We’ve had a cold spring, but finally the ground is warming up.  As the sun set last night, my husband and I put in a small garden: tomatoes, squash, okra, eggplant, and melon plants and some bean seeds.  Overnight we had some welcome rain and the corn in the farmer’s field behind our house appears to have grown a foot.  Another farmer nearby has planted a field of potatoes, and my husband chuckles when he remembers the first time I dug up potatoes.  I thought I had found buried treasure as right below the ordinary surface of the garden, I uncovered these rounded jewels.  A garden provides these small surprises almost daily.  I will eagerly watch that row of bean seeds for the delight of those first, green leaves.  I believe we put in a garden as much for these small daily gifts as for the vegetables we hope to harvest.

Where I’ve been fortunate to be a part of a “culture of collaboration,” I have found the same sort of delight in planning with other professionals.  There’s the same sense of putting your hands in the dirt and coming up with nuggets of great ideas that will nourish the learning of our students.  Or, planting seeds of lesson ideas and walking into a classroom several days later to discover they have sprouted into student projects on walls and desks.  Or, receiving an unexpected rain of support from an administrator, who recognizes the importance of collaboration and allows it to grow in unexpected ways.

Often, I believe it’s the small gifts that cultivate and sustain a collaborative culture.  When we meet face-to-face, there is the chocolate on the table, the family photographs someone shares from their phone, or the humorous classroom anecdote shared by a teacher. It’s quite simply the laughter, the raised eyebrows, and the sharing of a time and a space.

Many of my collaborations today take place online.  It’s exciting to meet with colleagues around the country or in Australia.  We share documents in GoogleDocs or Dropbox.  But I often find myself wondering online, “where’s the chocolate?” or “what small gifts might I offer to sustain this relationship?”  Because ultimately, while the collaboration is task-oriented, it’s the relationships that provide the rich soil, sunlight, and rain needed to nourish and grow that work. Relationships provide the medium for collaboration.  They are the heart and the chocolate, and we need to find the small ways to nourish those relationships whether it’s face-to-face or online.

 “What are we doing today?” Jerome asks as his class walks into the library. Their teacher, Mrs. Jones has just left them at the door. “I’m going to tell you, just wait,” I respond having designed a research project (in conversation with some of the grade level teachers) to prepare fifth graders for an upcoming overnight and out of state field trip. “Oh, Mrs. Jones just said you could read a story to us, she didn’t care.” Jerome’s remark hit me in the gut. It didn’t matter how hard I had worked at this school to reach out to teachers in order to plan meaningful library lessons that were integrated with their curriculum. For some teachers, the only value they saw in the school library was a place to drop their students for forty-five minutes. Other teachers would tell me as they left their students at the door, “Oh, by the way they need to check out a biography today,” and I would be faced with the choice of  whether to teach the lesson I had prepared or to drop that plan and teach about biographies, or to do both in a rushed and incomplete way. The library had a revolving door with classes lining up to leave as other classes were lined up outside the door to come in. I was busy; I worked hard and felt good about reaching every child every week. But my doorway told this story: classroom teachers stopped here to leave and pick up. They didn’t really know what happened on the other side of the door, some didn’t really care, and the culture of this school  (and its scheduling of the library) allowed this to happen.

This is one of the more painful and revealing memories I have of my first professional school library position in an elementary school with a fixed schedule. Judi’s post about creating a school culture that supports collaboration brought this flooding back to me.  Implicit and important to the shared practices that express a culture’s values are the ways of understanding and using time.   Time is one of the most important resources we have in a school and we should use it in service of student learning not the other way around. In 1994 the National Commission on Time and Learning prepared a report about American schools entitled “Prisoners of Time” criticizing schools’ promotion of schedules and grade level expectations as being more about time and time served than about student learning.  How can we continue to afford this?

Years ago, Donham Van Deusen and Tallman’s research demonstrated that schools with a flexible schedule included more collaboration between teachers and the school librarian (1994).  We recognize collaboration as a best practice and this blog celebrates and promotes librarians and teachers planning together.  Yet we cannot remain silent about the continuing practice in elementary schools of fixed schedules that thwart our efforts at collaboration and undermine our ability to infuse the school curriculum with twenty-first century skills, resources, and tools.  Judi’s research that pre-service teachers eager to collaborate with school librarians encountered numerous barriers including the library schedule and the school librarian should be a wake-up call to us all (Moreillon, 2008).  Our doorways should tell the stories of eager learners and instructional partnerships not rigid schedules and rigid mindsets.

