Tag Archives: coteaching

Collaboration Is Key to Student Achievement

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The past weekend I had the pleasure of sharing a keynote and concurrent session with members of the Pennsylvania School Librarians Association (PSLA). Like many other educators around the country, Pennsylvania school librarians are wrestling with their place in the implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).

PSLA is a vibrant professional association. They have/are a strong advocacy team/membership committed to maximizing the impact of their 2012 school libraries study. This is one of the findings “Creating 21st-Century Learners: A Report on Pennsylvania’s Public School Libraries:”

“The librarian collaborates closely with classroom teachers in every subject area to teach students everything from making sense of the information they gather to collaborating with other students to create new knowledge” (PA School Library Project 2012).

Classroom-library collaboration can be challenging; it can also be so rewarding in terms of improved student learning outcomes. (And besides, it is more fun to teach together rather than alone!) The time is now for school librarians who serve as collaborators to coteach with classroom teachers to improve instruction and to do the hard work of co-implementing best practices in teaching and learning.

Bravo to PSLA for their commitment to making a positive impact on student learning!

References

Moreillon, Judi. “Collaboration.” Digital Image. From the Personal Collection of Judi Moreillon.

PA School Library Project. 2012. “Creating 21st-Century Learners: A Report on Pennsylvania’s Public School Libraries.” PA School Library Project. http://tinyurl.com/PAstudy2012

School Structures that Support Collaborative Cultures

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In our conversations about collaborative cultures, it is important to remember that classrooms and school libraries are situated within a system called “school.” Systems have structures that support or hinder the growth of their members. Teacher isolation is one structure that has – for far too long – created barriers to educators’ professional development and to school reform.

“Teacher isolation is so deeply ingrained in the traditional fabric of schools that leaders cannot simply invite teachers to create a collaborative culture. They must identify and implement specific, strategic interventions that help teachers to work together rather than alone” (DuFour 14).

When we consider how school librarians can serve as essential leaders in building a culture of collaboration in schools, we must consider the structures within which we work. Fixed library schedules are one tradition that thwarts school librarians’ efforts to serve as equal partners in instruction with classroom teachers.

In fixed library schedule schools, learners come to the library once a week for a brief lesson and book checkout. Often times, classroom teachers do not stay in the library with their class. There is very little instructional time and whatever concepts or skills are taught are not revisited until the next week during the regularly scheduled time. This practice is contrary to what we know about how people learn. It is not a best practice.

Roger Grape is an elementary school librarian in Dallas Independent School District. He created a digital advocacy story targeted to a school principal audience to promote flexible scheduling in libraries. He advocates for giving classroom teachers and school librarians opportunities to coteach and co-facilitate student learning. As Roger notes, with the support of two educators and given the time they need to practice deep learning, students will achieve more.

Check out “Bendy, Twisty, Flexible Scheduling” by Roger Grape! (And thank you, Roger, for giving me permission to share your work.)

Works Cited

DuFour, Richard. “In the Right Context: The Effective Leader Concentrates on a Foundation of Programs, Procedures, Beliefs, Expectations, and Habits.” Journal of Staff Development 22.1 (2001): 14-17. Print.

Grape, Roger. Bendy, Twisty, Flexible Scheduling. Mar. 2013. YouTube.com. 1 Apr. 2013. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWo3FWmQVhM>.

Coteaching Models

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 In my professional books on coteaching reading comprehension strategies, I use the coteaching models suggested by Marilyn Friend and Lynne Cook. Their background in special education inclusion is a good fit for the kinds of instructional interactions that can address the needs of individual, small groups, and whole classes of students. These are the Friend and Cook coteaching strategies:

  • One Teaching, One Observing/supporting (which, in my opinion, is important for special ed observations but not school librarian work)
  • Center or Station Teaching (with educators facilitating some stations and students working independently in others)
  • Parallel Teaching (dividing the class into two groups and engaging in the same processes and the same or similar content)
  • Alternate Teaching (One educator teaches a smaller group of students who need to get caught up or need additional background knowledge or help before they join the entire group.)
  • Team Teaching (working together with the entire class as in the coteaching videos in the “Coteaching: What Does It Look Like?” post)

Dr. Gail Kirby from Western Kentucky University created a “Co-Teaching Models” Prezi with embedded videos to demonstrate these strategies. Thank you to Dr. Barbara Fiehn for requesting permission from Dr. Kirby for me to share this presentation with my graduate students and here on our blog.

