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My Goals for Building Instructional Partnerships

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My Goals for Building Instructional Partnerships

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Attend faculty meetings and meet with teachers to learn about what students are studying in the classroom

Advocate the knowledge and expertise that I have as a librarian, and how these skills can benefit and be utilized in the classroom

Collaborate on lesson plans to ensure our students are meeting the needs of the standards by teaching digital citizenship,  information literacy, critical thinking, and fostering innovation

Develop and maintain relationships with other district school librarians to share ideas and develop new ways to implement current trends in our libraries

Join virtual educational communities to stay up to date with technology trends and share ideas with fellow educators

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Alliance for Excellent Education: Building Instructional Partnerships Webinar

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Alliance for Excellent Education: Building Instructional Partnerships Webinar

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This webinar was led by Shannon McClintock Miller and other presenters. It explains the importance of librarians building instructional partnerships and ways that they can implement them in the Future Ready Framework. The presenters also discuss their personal stories.

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Future Ready Librarians: Building Instructional Partnerships

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Building Curriculum with Colleagues: Where the Library and Classroom Learning Connect

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Building Curriculum with Colleagues: Where the Library and Classroom Learning Connect

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This is a webinar led by Michelle Luhtala. In her presentation, she discusses how librarians can join forces with teachers to develop curriculum.

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Presented by Michelle Luhtala, Library Department Chair, New Canaan High School, CT; Amy Rothschild, Social Studies Teacher, New Canaan High School; and Jessica Cullen, English Teacher, New Canaan High School
Sponsored by Mackin Educational Resources
WATCH THE EDWEBINAR RECORDING If you attended the live session, you'll be emailed a CE certificate within 24 hours of the edWebinar. If you view the recording and would like a CE certificate, join the Emerging Tech community and go to the edWebinar Archives folder to take the CE quiz.
August is prime time for PD. Many teachers return refreshed from summer break to begin the new school year working on new or refreshed curriculum with faculty across grade levels and disciplines. This creates a sweet spot for school librarians to collaborate with colleagues and develop curriculum they will co-teach. In this edWebinar, Michelle Luhtala, Library Department Chair, New Canaan High School, CT and colleagues, share strategies for using this time to build instructional partnerships that will last throughout the year and beyond. Digital backpacks, integration with Google, Mackin Groups, Learning Management Systems, Library Management Systems, and curation will be addressed. All librarians are invited to watch this recorded session.
About the Presenter
Michelle Luhtala is the Library Department Chair at New Canaan High School in Connecticut and was one of five school librarians named as a "Mover and Shaker" by Library Journal in 2015. She is the winner of the 2011 "I Love My Librarian" Award and the Library Association's 2010 Outstanding Librarian Award. The New Canaan High School Library won AASL's National School Library Program of the year in 2010. Follow her on Twitter @mluhtala.
Join the Emerging Tech community to network with educators, participate in online discussions, receive invitations to upcoming webinars, view past webinars, take a quiz to receive a CE certificate for a past webinar, and access free resources. WATCH THE EDWEBINAR RECORDING
For more than 30 years, Mackin Educational Resources has provided library and classroom materials for grades PK-12. Working with over 18,000 publishers and a database of more than 2.5 million printed titles and more than 350,000 digital titles, Mackin supplies print books, eBooks, online educational databases, audiobooks, video resources and more, along with digital content management and custom collection analysis services. A true partner in education, Mackin's continued success and unblemished reputation is known by thousands of teachers, administrators, and librarians across the country and throughout the world.

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Building Curriculum with Colleagues: Where the Library and Classroom Learning Connect

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Presented by Michelle Luhtala, Library Department Chair, New Canaan High School, CT; Amy Rothschild, Social Studies Teacher, New Canaan High School; and Jessica Cullen, English Teacher, New Canaan High School Sponsored by Mackin Educational Resources WATCH THE EDWEBINAR RECORDING If you attended the live session, you'll be emailed a CE certificate within 24 hours of the edWebinar.

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COLLABORATING WITH FACULTY PART 1: A FIVE-STEP PROGRAM

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COLLABORATING WITH FACULTY PART 1: A FIVE-STEP PROGRAM

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This is the first part of a two part article. It was written by Kim Leeder, and it provides step by step advice for how librarians can establish a relationship with their colleagues so that they will be able to collaborate in the classroom.

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This is the first in a two-part series on librarian collaboration with faculty. Part 1 presents a five-step program for building collaborative relationships, while Part 2, published on July 13, 2011, addresses specific examples and strategies for collaboration.
by Kim Leeder

Introduction

Collaboration has become something of a buzzword of late, which puts us in danger of forgetting what it's really about. At the very foundations of the concept, beyond the conference presentations, published articles, and tenure portfolios, is the critical, learnable skill of connecting with others on both a personal and professional level. Collaboration is based on building relationships with others and finding mutual interests or goals that we can help each other accomplish. It requires shifting the ways we typically think about our jobs and being willing to embrace another's vision of our work. It demands an open mind, a willingness to listen as well as discuss, and the ability to compromise and adjust our expectations based on feedback. It is not an easy task, but it is an extremely rewarding one.

Like many academic librarians, I spend a lot of time reaching out to and trying to build connections with faculty members in my liaison departments. I love this part of my work, but it can be extremely challenging. I bring a somewhat unusual perspective to this challenge as I happen to be married to a faculty member, which gives me the ability to see things from the faculty side as well as from my own perspective. Interestingly, the book Compatibility Breeds Success by Marvin Snider compares collaborative partnerships to marriages, so there's a double point of relevance here. According to Snider, these partnerships involve a long-term commitment, accountability for one another's behavior, a commitment to resolving differences, a strong emotional commitment, and "are likely to have a major impact on each other even after the partnership ends." Instead of love and family, academic participants share a goal of improved teaching, expanded publishing opportunities, or the like.

