Blog Post #1 - Exploring, Comparing and Contrasting the AASL and ISTE Standards

 When I started teaching,  I had a chalkboard, chalk and some old textbooks.   I had no curriculum other than the textbooks.  There were no curricular standards much less any library or technology standards.  There was no technology.  We didn't have a printer in our school.  We only had a purple mimeograph machine.  Our school secretary/nurse had to take anything that needed to be printed to the district office for printing. The library had a card catalog and that's how we looked for books.  My generation has probably experienced the most changes in education than any other generation of educators.  The advent of technology in the world of education changed everything.  In my generation, we went from World Book Encyclopedias to the World Wide Web overnight.  I can remember sitting in a professional development seminar and the speaker telling us that everything we were teaching our children would be obsolete in the next five years.  And because all the "things" that we were teaching were going to be obsolete, we had to begin to think about the learner and what the learner would need to look like in the 21st century.  We wrote curricular standards and started using words like, inquire and explore and problem solve.  We needed our children to be able to tackle the ever-changing world they were growing up in.  The articles in Knowledge Quest spoke to all this for me.  Technology has changed everything.

We have to empower our learners to face the unknown.  Technology has and will continue to change the landscape of the world as we know it.  Our learners have to think, create, share and grow.  They have to be independent and empowered.  Both the AASL Standards and the ISTE Standards accomplish those goals for our learners.  I read Jenna Spiering's article, Engaging Adolescent Literacies with the Standards, with great interest.  She speaks about adolescent literacies and new literacies which I think cover all of our young learners.  In referring to "adolescent literacies" she talks about the myriad of ways that learners engage with text and illustrations and other media in numerous contexts other than the printed text.  The skills we have always taught may not be relevant now or in the near future.  I think the ISTE Standards and the AASL Standards speak to these "new literacies" and inform our teaching in numerous ways in order to grow our learners.   There has been at least one constant that has remained true throughout my career!  We have to teach children and adults, from where they are.  We have to play off of their background knowledge and their interests.  The Shared Foundations of Inquire and Explore and the ISTE Standards both incorporate inquiry and exploration in empowering the learner.  One example that Dr. Spiering includes in her article is graphic novels.  Graphic novels are checked out more than any other section in my library.  Until I became a teacher-librarian, I was like many other classroom teachers and believed that graphic novels weren't really "reading" and I didn't encourage my children to choose them.  Now I do!  As Dr. Spiering discusses, they can be viewed as a much more complex text because of the need to interpret many other things than the printed text.  

The crosswalks document really helped me see the samenesses and differences in the AASL Standards and the ISTE Standards.  There are many more samenesses than differences.  The overarching "themes" if you will, are the same - empowering learners to think for themselves, to grow and share and collaborate with others.  The differences would be in the methods that those things are accomplished.  I sat down with our Technology teacher and the AASL Standards and the ISTE Standards over the summer to decide what each of us would be responsible for in our separate areas.  There was so much overlap that we decided to do a lot of what we needed to do by collaborating and team-teaching.  I think this shows how similar the documents are and how one supports the other and vice-versa!  Combined with the curriculum standards and collaborating with classroom teachers, I believe the AASL Standards and the ISTE Standards provide a strong framework for growing and empowering our students.


References

American Association of School Librarians. (2017). National School Library Standards for Learners, School Librarians, and School Libraries (1st ed.). STA - Standards ALA ALA Editions AASL.

American Association of School Librarians. (2018). National school library standards crosswalk.

Retrieved August 25, 2021, from

https://standards.aasl.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/180828-aasl-standards-crosswalk-iste.pdf

Spiering, J. (2019). Engaging Adolescent Literacies With the Standards. Knowledge Quest, 47(5), 46–49.

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