My Role in Professional Development and Coaching as a Regional Literacy Consultant

by Heather Stewart

It is interesting to me that my path in education has led me to becoming an “adaptive expert” in literacy coaching. As a classroom teacher, I believed like many that I would become a better teacher in the classroom with practice and with better materials and by taking more college courses. I still think those things are true, but I have come to realize that teachers need support. They need help in critically analyzing their lessons and looking at student work samples to identify strengths and needs, and they need someone to provide effective models for instruction.

Thinking back to my first real experience in teaching, I looked to the person in my grade level who had worked in the trenches the longest for ideas and resources. I remember frequently standing in the doorway of Mrs. Lox’s first grade classroom with this pleading look on my face that clearly said, “Please help me, and I have no idea what I’m doing!” I would quietly get quick peeks of her lessons, rifle through her books and handouts, ask millions of questions at lunchtime, and generally try to duplicate her instructional practices so that I could achieve some success as an educator. What I didn’t know was that there was a whole movement in education that revolved around the idea that teachers could improve their instructional practices by receiving embedded professional development with a built-in support structure that included a literacy coach.

According to the International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of English (Literacy Coaching Clearinghouse, 2008), literacy coaches perform a range of complex tasks within schools. They participate in instructional planning, assist in assessment of students, and spend a large portion of their time coaching, e.g., observing classes, teaching demonstration lessons, modeling strategies, and talking with teachers about instruction. I often think about what my first year of teaching would have been like had I had the support of a literacy coach. Would I have sought out the coach for resources and strategies? Would I have wanted someone to observe my lessons? Would I have been more reflective when planning? Would assessment data have guided my instructional decisions?  The answer for me is a definite yes!

I am currently a regional literacy consultant (RLC) in northeast Ohio. I am part of the Region 4 State Support Team and the designee of the ODE Office of Literacy. My responsibilities include working with districts to create a comprehensive literacy plan, analyzing district assessment data, and supporting the school literacy consultants (SLCs) who facilitate professional development and coaching in a variety of settings. Also, along with other State Support Team members, I provide resources and training to participants in the Ohio Improvement Process.

The bulk of my work is related to training the building school literacy consultants. I meet monthly with them to discuss school literacy plans, facilitate professional development, analyze assessment data, discuss research-based literacy strategies, and talk about the roles and responsibilities of coaching.

The School Literacy Plan

An important element of coaching is the school literacy plan, which identifies the coaching goals. The goals are created to meet the needs of the school and are based on multiple forms of assessment. In the beginning of the year, the SLCs and I meet with the building principal to review the current plan. We make changes based on current assessment data and add professional development, coaching goals, and action steps that will be implemented and monitored throughout the year. An example of one action step might be:

• Gather classroom observations and student performance data for the purposes of analyzing student work samples, reflecting on instructional practices, and creating data trend charts.

The school literacy plan is updated regularly to monitor its effectiveness.  The plan is monitored by collecting reflections from teachers, aggregating assessment data, documenting evidence of coaching, and analyzing instructional practices.

Taking Action Steps

This year our focus has been on providing ongoing embedded professional development using high-yield strategies (Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001). Using the school literacy plan, we have formulated action steps that specify when professional development sessions will occur and in what settings.

The districts in the region provide professional development to professional learning communities in various settings, offering it to groups during once-a-month teacher release days and providing it to groups after school. The participants are taking an eRead Ohio course, entitled “Marzano High Yield Strategies,” for which they have the option of earning three credit hours through Lake Erie College.

In one district, a cohort of teachers has just started taking another course from eRead Ohio called “Supporting English Language Learners in the Classroom.” Our expectations are that teachers will receive the professional development, practice the research-based strategies with the building coach, and then analyze the student work for effectiveness of the lessons and strategies. The participants will share their experiences and, the hope is, build a “toolbox” from which to draw strategies and resources that effectively increase student achievement. The professional development is delivered in a blended model that consists of both face-to-face sessions and an online component that provides access to content and discussion board forums.

Training and Resources

Giving much thought about what the SLCs need to facilitate professional development effectively, I have developed my own plan for providing training and resources. I meet with the SLCs at least once a month to discuss ways to provide effective professional development and to create plans for coaching teachers based on their individual and group needs. We have rich conversations in which we exchange ideas about what the best flow would be for providing professional development and explore ways to get teachers to be reflective in their practices. We also talk about literacy assessment tools, effective literacy instruction, coaching observation cycles, and lesson planning protocols. And we consider ways to utilize technology resources and analyze student work samples.

During our meetings, I model the strategies that the SLCs will be using in their PD sessions. As an example, one tool I have recently demonstrated is a summarizing strategy called “word tournament,” which I learned from Nancy Mack at an Ohio Leadership Institute in 2008. In this activity, the whole class debates and votes for which words are most important in each paragraph and then, choosing from the list of words they have selected, votes for the most important word in the article. This is excellent for preparing students to write short answers for achievement tests or summaries for writing across the curriculum.

