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Cooperative planning and teaching is often a high stakes endeavour. As I have argued in an earlier paper (Oberg, 1990), participation in any activity has its price, and participation in a collaborative teaching is expensive for teachers. Involving technology increases the price for many teachers. Collaborative work is a high stakes endeavour for teacher-librarians as well. In advocating collaborative approaches, teacher-librarians are often challenging the norms of teacher privacy and self-reliance that are still part of the culture of many schools. In some instances, teacher-librarians who have not been successful in collaborative work have been re-assigned to classroom work or they and the library program have been marginalized within the school. The influx of new technologies into the school presents another risk of marginalization for the teacher-librarian and the library program.
In addition to the inherent risks for teachers and teacher-librarians of collaborative work involving technology, there are increasing pressures on them from others, within the school and beyond. Principals and parents are expecting that students become technologically "literate" and messages from the world of business and the media are reinforcing this expectation constantly. Teachers are being expected to develop the skills needed to incorporate technology into their teaching. Teacher-librarians are being expected to have technological expertise, and to share that expertise with teachers as well as with students. Teacher-librarians need to stay current in the area of technology, and although many schools seem to be willing to invest in the technology, they do not seem to be quite as willing to invest in teacher-librarian time and in teacher-librarian learning.
For teacher-librarians, the changing technology has made resourcing the curriculum a much harder task. It is possible to put together a range of books and magazines from a library collection for a teacher and/or class in a relatively short time. Incorporating electronic resources takes longer, and not just because the resources are less familiar to us. It takes more time to identify worthwhile sites on the Internet than to find the same number of worthwhile print items on the library shelves. The cost of electronic resources means that it is harder for teacher-librarians to respond to teachers' and students' emerging information needs. The selection tools for electronic resources are not as well developed as those for print resources. Ironically, the incorporation of electronic resources means the need for more time, not less, for collection development and for instructional planning, and in a time when the expectation is that resources can be at your finger tips with a keystroke.
Managing student access to work stations adds new demands to teacher-librarians' work because increasingly students are using the technology not only in the information retrieval stage but also in the creating or producing stage of their research work. The access to limited computer work stations was simpler to manage when most of the students' computer work was done to locate resources. Now, as more students turn to multimedia production to share what they have learned through the research process, they need access to computers for the majority of the time allotted to the research project. The demand for access increases at a faster rate than the funds to provide that access.
In the incorporation of technology and in collaborative work, there is potential for high payoffs in student learning and in teacher effectiveness (including enhanced parental and public perceptions of student learning and teacher effectiveness). However, there are very high nonmonetary costs that teachers must pay in order to gain the benefits of these or any other changes in educational practice. If teacher-librarians want to provide a leadership role in integrating technology into the instructional program of the school through collaborative work, they need to understand and to take into consideration these costs.
The cost of change to teachers, whether it be collaborative teaching or the integration of technology into teaching, can be understood in terms of social price (Fine, 1981), which involves costs of time, effort, lifestyle, and psyche.
Time and effort are real costs of collaborative teaching, especially in the initial stages. Teachers are usually very pressed for time, and time is a resource that cannot be readily increased. Teacher effort is a cost for putting into practice unfamiliar teaching strategies such as cooperative planning and it is a cost for learning how to use new resources. Teachers pay with time in order to use the library and its resources in their teaching. They wait to get the resources and services they need because they share the library and the technology with others; it takes time to use library resources and services including planning with the teacher-librarian; there can be delays in getting resources because of hardware failure and connectivity problems and delays in getting access to facilities that are heavily booked.
Lifestyle is another aspect of the social price to teachers. Collaborative work means negotiating with another to find time to work together, and it inevitably means compromises for those involved throughout the planning, teaching, and evaluating. Lifestyle price is closely related to the fourth aspect of social price, that of psychic costs. The teacher may face costs in terms of self-esteem and freedom from risk. The teacher may feel that the teacher-librarian is the expert in collaborative work or in technology use and that the teacher will be cast in an inferior role. With technology, comes the very real likelihood also that the students will be the experts. If teachers feel uncertain about how they can use the technology or if they are unsure about the benefits to their students, many will avoid it.
Managing the nonmonetary costs of an innovation is an important aspect of implementing it. Teacher-librarians need to have a clear understanding of the teachers' perception of what the innovation costs them. These costs may be subtle but crucial barriers to involvement. Because of the shortage of time in educational settings and the practicality ethic of educators, projects are sometimes launched before those involved have developed a good understanding of what is involved in the change. Teacher-librarians will find the process outlined in the practitioners' handbook, Implementing Change (Driscoll, 1989), helpful in understanding their work with teachers and in developing effective strategies for implementing new programs or for making changes in established programs. The kind of analytical work suggested below, that is, thinking about the nature of the new practice, the culture of the school where the practice is being introduced, and the individual needs of the teachers involved, is critical for all facilitators of change in instructional practice.