References

Donham van Deusen, J. and J. Tallman. 1994. The impact of scheduling on curriculum consultation and information skills instruction: Part one, The 1993–94 AASL/Highsmith Research Award Study. School Library Media Quarterly 23(1): 17-25.

Moreillon, J. (2008). “Two Heads Are Better than One: Influencing Preservice Classroom Teachers’ Understanding and Practice of Classroom–Library Collaboration”, School Library Media Research.  Chicago: American Library Association, September 24, 2008. http://www.ala.org/aasl/aaslpubsandjournals/slmrb/slmrcontents/volume11/moreillon

National Commission on Time and Learning (1994).  Prisoners of Time.  Washington, D.C.  Accessed online:  http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/PrisonersOfTime/index.html

As school librarians, we value collaboration in the work we do with teachers and other community members.  We also recognize that our students will need the skills of teamwork and collaboration in their continuing education and employment.  One of the Common Beliefs espoused in our Standards for the 21^st Century Learner is that “Learning has a social context” and that “Students need to develop skills in sharing knowledge and learning with others, both in face-to-face situations and through technology” (AASL, 2007).

In the online courses I teach, I have worked to include opportunities for students to collaborate with each other through partner and group projects.  It’s not unusual for me to have a student ask to work alone and I respond that as the school librarian, you won’t work alone but will need to develop the skills, knowledge, and dispositions to work with others: to be a member of a team.

This semester, I added an exercise at the beginning of a group project to encourage students to think about teamwork and their contribution and commitment to the group.  The first reading was a very brief story about Steve Jobs (Elmer-Dewitt, 2011) taken from an older recorded interview.  Jobs relays a story about a neighbor who showed him what happens when a bunch of ordinary, rough looking rocks were tossed in a rock tumbler.  After some noise and time, and through the friction of those rocks rubbing together, they were transformed into something polished and beautiful.   Jobs talks about how the work of a team resembles that rock tumbler as ideas are shaken up and transformed through the friction of group work.  I think it’s important that it’s the ideas that are given such rough treatment, not the egos or feelings of group members.

The second resources I asked students to view was a short video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jF80RqLkl6E

Teamwork: Birds or People

In this video a group of people, carefully choreographed and well-practiced, transform themselves into a variety of shapes.  It looks like magic.  Jobs also commented on the magical transformation that results from a group of people working together to design a new product:

Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.

And it’s that process that is the magic (Jobs cited by Elmer-Dewitt, 2011

But of course, we know that it’s not magic.  It’s hard work that shakes us up.  But through practice and commitment and perhaps some noise and friction, we find the rough edges of our individual ideas become polished and take a shape we are unable to create by ourselves.

American Association of School Librarians (2007).  Standards for the 21st Century Learner.  Chicago: American Library Association.

Elmer-Dewitt, P. (2011).  Steve Jobs:  The parable of the stones.  CNN Money (November 11, 2011). http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/11/11/steve-jobs-the-parable-of-the-stones/

Itchelielie (2007).  Teamwork: Birds or People.  Online http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jF80RqLkl6E

Some of my most rewarding instructional partnerships were with first year teachers. Remember what it was like to juggle planning lessons, teaching, classroom management, and the general expectations of a new workplace that first year?  As the school librarian, I always made it a point to visit new teachers as they were setting up their classrooms (so exciting!).  I often appeared in their door with a wagon-full of books to use for displays and read-alouds during those first days of school.  I let them know what the library had to offer both in terms of resources and collaboration.  In many ways these first encounters were simple offers of friendship.  “You know where to find me if you need something.” These were small but important beginnings.

While the school year generally starts in August or September, it’s not unusual for new teachers to enter classrooms throughout the year as long-term substitutes or to fill other unexpected vacancies.  These new teachers may have considerable work to do entering classrooms midstream and joining a well-established school culture.  As the school librarian, you can become their best friend!  Reach out to these new staff members with general offers of resources and information.  Some of these new teachers will be fortunate to join established teams of teachers and find mentors who are already engaged as instructional partners with you as the school librarian. But others may not be as lucky and a few welcoming words from you with offers of assistance will go a long way toward building a strong future partnership.

