Content Category: Lead Literacy
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Fine-Tuning Our Coaching with an Equalizer Model
When I was a kid, my dad had a component stereo system. In addition to the cassette deck, turntable, and receiver, he had an equalizer. The dials, switches, horizontal fader...
Welcome Slides Set Professional Learning in Motion
The beginning of staff meetings was normally a flurry of activity, getting set up, checking in with colleagues, and passing out any materials while the hubbub of catching up and...
Mantras Matter
Everyone deserves a thought partner is a mantra that anchors my beliefs and guides my behaviors. I say it often. Sometimes in my head. Sometimes in the company of colleagues....
Wrapping Up the School Year: Start, Stop, Keep
In no year—a year testing our limits with challenges, grief, and loss—has it been more important to reflect on our time with students and determine next steps for how we...
The Daily GIF
Each morning, our school’s administrative assistant, Jenni, sends out an email with the morning’s daily update. It summarizes the day’s staff absences and reminds everyone of any big events for...
Coaching Through the Student Door
The number-one thing teachers never have enough of is time. During pandemic teaching, time is even more precious, because planning tasks takes much longer as we all think about how...
Coaching and Demonstration Lessons
Literacy coaches Cathy Mere and Kelly Hoenie talk about the value and challenges of demonstration lessons.
Coaching Minute: Principals and the Change Process
Principal Lee Snider talks about the change process with teachers.
COVID: What I’ll Keep
As I write this, we are finishing a year of pandemic life, and we educators have lost a lot: time, instruction, resources, security, and even the surety of activities that...
Soft Starts to Meetings That Build Empathy
The most meaningful professional development opportunities we’ve had have been ones where we’ve learned effective practices to use with kids by doing the work of a reader or writer ourselves....
Trust Your Tools. Trust Your Teachers
A teacher asked me if she should have her students journal digitally or in print. “Which do you think is best?” she asked. We were meeting for our fall individual...
Hiring Teachers for Today and Tomorrow
“Due to retirement, Mineral Point Elementary School is searching for a highly qualified fifth-grade teacher. In addition to appropriate licensure, the highly qualified candidate will possess the following knowledge, skills,...
The Power of a Confession: What Readers Really Do
Wait time can totally be the worst. Or maybe I should revise that sentence to say that 24 years into teaching, I am still impatient with silence. Two weeks ago,...
Teacher to Literacy Coach Transition
Literacy coaches Cathy Mere and Kelly Hoenie talk about the transition from being a teacher to becoming a coach.
Virtual Icebreakers: Maintaining Human Connection (Part 2)
In a world of algorithms, hashtags and followers, know the importance of human connection. —Mama Tribe Marketplace If you are looking for ways to inspire teachers to think outside the...
Virtual Icebreakers: Part 1
In a world of algorithms, hashtags and followers, know the importance of human connection. —Mama Tribe Marketplace I hit the Leave button on the screen, feeling incomplete about the meeting...
Coaching for All
I am part of an online principals’ forum with tens of thousands of members. Not long ago, someone posed the following question. I’ve removed all identifying details but kept the...
Coaching Minute: Side by Side
Jen Court explains how she works side by side with teachers in this quick video.
Insight Before PD
Our students are not going to outgrow us. We have to become better if we want them to be better. Cornelius Minor In my role as an English language...
Plan It, Don’t Wing It
Plan it. Don’t wing it. I drive by this message daily, posted in big, bold print across a billboard. This message is brought to us by a local bank with...
Defining Through Experience
The topic for our professional development: providing feedback to our students to help them persevere through any complex task. Up to this point in the year, our staff had experienced...
