Maine State Library

The September, 2003 minutes were approved.

The Treasurer’s Report was discussed. A letter was received from the MSBA (Maine Student Book Award) committee, including a thank you from Sharon Creech, MSBA winner for Love That Dog. $400 for MSBA was voted unanimously. The Treasurer’s Report was unanimously approved.

Introductions were made. Those present were: Dr. Ross Todd, Edna Comstock, Mary Moore, Gretchen Asam, Eileen Broderick, Cyndy Bufithis, Francie Aley, Sue Leiter, Sylvia Norton, Susan Allison, Teri Caouette, Nancy Grant, Donna Chale, Mary Simpson, Jeff Small, Gerry Crocker, Liz Reiss, Margaret McNamee

Sylvia Norton has been asked to go to Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirate) to help plan school libraries. The Board is very proud of Sylvia’s part in this exciting professional work. We feted her with a special song, "It’s a long way to Abu Dhabi." Sylvia and the team will: "Develop a standards-based curriculum and assessment system;"

• Ensure students who graduate from secondary schools are fluent in Arabic and English grounded in their local culture, proficient with technology, able to work as problem solvers and critical thinkers – independently and in teams – and prepared to enter higher education or the workforce;
• Build the capacity of local school and district teachers and administrators so that the changes reflected in the Abu Dhabi charter district can serve as the basis for school change in Abu Dhabi Emirate and in the UAE.”

COMMITTEE CHAIR REPORTS

Kelly McDaniels sent a report about ACLU action against the Patriot Act this week.

Francie Aley recommended the LOBO2 research process web page at http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/lobo2/rprocess/ from NC State University; and the professional book, Information Literacy : Search Strategies, Tools & Resources for High School Students, by Zorana Ercegovac. (1-58683-021-X). Francie is going on a cruise next summer with librarians from all around the world who will spend some time having fun and some time presenting Information Literacy “stuff!”

Edna Comstock distributed copies of the changes made at the retreat to the MASL constitution. Please e-mail feedback to Edna.

Mary Moore sent around the “NEEMA Views” newsletter.

Mary Simpson was featured in the Orono newspapers when Richmond 7th graders met with author Ed Rice.

OLD BUSINESS

Sylvia Norton spoke about AASL. She especially enjoyed the opening speaker Dr. Bertice Barry talking about her school librarian, Miss Amanda Brown, who made such a difference in her life. The local high school marching band processed in and led everyone outside and down the street with music playing! The next AASL conference will be in Pittsburgh. Sylvia noted that the Improving literacy through School Libraries legislation has one more week to raise more money in Congress (Our Maine senators voted for it). AASL recognizes Laura Bush for encouraging the President to support schools and libraries.

MEA CONFERENCE

Nancy Grant tabulated the results of the teacher surveys. This is the third year we have been at the MEA conference. People were looking for MASL! Many teachers asked about avoiding plagiarism and elementary teachers asked about other issues. There was a suggestion that next year, maybe we should do some drawings or something else different. It is important to have a presence at MEA to emphasize that we are teachers, too. Some books were left over and were available to any takers at the Board meeting.

Ross encouraged MASL to have a presence at the AASL Exploratorium next year.

Gerry Crocker spoke about promoting exhibitions as part of local comprehensive assessment systems to target research. Gerry will send an announcement to the Board when the standards are sent to the state web page.

NEW BUSINESS
Nancy Grant proposed a Spring Workshop for paraprofessionals. She will write up a concrete proposal incorporating the suggestions made.

MAKING THEM A CLASS ACT
Monday, November 3, Registration at 8:00.
Parking will be a problem. Park in the Maine State Library State Street side lot, way down in back. Look for the van for transportation to the St. Paul’s Center. The Center is about a block past the rotary. (The bridge across river may be closed.)

NEXT MEETING
Saturday, December 6 at the Maine State Library. A Conference committee meeting will follow, but may begin later than usual if we need more time for our meeting. Michael Moore was suggested for the keynote conference speaker.

The meeting was adjourned following Dr. Ross Todd’s discussion of a MASL standards document.

PROFESSIONAL STANDARDS WITH DR. ROSS TODD
Cyndy Bufithis reviewed the committee work to date:
The Committee has written several drafts centering on Staffing, Collaborative Instruction, Facilities, and Resources. We have a mission statement and a vision statement. The four sections are broken out with indicators and followed by an appendix. Drafts were distributed.

Ross spoke about how he likes the words “principles” or even “criteria” because he feels they have a more positive connotation than standards.

What we are aiming for is the provision of an effective learning environment through school libraries. We must start with student learning and student outcomes. The guiding principals of the Maine Learning Results (MLRs) should be the starting point and the end point for our document. We must make a clear and explicit link to the mission and continuous improvement program of Maine school education.

