Lead Lit Topic: Getting Organized
Getting Organized
Results
Building Self-Evaluation Skills: What’s Your Signature Move?
Flowers are blooming, temperatures are rising, and school calendars are ticking toward closure. Although this means many things for schools, it also means one significantly noneducational thing in particular: it’s...
Looking Back and Planning Forward
When I was a classroom teacher, I had two things on my mind when the calendar turned to spring: a strong finish with my students and the changes I wanted...
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...
Coaching Minute: Lesson Planning Form
Kathy Provost and Heather Fisher talk about the value of using a lesson planning form with teachers as a shared record of plans, action, and reflection in coaching sessions. The...
A Checklist for Reflection
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. Soren Kierkegaard It's 4:30 p.m. on a Thursday in the dead of winter. I should go home...
“There Are Words All Over Our Hallways!”
For students who are quickly becoming independent readers, they need to see the word about ten times before it moves into their bank of easily recognized words. However, our dependent...
Exit Slips for Reflection and Planning
In this video, Kathy Provost and Heather Fisher use exit slips to assess the success of a professional development session and plan next steps.
Coaching Minute: Selecting Books for Teachers
Kathy Provost and Heather Fisher share some criteria for selecting books for teachers to open doors and conversations.
Finding a Coaching Model That Works
Our district coaching team is made up of four literacy coaches, each of us based in our own school. Although we are responsible for many aspects of literacy instruction in...
Unspoken Leadership
I once attended a student recognition event at a local high school as a community leader. Students from various pathways were nominated by one of their teachers in their respective...
Collecting Data on Case Study Students
As part of a yearlong in-depth study of one student, each reading specialist in our district gathered data in a variety of ways about a student who, as a reader,...
Data Mining Before a Coaching Cycle
Over the course of my coaching, I have become more and more student-centered. Whenever I embark on a formal coaching cycle, I do some data mining before I even meet...
Meeting with Principals
During a recent meeting I was having with a principal in our district, our superintendent stopped in unexpectedly. “What are you working on?” he asked. He was impressed when we...
Making the Most of Monthly Common Planning Times
We were about to enter a new year, a time for a fresh start for meetings with grade-level groups. Heather (my coaching partner) and I put ourselves in the shoes...
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,...
Coaching Minute: Considering Language
Heather Fisher and Kathy Provost share subtle changes in the language they are using with teachers to foster more collaboration.
Coaching Minute: Literacy Master Document
Kathy Provost and Heather Fisher explain how the Literacy Master Document has simplified and improved their coaching.
200 Feet
It was a personal mission at my previous school to provide students with as much access to books as possible. Two hundred feet from a book at any one time...
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....
Reigniting Your Coaching Schedule in December
It happens. That moment when you glance at your calendar and current cycles of coaching are ending and there isn’t much scheduled in the way of new work. This is...
