How Librarians Can Support Teachers

Teacher and librarian partnerships are a win for students’ educational experiences.

Teacher Appreciation Week is coming up soon, so there’s no better time to look at the accomplishments of teachers and those who support them. Teaching isn’t an easy job, and teachers often rely on others to help create the best possible learning experience for their students. One of the most common helpers? Librarians.

Help with Lesson Planning

How do librarians help, though? Take, for example, the lesson planning process. It’s fairly involved and takes up a large amount of time. There’s far more that goes into planning a great lesson than meets the eye, from gathering resources to spinning them into a lecture that’s engaging and informative.

School and public librarians make this process a bit simpler. In the case of the former, all of the materials are designed to be age-appropriate and digestible for children. The latter has plenty of child-friendly resources, as well as resources for the teachers themselves. These resources can help teach them to plan better lessons, interact with their students more effectively, and create a better learning environment overall. 

Sign the pledge to vote for libraries!

The librarians themselves are a great help as well. If teachers find themselves in a rut when finding reading materials, librarians can offer recommendations. Working with the information given to them by the teacher, they can help pick out the perfect books, articles, and reference materials for a specific set of students. With the reading materials carefully handpicked in this way, students are sure to take an interest in their lessons, nurturing a lifelong passion for reading and learning.

Interactive Library Activities

Aside from helping teachers work with their students, librarians can also work with the students themselves. School librarians often work with teachers to coordinate class library visits. These visits may include read alouds, presentations on researching and analyzing a piece of literature, or maybe just a bit of time for students to freely explore all the library has to offer. 

During these visits, students will gain a greater understanding of how to interact with, study, and comprehend materials they may have once seen as boring and be given the opportunity to do so on their own terms.

Take action today to support libraries!

Such a change of pace might be just the thing a student needs to become a more adept reader, and few people are better qualified to provide it than school librarians. The importance of their role in the academic and intellectual development of students can’t be understated, nor can the importance of their support for teachers.

If you’d like to learn more about how librarians support teachers and children, visit our site at EveryLibrary today!

Visit www.everylibrary.org to learn more about our work on behalf of libraries.

#librarymarketers: Enjoy this story? Want to use it for your library newsletter, blog, or social media? This article is published under Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International and is free to edit and use with attribution. Please cite EveryLibrary on medium.com/everylibrary.

This work by EveryLibrary is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0