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First-Grade Team: Next Steps

Heather Fisher leads a first-grade teaching team as they plan action steps to take before their next monthly meeting.

Planning for Monthly Literacy Team Meetings

Kathy Provost explains how she gathers resources for team meetings, anticipating the needs that might come up in group discussions and how often to vary the group activities.

Better Team Meetings

Are your team meetings welcoming? Jennifer Schwanke describes how one team leader created a happy, thriving, and safe space for team gatherings.

Building from Strengths

This professional development activity from Brenda Power is a positive take on the many skills teachers have to tackle any problem.

More Productive Workshops

By early in the new year, literacy workshops should be humming with productivity. If you're in one that isn't, Melanie Meehan has suggestions for working with the teacher to find and solve problems together.

Breathe

Jen Schwanke resists giving time over to a teacher for an unplanned activity before a meeting she knows will be challenging. Afterward, she realizes the value in pausing to remind everyone what matters most in our work.

Build More Lingering into Coaching

Stephanie Affinito finds that frustration can morph into appreciation when coaches linger long enough to let teachers know how much their work is valued. She provides many practical suggestions for how to slow down during hectic coaching days.

Who Are “They”? Word Choice and Student Learning

Gretchen Taylor finds that these kids and everyone are key words to focus on in coaching, because they can signify sweeping assumptions in lieu of a close look at individual behaviors.

First-Grade Team: Exploring Student Engagement

Heather Fisher leads a first-grade team monthly meeting where everyone shares strategies they are trying for fostering more student engagement.

Making Meetings Purposeful

From identifying intent to setting personal norms, Jen Schwanke shares her key principles for leading meetings that participants won't hate.

The Children Are Communicating. Are We Listening?

Melanie Quinn realizes our classrooms are filled with mini-coaches. The students in front of us are clearly communicating their needs; we just need to do a better job of paying attention.

Being Selfish About Meeting Norms

Jennifer Allen questions the purpose of meeting norms, and begins from a new place in establishing them for a study group.

Coaching Minute: Case Study Observation Form

Literacy coaches Heather Fisher and Kathy Provost talk about how their work with reading specialists has evolved by having the specialists focus on case studies of individual students, rather than spending much of their time focused solely on big data. They share a form they use to help reading specialists hone their observation skills.

Do or Die

Melanie Quinn deals with a panic-stricken young teacher near tears after a lousy evaluation. She explains what she did to move him past emotion and into a plan to improve his instruction.

Getting Emotional

It happens at least once a year for Jennifer Schwanke: she finds herself on the verge of crying in a professional setting. Here's her best advice for literacy leaders to keep the tears at bay.

No Substitute for Owning the Learning

Karen Terlecky finds herself in a fitness class with a bunch of angry participants. The experience causes her to reflect on the disconnect between coach and teacher expectations when coaches think their role is to fix classroom issues.

Be Someone Who Writes

Melanie Meehan shares some practical suggestions for helping teachers (and literacy coaches) build a writing habit and get over their feelings of inadequacy as writers.

What We Lost

Brenda Power shares a simple activity to use in a teachers' writing workshop or professional development setting to get everyone writing and talking.

The Evolution of a Coaching Tool Kit

Melanie Meehan moves from a cart to a bag to a small baggie . . . and then back to a cart again. She explains how the tools she brings to classrooms and the thinking behind them have changed over time.

Bonding with a Collective Biography

Brenda Power is inspired by Amy Krouse Rosenthal to try a professional development icebreaker that brings any group together by talking through common experiences and beliefs.

Sketchnoting in Professional Development

Stephanie Affinito energizes a professional development session with sketchnoting, and teachers soon take the practice back to their classrooms.

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