Summer Is Here and Standards Are in the Air!

By Marcia Mardis, Chair, AASL Standards & Guidelines Editorial Board on 06/20/2016 • ( 0 )

School is out and summer is here…time for a vacation, right? Not for your AASL Standards and Guidelines Editorial Board! We’re busily working to refine your professional and student-learning standards to support all aspects of school librarians’ important, impactful work.

As you may recall, we kicked off the revision effort in March 2015. The Editorial Board agreed that this revision needed to be driven not only by the data gathered from today’s school library community, but also by a keen awareness of future trends and priorities. To gather these data, we spent several months developing a survey. Our aim was to develop an instrument that would effectively gather the AASL community’s needs and concerns regarding library standards and implementation. In August and September 2015, we launched the online survey, and in November 2015, we brought you the survey results at the fabulous 2015 AASL National Conference in Columbus. You may recall my blog post about the survey results. We are indebted to all members who took the time to share their perceptions and ideas. Thank you!

In an effort to amplify the survey findings, editorial board committee members conducted focus groups at the AASL National Conference and at a geographically diverse set of state affiliate conferences. These focus groups allowed us to hear your voices, and they were powerful learning and data-gathering experiences for all of the editorial board members. Many thanks to the numerous school librarian educators, state liaisons, district school librarian supervisors, and building-level school librarians who welcomed us to their conferences and participated in these focus groups. We’ll be releasing an executive summary of our fulsome analysis of the focus group data in the early fall. These findings will not only inform our ongoing work with standards development in a very real and immediate way, but the results also will provide you with a compelling snapshot of the current state of U.S. school libraries.

Now, we’re in the process of writing our initial draft and manuscript of the standards and guidelines. We’re on target for a timely release of our work in fall 2017 with programming to support it online and at AASL National Conference. We think you’ll like what you see!

Our work has been productive, punctual, efficient, and, I’d like to add, joyful. The editorial board extends its deepest gratitude to the community we serve for their support, enthusiasm, and contributions.

See you all in Orlando!