The Colorado Springs School Library is a vital part of the learning community with materials and services to promote and reinforce student interests and abilities in reading and research. The library collection supports classroom instruction, encourages literary exploration, includes professional resources, and contributes to meeting the information needs of the entire community. The staff maintains a flourishing and inviting environment, builds a current and comprehensive collection, and collaborates with students, staff, and parents to ensure a quality program.

II. Performance Goals and Objectives

The goals and performance objectives for the Library department are as follows:

To provide intellectual access to information through learning activities that are integrated into the curriculum and that help all students achieve information literacy by developing effective cognitive strategies for selecting, retrieving, analyzing, evaluating, synthesizing, creating, and communicating information in all formats and in all content areas.
To provide learning experiences that encourage students and others to become discriminating consumers and skilled creators of information.
To provide resources and activities that contribute to lifelong learning while accommodating a wide range of learning styles, interests, and capacities.
To provide a program that functions as the information center of the school, both through offering a locus for integrated and interdisciplinary learning activities with the school and through offering access to a full range of information for learning beyond this locus.
To provide resources and activities for learning that represent diversity of experiences, opinions, and social and cultural perspectives and to support the concept of intellectual freedom.

III. Instructional Strategies

The instructional strategies employed by all grades are as follows:

Traditional Strategies

One-on-one individualized instruction as requested by the student or teacher
Class instruction on a regular, weekly schedule for Children’s School
Class instruction in Middle School and Upper School as requested by the teacher
Student handbook appropriate for the particular grade level

Experience-Based Strategies

Hands-on interaction with all materials and databases
Research collaborations with classroom projects

IV. Assessment Techniques

To assure that our department and students are meeting these goals, the following assessment techniques are applied:

Feedback from the teachers as to how well the lesson carried over into classroom work
Observation in the library as students locate resources and use them, work independently, and work in groups.
Student surveys