Structural Cooperation Between Teachers, Public Librarians and Teacher Librarians

Abstract


 
 
 According to the concept of ‘Public Library at School’, secondary schools and public libraries in the Netherlands are working on a structural cooperation. They collaborate at strategic, tactical and operating level to improve language skills, reading motivation and information literacy of students. This paper describes the experiences of the collaboration between several pre-vocational secondary schools and public libraries during the period of 2012 – 2015. Especially, the force of the collaboration of all the parties involved, is shown at all the components of the concept ‘Public library at school’. In all the example-schools it is shown that collaboration pays off. There are results on the management, employee and student level. The most important improvements are: students read more, students visit the (school) library more often, reading is more and more seen as ‘a normal thing to do’ and reading attitudes of students are improved.