What Do We Do with the Guidelines?

When American Association of School Librarians' (AASL) "Standards for the 21st Century Learner" were released in late 2007, librarians rushed to incorporate them in curricula at the local and state level and in existing lessons. After an initial frenzy of simply replacing old learning objectives with new ones, the field settled into the task of rethinking curricula, reinterpreting what librarians do and teach, and re-interrogating subject curriculum to place the learning standards in their proper place. A mantra heard over and over was that standards are not curriculum. Standards are what a professional association thinks that students should know and be able to do in that subject specialty. Curricula are then built from the standards. Instruction is planned from curricula. Assessments are based on instruction but aligned back to the standards. It's a continuum of instructional improvement, and one that takes time and practice to implement. It is, in many ways, a constant experiment. "Empowering Learners; Guidelines for School Library Media Programs" was released in April. The field is again faced with the challenge of how to incorporate new guidelines into existing programs. Maybe the field is faced with the opportunity to not incorporate new guidelines into old programs, but rather to shape new programs around new guidelines. It's time to review every guideline and every action to determine what it means for libraries today. The author doesn't think this conversation can or should happen in a vacuum. As a profession, librarians need to talk about the guidelines and how they can be implemented. They need to make time at every conference and at every library professional meeting to have open-ended conversations about what they should do now. Most importantly, they need to have a forum to share the results of all of those conversations. Only then can these guidelines be effective in not only empowering learners, but also in empowering their profession. (Contains 3 figures.)