I just heard from a student who is preparing to start her first year as an elementary school librarian.  She’s been working all summer to create a welcoming space for her students and she wanted to know if there were any resource books I might recommend for library lessons.  I remember wanting that book when I started out as well.  But I never found it because ultimately the best lessons are those that you create yourself for your unique context with your unique stamp of creativity.  And they are created in response to the needs of your students and teachers and discovered in a collaboration with the school community.

But where do you start?

Try to find out what’s happening in classrooms/grade levels so you aren’t teaching skills in a vacuum.  For example, I did a reading interest survey every year with 3rd grade but then presented the findings as large graphs that I used for lessons related to their math curriculum and then posted outside the library for everyone to see.  I usually asked teachers what they were doing in science or social studies because those were easy content to grab on to.  Then I might ask what they were teaching in reading or writing and find a way to integrate those with library resources/skills.  So when I learned that second grade was studying voting in social studies and using literature for writing models I introduced the  Jane Yolen, How Do Dinosaurs... series and we wrote a class book about “How Do Dinosaurs Vote?”

It helps if you have some theme that you pull through the lessons and the year.  So one year I was asked to focus on integrating math; another year the focus was science – in these cases the principal or the school improvement plan allowed me to see what was a schoolwide focus that I could work with.  Or decide that you will make this the year of poetry or the year of working with video and find ways to integrate those with as much content and lessons as possible.  Then you can stand up in a faculty meeting and say “This year the library focus will be on poetry and I invite you to plan lessons with me that integrate poetry.  I’m sure I can find a poem for anything you are teaching: math, science, social studies.  And you can expect to find poetry popping up in unusual places like the morning announcements, the cafeteria or the bus line.”  You’ve provided an invitation and a challenge.

What are teachers being told they need to do more of this year? — find out how you can help or even lead any initiative.  One year teachers were introduced to thinking maps so I was modeling those with every library lesson.  I attended any staff development required of my teachers and then tried to integrate what they were told to do in their classrooms with what I was doing in the library. When I was planning with teachers this willingness to support them in new initiatives was greatly appreciated.

Use what you have – this may seem obvious – but look around to see what kinds of resources are unique and underutilized – online databases, ebooks, whiteboard, old sewing machines, puppets, a collection of magazines…

One year I built my lessons around my state’s children’s book award list.  I noticed that a lot of the books had some relationship to math concepts and I was able to integrate literature with mathematics in collaborative lessons.  Then we were able to participate in voting for the award.

Today I would be looking around for lesson ideas on Pinterest or Livebinder and curating my own collection of ideas.  Find colleagues who are willing to share ideas and don’t be afraid, as one of my mentors told me to “beg, borrow and steal” ideas but combine them with local needs and resources to spin your own particular kind of magic.

Yolen, Jane (2000).  How do dinosaurs say goodnight?  Scholastic.    Find this book and others in the series at http://www.scholastic.com/titles/dinogoodnight/

Photo courtesy of Jessica Thompson (2014).

What should learners hold us as school librarians accountable for? Clearly one area would be categorized as information literacy.  I’ve been pondering what this means and have begun to think of it as developing a relationship with information that includes understanding how to locate, evaluate, apply, create, and share information.  But beyond these skills and actions, our Standards for the 21^st Century Learner also point toward important dispositions or habits of mind including recognizing a need for information, possessing the curiosity, persistence and judgment to seek out, evaluate, and select information, and the creativity and persistence (again) to apply information in new ways to new problems and new solutions.  We want learners who will not only consume, but produce new knowledge and information.  Learners need to reflect and assess their own products and process in order to continuously improve.  We want learners who will push their own boundaries and the boundaries of their communities.

Community adds another layer of complexity to our relationships with information and knowledge.  Because we believe that learning is social and information is a social good, we want learners to seek and draw on the expertise of others at every step in the information seeking and knowledge creation process.  How do we as school librarians promote this social aspect of information literacy when it comes to dispositions?  How do we teach students to seek and provide support for each other when it comes to persistence, curiosity, reflection, and self-assessment?  One way is to actively seek and provide feedback and evaluation to each other.  We can model support, encouragement, and sharing the work as collaborative partners.

But it also occurs to me that these social aspects of our relationship with information are not always easy.  Conflict and challenge may be necessary to push ourselves and our communities into new directions and toward new knowledge.   Students need honest critique and are likely to experience disagreement, friction, disappointments and failure.  Our relationship with information is complicated and not always gentle, particularly as we seek to become producers not just consumers.  We can help our students as well as ourselves and the professionals we work with to learn to let go and push through a sense of loss toward new learning and knowledge.  It’s complicated but it’s a living and growing endeavor.