I also provide literature and resources to help the SLCs plan for professional development and coaching. Among the resources I frequently use are Classroom Instruction That Works (Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001) and a book study of When Kids Can’t Read (Beers, 2003) from our coaching handbook.

In addition, I work with the SLCs to create documents that show the evidence of our work—data sheets, coaching logs, lesson planning tools, PD reflection sheets, sign-in sheets, goal-setting sheets (see Figure 1), and lesson demonstration planning tools.

Figure 1 An example of a goal-setting worksheet

Time for Sharing

Most importantly, at the beginning of each team meeting, the SLCs share what they have been doing in their buildings. This is an opportunity for them to be reflective and collaborative about their role as a coach and as a facilitator of professional development. They share their successes and receive support when they need help. They talk about the relationships they are building with teachers and students, strategies they use during PD, documents they create to support their work, and “aha!” moments that brighten everyone’s day. It is also an opportunity for us to question each other or for others to question me about how to work with reluctant teachers, how to model a difficult lesson, or how to convey the importance of using specific literacy strategies.

Site Visits

I also prepare a schedule for making site visits. On these visits, I may meet with the principal and SLC to do a debriefing on professional development goals or to discuss building needs that could be incorporated into the school literacy plan. I meet with the SLC to review coaching goals and how the process is going. I observe professional development sessions and talk with teachers about the strategies they are trying out in their classrooms. I conduct classroom walkthroughs to collect data about the implementation of the PD goals to analyze with the SLC and the building staff, and I debrief with the coach about the lessons she or he observed.

While my role is to support the SLCs as their coach, I try not to be seen as an outsider. So, often at site visits, I observe the SLC giving the PD and jump in when I can add to the conversation about strategy use. Some of my favorite experiences are talking with teachers about the strategies they tried based on the PD they received. On one visit, a teacher shared with me how she used the word tournament summarizing strategy with her students. The result, the teacher said, was “great,” and “the kids seemed to really understand because their work was so much better.” The teacher then decided to modify the strategy for a different group of students and felt that having the SLC and other participants from the school’s PD sessions was an asset because she could get immediate feedback about how best to implement her instructional changes.

At our next professional development session, we discussed the uses of Wordle. Wordle is an online tool for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. The teachers began to discuss the instructional implications for using this tool for summarizing, and the teacher I had spoken with earlier about her word tournament lesson thought that Wordle would be a good follow-up activity. Working with the teachers and listening to them reflect on how to use the strategies they learned in PD is just one example of why I love my job.

An Ongoing Process

We are continuing our work with implementing and monitoring the school literacy plans. The SLCs are learning more about their role as a coach using a coaching guide developed by the Ohio Department of Education, Office of Literacy. We also use the Literacy Coaching Clearinghouse website to read about the work of other coaches and to plan our next steps. The work of the SLCs is an integral part of effecting instructional changes in the classroom. Their hard work amazes me on a regular basis, and they make my job easy. I wouldn’t be effective in my role as a regional literacy consultant without the excellent work they do for teachers and students every day.

My story as an educator began with my being a classroom teacher who vigorously sought out help to become a better teacher. Now I am an advocate for those who feel the same way I did—that children deserve to have all their educational needs met in the classroom.

To meet their students’ needs, teachers are learning strategies to differentiate their instruction. Changing their practices can be a scary thing for teachers. Educators need to feel safe to try new things and not to feel evaluated in the process. They need support in finding the best strategies to use in their grade level or content area. They need capable coaches to help them analyze their lessons, model what works, and plan data-driven instructional lessons.

I love the work that I do. I truly believe that districts that provide embedded professional development initiatives with the support of a coach can improve teacher practice and student achievement. As a part of such an initiative, teachers can learn about research-based practices and discuss what strategies are most effective and why. Teachers will have someone to provide them with resources, observe their lessons, cover their classrooms so they can watch a colleague, or simply listen when they need to vent. Someone once said that we have a moral obligation to teach all students based on their individual needs. I just hope that I can make an impact on teachers and coaches alike to make that statement a reality.

References

Beers, Kylene. (2003). When kids can't read, what teachers can do: A guide for teachers 6–12. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Literacy Coaching Clearinghouse. (2008). Role of a literacy coach. http://www.literacycoachingonline.org/aboutus/literacy_coach.html.

Marzano, Robert J., Pickering, Debra, & Pollock, Jane E. (2001). Classroom Instruction That Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement. Alexandria, VA: Association for Curriculum and Development.

Heather Stewart has been a classroom teacher of many grade levels in various places around the world since receiving her B.S. in psychology from Allegheny College and her master's of education from John Carroll University. Benefitting from having a husband in the military, she started her career as a teacher of English for primary students in the small village of Tonduchon, South Korea, and then became a middle school reading/language arts teacher in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Returning to her hometown, she began teaching in the East Cleveland City Schools and became a literacy specialist with the Reading First program. This experience began a journey that has taken her from receiving her Literacy Specialist Endorsement from John Carroll University to becoming the regional literacy consultant for the Region 4 State Support Team. Heather hopes to begin her Ph.D. using her recent interest and experience in effective coaching models. You can contact her at lc_stewart@lgca.org.

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