A few weeks ago I attended the Third International Research Symposium at Center for International Scholarship in School Libraries (CiSSL) in New Brunswick, NJ . The theme this year was Digital Youth, Inquiry, and the Future of the School Library … Research to Practice.

The focus question was: How can schools prepare to deliver a 21st century education for digital youth?

I always like to sit at a table with people I don’t know when I go to these types of conferences or workshops so that I meet new and exciting school librarians. I have met some of my now dearest friends and favorite co-collaborators that way. And the same was true for this event! I sat at a table with some wonderful school librarians and school library coordinators from Maryland, Virginia, and Washington. I experienced two full days of engaging and energized learning with this group. We brainstormed as a group on what we think schools should be doing to address the needs of today’s learners. Then we listened to a variety of speakers that included international guests, practitioners, and academics speak on their views, experiences, and research in this area.

Another focus of the conference was also to celebrate 10 years of CiSSL and 30 years of Dr. Carol Collier Kuhlthau’s research centering on the Information Search Process and Guided Inquiry.  Guided Inquiry serves as a framework that can give learners a foundation for developing deep knowledge and understanding. It was inspiring to hear Dr. Kuhlthau speak on how she developed the Information Search Process from observing real world students and their information needs and seeking processes. Also her daughter Leslie, who is also her co-author, spoke about bringing in the teacher’s point of view to this process and how they developed the Guided Inquiry Design book. Practitioners from across the globe including England, Sweden, and Australia shared how they were using the guided inquiry framework and new technologies to address the information needs of digital learners and learning in a variety of environments.

It was great to see the element of collaboration in each of these presentations – how school librarians and teachers were working together to create deeper learning experiences for kids. It was refreshing to see and hear about these experiences and to experience some good professional collaboration myself. I often find that I learn just as much from my colleagues through informal chatting as I do the formal presenters. It was a treat to get to talk with and share ideas with school librarians from across the globe. As we enter the summer, be sure to think about yourself and your own professional growth – what do you have planned to expand your thinking and grow your network?

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.

As we were gathering articles for the 2013 March/April issue of Knowledge Quest one of the areas Ann Martin and I chose that we would like to highlight was the partnership between school and public libraries. And while I am sure there are great examples out there, I was amazed that this still seems to be an area where we as school librarians can grow.

In looking back through School Library Research there is really only one piece of research dealing with this partnership. In 2000 Fitzgibbons explored successful cooperative partnerships between school and public libraries, what these partnerships looked like and what factors have to be considered in forming these successful relationships.

This also came to mind as I reflected on the semester as it comes to a close. This semester in both of my courses, that are focused on school library topics, I had students who are not on the school library certification track enroll in each of these courses. I went from wondering why they were taking those courses to enjoying the different views and perspectives they brought to our class discussions. They in return expressed that they had learned more about what school librarians actually do and of course most of them were surprised at the many roles of the school librarian.

This experience made me wonder if we are perhaps not doing all that we could in preparing school librarians to encourage this partnership, and if maybe we are even hindering it’s development. I say this because all too often school librarians have take different classes from other MLIS students that are more specialized and needed for certification and even when they are in general MLIS classes you will often see groups for group work created by type of library focus. After this semester and seeing the great projects and ideas that came from the school library students working with the public and academic library students I will be encouraging these in the future. I think this type of learning experience can go further in promoting these relationships than hearing me say over and over again “you really should be partnering with your local public librarian.”

Fitzgibbons, S. A. (2000). School and public library relationships: Essential ingredients in implementing educational reforms and improving student learning. School Library Media Research, 3. Retrieved from http://www.ala.org/aasl/aaslpubsandjournals/slmrb/slmrcontents/volume32000/relationships

Image: http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=19960&picture=hands-holding-jigsaw”>Hands Holding Jigsaw</a> by Petr Kratochvil

 “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