I was fortunate to work in a school with a strong collaborative culture and principal support for grade level planning with the librarian.  Yet, I was constantly reminded that the work of building instructional partnerships is ongoing.  Many, if not most schools experience staff turnover and not just at the beginning of the year.  Step in early to introduce yourself and go out of your way to say hello in the hallway or teacher’s lounge.  Ask how it’s going and offer your ideas, energy and time.  Especially in the middle of the school year, you may get busy with those teachers and teams with whom you have developed collaborative relationships.  But you can’t afford to overlook these new teachers, and they will be grateful for your attention.  This gratitude will likely return to you for months and years to come.

So if you are reading this and someone new has joined your staff, stop now to reach out to them.

One issue that often arises in discussions about collaboration and instructional partnerships are those teachers who simply don’t want to “step out of the box,” as Judi puts it.  Often our advice to school librarians is to move on and work with the willing.  I’ve never been comfortable with that advice because it’s their students who will suffer.  Particularly in an elementary school, I recognized that students with a teacher who didn’t want to collaborate with the librarian might potentially go through an entire school year with little opportunity to use the resources of the library in the deep, meaningful ways enabled through collaboratively planned learning activities.  We have to be careful not to box ourselves in with teachers won’t come in to work with us.  Here’s a few ways I have tried.
Plan with other members of that teacher’s team and simply offer to do similar lessons or activities with the reluctant teacher. “Hi, I know you’re getting ready to teach genres to your students, could I share the lesson and rubric Mrs. M. and I developed?” I did find that a pitfall of this approach was that the reluctant teacher did not have the same sense of ownership of this lesson and did not provide the same level of preparation or follow-up.
Plan with other staff members who work with the same students.  Maybe you can do an integrated lesson with the art or physical education teacher.  Or perhaps, the same students go to another teacher for science and you can plan a lesson with that teacher.  At least, the students will have some meaningful lessons integrated with 21st Century Standards and enriched through the resources and teaching of the school librarian.  Student teachers are often enthusiastic instructional partners and you may be able to draw them in even without the full participation of the cooperating teacher.
Offer extension activities for students before or after school, or during lunch.  These might include competitive activities like Battle of the Books or clubs to share and discuss books or graphic novels or the availability of technology and library resources for media productions.  Ask for a few minutes in the teacher’s classroom to introduce and promote these activities; these students may be particularly eager to spend choice time in the library.
Continue to offer services that are lower on the collaborative ladder such as providing resources or even providing stand-alone lessons on occasion.  While we strive to promote instructional partnerships and to protect our time for those teachers willing to plan with us, we need to maintain connections with all of our students.
Be involved and take initiative in school-wide activities.  Plan a poetry day, author visit, or assembly that engages the entire school.  The more ubiquitous the library is throughout the school, the more likely that all students, even those with reluctant teachers will glean some benefit from your perspective and will maintain a relationship with the library and librarian that will carry them through the “lean” years.
I realized there were a few teachers who were never going to “step out of the box” with me, but I also realized the ones who were really punished in those cases were the students.

An outstanding session I attended at NCSLMA was Track It: Documenting Instructional Impact developed by Gerry Solomon, Donna Shannon and Karen Gavigan from the University of South Carolina School of Library and Information Science.  An outline of their presentation can be found in their wiki http://slmimpact.wikispaces.com/Presentation+Outline   In their session they presented numerous resources to assist school librarians as they use documentation to inform practice, demonstrate impact, and advocate for school libraries.  Links to these resources are collected in the wiki.  A similar presentation is on the program for the American Library Association Annual Conference in 2013.  The wiki is a gold mine for school librarians to use to collect data about their impact on student learning.

