Lead Lit Topic: Guiding Teachers
Here is where you'll find information on guiding teachers.
Results
One Powerful Way to Improve Your Strategic Plan
What would I eliminate if I had a magic wand? Overconfidence. —Daniel Kahneman, psychologist, Nobel Laureate, and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow Strategic plans are as common in schools...
How to Let Go of Outdated Literacy Practices
One of the great misconceptions we often carry throughout our lives is that our perceptions of ourselves and the world are basically accurate and true, that they reflect some stable,...
Five Business Books Every Leader Should Read
My reading life consists of an eclectic mix of books, and I have found that business books often provide valuable guidance for my school leadership. These lessons have been applicable to...
A Checklist of Ideas to Support New Teachers
Every year brings grade-level shifts, new agendas, and new and improved ways of doing things in a school. Even though these initiatives and shifts take time and adjustments, we at...
Avoiding Burnout
This article is not about using this summer to get reinspired, or about falling further in love with your work, or about the best books to buy for your students....
Ninja Feedback: Empowering Teachers to Reflect
The greatest feedback I've gotten has been feedback I didn't know I was getting. The most effective coaches and mentors in my experience were those who knew how to ask...
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...
Coaching Minute: Reminders for Facilitating Coaching Conversation
Instructional coach Brian Sepe offers three reminders for facilitating a coaching conversation. Staying focused on action, clarity, and energy ensures that the conversation will be fruitful.
Coaching Minute: Listen Deeply
Instructional coach Staci Revere shares a key mantra to use when working with teachers, especially those who do not want to work with an instructional coach.
Three Expectations Regarding Grammar Instruction
Anyone who has ever sat at a desk with an open grammar book and 10 sentences to perform a rote task like identifying the subject, the subordinate clause, or the...
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...
Offer a Mirror: How Coaches Empower Reflection
“I don’t know! It’s just that I get in there and I start teaching it, and then things happen...like someone has a connection or someone doesn’t understand a word and...
Welcome Slides Set Professional Learning in Motion
The beginning of staff meetings was normally a flurry of activity, getting set up, checking in with colleagues, and passing out any materials while the hubbub of catching up and...
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...
COVID: What I’ll Keep
As I write this, we are finishing a year of pandemic life, and we educators have lost a lot: time, instruction, resources, security, and even the surety of activities that...
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...
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...
Insight Before PD
Our students are not going to outgrow us. We have to become better if we want them to be better. Cornelius Minor In my role as an English language...
Harnessing the Power of Change
Camping, real camping, the kind with tents and sleeping bags and stiff backs . . . I don’t really know why I subject myself and my two young sons, Ben and...
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...
