Collaborate with Ms. Gina Causey, Alston Middle School

 

The AASL domain Collaborate focuses on working with others toward a common goal. Collaboration occurs with teachers and between students within the library setting. Ms. Causey, the School Librarian at Alston Middle School, shares that collaboration with teachers used to be more prevalent but within the past couple of years, there have been many staffing changes that impact collaboration. This year, Alston Middle School has 25 new staff with 8 as international teachers. Due to this amount of change, she has noticed a decline in collaboration. Though there are many possible reasons for this decline, there is a concern that “adding” collaboration to the teachers’ plates will further overwhelm already overwhelmed teachers. I believe we should acknowledge our teachers’ concerns but we also should not allow those concerns to limit our services. Working in partnership with teachers should not create more work but instead, can help lessen the teachers’ load. My conversation with Ms. Causey related to teacher collaboration highlighted the need to clearly communicate our role to new staff, ensuring they understand what we can offer to them and their students. This advocacy can be through a menu of services, communicated in PLC meetings, and through email correspondence. Changes in our responsibilities should also be communicated clearly; there is a perception at Alston Middle School that the librarian works primarily with technology management. However, this perception is no longer accurate due to the district’s hiring of a technology person for each school. 

Collaboration with teachers seems to primarily take place within English and Social Studies classes, a theme found through all three school library interviews so far. This collaboration can look different, depending on the unit, the teacher, and student needs. Students receiving instruction often work together and have opportunities to collaborate with one another in groups established by the classroom teacher. The classroom teacher seems to be the one who initiates collaboration, sharing the topic and desired outcome with the librarian.

It was stated in a previous interview that collaboration with veteran, older teachers is at times difficult due to their resistance to change. In this interview, Ms. Causey mentioned the difficulty in collaborating with new teachers who feel overwhelmed in a new role. If we cannot advocate for collaboration with veteran teachers or with new teachers, then who can we collaborate with? It seems that there could be a complacency regarding collaboration, finding it possibly “easier” to allow the perceptions of school librarians as only managers of the library to remain so, rather than consider us as teachers. There should be intentionality in forming a relationship with our administration to garner support of library services. If the school principal and the school librarian are working toward the same goals, then the administrator can help promote the importance of collaboration between the teacher and school librarian for the betterment of the school. The librarian should also take the lead on collaboration, studying curriculum maps to find opportunities to “push in” to classes instead of waiting for the invitation.