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
Tips for Conducting Demonstration Lessons, or How to Avoid the “Am I Doing This Right?” Question
Teachers spend most of their day alone with their class, and each day they are required to make hundreds of "in the moment" instructional decisions. Here are just a few...
Jennifer Allen on Working with Veteran Teachers (PODCAST)
In this podcast, Jennifer Allen talks with Franki Sibberson about mentoring veteran teachers. A transcript is included below the player. Franki Sibberson: What is your role in working with...
Draft Stamps: Moving Learners at All Levels Forward
One of our first discoveries as administrators was that our title authorized our membership on countless committees. We never knew so many committees could exist! Our past employment as consultants...
“To Teach is to Learn Twice”: Creating Professional Communities in Schools
This year at our Choice Literacy Workshops the last gift we gave everyone was a backpack with the quote, "To Teach is to Learn Twice" printed on it. It was...
Calendaring a Literacy Coach
My husband and I married when we were sophomores in college transferring to the University of Washington. He was pursuing architecture and I was in education. We arrived in our...
Building the Reading Community Among Teachers
The starting point for teaching reading is always our own lives as readers—tuning in to our processes as proficient readers, and then tapping that knowledge to help the children in...
Relevant Support for New Teachers
By building relations we create a source of love and personal pride and belonging that makes living in a chaotic world easier. Susan Liebermann This fall my son Ben ran...
Assessing Professional Development: Focus on Feedback
This summer I was at the ocean with several families. A few adults and a slew of kids including my daughter Samantha were swimming out to an island. It was...
A Thanksgiving Take on Differentiating Instruction
As I've traveled between conferences and classrooms this fall, I've heard a lot of buzz around the concept and practice of "differentiation." When I've asked teachers, literacy coaches, and language...
Returning to Our Creation Chambers: Supporting Experienced Teachers
"Gorky built upon the achievements of the early modern artists he greatly admired and broke new ground during a remarkable moment to become an inspiration to a new generation of...
Creating Shared Learning Experiences for New and Veteran Teachers
Nothing brings people together more than shared experiences. Jimmy Fallon One of my many guilty pleasures is taping Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and watching...
Unlucky Lists: Raising Non-Writers and Non-Artists
In my work as a literacy educator at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, I often walk by a poster at the elevators that makes me pause and think: "Unlucky Arithmetic:...
Creating Data Teams
A concern that arises in thinking about the collection and use of data is the number of schools that are assigning the job of "data manager" to their reading coaches/specialists....
Making the Case for Literacy Coaches
It's that time of year. School districts are examining their budgets for the upcoming school year. Due to the troubled economy, many of them are finding that they are not...
My Colleague Refuses to Collaborate with Us (LITERACY COACH CONFIDENTIAL)
A literacy coach writes to us with the question: How do you work with a teacher who refuses to be a collaborative part of a team? She does her own...
Implementing RTI: Keeping Students at the Heart of Our Conversations
The success of any RTI initiative will rest largely on the ability of the teachers to select appropriate instructional activities based on the diagnostic evidence each student provides at the...
Creating a Culture of Literacy
My in-laws really love sports. My nephews spent their entire infancies in onesies emblazoned with professional team logos. As soon as they were old enough to get out of their...
How to Use a Coach: Four Things to Consider
When my husband and I rented the movie Slum Dog Millionaire, I hid my eyes frequently during the first thirty minutes. Completely unprepared for the on-screen violence, I asked Kurt to...
How to Be of Use: Starting Strong
During my summer, I've been working with my 10-year-old daughter on her conventions in general and her spelling in particular. I'm constantly on the lookout for fun ways to motivate...
The DIBELS Divide (LITERACY COACH CONFIDENTIAL)
Literacy Coach Confidential is Choice Literacy's forum for answering the toughest questions literacy coaches and teachers face as they work together. Our contributors respond to the questions anonymously, which enables them...
Triangulating: The Importance of Multiple Data Points When Assessing Students
We went to a professional development session a few years ago with Elizabeth City and she gave us a name for something we have always believed - the importance of...
