Collaborations for Literacy: Creating an Integrated Language Arts Program for Middle Schools

(Hardback)

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The best of middle school teaching is learning by doing and is interdisciplinary. This book ties it all together and offers a complete, innovative program, from vision, through planning, implementation, and assessment. The program is accomplished through the collaboration of the school library media specialist and the language arts teacher. Senator outlines ways in which they can collaboratively plan, teach, and assess units which use language arts as tools. She includes specific instructional programs, suggestions for staff development, examples of questions, organizers, and units for grades six through eight, ideas for creating schedules, and methods of working together to develop materials for instruction. This program reflects the restructuring movement in American education. It emphasizes process as well as content, uses authentic material, and stresses interdisciplinary learning and learning by doing. The first part deals with literature as a subject and offers many practical units for the library media specialist and the language arts teacher to use in collaboratively teaching students inquiry and a framework for literature. Armed with these tools, students are able to read, discuss, think, and write about more challenging and interesting literature. Senator offers many ideas for extending literature through creative dramatics, storytelling, booktalks, and book shares. The second half of the book shows how to plan interdisciplinary units so that students, through resource-based learning, may learn to use new technologies and information problem-solving. The work also includes some units for elementary and secondary schools. Because of its innovative methods and practical ideas it will be a boon to library media specialists, language arts and English teachers, reading specialists, and library schools and undergraduate and graduate schools of education.

Reviews

Senator offers detailed practical approaches for collaboration between library media specialist (LMS) and classroom teacher to empower students for lifelong reading and thinking...This book is comprehensive within its brevity, providing a wealth of sample units including excellent student worksheets, numerous questions as paradigms for inquiry-based learning, and practical suggestions for making the program effective for all. Although the book targets students of middle-school age, it applies the concepts to both elementary and high school. Because of its comprehensive nature, Senator's book is valuable for teachers of secondary English who must work solo without the aid of an LMS. In addition, the book has potential for university classes in Adolescent Literature and/or Methods of Teaching English...Senator's book is excellent and should reach an appreciative audience.-VOYA
Teacher-librarians looking for information on the integration of resource-based learning with contemporary language arts practices need look no further...It is rich in content, strong in its proactive stance and deeply-rooted in the need for teacher-librarians to be full partners in the planning, teaching and evaluation of information problem-solving activities...Middle school classroom teachers and teacher-librarians will value the many practical examples given from programs at this level and educators looking for a strong rationale for moving to this type of curriculum will find Senator's description of the vision very useful. She writes in a clear and easy style, with a keen sense of who her readers are. She grounds her arguments in recognized policy documents and in the research in this area, leaving the reader assured and confident that this type of school library program is very possible.-Emergency Librarian
This book will help media specialists and language arts teachers, grades 6-8, work together to provide interdisciplinary units...Recommended.-The Book Report
"Senator offers detailed practical approaches for collaboration between library media specialist (LMS) and classroom teacher to empower students for lifelong reading and thinking...This book is comprehensive within its brevity, providing a wealth of sample units including excellent student worksheets, numerous questions as paradigms for inquiry-based learning, and practical suggestions for making the program effective for all. Although the book targets students of middle-school age, it applies the concepts to both elementary and high school. Because of its comprehensive nature, Senator's book is valuable for teachers of secondary English who must work solo without the aid of an LMS. In addition, the book has potential for university classes in Adolescent Literature and/or Methods of Teaching English...Senator's book is excellent and should reach an appreciative audience."-VOYA
"This book will help media specialists and language arts teachers, grades 6-8, work together to provide interdisciplinary units...Recommended."-The Book Report
"Teacher-librarians looking for information on the integration of resource-based learning with contemporary language arts practices need look no further...It is rich in content, strong in its proactive stance and deeply-rooted in the need for teacher-librarians to be full partners in the planning, teaching and evaluation of information problem-solving activities...Middle school classroom teachers and teacher-librarians will value the many practical examples given from programs at this level and educators looking for a strong rationale for moving to this type of curriculum will find Senator's description of the vision very useful. She writes in a clear and easy style, with a keen sense of who her readers are. She grounds her arguments in recognized policy documents and in the research in this area, leaving the reader assured and confident that this type of school library program is very possible."-Emergency Librarian

Author Bio

ROCHELLE B. SENATOR is the recipient of the International Reading Association's Middle School Special Interest Group Literacy Award for 1994. She retired in 1994 after 25 years as a library media specialist. During the last 11 years she developed and coordinated the reading comprehension program for the newly created sixth grade and brought resource-based learning to the middle school in New Canaan, Connecticut. She has presented workshops at the National Council of Teachers of English, at Connecticut Institutes for Teaching and Learning, and at the Connecticut Educational Media Association, among others. Currently she is consultant to several school systems and is the Connecticut coordinator for Count on Reading, a national literacy initiative of the American Library Association.