Making Every Librarian a Leader

Laura Grosvenor, a librarian at Kimball Elementary School in Seattle, wasn't expecting much when she and her colleagues from the Seattle Public Schools walked into an in-service session at Seattle University in the fall of 2000. She'd heard that Mike Eisenberg, dean of the University of Washington's Information School (or "I-school," as it's known on campus), would be leading the training for a new program called the Rapid Library Transformation Initiative (RLTI). She thought "this was just another district initiative." After all, "you need to understand that in Seattle we've been working on restructuring, revisioning, and transforming for the last decade," explains Grosvenor. Most of those changes, however, hadn't affected the status of school librarians.

Grosvenor was weary, she admits, of striving to be recognized as a key member of her school's faculty. Even though she describes Kimball as "one of those open-space schools with the library at its center," Grosvenor didn't feel she was regarded as the central person in the minds of teachers and students. "I did the usual library lessons, but nothing much ever came of them," she says. Teachers mostly perceived her as the one who "showed students where the encyclopedias were and checked out a huge stack of books." Grosvenor knew she could be doing more, but wasn't sure what to do or how to do it.

Enter Eisenberg. When he began to tell the group how to transform libraries by changing the way they did their jobs, Grosvenor was hooked. She listened to Eisenberg's proposals and liked what she heard. "I'd try what Mike suggested [in my school]," she says, "and BAM! I'd get the results I wanted." Grosvenor began reaching out to teachers more often and they increasingly called on her to collaborate on projects.

What's so radical about Eisenberg's ideas? He told Seattle's school librarians it was time to reinvent themselves—to demonstrate that they directly affected student learning and were instrumental in preparing students for life in an electronic world. Eisenberg contacted everyone he could reach in the district—from the superintendent of schools to the building staffs—telling them that in the age of the Internet, the librarian should serve as every school's "chief information officer."

Most librarians need to change how they do their jobs, says Eisenberg. It's time, he says, for the librarian to become a polished communicator to the administration, the other teachers, and the community. Librarians, he adds, need to deliver a consistent message about the things they do—not how many books and computers they maintain. "[Librarians] need to talk about how many research lessons they presented, how many books they booktalked, and detail the collaborations they've had with teachers," says Eisenberg. He refers to these actions as the library's outputs. (For more details, see "This Man Wants to Change Your Job ," September 2002)

He also told his audience that the "teacher-librarian" has three roles to play in K–12 schools: 1) an information literacy teacher for students and staff; 2) a reading advocate who does everything from booktalking to presenting reader's advisory; and 3) an information manager who selects the appropriate print and electronic resources and presents them effectively to teachers, students, and parents. As Eisenberg says with a smile, "You get three professionals for the price of one."

He stressed that it's time for librarians to stop waiting for teachers to take the initiative. "In many communities, some media specialists are passive and complain about how few teachers work with them," says Eisenberg. "I ask them, 'What are you doing to change that?' Do teachers wake up and say, 'I'm going to make the teacher-librarian's life miserable?' I don't think so. Tell the teachers what you do in the staff room, in the halls, at in-services, and offer your help on an upcoming unit." He points out that in the average school, teachers present about 400 units a year. "And there are 40 weeks in the school year," he says. "Can't you find at least a few of those lessons you can collaborate with your teachers on?"

Shortly after Grosvenor heard Eisenberg's ideas, her principal, Barbara Nielsen, attended a principals' in-service session in which he explained how a teacher-librarian could become a key player in every school. "My principal came back from the meetings as pumped as I was, and I actually had someone to talk to about my ideas," says Grosvenor. "All of a sudden, I had [both the] administration and an expert backing me up." Nielsen, who says she was a fan of Grosvenor's work before she had ever heard of RLTI, says that hearing Eisenberg speak helped bring the full range of librarians' professional tasks into focus.

Grosvenor, following Eisenberg's plan, began to send Nielsen memos every 10 weeks describing her activities, emphasizing the ones that taught students directly. While she considers herself a supporter of her school's library, Nielsen says that after she read Grosvenor's memos, "I saw the teaching aspect [of her job] more specifically, making the library a more central part of the school." Grosvenor now realizes the value of scheduling regular meetings with Nielsen to talk about what she's doing. "I have a great principal, but between my schedule and hers, there never seemed to be a good time [to meet]." Now, when she sends her principal those memos, she also copies them to members of the school's leadership team, so that the most influential faculty members can read about her collaborative projects.

RLTI came together during a critical time for Seattle's public schools. The district was completing a fiber-based network to provide high-speed Internet services to its 90 schools and technology was assuming a bigger role in every grade. The district's chief information officer, Judy Margrath-Huge, developed a grant proposal that would enable Seattle's school librarians to play a greater role in technology-related learning. When the district's library program received a $190,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in the summer of 2000, Bryce Nelson, the district's supervisor of library services and a supporter of many of Eisenberg's proactive strategies, knew that the proposed program would need the support of Joseph Olchefske, Seattle's superintendent of schools. Olchefske had come into his office after the death of John Stanford, an extremely popular predecessor and a longtime library advocate who was instrumental in getting more books for district media centers. Eisenberg posited that as the role of technology expanded in the district and the need for information literacy training grew, each school's media specialist needed to be the one to lead the way. The superintendent approved hiring Eisenberg and the I-school faculty with the Gates Foundation grant money to train librarians and convince principals of the importance of their libraries. Plus, the district agreed to buy a laptop for each librarian, since the grant money didn't stretch far enough to purchase one for every media specialist.

