Put a teacher-librarian on your team

(BC Teacher: 2005 September) by Karen Lindsay

All over the world, companies are reaping the benefits of collaborative effort. Automobiles are created by teams and job interviews are done in collaborative group settings. Can’t make it as a team player? You won’t get into McMaster’s School of Medicine. It’s not just a fad; it’s a recognition that results improve where many minds, skills, and perspectives are brought to bear. Shared responsibility improves performance, unleashes creativity, and broadens skills while reducing stress and building relationships.

Teaching, especially at the secondary school level, has not embraced this concept. Teachers spend much of their day planning, delivering, and assessing lessons in isolation. It is not unusual for a beginning secondary teacher to enter the profession facing four different lesson preparations per day, difficult classes, and five months of teaching without a preparation block!

There is no opportunity to observe more experienced teachers, and no time to work collaboratively with anyone. Over time, we become inured to, proud of, and perhaps even happy with our isolation. However, it is not the healthiest, most productive approach to teaching students.

Enter the teacher-librarian. Here is the one person on staff whose prime function is to support teachers in unit planning and lesson delivery. Teacher-librarians are committed to collaboration.

We work best when we work closely with individual teachers in the critical areas of designing authentic learning tasks and integrating the research and technological pieces required by various IRPs. Did you know that next to socio-economic issues, the single greatest factor affecting student achievement is the school library? Research undertaken and replicated over the past 60 years indicates that students whose teacher-librarians take active planning and teaching roles tend to achieve significantly higher test scores. In schools where teachers and teacher-librarians work together to plan, implement, and evaluate lessons and units of study, student results improve by between 5 and 20%. No teacher would wittingly deprive their students this opportunity for improvement, but for it to occur, classroom teachers need to make teacher-librarians a part of their planning, teaching, and evaluation routine.

No one needs to tell you that the demands of teaching are constantly increasing. Our students have so many more needs, and need so many more skills than they once did to be successful.

Curricular change seems like the only constant along with increasing class sizes. Nevertheless, it is important that students receive research assignments that teach them how to locate, evaluate, and use today’s information, both in school and beyond. No one person can be expected to have the experience, knowledge, and time to teach information literacy and technology skills, while continuing to teach the child, and the curriculum. Teaching in today’s school demands a team approach. Lean on your teacher-librarian.

During the planning of a unit, your teacher-librarian will focus on incorporating challenges that will call upon students to access, evaluate, and use information from multiple sources in order to learn to think, and to create and apply new knowledge. Intelligent decision-making relies on accurate and complete information. Through their collaboration, teachers and teacher-librarians, can provide students with specific opportunities to develop skills in information literacy and information technology, skills that they will need more and more both in school and outside its walls.

Co-planned lessons generally do not rely on textbooks, preferring to teach students how to locate and use resources that will meet the needs of the task. Frequently the products of a co-planned lesson might be PowerPoint presentations, mock trials, virtual seminars, or poster sessions, rather than pen and paper activities. Teacher-librarians often take responsibility for assessing the students’ process through the unit, as well as marking their reference list/bibliography.

What to bring to a collaborative planning session:

• A unit you’ve already taught or an idea for a new unit.
• Your expert knowledge of the curriculum and your students.
• An open mind.

What the teacher-librarian might teach, using a task that requires critical thinking and problem solving:

• How to formulate critical questions to guide the research process.
• How to select the most appropriate resources to accomplish a given task.
• How to search the library’s catalogue and locate resources in the library.
• What a database is and how to use it.
• How to search the Internet effectively.
• How to check web sites for reliability.
• How to use information ethically.
• How to take notes and track sources effectively.
• How to use process management tools for assigning responsibilities, tracking tasks, and setting deadlines.
• How to organize, integrate, and present findings in effective ways.

If your school does not have a fully trained teacher-librarian, ask your principal why. If your teacher-librarian’s time is largely taken up providing preparation time and supervising book exchanges so that collaborative planning and teaching become impossible, ask your principal why. If information literacy skills are not fully integrated into your curriculum, if you and your teacher-librarian are not equal partners who plan, deliver, and assess work together, figure out why and do what you can to change that. Every school deserves an effective library program.

For most of the Western world, January heralds the New Year. Not so for teachers. September is our time for new beginnings and resolutions. This year, why not make one of them to plan at least one unit with your teacher-librarian?

Karen Lindsay is the teacher-librarian at L’École Secondaire Reynolds Secondary School, Victoria

Whither literacy?

(BC Teacher: 2005 May/June) by Maureen L. MacDonald

I chased my dream to be an elementary music teacher, and it was good. But when I taught from 1969 to 1971 in a school with a marvelous library program and a dynamic teacher-librarian named Doris Fuller, I knew that I would make a change. I quit my job and returned to UBC to take a year in teacher-librarianship, and I have never regretted that decision.

