Alone in Your Library? Take These Five Steps to Break Out and Connect!

by Val Edwards, October 2021

Solo librarians often struggle with feelings of isolation and loneliness. It doesn't have to be that way.

You can take action to break down barriers and connect with colleagues using a few simple strategies. Connecting with your colleagues and community will increase your feelings of accomplishment and professionalism as well as strengthen the visibility and impact of your program.

Find a starting point that suits your ambitions and circumstances and begin. The pace and plan will be uniquely your own, but rest assured there are many of your library colleagues around the world on the same path. Always look to your professional organizations and network for support and ideas.

Even if your school is struggling with the challenges of operating and delivering instruction in chaotic times, the actions recommended here will still be effective, if not even more welcome. Don't be deterred. Reach out and connect!

YOUR ACTION PLAN

These five steps provide a solid platform for your efforts to develop relationships and build trust:

1. Survey & Strategize

Know what you are able to offer. Review your print and digital resources in order to share specifics about how you can support the content curriculum. Assess the library floor plan to identify instructional spaces. Are you able to accommodate multiple classes and students on a pass? Do you have adequate resources to support classes working in your space?

Don't over-promise. Consider how additional purchases or rearranged space can expand your services and offerings. When you adapt to meet teacher/student needs, you build trust.

There are many factors to consider here. Do not overlook the impact success will have on your schedule. Are you able to schedule flexibly? You do not have to be on a full flexible schedule in order to collaborate but it may require some shifting and negotiating to meet demand. Take care to ensure that you have the capacity necessary to deliver instruction and eventually support multiple classes simultaneously.

Now, use your findings to inform your outreach. Brainstorm the forms your support may take. Instructional delivery and support can vary widely in terms of the demands on your time. Seek out colleagues whose curricular units are staggered to space out these demands. This is particularly critical when you take an active role throughout a unit, including scoring bibliographies or other student products. Joining curriculum planning meetings and assuming a vital role is a time commitment that must be balanced with other responsibilities. Executing a new assignment to establish an exemplar and provide a model for students is a time-consuming and often humbling task. However, the rewards in terms of relationship building with both students and teachers are immeasurable.

Having a vision, mission, and the ambition to build a high-quality program will help guide you in this work. CAUTION: Do not let your enthusiasm carry you away. Over-promising and failing to deliver will do far more harm than a slow implementation. Take the measure of your current efforts and then establish a plan for scaling up and expanding service. Once you have a sense of your professional capacity, you can plan strategically and prioritize your outreach.

2. Connect & Support

Team goals are library goals. Know the annual goals of your district, building administration, and content or grade-level teams. Dig into those goals to identify specific areas that can be directly and tangibly supported by the library. Listen closely at staff, team, and leadership meetings and you will learn where your colleagues are struggling. Reach out with a concrete offer of support including resources, your time at planning meetings, your presence for delivery, or direct student support.

Strengthen your relationship with your administrative team by listening for their information needs and sharing relevant content. Email links to resources/tools and share articles from professional journals to not only save your administrators time and help solve problems but also to enhance their understanding of your value as an educator and resource in your own right. What are their goals beyond academics? An engaging library program can also help with meeting attendance and discipline goals.

Once you have gained insight into the needs of your colleagues, you can build your program goals around broader school goals. Select your professional and library program goals carefully. They should mirror the goals of your district, building, and the content teams with which you work most closely. Use your goals to stretch and grow your own capacity and that of your library program. Library goals that reflect and support colleagues' instructional goals will allow you to build trust while meeting existing professional requirements with authenticity.

When you are ready, expand your sphere of influence. You are more than a peer, you are a leader in your building and district. Connect your offerings to the goals of your colleagues and administrators. Dive in to assist with project planning and find areas where collaborative instruction will bolster student outcomes.

Do not wait for an invitation. VOLUNTEER! Ask to be included in meetings. That's right. Ask to be included in meetings. Once you are in the door, participate. Listen, ask questions, offer to assume task responsibility, and deliver on your commitments.

Persevere! A single email invitation or verbal offer delivered in passing will not yield results. Tell your colleagues how you can collaborate with them to strengthen student learning and then show them. They need to be able to visualize the partnership, before they will take advantage.

When you overhear a colleague expressing frustration on the limited resources available in a particular content area, follow up. Dig up resources that are already available (perhaps in a state-funded database that has been underutilized) and/or identify materials that can be purchased and added to your collection. When you offer to make purchases to directly support instruction, you will gain your colleagues' full attention. You may well find you learn more than you ever wished about their units of study. Celebrate that! It is a win for you, your library program, and most of all your students.

3. Listen & Communicate

Where are the educator and student pain points? You will find fulfilling your library program standards easiest and most successful when you approach them via your colleagues' curriculum. To that end, you will need to be aware of and support their major areas of instruction as well as their benchmarks for student achievement. Supporting classroom content by collaborating where students struggle most makes you an invaluable instructional partner.

One of my best days was when a student asked me how I always knew what their assignments were. When students believe that you understand what is being asked of them, they will trust you to help them. The more student contact you have, the better you will understand the resources that are needed and how you can make teachers' lives easier and increase achievement.

You can learn much about classroom curricula and instructional challenges by learning from your students. Engage students in conversation about their studies. Look beyond a singular request for resources to learn about the entirety of an assignment. Ask questions and discover where they are having trouble or feel lost. You will learn enough to begin a constructive discussion with their teachers and will have the opening you need to offer support and improve outcomes.

