Please add your anecdotes, advice and frustrations in collaborating with your classroom teachers. What wonderful projects have you created and helped assess. what are the obstacles you are facing in becoming a central part of your school's educational experience?

Karen Ulric, SSDS of Essex and Union, West Orange, NJ

I am currently in the beginning stages of creating a school-wide Information Literacy Curriculum. I expect this to be a long-term (3 year project). I am beginning with a proposal to the administration addressing the need for a consistent approach to interpreting and evaluating information accross the curriculum, so that from the get-go this will be a collaborative effort. If I don't have buy-in from the administration that this is an important educational goal, the whole project will be dead in the water. After initial research, a commitee of librarians, teachers and adminstrators will create a set of standards and indicators that can be applied across the disciplines. We will probably need a pilot year with interested teachers before taking it school-wide (which will need quite a bit of training and a big push to get a buy-in across the faculty. I am biting off something very big, but I think it will have major long-term benefits.

Marsha Lustigman, Bialik High School, Montreal, Quebec

I have been successful at working with various departments within the school community in order to develop information literacy skills, but I have never attempted a school-wide curriculum project. The literacy skills project which we are now using The Research Path: 7 Steps to Success was developed with input by faculty from all disciplines, but it is really in social studies and english that I have been able to implement it most successfully. In grade 7 science (Biology) there is also support, although the regular curriculum, combined with the jewish studies curriculum and 3 foreign languages, takes up so much time, that there has to be a real effort on my part to make any of this work within the context of a real project. Full participation, I think, demands information literacy skills courses at each level of the secondary career- grades 7 through 11 herein Quebec.