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Brian Kenney

The Collaboration Imperative
June 3, 2007

Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate. It's the mantra in the school library community. The idea is that when school librarians and classroom teachers work together, it is a "good thing." But who, exactly, is it good for? And in what ways?

The "Multiple Faces of Collaboration" was the topic of a research symposium recently held at Kent State University and jointly sponsored by Rutgers' CISSL and Kent State's ILILE that dove into this question from a variety of perspectives.

The highlight of the event was a presentation by Rutgers' Ross Todd on the qualtitive study on the experience of instructional collaboration. The study excamined 170 librarian/classroom teacher partnerships, part of an IMLS-ILILE three-year program, where the teams jointly set goals, designed learning experiences, and taught and evaluated a unit.

What were the findings? Well, the primary motivation for teachers was to build collegial and collaborative relationships; for librarians it was marketing library services and increasing their status in the school. Allison Zmuda , an educational consultant with ASCD, in her response to the study, was quick to ask where student achievement stood in relation to collaboration. Shouldn't that be the purpose of any action by educators...and not better marketing or having some nice collegial experience? It was certainly a lively presentation, and it was clear that collaboration isn't easy and the mandate "go out and collaborate" takes a good amount of support--which at least these participants had from ILILE. As soon as I can find Ross' presentation I'll link to it.

But the symposium had a lot more going on, there were a couple of dozen presentations in all, and I found a quite a few people I hope will write for us in the next year. There was an exhibit where several of the ILILE teams exhibited their projects, with examples of the student outcomes--these were terrific. As always, ILILE's Carolyn Brodie and Greg Byerly were wonderful hosts.

Posted by Brian Kenney on June 3, 2007 | Comments (1)

June 3, 2007
In response to: The Collaboration Imperative
Monica Edinger commented:

Brian, I think collaboration in schools is wonderful. I've been on both sides of the equation. I first came to Dalton as a computer specialist and so collaborated successfully with classroom teachers. Shortly thereafter I returned to the classroom myself (see Amy's interview with me for more details) and have since then collaborated with many technologists and librarians. I love doing so. Seems to me that if collegues are excited about something they are doing together, they definitely up the ante in terms of student learning. Certainly there is so much that can happen when I collaborate with my school librarian here at Dalton that wouldn't be happening if we didn't do this. And the kids get way more out of learning research skills if it is in context. Just to give one small example, early in the year my 4th graders did immigrant oral histories and then shaped the transcriptions into picture books. They needed, sometimes, to learn more about the countries their subjects were from and so Roxanne did a fantastic lesson on google so they learned how to do more efficient image searching. So much than I could have done on my own.