Teachers and Librarians Working Collaboratively

[Matt Participant]

Of all of the chats this seemed like the forum where collaboration should be discussed. I have been working with a small focus group of staff at my school to discuss teacher-librarian collaboration. Our vision is a seeing our librarian collaborate with teachers to focus on developing student’s core skills (since we are an IB school these would be AtL skills) and developing teacher’s abilities to be facilitators of library services. As I did my background research on this I looked into what makes for successful collaborations?

Some key points I came across so far are:

– Develop relationships and collaborate with these teachers

– Document the collaboration

– Clearly define what your roles are

– Collaborate often (enough) once a month is ideal

– Be the extra-miler (the organiser helps) but don’t do it too much!

– Have a shared vision

– Collect and assess formative data about the collaboration

The trial collaboration

I’ve arranged a trial collaboration with a MYP Language and Literature teacher at my school. His students are reading The Breadwinner by Deborah Ellis and as their product they are being asked to produce three journal entries as if they are someone living in Afghanistan at that time. For my role in the inquiry I am going to show them some techniques for using our library resources, taking notes, and documenting their sources. I drew from four FOSIL framework skills to define what I will teach. I would like them to keep an inquiry notebook as they read to jot down ideas that they can explore using a variety of sources to learn more about life in Afghanistan under the Taliban. My thought is to develop a series of journal prompts that will also support this. The goal of this being so that when they write their three journal entries they will include some of the knowledge they gained from the story and from the sources they learned along the way.

The goal of this trial collaboration is to develop some data from a successful collaboration that we can use at my school to influence others to collaborate / use the library to support their units.

I am having my first planning meeting with my teaching colleague today. I will keep everyone posted with how this goes.

Bibliography

Kammer, Jenna, et al. “Stategies for Successful Librarian and Teacher

Collaboration.” School Library Research, vol. 24, pp. 1-24. ERIC,

eric.ed.gov/?q=strategies+for+successful+school+librarian+and+teacher+collaboration&id=EJ1292862.

 

[Elizabeth Hutchinson Participant]

Hi Matt

It will be really interesting to hear how this goes. Focus groups are something that is currently being discussed in my membership so I look forward to reading your outcomes.

Best Wishes

Elizabeth

[Darryl Toerien Keymaster]

Thank you, Matt and Elizabeth.

Matt, on Elizabeth’s excellent suggestion, I have created a separate topic for your post because it is important and distinctive enough to warrant it.

For reference, it came from Between the classroom and the library : a work in progress, which references Chis Foster’s topic, Teachers and Librarians Working Collaboratively: New Models of Professionalism.

I, too, will look forward to your promising update.

[Author]

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