Blog 3 – Round Top Elementary School – Cindy Symonds – Explore – November 15th

By Joseph Brown

This blog post is the third of four posts that interview a school librarian about how the AASL National School Library Standards for Learners, School Librarians, and School Libraries (AASL, 2017) realistically look in their media centers, with each interview focusing on a specific Shared Foundation.

Shared Foundations (AASL, 2017).

This third interview is with Mrs. Cindy Symonds who runs the media center at Round Top Elementary School in Blythewood, South Carolina. The interview took place on November 15th, 2019 and focuses on the Explore Shared Foundation.

The goal of the Explore foundation is to “discover and innovate in a growth mindset developed through experience and reflection” (AASL, 2017).

From a librarian’s perspective this includes fostering “learners’ personal curiosity, stimulating “learners to construct new knowledge”, preparing “learners to engage with the learning community”, and helping “learners develop through experience and reflection” (AASL, 2017).

Mrs. Symonds bases all of her lessons on standards, which include the Explore Shared Foundation. She notes that the AASL standards, including the Explore foundation, can be fit into any curriculum and can be applied to just about any lesson that the media center does. The vast majority of her interactions with teachers are for collaborations and the Explore foundation is particularly easy to inject into their curriculum. 

As far as fostering personal curiosity and stimulating learning, she recommends storytelling as a hook to keep students engaged in a lesson. This can be something as simple as framing the problem with some sort of imaginative scenario that creates a problem for the students to solve. Also, she notes that with elementary students, the “grosser the scenario, the more engaged the students will be.” It is important not to get stuck anyway and to keep things moving to retain interest and to keep instruction to a minimum. The more the student are doing something, the more they will be learning and the more creative they will be. It also helps to know the students by name, to know their habits, and what they are interested in. Another policy is to be welcoming; that means no rules that prohibit certain things.

The library can also implement the Explore foundation by hosting events or extracurricular activities in the library. This could be in the form of clubs that foster the competencies such as the morning new club and the makerspace club or it could be a once a year event like having students show off and explain projects in the library.

A specific example of the Explore foundation in supporting curriculum is a unit the library works on with second graders where they learn to compare and contrast concepts, which helps the students learn to be able to construct knowledge like this on their own later. This past year, they compared and contrasted the Native American culture versus the pilgrim culture. 

Many resources are used in the Round Top Elementary School media center to help implement the Explore foundation: Discus, print books, Tumble Books, Epic Books, Big Universe eBooks, OverDrive, PebbleGo for K-2 and PebbleGo Next for 3-5, Learn360, and other databases the district subscribes to. There are statistics available on the databases to see what gets used the most to justify what should be retained and what should be unsubscribed from.

Time is the primary challenge for Mrs. Symonds to implementing any of the standards, not just the Explore foundation. Money and funding can be an issue but bookfairs and grants can offset this issue. That said, the librarian ends up spending much of their own money on activities and props for events. Juggling class visits, clubs, and events may be overwhelming.

Some other general comments Mrs. Symonds had about the standards are that she uses the graphics at the beginning of the chapters more than any of the detailed sections, that listing out standards is time consuming so she may just list the general foundation, and it is important to verbalize the standards in an understandable way to students at the beginning of each lesson so they will understand what they should be learning. 

One thing that stuck out during this interview is that as much as the questions tried to direct her to answering specifically about the Explore foundation, Mrs. Symonds often tended to answer for the standards as a whole; this is probably because she views them as interconnected and related. The other thing that stood out is that the Explore foundation can be inserted into any curriculum as it is about curiosity and learning how to learn. 

References

American Association of School Librarians. (2017). National school library standards for learners, school librarians, and school libraries. Chicago: American Library Association.