Recently I've broken down my approach to relationship-building with faculty into identifiable steps in order to be more deliberate about my efforts in the future. Those steps are the subject of this post. This program is a proposed set of goals I've built for myself, and which I share with the Lead Pipe readership in the hope that you'll find it useful. For the record, this "program" is still in beta (so to speak), and I welcome your feedback and thoughts in the comments below. I presented a skeleton of this at ACRL's Ideapower Unconference in Philadelphia last week.

One dictionary defines collaboration as "Traitorous cooperation with an enemy," which is a humorous yet apt starting point for the conversation. It seems to me that many librarians have an uneasy relationship with our faculty for a whole variety of reasons, not least of which are the different letters that follow our names. Fortunately, the anxiety that comes from our different backgrounds and job descriptions is based more in misunderstanding than substance, so we can learn to shed those feelings on the way to a new partnership. Instead, let's redefine collaboration and set our goal as an equal partnership between one or more non-librarian faculty members and ourselves. Personally, I'm interested in the relationships that push the boundaries of the day-to-day working relationships that many of us already have with other faculty on campus.

I recently attended a presentation at the ACRL National Conference in Philadelphia entitled, Engaging Faculty, Creating Allies. I expected the presentation to inform this post and expand my ideas of what collaboration with faculty could look like. While the presentation was good, I was a little disappointed that the "engagement" of faculty described was largely through workshops or colloquia organized by librarians and to which faculty were invited (and, in some cases, paid to attend). While collaboration can happen at such events, I just don't see that as putting us on the equal footing that is necessary for deep collaboration. As Jean S. Caspers describes, we can look at librarian-faculty relationships as occurring along a continuum of three stages: parallel work is the most basic sort of relationship in which we're working alongside each other for similar goals; cooperative work involves basic coordination of efforts; and collaborative work is the deepest type of partnership (21). Sometimes having parallel goals is enough, but collaborative work is more likely to yield the greatest benefits for student learning or research.

That said, it's time to discuss the five-step program. It begins with a little self-reflection.

Step 1: Be confident

The major challenge to librarians when contemplating a collaborative relationship with faculty is finding equal footing upon which to build it. We need to start by addressing, head-on, the librarian insecurity complex. Yes, we have an MLS instead of a PhD, as do many other academic professionals and faculty; we're different. As Peggy A. Pritchard writes, "To be taken seriously by faculty members as potential partners...librarians need to view themselves as professional colleagues with important knowledge and expertise to contribute" (387). While this sounds easy, it can be a substantial hurdle for some librarians. The first and most critical step to becoming a collaborator with faculty is shaking off at least a century's worth of history that makes us think, for no good reason, that we can't function as equal colleagues. We don't have the same scholarly training, nor the same number of years of study under our belts, but we have plenty to offer. We have different skills and talents than other faculty, and that's what makes the potential for collaboration even more exciting.

In a 1977 article, H. William Axford commented on the librarian movement for faculty status, and the nervousness of some librarians about the shift. "Part of the problem," he wrote then, "can be attributed to the nature of library education which simply does not engender in students the attitudes necessary to feel at home within the traditional values of the academy, particularly its canons of scholarship." Not to pin the whole problem on library school, but the truth is that librarians are not initiated into our field in the same way that faculty are: by reading scholarship, identifying our own specific area(s) of specialization, presenting at conferences, and building a network of colleagues whose interests overlap our own. This is in part because library school students may go on to work at a whole variety of different organizations. And some of this happens in library school for more motivated students, but the vast majority probably do not have this set of experiences. The result is graduates who have been schooled as professionals but not as scholars. It's a different way of looking at the world, and a different way of looking at a career. So our challenge is to adopt the scholar's worldview once we're actively in the field. It's ours for the taking.

In fact, a recent study of faculty attitudes found that faculty have a very favorable view of various aspects of collaboration with librarians (rated overall as a 3.98 out of 5). An earlier study fleshed out some of the differences in how librarians and faculty see each other, pointing to an awareness problem that has led to faculty being ignorant of the scope of librarians' work. Considering both of these studies together, it is clear that faculty are not deliberately disregarding librarian expertise, nor are they averse to collaborative opportunities. The door is open.

Step 2: Make the connection

The first phase of any collaborative relationship-before we can even think about the idea of collaborating-is simply making a connection with another human being. The best collaborative relationships often include an element of friendship, or at least friendly collegiality, in addition to a solid professional working relationship. If we think of collaborative relationships as just that, relationships, we can more readily accept the fact that they take patience, cultivation, and work, like any relationship. For those of us who love our library jobs, it's easy to see how the professional and personal can bleed together. It happens on a daily basis, particularly for those who live in smaller communities or work on smaller campuses.

How do we make these connections with faculty? It starts just by reaching out. We can make connections at the reference desk or on a committee, but they're more likely to happen when we get out of our comfort zones. Getting involved in new faculty candidate interviews. Coffee dates. Going to after-hours socials, plays, exhibits, speakers, and more. Attending campus events and breaking away from the same, comfortable group to meet new people. One librarian at The University of Saskatchewan decided to methodically arrange in-person meetings with a subset of her liaison department and later surveyed them to see whether her personal attention had an effect. It did, with 92% of faculty reporting that their use of the library had increased after the meeting.

As an example, I started my current position and was assigned as a liaison to several departments. For one of those departments I lacked any notable background in the field and wasn't sure what to expect. Still, with my new librarian enthusiasm, I contacted the department chair and got myself invited to a faculty meeting. They gave me five minutes, and while they were cordial, my reception was less than enthusiastic. I left that meeting feeling that I had failed in making the connection I'd hoped for. Still I regrouped, and decided to focus my energy and time on the department's faculty liaison to the library (let's call her Jane). I proposed that Jane and I meet for coffee, and the two of us spent an hour awkwardly sipping hot drinks and trying to find common ground to discuss. It was a challenging conversation, but it was a start.

