AASL Shared Foundation - Curate

Curating Information in High School Lessons

To gain some perspective on how schools are implementing AASL standards, I spoke with a high school librarian working at an international private school in Hong Kong with 109 students, grades 9-12. The school is highly diverse, with most students coming from Hong Kong, America, Canada, and Australia. His work strongly reflects the AASL Shared Foundation of Curate, which focuses on how learners collect, evaluate, and use information meaningfully and critically. 

Interview Guiding Questions

1. How do you implement the AASL Curate standard in your library lessons? 

2. What resources do you use to support students in curating information? 

3. Do you collaborate with classroom teachers to support these research skills? 

4. What challenges do you face when teaching these competencies? 

5. How do you assess student understanding of collecting, evaluating, and using information? 

AASL Curate Standard in Practice

In this high school setting, the librarian focuses on teaching students how to evaluate and prioritize sources, primarily through the use of the CRAPP criteria (Currency, Reliability, Authority, Purpose, Perspective). Students are guided to go beyond simply deciding if a source is credible and instead consider how much weight a source should carry based on its methodology and purpose.

During lessons, the librarian works through examples alongside students, comparing multiple sources on the same topic. This side-by-side analysis helps students recognize differences in bias, credibility, and usefulness.

I had the opportunity to work alongside this librarian on several lessons, and I saw how lessons were built around sharing experiences with each other to build background knowledge, then conducting research while evaluating those sources based on CRAPP criteria, and then finally putting together everything they’d learned collectively to design their own model for a pop-up resale shop in the school. Because of the school’s small size, these lessons were interactive and discussion-based, allowing students to explain their reasoning and receive immediate feedback from peers and instructors. 

Resources and Collaboration

The librarian supports instruction using a self-created slide deck and the IB Approaches to Teaching and Learning research module, which provides a structured framework for information literacy. Students are introduced to both open-access and subscription databases, including PubMed and JSTOR, helping them engage with more scholarly and credible sources.

For classroom collaboration, teachers can invite the librarian to lead a one-hour lesson connected to a classroom assignment. While collaboration is not constant, this allows research skills to be embedded in authentic learning contexts.

Challenges and Assessment

A key challenge is student motivation. Since the library is not a graded class, students may not feel accountable for retaining the skills taught. The librarian must rely on helping students understand the long-term value of research skills for their academic and future success. They do this by creating authentic, student led experiences in which students see positive results in how well they do their research, for example in the Model UN competition, the popup shop, and their humanitarian support project in the Philippines. 

Assessment is primarily formative, based on discussion and observation during lessons. While this allows for immediate feedback, there is limited tracking of long-term retention, which the librarian identified as an area for improvement.

Personal Reflection

I was especially impressed in the way this librarian worked alongside students to curate resources.  Rather than explicitly teaching content, he asked questions that guided students to evaluate their sources and question their own assumptions.  I think that acting almost as if he were a student as well gave students the space to figure things out on their own, which will help them retain the information longer. 

This is certainly a strategy I will implement in my research lessons when teaching students to curate information. It is important to teach students not just to find sources, but to evaluate and prioritize them thoughtfully.  In my future practice, I would aim to incorporate structured evaluation strategies like source comparison while also strengthening collaboration with teachers to reinforce these skills over time.