Youth learn from modeling and by imitation; adults learn in these ways as well. For educators who have not had opportunities to practice coteaching, seeing others engaged in these practices is a first step.

References

Friend, M. & Cook, L. (2010). Interactions: Collaboration skills for professionals. 6th ed. Boston: Pearson.

Kirby, G. (2013, February 16). Co-teaching models. Retrieved March 9, 2013 from http://prezi.com/ggct4dh2swju/co-teaching-models/

Moreillon, J. (2007). Collaborative strategies for teaching reading comprehension: Maximizing your impact. Chicago: ALA Editions.

Moreillon, J. (2012). Coteaching reading comprehension strategies in secondary school libraries: Maximizing your impact. Chicago: ALA Editions.

 

Coteaching: What Does It Look Like?

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Many schools are getting serious about collaboration and coteaching as strategies for implementing the Common Core State Standards. Communication and collaboration across grade levels and content areas are especially critical to students’ success in meeting the CCSS College and Career Readiness Standards, which are identical across grade-levels in the English Language Arts (ELA) standards. Coteaching, however, takes collaboration beyond curriculum articulation.

Coteaching among educators offers many benefits for learners and for educators, too. When implementing new standards, educators who develop a shared vocabulary, procedures, and processes create greater opportunities for student success. Coteaching between a classroom teacher and a school librarian brings together the combined expertise of two professionals who bring different skill sets to the table.

In our graduate program, the majority of our preservice school librarian students, who have all served as classroom teachers, note that they have never practiced coteaching. In our courses, we encourage coplanning and collaborative work. Still, students ask, “What does it look and sound like?”

To that end, Texas Woman’s University doctoral student Ruth Nicole Hall and I provided a demonstration lesson for preservice classroom teachers and selected video snippets of various parts of the process. For both preservice classroom teachers and preservice librarians, we posted videos that showed us, in the roles of classroom teacher and school librarian, coplanning, comodeling, comonitoring, and coteaching this lesson. We hope these snippets will help our students see the benefits in action. Check out the videos on our undergraduate preservice classroom teacher Library Materials for Children course wiki!

Reeling in the Reluctant Fish

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Several weeks ago, Sue Kimmel blogged about working with reluctant teachers, the ones who are not coming to the collaboration table.  She offered some ideas for making sure that students in those classrooms still had school library learning opportunities in different settings.  I would like to explore ways to reel some of those reluctant fish into collaborative relationships.

First, cast the line with some intriguing bait:

From my experience, many teachers who are reluctant collaborators are often leery of new ideas or trends.  They may not want to jump on the latest bandwagon, or to take a risk in looking foolish in front of colleagues or students.  Mostly, they like to play it safe, not venture into the unknown.  Respect that view, be generous, and don’t give up.  Cultivate a person to person relationship.  Watch, listen, and ask probing, but friendly questions about what’s happening in their classrooms.  Tease out the challenges that they have encountered around curriculum units, or student engagement.  Ask to visit or help out in the classroom.  Listen to students who come in from those classes with projects that have been assigned.  Get the big picture, and just wait.

Get acquainted with any school reform initiatives, or curriculum revisions that might impact that teacher.  Implementation of Common Core Standards and the new testing format are certainly hot topics right now.  Be part of that conversation, and immerse yourself in the documents, so that you understand the implications for the educational community. Embrace emerging technologies. Have some hotlinks in your PLN for other standards, too-AASL, ISTE, and so on.

Gather up a few “lures,” such as online resources, web 2.0 apps, blogs, rss feeds, and best practices in pedagogy and brain-based learning.  Fill your tackle box with information about Universal Design for Learning, flipped classroom, backward design, differentiated instruction, inquiry based learning, and so on.

Be ready with one small lure to offer that reluctant teacher, when you have the conversation that opens an opportunity to take the first step.

I know, I know… you don’t have time or patience to wait for that fish to bite, but as long as you have the line out, and the fish is circling, you may get a big one in the end!

Caught one!

