The Temperature is Starting to Drop

For the last several weeks, my SOL’s have been about literacy coaching. Partly, because I felt I needed to stretch my comfort with informational writing. I figured I should be able to do what I ask kids to do. And I do believe that my thinking about the range of informational writing has broadened. My other purpose for  writing about coaching is to document who I am and what I do as a professional.  As I’ve said before, you can’t be a wimp and be a literacy coach and a particularly brutal winter is being predicted for Michigan this year. New visions of who I should be and how I will spend my time are coming down the road like a snow plow. A path is being cleared. Nothing I can do. I’m not even sure who is really driving the truck. It will be interesting to see if my thinking ends up crushed like an unfortunate mailbox positioned too close to the road. Will my ongoing work or the insight of my fellow cliff divers count for anything? The weatherman is predicting snowflakes as early as the end of the week.

Text for this word cloud came from The Coach and
the Evaluator by Bob and Megan Tschannen-Moran,
an article in the October 2011 issue of
 Education Leadership.

Coaching Conversations Don't Always Fit a Protocol

If blogging along with TWT has taught me anything, it is the power of audience, no matter how small, to motivate and give purpose to writing. During a recent discussion with a teacher I am working with, she mentioned wanting help with publishing with her students. At the beginning of the school year, when I met with this teacher to plan for the trimester, it was sort of a flop. I had to let go of my protocol and honor her current practice. This was one of those unplanned conversations. As a coach who is more comfortable with nudging than pushing, I knew this was an opportunity that had to be seized. She was ready and open. Here is an edited summary of the exchange that took place:

Teacher	Coach
I need your help with publishing.	How many times would you like them to publish by the end of the month?
At least once.	Do you want the piece to be something of their choice or an assigned piece?
Choice.	If you want to be able to attach some kind of grade to the piece, you’ll need an instructional rubric so the kids know the expectations.
Yes, I want to grade it. I need to be able to show parents and include the points in their report card.	Planning a celebration now will give your kids purpose and an audience for their writing. It could be very simple. Nothing fancy. Maybe set something up before parent-teacher conferences.
Good, because I don’t really have time for a big party or anything like that.	You could have the kids put their pieces on their desks along with a sticky note. You could invite another class to come in, walk around, read their work, and write a comment on a sticky. After that, the kids could share their comments. You could even have the parents write comments on a sticky note too.
I could ask one of the other 3rd grade classes in the hallway.	Let the other teacher know what you would like her class to notice about your kids’ writing. How could we make sure every kid gets a comment?
Maybe have them write one comment per sticky note or partner them with the writer they will comment on prior to the walk through.	That might speed up the process and help the commenters be more specific.

The conversation I summarized above would never have happened if I would have put filling out questions on a coaching protocol before the need to establish trust with this teacher. Before the end of the trimester, I will attempt to re-visit the coaching protocol but then again maybe I won’t. Sometimes using a coaching protocol feels a bit like forcing a writer to use a graphic organizer to write. Sometimes it makes sense. Sometimes it doesn’t. Protocols are tools, nothing more.

This is a writing folder from one of the teacher's students. One pocket is
labeled still working on and the other is labeled finished. The teacher is
just beginning to play with the idea of writer's notebooks.

Facilitating a PLC is Different than Giving a Presentation

         I don’t know why I still get so nervous about these things. I’ve been facilitating study groups and giving presentations for over a decade. What worries me the most is I don't want teachers to feel like their time spent in the PLC is a waste. I am very sensitive to the fact that these teachers have to write sub plans and will probably have to mop up a mess or two after having been out of their classroom.  I need to calm down and trust the process. This year I’m participating in a professional learning community with a focus on supporting young writers. The first meeting went well and our second meeting is tomorrow afternoon. I’ve read and reread the agenda, replaying possible scenarios in my mind. Mostly, I want to ask the right questions, at the right time, in just the right way. I need to assist teachers to consider links between what we learn and think about in our PLC to classrooms and students. At the same time, I need to stay out of their way. I’m hoping that one teacher from the group might be willing to let the rest of us visit her classroom to learn how she uses her smart board for interactive writing. It all depends on how safe everyone feels with each other. That reminds me. I need to bring snacks.

Our PLC is pulling together a collection of lessons that
will hopefully function as a resource for teachers new to
writer's workshop in kindergarten and first grade. In our
district, due to building closures and budget cuts, many
 teachers have changed buildings and grade levels.

My Dream School

         I dream of working in a school that drips with collaboration and trust among teachers. A few weeks ago I wrote about our school’s ambitious plan for PLC’s. The plan was a collaborative effort based on the idea that professional learning communities and a school’s culture go hand-in-hand.  I still believe that one person, one teacher, can make a difference not only to children but to a school and a district. As I read Stacey's post about Peter Johnston’s book, Choice Words, I thought not only about the language I use with children, but the language I use with my co-professionals and the language administrators use with teachers. The words we say and how we say them matter. Classroom teachers need to be empowered to lead the way. In my view, the best literacy coach is always trying to work his or her way out of the job; building agency, not creating dependency. This is scary for me to say because I love my job. But it isn’t about me. It is about kids and the teachers who teach them every day. In a school that drips with collaboration and trust, you don’t need a coach at all.

These are some of the professional resources
we will be using as part of a PLC with a focus
on supporting and teaching our youngest writers.
And by the way, our first meeting ROCKED!

