Teacher Leadership in Action
I have been fortunate enough to be able to share many of my findings about reading in the ELA classroom with other teachers at my school through the position I serve as instructional coach for 4th-8th grade Reading/ELA and Social Studies teachers.
1) Finding 1: The Before-During-After Reading Framework
According to Katzenmeyer and Moller (2009), "teacher leaders influence others toward improved educational practice" (Katzenmeyer and Moller, 2009, p. 9). In order to influence other teachers, teacher leaders identify problems in their school's instructional practices and develop a position to address and solve those problems (110). When I became academic dean at my school, I identified that we were asking teachers of all subjects to use the exact same lesson plan template. I realized that it may not make sense for middle school teachers of English Language Arts to teach the exact same way as middle school math and science teachers. Thus, I used my new knowledge of the Before-During-After Reading Framework, or Scaffolded Reading Experience (SRE) to develop a new lesson plan template. I brought this template to our school's leadership team and asked if we could require all middle school ELA and Social Studies teachers at our school to use it. They agreed, and during summer orientation in 2013, I held a professional development session with our teachers in which I taught them how to use the template, using my own adapted lesson plan from my NCSU project on The Monkey's Paw. For the past two years, our middle school ELA and Social Studies teachers still use this lesson plan template.
Here is the plan I used the day I led this professional development:
1) Finding 1: The Before-During-After Reading Framework
According to Katzenmeyer and Moller (2009), "teacher leaders influence others toward improved educational practice" (Katzenmeyer and Moller, 2009, p. 9). In order to influence other teachers, teacher leaders identify problems in their school's instructional practices and develop a position to address and solve those problems (110). When I became academic dean at my school, I identified that we were asking teachers of all subjects to use the exact same lesson plan template. I realized that it may not make sense for middle school teachers of English Language Arts to teach the exact same way as middle school math and science teachers. Thus, I used my new knowledge of the Before-During-After Reading Framework, or Scaffolded Reading Experience (SRE) to develop a new lesson plan template. I brought this template to our school's leadership team and asked if we could require all middle school ELA and Social Studies teachers at our school to use it. They agreed, and during summer orientation in 2013, I held a professional development session with our teachers in which I taught them how to use the template, using my own adapted lesson plan from my NCSU project on The Monkey's Paw. For the past two years, our middle school ELA and Social Studies teachers still use this lesson plan template.
Here is the plan I used the day I led this professional development:
2) Finding 2: The Power of a Robust Independent Reading Program
After I completed my position paper on independent reading during my first semester in the program as well as taking ECI 521: Teaching Literature for Young Adults during my second semester, I decided to read several books to learn about creating an independent reading program in my school:
- The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child by Donalyn Miller (2009)
- Reading in the Wild: The Book Whisperer's Key to Cultivating Lifelong Reading Habits by Donalyn Miller (2013)
- Creating Lifelong Readers through Independent Reading by Barbara Moss and Terrell A. Young (2010)
- Independent Reading in the Age of Common Core by Assunta Cannone-Calick and Elizabeth Henley (2013)
Through the research I conducted in these books as well as the takeaways I gained from my university classes, I decided to design a robust independent reading program at my school. I did this by asking every middle school reading teacher to read Donalyn Miller's The Book Whisperer during the summer of 2014. Then, at summer orientation at the start of the 2014-2015 school year, I held several professional development sessions with these teachers, training them in how to execute the program. I also asked every single teacher at my school to decorate their classroom doors at the beginning of the year with their "Reading Lives", which included their favorite books.
Here is a sample of one of my Power Point presentations I conducted with our middle school staff on independent reading:
As of April 2015, our students in K-8 had already tripled the number of books they read independently as compared to last year! There is a palpable reading culture in my school: kids carry books with them everywhere they go, walls are covered in book recommendations, excited voices discuss loved books with one another among teachers and students alike, and so on. According to Katzenmeyer and Moller, teacher leaders can have a huge effect on the culture of their schools (84), and through my graduate work with independent reading, I was able to help foster a strong academic culture that fosters a love of reading in my school.