It can feel like defeat when you haven’t worked with a teacher on a lesson or a unit in a while. It might just be time for a mindset shift.
Teacher librarian collaboration isn’t always traditional.
Collaborating with classroom teachers doesn’t need to look like co-teaching a lesson or unit together. One of the best strategies to increase teacher collaboration is to meet teachers where they are.
An all or nothing approach causes us to miss the opportunity to work together and to recognize when we’ve started to nurture a relationship. We want our classroom teacher colleagues to know that collaborating with your school librarian is less prep, more punch, and more fun in the long run.
Classroom teachers get bogged down with the requirements from state states. Collaborating on a unit or a project can seem like a big risk. If a collaboration is a failure, teachers think they’ve lost valuable instruction time. Some teachers don’t want to risk it.
And as we know, there are many other barriers to teacher librarian collaboration that are out of our control.
So, let’s focus on what we can control First, take a look back at your mindset.
Reframe collaboration to be a continuum, a fluid, moving continuum.
The continuum of collaboration starts with curation and ends with co-teaching.
Stop and recognize how many times you’ve collaborated this school year. Answer these questions:
How can I nurture these collaborations?
Are there any collaborations I can move to the right on the continuum to benefit teachers and students?
I’ll be writing more about how I use a continuum of collaboration and how to increase collaborative opportunities. If you want more information, check out one of the activities I created called “Would You Rather Read”.
One Example of Teacher Librarian Collaboration
I’ve written more about collaboration with my colleague Casey. She’s a graphic novel expert. Our collaboration was featured in a blog post for the Ohio Educational Library Media Association’s blog.
We work together to plan a unit on students choosing graphic novels to read. I am a big advocate of students choosing their own novels to read at least once a year in ELA class.
For this collaboration, I curate some of the best diverse graphic novels for teens and in the past we’ve hosted a book tasting event. The Would You Rather Read game I designed is a great replacement for book tasting in the time of social distancing.
You can get your free copy in the sidebar.
This type of collaboration uses the entire collaboration continuum. I’m looking forward to sharing more about that in the upcoming weeks. Soon, I’ll be talking about some hands on strategies for tracking collaboration and a collaboration continuum tracker tool you can use for teacher librarian collaboration.
Now is the perfect time to start thinking about collaborating even more in the upcoming school year. Teachers, collaborating with your school librarian is good for everyone!