Judi’s questions about linking individual teacher evaluation to individual student achievement highlights a real conundrum in educational research and best practices. I almost have the sense that we are holding onto the baby and throwing out the bathwater without acknowledging the role the soapy bathwater played in getting the baby clean. In trying to tease out the particular interventions, instructional materials, or teacher practices that improve student learning, we have often neglected the cultural context surrounding both teacher and learner.  In particular, we might attend more to the culture of collaboration in a school and how that allows teachers to locally adapt and sustain educational reforms.

Contrary to the current focus on individual teachers and their impact on student learning, we recognize that complex problems like student achievement require complex solutions. They require diverse perspectives, knowledge, and skills.  A team of teachers is more likely to offer the kinds of diversity needed to address the achievement gaps that continue to challenge our schools.  How can administrators promote the collaborative culture needed to sustain such teamwork? One way is to provide time in the schedule for teams to meet. Principals can also make participation in collaborative teams a part of the expectation and evaluation of teachers.  Another strategy might be to enlist the school librarian, whose professional training has included collaboration, as an important member of every team.

While we as a profession have championed collaboration and instructional partnerships, we seem to have failed to articulate our role in those partnerships and more importantly, our role in student achievement to our stakeholders.  This clearly, as Melissa, referencing Elizabeth Burns, has suggested is a problem of advocacy.  But perhaps it’s also a problem of articulating for ourselves what it is that we do, or offer to educational practice, that might be unique to libraries and librarianship.  Is it our knowledge of diverse resources and how to identify, select and evaluate them? Is it a particular pedagogical or even a philosophical approach to learning needed to meet today’s technological and economic challenges? Is it the physical or virtual spaces we provide for exploration, access, and innovation? Are we an important gear turning the wheels of collaboration in a school? How does the school librarian support innovation in instructional practice? Let’s find out before we throw out the bathwater, or get thrown out with the bathwater.

Clip art from Microsoft.

During the past two weeks I have attended the Virginia Association of School Librarians Conference and the AASL Bi-Annual Meeting in Hartford.  In Hartford, I attended a pre-conference led by Audrey Church, Jody Howard, Judy Bivens, and Mona Kirby on Performance Evaluations for School Librarians.  In this session we learned about the wide variety of performance evaluations in effect in the fifty states plus the District of Columbia.  Audrey Church shared information about Virginia’s system where school librarians are evaluated on the same instrument as teachers.  This instrument includes seven measures: professional knowledge, instructional planning, instructional delivery, assessment of and for student learning, learning environment, professionalism, and student academic progress (VDOE, 2012). The seventh one: student academic progress states that “the work of the teacher results in acceptable, measurable, and appropriate student academic progress” and requires teachers to demonstrate their impact on student achievement.  Many teachers (including school librarians), who don’t have test data connected to them, must explore other ways to demonstrate this impact.  School districts have taken different approaches to school librarians.  Some must have a program goal and measure, and others are required to have a student learning goal and measure.  In the latter case, a pre and post-test are often administered to demonstrate growth for example, in information literacy skills.

In this session, a comment by Nancy Everhart caught my attention.  Nancy talked about identifying and measuring other impacts of a school librarian or school library program such as drop out rates or student behavior referrals.  Quite often school improvement plans have achievement goals that are based on growth measured by end of course or end of grade test scores.  But these plans may also include other school (and district) goals.  These could include graduation rates, behavioral referrals and suspensions, and parental involvement.  As school librarians, perhaps it is time that we work to demonstrate our impact on these valued measures.  We know from research that parental involvement has an impact on student achievement (NEA).  School librarians should be able to develop goals, implement programs, and develop measures to evaluate this important goal.  We draw parents in as volunteers, for events such as bookfairs and family reading nights, and can measure parental visits to the library and circulations.

I also believe school librarians have an impact on another area :teacher job satisfaction and teacher retention.  Between 40 and 50% of teachers leave the profession within the first 5 years (Riggs, 2013). How can school librarians work to alleviate this problem?  We can reach out to new teachers with offers to collaborate on lessons and units – not just lessons that will be taught in the library but to help them plan their own classroom lessons. We can be pro-active in identifying and providing materials for those lessons.  And we can offer our assistance as the “information” person in the building.  “Ask me anything and if I don’t know the answer I’ll try to help you find out who to ask or where to look.”  These new teachers will become strong library allies.  New teachers will remember that the librarian was a true lifeline in their early years and will remain instructional partners throughout their careers.  A MetLife Survey (2010)  found that teachers in highly collaborative schools were more satisfied with teaching as a career. Do school librarians who serve as collaborative, instructional partners have an impact on teacher retention?  What about strongly-resourced library collections? How could we demonstrate these impacts?  School librarians work with everyone in the building and therefore, should be able to demonstrate on various measures of school success.

