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Lead Literacy Articles & Videos (formerly leadliteracy.com)

Our lounge is your home for exploring hundreds of articles and videos for literacy coaches and school leaders. Our contributors share their best advice for working one-on-one with teachers in coaching cycles, hosting professional development sessions, and designing demonstration lessons and study groups.

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What’s the Temperature?

Cathy Mere substitutes in leading a meeting, and realizes the importance of always slowing down and taking the temperature of the room when beginning professional development sessions. She shares her seven favorite strategies for slowing down and reading the room.

Coaching Minute: Principals and Questions

In this quick video, Jen Schwanke explains why the most essential task for a new principal or literacy leader may be to slow down and ask lots of questions.

Reframing Data Discussions

David Pittman humorously conveys the dread he experiences when he is assigned to lead an inservice session focused on data. He then finds creative ways to reframe the discussion.

Coaching Minute: Fostering Team Collaboration

Jen Schwanke talks through the tricky work of making sure literacy specialists, coaches, and classroom teachers have the time and structure they need to collaborate well around students and data.

Rethinking Homework

Melanie Meehan explores research findings on homework, and provides a series of prompts for thinking through with teachers how to revise homework practices to be more relevant and helpful for students and families.

Defining the Principal’s Role

Jennifer Schwanke talks about the importance of school leaders building a sense among teachers and families of how literacy is the foundation for all learning in classrooms.

Coaching Minute: Building Coach and Specialist Collaboration

In this coaching minute video, Cathy Mere and Kelly Hoenie talk about the importance of more collaboration between literacy coaches and reading specialists, and how to foster it.

Blind Spots

Matt Renwick has to confront his “blind spots” and assumptions when his data from instructional walks about classroom talk in small groups and whole-class teaching situations does not match teacher perceptions.

The Power of a Rant

Louise Wrobleski explores the power of rants and the lesser-known ubi sunts in a professional development session to help teachers understand persuasive writing in fresh ways.

What Do We Mean by Coachable?

We think of teachers who are easy to persuade and work with as being the most “coachable.” Stephanie Affinito explains why the teachers who challenge us may teach literacy coaches more.

Field Notes: Stories and Courage

Ruth Ayres shares how a principal changed the literacy story of his school from failure to success by having the courage to cultivate “lone nut” leaders.

Identity and Coaching

Suzy Kaback considers how the way we talk about ourselves shapes our identity in subtle ways, and what this might mean for coaching teachers.

Enticing Teachers to Write

Ruth Ayres explains how to scaffold teachers as writers with continuous invitations and low-risk opportunities.

Talk in a Fifth-Grade Girls’ Book Club

In a demonstration lesson, Tammy Mulligan scaffolds talk in a fifth-grade book club with the transcript of another student reading group. The video includes a planning session with the teacher and debrief.

Literacy Morning Announcements

Stephanie Affinito has suggestions for how short poems and snippets of children’s literature might be integrated into morning announcements.

Never Again

Matt Renwick explains how the Never Again protocol for professional development sessions can help teachers rethink and revise their literacy practices.

Coaching Minute: Using Video with Literacy Coaches

Cathy Mere shares four quick tips to help literacy coaches use video thoughtfully in professional development and to hone their own instructional skills.

Creative Reading Responses: It Begins with You

Stephanie Affinito finds the secret to helping teachers get creative with reading responses is to try them out in their own reading first.

March Read-Aloud Madness

Stephanie Affinito explains how you can spice up a winter professional development session with a read-aloud book tasting and competition modeled after the March Book Madness initiative.

Helping Teachers Use Their Writing in Instruction

Ruth Ayres remembers how using her writing in instruction transformed her teaching, She shares three strategies for helping teachers inject their writing into lessons.

Analyzing Student Work: Beginning with Strengths

David Pittman coaches a fifth-grade teacher to look beyond the sea of grammar and spelling errors in student work, and instead start with strengths to analyze where to go next in instruction.

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