In years past, I had a fish, oops, I mean colleague, who was in a self-contained classroom, and I tried to extend a collaborative hand without a lot of success.  Then, the administration required every teacher to collaborate in a team to develop and co-teach a standards based unit.  Since this person was not part of a team, she had to team up with someone.  Guess who she chose?  Needless to say, it was the beginning of a creative and stimulating collaboration that benefited both of us and the students in her classroom.  Our collaboration continued to grow throughout the years, and we had so much fun! (BTW-that’s not me in the photo.  All photos from Microsoft Clipart)

More hooks:

Looking for other entry points for collaboration?  Be sure to check out the Teacher Resource pages within Debbie Abilock’s fabulous NoodleTools website.  There are wonderful ideas and links to web tools and resources.  Every school needs to have this resource for information literacy.  Some of the material is gratis, but the advanced product is well worth the cost.

Resources:

NoodleTools Curriculum Collaboration Toolkit.  NoodleTools, 2007. Web. 25 Feb. 2013. <http://www.noodltools.com/debbie/abilock/collab/.>



					

		
		
	


				
					
	

		

						
Advocating for the Instructional Partner Role

			
						

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In LS5633: The Art of Storytelling, Spring ’13 Texas Woman’s University graduate students will identify a personally-meaningful library or education value and create a digital story to advocate for it with specific library stakeholders.


Coteaching is central to my practice of school librarianship. In my experience, supported by research in the field, coteaching is the best strategy for making the greatest contribution to students’ learning and teachers’ teaching. Coplanning, coteaching, and coassessing lessons and units of instruction are essential activities of 21st-century school librarians. For card-carrying school librarian instructional partners, reaching out to classroom teachers and specialists requires on-going advocacy work.


For the storytelling class last spring, I created “Coteachers: Step Out of the Box,” an Animoto video targeted to classroom teachers and school librarians who may not have experienced the astounding benefits of coteaching. This spring I am asking grad students to draft their digital advocacy stories, use social networking and participatory culture tools to seek feedback from their target audience(s), revise and publish their stories, and reflect on the assignment.


So, I am seeking feedback from Building a Culture of Collaboration Blog readers as well as my Twitter followers and Facebook friends.


    

  1. Do the photographs in the video communicate the benefits of coteaching to educators and students?
    2. 

  2. Do the design, images, and music reinforce the idea that “stepping out of the box” for effective and fun(!) coteaching is a worthwhile strategy?
    3. 

  3. Does the video capitalize on the meme “out of the box” as an expression that describes nonconformal, creative thinking?
    4. 

  4. Other ideas for improvement?
    5. 



Please post your feedback here or email it to me at: jmoreillon@twu.edu


Thank you for making time to help me improve my digital advocacy story.


Sincerely,

Judi




 




					

		
		
	


				
					
	

		

						
New Year’s Resolution: Deep Learning through School Library Programs

			
						

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In a recent post to the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) Forum, Dr. David Loertscher pointed us to a Mindshift blog post by Tina Barseghian. Her piece focused on measuring deeper learning.


In the Mindshift blog post, Dr. James Pellegrino defined deeper learning as a way to learn processes that transfer and make knowledge useful in new situations. Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond, professor of education at the Stanford and advocate for education reform, is also cited in Barseghian’s post. Darling-Hammond states that deeper learning involves problem solving in collaboration with others: “Collaboration is a skill not a deficit.”


On the AASL Forum, David asked how school librarians are shifting their practices, particularly in Common Core State Standards learning experiences, “to concentrate on deeper learning rather than the old superficial factual knowledge acquisition that has been commonplace.” He also asked what school library educators are doing to teach this shift in preservice preparation courses. To answer David’s questions, I would like share my New Year’s resolutions.


I will continue to work with the school, public, and academic librarians in Denton, Texas as we inquire about how to best support young people in our community in developing lifelong literacy skills through deep learning. As a first step in the 2012-2013 academic year, the Denton Inquiry 4 Lifelong Learning team is facilitating a year-long book study of Drs. Carol Kuhlthau, Leslie Maniotes, and Ann Caspari’s book Guided Inquiry Design: A Framework for Your School (Libraries Unlimited, 2012).


In my work as a school librarian educator, I will continue to push the preservice candidates with whom I am privileged to learn toward facilitating inquiry learning and technology integration through classroom-library instructional partnerships that position librarians as leaders in “deeper learning” reform efforts in their schools.


