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A conversation with Mrs. Bennett

 Engage Key Commitment: Demonstrate safe, legal, and ethical creating and sharing of knowledge products independently while engaging in a community of practice and an interconnected world. For my last conversation with a librarian, I was able to speak with Ann Bennett who is a second year librarian in my district and who went through the same USC masters program. Mrs. Bennet was happy to share how she has taken what she learned in the program and implemented it in her middle school library. When we focused our conversation on the engage competency of the AASL standards, she shared that her evaluation focus this year was on collaboration with the English department on research skills.  Mrs. Bennett shared that she is instructing the entire school on how to ethically and legally gather information for research through a multi-year project. She is scaffolding her library class instruction on different components of the research process including gathering and evaluating informati...
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A conversation with Mrs. Mandrell

 Collaborate Key Commitment: Work effectively with others to broaden perspectives and work toward common goals. Jennifer Mandrell is a fellow middle school librarian in Dorchester District Two who has worked extensively with the teachers at her school to build a strong partnership between the classrooms and the school library. When I spoke to her about the collaboration domain of the AASL standards, she expressed that she was often surprised when classroom teachers did not know all the resources available to them that she could help them use.  Mrs. Mandrell shared that often sits down with teachers when they are planning out units, especially any units that require research, to see how she can work with them. She shared that one strategy she used during collaboration meeting was to ask the teacher for the specific assignment details and list of possible options for students. This way she can do her own research ahead of time to know what specific databases and text would work ...
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A conversation with Ms. Stein

Explore Key Commitment: Discover and innovate a growth mindset developed through experience and reflection.  For the past six years, I was an elementary school reading teacher at Windsor Hill Elementary and have since moved on to be a librarian at the middle school up the road. However, the librarian at Windsor Hill will always be a valuable colleague and profession resource for me as she helped fuel my passion for this profession. Mrs. Stein is unique as an elementary school librarian since she came from the public side of librarianship before landing in a school, and even more so since she spent much of her time in a law library.  When I started our conversation on the Explore competency of the AASL standards, Mrs. Stein immediately jumped into the think domain which focuses on fostering student's personal curiosity. She shared that some of her favorite lessons to do with students center around nonfiction texts where she guides them through a KWL chart (know, want to know, a...
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A conversation on curation with Mrs. Musselman

AASL Curation Key Commitment: Make meaning for oneself and others by collecting, organizing, and sharing resources of personal relevance.  During my practicum experience at Fort Dorchester High School, I was placed with Christine Harley as my supervising librarian but the school is large enough to have a second librarian: Anna Musselman. Ms. Musselman took on the role of teaching me about the school collection, their collection development efforts, and how she advocates against book challenges in our library.  Throughout the course of our conversations, we focused on the AASL Curate Domain. Ms. Musselman explained that she implements this specific domain more than I might realize since it is more than just ordering new books for the collection. She does work with Mrs. Harley to place new book orders and takes suggestions from students, teachers, and does her own research on what books would fit their collection's needs. She shared that she likes to use the School Library Journ...
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