Leading Professional Learning

Coaching Guide and Protocol

Summary: This coaching guide and protocol from the Southern Colorado Writing Project may be a useful resource for program leaders looking for ways to support teachers in presenting their work to colleagues. While the protocol lays out a schedule and rationale for meetings between presenting teachers and their mentors, the...

James Gray On Coaching: An Excerpt from Teachers at the Center

Author: James Gray Summary: Coaching the development of successful workshops is a key step in preparing teachers to become professional development leaders. In this excerpt from Teachers at the Center, NWP founder James Gray shares some of the early insights that informed the practice of coaching teachers as they prepare...

Reading, Writing, and Reflection in the Holocaust Educators Network

Summary: Each summer for the past ten years, NWP teachers, many from rural sites, have participated in summer seminars offered by the The Olga Lengyel Institute for Holocaust Studies and Human Rights (TOLI), a NYC-based organization dedicated to furthering the knowledge of teachers and students about human rights and social...

No Longer a Luxury: Digital Literacy Can’t Wait

Author: Troy Hicks and Kristen Hawley Turner Summary: Calling for reflection upon and critique of how technology is typically used in schools, authors Hicks and Turner caution that technology in the classroom cannot be viewed simply as an add-on, but must instead be used to cultivate distinctly digital literacies, inviting...

Book Review: Teaching Reading in Middle School

Author: Rosalyn Finlayson Summary: This review of Laura Robb’s book, Teaching Reading in Middle School, is a useful resource for professional development program leaders and teachers looking for strategies to implement reading workshop in their classrooms to benefit students at all reading levels. Sharing the impetus for and insights drawn...

Improving Students’ Academic Writing: Building a Bridge to Success

Author: Juliet Wahleithner, Jayne Marlink Summary: This report would be of interest to teachers engaged in or planning college-preparatory reading/writing initiatives.  It describes the statistically significant impact of a statewide professional development program designed to improve students’ understanding of and ability to write academically in high school, specifically in grades...

National School Reform Faculty: Learning Communities Protocols and Activities

Summary: This extensive collection of protocols and strategies from the National School Reform Faculty is an essential resource for those facilitating professional development. There are protocols on everything from looking at student work to professional dialogue on problematic classroom scenarios to discussing shared readings.

Such Stuff as Writing Dreams Are Made Of: Technology in the Writing Retreat

Author: Michelle Rogge Gannon Summary: This article describes how to plan and implement a Professional Writing Retreat that supports writers who create multimodal texts, and how to troubleshoot technology-related issues that might arise. Included are guidelines for responding to multimodal writers in ways that support their revision in various media....

A Thousand Writers Writing: Seeking Change through the Radical Practice of Writing as a Way of Being

Author: Robert Yagelski Summary: Have you ever found yourself having to justify teachers’ writing as a key, non-negotiable component of your site’s professional development? If so, this article can help ground you in the importance and value of the act of writing. Yagelski proposes a pedagogy of “writing as a...

Disciplinary Literacy: A Select Research Bibliography

Summary: Literacy researchers across a range of disciplines have been looking at the unique uses of literacy particular to their disciplinary activities. If you and your site colleagues are interested in further study of the research literacy, this is a fairly extensive bibliography. Original Date of Publication: June 2019