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 information starting with sixth grade and continuing to eighth. Her hope is that students will be more engaged in their learning by carrying it over from year to year and building upon those standards. I personally feel like this approach is going to have a large impact on the middle school students' ability to conduct research that is ethically gathered and evaluated for accuracy. Her school wide vision is something I hope to adopt myself in my own position so that research does not seem like such a daunting task to students. 

While Mrs. Bennett has been working closely with the English department, she said she also collaborates with other departments including math and science. However, like many other librarians I've spoken to, she said time was her biggest challenge when it comes to collaborating. Mrs. Bennett also mentioned how time can be difficult with her engage competency since information changes so fast and with the increased use of AI programs. We talked about how the Engage competency of the AASL standards might need to be adjusted to be more specific when it comes to ethically and legally using AI in the library and in lessons. It is an interesting topic of conversation to address how ethical AI is without knowing where it pulls its information from, and then how to cite the information since it is not a human author. 

Overall, with the Engage competency I think it is important to remember that the school librarian has the responsibility to communicate any legal and ethical topics to the staff. This can come through great professional development opportunities, classroom collaborations, and a good relationship with the school community.