AASL Standards Shared Foundation: Collaborate

COLLABORATE Building-level  

The school librarian participates in the implementation of collaboratively planned learning experiences by providing group and individual instruction, assessing student progress, and evaluating activities.  

The school library provides an environment in which collaboration, innovation, and creative problem solving thrive.  

The school library welcomes and encourages input to create consensus on library policies and procedures.  

The school librarian serves on decision-making teams in the school and participates in school improvement and accreditation activities.

For the first interview in this series, I spoke with Brandi Roper, the media specialist at Liberty Elementary School. Brandi has been the librarian there for 8 years and had previously taught ELA for a time in both 3rd grade and 5th grade. She had actually taught one of my own children in the past. I had the privilege of working with Brandi in my internship this semester, and for this reason I chose the shared foundation of "collaborate" for her interview. During my time at the school, I was able to see some of her collaborations firsthand, both in the way she worked with teachers, administrators and staff at the school, as well as the lessons that she set up for the children during their library time.

This year at Liberty Elementary School, because of Brandi's experience in teaching writing, it was decided that her focus should be with helping reinforce writing skills alongside their ELA teachers. Her students visit the library during their writing block and Brandi helps the teacher by teaching research skills, grammar, or even conferencing one-on-one with students on their writing assignments. She has meetings with these teachers weekly to plan their lessons in collaboration. She also pulls materials in advance for them. I witnessed one grammar lesson where she put the students in groups to diagram a sentence with nouns, verbs, and teach them to build sentences with more detail. By putting them in groups, she was allowing the students to collaborate and brainstorm together which is an important life skill for them to develop. Working on these skills in different ways can help strengthen students understanding of writing skills, but also teaches them how to work with others.

Another way that Brandi collaborates at her school, is in her collection development. Their school has developed a committee that meets and discusses collection needs for their students. Having this committee to work together helps Brandi to see through the eyes of other instructors, things that she may have missed and allows them to give input into purchases for their library. They provide oversight for each other and their students benefit from it.

One of the challenges that Brandi mentioned when it comes to implementing collaboration, is that teachers are often protective of the time they have with their students. I witnessed more than one occasion when I was at the school, when a teacher called down and had simply gotten busy and forgot to bring their kids. They then had to try to reschedule a time to bring them down. Due to being a Title I school, they also have three instructional coaches in their school for math, reading, and technology. For this reason, teachers also turn to them to ask for assistance rather than consulting the librarian. This is consistent with what I have heard from other librarians I have spoken with about having a difficult time getting teachers to be open to collaborating with them at times.

To sum it up, however, collaboration is not always easy, but it is always worth it. The value that it adds for your students and the school community in general is priceless. Every school that I have worked in and observed in is different and each has different expectations for their media center and librarian. Regardless of those differences, in order to best serve the school and your students, working together is a vital part of that role. As Brandi was quick to point out, collaboration is her absolute favorite part of her job, and being able to problem solve and help others is very rewarding.