Owning Our Curriculum
Head for the Edge, Library Media Connection, October 2004
Doug Johnson
dougj@doug-johnson.com
Over the past 20 years or so, I have been subjected to two major attempts to “integrate” a set of skills into my content area curricula.
In the early 1980’s, the state of Iowa made a serious attempt to infuse career awareness into every subject area, including my seventh grade English classes. (The state was a good deal more optimistic that my students would be one day be employable than I was at the time.) A “career integration specialist” was hired, we had meetings, we wrote lesson plans, and we even had a summer retreat at a local bible camp to discuss “career awareness.” (The camp actually kicked our young, rowdy group out before we were scheduled to end and I still have extremely fond, though hazy, memories of the event.) After a year, the grant ran out, the specialist became an assistant principal, and the career lessons were quickly pushed aside and forgotten.
The second major effort to infuse a skill set has been more recent – a push to teaching reading and writing “across the curriculum.” This has been a sustained program by language arts teachers in collaboration with administrators and building teams to make sure students are practicing reading and writing skills in every class. The model has had a major impact on many districts despite it not needing a “specialist” on staff, major funding, or even bible camp retreats. Oh, and the language arts teachers have not relinquished primary responsibility for teaching basic reading and writing skills.
As library media specialists, we should be asking ourselves if we following the career education model, asking classroom teachers alone to be responsible for teaching information literacy and technology skills, or the “across the curriculum” model, where we retain responsibility for these skills, but expect them to be practiced throughout the curriculum?
Pragmatist that I am, I see two clear reasons to emulate the “across the curriculum” model: 1) to teach all students a core set of important, life-long skills, and 2) to keep the role of library media specialist indispensable to the school.
In order for us to maintain primary responsibility for instruction, we must provide:
1. Clearly articulated information and technology curriculum and specific benchmarks. Your school should have a separate K-12 IL curriculum with clear grade level benchmarks. If your state has one, so much the better – use it. (Wisconsin’s standards are excellent.) But if not, write your own based on AASL’s Information Power and ISTE’s NETS standards. When an administrator, teacher or parent wants to know exactly what skills you teach, you can readily show them.
2. Regularly scheduled learning opportunities with the LMS as the primary instructor. At the elementary level, these skills can be taught in scheduled library classes. At the secondary level, there need to be formal units in the content areas, or, heaven help us, actual “library” classes scheduled before major projects or as exploratory classes.
3. Means to formally assess, record and report student attainment of skills. Teachers do not just teach and assume students have learned. They assess the learning and then report back to the learners and their parents how successful that effort has been. Grades (even if pass/fail) should be given for IL skill attainment like those given for reading and math on elementary progress reports. At the secondary level, the LMSs should give a grade for any “library classes” they teach as well as grades for portions of all research projects. Designing clear assessment tools are the responsibility of the LMS.
4. Collaborative means of integrating skills into the classroom. Every effort needs to be made to encourage teachers to give students the opportunity to practice and apply these critical skills within the content area. Co-planning and team-teaching such units are the natural follow-up to the separate classes and critical if the learned skills are to be internalized.
5. Recognized support of school leadership and the community. All efforts in creating and implementing the curriculum need to be done with support of the building and district leadership and teachers. If you district has a formal curriculum committee, use it as a mechanism to get these things in place. Parents, even more so than teachers, believe information and technology skills are vital to their children’s success. Use their support to make the library’s curriculum a priority in your school.
There are two things that must be present if a place is to be called “school” – students and teachers. You can eliminate administers and support staff. You can stop buying textbooks, computers, and desks. Even buildings are optional. But students and teachers are a must. If we own a curriculum, we are teachers.
