Teacher-Librarian Collaboration

Just on time I received a link to Edutopia on Project-Based Learning approach to teaching!

Students are engaged in exploration of real world problems and investigation of the subject much deeper than they are when reading textbooks and listening to lectures.

A couple of weeks ago High School students presented their final projects at their Ancient History class. Both their Social Studies teacher and I, the librarian, were satisfied with results of the work. For the first time we worked as a teacher/librarian team on this project: we planned the steps of research and agreed on our expectations by putting a rubric.

The project  was about one of the a tribe that is currently living  in one of the part of the world and still their life style is similar to the life style that people during the Stone Age had. The goal of the project was to identify the stage of the development of the tribe supporting the hypothesis with examples and explanations.


Students spent a block in the library. Without realizing that they were learning new skills, students browsed the library catalog and located books on shelves; they followed my instructions on how to build a background information by using World Book Online and find scholarly articles in EBSCO.

What time to learn citing sources can be more appropriate than that when the students work with resources for their projects?!   "Where to find a good picture?" , "Map?", "Music?", "How to insert them in your presentation?",  "How to give credits to the sources?",  "Where to put those credits?" - students puzzled.
They helped each other and had our support all the time.

Besides learning the content the students exploited technology. They worked with Google documents and learned how to share their presentation online. Seeing that all of the students chose Power Point Presentation to demonstrate their final projects, we agreed that we'll introduce new tools that can be used for making interesting presentation at our next collaborative project. There are so many of them: prezi, glogster, slideshare, photostory, and several more.

SJ is adroit at running the "Tribe" project. She's been working on this project with students for a number of years. However, the results of our collaborative work were impressive. Students' understanding of the subject and the range of materials they use in the project were much wider and the use of the information was deeper than before.