“Education is soul work. We go to school every day to change things.” (Flanagan 2014)

Most of us entered the teaching profession to make a difference in the lives of children and youth. We deeply care about other people’s children. This shared value distinguishes us from many of our fellow citizens. We, as educators, are people who aspire to influence the life path of our nation’s young people and, through our work, help guide their future as well as our own.

WHY ATTRITION?

With these lofty goals, why do many classroom teachers leave the profession? The 2012-2013 National Center for Education Statistics Teacher Attrition survey found a correlation between the level of support and training provided to new teachers and their likelihood of remaining in the profession or leaving after the first year (NCES 2014). Some districts have hired district-level instructional coaches to support novice or struggling educators, while others have relied on in-school mentors or collaborative teams to increase teacher retention and job satisfaction.

Does the school librarian have a role to play as an in-school mentor for new teachers? Is the school librarian who serves as a teacher leader positioned to advance the school’s effort to improve instructional practice through collaborative teams?

ON-SITE MENTORS

If you served as a classroom teacher, can you remember the first day you walked into a classroom as a student teacher or first-year teacher? Do you remember your excitement? Do you recall fear or anxiety at facing the unknown? I remember it well, and I remember my student teaching mentor teacher as a lifeline to build my confidence, classroom management skills, and pedagogical and content knowledge. While school librarians cannot provide that kind of day-to-day all-day support, we can effectively support the growth of novice educators.

Student teachers are often open to learning and teaching in new ways. If the mentor teacher is someone who has cotaught with the librarian in the past, it is easy to approach both the student teacher and mentor teacher to offer collaborative support. If that’s not the case, however, we can still extend support directly to the student teacher. Most student teachers are required to design, plan, implement, and assess a standards-based unit of instruction. Rather than simply providing resources for that unit, school librarians can offer to co-plan, co-implement, and co-assess the unit. This level of interaction early in a teacher’s career not only supports K-12 student learning but can also help establish classroom-library collaboration as a teaching norm.

Most educators know the importance of building relationships with colleagues, and first-year teachers or teachers who are new to the building will welcome the librarian’s efforts to reach out. Wise librarians keep the coffee pot full and the bowl of chocolate at the ready. Many school librarians offer library orientation for new teachers, but we can do so much more. School librarians know the resources that have been used to support a particular curriculum unit in the past. Using resources as a conversation starter, we can suggest co-planning and co-teaching as supportive instructional strategies. Few new teachers will fail to see what they and their students have to gain from working collaboratively with the librarian.

VETERAN TEACHERS

Some librarians have found that collaborating with veteran educators presents the greatest benefits and challenges for co-teaching. These experienced educators have a wealth of knowledge and experience from which wise collaborating school librarians can learn and grow. Veteran teachers have developed successful strategies to teach particular content or to support striving and struggling learners. They have collected data to support instructional decisions based on past results. The reciprocal mentorship that can happen when veteran educators and school librarians co-teach is a benefit to all—students, teachers, librarians, and administrators as well.

But just as some librarians are comfortable doing things the same way they have always been done, so are some experienced classroom teachers. For classroom teachers who see themselves as solely responsible for students’ success, classroom-library collaboration doesn’t fit into their teaching schema. Time-crunched educators may annually reuse units for another more or less successful run—no changes, please.

We know everyone’s plate is full, but we also know school librarians have much to bring to the collaboration table. We can offer veteran teachers new strategies for motivating students. We can teach new technology tools that directly address teachers’ student learning targets and increase student engagement. We can offer to co-develop improved graphic organizers or rubrics to scaffold student learning or improve student success. We can demonstrate our commitment to veteran teachers’ success by taking risks alongside them to help them improve their teaching and students’ learning outcomes. With reluctant-collaborator veteran teachers, we must practice persistence and patience.

LESSON STUDY AND CO-TEACHING APPROACHES

Whole-school or grade-level initiatives such as lesson study are one way to build collaborative relationships among faculty. Lesson study involves educators in studying curriculum, co-developing a lesson, observing at least one educator teaching it, reflecting on and revising the lesson, and documenting the process. Librarians who fully participate in this process with small groups of teachers (including being observed teaching and observing colleagues) are seen as full-fledged members of the academic program.

Co-teaching is another approach to enacting instructional partnerships. Principals can support this work through setting the expectation that all teachers are expected to co-plan, co-implement, and co-assess one or more units of instruction with the school librarian each quarter, semester, or academic year. Principals can attend co-planning sessions when classroom teachers and school librarians are co-designing lessons. They can also be willing to conduct teacher evaluations during co-taught lessons and participate in debriefing sessions in which co-teachers assess student learning outcomes, teaching strategies, and revise instruction for future use. Principals can also show their value for this work by spotlighting successful instructional partnerships at faculty meetings and in school publications.

TAKING A SYSTEMS APPROACH

Working together, the adults in the building can co-create what Peter Senge and his coauthors call “schools that learn” (2012). Partnering with principals, school librarians can take a systems approach to leading a culture of collaboration within the school. We can build relationships so that more of our colleagues are open to learning with and from each other. We can show our colleagues that we share responsibility for all students’ learning and further the collaborative culture in the school.

School librarians who make every effort to reach out to all classroom teachers to build relationships and enact effective instructional partnerships are co-leaders in the whole school approach. Maybe your next classroom-library co-teaching experience will be the one that brings your school community to the tipping point and results in a schoolwide collaborative culture in which learners—young people and adults—can grow.