Insights on LS593 Invigorating your Library

By Sheryl Wittig

​I would recommend taking the LS593 Invigorating Your Library with the AASL National Standards to anyone interested in delving deeper into the new AASL standards and applying them to your program.  Attending multiple Standards sessions at AASL in Phoenix was a great orientation to the new standards. For me, that gave me a good overview of the Standards and each of the six Shared Foundations.  But I still wasn’t ready to implement them. 

The Alaska School Leadership Academy in Juneau this summer also addressed the standards; many of our activities gave us opportunities to apply the standards.  But the online, self-paced course that kept a dozen or so of us busy most of the fall was the most helpful.  It was the opportunity to really read, study, reflect, and share that has better prepared me for the task at hand.  We studied the learner framework, including aligning lessons to the new standards.  We looked at our own practice in the librarian framework, and found alignments with evaluation tools used in Alaska, such as Marzano and Danielson. 

I found the library framework study to be enlightening, and after conducting a library program evaluation, I now have a game plan for what I need to do to improve my library. I would recommend this class to all school library staff in Alaska.  In particular, if you don’t have an administrator in your district facilitating your standards work, or a support network, participating will help you find that network - in your district, state and/or nationally - and together you will be better prepared for the task at hand.

For more information:
https://standards.aasl.org/ Portal with all sorts of resources to support our implementation of the new standards.    

http://www.ala.org/aasl/ecollab  Great webinars about timely topics PLUS catch those sessions you missed or revisit those you did attend at the last AASL conference.  Some webinars are free, so require current AASL membership.  ​

https://knowledgequest.aasl.org/   A handy website for finding out what other school librarians have to say about a topic, or find that article you remember reading.