issues for a moment, consider a few of the changes we saw this year in technology. Those 3.5-inch floppy disks have finally being laid to rest (bit.ly/bbBMA4); time to make sure they’ve been fully weeded from lessons and library signage, too. And with Target stocking the Kindle and Best Buy, the Nook, ebooks have gone mainstream. Any discussion or lessons involving books need to address digital formats as well as print. Other new concepts we must add to our repertoire: cloud computing, tweeting, and, yes, sexting.
But even bigger changes are afoot. The common core standards, an initiative of the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, present a new set of learning benchmarks, which have been endorsed by almost every state. While much work needs to be done before the standards can be implemented, it behooves us to become part of the discussion now. With the standards addressing research and information skills, we want to help guide how they’re rolled out in our districts.
School librarians are actually in a unique position to contribute to these conversations given our work with the American Association of School Librarians’ (AASL) Standards for the 21st-Century Learner. Both the AASL and the common core benchmarks are structured quite differently from traditional standards. The AASL standards require a solid base of content knowledge, however, greater emphasis is on developing students’ skills. For example, standards for each grade level incorporate technology in the production of student writing and distributing that work using online tools. With our experience implementing standards focused on skills, school librarians can assist teachers facing the same challenge.
Libraries will also need to take part in teaching 21st-century skills. Information and technology skills and
resources are embedded throughout the common core standards; our job will be to tease out the precise skills and concepts that need to be taught at each level.
You might start by doing an audit of your current curriculum. Are all the units you teach aligned with current standards? Are you covering the skills that students will encounter on ELA assessments? Have you culled material that’s no longer part of the standards or being tested?
All of this takes time, and probably requires help from curriculum specialists, but it’s important work. Even if you aren’t ready to tackle the common core standards, curriculum “cleaning” is necessary given the technical nature of our instructional area.
Online, a year is an eternity. Are the websites you used for this fall’s opening lessons still around, for example?
As with any cleaning job, many hands make light work. Share the process with colleagues. There is much work ahead, but thankfully, it won’t involve floppy disks.
Christopher Harris (infomancy@gmail.com) is coordinator of the school library system of the Genesee Valley (NY) BOCES.
