Fall 2003
Doni Stewart finds drama in everything—even an overdue book. At the school year's end, students at Portland's West Sylvan Middle School flock to the library to settle accounts. Behind the desk, Stewart, the school's librarian, moves and talks nonstop. Her eyebrows rise and fall, knitting into a mock scowl ("OK, you owe me $16.15") or arching with surprise ("What happened to your hair?"). Her voice, too, sinks and soars. It trembles with sadness over a lost novel one second ("It's $14.95—tryyy to find it") and barks orders the next ("Go to your locker, go over to the shelf, see if it's there! Oh—am I yelling?").
Despite her exuberance, Stewart doesn't want a visitor to get the wrong idea from the fact that she's checking in books and collecting fines. "This part I don't usually do," she says, explaining that her assistant is on maternity leave. Like other school librarians, she's up against a stereotype that her job is largely clerical. It's a misconception common even among other educators.
Stewart's real passion is teaching and curriculum, not shelving or checking out books or gluing on book covers. She, like other excellent school librarians, works alongside classroom teachers: finding information and materials for them, planning curriculum and instruction with them, teaching students, and conducting inservice training in technology use and other subjects. Such activities not only enrich the curriculum, but—studies show—as part of a strong library program, boost student achievement.
"Students succeed where the LMS (Library Media Specialist) is a consultant to, a colleague with, and a teacher of other teachers," says Good Schools Have Good Librarians, a study of 500 schools published by the Oregon Educational Media Association. The report, subtitled "Oregon School Librarians Collaborate To Improve Academic Achievement," links the strength of a school's library program to scores on the state reading assessment. The connection is clear even after accounting for school and community differences, such as per-pupil expenditures or the percentage of children in poverty.
Where the unenlightened may see a book warehouse, Kelly Kuntz, Beaverton School District's coordinator for instructional technology and past president of the Oregon Educational Media Association, compares the ideal school library to an octopus. "It would work its way into every classroom and if you tried to cut off the tentacles you couldn't because it was so interwoven into the fabric of that school," she says.
The library program at Bridgeport Elementary School in Oregon's Tigard-Tualatin School District is one such octopus, thanks to librarian Janet Lockwood, who was named the school's Teacher of the Year for 2002-2003. Lockwood deftly blends the teaching of research skills and information literacy with art, literature, science, and social studies. She collaborates on curriculum units with teachers, teaching segments of those units in the library, grading student work, and maintaining a presence in the classroom. She participates in many of the same professional development activities as her classroom colleagues.
"She's always working with us," says fourth-grade teacher Lisa Tilney.
Lockwood has a comprehensive knowledge of the curriculum at each grade level. She begins building students' information literacy in the early grades, but always in context. For instance, dovetailing with a classroom emphasis on rhyme, she has groups of first-graders write and illustrate rhyming stories with titles such as "The Frog and the Spot," "Dan's Van," and "The Snake Bellyache." One such story describes a boar at the shore who went to the store to buy some s'mores. A line drawing worthy of The New Yorker depicts the boar standing on two legs with his grocery cart, while a shopper in the background looks on.
After she has the stories bound into books, one for each child, Lockwood teaches the students some rudimentary basics about how a book is organized. She and the children discuss page numbering, and then the children number the pages and insert each story's starting page number in the table of contents.
Lockwood works most closely with Bridgeport's fourth- and fifth-grade teachers, particularly on major research projects. Though the school has no formal time set aside for such planning, and meetings with individual teachers are often brief, both Lockwood and the teachers find them highly productive.
"We start with a topic and talk about an end product, and what materials and strategies we'll use to get there," says Lockwood. She and the teacher also decide on criteria for research, as well as which activities should happen in the library and which in the classroom.
For example, for her fifth-grade unit on astronomy, teacher Karen Houtz was eager to try an approach Lockwood and fifth-grade teacher Andy Crouse had used for a unit on explorers. Lockwood's idea was for students to write a report in book form, using the style and format of Magic Tree House Research Guides, published by Random House. These guides, nonfiction companions to the popular Magic Tree House fiction series, maintain a lively tone and break up the main text with pictures, photographs, borders, and marginalia.
Lockwood and Houtz decided students would write three chapters: one on Planet Earth, one on another planet, and one on an astronaut, astronomer, or physicist—anyone from Greek astronomer Ptolemy to Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova—chosen from a list Houtz supplied. In addition, students had to use four sources from among books and Web sites Lockwood had flagged, and include two margin notes and one illustration or border in each chapter. In the library, they did tempera paintings of planets for their book cover. Writing and research took place in both the library and the classroom.