Whenever the opportunity arises, I will write letters to the editors of the newspapers in my communities to inform readers of the potential of professional school librarians to positively impact 21st-century students’ learning and teachers’ teaching.


And I will continue to coproduce this blog with my colleagues Drs. Sue Kimmel, Melissa P. Johnston, and Judy Kaplan to share news and views to further conversations with our preservice librarian candidates and practicing librarians regarding our role in building cultures of collaboration in our schools.


As a practicing school librarian or school librarian educator, how will you resolve to improve the practice of our profession in 2013?


References


Barseghian, Tina. (2012, Sept. 13). How do we define and measure deeper learning? Mindshift Blog. 31 Dec. 2012.


Word Cloud. Wordle.net. http://wordle.net


 


					

		
		
	


				
					
	

		

						
Collaboration: Benefits to Students

			
						

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While observing the one-hour workshop cooperation and a collaboration planning session role play, the preservice principals in the TWU Professional Development and Supervision course identified the items (on the post-it pictured) as benefits to students.


The principals noticed that students would benefit from instruction provided by two (or more) educators with different teaching styles. When the preservice principals shared this bullet, they also talked about how the instruction that was planned addressed students’ various learning styles as well.


They noticed that through collaboration the educators pushed the instruction to a higher level. Critical thinking was a focus of the lesson/unit planned. The collaborative planning session revised a previously taught Civil War unit that focused on heroes and battles (what David Loertscher calls a “bird unit”) and involved students in an inquiry process in which they would develop personally-meaningful questions about the war.


Targeted assessment and shared responsibility for assessing the learning outcomes were also important to these preservice principals. School librarians can excel in gathering locally-generated formative assessment data to demonstrate the impact of instruction on student learning outcomes. This aspect of evidence-based practice is essential in today’s learning and teaching environment.


I want to thank the students in Dr. Starrett’s ELDR 5223 Professional Development and Supervision Fall ’12 class for allowing me to share the “library story” and for sharing their insights with me/us.


 


Reference


Loertscher, David V., Carol Koechlin, and Sandy Zwaan. Beyond Bird Units: Thinking and Understanding in Information-Rich and Technology-Rich Environments. Salt Lake City: Hi Willow Research and Publishing, 2008.


					

		
		
	


				
					
	

		

						
Dream Teams: Classroom Teachers and School Librarians Connect and Coteach for Student Success

			
						

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Are you attending the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Conference in Las Vegas next week? If so, we hope you will attend our session. (Specifics below). Presenters will be coteaching teams from each instructional level—elementary, middle, and high school. Here’s our description.


Ignite student learning with collaboratively-designed and cotaught lessons and units of instruction! When classroom teachers and school librarians join forces, they create resource-rich, inquiry learning experiences to impact student achievement. Coteaching also offers educators the benefits of job-embedded professional development. Let us share how everyone wins on these successful teams!


If you can’t join us, please check out our wiki, which is still in progress at: https://dreamteams.wikispaces.com/


Coteachers positively impact student learning and build a culture of collaboration in their schools!


Session Code: G.09

Saturday, 11/17/12 from 9:30 to 10:45 a.m.

Grand Ballroom #117, Level One


					

		
		
	


				
					
	

		

						
The Flipped Library

			
						

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21st-century school librarians post a fine collection of book trailers, extensive pathfinders, online tutorials, and other resources, and student learning artifacts online in order to serve their learning communities 24/7. These curation activities provide 21st-century resources to support school library collection development.


But then what?


On Friday, November 2nd at the Richardson-Plano (Texas) “Pump Up Instruction” Library Expo 2012, I presented sessions to invite elementary and secondary librarians to consider how they can show that the librarian is the most important resource in any library. (Thank you to David Lankes for crystalizing the concept.)


In the “flipped” library, school librarians provide students and teachers with support they cannot get learning from home or in their classrooms without the aid of their school librarian. School librarians can provide students with explicit modeling for reading comprehension and inquiry learning. School librarians serve as coteachers who strengthen the work of their colleagues in monitoring student learning, assessing outcomes, and developing expertise in instruction.


Check out the resources at: https://flipped-library.wikispaces.com