Nelson and Eisenberg knew they had a bigger job than boosting librarians' communications skills. They also needed to convince the district's principals, and through them its teachers, that collaborating with librarians was a must in the age of the Internet. Nelson contracted the I-school to work with Seattle's 90 school librarians to help strengthen their technology skills and guide them in redefining their jobs. Eisenberg and his colleagues led the training and provided RLTI workshops to the district's principals.

The librarians plunged into a cycle of monthly meetings throughout the 2001–2002 school year, learning how to use technology to present information literacy lessons to teachers and students. As with any group of K–12 educators, some of Seattle's librarians were technologically sophisticated and others had as little to do with computers and the Internet as possible. The campaign to increase the librarians' tech capabilities was key to RLTI; Nelson wanted librarians—especially those who had been reluctant to embrace technology—to use their laptops at home, carry them around to classrooms and meetings, and do PowerPoint presentations on information literacy.

The Seattle Public Library (SPL) played a role in encouraging more cooperation between public and school libraries. In December 2000 and 2001, SPL's children's and young adult librarians met with school librarians to listen, for example, to presentations on motivating young people to read. SPL's staff trainer, Mary Ross, presented a Web reference class to the secondary school librarians. Nelson says that since then the two sets of librarians have shared e-mail addresses and phone numbers, and now there is "a lot of informal local collaboration." Public and school librarians have also worked together on a "What If Everyone Read the Same Book?" campaign to get every fourth- through eighth-grader to read and discuss Louis Sachar's novel Holes. Chance Hunt, SPL's coordinator of children's services, says that although the public library and public schools in Seattle have had an excellent working relationship for many years, RLTI added "a tremendous amount of energy and focus on the importance of librarians and their impact on student learning."

Other I-school faculty, such as Lorraine Bruce, introduced librarians to concepts such as curriculum mapping, a method of charting out what educators are actually teaching in the classroom. Nelson established a cadre of mentors, paying each experienced librarian an extra $1,654 last year to assist those who were new to the district and those who needed extra help in using technology and in communicating with their colleagues. Janet Woodward, a mentor who is a librarian at Seattle's Garfield High School, says that roughly 50 school librarians attended the monthly workshops. The mentors, who were each assigned about 10 media specialists, taught librarians how to write memos to their principals and helped those librarians who were not very tech-literate.

After Eisenberg completed the in-service training, many of the participants felt free to speak their minds. They told him, says Grosvenor, that they were having none of the "chief information officer" title and weren't so sure about using the "teacher-librarian" moniker. Not many librarians in the district are using the latter title, she says, even if they strongly agree that they're teachers. They also told Eisenberg that he was pushing the information literacy and information manager aspects of the job a little too much. " 'Information manager' says nothing about how we can help students develop a love and appreciation for literature," says Grosvenor. Eisenberg concedes that "there are times when you're going to want to emphasize your role as a reading advocate [more than the other roles]."

Still, most of the trainees say RLTI has made a significant difference. Over the past two years Nelson has seen librarians take a more active leadership role in their schools. "We have a very high percentage of librarians on the school leadership teams and tech teams—about 75 of them are on one or both of them," he says. "We've told the librarians that they have to be politically savvy and politically active." He also tells them that RLTI or no RLTI, they must provide what teachers, principals, and the public want, which is academic achievement.

Grosvenor is an example of the kind of librarian who can't help but boost the profession's reputation. For the past two years she has been presenting regular sessions to Kimball's teachers on the Big6 (Eisenberg's and Bob Berkowitz's information literacy curriculum) and how it fits into the elementary school curriculum. Nielsen says that teachers have reacted positively and collaborate with Grosvenor regularly. Because Kimball Elementary School is located in a part of the city where close to 60 percent of its students speak a language other than English at home, she began a family literacy program for parents this fall. Parents of students have long been welcome to check out books. But this year, Grosvenor and several of the school's bilingual assistants will teach parents how to locate and choose appropriate library books for their children and how to read to them and ask appropriate follow-up questions. Her principal couldn't be prouder of her. Eisenberg explicitly encourages librarians to involve themselves in just this kind of program—one that affects the children directly, instead of one that simply supports the teachers or the curriculum.

Grosvenor says RLTI gave her and her colleagues the tools to tell principals, teachers, and students that what the librarian does really matters. Eisenberg and his cohorts also told the librarians that what they do really matters; he energized them and convinced many of them that now was the time to change. Equally important, the project brought Seattle's school librarians to the attention of Superintendent Olchefske. In a recent statement Olchefske said, "Through this initiative we envision dramatically expanding the role of school librarians, who will now serve as chief information officers, helping students and staff navigate the abundance of information now at their fingertips."

The core message? Curriculum units that make use of librarian's skills are more likely to boost student achievement—and their test scores. "I can see the difference it has made in my school," Grosvenor says. "So can others. Not everyone has made the same strides, but there is a common vision [that wasn't there before] and a belief that we can change things."