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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.

Sketchnoting in Professional Development

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

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.

Kid-Watching as a Coaching Move

Dana Murphy explains why kid-watching is often the most effective strategy for her time in classrooms, and how she uses her notes with teachers.

Coaching Minute: Student Observation Form

In this brief video, Kathy Provost and Heather Fisher talk about the value of trying out a student observation form first within the coaching team before using it in classroom observations with teachers.

Meeting Mind-Set

Christy Rush-Levine helps a colleague develop strategies for getting the most out of an upcoming meeting she dreads.

Allocating Services

Jennifer Schwanke shares principles for leading those awkward meetings when staff need to decide between too many students who need a finite amount of services.

Telling Our Story

Cathy Mere is keenly aware that coaching positions can be expendable during budget crunches. She and her coaching colleagues are proactive in explaining their value by creating a series of graphic representations of their work.

Third-Grade Team Discussion: Rate Your Post-It Tool

Literacy coach Kathy Provost leads a team of third-grade teachers as they discuss using a “Rate Your Post-It” visual tool in their classrooms.

Protecting Your Coaching Time

Dana Murphy reflects on some of the mistakes she made early in her coaching career, as well as what her standards are now for making the best use of limited time.

Culture for Coaching Part 2: Resistance to Cycles

Ruth Ayres faces passive defiance when teachers learn they will be participating in coaching cycles as part of a school improvement plan. This is the second installment in a four-part series on building a culture for coaching within a resistant staff.

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