No Librarian Is an Island

     As an English major in my undergrad, I didn’t have the opportunity to work collaboratively often, or ever in my classes; I think I had one collaborative essay assignment in my Freshman English class. Despite enjoying working as part of a team in the corporate world, I was not excited by the idea of having group work in my MLIS courses, especially because of the virtual environment. I do admit, when choosing courses and teachers, part of my requirements was to have limited or no group work. Nonetheless, I have certainly had my fair share of group assignments, and they’ve actually all turned out well. Workload wasn’t always distributed evenly, and there were times I felt like group work was less efficient than individual work, but the ending products were all sufficient to earn acceptable grades. And that’s the thing, when I do group work in school, I’m concerned with learning (of course), but I’m also concerned about the grade. I know school group work is supposed to prepare us for the real world, but I think that school group work operates differently than real world group work because of the grade element.

     Nonetheless, as a learner, collaborative work has been valuable because it has brought me into contact with other individuals who have different backgrounds, different strengths, and different ideas. This has enriched my school experience. However, I actually think that the most important things I’ve learned from doing collaborative group work in school are not related to the subject matter of the assignments or courses, but rather the general skills required to successfully work with others—virtually or in person. And I think this is the most important part of school group work because it is highly transferable to the actual work place.

     There are many opportunities to collaborate as a librarian, either with other librarians, staff, faculty members, administrators, IT departments, or other interested parties. I’d argue it’s likely impossible to be a librarian and not be engaged in some level of collaborative work. No librarian is an island. To do our job, we need to work together with many other people. In terms of instruction design, an ideal scenario is that librarians can work together with faculty members to incorporate information literacy lessons and assignments within the course curriculum. It’s also very valuable to collaborate with other librarians regarding lesson design. My experiences with the Lesson Review and Online Module assignments have confirmed this. Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development also supports the idea that a more capable peer and/or a group can encourage student—and teacher/librarian—development.

     Stigler and Hiebert state the following:

Another important benefit of the collaborative nature of lesson study is that it provides a benchmarking process that teachers can use to gauge their own skills…. At the same time, the collaborative nature of lesson study balances the self-critiquing…with the idea that improved teaching is a joint process…. Problems that emerge are generally attributed to the lesson as designed by the group…. It thus becomes possible for teachers to be critical. (as cited by Wiggins & McTighe, 2005, pp. 317-318)

It can be difficult to be self critical, and it can also be difficult to be directly critical of someone else. The beauty of truly collaborative lesson design is, as stated in the quote, that the problems in the lesson are not directly attributed to any one individual; therefore, the goal is that teachers, or in our case librarians, are freer to be critical, with the purpose of making improvements.

     So, we wouldn’t necessarily be lesson planning together, but if any of you are finished with your final project and want to take this collaboration/socializing from the virtual world to the physical world, I’m planning on going to the California Conference on Library Instruction in Santa Cruz, California, May 13th. Appropriately, the workshop is titled, “No Librarian Is an Island: Exploring in-person and virtual instruction, as we work towards innovative, collaborative, and engaging teaching techniques”—I swear I decided on the title for this post before I actually looked this up!

[LIBR250 Prompt: What is the role of collaboration in understanding?]

References

Wiggins, G. & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.