Literacy Coach Mode

Literacy coaches- Here is a great way to help bring staff together and share strategies.

Literacy Coach Mode

A common mistake in piloting is assigning one “guinea pig” teacher per grade level. This is a recipe for isolation. My advice is to always pilot with multiple teachers per grade level. When you have a pilot team, the dynamic changes: you have someone to vent to, plan with, and troubleshoot with in real-time.

Collaboration doesn’t happen by accident. To ensure we are making decisions based on shared data, not just isolated frustrations, we must commit to meeting once a week to debrief. These structured sessions are where we transform individual challenges into collective solutions. Remember, we are not just testing a curriculum—we are testing how we can teach it together.

Literacy Coach Mode

A common mistake in piloting is assigning one “guinea pig” teacher per grade level. This is a recipe for isolation. My advice is to always pilot with multiple teachers per grade level. When you have a pilot team, the dynamic changes: you have someone to vent to, plan with, and troubleshoot with in real-time.

Collaboration doesn’t happen by accident. To ensure we are making decisions based on shared data, not just isolated frustrations, we must commit to meeting once a week to debrief. These structured sessions are where we transform individual challenges into collective solutions. Remember, we are not just testing a curriculum—we are testing how we can teach it together.

Literacy Coach Mode

Struggling to make literacy strategies stick in high school content areas? It starts with shifting who leads the conversation. In this post, I share how we moved away from top-down professional development to a distributed leadership model. Discover how we empowered content-area teachers to champion four high-leverage strategies—Background Knowledge, Vocabulary, Interactive Read Alouds, and Close Reading—to deepen student learning in every department.

Literacy Coach Mode

Moving literacy instruction beyond the English department is a challenge every coach faces. This post outlines a practical, school-wide framework for empowering content-area teachers to assess and improve comprehension within their specific disciplines. Learn how we utilized AI to lower the barrier to entry, standardized data collection for better visibility, and turned “cold reads” into a collaborative tool for driving student growth across all subjects.

Literacy Coach Mode

As a literacy coach, my passion lies in ensuring that our instructional practices are not just broad, but deeply responsive to every student walking through our doors. It’s easy to focus solely on grade-level averages, but true growth happens when we intentionally plan to push all students—from those needing intensive intervention to our most advanced readers.

This post peels back the curtain on the systematic, data-driven framework we use to achieve this goal. We moved away from generalized planning and into a targeted, three-phase cycle of deep inquiry. It all starts with putting a name and face to the data and asking: “What does intentional, personalized progress look like for this specific learner?”

Join me as we dive into the process that transformed our approach to differentiation and made visible, measurable growth a reality for every student.