Shared Foundation 3- Collaborate with Wendy Rollins

Shared Foundation 3- Collaborate with Wendy Rollins

    For the Shared Foundation, Collaborate, I interviewed Wendy Rollins the librarian at Inman Elementary School in Spartanburg School District One. Mrs. Rollins has worked all over South Carolina at various schools as their librarian and this is her second year at Inman Elementary.  

    Mrs. Rollins had a lot of collaborative experience with teachers from her different library jobs over the years. At one of her schools where she had a flexible schedule, she was able to meet with teachers on their lunch break 2-3 days per week and plan for lessons and also offer educational workshops. She also likes to create a “menu” for teachers that lists everything she can do to assist them in their classroom lessons. This ranges from her going to their room to co-teach to her helping students check out books for an upcoming research project in class. I like the idea of meeting with teachers more regularly. I think I might see if I can meet with the teachers at my school during part of their planning block one a month to check in and see what they need and share anything new happening in the library.  

    She starts off the year by giving everyone something that introduces herself and lists some of the ways she can help them. She usually makes it cute by including a bag of popcorn that says, “pop into the library”. I have noticed that the students have loved the puzzles I set out in the library and that a lot of teachers are buying puzzles to keep in their room as an early finisher activity for their classes. I think getting everyone a puzzle would be a neat thing to do at the beginning of the year because one, it would be something they can use in the classroom and two, it would promote the library because we have more puzzles in the library.  

    She also talked about the struggle to get teachers to participate like many of the librarians I have interviewed, and she told me that getting one or two on board makes all the difference. Usually once those first teachers start collaborating with the librarian more will follow. This is something I have been experiencing, and it is good to know that once I get a few people on board it will get easier. I am going to focus on the English classes for now but I think it would be fun to do some sort of collaboration with the art teachers as well.  

    While we didn’t talk as much about collaboration between students, all these teacher collaborations would promote student collaboration as well. When they are in the library they work together and when I teach lessons, I have been including at least one activity that involves partner or group work. Eventually including lessons or programs for multiple classes at once would be neat too.