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Volume 29, Number 5, June 2002

Collaboration: Where does it begin?

Ruth Small

In today’s society, collaboration has become the norm in most organizations. Corporate teams from disparate departments work together face-to-face and virtually on common projects to satisfy clients or customers and to benefit the organization. Non-profit agencies work together to pursue funding opportunities and sponsor services for their target communities. Within educational organizations, the formation of standing or ad hoc committees or working groups teaming a variety of practitioners has become a typical strategy for K-12 schools, colleges and universities and adult and continuing education organizations in order to collaborate to solve problems and make decisions. Successful collaboration is based on common goals, a shared vision and a climate of trust and mutual respect (Muronaga & Harada, 1999). To be motivated to collaborate, all participants must first see some personal value in collaboration and believe that they have the knowledge and skills necessary to be successful collaborative partners.

Information power: Building partnerships for learning (1998) cites the ever-increasing importance of collaboration to library programs and the librarian’s role. “Effective collaborations with teachers,” Information power points out, “helps to create a vibrant and engaged community of learners, strengthens the whole school program as well as the library media program, and develops support for the school library media program throughout the whole school” (p. 51). Let’s look at a few real-life examples of librarian-teacher collaboration.

Examples of Librarian-teacher Collaboration

Penny Winklebeck, a teacher-librarian at Fairley Elementary School in Hannibal, New York, describes her collaboration project with the school’s art teacher. “Our favorite collaboration this year was dealing with quilts! I read The keeping quilt by Patricia Pollaco to all the 2nd grade classes. I also brought in examples of quilts from my family to share. Within a couple of weeks, quilts were designed by each individual class and hung in the hall between our rooms. The art teacher, as usual, also included a bulletin board display of pictures from the book, of me reading to the children and of the classes working on their projects…” Penny adds, “Because we are across the hall from each other, we both tend to ‘pop in’ on each other during the day as time permits. This shows the students the ‘behind the scenes’ of our collaboration. We are also interested in including the music teachers in these collaborations and the phys ed teacher keeps trying to figure out how she can fit in!”

Kathy Cadden, teacher-librarian at the Nathaniel Alexander Elementary School in Charlotte, North Carolina, used some information she heard at the Grade 4 team meeting as a catalyst for collaboration. The teachers were voicing their growing frustration at trying to fit science into their very hectic day, even with the hands-on science kits provided by the district. Kathy offered to set up a Grade 4 science lab unit on simple machines in an empty classroom. As Kathy describes it, “We previewed the kits, weeded out lessons to fit the unit in the time frame allowed, set a bi-weekly schedule for the six fourth-grade classes, set up and broke down materials for each lesson taught, and co-taught as many of the lessons as we could. It was a huge success. The students love the science lab. Parent volunteers, thrilled with their children’s new-found enthusiasm for science, have offered their time to decorate the lab. Fifth-grade teachers, hearing of our success, have asked us to help them set up a science lab as well. Our principal and assistant principals are excited about the lab and our media/classroom collaborative efforts. The district science specialist has come out to observe our lab and a dialogue has begun at our school about beginning a K-5 science lab with dedicated science teachers. As for academic benefits to students, only the fourth-grade End-of-Grade science test will really tell, I guess. I know I have students checking out a lot of simple machine, electricity and magnetism books just for fun!”

Both examples demonstrate how successful examples of librarian-teacher collaboration can become “contagious,” creating a demand for other such experiences throughout the school.

Yapha Mason is the librarian and Megan Cantly-Bishop is the library assistant at the Brentwood School West Campus in Los Angeles. They developed a collaborative project with the Grade 5 teachers last fall on a unit on the upcoming presidential election. When they were finished, Yapha and Megan had involved everyone in the school from kindergarten to faculty and staff.

After the classroom teachers introduced the project, Yapha and Megan brought each of the two Grade 5 classes into the computer lab to help them conduct online research on each of the presidential candidates and their positions on a range of issues (e.g. education, gun control, the environment). When the students had completed these initial stages of the assignment, both classes came together to work in small teams to prepare presentations based on their research. Megan explains:

Because each class had chosen slightly different issues, each group could decide which issues seemed of greatest importance to their candidates. Their research was to be presented orally to the school, with supplemental signs and posters. Each student was required to participate in the oral presentation, so the students had to decide how they would organize the information to give everyone a chance to speak. While this preparatory work was being done, groups of fifth graders went to all the classrooms in the school to explain registration and voting procedures. A few days later, there was a registration table set up during recess and lunch, staffed by fifth graders, with some supervision provided by the librarian and library assistant. The election was open to everyone (from kindergartners to faculty and staff), but everyone had to pre-register or they would not be permitted to vote the following week.

