Collaboration Ideas

[Carolyn Brook]

I'd like to start a discussion about how different librarians are collaborating with classroom teachers.  I'd like to hear about success stories, problems, etc. I'm also interested in finding out about schools that have officially adopted some kind of information literacy/school library media/guided inquiry program and how that came to be. 

[Kathleen Johnson]

I make LibGuides pathfinders (see example link below) and I promote teacher guest posts on my library blog.  I am moving towards videotaping more student performances to stream off my wordpress blog. I also hope to be able to administer or help administer potential e-portfolio projects with students because it has been shown to enhance self-reflection. 

http://guides.seattleacademy.org/content.php?pid=183051&sid=153...

All of this creates more visibility me and my program. I am a solo librarian in a 6-12 school.

[Zaiga Alksnitis]

I collaborated with an art teacher on a project that was based on the NYPL's Design By The Book project. NYC artists gave the NYPL librarians ideas about what their art projects wanted to explore, and the librarians provided books to help inspire them. You can watch the series of videos documenting the project on YouTube. In our case, I pulled books from the library collection for the AP Studio art class (high school seniors), based on the ideas they wanted to explore. I gave each of them a pile of books which were not only from our art book collection, but from other areas of the library as well. For instance, someone interested in movement not only received books about drawing movement, but a science book showing the mechanics of bird flight.  They were required to use the books as they developed their projects. The purpose of the project was to remind art students of the different ways a library could be helpful to them and reinforce the idea that research is just as important for artists as it is for scholars. We showed them clips from the Design By the Book program and also introduced them to NYPL's Digital Gallery. It was really fun to see what the students came up with, and the teacher proclaimed that this project had most of the students deviating from their usual styles to explore new directions for their art. Once the teacher saw how well the project worked, she was excited to have other classes use the library. I have a good relationship with this particular teacher, so it was not hard to get her excited about this project. If only collaborating with other departments could be this easy!