Different Districts, Different Approaches: All for Children’s Success
By Melanie J. Cardell, PhD, Juanita Warren, PhD, and Linda Martin, Ed.S.
If GPS, QCC, LFS, NCLB, AYP, and SLMS are not new terms to you, then congratulations, you are in one of the best of places for collaboration with teachers in Georgia! If this tsunami of acronyms has not reached your shore, then hold on, they will. Three colleagues in three different school districts in Georgia began comparing their efforts in making sense of the new Georgia teaching standards, the Georgia Performance Standards. The more this trio talked, the more they realized there were multiple ways to address collaboration with teachers. They began borrowing and sharing each others’ ideas. In November they presented their ideas to a well-attended session at GaETC in Atlanta.
Linda Martin, SLMS at Sugar Hill Elementary School in Hall County, talked about her individual projects collaborating with teachers. She relayed how her storytelling in the library supported the social studies curriculum [SS2H2] and the English/language arts curriculum [ELA2LSV1 & ELA 2R3]. Her collaboration reached across grade levels, also involving the physical education teacher, the art teacher, and the music teacher. Her culminating program brought in over 300 attendees for an evening program at the school. Collaboration enthuses students and teachers alike.
Melanie Cardell of the Douglas County School System presented her informal work in collaborating with school library media specialists through a district web site for the media specialists. Information Skills Lesson Plans, Tips, Ideas, & Links will be found at the district media specialists’ web space. The information access skills are tied to specific GPS standards, such as the ELA 5W3 standard to use organizational features of printed texts (index, table of contents, etc) to locate relevant information and to use various reference materials (dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc) as aids to writing. Lesson plans using the organization features for the fourth and fifth grade science and social studies textbooks are posted at the web site. On a formal level, the Douglas County SLMSs were asked to be graders and facilitators for the district’s rollout of the 8-day English/ Language Arts training that was implemented through both face-to-face and Blackboard online formats.
Juanita Buddy, DeKalb County School System coordinator in the Department of Educational Media, offered her district’s official work in collaborating to develop information literacy-infused GPS units of study. District media professionals took existing units of study and integrated relevant information access skills from the AASL Information Power nine standards and from the ISTE standards for technology and the GLMA Information Literacy Skills K – 12. Each lesson plan fully aligns the AASL, ISTE, GLMA, and GPS standards where appropriate. These units were collaboratively developed by classroom teachers and SLMSs during summer professional learning sessions. Sample units are available by request.
Points from the Presentation
- What are the roles of the librarian in GPS? Teacher, Instructional Partner, Information Specialist, and Program Administrator
- It’s great to be GREAT, but you’ve got to be Wal-Mart and give them what they want!
- If they don’t know what you offer, they don’t know to ask for it – BRAND YOURSELF!
- Promote your library media program – newsletter, email, in-service - be creative, be highly visible
- Involvement in the classroom implementation of the standards builds both relationships inside and outside the school
- Involvement in the classroom implementation of the standards builds the materials collections, print & non-print, in the LMC
- Promote your program, promote your program, promote your program
- Read the research on how library media specialists and library media program make a difference in the education of students at: http://www.lrs.org/impact.asp
- Be proactive in collaborating with classroom teachers