In 2012, BPL piloted an initiative called “school community outreach,” aimed at raising awareness and making whole schools into strong library users by expanding school outreach to parents, teachers and administration. The new focus revealed a knowledge gap among teachers regarding the modern library, particularly in the use of digital resources. BPL increased programming targeted to teachers, offering free librarian-led trainings and workshops both in the schools and at the Library. The Teacher Lab, launched in 2014, was an experiment to see if busy teachers would find value in a rigorous library skills and information literacy course over the summer.

The Teacher Lab, now in its third year, is designed to link the 21st century public library directly to classroom practice — to graduate, attendees must build an annotated resource list on a unit of their choice. The course leverages the Library’s mission as a place for lifelong learning to benefit a new audience. For the first time, BPL was certified by the NYC Department of Education as a provider of professional development credit, which teachers use towards maintaining their state license. Finally, partnering with teachers gives the Library valuable insight into how to continue to best serve our school communities.

The Teacher Lab course and related teacher-centric programming and services aim to accomplish several outcomes:

• Raise the status of the public library among the school community as a trusted place for learning;
• Demonstrate the value of a dedicated, creative librarian as a classroom partner (indirectly supporting the vision of a qualified media specialist in every school);
• Serve an audience with great potential to influence community opinion of the library. In other words, a teacher’s perception of the value of the Library (either positive or negative) is likely to be passed to his/her school administration, students and their families.