Next, there was an assembly, at which the head prefect from the Brentwood Upper School (a high school senior) talked about voter responsibility, and the fifth-grade groups made their oral presentations. The following Monday, Nov. 6, voting booths were open on campus from 7:30 a.m. until the end of lunch recess. Every effort was made to mimic the real election. There were fifth graders appointed to read the ballots to the kindergartners if they needed help. It was made clear that it was the students' responsibility to find the time to vote (there were library passes available for students to leave class at any time, with permission). Voters' names were checked by fifth graders against a list of those registered and marked off as they took a ballot. “I voted” stickers were given out. There was an exit poll taken (every fifth person) by fifth graders; no electioneering was allowed within sight of the polling area.

The fifth graders then tallied the votes (with minimal supervision), and on Tuesday, Nov. 7 (our national voting day) the winner of the Brentwood Lower School presidential election was announced at morning assembly. The fifth graders then used the data to learn to create spreadsheets and graphs in Microsoft Excel.

This was an excellent example of librarian-teacher collaboration. It not only taught students about the electoral process and involved a large number of educators and students throughout the school, but it also provided a highly visible example of collaboration to students, teachers, librarians and administrators.

So What’s The Problem?

While these are wonderful examples of successful librarian-teacher collaboration (and there are many more such examples in the literature), we also often hear stories of a total lack of collaboration opportunities or of unsuccessful attempts at collaboration from practitioners throughout the country. Wolcott (1996) points to a lack of evidence of librarian-teacher instructional partnerships in schools. She cites the work of Miller and Shontz (1993) who found that teacher-librarians “are struggling to become teaching partners with teachers who don't want them” (p. 28). Williams (1996) cites several constraints to librarian-teacher collaborations such as administrative and curricular demands and lack of experience in cooperative planning.

Some will say that this is changing, that with the infusion of technology in schools there is more and more evidence of collaborative partnerships between teacher-librarians and other educators. There is no doubt that the ever-increasing importance of information technologies in schools has increased the need for librarians and other educators to collaborate and has opened new avenues for collaboration. But efforts to collaborate are often awkwardly conceived and less than successfully implemented. Why is this? Why is it often so difficult for teacher-librarians to initiate and carry out collaborative efforts?

A Possible Cause

While I think that most academic programs do a good job of preparing their newly-minted school library professionals to go out into the schools and seek ways to form collaborative partnerships with other educators, I often hear and read the following types of statements: "I can't convince the teachers in my school to collaborate,” or “I’d love to collaborate with the teachers in my school but they don’t see me as an equal partner,” or “The teachers here don’t have any idea what I do or what I can do for them and their students.” Haycock (1999) states that teacher-librarians’ “actual involvement in collaboration with classroom teachers does not match the theoretical role and the role they were trained to perform.” One possible explanation is the lack of a common collaborative mentality.

Unfortunately, the concept of the self-contained classroom belies the notion of collaboration. Pre-service teacher training has traditionally taught prospective educators to function within the confines of their four-walled classroom, collaborating strictly within confines of their disciplines or grade levels. However, with the explosion of technology in today’s schools, classroom teachers are beginning to understand the importance of breaking down the psychological “walls” that separate them from other types of colleagues, discovering that isolation is no longer desirable and collaboration in its broadest sense is essential for educating their students.

Many have written about the factors that affect successful collaboration among teacher-librarians and other educational professionals in schools. Most focus on in-service professionals, i.e., those currently in professional practice, and the success factors that facilitate or obstacles that inhibit such collaboration (e.g. Wolcott, 1996; Haycock, 1998; Bishop & Larimer, 1999). However, this perspective overlooks a critical piece to the collaboration puzzle – the education of the pre-professional.

Pre-service Education

While many school librarian preparation programs emphasize the importance of collaboration and techniques for accomplishing this, the evidence suggests there is much less effort to provide such emphasis in programs that prepare classroom teachers (Hartzell, 1997). In a study examining whether teacher education programs prepare future teachers to expect and accept the full range of roles and responsibilities of librarians, Wolcott, et al. (1999) found that teachers had a limited vision of the total librarian potential. In a study of attitudes toward working with school librarians by pre-service and in-service teachers, Getz (1996) found no difference between the attitudes of the two groups, citing teachers' knowledge as one factor affecting collaboration. Hartzell (1997) found that one of the major reasons why librarians are often overlooked by teachers is the lack of exposure during their teacher training programs to the types of value-added services librarians can provide. Collaboration cannot be fully realized without creating a collaborative culture in which all partners see the importance and understand the benefits of collaboration to themselves, each other and their students.

