Lead Lit Topic: Guiding Teachers
Here is where you'll find information on guiding teachers.
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Coaching Minute: Back Pocket Questions
In this Coaching Minute video, Heather Rader shares the power of back-pocket questions in building rapport with teachers and administrators. A transcript is available below the player. In the book...
Picture It: Pinterest for Professional Development
This fall we are trying a new way to organize how we share professional readings and videos for our professional development sessions. We are creating text sets of professional readings/videos/blog...
Coaching Minute: Wait for the “In”
In this brief video, Heather Rader shares her strategies for getting into classrooms of teachers who may be hesitant about inviting visits from coaches. A transcript is available below the...
10 Steps to a Literacy Vision
Being forward-looking—envisioning exciting possibilities and enlisting others in a shared view of the future—is the attribute that most distinguishes leaders from non-leaders. ...
Phasing in New Initiatives: Keep the Baby!
Laura, a literacy coach, came to the first coaches' meeting of the year with a glum look on her face. With just a little prodding, she told her story. The...
Alignment and Community: Planning a Year of Professional Development Opportunities
The role of the leader is to enable, facilitate, and cause peers to interact in a focused manner. Peer interaction is the social glue of focus and cohesion. Michael Fullan...
Turning “Unfortunate” into Good Fortune
Recently I sent an email to an administrator that went to everyone in the school. It was an email regarding the strengths and needs of teachers. Although I scrutinize every...
Coaching Minute: Writing Objectives
Heather Rader explains why it is important to write an objective before any professional development meeting, and shares a succinct example. While I’m comfortable writing objectives for the classrooms...
Speaking to Adults Through Books
When I had a child who worried about being different from her playmates, I curled up and read The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf. Maya summed up the story...
Improvement Plan
Maria taught sixth-grade language arts in the middle school where I was an assistant principal. When I first came to the building, my principal warned me about Maria. “She’s struggling,”...
Coaching Minute: The Power of Rehearsal
Heather Rader guides a novice coach by sharing the power of rehearsal before leading professional development sessions. A transcript is provided below the player. My colleague Samantha Munnecke and I...
Common Core Standards: Spreading the Word
As a district-level literacy coach in California, I've been given the task of helping move our system toward implementation of the Common Core Standards. We are a large urban district...
Introducing the Writing Common Core Standards: Planning for Professional Development
When I began to plan for how introducing the Common Core State Standards in Writing with a key group of leaders in our district, I kept these words of wisdom...
Off the Dance Floor and Onto the Balcony: Getting the Big Picture in Schools
We coordinate professional development efforts in schools. Periodically we visit classrooms during literacy blocks to think about how we are progressing toward our goals and to identify next steps for...
Building Community Protocols
When we plan professional development sessions, inservice courses, and literacy team meetings, we are always on the lookout for new ways to build community within the group so that everyone...
Ask Me – I’m Not the Expert
If nothing else, children should leave school with a sense that if they act, and act strategically, they can accomplish their goals. I call this feeling a sense of agency....
Same Old Books with New Intentions: Reflecting on Rigor and the Common Core
Rigor is not an attribute of a text, but rather a characteristic of our behavior with that text. Kylene Beers and Robert Probst I remember one of my first...
Opinion Exchange: A Workshop Activity for Study Groups
What do new teachers need to keep them going that difficult first year? In our first session with new teachers in October, our room was filled with the stories of...
Making Assumptions
It had been a rough morning. I'd spent the last two and a half hours in jaw-tightening silence, watching a novice teacher making misstep after misstep in his classroom. In...
Some Study Group Participants Aren’t Reading the Book
A couple of teachers who participate in our book discussion group don't seem to be reading the book—at all. It makes for awkward moments in the conversation, like last week...
Hollering About Informational Text
We set out over a year ago to increase the informational side of our bookshelves when we realized that our professional development mentor texts mirrored the elementary school discrepancy between...
