Co-teaching or Access: if you can't have both, which is better?

My school has a strong culture of collaboration. Our teams are collaborative. We are transforming into a project based learning school, so frequently throughout the year grade-level teams collaborate on planning and executing cross-curricular projects with challenging real-world questions and authentic student learning (Lergan & Mergendoller, 2015). The librarian is a part of the planning and teaching of these units and the library acts as over-flow and presentation space. 

When not engaged in PBL, teachers love to come to the library for a week or more at a time to do co-taught unit, often with stations. In my tenure as a fifth-grade teacher at CRMS my students and I sailed through the library in our explorers unit. As a seventh-grade teacher the librarian and I took my students "Back to the Future of Maine" in plutonium-powered lobsterboats. We have had them collecting electoral votes in our presidents unit, researching the late 20th early 21st century with Research-O-Rama, and traveling the world as rock bands in our World Tour geography unit. The eight-grade language arts teachers do a podcasting unit in the library, and sixth grade does Boom or Bust, Civil War, World War II in the library (there is even a boot camp). There have been science units on geology and invertebrates, and many more that I can't even remember or never knew about. 

This is what I thought co-teaching in the library was and it's why I wanted to be the CRMS librarian. This week I listened to and read the transcript of the Cult of Pedagogy podcast "How this school library increased student use by 1000 percent" and it really made me think about what collaboration is and question what is more valuable to students, co-teaching or access to the library (Gonzalez,2016). 

I read Gonzalez because I was reading about library design and I did get a big design takeaway from the podcast (flexibility is more valuable than technology). The "learning center" at the Big Walnut Middle School that principal Penny Sturtevant and tech teacher Ed Kitchen created is based on the model of personalized learning. Students come to the learning center with a specific "prescription", they pass their student ids through a bar code scanner which places them on a spreadsheet that teachers can access. They present their prescription to Mr. Kitchen and set off on their work with Mr. Kitchen facilitating many students from many classes doing various projects. Kids were excited to go to the learning center and it was used as a motivator. 

One skepticism I had about this arrangement was although kids were "making" it wasn't a true "maker" mentality, kids were working solely on school projects and there wasn't a genius hour or passion project type time (although there was a half hour hang time that kids could maybe use for that). 

My bigger skepticism was is this collaboration? It didn't seem to me like it was. The teacher was a former math and technology person, not a teacher librarian and seemed like less of a resource and planning partner than a library monitor. His planning with teachers seemed to be on the fly and consisted of teachers asking him how to make projects a little flashier.

Here is the question that I am wrestling with, what is most valuable to students? I would argue that both models, the students and teacher come down to the library for a co-taught unit model and the send kids down when they have valuable work to do model have kids using the library when they need it most. Both models have students working in the library in the context of their content work not theoretical "library skills" but research authentic to what they are doing in classes. 

The "send the kids down" model allows more teachers more flexibly to send kids to the library when needed without it being a scheduling ordeal, and hence theoretically gives students more access but what is lost? Is this co-teaching? 

To me it doesn't seem like co-teaching it seems more like instructional babysitting. Perhaps I am being too hard. Certainly learning center teachers can help kids find resources and point them in the right direction, but they give up the two heads are better than one planning that co-teaching provides. 

Does it matter? Maybe what is good for their school wouldn't work at mine. Big Walnut had an underused library, ours is thriving. But what keeps coming back to me is - is it better for kids to have almost constant access to the library, or is it better to continue to have the librarian be a partner with teachers and students in intensive units? Where I stand now is that it needs to be a little of both. Maybe the Big Walnut model would work when a team is doing PBL, but co-taught units work when they aren't, the problem is trying to schedule for both!

REFERENCES

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/   

Lergan & Mergendoller (2015) "Gold Standard PLB: Essential Project Design Elements". PBL Blog. Buck Institute for Education. https://www.bie.org/blog/gold_standard_pbl_essential_project_design_elements 

Image #1 retrieved from: https://blog.tradeshift.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/collaboration-illustration.jpg

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