Some Possible Solutions

Successful collaborative partners (teacher-librarians, classroom teachers, special area teachers such as for art and music, technology coordinators and administrators) require collaboration training during their professional preparation programs. Logan (2000) suggests that teacher-librarian practitioners need to seize opportunities to teach future classroom teachers about the collaborative possibilities during their student teaching experiences. She describes her own efforts to proactively raise pre-service teachers' awareness of her resources and services by working with her local university's student teacher/field experience student program coordinator. While I applaud and encourage these efforts, teacher-librarians cannot and should not bear the total responsibility of raising awareness and demonstrating the possibilities for collaboration.

Faculty who prepare teacher-librarians also need to do their part by finding ways to collaborate with faculty who prepare classroom teachers and other school professionals in order to (1) raise awareness of the ways in which educators can work collaboratively to benefit all and (2) provide opportunities for guided collaboration experiences during their pre-professional academic studies. For example, at Syracuse University, faculty from the School of Information Studies are collaborating with faculty from the School of Education on several projects that require students from both schools to work together. Through this experience, faculty have developed a better understanding of each other's fields, goals and needs and have become motivated to find ways to provide collaboration experiences to their students.

The initial outcome was an invitation for the author to address over 100 student teachers at their end-of-semester dinner on the subject of “Librarian-Teacher Collaboration.” Always a proponent of the “seeing is believing” approach, I provided a brief overview of the potential of collaboration and then turned the podium over to a librarian-teacher team who described a specific project in which they worked together. While I could only talk about collaboration, these dynamic educators showed the results of their collaboration. Through their interaction during the presentation, it became evident that they had not only been successful collaborators but also had developed a camaraderie and pervasive sense of trust and respect. Needless to say, this had a major impact on the audience.

Efforts are currently underway to create opportunities for faculty from the two schools to work together to foster students’ collaborative mentality, including a research and development center for joint projects and a new course, collaboratively taught by faculty from both schools (thus providing a living example of collaboration) and requiring students to work together in teams with classroom teachers on field-based technology projects.

While teacher-librarians are doing their part to develop collaborative relationships with other educators in their schools, we faculty must do a better job of "practising what we preach." We must find ways to collaborate with our Education faculty colleagues to help all of our students develop the spirit of collaboration during their professional preparation programs that carries them into their professional careers and becomes a natural part of their daily activities as professional educators.

References

American Association of School Librarians & Association for Education Communication and Technology. (1998). Information power: Building partnerships for learning, Chicago: American Library Association.

Bishop, K. and Larimer, N. (1999, October). Literacy through collaboration. Teacher Librarian, 27(1), 15-20.

Getz, Irith. (1996, January). Attitudes of preservice and inservice teachers toward working with school librarians. School Libraries, 2(1), 59-70.

Hartzell, G. N. (1997, November). The invisible school librarian: Why other educators are blind to your value. School Library Journal, 43(11), 24-29.

Haycock, K. (1999, September/October). What works: Collaborative program planning and teaching. Teacher Librarian, 27(1). Available: /pages/whatworks27_1.html

Haycock, K. (1998, May/June). What works: Collaborative cultures, team planning and flexible scheduling. Teacher Librarian, 25(5), 28.

Logan, D.K. (2000, May/June). Dear student teacher, you are invited…Educating the future educators. Book Report, 19(1), 15-17.

Miller, M.L. & Shontz, M. (1993). Expenditures for resources in school library media centers. FY 1991-92. School Library Journal, 39, 26-36.

Muronaga, K. & Harada, V. (1999, September/October). The art of collaboration. Teacher Librarian, 27(1), 9-14.

Williams, T. J. (1996, Winter). Creating partnerships between the library media specialist and classroom teachers. Indiana Media Journal, 18(2), 1-18.

Wolcott, L. (1996, January/February). Planning with teachers: Practical approaches to collaboration. Emergency Librarian, 23(3), 9-14.

Wolcott, L.L., Lawless, K.A., & Hobbs, D. (1999). Assessing pre-service teachers’ beliefs about the role of the library media specialist. ERIC Clearinghouse on Information & Technology (ED437065).

Dr. Ruth Small is a professor and director of the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University in New York. She can be reached at drruth@syr.edu.