When I was first a teacher-librarian, times were exciting for school libraries. Budgets were sufficient to allow the purchase of many new books each year—perhaps two or three per student. Walls were knocked down so that the one-room libraries could expand to the size of two or three classrooms to meet the demand for shelf and student space. Collections expanded to include more than books. Teacher-librarians practiced Co-operative Program Planning and Teaching (CPPT) with colleagues. Students borrowed books and tapes and, in my school, stuffed animals to read to.

The point of the library program always was, and still is, to enhance literacy. Long before the days of mission statements and school growth plans it was understood that literacy was our goal. No one said "improve literacy" and "slash the staffing and materials budgets" in the same breath. Not until just after the provincial election of 2001.

Is it any wonder that the members of the educational community are scratching their heads in amazement at the ridiculousness of the juxtaposition of the partial closure of libraries and the admonishment to keep up high standards? Scholars, parents, teachers, students, newspaper columnists, and members of the public fail to see any logic in the plan of the Gordon Campbell-led provincial government to underfund the public education system. Perhaps the benefit of this plan is only seen by the operators of private, for-profit schools that advertise to attract well-off students to their big libraries and their small classes.

BCTF members have dealt with the library crisis in a variety of ways—endless fundraising activities to stock the libraries, calling on volunteers to pitch in where there used to be staff, relying more on student monitors. Why do we try to fill the gaps left by deliberate underfunding? You know why! We don’t want the students to lose any opportunities to learn. We add to our own workloads until we can stand no more.

The breaking point for teachers has come. We cannot do more with less. We cannot even do the same with less. We can only do less with less.

Let’s stop covering up for the deficiencies in the system. Let’s let the public and the school community have a taste of reality. How will they know if we don’t show them? Wouldn’t a knowledgeable public want to see the restoration of the library programs cut by the Liberal government since 2001?

Literacy is the cornerstone of democracy. Our urgent and immediate job as teachers in this democratic society is to protect literacy. One way to do this is to recognize the changing social and economic conditions in society and to reflect that in public school libraries. In other words, provide students with well-stocked libraries staffed by professional teacher-librarians and learning will ensue. That, my friends, is common sense.

When I see the school library in the big picture, I notice that the outline has been erased and the image is getting smaller. Multiply this times a thousand schools. The picture is not pretty.

The stripping of teachers’ bargaining rights, the elimination of class-size and class-composition clauses from our collective agreement, the mockery of assuming that libraries can run without teacher-librarians, and the slashing of budgets for staff and materials was highly detrimental to the learning conditions of our students. Success is not achieved by supplying fewer resources.

We have a different set of MLAs to educate now. Let’s tell them what a good library program would do to enhance literacy. It is false economy to reduce educational opportunities because today’s students are the most valuable assets of our future.

Maureen MacDonald is a teacher-librarian at Elsie Roy Elementary School, Vancouver.

Is it a library or a bookstore?

(BC Teacher: 2005 January/February) by Chris Bocking

My elementary school library has been closed for almost a week. Why? Well, a huge transnational corporation based in the United States has been using it as a profit centre. Yes, Scholastic Corporation has set up its books, pencils, stickers, and posters in attractive displays, and the students have been encouraged to bring money to school to support this "book" event.

Teachers who see Scholastic as a benign presence like being able to purchase books and stickers for their students. They argue that book sales raise money for the library. I suggest that these reasons are insufficient and that teachers should not support commercialism in the public school system.

Richard Robinson, who is not only chair, but also president and CEO of Scholastic Corporation, says on his company’s web site that his company is "dedicated to helping children around the world to read and learn." How noble.

That mammoth company had revenues of $2.23 billion in 2004. Elsewhere on the web site, we learn that the good people at Scholastic are "helping children learn, grow and be happy."

Staggering profits could not be achieved without willing support and tireless efforts of the teachers who volunteer tens of thousands of hours promoting Scholastic’s products to their students, collecting the forms, filling out papers, supervising book sales, and so on.

Scholastic is excited about the Internet’s possibilities for bringing future growth. In May of 2004 alone, Scholastic’s teacher web site had 1.26 million unique visitors. I have heard from teachers about the ease of ordering products online or using Scholastic’s phone service.

Does anybody still want to consider the library the heart of a school? Closing it down and turning it into a private, for-profit book and junk-item store to raise money is wrong. That should not happen. And teachers’ time could be spent in better ways than padding the profits of the largest book company on the planet.

For information on the upcoming Public Education Not For Sale II conference, February 18–19, 2005, go to http://bctf.ca/notforsale/PrivatizationConference.

Chris Bocking teaches at Keating Elementary School, Saanich.