The effect of instructional intervention on the methods of collaborative work with elementary school library media specialists by pre-service elementary classroom teachers

The broad research question for this study was: What effect will pre-service instructional intervention have on the willingness of student teachers' to: (1) use the library media center; (2) collaborate with school library media specialists?;Three instructional interventions were conducted over two semesters, two in a teacher training classroom and one in the school library media centers at the schools where they were student teaching. These interventions focused on collaborative planning between classroom teachers and library media specialists.;Data were collected from a pretest, two post tests, interviews, and unit plans prepared by the pre-service teachers. A questionnaire was also administered to the school library media specialists.;The pre-service teachers' responses to the pretest and post tests did not reveal any change in their willingness to utilize library media center resources. They had indicated a strong willingness to do so in the pretest and continued this indication through the post tests. Although they reported that they discussed their work with their library media specialists on many occasions, they collaborated primarily with their cooperating classroom teachers throughout the period of the study. The graded, highly structured experience of student teaching may account for the tendency to plan more with the cooperating teacher than with the library media specialist.;The study followed sixteen pre-service teachers from their early field experience through the completion of student teaching--two academic semesters. Eighteen school library media specialists who were the practitioners at the schools at which the pre-service teachers were placed for student teaching also participated in the study.;Three further questions that this study addressed were: What do student teachers know about collaboration with school library media specialists and about library media centers (1) prior to instructional intervention; (2) after instructional intervention; and (3) after student teaching?;The pre-service teachers' expectations about school library media specialists and library media centers were quite different from the realities that they found during student teaching. They expected to find full-time library media specialists in their schools which often was not the case, and since it was not, many of them found it extremely difficult to meet with their library media specialists to plan. During student teaching, they found library media centers with materials that were pertinent to the curricula that they were teaching to be the most valuable to them as well as the advice of a professional library media specialist. They utilized library media collections at a steady rate during both student teaching experiences while their use of classroom collections dropped as their experience increased.;Recommendations are made from the study's implications concerning teacher training and the need for instruction in collaboration for pre-service teachers. A profile of an ideal situation in which to train pre-service teachers emerged which would contain a curriculum infused with models of collaboration and student teaching in placement sites that would meet the proposed model of the "collaborative school environment.".;Further recommendations are made to school library media programs, which support earlier research, for fully-staffed library media centers with flexible scheduling to provide adequate time for collaborative planning. Issues of library media specialists' attitudes and the climates for learning and collaboration that they create are also addressed. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).