How a Meaningful and Personalized Mission Statement and Inquiry Skills Framework Can Breathe New Life Into Your School Library Program

Emily Houston and Kendall Boninti are the librarians at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in Cambridge, MA and they received a 2018 Web Seal of Excellence Award. 

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In the year and a half we have been working together in the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School Library, the two of us have sought to create a more equitable, accessible, and joyful experience for our students by making big changes to the physical space, programming, and the way we teach and collaborate with colleagues. After weeding and moving our print collection and revamping our website in the fall, we decided our next step was to formalize our mission and create a library learner competencies framework. We’ve already seen the impact that they have had on our program and we want to share our process with school library community.

Why we decided to finally do it:

One of our greatest frustrations has been the wide gap in inquiry skills at each grade level and the slow progression of students’ growth from year to year. In any given class, it seemed like half of the students had already mastered the skills we were teaching, while the other half was completely unfamiliar with the skills. Another frustration was that it was impossible for us to meet with every team from every department in a way that would ensure that the scope of projects we developed would provide an equitable learning experience for all students.

We quickly realized that creating a consistent framework outlining how students should move from basic inquiry skills to advanced skills would have several benefits:

• Close skills gaps and give students equitable opportunities to learn and master appropriately challenging skills
• Make better use of our expertise and our time 
• Evolve our role from being gatekeepers of inquiry skills into being leaders and instructional coaches who share the responsibility of implementing inquiry skills with our colleagues

How we did it:

• Formalizing our library mission

Before we could create an inquiry skills framework, we had to reflect on our fundamental mission. We’d been working with the AASL mission statement for quite some time (“The mission of the school library program is to ensure that students and staff are effective users of ideas and information”), but it felt too “cookie cutter.” We decided to keep the first sentence, added “producers,” and then expanded it further by including a detailed portrait of the essential elements of our unique program. Here is our formalized CRLS Library Mission.

• Developing a framework

We invited our ITS, Nicole Hart, to join us as we drafted our framework. First, we reviewed the AASL National School Library Standards (2018) and MA Digital Literacy and Computer Science Standards (2016). We quickly realized that we wanted our framework to focus on inquiry because it is the heart of our instruction and it encompasses various information literacies (media, textual, etc.). Next, we identified which skills we were already teaching, which skills students have usually mastered by a certain grade level, and which skills they need to master before they graduate. This resulted in our current CRLS Library Program Learner Competencies. We shared our framework with our administrator, Amy Short, and with colleagues in various departments to gather feedback. The overall reaction has been very positive and several teachers told us the framework did a wonderful job of clarifying which inquiry skills they needed to address in each of their classes.

What we have learned:

• Having this inquiry skills framework has helped us reconceptualize our program and the way we collaboratively plan projects for any subject area in any grade level. In particular, it makes the focus of each lesson more purposeful and more connected to the overall scope and sequence of inquiry skills.
• The framework is OUR curriculum standards, which gives us leverage as a department so that we have an equal stake with classroom teachers when collaboratively developing inquiry projects.
• Students can use the framework to get a clear outline of the learning expectations at each grade level and the progression of skills from year to year.
• Both the mission statement and the learner competencies framework are living documents that we expect to continually update as our community, access to resources, and program priorities all shift and evolve.

​If you have suggestions, we would love to hear them!