Responsive Literacy Coaching Developing Respectful, Caring Instructional Relationships

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Responsive Literacy Coaching Developing
Respectful, Caring Instructional Relationships

• Cheryl L. Dozier
• March 20, 2009
• Illinois Reading Council Conference
• cldnsc_at_aol.com

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Responsive Literacy Coaching

• Inquiring
• Learning Together
• Rethinking
• Wondering
• Exploring Multiple Instructional Possibilities
• Co-learner (Brian Cambourne, 1995), not an expert

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Developing Relationships

• Understanding engenders care.
• - Natalie Goldberg
• Start the year/your time together building trust.
• Help teachers become invested in one another
• and create a learning space where they thrive.

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Create A Learning Community

• Teachers cannot create and sustain
• contexts for productive learning unless
• those conditions exist for them.
• -Seymour Sarason, 1996, p.367

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Engage in Literacy Events

• Engage with teachers, learner to learner, reader
  to reader, writer to writer, inquirer to
  inquirer.
• Read and write together
• Share literacy artifacts

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Prompts

• Respond in a way that works for you.
• Responses Sketching, Highlighting, Notes on the
  side, Paragraphs, Questions
• What resonated for you in the text?
• Share language you found compelling.

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ArtifactsSelect 3 Artifacts That Represent
Your Life as a Literacy Coach, a Literacy
Specialist, a Reading Teacher, a Teacher, A
Teacher Educator, An Administrator
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Reflecting on the Process

• What worked well for you as a learner?
• What did you learn about yourself as a learner?
• What surprised you?
• What are implications for classrooms?

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Find Strengths for Each Teacher

• Celebrate What is Going Well
• Lets start with celebrations.
• Change the Discourse to Strengths First
• Support teachers to look at students from a lens
  of strengths
• Avoid Deficit Driven Theorizing

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Find Entry Points For Each Teacher

• Learn each teachers entry points.
• Tell me what youre interested in/ or youd
  like to work on/rethink/reconsider/refine?
• Celebrate/Support steps teachers take, and are
  willing to take. Celebrate risk taking.

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Model Literacy Lessons

• Preparing/Discussing the lesson
• What instructional practices to model?
• Teacher scribes lesson.
• i.e. Book Introductions
• Focus on the Learner
• Focus on the Instructor
• Extending the conversation
• Articulating choices
• Analyzing
• Considering a Range/Identifying Instructional
  Possibilities

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Work Collaboratively Problem Pose and Problem
Solve

• Teach and Learn Together, Side by Side
• What worked well for you?
• What do you wish we had done differently?
• And, if this doesnt work, well generate/come
  up with several more instructional
  possibilities to try.
• Conduct and Analyze Assessments Side by Side
• Look for consistencies and discrepancies

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Ground Conversations in Childrens Work

• Consider How Students Take Up a Range of
  Genres, Lessons, Activities
• When were children most engaged? least engaged?
  
• What can we learn from their engagement?
• What excited your learners, motivated them?
• Analyze Responses to Readings, Writing Samples
• Notice Patterns
• What can this reader/writer do?
• What are the strengths of the learner?
• What strategies is the child using?

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Identify Literacy Strengths

• Work in Pairs
• Work As Teams
• Grade Level Teams
• Across Grade Level Teams
• What are the strengths of the learner?
• What patterns do you notice?
• Individual
• Across the class/Across grade levels
• How will this inform instruction?

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Noticing and Naming

• Where do you see evidence of re-reading for
  meaning?
• Losing place/re-reading line
• Wait, I just read that!
• Reading through punctuation
• Oh, I need to re-read that.
• Prompts
• Lets go back and read that again.
• Lets go back and re-read __________ to make
  sense.
• Are you getting confused? Lets re-read that to
  make sense.

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Noticing and Naming

• As Natalie Goldberg (1986/2005) reminds us, Be
  specificGive things the dignity of their names
  (p.77).
• Are we naming our children as poets, as readers,
  as writers, as historians? As inquirers? As
  wonderers? (Peter Johnston, 2004)
• Noticing and Naming involves an explicitness, an
  intentionality, an opportunity for teachers and
  children to articulate developing understandings
  and develop a shared language.

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Build in Reflective Spaces

• What counts as learning? What counts as
  knowledge? How are we defining literacy?
• What literacy experiences are students engaging
  in each day? What types of literacy environments
  are we developing? creating? nurturing?
  sustaining?
• Text Choices What do the texts we choose say
  about the world? For read alouds? shared reading?
  guided reading? independent reading? What
  messages do we send (intentionally or
  unintentionally) with our text selections?
• What materials are necessary? How do
  teachers/children use these materials?
• What does your engagement look like? sound like?

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Reflecting

• What types of learners are we nurturing?
  sustaining?
• Are we honoring each learners literacies?
• What do we privilege?
• What does our silence say?

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Continue to Develop Professionally

• Broaden professional and content knowledge
• Read extensively, attend conferences
• Join local and national professional
  organizations
• Try new instructional practices in classrooms
• Explore practices in a range of classrooms
• Share articles, books, resources, conference
  information you find informative, interesting,
  and engaging
• Tailor choices to meet individual interests and
  needs

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Developing self-extending systems (Marie Clay
1991 2001)

• How are you supporting each teachers
  self-extending system? How are you supporting
  each childs self-extending system?
• Developing your self-extending system.
• How are you continuing to grown, learn,
  replenish, rethink?

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Continuing the Conversation.

• www.albany.edu/reading
• cldnsc_at_aol.com