MetLife (2010).  MetLife Survey of the American Teacher: Collaborating for student success.  New York: Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.  http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED509650.pdf

NEA (n.d.). Research spotlight on parental involvement in education. http://www.nea.org/tools/17360.htm

Riggs, L. (2013).  Why do teachers quit and why do they stay? Atlantic (18 October)  http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/why-do-teachers-quit/280699/

VDOE (2012).  Guidelines for uniform performance standards and evaluation criteria for teachers.  Virginia Department of Education. http://www.doe.virginia.gov/teaching/performance_evaluation/guidelines_ups_eval_criteria_teachers.pdf

I was recently struck by the title of a blog post about blogging: “Isolation is now a choice educators make.”   I found this title provocative, not just about blogging, as I thought about choice, isolation, and the word “now.”  Choice seems to be an important aspect to Judi’s discussion of co-teaching versus coaching.  Teachers and school librarians choose to collaborate, teach, and assess student learning together.  Willing partners may choose to take risks together and to support each other in those endeavors. Co-teaching is a choice that we make.
But isolation is also a choice. Isolation is a choice that some educators and some librarians continue to make.  In libraries, we make the choice to work in backrooms when students and teachers are in our building and in our library.  They find and check out books by themselves or with a clerk or volunteer.  Librarians choose isolation in school buildings when they remain in the library instead of working in classrooms, hallways, or labs.  Isolation is a choice if we eat by ourselves instead of in the cafeteria or teacher’s lounge.  We may be the only librarian in our building but isolation is a choice if we don’t belong to listservs or professional organizations.
I also find myself putting emphasis on the word “now.”  The word “now” has an immediacy and urgency. Isolation is now a choice. We now have so many other choices with blogging, twitter, and other forms of social media that we can now choose whether or not we are isolated.  Judy’s description of how the Vermont School Library Association used Skype and Google docs to work collaboratively is a great example of using social media tools to overcome isolation and work collaboratively and productively now. We now live in times of abundant choice.  And in each moment we can choose to become engaged with each other, with teachers and staff, and with students.  Can we now afford to make any other choice?

I was interested to read Judi Moreillon’s recent post about professional learning communities.  Education is a complex endeavor, and as school librarians we belong to several communities of practice including the practices of collaborative teaching and learning in our schools.  What makes these communities of practice into learning communities for the participants?  Etienne Wenger, a major theorist regarding communities of practice discusses three modes of belonging: engagement, imagination, and alignment and suggests that an effective combination of these three can transform a community of practice into a learning community (1998).

Engagement is the work of participation. Quite simply, in a school I think of this as “showing up” and taking part in activities that are focused on student learning including planning meetings, professional development, and committee work.  It means being visible in the school: in hallways, at parent nights, in classrooms and all those spaces in a school where learning is occurring. In short: not just the library.  Wenger talks about engagement as identity work, or “gaining a lived sense of who we are” (1998, p.192). We develop this sense through our work and through our interactions with others.  In a learning community, members engage with each other through listening, speaking, and doing together.

Imagination is the process of moving beyond the present moment and seeing future possibilities and potential.  When a school librarian and teachers plan together and envision what students will know and do differently as a result of instruction, they imagine outcomes for the work of their collaboration. Together they take the raw materials of curriculum, resources, and knowledge of learners and learning to create something new.  Imagination is creative and playful and requires engagement and alignment to ground it in practice.

Alignment connects us to a broader purpose and allows us to coordinate our efforts. Content standards allow us to align our efforts as school librarians with those of classroom teachers.  A school librarian’s knowledge of content standards, the school’s mission, and even the textbooks that teachers use helps to align our efforts with the overall goals of the school and community.

Wenger sees these three modes of belonging as necessarily supportive of each other.  Alignment without imagination is blind allegiance. Imagination without engagement has no real application in the world. Engagement without alignment has no focus.  In combination, these three modes of belonging are particularly powerful. For example, imagination combined with engagement leads to a reflective practice.

Professional learning is about shared membership in a community of practice. Our responsibilities as members of a learning community involve interactions with our colleagues that are engaged, imaginative, and aligned with a shared purpose.  A community of practice framework allows us to coordinate our efforts as we engage with each other.  Collaboration is work but it can also be imaginative and playful.

Wenger, E. (1998).  Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity.  New York: Cambridge University Press.