In finding ways to reduce the costs to teachers of any new practice, teacher-librarians need to develop knowledge about three aspects of the particular school in which the new practice is to be implemented: (1) the current teaching practices of the school; (2) the 'culture' of the school; and (3) the teachers' skills, knowledge, and attitudes in relation to the new practice. Together, these three areas of consideration should help teacher-librarians to assess the costs to teachers of collaborative work involving technology and to develop implementation strategies that take those costs into consideration.
Analyzing the current teaching practices of the school will assist in determining the extent of the change involved. One way of doing this is to list the different components of cooperatively planning and teaching with technology, and to identify which components will be new or constitute a change in practice for teachers. This should assist teacher-librarians in assessing the number and magnitude of the changes involved in implementing the new practice. A new practice may represent smaller changes in one school than in another. For example, where library research projects are routinely carried out in a collaborative way, using CD-ROM or Internet resources may be seen simply as an improvement of practice. Where lecture and textbook are the regular teaching strategies used by teachers in classrooms, working collaboratively and using electronic resources may represent challenges to traditions such as teacher autonomy and the classroom teacher's control of the learning environment. Comparing current teaching practices to new teaching practices clarifies for the teacher-librarians the costs of the change to teachers in their school and provides some guidance for setting attainable objectives.
Teaching practices are one part of the social organization of schools, one aspect of what is increasingly being referred to as the 'culture' of the school. There is mounting evidence that the conditions under which teachers work have more to do with success in innovation than do the particular characteristics of the individual teachers involved (Fullan, 1991). In schools that are more successful in making changes, teachers work together to improve their students' learning and they are oriented toward the whole school rather than towards their own classrooms (LaRocque, 1986). The way that teachers work in effective schools is characterized by shared goals, teacher collaboration, teacher learning, teacher certainty, and teacher commitment (Rosenholtz, 1989). These factors are interrelated and mutually reinforcing. Shared goals are developed through teacher collaboration; if teachers are to agree on their practices, they must work together to understand and select those practices. Teacher collaboration allows teachers to learn from each other, and that learning helps teachers to evaluate and become more certain about their own practices. Teacher certainty helps to develop teacher commitment; teachers are willing to invest more time and energy into endeavours they know have a high chance of success. The culture of effective schools supports teachers' continuous improvement and facilitates behaviours that would be impossibly risky in other schools. Teacher-librarians will gain much insight into the culture of their school by observing school practices and by engaging in conversation with their colleagues, with the Rosenholtz framework in mind. An excellent place to start these conversations would be with the principal and with several of the opinion-leaders in the school. It is also important to recognize that, by engaging in such interaction, teacher-librarians may be initiating some change in the culture of their schools and may be encouraging others to help create a stronger culture of change. Collaborative work facilitates teachers' professional growth and changes the very nature of teaching and learning in the school.
In addition to assessing readiness for change in terms of the teaching practices of the school that relate to the innovation and in terms of the overall culture of the school, teacher-librarians need to consider the needs of the individual teachers in the school. Even in effective schools, teachers do not all pay the same costs in making changes in their practice. The Concerns-Based Adoption Model provides an analysis tool for assessing where teachers are in relation to an innovation, in terms of their concerns about and use of the innovation (Hall & Loucks, 1982). This model recognizes that teachers experience changes in their feelings about an innovation as well as changes in their skills in using the innovation. The teacher-librarian, informally but systematically, can discuss with the teachers how they feel about collaborative work and how they are utilizing technology in their teaching. Levels of use can also be ascertained by observation and by analysis of planning documents such as the teacher-librarian's plan book and the year plans of the school and of individual teachers.
This assessment of the cost to teachers of an innovation, through three kinds of analysis, should help to make clear to teacher-librarians the complexity of the process involved. "The group, the individual, and the nature of the change are all important factors" (Stiegelbauer, 1982, p. 35) in implementation. Building knowledge about the organization in which the innovation is to be implemented will help teacher-librarians be more successful makers of change. Without this careful analysis, teacher-librarians are likely to find the innovation effort floundering, even after an ambitious and enthusiastic start. This may mean a retreat from innovation efforts and a return to traditional service (Miller & Spanjer, 1985). The success of an educational change effort is strongly influenced by the way the implementation process is handled and the school's previous implementation history. The implementation process must be guided by a recognition of the critical importance of teachers in the change process and a sensitivity to where they are in relation to the innovation. The implementation process can be designed to establish conditions within the school that facilitate continuing change and that enhance a culture of continuous improvement. Failed change has and continues to cause resistance to innovation in education.
Taking the time to develop a thorough understanding of the school within which changes are to be implemented has great potential benefit over time. Thinking carefully about the nature of the changes that collaborative work and the use of technology requires, about the culture of the school, and about the teachers' needs in relation to collaborative work and technology will help teacher-librarians in developing appropriate plans for implementation and in implementing those plans effectively. It will assist them in deciding where, with whom, and at what pace to proceed in incorporating technology and in encouraging collaborative teaching. It will also help teacher-librarians to participate in building their schools' capacity for change.
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