Teacher and librarian collaboration: A qualitative study

The twenty-first century is marked by increased challenges in education and limited resources to address them. A solution proposed within school librarianship is teacher and librarian collaboration. This qualitative study examines the practices of highly collaborative teachers and librarians and identifies mechanisms that operate within schools to facilitate high-end collaboration. Five broad themes emerge from the data and identify essential elements of successful collaboration: school culture, positive attributes of collaborators, communication, management, and motivation. This study adds to the body of knowledge of teacher and librarian collaboration by providing empirical support for collaborative practices described in school librarianship literature. The model of teacher and librarian collaboration that emerged from the data provides a preliminary framework for high-end collaborative environments in schools. Of particular interest were findings regarding time management. Participants indicated that in spite of limited time, time issues are overcome when collaboration is highly valued.     

Integrating Information Literacy into Teacher Education: A Successful Grant Project

Information literacy has gained importance over the last few decades, not only among librarians, but also with higher education faculty. Information literacy instruction is important for all college-level students. However, it is essential for teacher education students who must not only be information literate themselves, but also be able to teach information literacy in their K-12 classrooms. This article describes the implementation and evolution of an information literacy instruction program for teacher education students at a large public Midwestern university.     

The Relationships Between Teacher Nonverbal Immediacy and Student Course Workload and Teacher Availability Expectations

The purpose of this study is to identify student expectations for course workload and teacher availability and to assess whether teacher nonverbal immediacy influences these student expectations. Based on a sample of 198 students at a large public university enrolled in a required general education hybrid communication course, students were willing to complete more work than the current course requires, which is comparable to other general education hybrid communication courses in the USA. Additionally, students have moderate to high expectations for teacher availability. Student perceptions of teacher nonverbal immediacy were positively correlated with students’ willingness to engage in their learning (reading, writing, speaking), teacher availability expectations, and tolerance for teacher unavailability.     

Part 10: Teacher Behaviors

Effective teachers place learners’ needs at the center of their efforts and find ways to bridge gaps between learning objectives and students’ prior knowledge and interests. Proven techniques to maximize student learning include encouraging questioning, provoking thought, connecting with students’ interests, expecting engagement, and communicating trust that students can succeed. Findings are presented from research on one-on-one instruction, making clear explanations, and giving effective feedback. The column concludes with guidelines for self-assessing librarians’ teaching effectiveness.     

Information Literacy in Pre-Service Teacher Education

Abstract

This annotated bibliography presents a review of articles published on the topic of information literacy in teacher education since the late 1980s. Many of the articles outline concerns about pre-service teachers who graduate with insufficient information literacy skills, who are unprepared to teach these skills to their future students, and who do not understand the role of the school librarian as an instructional collaborator. On the other hand, many articles describe innovative and successful programs where exposure to librarians, integration of information literacy instruction, attention to library research, or introduction of a process approach to information use can produce new teachers who are equipped to collaborate with school librarians and to teach information literacy skills to their students.     

A model of empathic communication

This study examines a path model of empathic communication. Several empathie structures are predicted to influence the process of empathie communication. Results show that humanistic orientation predicted perspective‐taking, which predicted communicative responsiveness, which predicted comforting. Empathie concern and emotional responsiveness were eliminated from the model The parameter estimates and predicted correlations among the remaining variables were all statistically significant (p < .05). In addition, self‐rated comforting and independent ratings correlated at only .51, with the former exhibiting higher correlations with other variable.     

A non-parametric topical relevance model

An information retrieval (IR) system can often fail to retrieve relevant documents due to the incomplete specification of information need in the user’s query. Pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) aims to improve IR effectiveness by exploiting potentially relevant aspects of the information need present in the documents retrieved in an initial search. Standard PRF approaches utilize the information contained in these top ranked documents from the initial search with the assumption that documents as a whole are relevant to the information need. However, in practice, documents are often multi-topical where only a portion of the documents may be relevant to the query. In this situation, exploitation of the topical composition of the top ranked documents, estimated with statistical topic modeling based approaches, can potentially be a useful cue to improve PRF effectiveness. The key idea behind our PRF method is to use the term-topic and the document-topic distributions obtained from topic modeling over the set of top ranked documents to re-rank the initially retrieved documents. The objective is to improve the ranks of documents that are primarily composed of the relevant topics expressed in the information need of the query. Our RF model can further be improved by making use of non-parametric topic modeling, where the number of topics can grow according to the document contents, thus giving the RF model the capability to adjust the number of topics based on the content of the top ranked documents. We empirically validate our topic model based RF approach on two document collections of diverse length and topical composition characteristics: (1) ad-hoc retrieval using the TREC 6-8 and the TREC Robust ’04 dataset, and (2) tweet retrieval using the TREC Microblog ’11 dataset. Results indicate that our proposed approach increases MAP by up to 9% in comparison to the results obtained with an LDA based language model (for initial retrieval) coupled with the relevance model (for feedback). Moreover, the non-parametric version of our proposed approach is shown to be more effective than its parametric counterpart due to its advantage of adapting the number of topics, improving results by up to 5.6% of MAP compared to the parametric version.