Common Core Toolkit

*Today's post is by Meg Brooke, the school librarian at Shades Valley High School/JCIB. 

Testing usually makes me not look forward to going to work.  Those times of staring into space and thinking about all of the work that needs to be done is frustrating.  This testing week, however, is different.  I’m incarcerated in my office, unable to leave for 3 whole mornings while testing goes on in the library with other administrators and facilitators, allowing me to get uninterrupted work time!  Whoopie!  Life is good!

One thing I’ve done today is to catch up on some PD reading, and I’d love to share an interesting 1-page article from the November/December 2011 LMC written by Julie Walker, AASL’s executive director. It’s an article that can help us be leaders with our library programs as our schools implement standards.  Julie writes about the Partnership for 21^st Century Skills, the P21, and how librarians can be leaders in this movement that is a requirement in the Race to the Top.  She explains that P21‘s CCSS (Common Core State Standards) leadership has created a downloadable toolkit to help guide educators through P21.   AASL has gone even farther by offering a “crosswalk” as well as a lesson plan database so that school librarians can become leaders in implementing these Common Core State Standards.  Using these tools from AASL can enable us to demonstrate how our particular school’s library program can be a method in accomplishing the implementation of these standards.

To see, download, and print the tools from the article, click on the following links:

P21 Toolkit:       www.p21.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1005&Itemid=236

AASL Crosswalk: 

www.ala.org/aasl/commoncorecrosswalk

AASL Lesson Plan Database: 

www.ala.org/aasl/lessonplandatabase

This database was an awesome resource!  Lessons with titles like Creating 21^st Century Superheroes; It’s Debatable; and Rock Star Road Trip will definitely create interest in our libraries while implementing the Common Core and AASL standards for the 21^st century learner.  I’d love for us to create some kind of similar database where we could share lesson plans, multimedia presentations, etc. with each other.  We have some great thinkers/doers/presenters in our group, and we could bank on others’ talents tweaking them to meet our particular needs instead of reinventing the wheel!

Walker, Julie. "Introducing the P21 Common Core Toolkit." LMC. 30.3 (2011): 21. Print.