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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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Lessons from a Multitasker

Trying to do too many tasks at once causes Jennifer Allen to make an embarrassing error and develop a plan for slowing down and focusing.

Taking a Fresh Look at PLCs

Melanie Quinn finds that a shift in location for her school's Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) makes all the difference in increasing the quality of the meetings.

Coaching Minute: Dress for Success

What message does your attire send? Heather Rader explores this tricky issue in this quick video tip.

Meaningful Transitions During Professional Development Sessions

Clare Landrigan and Tammy Mulligan share ideas for making transitions during professional development sessions lively, meaningful, and respectful.

You Are Not My Mentor

Heather Rader questions why some mentor/mentee relationships don’t click, and what we can do about it.

Coaching Minute: Teachers First

In this brief video, Ruth Ayres explains why listening and asking genuine questions are essential when mentoring teachers.

Cultivating Teacher Leadership

Jennifer Allen explains why it is essential for literacy coaches to expand their work to include mentoring teachers into leadership roles, especially involving curriculum work.

Benefits and Barriers: Helping Teachers Change

Heather Sisson designs a simple template to use in teacher study groups to help colleagues explore barriers to change, and come up with plans for overcoming them.

Coming Apart to Come Back Together

Ruth Shagoury uses a poem from MeKeel McBride with teachers of many different grade levels to help them explore what's falling apart in their teaching, and how to bring it all back together again.

Coaching Minute: Cellphone Fun

Do you want a quick fun way to get to learn a bit about participants in professional development? Heather Rader suggestions a cellphone poll in this video tip.

Engaging That Class

Jennifer Brotherton has flashbacks to her own teaching experiences with a challengng class as she coaches an eighth-grade teacher using a seminar format with students.

Reaching Boy Writers

Principal Jodi Mahoney and teachers in her school embark on a quest to understand boy writers better, and re-evaluate their writing workshops as they read, talk, and take some risks together.

Coaching Minute: One Size Does Not Fit All

Ruth Ayres talks about the importance of varying responses to teachers with diverse needs in this two-minute video.

Helping Teachers Learn to Love the Common Core Standards

Principal Jason DiCarlo realizes you can’t love anything you don’t know well, so he designs a professional development session to help teachers take a closer look at the Common Core.

Throw It In, Stir It Up, See What We Get: English Language Learners Tackling Complex Texts

While planning a unit for social studies in line with the Common Core, Suki Mozenter and colleagues shift their thinking and practice about scaffolding complex texts.

Demonstration Lesson: Deeper Reading with Advanced Third Graders

Clare Landrigan works with a third-grade teacher to help two advanced students read deeply and look for evidence in texts in this demonstration lesson. The video includes a discussion before and after the small group with the teacher.

Inviting Teachers into the Digital World

Julie Johnson shares some practical tips for helping teachers with little tech savvy find ways into the digital world.

Coaching Minute: Pinterest

Clare Landrigan and Tammy Mulligan share the many ways Pinterest has enhanced their professional development with teachers.

Literacy and Technology: Changing Structures

Jennifer Schwanke finds her school's computer lab feels more like a relic from a 1980s typing classroom than an entry point to the digital world for students. Here's what she changed to bring the resources into the current century.

Confessions of a Struggling Beginning Reader

Wouldn’t you love to put yourself in a time machine and go back to your earliest days of learning to read? Shari Frost is able to experience learning to read again as a veteran literacy coach. She takes on the Hebrew alphabet and language, and gleans many insights for her work with children and teachers.

Infusing Technology into Writing Celebrations (Grades K–2)

Brian Sepe works in a school with iPads aplenty in grades 3 and up, but few available for first graders. He works with a first-grade teacher to find ways to showcase young students’ writing using an inexpensive tech app.

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