At the end of the day it’s all about the kids. I am a classroom teacher. I am a mentor, a guide, an awakener, a keeper of confidences, an actor, a partner, a learner, a thinker, a doer—the list goes on. In all areas of my life I am a bottom line type of person. So what’s the point? What does this look like? Where will this lead? How do I do this? It makes sense that this type of thinking transfers to the work I do each day with students and colleagues. While I enjoy, and indeed love, talking and listening to the people who have grand visions of education and offer the what-ifs, give me another bottom line thinker any day. I believe we get things done. My experience learning with a literacy coach married these two ideas for me—getting things done and appreciating the purpose and vision behind them. The literacy coach worked alongside me and the students in the classroom and was an invaluable resource offering guidance in terms of instructional practices and growing my knowledge base. I wanted to do the best I could do—for kids.

Bottom line: How do I create the necessary environment for kids to learn, find, and confidently trust their voice and grow into the people they are to become?

As a classroom teacher, working with a literacy coach changed the way I think about this bottom line. It now involves we, instead of I, because from my perspective the nature of teacher collaboration changed as a result of literacy coaching. How do we create the necessary environment? Not only did I have the opportunity to work and learn with a literacy coach, but so did my grade level colleagues. Based on our experiences, the focus of our collaboration shifted from talking about “the what” to understanding and learning about “the why”. This understanding and learning enhanced our instructional practices and our ability to collaborate meaningfully and led to an improved environment for kids to learn and grow.

Collaboration practices

I assert the purpose of literacy coaching is to improve instruction and student achievement. There is research that coaching has a positive impact on teacher collaboration (Schwartz & McCarthy, 2003) and teacher collaboration structures are related to student achievement, as written by Roger Goddard and Megan Taschannen-Moran. I believe collaboration allows us to grow as educators because we can inspire and learn from each other. My experience with collaboration involved the traditional structure of sitting together with our school calendars and planning lessons, activities, projects, etc. In our planning time we would open our calendars and pencil in the date for the narrative writing publishing celebration, the date to assign the latest social studies project, the date and time for the building team meeting with the principal, etc.—all necessary. We would also talk about how word study was going, share a new strategy to introduce vocabulary, find out where each class was in terms of math lessons and assessments, decide who will make the copies for the upcoming science lab, etc.—all necessary. We would discuss the list of min-lessons outlined in the reading curriculum, ask each other questions about which mentor texts seem to fit the learning goal the best, offer book titles to suggest to our reluctant readers, etc.—all necessary. But, were we really inspiring each other and growing as educators?

Bottom line: How can we take what we gained from working with a literacy coach and collaborate in a more meaningful way to help kids do better?

The shift from the what to the why

While part of our collaboration as teachers still included the what of our work, we began to talk about the why. We were able to do this because we had the benefit of working with a literacy coach. We had gained confidence in our thinking and in our practice. We had the language to offer to our conversations. This confidence allowed us to share openly—without fear of judgment—our questions, attempts, successes, failures, etc. We felt a shared camaraderie that we were in this together. We were in this together to understand the why of what worked for kids and what didn’t. We began to see the what was the easy part, understanding the why would take some serious thinking and we could do that thinking together.

Example of that shift:

• The what is to keep the mini lesson short. Why is that important?
• The what are the components to balanced literacy. Why do they work together to create independent readers and writers?
• The what is to offer kids choices of titles to read. Why is choice so important?

The very nature of our collaboration practices changed. It was still necessary to sit around a table with our school calendars open, but there was now a value added. Planning now included rich conversations about our deeper understandings of the decisions we made and they allowed us to grow as educators and improve our craft. Yes, we were inspiring each other. Yes, we could help kids do better. These conversations took place during our scheduled planning time, but an additional shift in our collaborative structure was that they now happened readily and anywhere: in the hallway, in the lunchroom, by the office mailboxes, in an email, etc.

Bottom line: When you know better, you do better.

Working with a literacy coach was, in reality, working with a mentor—a wise and trusted counselor.This experience led to a shift in the nature of our collaboration.My colleagues and I now work with one another to improve our instructional practices, develop our skills, and most importantly, deepen and grow our understanding.We were also in a new position to raise questions about the effectiveness of some instructional choices and make decisions to implement some changes. Empowering. Now we could go back to our classrooms to take a risk and try something new because we were confident practitioners. Reflective and critical inquiry was now at the core of our collaboration, and it was a natural next step to create the same learning environments for our students.

Bottom line: At the end of the day it’s all about confidence. And the kids.

Gail Cordello has been teaching fifth grade in Wyckoff, NJ for 14 years. She has presented at national conventions and often opens her classroom to teachers looking to learn from her students. In one mid-sized school district she collaborated with Grace White, a school administrator, Chris Fuller, a literacy coach, and Gravity Goldberg, a literacy consultant, to establish a literacy coaching program and years later, the team continues to meet and share. This post is one in a series from these educators in which they share their greatest take-aways from their collective experience. You can follow Cordello on Twitter.