From the very beginning, building collaborative relationships requires boldness. There's no hiding behind a mask of introvertedness. The hard part, typically, is making conversation with strangers. Fortunately for us, this is a learnable skill, not an inborn characteristic. Since I was a child, I've watched my mother conduct long, effortless conversations with just about anybody who comes near her. Over the years, I've discovered that what comes naturally to her-making connections with people-is not just a personality trait, but an attainable skill. The key is: ask them about themselves. Sounds obvious, right? It is, sort of.

And just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that you meet someone and then launch into twenty questions and interrogate them. The best conversations are a give-and-take between two people sharing information about themselves or their viewpoints. But of all the great things I've learned from my mother over the course of my lifetime, possibly the most valuable and useful on a daily basis is: people love to talk about themselves. Not in an egotistical way, but in a very straightforward and human way. We all have our unique passions, and we all love to share them. If you can steer the conversation to some of a person's interests, hobbies, family life, or other passions, you can usually have an effortless conversation for hours. This simple strategy is something we can all adopt in our everyday lives to make friends, network with colleagues, and yes, build collaborative relationships with faculty.

Be bold, be friendly, and be inquisitive: that's all it really takes. Don't forget to be yourself, too, and share your own responses to questions they ask. Be a whole person, just as they are. Not everyone on campus will embrace spontaneous conversation with a librarian, but most of them will. And even if someone clearly doesn't want to connect with you, don't take it personally. It's their loss.

Step 3: Reinforce the connection

Once you've made that desirable connection with a faculty member, don't blow it! The next step is to follow up, make sure they have your contact information, and remind them that you're out there. This could be as simple as an email message saying, "it was great to meet you!" with a couple of notes about something library-related that you had spoken about, and an open-ended invitation to meet again. This was my approach with Jane. Or the followup could be as elaborate as a tailored newsletter or flier with more details about various services you can offer.

At this point, the most important thing is to connect with them on their level, not yours. Don't immediately set up a blog or LibGuide or start bundling RSS feeds unless you know they're tech-savvy enough to appreciate it. One of the biggest downfalls I see when librarians connect with faculty is an expectation that those faculty will be as technophoric as we are. Don't count on it. Choose a platform that they'll use and find comfortable, regardless of how much you love Twitter. If you're just dying to put your love of technology to work, you can harness RSS feeds or email alerts to track the topics the faculty you know have mentioned as interests. Newly released books or articles make great conversation topics, and you can drop a line when you see their work get published.

It's also important to be multi-dimensional and not sound like a library salesperson trying to make the sale. If you went from friendly and personal in the initial meeting and now bury them in library paraphernalia, you're going to lose the personal nature of the connection that is so critical to relationship-building. I'm not suggesting sending them photos of your kids unless they've asked for them, but in whatever communication you send, mention something you discussed during that first meeting. Even if it's work-related, it reinforces the sense that you were listening (which you were, right?). Be personal and professional. Remind them that you are, indeed, a whole person.

Step 4: Build the relationship

Once you've reinforced that connection, it's time to begin building the relationship. This requires regular, consistent effort and possibly even putting reminders on your calendar or to-do list. This process is sometimes described in business literature as "bonding." Make it a goal to connect with the faculty member biannually or yearly. Ideally, those connections should be in person, by dropping by their office, setting up a coffee date, or attending a faculty meeting and chatting with them afterwards. If those in-person options aren't possible, an email or blog/newsletter can probably do the job. The more tailored and personal, the better. And again, choose the platform based on their comfort level with technology, not yours.

Jane and I started meeting for lunch every semester, and I made a point of sending an invitation by email every time unless I heard from her first. As we got to know each other better our conversations got easier and we learned about each other's jobs and families. We spent most of our time talking about the research classes she taught, and the ways that I might help, but we also talked about a whole array of other topics. Our exchanges became friendlier, more comfortable, and much more fun for both of us.

At this stage, you're getting to know them as a person as well as a professional, too. Continue to ask questions: how are they doing? How are classes? How is their research? How is whatever they might have mentioned from their personal life? Even more importantly, listen to the answers and learn as much as you can. Take notes afterwards, for future reference, especially if you have a less-than-stellar memory. It may sound mercenary, but taking the time to remember details about someone means you care, and that's a good thing. Hyun-Duck Chung from North Carolina State University is a great example of a librarian who embraced a business librarianship role fully by putting herself in a position to learn about her liaison department from the inside out. Chung notes, "Genuine excitement about a common goal can help ignite the relationship-building process, but cultivating it requires sustained engagement with individuals over time, and being open to learning from each other" (165).

Step 5: Go Collaborate

Here's where all that effort pays off, if you've played your cards right. After all this relationship-building you know what your faculty member is working on, what classes they teach, what sort of research assignments they assign, and other aspects of their professional activities. Now's the time to identify areas of mutual interest where a collaboration might be fruitful to both of you. Look at their class research projects and think about ways you might build more library involvement into it, to benefit the students. Pay attention to calls for papers that are open to an interdisciplinary approach to a topic (many are). Wrap your brain around what a collaborative project with this individual might look like, before proposing anything.

Once you can see the potential for collaboration, go ahead and talk to the individual. Be sure to describe the project you have in mind as well as the benefits to both of you. Ruth McCorkle concisely describes "four main components of research kinship: a willingness to share ideas and the ability to critique and respond to others' ideas; the recognition of one another's talents; the joint sharing of an idea and crafting of a hypothesis; and, the commitment of time and resources in a shared venture" (539). Be willing to give and take, consider other directions, or change the project completely in response to their feedback and ideas. A professional collaboration is a negotiation, and you'll have to be flexible to make it a success.