Ross thinks the MLRs guiding principles are fantastic. He likes them because they talk about kids. Too often, the focus of a standards document is on the library as an isolated facility
Our standards document should articulate how a good school library contributes to the six guiding principles.

If the six guiding principles are our destination, then, what will a school library contribute? (To develop the six outcomes (communicators, learners, problem solvers, citizens, workers, thinkers), certain dimensions of a library should be in place.)

The three dimensions of a school library program are:
INFORMATION, TRANSFORMATION, AND FORMATION.

Start with the Informational (or resource) base.

If students are to become “informed and integrative thinkers,” “responsible and informed citizen,” and “clear and effective communicators,” they need a resource base.

Next, comes the Transformation dimension: Information itself is not enough. We teach kids to engage with information. School libraries shape and develop thinking student thinking. The building block of the transformational dimension is the school library’s instructional collaboration. Transformation does not happen by chance. Instructional intervention by the school librarian is necessary.

Third, is the Formational dimension. Student achieve learning outcomes as well as social and cultural outcomes. They become the kinds of learners shown in the guiding principles.

The three critical dimensions of information, transformation, and formation are the contribution that school libraries make to learning outcomes.

In our document we need to set out our philosophical and conceptual rationale for our standards:
Effective school libraries demonstrate our relationship to the six guiding principals.

We must also state our case for school libraries contributing to continuous improvement.
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is all about learning accountability. Our document has to be accountable for student learning, so we should start by showing what school libraries do to enable student learning. We must state that we are committed to every child having the best learning opportunity by having a school library that supports student learning.

The document can not be simply a list of what we are supposed to have and do. Ross sees the standards document as more of a workbook construct with a broad set of beliefs and values. He envisions it as a record of our negotiations with our individual schools to determine goals and benchmarks for individual schools. He says, “Don’t use the standards as bricks to bash principals over the head. For example, 25 books per child may not be realistic in every school. Instead, say, “Here are our goals. What can we negotiate for this year and for next year to make continuous improvement?”

We could use the standards document along with the local Comprehensive Education plans that are supposed to be updated every year.

Our standards document should enable us to insert our local school’s mission statements. We should couple the standards with data from our individual school to support what we are doing as a school and what we need to do.

One aspect of our document has to be how we record the evidence of the student learning outcomes. Our standards document should offer an invitation to collaborate and it should show how we implement collaboration. It could be a hands-on workbook to set goals and ideals, to negotiate stages and to record significant achievements. It could end with a portfolio of how the school library supports the mission of the district, the MLRs, NCLB and Promising Futures.

• What does all of this mean for an individual library?
• What are the specifics?
• The first standard is a linkage to educational goals
• The second standard is the Informational construct.
• What is needed for the instructional dimension?
• Resources are needed.

• Up to date sources
• A variety of media formats,
• A range of readability levels,
• Resources aligned with local and state curriculum,
• Resources aligned with academic content standards, aligned with personal, social, cultural, attitudinal needs for development of students as citizens of our country and the world.

We need to elaborate the resources, but we need to do that by looking at how the school library media program provides, integrates, organizes, and utilizes resources in a technology-rich environment so that students become consumers of the technology. Access to the Internet, access to full text and other up-to-date technology tools enable kids to acquire information, to organize information, to produce information. Access and acquisition is not the only emphasis. Production facilities are needed for kids to create products.

School libraries need technology to organize the collection.

We must articulate the various roles that technology will serve. It is a gateway to information outside the school. If our function is information, then, this is what we need to make it work

Student learning and student outcomes should be the subject of every sentence in our document. The sentences should not all start with “The Library,” “The Librarian,” etc. This change is difficult to make. Cyndy and the committee have done a great job with the draft.

Now, let’s look at the Transformational dimension.
What we want to say here is that in order for students to engage critically, carefully and reflectively with diverse information sources, the school library provides opportunities in collaboration with classroom teachers to develop information literacy scaffolds for students to successfully engage with resources. School libraries create a dynamic learning environment where students are able to effectively engage with and make the best use of diverse information sources.

We need to get the words “the whole school” and “systematic” into our document.

Our profession has been totally guiltified by the word “collaboration.” We have been told to collaborate with classroom teachers whether they want to or not, and whether we are able to or not. Ross said that in the Ohio Study, out of 13,000 students, not one student mentioned collaboration. Kids don’t care about whether teachers and librarians collaborate. They care about outcomes.

