Tag Archives: coteaching

Collaboration Beyond the Walls, Redux!

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As I was planning my next post to this blog, I happened to see Melissa’s recent entry about the need for powerful community partnerships, and realized that I had been scooped!  I would like to say something about great minds, but that would be a bit pretentious.   Instead, I will share a fabulous example of a working partnership of school and community librarians here in the far northern reaches of New England.

Winter is long and cold in Vermont, and curling up with a good book is a favorite past time for many, but by March we get a little cranky, and we need something to keep us going until spring (usually late April).  Basketball (NCAA) is also a big topic of conversation in March, so school librarians and teachers from adjacent districts, as well as local public librarians, collaborated to develop a community based reading discussion for middle schoolers called DCF March Madness.  

How it came about…

Kim Musante, library media specialist, and Katie Rose, sixth grade language arts teacher at Essex Middle School (Essex, VT) have been collaborating for a couple of years to bring a new dimension to literature circles by incorporating social media through the use of wikis. Whodunit??? Mystery Partners  is designed to have students in two separate classes enjoy sharing a good read. The mystery theme is promoted and book talked by Kim and Katie for several titles.  Once they make a choice, students are paired up secretly to read a mystery book together, not knowing the identity of the other person. They read and participate in discussions within a wiki, and then at the end of the unit celebration, the mystery partners reveal themselves through masks they make about the book.  The activity is structured to meet standards for literacy and has created enthusiasm for books and reading. It appeals to readers across the spectrum of abilities with opportunities to share ideas in a safe environment. Students who might not speak up in class may share comments within the wiki.  Once the process is modeled, students can take ownership and create other experiences using the format.

And then…

Kim was networking with school librarians in monthly meetings for Essex Town School District and Chittenden Central Supervisory Union, and she shared information about her collaboration with Katie.  Melanie Cote, LMS at Albert D. Lawton Middle School (Essex Jct., VT) picked up on the idea and asked if there might be a way to collaborate between schools.  They began meeting in January, and several planning sessions ensued. The two youth public librarians were invited to join, as they also serviced the same students in after school activities. Caitlin Corliss from the Essex Free Library and Kat Redniss from Brownell Library volunteered to be book group advisors in the schools.  Not deterred by physical distances or spaces, this dynamic group came up with a way to create literature circles that would meet face to face and online to read and discuss some of the books on the 2011-12 Dorothy Canfield Fisher Book List. It took place in the doldrums of March and proved to be an exciting program for all involved.

Welcome to March Madness:  How it worked…

DCF March Madness is based on a statewide reading program, and the objective is to get students to read and to generate excitement about some fine new books.   The Dorothy Canfield Fisher Award is a state award that is chosen each year by Vermont students in grades 4-8. The books are selected by a committee of school and public librarians.  Since 1957, the program has been publicized and promoted both in school and public libraries to encourage reading of quality children’s literature.  The vote is held in April and the winning author is invited to Vermont to receive the award before an audience of young readers. Check the website for more information and past winners.

At Essex Middle School, Kim and Katie presented five of the titles that would be offered for reading to a class of sixth graders.  At Lawton School, Melanie and Bill Burrell, a sixth grade teacher did the same.  During the month, the groups met three times a week during reader’s workshop in the language arts class time. Caitlin participated with students at Essex Middle School, and Kat went to the Lawton School. Each group had an adult advisor, but the students decided the pace of the reading and posted comments and answers to the question prompts.  Within the wiki, social etiquette was introduced as a norm for discourse, along with standards for formal written English and GUM.   Students who read the books at the separate schools posted comments within the folder for the book on the community wiki.  Students used first names in their posts.  To initiate another level of excitement and competition, each group was considered a team, and the team would get a score each week based on the quality of their responses to the prompts, and the “brackets” aka rubrics were posted on a brackets page for each school. Points could be earned or deducted for being prepared, participating orally and online, and using proper written language. The team could view its weekly progress.  As a culminating task, each group at the individual schools had to produce a 30 second commercial for the book using a flip camera.

Finale…

The final book discussion was a joint meeting at Essex Middle School. Students from Lawton were bussed in for the morning, and the two groups and their advisors met face to face for the first time in the school media center.  After getting to know one another, they had a chance to share their videos.  A group feedback session allowed students to voice their opinions about the process and to offer some great suggestions for the next time.

Success breeds success, one step at a time, and this example of a collaboration that began between one school librarian and one teacher has extrapolated beyond the walls of the school and into cyberspace.

Books on the 2011-12 DCF list featured in this program included:

Draper, Sharon M. Out of My Mind. Atheneum. $16.99. ISBN 978-1-4169-7170-2. Considered by many to be mentally retarded, a brilliant, impatient fifth-grader with cerebral palsy discovers a technological device that will allow her to speak for the first time.

Gibbs, Stuart. Belly Up. S & S. $15.99. ISBN 978-1-4169-8731-4. Twelve-year-old Teddy investigates when a popular Texas zoo’s star attraction–Henry the hippopotamus–is murdered.

Kimmel, Elizabeth Cody. The Reinvention of Moxie Roosevelt. Dial. $16.99. ISBN 978-0-8037-3303-9. On her first day of boarding school, a thirteen-year-old girl who feels boring and invisible decides to change her personality to match her unusual name.

Lupica, Mike. Hero. Philomel. $17.99. ISBN 978-0-399-25283-9. Fourteen-year-old Zach learns he has the same special abilities as his father, who was the President’s globe-trotting troubleshooter until “the Bads” killed him, and now Zach must decide whether to use his powers in the same way at the risk of his own life.