Jane and I talked about an idea I had to tier instruction for a series of courses she taught that required research papers. The same cohort of students moved through all these classes together, so I thought it would be worthwhile to introduce research skills to them gradually, building each semester on what they had learned last time. She liked the idea, so I reviewed all her syllabi and put together a proposal. She liked the proposal, made a few suggestions that I incorporated, and then we put it into action. I was happy to move from typical one-shots to a deeper way of working with her students, and Jane was delighted to see the improvements in her students' work at the end of the series.

So the collaboration is on! After that, you just have to maintain your end of the deal: meet your deadlines, do your share of the work, and most crucial of all, keep in touch. Communicate regularly to maintain the relationship. And if something changes in your relationship and you find that you have to work with someone new, don't be discouraged. Just start the process over again and give yourself time to get back to the same level.

Sound easy?

It's not. But it's an endlessly rewarding adventure that takes us in new directions as librarians, teachers, and scholars. Cross-disciplinary collaboration empowers us to re-envision our work, gain new perspectives, and reach goals we wouldn't have attained alone. At the same time, it reasserts our value as librarians on our campuses and among our faculty colleagues. It benefits us, it benefits them, and it benefits our campus community. What could be better than that?

Further Reading

In addition to the more specific sources found in the notes, I suggest these broader works for an overview of the collaboration topic.

Mounce, M. (2010). Working Together: Academic Librarians and Faculty Collaborating to Improve Students' Information Literacy Skills: A Literature Review 2000-2009. Reference Librarian, 51(4), 300-320. doi:10.1080/02763877.2010.501420

Notes

¹ Snider, M. (2003). Compatibility breeds success: How to manage your relationship with your business partner. Westport, Conn: Praeger.
² Knowles, E. (2000). The Oxford dictionary of phrase and fable. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
³ Caspers, Jean S. (2006). Building strong relationships with faculty-librarian collaboration. In P. Ragains, (Ed.), Information literacy instruction that works: A guide to teaching by discipline and student population (pp. 19-32). New York: Neal-Schuman Publishers.
⁴ Pritchard, P. A. (2010). The Embedded Science Librarian: Partner in Curriculum Design and Delivery. Journal of Library Administration, 50(4), 373-396. doi:10.1080/01930821003667054
⁵ Axford, H. (1977). The Three Faces of Eve: or The Identity of Academic Librarianship A Symposium. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 2(6), 276-278.
⁶ Yousef, A. (2010). Faculty Attitudes Toward Collaboration with Librarians. Library Philosophy & Practice, 12(2), 1-15.
⁷ Christiansen, L., M. Stombler, and L. Thaxton. (2004). A report on librarian-faculty relations from a sociological perspective. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 30, 116-21.
⁸ Watson, E. M. (2010). Taking the Mountain to Mohammed: The Effect of Librarian Visits to Faculty Members on Their use of the Library. New Review of Academic Librarianship, 16(2), 145-159.
⁹Cynthia W. Cann. (1998). Eight steps to building a business-to-business relationship. The Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, 13(4/5), 393-405.
¹⁰ Chung, H. (2010). Relationship Building in Entrepreneurship Liaison Work: One Business Librarian's Experience at North Carolina State University. Journal of Business & Finance Librarianship, 15(3/4), 161-170. doi:10.1080/08963568.2010.487432
¹¹ McCorkle, R. (2011). Interdisciplinary collaboration in the pursuit of science to improve psychosocial cancer care. Psycho-Oncology, 20(5), 538-543. doi:10.1002/pon.1766

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Kristine Alpi, Ellie Collier, Hilary Davis, and Eric Frierson for their feedback and help in shaping this unruly post.

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Collaborating with Faculty Part 1: A Five-Step Program

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This is the first in a two-part series on librarian collaboration with faculty. Part 1 presents a five-step program for building collaborative relationships, while Part 2, published on July 13, 2011, addresses specific examples and strategies for collaboration. by Kim Leeder Collaboration has become something of a buzzword of late, which puts us in danger of forgetting what it's really about.

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10 Google Plus Communities Every Teacher Should Know About

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10 Google Plus Communities Every Teacher Should Know About

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An article that provides links to 10 communities created through Google Plus. These communities are for educators who want to discuss current trends and developing technologies for schools.

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Educational Technology and Mobile Learning

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Google Plus has recently rolled out some very impressive updates to its features starting by improvements of the page lay-out to improvements in Google Plus Communities. Last year, Google integrated Google Plus into its ecosystem. Google calls this access to "your web." So instead of all the public information that is already available to everyone searching via Google, so you can see information that you posted into Google's new social network and on some of Google's other services like Picasa Web.

However, what I want to focus on today is a very interesting service offered by Google Plus called " communities". I see this feature as a great way for teachers to expand their personal/professional networks through connecting and sharing resources with a wide audience of like-minded educators and teachers from all around the world.

Teachers can also use Google Plus communities to create classroom communities where students get to learn collaboratively, check out this " 11 Steps to Create A Google Plus Community for Your Class " to learn how you can create one for your class.

If you want to use Google Plus communities to extend your PLN and grow professionally, here are some great communities I recommend for you to follow. Check them out below and share with us what you think of them. Enjoy

1- Educational Technology and Mobile Learning

This is the community we created for this blog. By joining you will be able to stay updated about what we post here everyday and also engage in relevant tech ed discussions. See you there.

