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
We Are All Shamu: What Literacy Leaders Can Learn from Exotic Animal Trainers
In the education crowd I run with, training is a dirty word. We're literacy educators, and "training" brings to mind all the crazy operant conditioning programs from the 70s and...
Literacy Coach Confidential: What Can I Do About Poor Attendance at My Study Group?
I lead a study group once a month for interested colleagues after school, and attendance is pathetic. What am I doing wrong? Answer: There may be many reasons why you're...
The Other Buddy: How Partnership Programs Help Older Readers
"Hey! Watch where you're going!" shouted a well-groomed, confident-looking boy. "Sorry," muttered his assailant. The third graders were entering the classroom to read with their first-grade reading buddies. The "assailant"...
Boosting Attendance at Study Groups
Many study group leaders find themselves facing two demographic challenges in coordinating study groups that meet before or after school. Middle-aged faculty are often in the "sandwich" generation, caring for...
Collaborative Teaching: Finding Common Ground First
The questions on this checklist are designed to be used by teachers, coaches, or mentors working as partners in co-teaching or demonstration teaching situations. Ideally, the partners should get together...
Literacy Coach Confidential: Teachers Resent Me – What Can I Do?
I am the new literacy coach at our school, and the teachers resent me. I was hired at a time when budgets are down. Class size is up, money for...
Keeping It Simple: Reflections on the December New Teachers Study Group
Written on a sticky note stuck to the edge of my laptop are three phrases: Listen first; teach by example; be patient. These are three things I've learned as a...
Planning a New Teachers’ Professional Development Program
It's the beginning of July and I am already sketching out plans for the first day of Charting the Course, the monthly professional development group for new teachers in our school....
Creative Literacy Events for Families
If your program for families has been centered on a few tried-and-true events you rarely vary over the years, you might want to mix it up with a new event...
Idealism Fades to Reality: Thinking Back to My Days as a New Teacher
I still remember picking up the phone in my kitchen and hearing the words, "We would like to offer you a third grade position." Fifteen years have passed, yet the...
Layered Support: Meeting the Needs of Beginning Teachers
The new teachers who reported feeling the most supported described their schools as having what we called "integrated professional cultures." There, new teachers could expect frequent and meaningful interaction among...
Coaching Moment: Reorganizing a Classroom Library
It may sound like such a minor coaching experience, and yet it was so powerful. I was asked by a second-grade teacher to help reorganize her classroom library, so it...
Building a Professional Library from Scratch (SHORTS)
Almost everything about Emily's new coaching position was perfect. The school was one of those charming, old, traditional brick buildings with lots of character: high ceilings, hardwood floors, wide corridors,...
Word Study Literacy Team Meeting
The literacy team is a group of teachers who meet once or twice a month to study and discuss literacy across the whole school. The team consists of...
Writing Workshop Teacherisms
With the beginning of a new school year fast approaching many classroom teachers find themselves reflecting on what worked and didn't work when launching the previous year's writing workshop. Everything...
In Praise of Handwritten Notes
When asked what was the most important thing she wanted to teach her students, long-time kindergarten teacher Isabel Beaton replied, "The art of gracious living!" Whether you're five or fifty,...
