Episode 7: Assessment (Evidence-based Practice) Virtual Podcast Interview with Kelly MillerIf school librarians are to achieve their capacity as leaders in their schools, it is their charge to influence the practices of their colleagues. As noted in Chapter 2: Job-Embedded Professional Development, coteaching is an ideal context in which educators organically practice reciprocal mentorship. Coteachers learn with and from one another as they guide, monitor, and assess student learning outcomes.

If school librarians are to collect direct measures, “they must be proactive in creating the conditions in which they can collect, analyze, and use evidence of their impact on student learning” (Moreillon 2016, 30). In short, in order to maximize their leadership, school librarians must seek out instructional partnerships, and they must coplan, coteach, and coassess student learning outcomes.

And in the best of all possible worlds, school librarian evaluators would observe them and provide actionable feedback in the context of coteaching. I was fortunate in my career to have site-level administrators who, with the classroom teacher’s permission, observed me during cotaught lessons. In several cases, our pre-evaluation conferences were conducted with the other educator present. In all cases, the post-evaluation conferences were one-on-one conversations between my evaluators and me.

Readiness for Coteaching
Jennifer Sturge, the Teacher Specialist for School Libraries and Instructional Technology for Calvert County (MD) Public Schools published an article in the January/February issue of Knowledge Quest (KQ). In the article, Jen shares how she provided collaboration training to help classroom teachers and school librarians prepare for classroom-library coteaching. She also worked with administrators to help them overcome possible barriers to coteaching such as library scheduling, collaboration time, and library staffing.

Jen found that 83% of the classroom teachers she surveyed believed that collaborating with school librarians would benefit students. Of course, there were challenges along the way, but can-do collaborators found solutions to address them. As Jen notes at the end of her article, “I was hoping to succeed but was also prepared to fail. After all, how could this project take off without funding? Through the sheer determination of everyone who has recognized the benefits to students and worked along with way with me, we’re moving slowly but surely to a more collaborative approach in our elementary school libraries” (Sturge 2019, 31).

Evaluating Coplanning
Using a coplanning form is one way to assess you and your colleague’s readiness to coteach. In the January/February KQ article “Co-Planning and Co-Implementing Assessment and Evaluation for Inquiry Learning,” I provided sample planning forms that include standards, learning objectives, and student outcomes evaluation criteria (Moreillon 2019, 42-43).

Effective collaborative planning creates a framework for measurable student success; it addresses the Understanding by Design (UbD) approach (Wiggins and McTighe 2005) to planning instruction. School librarian evaluators will benefit from observing, participating in, or reviewing educators’ evidence of collaborative planning.

Evaluating Coteaching
Evidence-based practice (EBP) suggests that educators base their instruction on published research, apply research-based interventions in their practice, and measure the success of their efforts in terms of the targeted student outcomes. UbD and EBP are aligned and can assist educators in determining the effectiveness of their teaching.

In the same issue of KQ, the literacy coordinator for Bismarck Public Schools Misti Werle shared her leadership in implementing and evaluating instructional partnerships in her district. Writing along with middle school librarian Kat Berg and English language arts teacher Jenni Kramer, Misti shared a “Levels of Library Services and Instructional Partnerships” document that guided Bismarck school librarians in serving as equal instructional partners. The document assisted them in stretching their collaborative practices and helped them assess their progress as well (Berg, Kramer, and Werle 2019, 35).

Evaluating the Outcomes of Classroom-Library Collaboration
In her podcast interview, Kelly Miller, Coordinator of Library Media Services for Virginia Beach (VA) Public Schools, provides school librarians with a pathway to leadership through evidence-based practice. When school librarians collaborate with others to develop an action research project, they can demonstrate their professionalism, collect and analyze data, and document how they are improving teaching and learning in their schools.

This tweet was cited in a recent issue of ASCD’s Education Update: “Have a dream or vision and struggling to get there? If so, let go of perfection, bring as many people together as you can, and focus on continuous improvement rather than a destination point of ‘success’” (@PrincipalPaul 2019, 3). Collaborative relationships can be challenging. Codesigning and coimplementing an action research project can be imperfect at times and collaborators must be able to self-assess and regroup.

Just as educators help students strive for continuous development, wise administrators and school librarian supervisors support educators in continually improving their practice. Approaching school librarian evaluation as providing feedback for learning means that librarians will have the necessary guidance to move their practice forward. Success is in the journey rather than reaching some static target for “perfection.”

Questions for Discussion and Reflection

1. Why is it essential for school librarians to have a different evaluation instrument than classroom teachers?
2. Think of a time you had an effective coteaching experience. What would an evaluator have noticed during this teaching and learning event?

For Fun!
Effective classroom-library collaboration can flourish in a positive school climate and a collaborative school culture. Figure 7.4 in this chapter (also available as a free download) shows a possible way to involve one’s administrators and colleagues in suggesting criteria for assessing the school librarian’s effectiveness.

Works Cited

@PrincipalPaul. 2019. ASCD Education Update 61 (1): 3.

Berg, Kat, Jenni Kramer, and Misti Werle. 2019. “Implementing & Evaluating Instructional Partnerships.” Knowledge Quest 47 (3): 32-38.

Moreillon, Judi. 2019. “Co-Planning and Co-Implementing Assessment and Evaluation for Inquiry Learning,” Knowledge Quest 47 (3): 40-47.

Sturge, Jennifer. 2019. “Assessing Readiness for School Library Collaboration.” Knowledge Quest 47 (3): 24-31.

Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. 2005. Understanding by Design, 2nd ed. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.