Lead Lit Article Type: Try It
Results
Choice, Voice, and Rejoice: Looking Back and Looking Forward
In speaking with my colleagues and “teacher friends” these past few weeks, I keep hearing the same thing again and again. After the year we’ve been through, many teachers are...
Resisting the Scripted Curriculum
During my classroom visits, one of the 4K teachers wanted to share some of her students’ writing with me. “Check out what Brooklyn can do.” She pulled a paper from...
Summer Work: Absorb the World
“I feel so much pressure to revamp the curriculum this summer,” one teacher leader said. “I know. I want to throw out what we’ve always been doing and think about...
How Well Do You Know Your Team? Checking In On Our Relationships with Teachers
It’s all about relationships. Take the time to create and nurture your relationships with teachers. Creating relationships is top priority. I recall words such as these flowing repeatedly from the...
Fine-Tuning Our Coaching with an Equalizer Model
When I was a kid, my dad had a component stereo system. In addition to the cassette deck, turntable, and receiver, he had an equalizer. The dials, switches, horizontal fader...
Mantras Matter
Everyone deserves a thought partner is a mantra that anchors my beliefs and guides my behaviors. I say it often. Sometimes in my head. Sometimes in the company of colleagues....
Wrapping Up the School Year: Start, Stop, Keep
In no year—a year testing our limits with challenges, grief, and loss—has it been more important to reflect on our time with students and determine next steps for how we...
Coaching Through the Student Door
The number-one thing teachers never have enough of is time. During pandemic teaching, time is even more precious, because planning tasks takes much longer as we all think about how...
Soft Starts to Meetings That Build Empathy
The most meaningful professional development opportunities we’ve had have been ones where we’ve learned effective practices to use with kids by doing the work of a reader or writer ourselves....
Trust Your Tools. Trust Your Teachers
A teacher asked me if she should have her students journal digitally or in print. “Which do you think is best?” she asked. We were meeting for our fall individual...
The Power of a Confession: What Readers Really Do
Wait time can totally be the worst. Or maybe I should revise that sentence to say that 24 years into teaching, I am still impatient with silence. Two weeks ago,...
Virtual Icebreakers: Maintaining Human Connection (Part 2)
In a world of algorithms, hashtags and followers, know the importance of human connection. —Mama Tribe Marketplace If you are looking for ways to inspire teachers to think outside the...
Virtual Icebreakers: Part 1
In a world of algorithms, hashtags and followers, know the importance of human connection. —Mama Tribe Marketplace I hit the Leave button on the screen, feeling incomplete about the meeting...
Plan It, Don’t Wing It
Plan it. Don’t wing it. I drive by this message daily, posted in big, bold print across a billboard. This message is brought to us by a local bank with...
Defining Through Experience
The topic for our professional development: providing feedback to our students to help them persevere through any complex task. Up to this point in the year, our staff had experienced...
Trending Hashtags: Finding Priorities in a Unit of Study
Outside of trust, getting to a goal that matters is arguably the most critical element for any coaching relationship. The goal has to be powerful and student focused, and it...
Listening and Learning from Literature
As a child, I lived in a world where everyone shared the same skin color, and I never questioned my place in the world. I lived in a world where...
Cheering On Teachers Through Seasons of Change
Kindness is choosing to acknowledge and celebrate the beauty in others, regardless of whether or not they can find it in themselves. —RAKtivist “I feel like a new teacher!”a veteran...
From a Coaching Vision to a Coaching Menu
I first heard the whispering of literacy coaching back in my very first year of teaching. The gifted and talented teacher worked with a few of my students each week,...
Hidden Gems: Five Ways to Keep Your Positive Vibes
Use your smile to change the world. Don’t let the world change your smile.—Unknown How do you keep yourself so positive in your coaching role? This question has been posed...
Measure for Measure
Measure in love. —Jonathan Larson (from the musical Rent) I remember the first time we took Liam to the pediatrician. After the waiting and the weighing and measuring and prodding...
