Lead Lit Topic: Study Groups
Teacher study groups are as diverse as the teachers who participate in them. They can be an informal, low-key coffee klatch designed to relieve the daily stress of teaching or a highly structured inquiry group with definite participant protocols. Most study groups are somewhere in-between, with colleagues getting together regularly to discuss books, view videos, and support each other as they test out new literacy instruction strategies in their classrooms. Here you’ll find inspiration and ideas from study group leaders who coordinate book groups, design workshops, and develop structures for helping colleagues transfer professional learning to the reality of the classroom and sustain it.
Results
Taming the Voices in Our Heads
Our entire lives, [Eckhart Tolle argued], are governed by a voice in our heads. This voice is engaged in a ceaseless stream of thinking—most of it negative, repetitive, and self-referential....
Letting Go: Nurturing Ownership in Writing
Once a month, a group of teachers from across the district gather to take a deep dive into writing instruction. The teachers, a variety of participants from grades K-5 who’ve...
Creative Reading Responses: It Begins with You
I am part of a teacher book club where we gather together in person and online to read children’s literature selections: picture books, early chapter books, nonfiction selections, young adult...
Helping Teachers Use Their Writing in Instruction
Early in my career, Katie Wood Ray offered this advice to a room full of teachers. It changed me. She said, “I believe we all should make a commitment to...
Scheduling Study Groups for the Year
It’s that time of year when I launch professional development offerings for next year. Some of the texts are being used in voluntary study groups, others in grade-level team meetings....
Book Study
For school leaders, developing effective professional development is a nagging itch that never goes away—valuable, troublesome, and difficult to conquer. Yet, when we ask teachers what they would most like...
Using Norms in PLCs
Is there anything more awkward than having to reprimand an adult? To ask an adult – a colleague, even – to stop scrolling through Facebook during a meeting? To remind...
Setting Norms in PLCs
I don’t know if I heard it, read it, or just realized it, but I know that I believe it. When you are working with a group of adults over...
Team Meeting: Next Steps
Kathy Provost closes a third-grade team meeting with a discussion of next steps, ensuring everyone is on the same page with plans before the next month's meeting.
Professional Learning Beyond PLCs
Professional learning communities, or PLCs for short, is a framework for professional collaboration and data analysis. The structure this approach creates allows for collective inquiry around student learning. Since coming...
A Book Tasting for Teachers
Where do you turn when you need your next book to read? If you are like me, you have a few methods up your sleeve to ensure your next book...
Not All Superheroes Wear Capes
Doldrums. One of Merriam-Webster's dictionaries defines doldrums as "a spell of listlessness or despondency; a state or period of inactivity, stagnation, or slump." Inevitably, we all get the doldrums at...
Science and Literacy Units
The best way to learn about anything is by doing. Richard Branson As the second-grade teachers walked into their professional development session that afternoon, they each grabbed a container...
First-Grade Team: Next Steps
Heather Fisher leads a first-grade teaching team as they plan action steps to take before their next monthly meeting.
Planning for Monthly Literacy Team Meetings
You hit home runs not by chance, but by preparation. Roger Maris October is when the "honeymoon period" has usually ended for teachers. It's the month when students show...
Better Team Meetings
In my first few years as a middle school language arts teacher, our principal required our teaching team to meet once a week. So new, so eager to please, and...
Coaching Minute: Case Study Observation Form
Literacy coaches Heather Fisher and Kathy Provost talk about how their work with reading specialists has evolved by having the specialists focus on case studies of individual students, rather than...
First-Grade Team: Exploring Student Engagement
Heather Fisher leads a first-grade team monthly meeting where everyone shares strategies they are trying for fostering more student engagement.
Making Meetings Purposeful
We’ve all heard the jokes and complaints: When I die, I hope it’s in a meeting. That way, the transition from life to death will be barely noticeable. I just...
Being Selfish About Meeting Norms
Writing norms helps create groups that are able to have honest discussions that enable everyone to participate and be heard. Joan Richardson I have found myself thinking about the...
Coaching Minute: Student Observation Form
Kathy Provost and Heather Fisher talk about the value of trying out a student observation form first among the coaching team before using it in classroom observations with teachers. ...
