Making the Classroom-library Connection

Moreillon, J. (2016). Making the classroom-library connection. Teacher Librarian 43(3). p 8-18.

Summary: This article describes the author’s experience with providing a workshop to pre-service teachers about collaboration and co-teaching with a teacher-librarian. The workshop was co-taught and featured small and whole-group sessions where preservice teachers were exposed to areas of teacher-librarian expertise such as copyright and fair use and a co-planning demonstration.  The author found that the majority of preservice teachers saw the benefit of collaboration with a teacher librarian and that efforts by teacher-librarians to reach out to these teachers would generally be well-received.

Evaluation: This article stresses an important element about co-teaching that is rarely addressed in the literature: teacher instruction. While librarians are taught about collaboration and co-teaching as fundamental to their careers, preservice teachers are not getting this exposure in their education. The author suggests that teacher-librarians reach out to teachers for co-planning, and that engaging new teachers in collaboration early can set the stage for more co-teaching. The author also suggests that this workshop could be given to education students and foster the idea of collaboration and co-teaching before teachers enter the school system.