Bridging the Gap Between High School & College: Part 3

This series of blogs will summarize and highlight important portions of our recent white paper, The New York City DOE/CUNY Library Collaborative: Bridging the Gap Between High School and College, which you can view here.

The whitepaper presents the progression and processes of the New York Collaborative Curriculum Revision Project (CCRP), a collaborative of high school teachers, college faculty, and librarians formed to build upon the new Common Core State Standards and better prepare students for post-secondary success. The posts will include sections quoted from the white paper as well as our own editorial.

Part 3: The Collaborative Curriculum Revision Project (CCRP)

To achieve the overarching goals of the Library Collaborative described in Post 2, the Collaborative put on a series of curriculum revision workshops, as well as created communities of practice among librarians, high school teachers, and CUNY faculty.

These workshops evolved to become the CCRP, which demonstrated that librarians can and should
play a central role in building a “pipeline” between institutions to develop a library-centered model of educational reform that:

• positions librarians as a core part of curricular development;
• respects the professional expertise and experience of librarians and subject educators;
• promotes cross-institutional understandings and partnerships through a sustainable forum;
• breaks down traditional institutional and disciplinary divisions through the development of personal relationships; and 
• integrates information literacy instruction through development of high school units aligned to Common Core standards.

Rather than creating a prescriptive toolkit to dictate curriculum revisions, the Collaborative chose a model that acknowledged the expertise of librarians and faculty. The CCRP model connects educators through discussions about student challenges, and creates opportunities for them to do the hard work of aligning high school units with college course requirements.

The CCRP provides a workshop model that is effective because it outlines a process establishing how librarians contribute to this essential work. The CCRP places the librarian at the center of the work to link multiple disciplines and institutions through the information literacy skills continuum…

Participants leave the working session knowing how to turn to librarians for support in identifying materials for instruction and developing assessments.

Two themes define the goals of the working sessions: developing community and concrete work. The first round created a learning community through conversation, the second round focused on building communities of practice, which then thought through the outcomes of a high school unit and revised the structure and content accordingly.

Check back next week as we continue our blog series and look at the results of the working sessions and how the CCRP can serve as a model for other revision projects. To learn more about the Collaborative and the CCRP, access the full whitepaper here. Read other entries in this blog series here.

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About the Author

Geoff is a Renaissance man, who can often be found reading about obscure historical topics, working on cars, or debating world affairs. He comes from a family of teachers and has a BA in communications.

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