How This School Library Increased Student Use By 1000 Percent

Christina Young
CO

Gonzalez, Jennifer. (2016). How this school library increased student use by 1000 percent.  Cult of Pedagogy, transcript retrieved from: https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/episode-38/  

Summary
In this podcast a principal and an administrator from Ohio are interviewed about their transformation of an underused library to a widely used "learning center". Highlights include personalized learning prescriptions and flexible spaces.

Reaction
The reason I tagged this under collaboration / co-teaching is because on of the red flags for me about this article was how their model of co-teaching had very little to do with common teaching and planning and seemed to me like the media specialist was less a collaborating teacher and more of an instructional babysitter. I am really interested in how people balance this in their own libraries.

One of the major things our library is used for is for teachers to bring whole classes for a week or more at a time so that the classroom teacher and the librarian can co-teach units often with different stations. This is what teachers in my school want to do and it is also what I was hired to do, but reading about other schools, like this one in Ohio, where students from all different classes come with a “prescription” for what they are working on seems exciting and useful too. That would allow more teachers (and hence students) to use the library in the context of what they are already doing (rather than as a special unit), but it would also limit the teachers who love the co-teaching model. I worry that in a model like the learning center in Ohio, the teacher librarian is instructional babysitting but not really co-teaching in a meaningful way.