Once this preliminary information has been gathered, maintain and expand your relationships as you continuously share resources that support vital areas of instruction. As you learn of forthcoming or newly released resources, share reviews for relevant materials and offer to add them to your collection. You bring a lot to the professional relationship and providing resources that cannot be purchased with department or grade level budgets is huge.

Bonus: When budget decisions are tough, these students and teachers will be vocal advocates for maintaining your program.

4. Take Action & Responsibility

Assume part of the workload. Front of mind as you work through these steps is that while you are directly supporting your colleagues, you are working to deliver library content. The time and effort that will be required is not "above and beyond." It is what is necessary to meet your program standards and have the needed impact on student learning. In order to have the necessary opportunities to do this, your collaborations will need to include developing instructional components that address student challenges.

Trust and respect in your professional relationships will strengthen as you partner to identify and take on the work of implementation, asking to join team meetings on a regular basis,and truly becoming a member of the team. Colleagues are unlikely to refuse an offer to collaborate on an identified problem when you assume a portion of the workload.

This worked well for me when my social studies colleagues lamented the reluctance of students to use diverse resources in their research and to provide only a URL when citing their online resources. This is what my offer looked like at their team meeting:

If you bring your classes to the library and give me time to introduce our resources, I will explain the value of the various required types of materials you have identified including why finding the same information repeated in five resources does not help the quality of the project even if it is fast. To measure this, I will develop a rubric for their required bibliographies and will grade them for you if you will give them weight in the overall grading of the project.

That proposal received a hearty "Yes." Word spread, and soon I was delivering this piece of instruction and assessment for the major research projects in all four grade levels within the social studies department and several upper-level, elective classes in the science department.

This approach can be just as effective when modified to fit the varied circumstances found in elementary libraries. Adapt and offer until you find the pace and process that serves your purposes and works in your setting.

5. Continuous Connection

Taking on additional committee responsibilities and meetings is challenging so be strategic in the committee appointments you seek and accept. Know who you will work with and how closely that work aligns with your library program goals. Committee work on building and district teams is a fantastic way to develop relationships with colleagues and administrators. Strong committee work increases your credibility. The advantages cannot be overstated if you are intentional about reaping the benefits.

Professional relationships need maintaining and tending in the same way as our personal ones. Initiate opportunities to gather that are informal and fun. Whether on-site or off-campus, getting to know and like your colleagues has a huge payoff in effectiveness and professional enjoyment.

I was able to host committee meetings, team retreats, and school parties in my home. Revealing yourself on a personal level is a trust and relationship accelerator. When I had an idea to float, a favor to ask, or tedious work to be done, I would propose working after hours at a quiet, local bar. The shift in atmosphere prompted creativity and made the work seem less laborious. Everyone's situation is different so consider the variations that may work for you.

Note: Make your invitation low pressure and repeat as necessary. Follow a general invitation with a specific and, ideally in-person, invitation. These are great ways to improve your response rate and convey to your colleagues that you value them specifically. Do not get discouraged. Listen to your colleagues if they turn down your offer. Can you provide an alternative to make it easier for them to accept? Do you need to offer a greater incentive in terms of resources or collaborative work? Maybe your time is better spent focusing on a different content area and circling back in the future.

Get to know your colleagues. There are many, many ways to do this. I loved being the party planner in my building, leading plans for our back-to-school picnic, holiday celebrations, as well as our Sunshine Club which focused on recognizing milestone events in the lives of the building team. All of these activities were fun and connected me to colleagues with whom I was not necessarily collaborating. This served to expand my circle of influence and set up openings for future collaborations.

Support your colleagues with special reader's advisory offerings targeting their personal reading. Invite them into the library for individual support as they select reading materials for winter, spring, and summer breaks. Teachers often do not feel welcome to use the library as a resource for personal use. Welcome them as fellow learners, explorers, and readers!

Bonus: Teachers can model the idea of libraries as a resource for life-long use. I would often mention a teacher's library use to their students during instruction. Not only did it reinforce the library as a valuable resource, it validated our relationship and partnership in the students' learning.

It's All Win!

Relieving feelings of isolation increases your professional enjoyment and bolsters your program. As you experiment and implement these five strategies, be aware that building relationships is never-ending. Use all of your opportunities to build a connection. Listen to colleagues: during staff meetings, at lunch, in the office, in the halls, and, yes, even in the bathroom. You will learn a lot!

The payoff of this effort will be far-reaching. Not only will you not feel isolated, you will feel valued. You will be valued. Even better, you will be impacting your students' learning in critical ways.

You will also be building goodwill among your colleagues. They will look to you for support, stopping by for advice or a bit of cheering up. You can single-handedly boost morale in your building just by reaching out and making your colleagues feel seen and heard. This type of effort gets noticed by administrators and strengthens your voice and the strength of your advocacy in the building, district, and community.

The return on your investment in building relationships and earning trust will likely include receiving the grace of your colleagues to experiment, innovate, and create as you test ideas, mentor student librarians, and continue your own professional growth. Over time, I reached a point with my colleagues where I could confidently encourage my student librarians to try out their own untested ideas. My colleagues knew I was guiding them and we had built a collaborative relationship that could not be damaged by errors made while learning. We all learned and we felt connected to our work and each other.

Never stop paying attention, planning, innovating, learning, and making it fun to work with you. Take heart! You may feel that you have lost an opportunity or your offer was not embraced as you had hoped. The opportunities will continue to present themselves. Regroup and move forward. You can do it!