ISCI 794: School Librarian Interview #4

 For my final interview, I spoke with an elementary librarian at an arts-focused magnet school. She is in a unique position, as she began as a media clerk there and now shares the librarian job with the librarian who has been at the school for many years. She is therefore one of two certified school librarians at the school, and will be the only one when the older librarian retires in the next two years or so. 

For our discussion we focused on the Collaborate Shared Foundation. Questions I asked her included: 

• Could you tell me about a collaborative research project you supported a teacher with? 
• How do you incorporate inquiry? 
• Do you teach the Dewey Decimal System to students? (This was prompted by an earlier interaction with a different school librarian that I was curious about.)
• How much guidance are you giving students, and how much are they working together?

We started by discussing a partner research project that the librarian developed for the third grade. Students were given an animal to research and a set of different types of sources: encyclopedias, the PebbleGo website, etc. Then they collaborated with a partner to find the answers to a set of questions about the animal and record what they found. 

This fits three domains of Collaborate: 

• Think: Learners deepen understanding and solve problems more effectively when they work together. 
• Grow: Learners learn with and from others by contributing to discussions and making meaning together.
• Share: Learners solicit and respond to feedback, think flexibly, and seek diverse perspectives when solving problems.

Because these were third-graders, the librarian said that she provided the resources they were supposed to investigate, but of course as students get older they are expected to exhibit greater independence with seeking out information sources. 

When it comes to inquiry, she likes to design lessons that ask the children to investigate resources and reason independently. Based on what we talked about, I am not sure whether she typically participates in the end product that students create for the lessons—I believe that is mostly facilitated by the teachers—but she is involved heavily in the research and brainstorming elements of these lessons. 

Regarding Dewey, I had seen another school librarian quizzing elementary students on where they would find books on different topics according to the Dewey Decimal System. This surprised me because knowing the different number ranges of specific subjects feels unnecessary—students need to be able to find what they're looking for of course, but that can be done with the catalog and then finding the correct number. 

I asked this librarian about her approach, and she says that she does teach Dewey but more how it works and how to find what you're looking for. She also showed me a great game called Mrs. Lodge's Shelver, which has users put three or five books in order by call number or last name for fiction. This seemed much more useful and practical to me and is something I'd like to do with my own students in the future.

Overall, I appreciated her approach to inquiry, which is something I hadn't gotten to discuss as much at the elementary level. It was helpful to understand how to provide guidance while still encouraging independent thinking and inquiry-based learning. 

References:

American Association of School Librarians. (2018). National school library standards. ALA Editions.