We need to collaborate not only with teachers in classrooms, but also with individual students. What are their learning, reading, and technology needs? When they talk about how school libraries help them, they talk about library classes or class visits to library and how the librarian teaches them. The Ohio study is a clear mandate for the instructional role of school libraries to develop information competencies. Our document must acknowledge the individual roles that librarians play with single students. Our role does involve this level of collaboration which has been unadvertised. We should talk about intervention at the point of need - within classes, at lunchtime, after school, etc.

In addition, we should discuss how school librarians develop intellectual scaffolding with staff through professional development.

We should try to incorporate the nine information literacy standards from Information Power, however difficult they are to express in a simple and meaningful ways. We could at least point to them in Maine legislation, Chapter 127. We should address them in the context of learning outcomes.

We should identify (as part of the informational scaffolds, the cognitive tools) the critical thinking and problem solving skills, the communication and technological competencies, the evaluative, reflective, metacognitive thinking skills that school libraries teach students.
Instead of using the words “information literacy,” use the words from local schools conversations, words that school boards will understand. “Bilio babble” will be meaningless; it alienates people.

Next comes the question of reading. We need to articulate our positional base on reading.
The Ohio students did not see fostering reading as not a particularly strong thing for their school librarians. The students scored it on a sliding scale downward from grade 3-12.
Nevertheless, libraries have always had a role in fostering reading – for academic achievement and for life long reading and pleasure.
This standard should center on the promotion and encouragement of reading for the two reasons stated above (academic achievement and lifelong reading and pleasure). We should foster the culture of reading.
We should take the MLRs’ guiding principles and talk about how they are underpinned by reading. If we want informed thinkers, clear communicators, etc., what do we want the school library to do? We want the school library to engage students in a range of activities that foster a sustained love of reading, such as author visits, SSR (silent sustained reading), reading enrichment programs, etc.
The planning of reading activities should involve mutual planning between librarians and classroom teachers. We should negotiate with school communities. We should support state and national reading celebrations and initiatives.
Libraries develop reading programs because they are fundamental to student achievement.
We should show how reading programs help slower kids bridge gaps, how they help kids with learning difficulties to cope., etc. We should link this standard to NCLB.

The final standard involves personal agency. What do we give kids after they leave school? School libraries give students not just information skills to learn independently and to solve problems, they teach them to be responsible and involved citizen, self directed and life long learners. We teach them to be people that have the knowledge and skills to get on and have a good life. We teach them to come out with a sense of self, to become a citizen of the world.
How does the school library support kids’ learning at home, out of school?
Our argument should be for a school library web presence providing tools and scaffolding to learn on their own.

We’ve avoided the topics of Staff and Physical Facility

If we are to be able to provide information, transformation and formative standards, what do we need?
We need:

A physical plant that has spaces for individual and group learning,
Places for engagement in technology learning
Places for the shelving of multiple resources in various formats
These are the minimal requirements for us to do what we need to do.
With a complete commitment to learning processes and student outcomes, the work can only be done by certified school librarian personnel, supported by appropriate technical workers.

What about the other issues?

How many computers should we have?
How many books per student?
How much budget per child?
Staff per number of students, etc.?

Will these numbers become a bashing point instead of a negotiating point?
Principals may want to know some of the suggested numbers.
AASL no longer sets these standards.

We could compile a collection of different numerical standards and benchmarks, such as
how many workstations, OPACs, MLSs, books per student. What should the age of collection be? We could take suggested numbers from Australian, Canadian, individual U.S. states, etc. We could give an assortment of models. Then, we could suggest that librarians attempt to negotiate for their local schools, having been informed by existing models.

Or we could give a range, for example: minimum, standard, optimal; in need of serious improvement, adequate, improving.
The standards document could become a planning document, a way to agree on strategies.
We could build in the budgetary requirements to move a library from one level to another.

The final standard should address evidence based practice. We need to begin to collect concrete evidence of what libraries do. We should emphasize the data that proves that library instruction is what makes the difference.

Why are we librarians? Not just because we love books. We are librarians because we love learning and we want to help kids learn. We want our document to say NOT just that these are the standards, but that as librarians we need to talk to our principals and our schools about our standards. We need to put in our documents the ways we can build professional development and enable people to grow to this vision. We need to think about recruitment to our profession. We need to think about ways to train librarians to talk with principals and administrators.

Where do we go from here with creating the final drafts of our standards document? This is not a one person job for the standards chairperson. There is a committee, and we do have money to pay for committee work, but it is difficult to get together. Should the document be a focus of our Board meetings? Ross will give us some very detailed feedback on our work.

Sylvia will set up a blackboard type online bulletin board for us to comment back and forth. She and Edna will set up some subsections so we can work on the document between meetings.

Our Make Them a Class Act workshop will also give us more food for thought and discussion!

Respectfully submitted,

Margaret McNamee
Secretary