There are many times during the school year when I think to myself, “I am so busy that I could spend the entire day with my nose to the grindstone!” What I mean by this is there are days where it feels like I spend the entire day answering e-mails, answering questions from co-workers, making phone calls, oh yeah…and teaching. I easily fall into a robotic, efficient mode where I do a great job at completing my list of managerial tasks, drawing satisfaction from neatly drawing a line through items accomplished off of my “To Do” list. I am going venture out on a limb and say that becoming a “manager of tasks” is the most detrimental thing a teacher, a principal, an administrator, or anyone associated with education can do. It will consume you and make you lose track of something much larger than your day-to-day tasks because it draws you away from seeing the big picture. Once we lose track of the big picture, our mission, our priorities, whatever you’d like to call it, we have literally lost everything because you can work and work and work and work some more, but without the vision, you will remain lost in work. This is something that has become rather clear to me as I’ve had time to unwind and reflect over summer break thus far.
This realization fully sunk in last week when I was in Burnsville, MN providing professional development on implementing Reading Workshop at the elementary grades. (I also provide independent educational literacy consulting for other school districts.) As I watched my co-worker and fellow literacy coach, Jess, educate teachers about the routines that needed to be built in their classrooms in order to implement managed independent learning and guided reading with children as young as kindergarten, first, and second grade, I realized that I have been operating with blinders on. I have been so stuck in my middle school world that I had forgotten what it takes at the elementary level for our students to become the readers and writers and the people that they are. I had always thought that I understood how students build their knowledge year by year, but my new understanding encompasses the idea of the effect a K-12 VISION can have in a school district. If we truly want our children to learn and grow as readers and writers, doesn’t it make sense that the vision begins in kindergarten and builds year after year until students graduate from our school system? Whatever that vision may be, it should be consistent year after year, allowing for students to build and connect to prior knowledge. Teachers need to clearly understand that vision and have the tools and resources necessary in order to bring that vision to fruition in their classroom with their group of students. If I, as a middle school literacy coach, focus only on middle school students without understanding where they have come from before middle school and where they are going after, I have lost sight of the complete picture.
Learning about the elementary literacy teaching framework was eye-opening to me and really made me appreciate the building blocks that serve as the foundation in the students we receive at the middle school level. Jess and I had an awesome time with the elementary teachers at Sky Oaks Elementary School covering the implementation of a Reading Workshop/Balanced Literacy teaching framework at the universal teaching level and the use of LLI as a Tier Two intervention. Check out our anchor charts below that were developed throughout the week with the amazing staff at Sky Oaks. We wish them the very best in the implementation of Reading Workshop and Guided Reading next school year and had a blast being part of their journey!
Below are anchor charts made by the teachers in our professional development after reading about how to set up Reading Workshop.
The next set of anchor charts are the anchor charts made after discussing and reading about the different elements of a guided reading lesson.
This anchor chart was created during the LLI training we provided.
Finally, a huge part of our training was about just giving little things a try, and to take things day by day and do the best you can. This became a motto for us throughout the course of the week.
Summer is a great time to take a step back and to reflect on what is the big picture and to ask yourself if what you’re doing is helping to accomplish that big picture. Keep moving forward, but make sure to make time for reflection to check in with how you are doing with meeting the vision you and your district are working for. If you do veer off the road, what can you do to get back on?