O’Connor, Barbara. The Fantastic Secret of Owen Jester. FSG. $15.99. ISBN 978-0-374-36850-0. After Owen captures an enormous bullfrog, names it Tooley Graham, then has to release it, he and two friends try to use a small submarine that fell from a passing train to search for Tooley in the Carter, Georgia, pond it came from, while avoiding nosy neighbor Viola.

 

Flipping Collaboration!

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      I think I alarmed Judi when she first approached me about joining this blog by saying that I had been wondering lately if we were entering a “post-collaboration” era. I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that the work of co-planning, co-implementing, or co-assessing wasn’t as important, or perhaps even more critical than it ever was.  But I have the sense that we are in the midst of a shift from collaboration as a noun that implies a solid state of affairs toward something more fluid – more verb than noun.  I found the conversation that took place in the comments last week between Carol and Judi indicative of this state of the matter. As long as we treat collaboration as a solid block, we have to find a space and time where we can meet with our colleagues.  Judi’s response about finding time by utilizing Web 2.0 tools such as wikis and Googledocs that allow us to interact asynchronously suggests that school librarians might move more fluidly into those cracks that offer possibilities to work with colleagues when there seemingly is no time in our scheduled days to do so.

Collaboration has always been a difficult ideal for the school library profession, and the challenge of finding time has been identified as one of the barriers.  Maybe, it’s time we just removed the excuse of time as the barrier that prevents us from making the effort.  Taking the lead from the recent talk about flipping classroom instruction,  I have been wondering what it would mean to “flip” collaboration. In the mathematics classroom model, flipped instruction means that students get the instructional content on their own time perhaps by watching bite-sized video lectures that introduce the concepts, while class time is used to work through problems that in the past might have been given and graded as homework. Instead students do the work of manipulating and applying content under the guidance of the teacher who is able to coach them through problems. Joyce Valenza provides many examples of flipping instruction and suggests a role for the school librarian in assisting teachers and flipping library lessons in her blog, Neverending Search.

What would it mean to apply that concept to the current model of collaboration where we sit down with teachers before they teach in order to plan instruction together?  How could the planning take place asynchronously?  The school librarian could have access to what classroom teachers were planning and would be able to post links to resources and lesson ideas.  Both the librarian and teacher would have shared calendars so they could schedule lessons with each other.  And the actual practicing and application of collaborating might take place in the presence of students.  We might all be in the library together; we might all be in a teacher’s classroom together, OR we might use SKYPE, Google Hangout or similar conferencing technology to be together virtually.

And frankly, as I write this I realize that the ideal of collaboration as co-planning, co-teaching, and co-assessing that required us to sit down together to plan often failed to hit the mark on the latter two: co-teaching and co-assessing. What if we flipped this solid-state model of collaboration and exploited the tools that allow us to plan asynchronously and be together virtually during instruction? We might find that the real meaning and value of collaborating are in the performing together as co-teachers and being able to scaffold each other in the work of instruction.  We might find that several of those library lessons that we formerly planned collaboratively could become short bite-sized video tutorials for students to visit (and re-visit) as needed. The time we save there could be spent co-coaching with the classroom teacher as students practice and apply what they have learned. And in the work of coaching together, I suspect we would find that conversations about formative assessment would happen more naturally as part of the flow of shared experiences working with students.

I’m going to admit that I am trying to push my own thinking here.  I was fortunate as an elementary school librarian to have a flexible schedule with time allotted to plan with teachers.  But those blocks of planning time always felt like a luxury, and frankly, I often experienced a conflict because time spent planning was time taken away from working directly with students.  While I was working with one grade level, there were many more teachers and students from several other grade levels with whom I was NOT working.  And I still hear questions like those from Carol, “but what about those of us who don’t have the time in the schedule for collaboration?”  I just have the feeling that we can all find the time to collaborate, even if there isn’t time in our days for collaboration. Several years ago, David Loertscher said it was time for revolution, not evolution in school librarianship and agitated for us to Flip the Paradigm.  Loertscher envisioned:

When an assignment is given, everyone—teachers, librarians, students, and other specialists—can comment, coach, suggest, recommend, and discover together, and push everyone toward excellence. (School Library Journal, November, 2008).

I would like to advocate that we look for ways to “flip the paradigm” of collaboration and become more fluid and nimble in our approach to time and how we use it to co-plan, co-implement, and co-assess teaching and learning as we continue to “push everyone toward excellence”.

Sue

 

Coteaching is Fun!

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One of the important aspects of instructional partnerships that I think is not emphasized enough is this: coteaching is fun! Last spring, I was observing a preservice school librarian graduate student coteaching a lesson in an elementary school library. When the class was filing out of the library, the teacher turned to the graduate student and the practicing librarian and said, “I love hanging out with you.” Educators do get lonely when they are isolated from their adult peers.

Last March/April, American Association of School Librarians (AASL) President Susan Ballard and I co-guest edited the “Coteaching” issue of the Knowledge Quest Journal: http://www.ala.org/aasl/aaslpubsandjournals/knowledgequest/archive/v40no4

Along with several contributors to that issue, we presented a Webinar on “Coteaching” for AASL members. At the end of that program, I shared a 2.5-minute advocacy digital video I created as a sample for a TWU storytelling class: “Coteach: Step Out of the Box.”

http://animoto.com/play/E3Vmk861WPIKbSmNQ83Hqg#

I offer it here as a visual reminder that collaboration is worth the investment in time because coteaching is FUN!

Do you have a fun coteaching experience to share?