Collaborating with the school principal and executive staff is an important job that should be maintained throughout the whole school environment whether it be for classroom teachers (CT), SLSO staff or the teacher librarian (TL). However the TL has the very important job of corresponding the school mission with the learning mission or intentions that match the learning in the school library through a variety of aspects in this learning environment. These aspects focus on the physical structure, availability of resources (including hard-copy or digital access through ICT devices), professional learning and the overall access that students have to develop their literacy or research-based learning whether it be in primary or secondary school.
The TL should maintain a constant collaboration with the school principal in order to also ensure that the school library program (SLP) is edited to better suit the visions and ideas that have come from discussions towards the mission of the school (Kachel, 2017). One of these visions in the SLP is to construct varied learning areas in the physical learning environment. This physical need should be discussed with the principal as new equipment or resources can take a significant chunk out of the school’s library budget. Therefore the TL and principal should be continually working with each other to organise the setting and the funding that goes towards the library. However this creates an interesting question about each library budget and the TL as the employed individual. What would happen if the library budget was completely lost or cut? One would think that the librarian position would be put at risk and the library itself would be struggling to keep up with new resources that are available for the library to introduce (Kachel, 2017). However I like to think that even with limited amounts of new resources coming into the school library the TL and the CT can still produce quality literacy lessons as well as ensure that each student can access the library for all manner of research purposes.
Reference:
Kachel, D. (2017). The principal and the librarian: Positioning the school library program. Teacher Librarian, 45(1), 50-52. Retrieved from: http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=1&sid=75a56264-6f25-4437-9e17-23cec66394d5%40pdc-v-sessmgr02
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