Lead Lit Article Type: Try It
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Empowering Teachers to Share: Leading More Powerful Professional Development Sessions
When our new puppy, Kate, joined our family of six, it was a little chaotic. Everyone wanted to teach Kate something. Hannah wanted her to sit and listen while she...
Changing Two Words
Teachers can position children as competitors or collaborators, and themselves as referees, resources, or judges, or in many other arrangements. A teacher's choice of words, phrases, metaphors, and interaction sequences...
Professional Development and Personality Types
The better you know yourself, the better your relationship with the rest of the world. Toni Collette As leaders and coaches the biggest and most important part of our...
Coaching Notetaking Skills
A few weeks ago, I was in a fourth-grade classroom as the teacher taught a lesson on notetaking. Listening to her, watching the students approximate what she was doing, and...
Poetry for Notetaking
On most days when I enter Katie Czerwinski’s sixth-grade classroom, I take out my trusty notebook and pen and pull up a chair beside a student or settle into a...
Hiring for Literacy: The Interview
When given the opportunity to interview candidates for a teacher or literacy support opening, it is easy for an interviewer or interview team to fall back on standard teacher interview...
When Guided Reading Goes Wrong
“Oh, I tried guided reading. It doesn’t work,” reported first-grade teacher Dina. She continued chatting about herself, her instructional program, her students, her challenges, and other stuff. But I can’t...
Five Notebook Pages I Can’t Live Without (and Neither Should Students)
Looking through baskets full of my writing notebooks, I find a handful of pages repeated in each one. They aren’t repeated in the sense that they are identical; rather, the...
Getting Creative in Building Relationships with Teachers
Soon after my husband and I moved into our home, we found ourselves locked out. It was before we had a chance to have extra keys cut and stowed on...
Four Ways to Breathe Life into Classroom Charts
Charts are an incredible resource for developing independence in classrooms. When used effectively, charts document the teaching that has happened in the classroom and allow students to revisit lessons. Sometimes...
Coaching Cycles Matter
As a former classroom teacher, I remember the days, weeks, and sometimes months when I felt like I was standing in a wind tunnel with things flying toward me. Those...
Learning Labs for Professional Development
With a staff of 42 teachers ranging from one year of experience to 30-plus years of experience, differentiation of professional learning is something our school leadership team is constantly struggling...
Coaching Letter to Jo
Jo is a fifth-grade teacher in Harlem. Although she has many responsibilities, Jo and I are working primarily on enhancing curriculum, instruction, and assessment related to her instructional reading block....
Coaching Minute: Read to Every Class
Principal Jennifer Schwanke has a simple strategy for building connections to every reader in her school: she regularly reads to every class.
Where Am I Going and How Did I Get Here?
And you may ask yourself What is that beautiful house? And you may ask yourself Where does that highway go? And you may ask yourself Am I right? . ....
Resource Round-Up for Text Types
My colleague Samantha Munnecke and I had just finished facilitating our Introduction to Writing Workshop series when it was time to create a new course and respond to teachers’ content...
My Ideal Professional Bookshelf: What Does Yours Look Like?
Inspired by our discussions of an important book in our professional lives (see Part 1), our literacy teacher support group decided to take our work a step further and create...
Teaching Is Like . . .
Early in the year as I prepared to meet with different groups of educators, I recognized that I needed a quick but meaningful way to build relationships. It was also...
An Ideal Professional Bookshelf: The Important Book for Teachers
This year, our literacy teacher support group is doing a lot of book talk—about favorite books, memories of reading, and current reading obsessions—to help ground us in our classroom practice....
Celebration Charts
Ruth Ayres, a Choice Literacy contributor, hosts a weekly meme on the web called Celebrate. We have been trying to share the spirit of celebration in our staff development sessions....
Courage to Change: A Professional Development Activity
We love to use picture books to inspire conversation around change in our leadership meetings. Recently we tried a new book and loved how it worked. We used Courage...
