School Library Connection Archive

Tell Your Story Every Day

Course
Teachers as Library Cheerleaders [4:45]
You want to inspire your teaching colleagues to speak for you. Without teacher support, your job is much harder. Make their jobs and classroom lives easier and you have inspired a voice on behalf of a strong library.
The base of the pyramid, your core allies. You want to inspire your teaching colleagues to speak for you. It's one thing to speak for yourself, but it's more powerful when other people can speak for you. What do you want them to do? You want them to mention to the principal how you, with your library program, your teaching, your resource selection and your collection of print and digital resources, will help improve their teaching and learning across the campus.

You want the teachers to see your value as your strongest voice to campus leadership. You are the horizontal teacher, the one who works with every student, every grade, every discipline. Without teacher support, your job is much harder. Make their jobs and classroom lives easier and you have inspired a voice on behalf of a strong library. That horizontal teacher bit comes out of a video from the California Library School Association, the school library association, which is really fabulous. There's also information on the Students Need Libraries page. There's a page for teacher information.

You want to foster a school-wide culture of literacy and inquiry. You know that. Barbara Stripling, former president of ALA and ASL and head of School Libraries in New York City, wrote an article for the National PTA Journal about a year ago, from which that line comes. There it goes directly to parents, but it's just as true for teachers that we do just that because your library collection is broader in content, reading level and interest than a classroom library can possibly be. You just have to figure out how to convince teachers that the time spent sending kids or themselves to the library is beneficial enough for them to spend it.

Your library collection speaks about both high and low readers and through them, to the teachers. You support differentiation that honors student curiosity, learning challenges, learning gifts and creativity within the core curriculum. These ideas come from a blog post that Judy Marillon wrote recently about TexQuest and Antiques, which are the Texas learning standards.

The Washington State Library Media Association has a video about teacher/librarians that quotes lots of people on various campuses talking about the impact of the library on their students. You can do that. You can just quote the people or ask people to write something about why your library matters on their campus. How do they see the library as supporting improved student success and achievement? If they don't, then find out what they think is missing because that's ammunition you need to understand.

We are responsible for media literacy, database access, and workforce readiness, and teachers don't always realize that we can help them with those things. But as we send our high school students, in particular, right out into the workforce, if they don't know how to find useful information to support their jobs and their job searches, they're not ready to live in the world. If they've never used a database, well how are they going to know the difference between valid and invalid information?

The Texas Association of School Librarians works closely with the Texas PTA and we staff a booth at their conference and last year, when we were getting ready for that, we made a handout for parents and for teachers and for administrators where the questions and the answers are the same in all the handouts, but the title is different so everybody thinks they're getting individual attention. But those questions you want people to ask about your library because you know that they have to answer them positively, those are so useful in building awareness of what they need to be seeing and what they want to push administration to support.

Having done all this, you might need to ask your teachers to speak for the library program. But if they already rely on your collaboration and your resources, that won't be very hard. They need to see your effect, but then, it would just come up in conversation to the principal or the PTA president or even a district administrator, that, "Oh yeah, I was just down in the library and they gave me these books that really made this lesson work," or whatever along those lines comes out. It's so important that you have your teachers at the base of this pyramid, speaking for you, working with you, and appreciating your skills.
Teach the Teachers

Context:

Dorcas Hand asserts that teachers should be school librarians' core allies and the base of the Advocacy Pyramid that she introduced in Lesson 1. Teachers and librarians share similar goals of a school-wide culture of literacy and inquiry (among other desirable learning outcomes), but they come to the table with different tools, priorities, and expectations. Some teachers readily comprehend this picture, and others don't yet—which is where clear communication and examples from the librarian are necessary. When teachers are closely familiar with the value of the school library, they can speak to it to principals, other teachers, parents, and community members.

Instructions:

1. View the "Information for Teachers" page on the HISD Needs Strong School Libraries website, recommended by Dorcas Hand in Lesson 1.

2. Browse the resources. Consider a specific teaching colleague and select one (or more) resources to share with this person. What need will you aim to fulfill? It might be introducing a teacher to a new perspective on the library or reinforcing an existing partnership.

Resources:

Students Need Libraries in HISD website, Information for Teachers
http://www.studentsneedlibrariesinhisd.org/information-for-teachers.html

MLA Citation

Morris, Rebecca J. "Tell Your Story Every Day: Teach the Teachers." School Library Connection, September 2017, schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/1987175?learningModuleId=1987183&topicCenterId=2247903.

Entry ID: 2128158

Additional Resources

Works Cited and Additional Resources.

About the Author

Dorcas Hand, MLS, is Director of Libraries at the Annunciation Orthodox School in Houston, TX. She earned her master's in library science from SUNY Albany. She is editor and co-conspirator of the www.studentsneedlibrariesinHISD.org website, an advocacy site in support of Houston ISD librarians. Hand is also editor of Independent School Libraries: Perspectives in Excellence. Her work is available on www.strongschoollibraries.com.

MLA Citation

Hand, Dorcas. "Tell Your Story Every Day. Teachers as Library Cheerleaders [4:45]." School Library Connection, ABC-CLIO, November 2015, schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/1987175?learningModuleId=1987183&topicCenterId=2247903.

View all citation styles

https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/1987175?learningModuleId=1987183&topicCenterId=2247903

Entry ID: 1987175