Curate

 Curating Resources to Evaluate Information

 

I was able to interview Colleen Hitchcock, a school librarian at Woodruff High School in October.  Colleen serves students who are in grades 9-12.

The questions I asked Colleen were: 

What are some ways you are incorporating the shared competencies in the school library?

How important are the shared competencies when you are planning lessons in the library?

Are any of the competencies overlapping with the SC state standards and how do you collaborate with teachers when planning your library lessons to align with their classroom instruction?

Do you face any challenges when implementing these competencies?

We talked about a lesson she completed with a high school English class where they created an annotated bibliography after finding and evaluating resources.  The major portion of the lesson was her modeling and having students use lateral reading to evaluate information to determine if the source was credible.  She spent time showing the students how to investigate their source.  So instead of just vertical reading and staying on one site, with lateral reading they leave the site and go out to other websites to find out about that site to see what others say about that source. The students then worked collaboratively and had specific sites to look at together to evaluate using lateral reading.

 

I discussed with Colleen the AASL Shared Foundations specifically, Curate, and how important it is to use during lessons in the library.  She said Curating is essential to the work we do as librarians.  Curating is the bulk of what we do in our school libraries including collecting, organizing, and sharing resources with our students.  We as librarians must be able to evaluate books and resources to determine the credibility, relevance, validity, and appropriateness for our students, but we must also model that skill so that our students learn to do the same when they are researching and looking for information.

Colleen said that it is very easy to integrate the domains and competencies with the SC state standards.  Much of the standards really focus on inquiry, so it is easy to use those inquiry standards and align those with the AASL standards.  One website I love to use is commonstandardsproject.com  You can actually choose a grade level and content area standards and the AASL standards to align and display side by side.  I love looking at the standards this way so I can find similarities and overlaps between the standards.

 

We discussed how with the curation competency, the biggest challenge is getting students into the library!  High school students are much more independent, and teachers are not regularly bringing students into the library for lessons and instruction, so it's more difficult to get the information to the students and teach the skills they need.  Students are navigating an information-rich world that seems to bombard them everywhere with information, both factual and misinformation alike.  These skills are necessary to teach students, but it is so difficult to do so without fostering relationships with teachers and collaborating to plan instruction.  Another challenge is the amount of information students are having to sift through because it is available at their fingertips within seconds.  The technology-driven world we live in overwhelms even the best researcher with abundance of information, and with AI, this has become even more challenging to decipher between credible and fake.  

 

What’s next?

School librarians should create an environment that allows students to watch them model curating information and resources and gives them the opportunity to practice these skills and do the same during their inquiry and search for information and resources.  I learned how difficult it is for high school librarians to teach students the skills they need for the future.  Thinking back to my discussion with an academic librarian earlier in the semester, she told me how students enter college as freshman really lacking the skills they need to independently navigate the library and complete research.  This shows me there is a need for high school librarians to teach students how to complete these tasks, however, they are not able to do so because of the lack of collaboration with teachers on the high school level.  We assume high school students are independent and give them the project to complete, but we haven't modeled the process well enough or given them the support and practice to prepare them.  In the future, I will work to prepare my 8th grade middle schoolers for high school and remind them they do have access to a school librarian who can help them.  I will also continue to model curation in my own library and collaborate with teachers to plan lessons to teach our students how to evaluate information and resources. Developing our learning community will also support my high school librarian and the work she is doing at the next level.  I will also collaborate with her to ensure we work together to help students navigate the media overload students are exposed to daily.