This is a community of people interested in Google Apps for education. Connection, Discussion, Sharing, Discovery ... with Google Apps for Education.
3-Educational Technology

A community of education professionals, technologists, students, and anyone else interested in sharing discussion of all things tech in education.
4-School Technology Leadership

This is an open space for anyone who's interested in effective technology leadership in P-12 schools. Please share widely and contribute as desired!
5-Educational Leadership

A community focused on educational leadership. Principals, superintendents, central office administrators, professors, policymakers, etc.
6-Connected Learning

this Community will be a welcoming space where learners of all ages, and from all walks of life, can come together to share their connected learning experiences, challenges, and thoughts.
7-

This is a community for educators utilizing or planning to utilize iPads and other mobile devices to engage students and optimize learning.
8-STEM Educators

This is a community where STEM educators can meet to share ideas and experiences. Everyone is welcome here, however, because everyone is involved in the education process. If you have a passion for science, technology, engineering, or mathematics education, you're in the right place.
9-Google Docs and Drive

Welcome to the Google Docs and Drive community, where we discuss new features of Google Drive, discuss about wanted features or concepts, and solve problems for individuals!
10-Technology and Innovation in Education
A community for the intersection of research and practice relating to innovation in teaching and learning.

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10 Google Plus Communities Every Teacher should Know about

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Google Plus has recently rolled out some very impressive updates to its features starting by improvements of the page lay-out to improvements in Google Plus Communities. Last year, Google integrated Google Plus into its ecosystem. Google calls this access to "your web."

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COLLABORATING WITH FACULTY PART 2: WHAT OUR PARTNERSHIPS LOOK LIKE

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COLLABORATING WITH FACULTY PART 2: WHAT OUR PARTNERSHIPS LOOK LIKE

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This is the second part of the two part article written by Kim Leeder. In the second part she describes ways that collaborative instruction can happen.

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This is the second in a two-part series on librarian collaboration with faculty. Part 1, published on April 7, 2011, presents a five-step program for building collaborative relationships, while Part 2 addresses specific examples and strategies for collaboration.
by Kim Leeder

I. What we talk about when we talk about collaboration

On April 7, 2011, I published " Collaborating with Faculty Part 1: A Five-Step Program," a post that described my strategies for developing collaborative relationships with disciplinary faculty. To briefly summarize my "program," I identified five steps to collaboration as: (1) Be confident, (2) Make the connection, (3) Reinforce the connection, (4) Build the relationship, and (5) Go collaborate. These steps are admittedly simplified, but they do serve to remind us of the importance of cultivating relationships beyond email updates or visits to department meetings. In this article, Part 2, I'll share some of the most common and most innovative approaches to librarian-faculty collaboration that I've heard about or seen in the literature. As I was researching this post I created a spreadsheet of some of the notable projects I discovered in the literature of the past ten years that may be helpful to others. This is not intended to be comprehensive, and I invite you to review, comment, argue, and/or add to it, as you see fit (I'm drawing primarily from the published literature here, but descriptions of non-published projects are also welcome). It is my wish that these examples will help us reconsider our existing collaborative efforts, and will be useful for hopeful librarian collaborators in reassessing and expanding their own initiatives. Partnering with faculty on projects, instruction, and other initiatives offers a whole array of rewards such as improved services, greater student learning, and the ability to grow as a professional. Plus, working with others on campus allows us to extend our reach and achieve more of our goals than we could do alone.

However, "collaboration" is a broad term that can be difficult to define. In thinking about librarian-faculty partnerships, I find it helpful to consider them on a spectrum of possibility. There are two models I think are useful for this. The first is Pritchard's (2010) scale to describe various levels of librarian-faculty partnerships on information literacy instruction. Pritchard makes the following distinctions between different types of support that may be offered by librarians for information literacy instruction in coursework:

1. Supplemental, which happens outside the curriculum through workshops and instruction, reflecting no cooperation between librarian and faculty member.

2. Integrated, which involves librarian support for a course without input into the curriculum.

3. Embedded, which implies co-development of course curriculum and/or assignments

While Pritchard's criteria are specific to teaching, we can extrapolate the same concepts to address collaboration more broadly. To expand these definitions to our discussion of librarian-faculty partnerships, we can identify parallel levels at which individuals may work together, as follows:

1. Communication: In which librarians and faculty members may notify each other of their activities and work with the same students, but without actually consulting one another, such as when a faculty member alerts a librarian to an existing assignment that will send students to the library, or a librarian sends a newsletter to faculty.

2. Cooperation: In which faculty and librarians work together on a project or initiative, with one partner supporting the other's goals, such as through typical instruction sessions (where the librarian is asked to support an existing curriculum or assignment), or through faculty workshops offered by librarians to educate faculty about library resources.

3. Collaboration: In which librarians and faculty work together in an equal partnership that requires them to align their different perspectives on a project, such as curriculum design and co-teaching or co-writing an article or grant, develop common goals, and reach a new shared understanding.

The second model I find useful was created by Black, Crest, Volland (2001), who came up with a simple flowchart that presents a comparable scale of librarian-faculty partnership. The major difference is that they view partnerships as a progression instead of a spectrum, and assert that each step along the scale leads to the next. In their minds the process begins with relationship-building (librarian and faculty getting to know each other) and faculty development (librarian teaching faculty about library resources), leads to collaborative instructional design (both parties working together to achieve course goals), and results in tailored instruction for classes.

The fact that both of these models provide similar "levels" of partnership reinforces the idea that collaboration can be achieved in a variety of ways. While all levels of partnership have intrinsic value, this post will focus primarily upon initiatives that embody the definitions of cooperation and collaboration as described above.

II. Cooperative partnerships between librarians and faculty

Cooperation requires that the librarian and faculty member work together at some level to identify and achieve a common goal. This often involves a one-way direction of effort, as one partner becomes involved to support the other's established goals. These partnerships are more in-depth than communication partnerships as there is some combined effort between the two participants, but the two individuals generally work independently of each other. For instance, at my institution I developed a tiered instructional plan to support a series of courses in my liaison department. The plan included a breakdown of the various research assignments that were required of students in the different courses, and described my strategy for building their skills throughout the series. While I consulted the faculty member who taught these courses and ensured that she was on board with my plan, my work did not have an influence on her course content. I created the plan to support her existing curriculum, assignments, and goals.

