Increasing Literacy in the High School Library

Ringwood, Jessica

Long, Deborah. (2007). Increasing literacy in the high school library. Teacher Librarian: 35(1), 13-17.

Summary: This article outlines the problems teachers face in teaching information literacy.  Many teachers at the high school level are not trained to teach reading skills, so they do not cover it, fear it or ignore them.  When the teachers struggle with this, a natural partnership to help them should be working with the school’s librarian.  This article promotes the use of “reciprocal teaching”.  Their method involved collaboration with Social Studies, English, Media Center, Business tech and Literacy coach.  They created a template on their website for students to use similar to how a KBC could function.

Evaluation: Unfortunately the methods endorsed by reciprocal teaching are not explained or explored in this article, so it requires more research by any librarian interested in learning about it.  What was nice about the article is it posed an example of how multiple disciplines could work together on a common project.  So it gives future librarians an idea of what kinds of projects they can be a part of.  They emphasized and embraced collaboration, but not co-teaching (all teachers in the room working equally and not switching off responsibilities) as we have been asked to view it in Library 250.