The past few months have been dominated by busy, busy writing agendas, and my inbox has been filling up with articles and resources for bookmarking. I haven't really had the time to dig in to these materials yet, but I'm excited about the examples they offer to share with my preservice teachers.
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READING

• On Interactive Read-alouds with Jon Klassen Texts
• On Blogging Children's Literature
• On Resources on Reading Development
• On Picture Walks
• On Engaging Multiple Perspectives on Representation: These sources illustrate conflicting interpretations of a popular children's text, Smoky Night.
  • Positive review of Smoky Night
  • Critical review of Smoky Night
• ​On Modules for Reading Development
• Teacher's Blog: The Literacy Nest
• On Explicit Comprehension Instruction
• Online Textbook Addressing Literacy Assessment (among other topics)
• On Teacher Education and Teaching Reading

WRITING

• On Writing Inspiration from author Kate DiCamillo

• On the Post-Process Writing Classroom
• On Moving Beyond Form-First Writing Instruction

Five years ago I was introduced to Frank Serafini's work at the Wisconsin Reading Research Symposium through his latest publication, Reading the Visual. This text was exactly what I needed at the time to jumpstart the design of my multiliteracies unit (now Digital Writes) as it helped me to think about how reading the visual in picturebooks could be an entry into author's craft for digital writing. Since then, my students have explored texts using his framework alongside a similarly focused framework provided by Dawnene Hassett. Recently, I found myself wondering how I might adapt this workshop experience to attend to relevant instructional practices beyond teaching author's craft. Why it took me this long to make the connection...no idea. But, I am so excited about the workshop redesign I cannot wait to put it into action!

This post on taking a critical coaching stance is, simply put, on point. While it might be a stretch to say the author created critical coaching, as a number of scholars have been drawing on similar frameworks for some time (including some from our UW family...), I truly appreciate the clarity with which the author asserts the need to ground literacy coaching work in asset-oriented perspectives that seek to address issues of equity. 

I've been reflecting on this topic a lot lately since we began searching for literature to guide our SIG on Coaching for Equity. It has also become apparent in our current coaching study that equity is taking a backseat within our participant coaching beliefs, as it has been subsumed within the broader belief of focusing on student evidence. But a focus on student evidence does not in itself drive deeper into structural questions about equity or how they play out within classroom instruction. Even a more strategic focus on the use of culturally responsive practices or analyzing the ways in which assessments construct language demands that may or may not be relevant to learning goals could be easy inroads to engage more constructive and equity-oriented dialogue in coaching conversations.

All of this speaks to the larger point made by ILA in distinguishing between coaching to conform, coaching into practice, and coaching for transformation. How we support coaches to engage in this work is essential to the potential impact of coaching efforts, especially if we hope to see instructional coaching live up to the high expectations that have been placed upon this form of PD.

After reading this chapter on "Studying Writers' Office Work," it is clear that I have not given enough attention to the importance of topic selection in the writing process. Ray makes an important distinction between how experienced and inexperienced writers select topics  highlighting how experienced writers realize that the writing is what makes the reading engaging, not the topic.

This passage helped me to see blindspots in my own writing instruction. In the past, I've focused my efforts on teaching the writing process to redefine what it means to engage in active and ongoing revision, as many of my students still struggle to differentiate revision from editing. But in doing so, I think it's pretty clear I've been shortchanging what it means to actively engage in prewriting. With limited time to delve deep into writing instruction, I also find myself wondering if this perspective could be addressed more strategically within a student writing project as opposed to a separate topic within understanding the writing process?

​In particular, Ray's writing has shifted my perspective for drafting digital texts within my larger-scale multiliteracies book response project. While I position topic selection as based on a writer's individual purpose (emerging from their reading(s), knowledge of technologies, experience with genres, personal interests, etc), I have not been as intentional about (a) how to help them discover that purpose; (b) how to develop that purpose prior to beginning the drafting process; (c) or how to transfer this experience to the classroom for their own students. Moving forward, I can envision how a more intentional entrance into these projects could greatly enhance the outcomes and the likelihood of impacting future practice.

Inspiration from Wondrous Words by Katie Wood Ray.

Inclusive coaching (Sweeney, 2016) begins with a cohesive vision for coaching that is shared and consistently communicated by administrators and coaching staff. Without a concerted effort to embrace the cultural shifts associated with a 'coaching is for everyone' mindset, the outcomes will likely fall flat. In other words, coaches cannot tackle inclusive coaching on their own. Nor can they hope to embrace this aim within individual coaching cycles alone. BUT. The goal-setting that takes place within those cycles is fundamental to making this shift. So what does this approach to goal-setting look like? 