Cooperative partnerships come in several common formats, including:

Faculty training

Technology assistance

Collection development

Information Literacy instruction

I describe each of these in more depth in the following sections.

Faculty training

Faculty workshops typically involve librarians planning and executing sessions intended to teach and/or raise awareness among faculty about the resources and services offered at the library. These sessions usually involve one or both of the following goals: (i) encouraging faculty to use the library more, e.g. marketing, and/or (ii) "training the trainer," with the purpose of empowering faculty to pass on deeper knowledge about the library to their students, e.g. instruction. For an example of faculty workshops in action, Lucas (2011) provides a helpful case study of the faculty in-service approach at D'Youville College in Buffalo, New York. Lucas defines the in-service as "the act of collaboratively introducing new and existing faculty to the library resources and services." The article lays out the details of what they cover in their in-service sessions.

Faculty workshops may also be targeted to specific audiences such as distance faculty, as noted by Miller et al. (2010). At the University of Maryland University College, librarians have taken a slightly different approach to the in-service model by presenting asynchronous online workshops lasting seven to twelve days that introduce distance faculty to the library. These sessions are cofacilitated by a librarian and the academic director of a given department, but content is created solely by the library. Miller et al.'s article includes detailed descriptions of the workshops that are likely to be useful for anyone considering a similar approach.

Cooperative faculty training occasionally goes beyond the typical workshop. Take, for instance the work of librarians at Jinwen University of Science and Technology (JUST) in Taiwan. They serve as a example of a library that trains faculty to serve as stand-in librarians, or "library specialists," for a semester at a time. Yu (2009) explains how, to expand the library staff's limited reach, they advanced a proposal to train one or two faculty representatives from each academic department as volunteer "library specialists." These faculty members were required to attend special library skills training, as well as to serve two hours of reference a week and function as consultants for subject-specific reference questions. The faculty become stand-in librarians for the purposes of helping students, and acted as consultants to the library on collection development and subject-specific reference. This unique program enabled faculty to become intimately familiar with their library while expanding its ability to serve a growing student body.

Technology assistance

In some cases librarians leverage their tech-savvy to raise their profile on campus beyond the scope of research, for instance by assisting them in creating websites or media. Bailey, Blunt, & Magner (2011) describe how librarians can leverage technology skills, in this case video and multimedia creation, to support faculty goals, instruction, and conference presentations. This reasserts the importance of librarians on campus and may potentially build a foundation for greater partnerships. In addition to video creation, it is common for librarians to work with faculty in groups or one-on-one to assist them with new technologies such as blogs, mobile access, social media, and RSS.

Collection development

Collection development is an area in which librarian-faculty partnerships have long been common, typically at the communication level but sometimes evolving into cooperative relationships with the intention of expanding a particular part of the collection to support relevant coursework. As one example, Ratto & Lynch (2011) describes an effort at the University of Southern New Hampshire to supplement traditional textbook access with a program to provide focused course content for a Marketing course through the use of electronic textbooks. The texts were licensed and cataloged by the library in coordination with the faculty member.

Another example of cooperative relationships in collection development is the designation of specific funds either as "new faculty funds" or as internal grants. Horava (2005) described a program at The University of Ottawa to get new faculty more involved in working with librarians to expand the collection in their research areas through the use of designated funds in the amount of $2,000 per faculty member. The program met with some success in building bridges between librarians and faculty and increasing collection development in current research and teaching areas.

Information Literacy instruction

The most common cooperative efforts between librarians and faculty relate to IL instruction in a wide variety of ways. The traditional "one-shot" instruction session is a classic example of this. There are also an array of variations on the "one-shot," from a similar "two-shot" to strategies that many refer to as "embedded" librarianship, in which a librarian is present as some level throughout the entire course. Kobzina (2010) describes a scenario at the University of California at Berkeley in which librarians embed in a prominent environmental studies course, with multiple library sessions, access to the online course site, and the ability to respond to course content on an ongoing basis. The only thing separating this effort from collaboration as defined in the introduction to this post is the fact that they don't contribute to the creation of the course curriculum or assignments.

III. Collaborative partnerships between librarians and faculty

Before taking this discussion further, I'd like to restate my own belief that collaboration, as distinct from communication and cooperation, requires an equal partnership between librarian and faculty member. I make this assertion because collaboration, as I define it, requires both parties to acknowledge, understand, and even embrace the other's viewpoint, with the result being a shared vision or product that is greater than the sum of its parts. This is not easy. More casual partnerships, in which participants align their goals but don't blend them, often accomplish great things but don't achieve the same shift in perception for those participating. I base this perspective on my own collaborative experiences with my institution's first-year writing program faculty, which has entirely changed my perspective on teaching research to first-year students. By working together to build a shared curriculum for our co-requisite research and writing courses, we all become more fully cognizant of the differences between our two approaches and the natural ways we could bridge them. The effects of our work together have rippled outwards into the way our two units interact and understand each other's work.

Thus, collaboration takes the initiatives described in the "Cooperation" section above and stretches them further by adding a give-and-take element to the relationship between librarian and faculty member. In collaboration we are forced to consider the other person's perspective, compromise, and often walk away with a new understanding of the project at hand. Collaborative partnerships result in a product that reflects the contributions of both parties. These efforts may take the following forms:

Information Literacy instruction

Professional (writing, research, presentation, grant, etc.) projects

As I did above, I'll now discuss each of these in more depth with some examples, though there are fewer examples of collaboration as I define it.

Information Literacy instruction

When it comes to teaching, collaboration often involves the librarian and faculty member partnering on curriculum design and development, and often extends into co-teaching. The literature of instructional collaboration is extensive, but Mounce's (2010) literature review covering articles published in 2000-2009 is helpful in gaining a big picture perspective.

