Listening for learning in the talk: An ethnographic story of the school librarian as broker in collaborative planning with teachers

Collaboration is widely promoted in school librarianship and education, yet little is known about the talk it entails. This intrinsic case study of eight planning meetings employed a discourse analysis and socio-cultural perspective to examine the school librarian's role as a broker for learning in the discourse of collaborative planning with three second-grade teachers. The study identified five activities in planning: orienting, making connections, coordinating, making sense, and drifting. Reading aloud from available texts provided explicit intertextuality, a form of learning. Several discourse models of school librarianship were present in the discourse including voluntary, helper, and separate silos. Implications for practice and pre-service education include the need for modeling intentional use of language and attending to teacher planning as learning.