Advocating for the Instructional Partner Role

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

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

 

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About Judi Moreillon

Judi Moreillon, M.L.S, Ph.D., has served as a school librarian at every instructional level. In addition, she has been a classroom teacher, literacy coach, and district-level librarian mentor. Judi has taught preservice school librarians since 1995. She taught courses in instructional partnerships and school librarian leadership, multimedia resources and services, children’s and young adult literature, and storytelling. Her research agenda focuses on the professional development of school librarians for the leadership and instructional partner roles. Judi just completed editing and contributing to Core Values in School Librarianship: Responding with Commitment and Courage (Libraries Unlimited 2021). She has published four other professional books including Maximizing School Librarian Leadership: Building Connections for Learning and Advocacy (ALA 2018). (See the book study on this blog.) Judi earned the American Library Association's 2019 Scholastic Library Publishing Award.

3 thoughts on “Advocating for the Instructional Partner Role

  1. Bravo to the Washington Library Media Association’s new “Teacher Librarians at the Heart of Student Learning” advocacy video!

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_ybY5O7WvA

    In the video, school librarians talk about how they support teachers’ teaching as well as how they support student learning in vital areas: information and technology literacy instruction, reading advocacy, and information management.

  2. Dr. Moreillon,
    I love the “step out of the box” idea you’ve got going with this! It captures the essence of what we do as school librarians and the risk that it takes (for both teacher and librarian!) to coteach for student success. While watching the video I had the idea to show this to my “reluctant” teachers as I’m trying to get them to work with me. New school means teachers who don’t know me. There’s much work still to do.

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