Shake, rattle, and role! The effects of professional community on the collaborative role of the school librarian.

摘要

School reform research reports that schools with high levels of professional community are not only more effective, but characteristically have a school climate wherein teachers' work patterns are cohesive and collaborative; school reform research by Louis, Kruse, and Bryk, as well as Newmann and Wehlage, suggests that professional community promotes collaboration and actually requires collaboration. For many years, there has been concern about the amount of instructional collaboration performed by school librarians. Research from inside school librarianship has most often tried to understand the dynamics of school librarians' instructional collaboration practices by examining characteristics of the school librarian her or himself. School librarians' instructional practices, however, are as likely to be affected by school climate as are the instructional practices of classroom teachers. In its shift of focus away from the school librarian to school librarians' work environments---by applying the findings of research on school reform to research on school librarianship---this study aimed to better understand the instructional collaboration activity of school librarians by examining whether the type of environment in which they worked (as measured by the amount of professional community) affected the amount of instructional collaboration they performed.; Data from a sample of schools involved in the national Library Power Project was used. A summed scale to measure amount of professional community was created. The summed scale was used to measure the amount of professional community reported by each of three groups in the sample: school librarians, classroom teachers, and school principals. Factor analysis showed the scale to be unitary, and Cronbach's Alpha scores from .83--.85 indicated that the scale was reliable. Regressions performed to determine whether predictive relationships existed between professional community and the amount of instructional collaboration reported by the three groups showed significant relationships for three out of five research hypotheses.