Choice Lit Topic: Leadership
Do you guide teachers, specialists, and literacy coaches? Here are tools, advice, and strategies school leaders need for their daily work in staff meetings, study groups, and one-on-one discussions with colleagues. If you have a leadership role in coaching teachers and designing professional development, you’ll want an upgraded membership with access to our Leaders Lounge.
Results
Talking About Synthesis: Metaphors from 2nd Graders
In this six-minute video, Lauren Scott's second graders brainstorm different metaphors for the synthesis process in reading while their principal, Karen Szymusiak, listens and responds. After the students leave, Lauren...
Tiger Teams: Mixed Age Student Groups
In this video, Karen Szymusiak (the principal at Glacier Ridge Elementary School in Dublin, Ohio) explains how "Tiger Teams" work. Tiger Teams are mixed age groups of K-5 students who...
Student Reading Interview: Assessing Ana
Principal Karen Szymusiak interviews Ana, a second grader, to learn more about her strengths and needs as a reader. Here are some sample reading interview questions: How would you...
Case Studies in Professional Learning Communities
In this brief video, Literacy Coach Pam Hahlen and Principal Karen Szymusiak meet with two teachers in a professional learning community group to discuss ongoing case studies. The meeting takes...
Data Cards: Assessment Profiles at a Glance
"Data cards" are ingeniously designed to allow an entire grade-level team to look at the reading levels of all students in the grade. In this four-minute video, "The Sisters" (Gail...
Chatting About Coaching Collaboration
Gail Boushey and Janet Scott discuss how they collaborate as coaches, sharing strategies and common goals across the classrooms they work in.
Collaborative Team Meeting: Assessing and Planning Together
Collaborative team meetings take place every 9-10 days in our schools. In these meetings, teachers from one grade level, literacy coaches, and our principal meet together to discuss individual students,...
Quick Take: Protocols for Teacher Study Groups
In this three-minute Quick Take video, Clare Landrigan describes the teacher study group protocol she uses to foster shared understanding and allow for differentiated learning among teachers.
The Dog Ate My Study Group Plans! Four Instant (and Fun and Reflective) No-Prep Teacher Workshops (E-GUIDE)
Okay, so maybe it wasn't the dog that ate your plans. Maybe leading today's study group is the 45th item on your "To Do" list, and you just didn't get...
Time for Reading
How much time do your students spend actually reading text during the literacy block? This question came up during a meeting of elementary classroom teachers. These teachers are required to...
Literacy Coach Confidential: Some Study Group Participants Aren’t Reading the Book
A couple teachers who participate in our book discussion group don't seem to be reading the book - at all. It makes for awkward moments in the conversation, like last...
Four Essentials in Designing Professional Development for Literacy Leaders
I never imagined years ago when I was a first-grade teacher that I would one day be responsible for designing professional development for literacy leaders in a highly successful school...
On Kidney Tables: Small Changes for Big Effects
Our staff is opening a new elementary school this fall, and we have been buried beneath the many decisions required to establish a new place for learning. When you start...
Above the Fold: Creating Individual Professional Development Plans (E-GUIDE)
Educators need their own books of important stuff. We can't learn everything. We can't take every course, read every book, attend every conference. We must have priorities. We must be...
Charting the Course: A Yearlong Professional Development Plan for New Teachers (SCHEDULE)
My first task in thinking through how to work with new teachers was to design a professional development plan for the entire year. Only then could I be sure the...
The Curricular Support Menu: A Collaborative Tool for Assisting Colleagues
We work as curricular support teachers in the Dublin, Ohio school district. We share a classroom, and each of us spends half the day supporting our colleagues throughout the building....
Literacy Room for Teachers Tour
When Jennifer Allen became a literacy specialist ten years ago in Waterville, Maine, she inherited a dusty basement space, bare except for a large pile of ancient reading intervention materials...
What’s Valued? Exploring Different Values in Evaluation (E-GUIDE)
This series of four activities is designed for use in workshops or mentoring sessions, with a goal of helping everyone ferret out their school community's history, beliefs, and goals in...
Three Little Phrases No Literacy Coach Can Live Without
If there are three skills any literacy coach needs, they are the ability to engage with colleagues, diffuse hostile situations, and connect with people who have a different world view....
Launching Teacher Study Groups: Guidelines and Resources
Teacher study groups are becoming more popular in schools, fueled in part by the surge of interest in adult book clubs in the U.S. over the last decade. In study...
Under, Over and Beyond Words: Strategies for Observing Talk in Classrooms
In the book Choice Words: How Our Language Affects Children's Learning, Peter Johnston writes about the importance of the ways teachers talk with students. He notes, "Teachers have very different...