Informational Writing: My Messy Process

Since attending a summer writing workshop, I’ve been trying to write more informational pieces. I discovered that my process for writing expository text was all over the place. For me, it was very different from writing a narrative, or a vignette, or a poem. Writing about a memory or a moment in time seemed easier. My thought was if I kept writing informational pieces, eventually it wouldn’t feel so hard. I wanted to write an informational piece for this week’s slice but I couldn’t seem to zero in on a topic.  For example, this slice started out seven different ways. It started as a piece about collaboration, then coaching, then my upcoming PLC, then back to coaching, then literacy celebrations, then writer’s notebooks, and then back to coaching again. Purpose and audience were screaming at me, distracting me. For Pete’s sake! Focus, for crying out loud! Some of my topics were geared more to a particular audience. Audience influenced what I wanted to write about. So was I trying to choose a topic or an audience? And in choosing an audience, how would I write about my topic? I needed to determine the purpose for what I wanted to write.

In an effort to organize my jumbled thinking, I made a map of my ideas on my dining room floor. My big ideas were audiences, purposes, and topics. Under Audiences, I listed who I wrote for, other than myself, and where my writing would be published. Under Purposes I listed all the reasons I liked to write. I didn’t have anything under topic yet. With the Tuesday SOL deadline looming, I picked cards from my audience and purpose categories which finally helped me to choose my topic. There . . . now wasn’t that easy! Uhhmm, no. At least audience and purpose stopped screaming at me.

Fred decided to help me out.

Roxy joined in the effort to help me
figure out my topic.

Starting with audience and purpose helped
me narrow my topic.

My husband looked at me and said, "You're not
gonna leave that all over the floor are you?"

Supporting Literacy Coaches

A couple weeks before school started, I wrote a post about the latest version of my conferring notebook. I received an encouraging comment from a first year literacy coach named Beth. Her comment reminded me of how challenging my first few years were as a literacy coach. Let’s just say, I remember crying a lot and wondering why I thought I could do this insane job. I learned quickly that coaches often lived under a microscope. Teachers watched what I did and didn’t do both in and out of the classroom. Teachers watched if I showed up for bus duty on time. Teachers wondered if I had more planning time than they did. They noticed if I arrived for appointments on time and how well prepared I was. And teachers talked about their noticings with one another. That’s the way it was and that’s the way it still is. You cannot be a wimp and be a literacy coach.

Literacy coaching is kind of a strange job. And effective coaches need a lot of support. I’m not sure I’ve ever talked to another coach outside of my own district that had job duties identical to mine. Even among coaches in my own district, there is variation based on the needs of the students and teachers of the school we may be working in. But after eleven years of working with adult learners, the two things I know for sure is that coaching is about building relationships and coaches should never be evaluators. Coaches cannot build relationships with co-professionals if they are viewed as evaluators. I try to focus my conversations with teachers, at least initially, on their students. And it makes sense. The concept of coaching came from the idea that teachers and classroom practice have a significant impact on student achievement. If I can assist a teacher to find joy and success in their teaching, children benefit. 

A sampling of stuff currently
piled on my desk at home.

But if coaches are there to support teachers and kids, who props up the coach? Professional development and collaboration with other literacy coaches helps. But sometimes you just need someone to talk to, have coffee with, or cry with.  So, to Beth and any other first year literacy coaches out there, since I can't meet you at Starbucks or Panera and talk, here is my short list of things for you to think about as you dive over the cliff into coaching  :

·        Follow through and show up on time.

·        It is more important to present yourself as a learner than trying to act like the “expert.”

·        Spend as much time as possible living in classrooms and working with kids rather than sitting at your computer.

·        When you feel discouraged or beaten down, focus on helping children know how brilliant they are. Kids are the best medicine for an ailing literacy coach.

·        Teachers have reasons for EVERYTHING they do. Don’t make assumptions and don’t pass judgment.

·        Keep growing your own knowledge. There is ALWAYS more to learn!

My Summer Writing Retreat

Our district English Language Arts consultants, Fran and Colleen, offered two 1-day training sessions this summer to help familiarize teachers with the common core standards for writing, with an emphasis on informational writing. Both sessions provided lots of time for teachers to write. Fran and Colleen stressed that if we expected our students to write, we needed to write ourselves. Each session started off with teachers writing about a summer memory.  After everyone wrote for about 15 or 20 minutes, we talked about our process. As we chatted about all the decisions we made as writers and shared snippets from our pieces, we asked each other questions about the details in the pieces or noticed craft. Teachers then had an opportunity to learn about or review Barry Lane’s technique for playing with time called Explode-a-Moment. We went back into our summer memory pieces and decided where we wanted to slow down time.


We also read about how to create a sense of era from the book Nonfiction Mentor Texts (pages 93-94) by Lynne R. Dorfman and Rose Cappelli. Each time we revisited our pieces, we applied our new learning. The experience taught me that if I was going to help kids love writing informational and opinion pieces as much as narratives, I needed to write informational and opinion pieces. At the very least, I needed to expand my understanding of the range of informational writing. As much as I love new learning, the most enjoyable part of the training sessions for me was the writing and the talk about the writing. Maybe someday I will get to attend a NWP summer institute. Until then, I’m happy to keep writing along with my district colleagues.



I wrote about the summer I went to gymnastics
camp. I tried to create a sense of era by
including details about the 1972 Summer Olympics.