Skip to main content

Collaborating, Curating, and OER:  BCPS School Librarian and Teacher Partnerships

The Future Ready Librarians (FRL) framework supports our continuing efforts to develop purposeful partnerships between school librarians and teachers and to connect our school libraries to classrooms.  To deepen learning on curation and building instructional partnerships we recently launched a professional learning opportunity for collaborative teams consisting of school librarians and teachers.  Our school librarians were invited to partner with a content teacher from their campus to create a shared learning experience. This project consisted of three parts: a group professional learning session, intersession work consisting of collaboration opportunities as a team, and a showcase for sharing the results of their efforts.

The professional learning session consisted of a series of modules on Open Education Resources (OER) and the #GoOpen initiative, BCPS Selection Policies, Copyright and Creative Commons licensing, and  Follett’s Destiny Collections for curation.  Through a series of hands on and reflective activities  the teams were given opportunities to gain new knowledge and understanding of these elements in order to prepare them to collaboratively curate OER to support a unit, lesson, or theme of their choice.

This professional learning encourages innovative, collaborative partnerships, strengthens technology integration, and provides examples of successful instructional practice.  Historically, librarians have been and remain uniquely qualified to lead efforts at curating resources for teaching and learning.  There are those among us who recall when that work began as text sets and have watched the transformation occur using digital tools and resources.  School librarians partner with teachers to build collections of evaluated resources to support instructional partnerships and support the teaching and learning of their colleagues.

In this shared learning experience we are highlighting the work of our librarians and empowering our teachers in developing the skills needed to select high-quality resources for their students. Using digital tools and resources in content and delivery method enables the collaboration to provide equitable access for all students, ease of use, and integration possibilities.

The showcase provides job alike peers the opportunity to demonstrate the results of their collaboration, reflect on new learning and process, and consider student impact.  The curated resources will be part of our systemic Destiny Collections and will support other teachers with high quality content for use in their instructional program.   We have found this to be an empowering way to support our ongoing transformation of teaching and learning.

We continue to create school libraries and classrooms that are dynamic learning spaces with students engaged in lessons that include integration of information and technology literacies with core content, critical thinking, problem-solving, reading competencies for academic and personal pursuits, interactions with information resources, and choice in communicating new meanings and understandings.  Providing our students with access to resources for learning and empowering our teachers in selecting it is essential to this vision.

If you are interested in learning more about OER sources and Destiny Collections, take a look at this curated set of OER resources.

ABOUT FRAN GLICK

Fran Glick serves as coordinator of the office of digital learning for Baltimore County Public Schools (BCPS). She is a former elementary teacher and elementary and secondary library media specialist. In her current role, Glick supports instructional technology and the K–12 school library program for BCPS. She was a member of the Standards and Indicators Task Force for the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) and contributor to Standards for the 21st-Century Learner in Action (AASL, 2009). Glick is a passionate advocate for re-imagining school librarians and libraries.