Being a leader of literacy instruction can feel like a daunting job. There are so many excellent instructional practices being used by teachers that it seems impossible to know everything needed to be successful at leading instruction. Simply knowing the curriculum at one grade level is a challenge, much less knowing it at multiple grade levels and knowing how best to present the curriculum to students. While intervening for struggling students. And challenging the gifted students. And helping English Language Learners. And focusing on student choice and interest and . . . well, you get the picture.
I experienced this firsthand several years ago. After teaching middle school language arts and working as an assistant principal at the secondary level, my career took a welcome but unexpected turn when I found myself the leader of an elementary school. Going into the job, I felt completely confident about leading literacy instruction. How hard could it be, right?
But within just a few weeks’ time, I realized I’d had no idea. Not about how hard it is to teach beginning readers and writers; not about the amount of skill and patience teachers have to have; not even about the amount of emphasis placed on literacy at the elementary level. I was embarrassed to discover how little I knew. For one thing, I was baffled by the words and phrases everyone was using. It was like a whole different language. Running records. Fluency. Word study. Sentence dictation. Vowel-consonant-vowel patterns. It was all brand new to me. I’d left my comfortable literacy teaching world where I used terms like simile, metaphor, symbolism, personification, and author’s purpose and stumbled upon a whole set of unfamiliar literacy terms.
A bit ashamed of my ignorance—after all, shouldn’t I know this stuff? I was a language arts teacher, for cryin’ out loud!—I bluffed for a while, pretending I knew exactly what everyone was talking about. But I just grew more and more confused and insecure. And it got pretty exhausting to pretend to be someone I wasn’t.
So, finally, I decided to just own my ignorance and admit I had a lot to learn. It was a simple solution—I just started asking a lot of questions each time I saw teachers working with readers and writers. My inquiries happened formally, as part of our required evaluation process, and informally, in casual conversations after a classroom walk-through. I had many conversations resembling this one:
Me: As you know, I’m trying to learn all I can about literacy, and I know you have a lot to teach me. Can you talk to me about what you were working on with that student?
Teacher: This student struggles to read through sentences without stopping, so I was working with him on grouping words into phrases.
Me: Okay, tell me more about that.
Teacher: I was using a book that was familiar to him, so he already knows many of the words individually. But since he tends to get stuck on one word, I used the masking card to have him group words into phrases. The card helps him scoot his eyes forward faster, and therefore he is able to read the phrase.
Me: I heard you telling him to make his reading sound like a story.
Teacher: Yes. I want him to learn to read phrases like he is talking or reading a story—that will help him be more fluent when he reads whole sentences.
Me: So what are your next steps?
Teacher: Tomorrow, we’ll reread the book one more time without the masking card. When he masters the phrases, we’ll move into full sentences. I think he’ll be able to do that within a day or two.
Me: And then?
Teacher: If I feel like he’s ready, we’ll do the whole process again with an unfamiliar book.
Me: What if he’s not ready?
Teacher: Then I’ll circle back around and do it again with a familiar book. I know he will be able to do it—I just have to build his confidence. So we’ll use familiar books as long as we need to until he’s reading full sentences fluently.
From that simple conversation, I gained knowledge about literacy instruction—about differentiation, fluency, and text familiarity. I even gathered an easy trick that will work with an unconfident reader. Incidentally, I also learned something important about this teacher—that she knew her students well because she knew who was struggling with what specific skill, and she knew exactly how to move them forward. This type of information was of great help to me when doing teacher evaluations.
Each time I had a conversation like this, I gained knowledge about literacy instruction. It was real-live professional development—on-the-job training, so to speak.
But the important thing wasn’t my learning. It was how I shared it. When I learned a new teaching idea or trick from a teacher, I’d look for opportunities to talk about it to other teachers when giving them feedback. I’d say something like, “I saw Mrs. Gill doing something really cool the other day with a masking card. I’d love to share it with you!” Or I’d say, “I’d love for you to talk to Mrs. Simmons about how she handles transitions in writing workshop—I think you’d really like how it works.” In that way, it wasn’t me making suggestions for growth or change—it was putting a structure in place where teachers were learning from teachers. After hearing about something that worked well with one of their colleagues, perhaps they would then reach out to the other teacher for further suggestions or ideas. In that sense, I was serving as a sort of conduit of tips and tricks of literacy instruction. Not the expert, mind you—just the conveyor of good information.
Here’s why that is important: As leaders, we can’t be the experts on best instructional practices for every single piece of curriculum in our schools. It’s impossible. There are too many other things we need to handle, both instructionally and managerially. But what we can do is tap in to the expertise of our teachers by constantly asking questions, and then share the good stuff they’re doing with other teachers. We can spread the word. And that, I have discovered, is what it means to be a leader of literacy instruction.