​One of the culminating activities of our Coaching Practicum course is the creation of a one-page document to articulate central Coaching Belief Statements. In the past, this assignment has taken a traditional, text-based format. As we hoped for this document to serve an authentic purpose at participant sites, we wondered if a visual representation might better support these aims. Using a variety of different technology tools, our students created visually-appealing belief statement representations that pushed them to clearly and succinctly communicate their vision for coaching. But for every gain this format offered, we had to weigh corresponding losses.

Having wrapped up another successful semester of online coaching labs, I wanted to take a minute to reflect on an emerging pattern in my notes. As most of our participants are just beginning their work in student-centered coaching cycles, they are just testing out the process. And for many of them, the central goal of this work is to help guide the process by: (1) balancing talk time and control; (2) to allow teachers to drive decision-making; (3) based on evidence of student learning. Most often, the selected focus for coaching labs is using reflective dialogue, which inherently sets the focus on the types of questions coaches pose during goal setting, planning, and analyzing student evidence. 

What became clear, was that at this stage in developing coaching practice, many coaches are focused on guiding the process by using paraphrasing and clarifying questions organized around open-ended questions that give direction to the conversation. These prompts are akin to sentence-stems and similar to many of the ones we share with our participants:

• What are the learning targets connected to this standard?
• How will we know what students understand and can do?
• What will that evidence look or sound like?
• What criteria are you using to sort student work?
• How would you support that with students?
• Do you see any follow-up instruction needed?

For the most part, these are almost interchangeable across participants and cycles as they move through the process. However, questioning rarely went beyond this level. As I constructed ideas for potential next steps to move questioning forward, I found myself asking where are the probing questions? 

Yesterday as Steph and I were planning for our 'supervision through student-centered coaching' study, we found ourselves digging into the challenge of teaching academic language demands. Our goal was to generate a series of probing questions that would help students uncover the language function and associated demands relative to their lesson focus. While I thoroughly enjoyed Heineke & McTighe's Understanding by Design in the Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Classroom, we found this resource to be far more useful for our own planning as opposed to our students' planning. To put it plainly--there's just too much 'going on' for the planning templates to be useful for our preservice teachers. In other words, it is beyond their zone of proximal development. So we needed to build some more reachable scaffolds that would help to push them along without overwhelming them from the start.

Literature on teacher PD continually emphasizes dimensions of adult learning theory to position educators as professionals driving their own learning. Collaborative coaching models that seek to build partnerships between coaches and teachers thrive on mutual ownership and expertise to guide the coaching process. At the same time, we spend a lot of time addressing coaching discourse: both what coaches say and how they say it. In analyzing language, we look closely at use of reflective dialogue and questioning strategies as often derived from Cognitive Coaching. Within our coaching program, we put these ideas to practice through a number of video analysis activities that focus on balance of talk time and noting and naming coaches moves through language. In these cases, we bring in the 7 Norms of Collaboration to identify examples of paraphrasing, asking clarifying and probing questions, putting ideas on the table, validating teacher expertise, etc. 
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Yet, underlying these instructional approaches is a focus on coach behavior as it contributes to the collaborative experience. I recently found myself wondering if spending so much time on coach contributions is inherently limiting our understanding of teacher contributions and undermining the partnership framing to begin with. 

It's been a whirlwind this week as our Practicum course moved from the first half of our time together, focused on PLCs, and into the second half, focused on Special Interest Groups (SIGs). The SIGs are a new approach to designing our course experience by providing more CHOICE and OWNERSHIP to our participants. Organized into 8 topical groups, participants have been engaging in relevant readings as they work to plan a facilitated discussion and create a coaching resource/tool for peers to utilize at their own sites. The tricky part about this process is remembering that it all takes place virtually-- the collaborative planning and the conversation itself. This would be tough enough for a group of my younger, millennial undergraduates. While experienced educators, many of our participants are embarking in the online learning milieu for the first time as they participate in our program. And here we are, asking them to design and lead their own virtual PD of sorts.

I'm really excited to engage in these conversations, explore the tools they create, and celebrate the success of pushing our work forward by taking on this risk. The next few weeks will present a number of challenges, no doubt, but I'm hoping that the final products will be a launching point to continue this work in the future.