Unpacking the National School Library Standards and the ISTE Standards

While reading the issue of Knowledge Quest and absorbing both the AASL National School Library Standards and the ISTE Standards, my first thoughts were just how dense the material was. With the AASL Standards, for example, there is so much to reflect on within each Shared Foundation, and then within each domain! 

My first experience with the AASL's National School Library standards dates to last summer, while taking the course Literacy in the Content Areas. Unlike many of my classmates, I am not a teacher—I'm changing careers from journalism—so working within a standards framework is still something very new to me. 

The article that I found the most helpful for understanding how the AASL Standards operate on a practical level within a school library was "School Librarians Level Up!" (Freedman and Robinson, 2019). I really appreciated the ways they mapped the standards to specific activities they'd completed with students. 

Not only did this help me envision how to apply standards to a lesson or activity; it also helped me see that by slightly changing the lens through which you present an activity, you can achieve different standards goals. As an example, a lesson I created for first-graders for a course last year involved reading a picture book aloud about a family celebrating the Moon Festival, and then participating in a discussion about their own holiday or family traditions. Through the discussion process, students connected the Chinese family in the book with their own families, uncovering similarities and differences in how they celebrate. This meets the Shared Foundations: Inquire standard, specifically "Think" and "Grow." 

However, if we were to take a slightly different tack and include a discussion of the Chinese-American community in our own local community, then this activity could also achieve the domains of "Grow" and "Create" within the Shared Foundation: Include. 

For the ISTE Standards, I will admit that I found the ISTE Standards website overwhelming. I felt much more able to grasp what they were designed to do when reading the AASL and ISTE Standards Crosswalks documents, along with the "Leveraging Crosswalks for Communication" (2019, p. 42) section of Courtney Lewis's article in Knowledge Quest. She mentions specifically that the ISTE standards do not really map to the AASL's "Include" Shared Foundation, citing the "number of empty boxes" on the ISTE side of the chart for that Shared Foundation. 

This gave me a good jumping off point to examine the standards together. While many of them do seem to be complementary, my main takeaway is that the AASL Standards fill in a number of soft skill/EQ gaps that the ISTE Standards do not address. This makes total sense in my opinion, as one of the greatest gifts that students receive from wide, recreational reading—and encouraging reading is still at the heart of school librarians' work—is empathy. Technology can definitely assist us in developing empathy, often in really remarkable ways, but I do not see the importance of that reflected in the ISTE Standards in the same way. 

In many of the other areas, like Inquire, Explore, and Engage, the ISTE Standards sometimes go even further in detailing how school librarians can and should help learners develop certain competencies. These are screenshots from the AASL/ISTE Crosswalks document for  the Shared Foundation "Inquire" in the Domain "Think":

In this case, the ISTE Standards go much further in explaining how educators can encourage learners to embrace curiosity and take initiative. 

I can see that these two sets of Standards are closely aligned in spirit and, I would guess, often in application. Overall, I know that I will need to familiarize myself with both sets over a long period of time, both in academic study and in practical application, to really grasp how they operate and become fluent in seeing how they apply to the lessons or activities I'm leading my students in. 

References: 

American Association of School Librarians. (2018). National school libraries crosswalk with ISTE standards for students and educators. AASL. https://standards.aasl.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/180828-aasl-standards-crosswalk-iste.pdf

Freedman, J. L., & Robinson, A. (2019). School librarians level up! Transform your teaching by unpacking the AASL standards integrated framework and implementing Shared Foundation V: Explore. Knowledge Quest, 47(5), 10-15.

International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). (n.d.) ISTE standards: For educators. https://iste.org/standards/educators

Lewis, C. (2019) Librarian reading groups and understanding standards. Knowledge Quest, 47(5), 37-43.