Content Category: Lead Literacy
Results
It’s Time to Pause: A PD Session to Reconnect with Core Values
Whatever things you go through, you stay true to who you are and your core values. —Sophie Gregoire Trudeau Being called to yet another meeting, with an already full to-do...
Coaching Minute: Be Aware of How Your Presence Affects the Room
In this installment about norms for professional learning, Ruth Ayres shares the importance of being aware of how your presence affects the room.
Goals Are Greater than Nice Conversations
If there’s no goal, it’s just a nice conversation. —John Campbell, Growth Coaching International I am still grappling with this quote. It hit me hard. Was I just having nice...
Coaching Minute: Expect and Accept a Lack of Closure
In this installment about norms for professional learning, Ruth Ayres shares why it is important to expect and accept a lack of closure.
Aiming for a 5 on a Scale of 1–10
To help our schools gather fast, formative data to guide instructional steps, determine which students qualify for intervention services, and meet the requirement of our state's new dyslexia screening law,...
Coaching Minute: What’s Said Here Stays Here; What’s Learned Here Leaves Here
In this installment about norms for professional learning, Ruth Ayres shares the importance of having a place for instructional coaches to learn, as well as process their own situations. The...
A Sense of Accomplishment: Four Strategies for Making Students’ Literacy Learning Visible
One of my first public social activities in 2020 was participating in a summer volunteer project. My city’s local arts school was offering a weekend course to learn how to...
Coaching Minute: Be Wholly Present
In this installment about norms for professional learning, Ruth Ayres shares the importance of setting a norm about presence.
Critical Questions that Lead to Powerful Change
“Does this practice, policy, or decision help or harm students from marginalized communities?” This is one of the questions that Alex Shrevin Venet wrote in her book Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education...
How the Influences of Reggio Emilia’s Teaching Approach Still Affect My Practice
I started my teaching career more than two decades ago at the American School in Paraguay, where I taught preschool in a bilingual setting. Our pedagogy was based on the...
Coaching Minute: The Importance of Norms
In this first installment about norms for professional learning, Ruth Ayres shares the reason why norms are important.
When the Best Coaching Is Offering Advice
A dialogue is a meeting of the minds, two or more people sharing ideas with each other. It is not a dialogue if I withhold my ideas, and it is...
Bite-Sized PD
As an instructional coach, I sometimes worry how I’m going to continue to meaningfully share the aspects of new resources to support our frameworks. Recently we've been learning to add...
Three Books that Changed How I Teach and Think About Reading
My school is going through a renovation. Although most of my supplies were boxed up and moved to storage in the building, one set of items I brought home from...
Watching Writers Work
I learned to teach writers by watching students work as writers. I believed Don Graves when he encouraged teachers to watch children write and trust that we would discover everything...
No More Learning Target Drudgery
Making learning targets meaningful to first graders was more complicated than I thought. I know the research and understand why kids need to know what they are learning and why...
Guided Reading Debrief
Lora Bieghler debriefs with teacher Cheryl Miller after a guided reading lesson.
Affirm, Acknowledge, Ask: A Simple Protocol for Communicating Feedback
How do we let people know how they might improve if they are not ready to hear it? There are many situations in which the signals are clear that feedback...
Finding Reliable Digital Resources
One of the things I love about education is that it is always evolving. When tablets first became the rage all those years ago, I looked for ways to incorporate...
Everything I Need to Know About Teaching Children, I Learned Through Conferring
Have you ever been asked that question, “If you could take only three things to an island, what would they be?” I know my answers change as time evolves and...
Coaching Minute: Keeping Writers in Motion
Ruth Ayres explains the importance of keeping writers in motion and ways in which instructional coaches can empower routines that will help students keep writing.
