Chapter 9 of Riedling’s book Reference Skills for the School Librarian (2013) barely touched on how important collaboration is to the role of a teacher-librarian. So far, each school that I have worked at had several blocks in the library which were dedicated to ‘collab’ time but truthfully, I have not used this service too much myself. This made me wonder what are ways that the teacher-librarian can include collaboration into their library services and how can I incorporate and promote these strategies when I have my own school library. This image provided from the BC Teacher-Librarian’s Association (2013) shows how collaboration is integrated in many aspects of the school library program.

(BCTLA, 2019)

The teacher-librarian helps students with their informational needs but they also teach information literacy and other skills that are essential to being a part of the global community in the 21^st century. As mentioned in the course notes as well as other articles, collaboration with the teacher-librarian is generally under-utilized because of the misconception of how vast the role of a teacher-librarian is (UBC, 2021; Latham, Gross & Witte, 2013). Collaboration can take place during any part of the teacher-librarian’s job from curating resources with the classroom teacher to support inquiry learning to working on assessments to evaluate student’s work (BCTLA, 2013).

(Image courtesy of Pixabay)

Managing reference resources and services that meet the needs of all students and supports student learning can be quite costly. I learned that my current school library has an annual budget where the budget amount and deadline is different each year and like many schools, the school library is usually the first thing to be cut from the budget. With this in mind, I wonder what are other ways to collect funding to support a well-rounded library. From the experience of the teacher-librarian at my school, book fair fundraisers and donations contribute greatly to the funding that is outside of the designated annual budget. Other suggestions include providing strong evidence or even buzzwords to emphasize how the resource requested contributes to student learning and to gather support from other members of the community so they can advocate for you (Dickinson, 2004). Another idea that stood out to me was that, “there is always money,” (Dickinson, 2004). This is a reminder for teacher-librarians to continue advocating for resources because although budgets cut to the library resources are prominent, there is always money but how it will be allocated depends on the school and the people in charge. Another role of the teacher-librarian is to redirect the monetary attention to library resources and emphasize how they contribute to student learning.

This video demonstrates what the teacher-librarian does with an abundance of visual examples. This video also demonstrated what collaboration looks like between a classroom teacher and the teacher-librarian.

Looking at the “standards” from the Achieving Information Literacy document, an “exemplary” collection is one that provides opportunities to develop literacy, supply materials for resource-based learning, and meet the needs of all students in the school community. Materials should be current, in “good repair,” and come in print, non-print, and electronic formats (Asselin et al., 2003). Maintaining an exemplary reference collection sounds costly with the amount of materials it recommends and how often materials should be renewed or replaced.

After evaluating the reference collection and services, ongoing advocacy is important in that it can build awareness for supporting informational and literary needs of the library and to have the community readily support the teacher-librarian’s decision to replace or renew items when needed.

References

Asselin, M., Branch, J. L., Oberg, D., Doiron, R., & Canadian School Library Association. (2003). Achieving information literacy: Standards for school library programs in Canada.

BC Teacher-Librarian’s Association. (2013, February 17). What About T-L Collaboration?. https://bctla.ca/2019/02/17/what-about-t-l-collaboration/

Dickinson, G. (2004). Budgeting: As Easy as 1-2-3. Library Media Connection, 22(6), 14-17.

Latham, D., Gross, M., & Witte, S. (2013). Preparing teachers and librarians to collaborate to teach 21st century skills: Views of LIS and education faculty. School Library Research, 16.

Riedling A. M., Shake, L & Houston, C (2013). Reference skills for the school librarian: Tools and tips, (Third Edition).

University of British Columba. (2021). Lesson 5: The Reference Interview: Cooperative Program Planning and Teaching for Personalized Inquiry. [Course notes]. Retrieved from https://canvas.ubc.ca/courses/60431/pages/lesson-5-the-reference-interview-cooperative-program-planning-and-teaching-for-personalized-inquiry?module_item_id=1865098

 

 

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• budget
• collab
• collaboration
• information literacy
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• teacher-librarian