To guide school librarians in their work of inspiring future generations of explorers, AASL tasked a 2020 ALA Emerging Leaders team with developing a guide of activities, resources, and professional development based on the Explore Shared Foundation in the "National School Library Standards." As learners prepare for college, career, and…

Tripp Reade is the school librarian at Cardinal Gibbons High School in Raleigh, North Carolina. This article describes how he redesigned his school's library orientation program after learning about escape rooms and a variant known as puzzle rooms. Puzzle rooms present players with a set of challenges to solve; they require "teamwork,…

Makerspaces, collaborative workspaces stocked with materials and tools for creating, building, designing, and learning, are becoming more and more common in schools and, in particular, in school libraries. Makerspaces in the school library allow for connections between making and literacy. Indeed, such connections are authentic and natural as…

Which potato chip is healthiest: (1) regular; (2) baked; or (3) sour cream and onion? This problem requires critical and numerical skills in order to read and compare nutrition labels. The question has applications in mathematics and science classrooms but also in teachers' lounges and school cafeterias. It is a problem that addresses the five…

An after-school book club, led by the school librarian, was held to test the efficacy of the peritextual literacy framework (PLF) in teaching skills related to critical thinking, problem solving, information literacy, and media literacy. The PLF is an extension of paratext theory developed by Gérard Genette, which provides a typology of the…

The rapid growth of information over the last 30 or 40 years has made it impossible for educators to prepare students for the future without teaching them how to be effective information managers. The American Library Association refers to those students who manage information effectively as "information literate." Information literacy instruction…

Members of the school library media profession are fortunate to have new direction from two organizations that seek to define the type of educational experiences that will best benefit students as they prepare to continue to learn, live, and work in the 21st century. Both organizations, American Association of School Librarians (AASL) and the…

A 21st-century conception of learning is much more than adopting new skills and integrating them into the curriculum or purchasing new technologies and placing them in classrooms--it is the fundamental shift from a teacher-centered learning environment to a student-centered one. Being an educator in a 21st-century learning environment is a…

Some of the author's most valuable experiences as a library media specialist (LMS) were not in a school library. Rather, they were on the streets of Chicago, in community gardens, and on the rooftops of buildings in Humboldt Park, where she was hired by the University of Illinois Community Informatics Initiative as a graduate assistant and LMS in…

A little imagination, a little drama, a little mystery. Using the guided inquiry model in this updated, second edition, students become detectives at Information Headquarters. They solve a mystery-and enhance their problem-solving and literacy skills. Middle school is a crucial time in the development of problem-solving, critical-thinking, and…

The Library Media Center of the Maggie L. Walker Governor's School, a high school specializing in Government and International Studies, located in Richmond, Virginia, serves close to 650 gifted students in grades 9-12. The skills of Governor's students range from the neophyte ninth-grade researcher to experienced faculty members embarking on their…

For the thirty-seventh year, the Research and Theory Division and the Division of Instructional Design of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) sponsored the publication of these Proceedings. Papers published in this volume were presented at the annual AECT Convention in Jacksonville, Florida. This year's Proceedings…

Describes the ILPO (Information Literacy Planning Overview) that combines facets of information literacy including critical thinking, problem solving, and information technology into a planning document to support teachers and teacher-librarians. Discusses the whole-school approach to integrating information literacy into the curriculum that has…

Illustrates how problem-based learning can be a context for developing information problem-solving skills, from defining an information need to evaluating information to articulating ideas through argumentation. It supports critical thinking, teaching for understanding, and development of student information literacy skills. (AEF)

Describes 10 key elements of generic teaching strategies for developing student thinking and provides a rationale for the participation of school library media specialists in developing student thinking skills. The role of media specialists within the school and the importance of information-based decision making in a free society are discussed.…