For instance, Gaspar & Wetzel (2009) describe a case study in which they participate in an Institutionalized partnership for specific programs in which librarians and writing professors collaborate on curriculum and assignment development. The beautiful thing about this example is that The George Washington University created a program requiring this collaboration and recognizing its benefits. As a result the program has central administrative support that makes it sustainable for the parties involved.

There are also models of embedded librarianship that meet the same criteria without the co-teaching element. In addition to presenting the useful model of integrated instruction that I described in Part I above, Pritchard describes an embedded experience in a nanoscience course at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. Students in the course write an article for a locally published academic journal for which the librarian serves as editor-in-chief, and partners with the faculty member and students to ensure that their research and articles are up to par. This unique example of embedded librarianship involves extensive collaboration with several individuals on campus. Pritchard includes advice for collaborative-minded librarians at the end of her article, much of which echoes my Part 1 Lead Pipe post. She says:

Entering into faculty-librarian partnerships is not a simple matter of introducing oneself to teaching faculty and announcing our plans for embedding IL and AL into their courses. It involves the careful cultivation of collegial relationships, the clear and consistent communication of the specialized knowledge and expertise we bring to the curriculum development process, and a sustained commitment to staying visible, available and involved (389).

Professional projects

Another project area that requires deep collaboration is the librarian-faculty co-written article, conference co-presentation, or co-administered grant project. Cross-disciplinary professional contributions are challenging for any faculty, but the benefits to the collaborators and to the field can be substantial. Fonseca & Viator (2009) recommend that librarian faculty act more like faculty and cultivate multi-disciplinary expertise by entering into collaborative projects (writing, grant proposals) with non-library faculty, and by engaging in active service on campus, particularly in leadership roles. Fonseca & Viator's highly readable article is a call to action for academic librarians around the nation. While it is common for librarians to serve on campus committees, I wonder how often we actually step up to the chair or president position to assert ourselves as professionals on our campuses. Local leadership by librarians not only allows the individual librarian to increase his skill set but raises the library's profile on campus by making it clear to faculty that the library is interested and engaged in campus issues at more than an administrative level.

There are a few examples out there of librarians and faculty members co-presenting. As recently as March 2011 the ACRL Conference included a poster session by Ratto (librarian) & Lynch (Marketing professor), entitled " Collaboration unleashes e-book database potential for replacing traditional textbook options." Their poster describes the cooperative collection development described above.

IV. Final thoughts

The variety of possible ways in which librarians and faculty can partner together, and the spectrum of what those partnerships might look like, far exceeds this post. For instance, though I did not find examples in the literature, I could envision many projects similar to those describe above that involve graduate students as future faculty. MyLead Pipe colleague Hilary Davis described a project at her institution in which her colleague worked with a graduate student association to plan workshops for their members. This program creates the opportunity not only to help graduate students build their research skills, but also to set a foundation for future collaboration when those individuals have moved on to faculty positions.

Overall I have attempted to capture a snapshot here of the wealth of opportunities at hand to remind and inspire us to extend beyond the limits of our buildings, our offices, and our daily interactions. It can be challenging at times to find the space and the emotional energy to cultivate the relationships required for productive cooperation and collaboration. However, the benefits to students, to faculty, and to our own job satisfaction are guaranteed to make the effort worthwhile.

Notes

For information about the references cited in this post, please view my spreadsheet. You are also welcome to add to it if you know of great collaborative models that might interest our readers.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Brooke Ratto, Ellie Collier, Hilary Davis, and Emily Ford for their feedback that helped to shape this post.

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Collaborating with Faculty Part 2: What Our Partnerships Look Like

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This is the second in a two-part series on librarian collaboration with faculty. Part 1, published on April 7, 2011, presents a five-step program for building collaborative relationships, while Part 2 addresses specific examples and strategies for collaboration.

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Collaboration: How it Looks and Who it Benefits

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Collaboration: How it Looks and Who it Benefits

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This chapter from Collaborating to Meet Standards, by Tom Buzzeo explains the benefits for students and faculty when Teacher Librarians collaborate, and how the instructional partnership can happen.

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Tara N. Jones's personal story for how she built instructional partnerships and models she used for collaborating in classroom. Her example discusses how she reflected on the experiences to understand what worked best and ways she made changes to better the collaboration practice.

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Collaboration.

It's a word that's always thrown around in professional development discussions. The concept sounds simple enough, and I thought I had a handle on it. Turns out, I never really understood how to best collaborate.

When I was an elementary school librarian, I asked teachers to meet with me. We discussed what they were teaching. Then I would go back into the library and plan future lessons for the students. Later, I would present these lessons in the library, without the presence of the classroom teacher.

I considered this effective collaboration at the time.
A new opportunity
I learned that my district, which did not have secondary teacher librarians, was redefining that role, renamed research technology specialist-and I was one of the first teachers hired. Currently, an additional such position is posted for the 2016-17 school year.

A research technology specialist is only required to have teaching certification and experience with research and technology. A MLS, though recommended, is not mandatory.

With that new position, I moved from a fixed-schedule library, where I had classes come to me on set days and times, in an elementary school, to an office beside the library at a combined middle and high school. Most of the time, though, I'm co-teaching lessons in classrooms. The library itself is on a flexible schedule, with teachers scheduling sessions at their discretion, and is staffed by a classified professional.

This new staffing structure required that I integrate the research and technology skills into the curriculum and work closely with staff during this process. This new position expanded my views of teaching, thinking, planning. I began to rethink how a 21st century librarian should collaborate.

Collaboration feels very different without predictable library classes containing the same students. My challenges soon became clear.
Identifying likely partners
Gary Hartzell's Building Influence for the School Librarian: Tenets, Targets, & Tactics Lists (Linworth, 2003) recommends building good working relationships with the following: new teachers, veteran teachers new to your school, teachers whose assignment has been radically changed, and teachers taking part in school-wide change.

