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Three Ways to Keep Coaching Student Centered
When I am working with a teacher in a coaching cycle, we commit to working together for a few weeks, planning, teaching, and assessing. When we first meet, they sometimes...
Can Anyone Be an Instructional Coach?
It was August, and we had a classroom teacher to hire. The reasons were positive: an increase in enrollment plus a school board and community that is very supportive of...
Allocating Services
Each autumn, a few weeks after the school doors have opened again after summer break, we gather a group of teachers, support staff, and administrators to consider our literacy data...
Coaching Feedback and Reflection
A leader’s job is not to do the work for others, it’s to help others figure out how to do it themselves, to get things done and to succeed beyond...
Telling Our Story
It was a few years ago when our principal called us all into the media center for a bit of news. One of my favorite games is Guess the News,...
Protecting Your Coaching Time
It was 3:00 p.m. when the dismissal bell rang. Some students bolted from the building to head for home, and others chatted loudly in the bus line. I emerged from...
The Awkward Chair
A colleague of mine recently presented an excellent professional development session about how school leaders can become experts in facilitating effective IEP or RTI meetings. These types of meetings are...
Bringing Order to the Bookroom
I was a big fan of Hope School’s bookroom. The bookroom is the result of more than a decade of work. It has a wide selection of leveled, read-aloud, and...
You Say Tornado . . .
Whatever the weather served, that was what they ate. But it never rained rain. It never snowed snow. And it never blew just wind. It rained things like soup and...
Literacy and Last Days: Keeping It Simple
“I’m not doing a bouncy house.” That was my initial response when I heard that as principal of our school, I am tasked with coming up with the last-day activity...
Rocking the Boat
When I was in high school, I attended ARC camp. The acronym stood for Advanced River Challenge. It was a weeklong canoeing adventure camp. I had never canoed before. It...
Professional Development Choice and Follow-Up
We have many opportunities for professional development in our district, but we are constantly grappling with the question of how to create more long-lasting instructional changes. In the moment, as...
Conference Records That Stay with Kids
As I waited for the transition to writing workshop, I looked around the kindergarten classroom. It was packed! Not only was the class size large—34 five-year-olds prepared their desks for...
Developing Life Skills vs. Teaching to the Test
My principal winced in trepidation while simultaneously nodding in agreement when I suggested last fall that we tackle our low test scores head-on. We started our inservice day meeting like...
Poetry Love
Our school district offers an annual Summer Writing Academy, and each year we have a different topic or focus area for the writing. When we first bounced around the idea...
It’s Not About Us
One of our teachers scheduled an appointment with me. Assuming she wanted to discuss her midyear professional goal, I was surprised when she came with guided reading resources. “I wanted...
Aligning Beliefs and Practices: Homework Policies
A few years ago, after rereading Debbie Miller’s book Reading with Intention, I led our teachers through an exercise of defining their beliefs about teaching and aligning practices. They named...
A Timesaver for Coaching Cycles
Time is a precious resource in schools today. As coaches we want to support the individual interests and needs of each teacher. To do that, we need time to connect,...
Advice for a New Coach
We have a new instructional coach in our office this year. Four of us share the space, and three of us have been working in classrooms for a few years....
Teaching Students at Their Own Level
My husband and I both play tennis. He is better than I am. In fact, the first time we ever played, we played a set, and I did not win...
Share, Learn, Grow: The PD Bulletin Board
A friend of mine opened a restaurant several years ago, and I remember him telling us how hard it was to wait for people to discover it. He knew he...
