The 10th episode of Sold a Story was released last week, and has done what good journalism does: it has made its listeners think. As always, Emily Hanford and Christopher Peak of APM Reports have given me great pause. The only thing stopping me from listening to the entire Sold a Story series again is … [Read more…]
As our school district embarks on “Systems Coaching 2.0” (not the official name, but rather one given by our instructional coaching staff), I am recognizing inevitable resistance. The resistance is showing up in multiple forms, including passive resistance, outright “This is ridiculous,” comments, refusal to participate in conversations, angry looks and angry exchanges. While I … [Read more…]
I usually avoid reading the plethora of blogs that I subscribe to on the day that I plan to post my latest writing. I do this to avoid straying from the original idea for my own post that usually comes earlier in the week. I like to let ideas “marinate” before adding more to the … [Read more…]
There’s nothing worse than leaving a meeting with a yucky feeling in your gut. It’s happened to me more times than I can count, most recently just a few days ago. As I worked with a teacher team on intentional planning (a “new” approach to our instructional coaching work in FMCSD), I found myself bombarding … [Read more…]
The ultimate goal of reading is to gain meaning, and it can be incredibly tough to do so. There are several models of reading comprehension that try to explain/simplify the process, including The Simple View of Reading, Scarborough’s Reading Rope, the Four Part Processing Model, and the recently developed Active View of Reading. A recent … [Read more…]
This week has proven to be yet another in which I have found myself in pursuit of perseverance. As I’ve been writing recently, our district is shifting its instructional coaching model from an invite-only model to a systems coaching model, which means that we no longer wait to be invited into classrooms to support teachers … [Read more…]
I was thrilled to be joined by eight other educators from Fort Madison Community School District at the Decoding Dyslexia Iowa Conference this past week. We were treated to a host of sessions that furthered our knowledge around dyslexia and structured literacy. Our keynote speaker on Thursday morning was Mindy VanZuiden, a reading tutor and … [Read more…]
It feels like we’ve had a breakthrough as an instructional coaching staff this week. (Here comes the sun!) We spent a great deal of time collaborating to arrive at common tools and language for our coaching work. More importantly, we focused on how we will move forward leading as a team, letting data drive our … [Read more…]
I’ve been wrestling with this blogpost for several days now, and am late in posting it according to my self-imposed Sunday, 1:00 p.m. deadline. I’m not sure that I can pinpoint the struggle with getting coherent words on the screen, but perhaps the struggle is evidence of the internal struggle I’m experiencing. The Internal Struggle … [Read more…]
In the last two weeks, the phrase, “Progress Through Struggle” keeps running through my head. That looping reminder is occurring because I have experienced more struggle than usual as an instructional coach as the beginning of this school year has unfolded. Part of that struggle comes from my cheese getting moved, part of it comes … [Read more…]