Students wrote their chapters in the conversational, "friendly" style of the Tree House Research Guides, using comparisons, questions, and arresting facts to pique the reader's interest. Writes one student: "Imagine a planet that if it was hollow it could fit 1,300 Earths inside it and is more than one-and-a-half times as big as the other planets put together. Well, you don't have to. Jupiter is the largest planet."
Writes another: "I would not want to travel to Jupiter. It would take 10 years to reach Jupiter going 100,000 miles per hour." Then, using a marginal note as designated in the project criteria for a definition or interesting fact, she adds, "The Voyagers did reach Jupiter, but they were spacecrafts with no people in them."
Even in what would have been a highly enriching event all by itself—a school visit from Nancy Coffelt, author-illustrator of the picture book Dogs in Space—Lockwood found a curriculum connection. In Coffelt's book, dogs visit all the planets in the solar system, but find something displeasing about each: Mercury, too hot; Mars, too dusty; Pluto, too cold and dark. Though the book is aimed at a much younger audience, Lockwood assigned fifth-graders to compose and illustrate a short story using Coffelt's writing style and artistic medium, oil pastels. But these stories were not about planets. Rather, students drew on factual material from state reports they were working on concurrently in the classroom. Thus, in a story titled "New York Dogs," the canines get dizzy at the Statue of Liberty, go to Central Park where they must stay on a leash, and visit Niagara Falls, only to find a "no dogs allowed" sign.
"She taught the writing lesson, she taught the art lesson, and then I just finished it up in my classroom," says Houtz. "All I had them do was finish rough drafts, edit, and revise."
Lockwood participates not only in planning and instruction, but in assessment of curriculum units. For instance, after fifth-graders had classroom instruction on the elements of various genres, she helped them prepare to give book talks. She discussed genres, gave students a reading-interest inventory, selected books that matched their interests, explained the book talk criteria, and modeled the process. Then she attended as many of the talks as possible in the classroom and watched the remainder on videotape in order to assess the final product.
Though she doesn't collaborate equally with every Bridgeport teacher, Lockwood finds that word-of-mouth brings her new opportunities. "Sometimes, we'll have a great project and someone else will see it and want to adapt it to their curriculum," she says. "We're always looking for new and interesting ways to integrate the curriculum between the classroom and the library. Collaboration leads to more indepth projects and learning for kids. We can accomplish more in less time. Collaboration often involves input for students from several teachers, which can be very valuable."
In the age of instant Internet research and online term-paper vendors such as SchoolSucks.com, instructional design is more important than ever.
"You can't say, 'Go do a state report and tell me about the minerals and manufacturing and the cities in California,' because kids will just copy and paste it and spit it back, says Kuntz. "To them, that's doing a report."
Librarians, highly aware of this instructional pitfall, can help teachers at all levels design assignments, like the astronomy book at Bridgeport, that result in thoughtful, personal, and nonplagiarized products. For example, far preferable to assigning the old-style "state report," says Kuntz, is to give students several criteria such as number of parks, quality of schools, and availability of recreational opportunities, along with a scenario such as the following: "Your mother has been offered jobs in Orlando, Florida, and Minneapolis, Minnesota. Research those two cities and decide which one you want your mom to move to."
"Then you have to do the research, and you have to put it in your own words," say Kuntz. Dissatisfied with the "book report" approach to the biography genre, Stewart developed a unit that guarantees originality from seventh-graders at West Sylvan. To demonstrate what she wants students to do, she brings Spanish music, prints, a PowerPoint presentation, and her "Frida box" to each language arts class. As she tells about the life and significance of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, she uses quotes from Kahlo and illustrates with props and symbols from the box—gauze to represent Kahlo's many surgeries after an accident, a vial of tears for her physical and emotional pain, a knife because Kahlo at one time wished to be a doctor herself, a decorative comb like the ones Kahlo wore, a paintbrush and a tube of white paint, and a photograph of Kahlo and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera.
After the demonstration, students choose a biography of anyone who interests them—from Hannibal to Katharine Hepburn—write an outline of the person's life, collect quotes from that person, and find appropriate symbols to use with the speech.
"The idea is that if students are using props to guide them through the speech, then they're not plagiarizing something out of a book," says Karen Rouse, who teaches seventh-grade language arts and social studies. "They're talking about how those symbols represent an aspect of the person's life."
With her librarian's global view of curriculum, Stewart is ideally suited to putting together interdisciplinary curricula at her departmentalized middle school. This year, together with eighth-grade language arts and science teachers, she taught a unit centered on realistic fiction dealing with health and personal issues relevant to teenagers.
Stewart drew up a list of possible subject areas for students: pregnancy, suicide, mental illness, eating disorders, cults, sexually transmitted diseases, AIDS, drug abuse, alcoholism. "Really uplifting," she jokes. She put together bibliographies of between 10 and 20 realistic novels dealing with each subject. For instance, Dancing on the Edge, about mental illness; Smack, about drug addiction; and Second Star to the Right, about anorexia.
