Principals and teacher-librarians: Building collaborative partnerships in the learning community

This study examined the concept of principal support of the school library program and information literacy in 171 school districts in western Pennsylvania. The study investigated the extent to which secondary school principals' assessment of the school library program's role and the teacher-librarian's role as defined in the Pennsylvania Standards for Library Certification and Practice converged or diverged from that of secondary teacher-librarians' assessment. Additionally, the study sought to ascertain secondary principals' and secondary teacher-librarians' assessment regarding the implementation of information literacy into the school's curriculum. The study provided both a descriptive and an inferential analysis of school library programs and teacher-librarians. The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences was used to analyze the data collected from the survey questionnaires. The probability for all tests of significance was set at .05. The study's major finding was that principals indicated the major role of teacher-librarians was in reference and research services, while teacher-librarians indicated their major role was instruction in information literacy; Other findings demonstrated: (1) the means for teacher-librarians were significantly higher than the means for principals on the following five library services: collection development and organization, integration of information with curricular content, reading guidance, staff development and training; and policy development; (2) there was a high degree of consistency between the rankings of specific library services from both groups (.864); (3) there was no significant difference in the quality of communication between principals and teacher-librarians; (4) both principals and teacher-librarians agreed that the primary challenge that faced the library program was lack of money; (5) both principals and teacher-librarians indicated increased staff development was needed to integrate information literacy into the curriculum; (6) principals named lack of funding as the major barrier to the implementing and integrating information literacy into the curriculum, while teacher-librarians named negative teacher attitudes and a lack of understanding of the role of the teacher-librarian as an instructional partner as major barriers. Based on the study's Keystone finding that principals rarely recognized the instructional role of the teacher-librarian, several implications for improving practice, policy and leadership were discussed.