Collaboration; bridging the divide one conversation at a time.
Many years ago our School District Administration approached the theatre teachers to use the newly adopted performing arts standards to create two very complicated and major things:
1. A vertical alignment structure
2. Student Learning Objectives for evaluation
Much like Dr. Green's discussion in the Module One, K-12 theatre teachers rarely (if ever), have a curriculum to follow. Instead the responsibility typically falls to the educator to singularly generate and cobble together how to approach standards to best meet students needs while measuring their mastery with our own created evaluation tools. Don't get me wrong, most of us beg, borrow or steal from other professionals, professional groups or other sources to create these items, but the chance to collaborate with fellow theatre professionals for the purposes of creating this structure though daunting, caused us to jump for joy!
We get to collaborate!
So? You are thinking so? Just like a School Librarian/ Media Specialist,(Whatever you want to call them) the theatre teacher is an island in a school. Because of their island status, collaboration doesn't get to happen as often as hoped. This is why we jumped for joy at the chance to collaborate to create these items. Doing a deep dive with the standards and the goals for our entire district (which includes 8 high schools 16 middle schools and even more elementary schools) was a gift. We were given 2 weeks of time and three professionals to work on this and eventually created a structure that is still used today. We brought our own experiences, interpretations and questions to create high quality authentic tools to use.
When reading the Knowledge Quest focused on the AASL standards I noticed a common theme of the importance of collaboration for understanding, and executing the the standards running throughout the articles. The featured article by Courtney Lewis, Collaborating to Communicate Librarian Reading Groups and understanding Standards focused a group of professionals work doing just that. They used each other's perspective to parse out as well as to do a deep dive into the standards.
Even though Lewis was focusing on independent schools as a whole her description of the "psychic curriculum" resonated with my current status as a theatre teacher. To solve this issue, they formulated a reading groups to look at these standards with a multi faceted approach. Using different modalities of both in person discussion and SLACK workspace these reading groups looked at the the impact on their daily practice as well as on learners. They also pointed out the crosswalks for the ISTE Standards.
Crosswalks. This was an incredibly helpful tool when navigating through both AASL and ISTE standards. WIth personal learning, or one to one platform taking many districts by storm the importance of utilizing both sets of standards are paramount. It seems that Lewis felt that as well as she devotes a great deal of time to discuss both sets and suggests the crosswalks to help utilize both sets of standards. I agree with Lewis that these standards can also be used together to advocate for our programs with administration and stakeholders that may not understand what we do in libraries.
Both sets of standards are geared towards learners and educators. Though the AASL has used both domains and foundations to group their standards, ISTE lists them for each domain. I found the AASL standards to be grouped more like the National theatre standards; using 4 foundations and dividing them in to various levels. Both are vague enough to allow for creative execution while also being complete enough to offer specific paradigms to be covered. In reviewing them with peers I found both sets of standards have ignited programming ideas and how they can be infused in the curriculums being taught in a school. Again, Collaboration for the win!
References
Crosswalks. (n.d.). National School Library Standards. Retrieved January 17, 2022, from https://standards.aasl.org/project/crosswalks/
Lewis, C. (2019). Collaborating to Communicate Librarian Reading Groups and Understanding Standards. Knowledge Quest, 47(5), 36–43.
Hi Megan! I enjoyed reading your blog post and your connections with being a theater teacher. I agree that collaboration is so important and can be difficult when we as school librarians and theater teachers can feel like an island in the school. You did a great job wrapping in your experiences and the article you read, thanks for sharing!
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