I love mathematics.  I’m not sure how many librarians would agree with me, and I often notice that we overlook math teachers in our collaboration efforts.  I was surprised one year when my principal asked me, as the school librarian, to focus my efforts on third grade math.  She also provided me with the suggestion that I send a word problem to the class ahead of their visit to the library to generate curiosity about what we would be doing in the library.  Our school had a mathematics focus that year for professional development and I attended with the teachers.  At one of those sessions, the facilitator suggested that students write their own word problems and he offered this familiar framework from language arts: character, setting, problem.  The proverbial lightbulb went off for me – here was my hook.  I could take the characters and setting from a picture book and write a math word problem that related somehow to the problem in the book.
I wrote the word problem on chart paper and sent it to the classroom ahead of their library visit.  Students brought their work to the library and I opened the lesson with a discussion about strategies to solve the problem.  “I don’t want to know the answer, I want to talk about how you got the answer.”  The discussions and activities that followed exemplified much of the second of the Standards for the 21st-Century Learner: 2.1.2 Organize knowledge so that it is useful; 2.2.2  Use both divergent and convergent thinking to formulate alternative conclusions and test them against the evidence; 2.3.1 Connect understanding to the real world; and 2.4.2 Reflect on systematic process and assess for completeness of investigation. I was often surprised when I asked students to explain their work by the kinds of divergent thinking that emerged.  Often students surprised me with valid methods that I had not thought about.  I learned from them, and mathematics became an exciting and collaborative area of exploration for all of us.
AASL has a crosswalk with the Common Core mathematics standards and the Standards for the 21st Century Learner.  I would argue that anywhere in the Common Core standards where you see “real world,” there’s a place for the librarian to build a connection with the mathematics in the classroom and the kinds of real world problems encountered in both fiction and informational texts.
When the learner is expected to organize or share their work, these are key information and communication skills found in the library skills domain.  We certainly see in the current interest in infographics the need for graphs and tables to visually present statistical information.  Mathematicians and statisticians must be able to communicate their work to others.  Librarians have also realized the importance of presenting data about our programs and our impact on our learning communities in a graphic and engaging manner.  In a recent VOYA article, Ryan Ireland shares how Greene County Public Library published their annual statistics as a graphic novel. The final product can be viewed at http://tinyurl.com/greenecountycomic

Check out the article: Ireland, Ryan (2013).  Get graphic with stats.  VOYA 36 (3) 38-9.

The AASL Crosswalk with the Mathematics Common Core standards can be found at: http://www.ala.org/aasl/guidelinesandstandards/commoncorecrosswalk/math

This summer students in two sections of our course Production of Instructional Materials, used a free IPad App, Videolicious to create quick video commercials on topics that ranged from how to use interlibrary loan to an introduction to the horror genre.  We were excited to see this app on the AASL Best Apps For Teaching and Learning list just released at ALA but we also knew first hand the limitations of the free app that we learned took lots of trial and error to realize a plan for combining video, still images, text, voice over and music.  Students collaborated ahead of time with a partner to create a storyboard for their video and then only had  a few hours on campus to pull it all together.  And wow! they did pull it together? Their videos were amazing and so much fun to view.  We talked about showing families how to use this free app on their devices or cell phones: think about the creative possibilities for students to share their learning!

The app clearly had its constraints and we had to remind students that this is a lot of what you deal with in the school library: learning to create something despite the constraints of time, money, and other resources.  This is what all artists have to work through: realizing an artistic vision despite the limitations of the materials or media chosen for the work.  As I think about this related to collaboration, I realize that we are also working with an idealistic vision of everyone working together to create learning opportunities for students.  We are also constrained by limited time and resources.  We have trouble finding enough time to plan together, or finding time in busy classroom schedules to provide adequate time for true student inquiry and creativity.  We find ourselves teaching students to use free apps on shared devices with filtered internet access.  And yet we believe in the vision and we persevere and some amazing things happen.

Finding a way to use the materials at hand to realize a vision doesn’t just apply to a two minute video assigned as coursework.  It’s a necessary frame of mind needed by those of us who hope to create a collaborative school culture.  The students who came to campus that afternoon with a plan knew where they wanted to go with their video.  They persisted through multiple trial and error attempts.  They worked together to find solutions that leveraged the materials they found around them. They learned from each other.  As school librarians, we hope they will have a vision, create plans in collaboration with others, persevere despite setbacks and limited resources, and continue to learn from their peers.

School librarians can create a culture of support, collaboration, and creativity with the teachers and students in their schools.  We are artists with access to a pretty cool palette of resources including those recently highlighted by the AASL Best Websites for Teaching and Learning 2013 and Best Apps for Teaching and Learning lists.  Give some of these resources a quick spin and be prepared to share them with your school communities.