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"Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much." - Helen Keller

"Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success." - Henry Ford

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Collaborating with teachers is considered to be a major responsibility of school librarians. Our role in teaching information skills and using new technologies can be done efficiently and thoroughly only when we have access to students in their classes. While we can support reading for the avid readers (who visit us daily, before and after school and during their lunch times), reaching the reluctant readers requires classroom visits and assignments.

While school librarians are well aware of the need to work with teachers and their classes, collaboration is not really done very often. In a study of Idaho Schools, (Keith Curry Lance, Marcia J. Rodney, and Bill Schwarz in **//Collaboration Works – When It Happens//**), 45% of teachers reported never collaborating with librarians and instructing together and another 40% report collaborating only once or twice a year.

A quote by Annette Lamb and Larry Johnson on their School Library media Specialist site ([] ) states that, “Whether you are integrating information literacy into the curriculum or developing a reading promotion, collaboration is essential throughout the library media program. But collaboration is one of the most difficult tasks for teacher librarians to achieve.”

=== In // Why Isn't Information Literacy Catching On? //, Debra Lau Whelan reports that “ only 15 percent of elementary school teachers and 21 percent of junior high school and high school teachers collaborate with media specialists on teaching (information literacy) skills. ===

With this as a background, three of the four school librarians in the Lamoille South Supervisory Union (Jennifer Faith, Liv Perry, and Martha McClintock) have decided to look into ways that collaboration can increase in their three schools.


 * Issues to Explore: **
 * 1) What is collaboration? Do the administrators, faculty, and school librarians in our district share the same definition?
 * 2) What can the school librarians do to increase collaboration?
 * 3) How can reliable data on the methods and results be collected?

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