Knowledge Quest on the Web:
November/December 2002
Special reprint of "The Job I Really Need to Do"
Exclusively on KQWeb
"On My Mind" is an op-ed column for personal, controversial, provocative commentary
The Job I Really Need to Do
Satyra V. King
I am no stranger to unfocused teacher-librarian collaborative ventures. Here’s the scenario: I am hired to implement a new school library program. The teaching staff, unbeknownst to me, expects that I will teach content and skills related to their classroom curriculum. I sense wariness and disconnect when I bring up library skills and goals, but I plow ahead hoping to win teachers over as I put the program together. Sound like a recipe for failure? Not so! I have gained some insights on how to create and implement popular programs in spite of these circumstances.
The first step is to identify a product or result that the teaching staff will see as useful, irrespective of what, as a school librarian, I believe is essential. For instance, in my most recent flexibly scheduled school library program, I was assigned a fixed-schedule circulation-plus-instruction hour with the first-grade classes, which meant that I would meet with each first grade class every two weeks. It wasn’t negotiable; the principal simply informed me that he had decided to include this in my schedule. The class would be called something like "Introduction to the Library," he said. I was to just teach my Dewey Decimal "stuff."
I found that the program gained popularity with teachers when they saw me model a lively discussion of an engaging story. They had an opportunity to observe what I was doing as well as gain insights about their own students who cycled in and out of engagement. When interest flagged, teachers felt comfortable stepping in to call on a particular student or reengage a distracted audience. They helped me learn which of their students needed an extra challenge and who spoke another language. I followed each story lesson with a sentence development lesson, emphasizing and reinforcing the use of a first capital letter, finger spaces between words, readable letters, and a final period. Over the course of the year, the first-grade classes and I developed more diverse, individualized sentence-writing activities. Teachers were pleased that they could incorporate these into their students’ classroom writing folders. A few of them shared their follow-up activities so that I could see how my lessons extended to further classroom activities.
As the program progressed, teachers grew to enjoy and appreciate my lessons and the abundance of material that I produced. Since I designed all of my lessons by working through our first-grade curriculum frameworks and standards, my materials were quite useful to them. I would plow through the social studies, science, and English/language arts standards to identify suggested lesson objectives that I could then craftily bundle together into artful lessons. Some teachers disclosed that they saved my materials to use with their next year’s classes. When a teacher realized that I would not be doing certain lessons with his or her class, the person requested permission to use those materials in the classroom,
However, during this past year, it began to dawn on me that the school was not using the library collection independently. Over the past three years I had cataloged most of my library collection. Even though the online catalog was up and running, and although third- through fifth-grade students eagerly used it to locate information, they continued to rely on me to interpret what the call numbers meant and where the books were located. Despite a few attempts at whole-class location lessons in the upper grades, I was the only one with good location skills! I decided that I needed to foster a better sense of library organization throughout the school, beginning with the youngest students who spend so much more time in the library.
I began to experiment with the format of my lessons in order to introduce the nonfiction section to my first-grade students. I began by dovetailing my focus on character from the story lessons with an exploration of the folk and fairy tales in the 398s. Fantasy, reality, and picture book genres seemed a good match for the poetry in the 800s. Finally students moved on to investigating science in the 500s and the useful sciences in the 600s. The new lessons seemed to flow beautifully from the first half of the year; the students were excited as I brought selected items to their tables for small-group investigations. They completed my picture-cued sets of book notes and lists of keywords on help sheets while they browsed through these new materials and discussing their findings with their tablemates.
I suspect that you are thinking that these exploratory library activities represented an example of how I worked collaboratively with teachers, right? Wrong! Teachers lost interest in my new format and brought paperwork of their own to do, clearly signaling that these lessons were not relevant to them. Where was the fascination and enthusiasm from my story and writing lessons? While the students were engaged, imagine the impact of my lessons if their teachers had shared their students’ wonder in discovering how the library is organized! Or if they extended my lessons into their classroom activities.
Further, I am reviewing the previous instructional units and am carefully revising those lessons to incorporate more effective independent use of information in the library. As I sit here deciding how to involve teachers in real collaborations, I can face the fact that prior years’ dramatic productions are less valuable than the job I really need to do.
Satya V. King is a Massachusetts School Library Media Specialist who has worked as a librarian in the Lowell, Somerville, Salem, and Lynn public school systems.
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