Collection Development Basics
Course
Curriculum Matters [7:15]
Your curriculum really matters. It has to fuel your collection development.
Depending on your level, these standards tell you what your teachers must teach. They don't tell you how your teachers will teach those standards. For instance, in Florida one of our sixth grade language art standards says that students must "interpret information presented in diverse media and formats. For example, visually, quantitatively, orally, and explain how it contributes to a topic, text, or issue under study." Great standard.
But your question is what topic is your teacher going to present to teach that standard and that will meet diverse media and formats. So when the sixth graders study world history, make sure you have the information on all sides of any controversial issue and make sure you have that information in all formats.
Video sequences can really bring history to life for your visual learners. Your online databases should have articles on both sides of an issue. They can read and, depending on their level, they can annotate or discuss it or both. Collaborating with your teachers is the most important thing.
Every teacher has her own preferences on how she teaches a concept and you just want to support her. Once you collaborate with that teacher, you may find out she is a social studies teacher teaching about maybe ancient Egypt. If this is the case, you'll be able to find many video resources for her to use. You can direct her to many databases and websites that will help her.
The American Association for School Librarians—AASL—has created the learning for life standards and uses those library standards to guide our program. Don't forget to look at the AASL "crosswalk" that takes the common course standards and correlates them to our AASL standards. That helps us to know how our standards fit in with the state standards.
There's no way we can be experts in every content area. I was a middle and high school English teacher so I feel like I know more about that curriculum. But I also need to know the general topics all of my teachers are teaching. Check out your school's textbooks to see what contents teachers will be focusing on. I know many schools are going to online textbooks. But you should have access to those too. You can look at the table of contents in each book, just look at that table of contents and it will give you the ideas of what types of resources you want to purchase. You want to support the topics that teachers teach and hopefully the students will want to learn more about what they are learning in class so you can get more books, more resources about those topics.
Create a survey for teachers to ask them what content they feel is lacking in your collection. Surveys are great. They often convey information as well as ask for information. I can't tell you how many teachers have come to me after I have given out a survey and said stuff like, "I didn't know we had non-fiction e-books in my subject area." (Of course, really, I had told them that before…) But anyway, surveys are a great way to let your community know the types of resources that you can offer them.
Don't just think about books as your collection. Your teachers might want you to purchase software too, they might want a school-wide subscription to something like Glogster; Glogster is an interactive, multimedia poster maker. Or GradeCam, it's a grading program that you use with your iPad or your document camera. There's a small fee for using programs like these but they're cheaper if you can buy like a school-wide license.
You could be the teacher's advocate trying to find grants or fund-raising opportunities to help them get that. Our district purchases SAFARI Montage which, among other things, offers video clips in all content areas. This has really helped our teachers bring another dimension to lessons for visual learners.
There's also a plethora of free software that teachers love to use. They might want you to have classes that you teach available on how to use these platforms. You could teach easy things like Kahoots, which you know is a game-based learning platform. Or Nearpod that helps create interactive lessons, or like Quizlet which helps create multi-player classroom quizzes.
Once you take ownership of this professional development, your teachers will see them as part of your collection. Many times fiction also figures into the curriculum. If you have a teacher who asks students to read historical fiction, you want to make sure that your shelves are full of books that will fit the historical periods that that teacher teaches.
Maybe a science teacher wants a class set of fiction books that talk about concepts he is teaching—books about space or scientific experiments fit that. Think about the book called The Martian that was just recently a movie. This is a great book for high school kids to read to determine what is sound science and what isn't. Teachers could check out the class set for their classrooms or they could just have students check them out individually from you.
Class sets can be catalogued and housed in the library so that multiple teachers can have access to the books. Many times ESL teachers, who teach students of different languages, or teachers who pull out ESE, exceptional education classes, they're looking for some kind of interesting connection to the curriculum and class sets may be the way to do that.
When you're looking for books and eBooks for your student's pleasure reading, look at award winning books. Check their criteria to see if they are right for your kids. Look at top 10 lists online. Ask you students for suggestions—actually, that's how I've built my entire graphic novels collection, just with suggestions from kids.
Consider surveys for your students too. You can ask them their interests, if your students are into camping or fishing, you need to know that. There are both non-fiction and fiction choices that your students would like on a topic like that. I have a terrific English teacher who asks students to read a fiction book, and then they pull a topic from that book. It can be like a place that was in the book, or a controversial issue, anything, and then they research that topic, and this has led to some great research and some really great discussions. So looking at curriculum really does matter.
The school library collection should support the school curriculum, and the librarian should have a strong knowledge of the topics and sequence of instruction in each grade level. Franklin suggests several methods for building connections between the curriculum and the collection—not only in terms of its offerings but also areas of need. Among the suggestions are to study academic standards; examine the crosswalk between school library standards and content area standards; view textbook tables of contents; and survey teachers and students as to interests and needs. Remember to consider as part of your collection electronic materials, such as free and subscription-based databases and digital tools.
Select a grade level and area of your school curriculum (and/or state academic standards) to compare to information in the collection analysis report conducted in Lesson 2. Use the report findings and your knowledge of the collection to assess strengths and needs.
For example, consider this standard in English Language Arts, Reading: Literacy for Grade 6:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.9
Compare and contrast texts in different forms or genres (e.g., stories and poems; historical novels and fantasy stories) in terms of their approaches to similar themes and topics. (http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RL/6/)
Then consider, does the collection have the materials for students to fulfill this standard? Are different genres and forms available at appropriate reading levels and in varied formats? Is there balance across genres, and if not, what could be added? Do you notice titles that might be deselected for reasons pertaining to multiple titles or currency (e.g., The Hunger Games or Twilight, as Franklin describes)? What other resources might be available in the school that the collection report doesn't show (e.g., department materials or class sets)?
MLA Citation
Morris, Rebecca J. "Collection Development Basics: Practice Aligning the Curriculum & Collection." School Library Connection, September 2017, schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/2081079?learningModuleId=2081075&topicCenterId=2247902.
Entry ID: 2128225
Additional Resources
MLA Citation
Franklin, Patricia. "Collection Development Basics. Curriculum Matters [7:15]." School Library Connection, ABC-CLIO, August 2017, schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/2081079?learningModuleId=2081075&topicCenterId=2247902.
https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/2081079?learningModuleId=2081075&topicCenterId=2247902
Entry ID: 2081079