Take a look at the wiki page for forms http://slmimpact.wikispaces.com/Tools

to find several related to collaboration.  The Collaboration Log/Checklist from Koechlin/Zwaan (2003) struck me for its ease of use with an ability to quickly circle the type of collaboration and the time frame.   As we have discussed in this blog, time is often identified as a barrier to collaboration. Maintaining a log such as this one will allow a school librarian to quickly note even the briefest (0-5 minute) hallway or parking lot conversation.  Over time, these encounters may establish a pattern of collaboration that might otherwise be overlooked.  Are there some teachers who seem to prefer this type of collaboration? Do these encounters lead to lessons or other activities?  Are they follow-up to more formal meetings? Or do they serve as preparation in advance of longer conversations?  Over time these collaboration logs might demonstrate an ongoing and cumulative collaborative relationship that might otherwise be lost.   I’m reminded of how some budgeting plans stress documenting even your smallest expenses because frequently these add up to become a significant drain on your budget.  In a similar way small savings may accumulate and earn interest over time.  The small conversations school librarians have with teachers will also add up and earn interest over time.  Here’s a way to collect and study that data.

I’m on a road trip that began with the North Carolina School Library Media Association’s Annual Conference in Winston-Salem.  Buffy Hamilton gave an inspirational keynote address where she asked the audience to question what we learned in library school, even as recently as five years ago, in light of new shifts in education toward what has been described by Jenkins et al (2006) as a more participatory culture. As I listened to Buffy, I found myself returning to the excellent query presented by Judi last week regarding what school librarians would do differently if we considered teachers to be our target clientele.  In my work collaborating with teachers, I often wondered about this same question. School librarians bring an entirely new set of resources to the table when teachers are planning classroom instruction both in terms of the kinds of media we are able to identify, select, and share and the Standards for the 21^st Century Learner that focus not only on skills, but on dispositions, social responsibility and self-assessment.  These resources may provoke teachers to consider different ways to deliver and engage students in instruction and assessment. Buffy Hamilton also called on school librarians to “become a part of the instructional design conversation” with teachers providing a focus that is inquiry-based, participatory, and promoting a sense of wonder and delight for learners. We need more research in the field that explores Judi’s question about the indirect impact of school librarian collaboration with teachers on student learning.  Such research might track the conversations and resources introduced by the school librarian during collaboration into the classroom to see how they are taken up by teachers and then by students.

Buffy Hamilton also spoke about an educational “ecosystem” and many of her remarks focused on the direct relationship of the school librarian to students and student learning.  What happens when we think of the school librarian as a coach and mentor to students? We have the means to connect directly with students, to embed ourselves in classroom instruction and to create “makerspaces” in our libraries where students come to work directly with us and the resources of the library to create their own products and new knowledge. In these terms I began to think of the direct relationships school librarians have with students and their families. School librarians are in a position to develop relationships with students that overflow the classroom, that transcend an academic year by following students as they progress through the grade levels, and grow to include siblings, cousins, parents, and grandparents.  The school librarian has a unique perspective on the trajectory of students beyond a single classroom or grade level.  This knowledge and understanding also cycles into our collaborative work with teachers.

As Buffy Hamilton suggested, we function in an educational ecosystem.  Everything we do is connected to everything else.  We have a unique position in the educational ecosystem that provides us with a wider view of student learning and multiple avenues to impact student learning. I think Judi’s question is a great one: As a school librarian how would you organize your time differently if classroom teachers were your primary clientele?  We should embrace it as a query that leads us to reflect deeply on the work we do with teachers and our impact on professional development and the ways a culture of collaboration might be nurtured with teachers.  Perhaps the question could be asked and pondered in terms of each of our stakeholders.  What would happen if we considered families as our primary clientele? Administrators? The community? Perhaps it’s not so important which stakeholder we choose to focus on, but that we find ways to track that impact back to student learning. Because, as I was reminded in another excellent session I attended, we should align everything we do in the school library with the mission of our school and no doubt the mission of each school includes some language about the education of the students in that school.  Ultimately that is our bottom line; there are probably multiple paths toward that mission and working as instructional partners with teachers is clearly one of the more fruitful paths we could choose.   Where do you see yourself making an impact on the educational ecosystem in your school?  What are the many ways you might track your work with various stakeholders back to student learning?  Consider each in turn as a query without quick answers, but reflective questions to ponder as you evaluate the choices you make regarding the use of your resources of time, space, and materials.  Think of it as self-assessment for school librarians.

Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, R., Robison, A. J., & Weigel, M. (2006). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture:  Media education for the 21st century. Chicago: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.