"Even though the subject matters might not be happy, they are subject matters that students are really interested in, and that nobody talks about at home," says Lee Jenny, who teaches eighth-grade language arts and social studies. After the students chose a subject area, Stewart gave talks on her three or four favorite titles in each subject area to help them decide on a book to read. In language arts class, students analyzed how the particular health problem was portrayed in the behavior of a character in the book they read.
As a tie-in to the annual health unit in science, students researched the problem from a scientific point of view, checking the accuracy of the novel they had read. Using the EBSCO Information Services online database, students located and summarized three magazine articles dealing with the same subject as the novel. Using the library information management system Dynix, they did the same for three relevant reference books. Using online reference sources such as the Multnomah County Library Homework Center and the Oregon Student Library Information System, they found three authoritative Web sites where their fictional character could find helpful information about his or her problem. They also identified a local organization that could assist with the problem. Outside the library, school counselors were another source of contacts and resources.
For their science class, all students made a tri-fold brochure that described the problem and answered questions such as: Where does the problem come from? Are there cures? What does research say? What solutions are people currently working on?
Each language arts teacher interpreted the unit slightly differently. One teacher had her students read both a fiction and nonfiction book on the same topic. Some teachers had students write a pamphlet. Jenny was pleased with the frank and open class discussions resulting from the reading and research. "People weren't afraid to ask questions, because they were all researching subject matter that they had questions about," she says. Her students designed eye-catching, informative bookmarks, and then visited a seventh-grade class where they distributed the bookmarks after making a presentation on their topic.
"A lot of what I tend to do is create something and then say to the teachers, 'Would you like to do something like this?'" says Stewart, who has master's degrees in both curriculum and library science. "Then, what is wonderful, the teachers always take it in their own direction and make it so much more."
Though curriculum development and team teaching is teacher-librarian partnership at its highest level, other library-based collaboration also enriches and improves classroom instruction and delivery. Training teachers in information technology and other areas is an important role the librarian can serve.
"You want to enable teachers to be able to do as much for themselves as possible," says Karen Wedeking, coordinator of the library media endorsement program at George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon.
That's a goal of librarian Mary McClintock at Roseburg High School—to help teachers help themselves and their students. On professional development days, McClintock trains classroom teachers on Internet search strategies and online databases. "If I'm going to spend money on databases, I want to make sure everybody's using them," she says. "That's a constant PR effort." She familiarizes teachers with what's available, and explains how databases—such as EBSCO and InfoTrac—differ from the open Web and what steps to follow to access them from home. "The first couple of lessons I did, people weren't aware of the databases we offer and why that was much more reliable information."
Getting time to work with teachers is challenging, especially in the upper grades. High school teachers and on-site staff development are "like oil and water," in the words of librarian Barbara Stolzenburg of Henry M. Jackson High School in Everett, Washington. "They really don't want to be there," she says. "They want to be in their classroom working, and I totally understand that." So she was bowled over by the positive response to her schoolwide workshop on reading strategies and instruction for secondary students.
Stoltzenburg asked every teacher to bring documents they expected students to read, understand, and react to in the next two weeks—anything from science texts to software manuals.
"We talked about how you could take the reading strategies and apply them to the different curriculum areas and to materials and resources in the library," she says. "It was powerful."
Without certain conditions, however, these kinds of collaborations are tough to pull off. One big need is for a full-time or near full-time library aide to free up the librarian's time. Another need is for an administrator who understands the librarian's potential impact on teaching and curriculum. Finally, a librarian must have a persistent streak for ferreting out information, publicizing library services, and reaching out to other teachers.
"They're not going to beat down the door coming to you," says Kuntz. "They're busy, they're not aware." Preservice teachers coming out of colleges and universities have not usually been taught that "there is a resource person who can teach along side them, who can make their life easier," she adds.
Finding the right resources for the right person can in itself have a transforming effect on curriculum. For example, the Library of Congress has digitized thousands of primary source materials and made them available online: letters, diaries, maps, documents, invoices, photographs. Instead of reading Franklin Roosevelt's Pearl Harbor speech in a textbook, says Kuntz, students can see the original documents and how the president crossed out words and fine-tuned his speech.
Kuntz finds a heroic aspect in the librarian's endeavors. "These
are incredible resources and it gets to kids because they know they're working with the real thing," she says. "But how are teachers going
to know about these resources? You have to have your ear to the ground, because you've got to hear even in offhand remarks and bits and pieces of conversations what's going on
in those classrooms, so you can run in like the great white knight and say, 'Look what I found, just for you!'" 
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