In order to establish relationships, I ate lunch with the staff and was sure to be present in the hallway. I asked teachers in person if I could observe them and their classes in action. (Emails did not get much response, probably because of the number of emails teachers receive.)
Finding out what research projects were planned
To find out more, I accessed curricula online. Being able to review the curriculum for all subjects helped me narrow down what research projects were being conducted in my school. The curriculum's scope and sequence gave me the short version of topics. Also, I asked students what research projects they remembered from previous years, to help narrow down specific teachers to speak to in person.
What then?
I had a list of possible staff members to collaborate with, and a good idea of the research projects in the pipeline. But I wasn't sure what to do next.

I decided to begin by introducing the resources available to students in our district. I asked the teachers on my list for one period of class time to teach a lesson.

I wound up hammering out a co-teaching arrangement with both the humanities teacher and the world history teacher. I would rotate, spending half the class period in humanities and the second half in world history. While the classroom teachers were the authorities in their respective subject areas, I could bring my expertise in best practices for researching and creating the projects. As Stacy Cameron, coordinator of library and media services at Frisco Independent School District in Frisco, TX, said in a webinar, "Co-teaching is a deeper level of collaboration. Each member of the co-teaching team brings her own level of expertise."
A tech tool smooths the way
The teachers and I began analyzing technology tools available to our district in order to be able to communicate outside our face-to-face meetings. At first, we shared a resource where we kept important documents (meeting minutes, emails, calendars, directions, PowerPoints). But we wanted to be able to edit each other's documents and leave comments on each other's lessons whenever it was convenient for each of us individually. Our planning needed to be able to continue even when we couldn't all meet up.

Microsoft OneNote 's ability to have multiple people working on different aspects of each lesson in the research process solved that problem of continuity. The lessons' transitions flowed from one skill to another, making the lesson easier for the students to understand. OneNote also allowed teachers to differentiate the lessons for each class and student based on individual needs.
Co-teaching models
Every teacher, research project, and lesson is going to lead to a different form of co-teaching. If you and the classroom teacher discuss a co-teaching model and classroom management expectations before you start teaching, the lesson will run smoother. Here are the seven models of co-teaching from the Teacher Quality Enhancement Center at St. Cloud (MN) State University:

1. One Teach, One Observe: One teacher has primary responsibility while the other gathers specific observational information on students or the (instructing) teacher.

2. One Teach, One Assist: One teacher has primary instructional responsibility while the other assists students with their work, monitors behaviors, or corrects assignments.

3. Parallel Teaching: Each teacher instructs half the students. The two teachers are addressing the same instructional material and presenting the material using the same teaching strategy.

4. Supplemental Teaching: This strategy allows one teacher to work with students at their expected grade level, while the other teacher works with those students who need the information and/or materials retaught, extended, or remediated.

5. Station Teaching: The co-teaching pair divides the instructional content into parts. Each teacher instructs one of the groups; groups then rotate or spend a designated amount of time at each station. Often an independent station will be used along with the teacher-led stations.

6. Alternative Teaching: This strategy provides two different approaches to teaching the same information. The learning outcome is the same for all students. However, the avenue for getting there is different.

7. Team Teaching: The lesson exhibits an invisible flow of instruction with no prescribed division of authority. From a student's perspective, there is no clearly defined leader. Both teachers share the instruction, are free to interject information, and available to assist students and answer questions.

After trying most of these models, I found that "Team Teaching" was the most effective. It created a respectful classroom community. Studies have shown that students learn and "imitate cooperative and collaborative skills" from observing how "teachers share ideas, work cooperatively, and contribute to one another's learning," says Richard Villa, Jacqueline Thousand, and Ann Nevin in A Guide to Co-Teaching (Corwin, 2004). Co-teaching also allows students more time to work because they spend less time waiting for teacher attention.
Round two!
During our second year collaborating, we structured projects to be student led and utilizing OneNote. Students were given four sections: information, workspace, research help, and research steps. Students could work at their own pace, allowing for differentiated one-on-one support.

I quickly realized that in order to make sure students were comprehending research and technology skills, I needed to be part of conferencing, review student's work throughout the process, and read their essays. By dividing the class in half (half assigned to me and half assigned to the classroom teacher), we were able to provide more immediate feedback and focus on students who were struggling. Students not meeting deadlines conferenced more frequently than those who were showing they were successful in researching. After school, students were more easily able to receive extra help because there were two teachers available.

Providing timely feedback for every step of the process for all students, though, proved near impossible. Each student received a partner (a "critical friend") for the entire project. Every research day, the students met with their critical friends, who reviewed their work, for the last 10 minutes of class.
Reflection
Not only is it essential to reflect on student work, but also on the co-teaching process. Schedule time to think about the first co-teaching lesson: What went well and what might change for the next project? Student feedback will also help guide your steps in future projects. Although co-teaching and collaboration takes considerable effort, the classroom teacher, students, and you will benefit and grow from the experience.
Tara N. Jones entered the education field as an English teacher before getting her Masters of Library Science Degree. She is now research technology specialist in a 6th-12th grade school in Bellevue, WA.

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Collaboration. It's a word that's always thrown around in professional development discussions. The concept sounds simple enough, and I thought I had a handle on it. Turns out, I never really understood how to best collaborate. When I was an elementary school librarian, I asked teachers to meet with me.

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From Teacher to School Librarian Leader and Instructional Partner

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From Teacher to School Librarian Leader and Instructional Partner

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This journal article written by Sheila Baker discusses the roles of the school librarian and how they can be utilized in instructional partnerships.

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Let's talk about Building Instructional Partnerships as Future Ready Librarians

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Let's talk about Building Instructional Partnerships as Future Ready Librarians

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Shannon McClintock Miller's padlet page that provides resources and ways that librarians can build instructional partnerships.