FOSIL in a Standalone Middle School Media Skills Course

[Matthew Rose Participant]

Beginning a New School Year at a New School

I am writing about how I am integrating the FOSIL Framework into my grades 6 – 8 Media Skills course. Grade six, seven, and eight students take my course for one semester each year. The course had been taught in the past as a standalone specialist class that focused on digital, information, and media literacy. It was my wish beginning this year to find ways to collaborate with other subjects and to integrate the FOSIL Framework into my units.

I began by changing the units in my courses. To do this I reviewed the standards I am required to teach which are the ISTE Standards for Students. Through reviewing them I picked out 13 that I thought were appropriate to teach in a school library course. I then grouped them around specific themes. I’ve placed in parentheses what the major topic covered in each unit is. I have also attached a slide showing which ISTE Standards I’ve aligned to each unit.

My four units are:

Knowledgeable Library User (Orientation to the School Library)

Critical Thinker, Reader and Viewer (Evaluating Sources & Information)

Capable Researcher (Research Process)

Ethical Communicator (Academic Integrity)

For me I believe that these units follow a logical progression. They also allow me to collaborate with whoever is working on these skills at the time that I am covering it.

Enter FOSIL

I am now beginning to crosswalk the FOSIL Framework to the ISTE Standards for Students that I am assessing in my course.  This will be the subject of another post once I have a version of the crosswalk complete. For now, I have included a slide showing how I have included two of the FOSIL Skills in my grade eight Knowledgeable Library User unit. It is my hope to identify the most important FOSIL skills that I want to support my students to develop. If anyone out there is using the ISTE Standards for Students I would be interested in hearing how you are integrating these with the FOSIL Framework.

21.10.2025

This post has been edited reflecting where I think critical thinking fits into my four units. I think it is better placed in the unit where students will evaluate sources and information rather than in the academic integrity unit. I have therefore renamed my units “Critical Thinker, reader, and viewer” and “Ethical Communicator.”

Attachments:

1. 

   1.png
   

2. 

   2.png
   

[Matthew Rose Participant]

I am sharing now what I have so far. The crosswalk contains the ISTE Standards which I am required to use for my assessments and grading, the FOSIL Framework, as well as the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts (Anchor Standards). After completing the initial crosswalk I decided to continue to cross-reference the standards used by my colleagues. As collaboration is my goal, I know I will need to communicate in terms of their standards. Through a conversations with my colleagues I have learned that our social studies department uses the AERO standards and our science department uses the Next Generation Science Standards. My next tasks will be to review these standards to see to what extent they discuss research. As well as start a dialogue with our learning leaders in each subject to see to what extent any standards that address research are in their taught and assessed curriculum. I will also return to my crosswalk (shared here) which is already quite long and prioritize which of the skills in the FOSIL Framework are essential to my course.

The work continues.

Attachments:

1. ISTE-to-FOSIL-to-CCSS-Crosswalk.xlsx

[Elizabeth Hutchinson Participant]

Hi Matthew, I just wanted to reply to your recent two posts and acknowledge the important work you are doing here. I do hope that once you are finished, you will share more widely and maybe even come back on my podcast to talk about it.

[Matthew Rose Participant]

Hi Elizabeth, thank you for your reply to my posts. All of this work is very formative as I am still understanding curricular standards that are all new to me. I expect it will take some time before I have developed some understandings worth sharing with a wider audience. I would be exited to do so if this project is successful. Until then I will continue to post my developments here. Best regards, Matt

[Matthew Rose Participant]

This will be my final post in this thread. Through some advocacy I have been able to arrange for my standalone media skills lessons to end at the close of this academic year. In it’s place I will be co-teaching with subject teachers next academic year. As there are other threads that address co-teaching I will likely post in these threads going forward.

 

[Jenny Toerien Keymaster]

Hi Matthew. Thank you for sharing your work on this – and congratulations for managing to achieve your goal of integrating your media skills into cotaught units. We’ll all be really interested to hear how that goes, which subjects you are collaborating with and what you find works better and what less well when coteaching. We’ve generally tended towards integrating inquiry into classroom subjects where possible because we have found that it is easier for students to see the importance and relevance of what they are doing when it is embedded in another subject* – and it is a good opportunity to help colleagues to integrate inquiry into their own practice, even beyond the collaboration. However it does come with its own challenges (such as shared ownership of classes and needing to negotiate time, learning objectives and assessment). Once you get going we would love to hear how your experience of shifting work that you have developed in a stand alone course into co-taught units, and perhaps how the opportunity to develop some of the lessons and ideas in your standalone course first feeds into your collaboration.

(*the main exception for me being EPQ and HPQ, where inquiry IS the subject in its own right, but is leant direction and purpose by the qualification at the end).

[Author]

Posts