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Clare Landrigan and Tammy Mulligan
We met fourteen years ago and knew right away we were a match made in professional heaven. We began our journey co-teaching in a laboratory school at Tufts University in Boston. This position involved both teaching children in the classroom, and teaching graduate and undergraduate courses for students at Tufts. The laboratory school was a demonstration site for current research. In our shared role, we implemented new instructional practices, participated in research studies, supervised student teachers, and facilitated on-site guided observations of our classroom for groups of public school educators. It was a place to question, reflect, and innovate. It pushed our thinking and opened our eyes to the world of professional development. We realized we loved teaching adults and having dialogues with other practitioners.
Since that initial collaboration, we have shared a curriculum director position in a large public school district in Massachusetts. We currently lead Teachers for Teachers, providing professional development to several districts as external consultants. We found our work as external consultants became more authentic, realistic, and collaborative as we gained experience as administrators. We now understand that as "the expert" our role is to find and build internal expertise within the schools where we work; share leadership; and create a culture of true collaboration.
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Balancing Assessments Through Better Classroom Notes
Clare Landrigan and Tammy Mulligan
Marie Clay reminds us, "The one closest to the classroom experience is in a unique position to see and communicate a reliable and valid instructional perspective of the child." (An Observation Survey, 1993) In data meetings and professional learning communities, we sometimes become concerned that conference notes and teacher observations are not being viewed as valid assessments. We are hearing that only "universal screeners" count in the world of response to intervention . . .
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Making Data Analysis a Motivating and Worthwhile Process
Clare Landrigan and Tammy Mulligan
At first glance, the task of data analysis seems simply to be mathematical. Teachers look at the numbers, decide what students need to learn, and then plan instruction. However, the reality is that those numbers reflect each teacher's hard work in his/her classroom; and unfortunately those numbers do not always exemplify a teacher's efforts. The data results are sometimes not what we expect. . . .
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Is "Just Right" Still Just Right?: Helping Children Select Appropriate Books
Clare Landrigan and Tammy Mulligan
We taught together in an elementary classroom for years. One of the most important things we always talked about with students was the concept of "just-right" books. We used the analogy of the three bears, teaching our students that there were three types of books: Too Hard, Too Easy and Just Right. While it made sense to us back then, we are now unsure that this analogy is "just right" as we watch readers from across districts and grade levels. . . .
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Teaching Revision to Struggling Writers
Clare Landrigan and Tammy Mulligan
Revision can be a difficult process for so many writers - kids and adults alike! As writers, we both know how difficult it is to come up with a topic, get our ideas down on paper, think about how to communicate what we are really trying to say, and then revise the piece to make it clear and engaging. Professionally, we tend to write in tandem. We typically begin by talking through an idea and generating thoughts. Then one of us takes a crack at the first draft. The other person reads it and gives suggestions for revisions. The revisions can go back and forth several times between us before the paper is complete. . . .
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Helping Students Deal with Distractions
Clare Landrigan and Tammy Mulligan
We have had the privilege of spending the last few weeks in many teachers' classrooms supporting them as they launch their literacy workshops. The first few weeks of school are so important for making the structures and routines you want to use all year long consistent and predictable. It is amazing how exhausting it is to teach 26 little bodies to follow directions, sit in the correct spot, find their materials, not talk to the person next to them, and read! One topic that comes up again and again with the teachers we mentor is student distractibility. Distraction can play out in many forms depending on the grade level and chemistry of the class, but the concern is common across many classrooms, schools, and districts. . . .
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What to Say on
Parent/Teacher Night
Clare Landrigan and Tammy Mulligan
As the school year gets in full swing throughout the country, many teachers and literacy coaches have been talking about and preparing for parent/teacher night or the annual school open house. This night is a once-a-year chance to talk with families not only about what their children will learn during the school year, but also about the ways in which children acquire new skills and knowledge. As teachers, we have so much experience watching a particular age group learn and grow. Parent/Teacher Night is a great time to share this knowledge with families . . .
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Lessons from Family Writer's Workshop
Clare Landrigan and Tammy Mulligan
While all of our professional instincts told us that hosting writer's workshop with our own children was not the best plan. . . we decided to do it anyway. For each of the past few summers, our four children (two of Clare's, two of Tammy's) have attended camp together for five weeks, as having them in the same place helps us with our work schedules. . . .
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Overcoming Slumps:
Principles for Student Writers
Clare Landrigan
I began this summer in two slumps - - a running slump and a writing slump. I injured my lower back in early May and could not run for about six weeks. At the same time, life became hectic and for many reasons I seemed to lose my writing momentum. I was feeling badly about both and wondering how I was going to get back in the saddle. I can now proudly say that eight weeks later, I am back on track with both! As I reflect on how I came out of my slumps, I am finding that in many ways my experience paralleled that of students who have writing slumps in the classroom. . . .
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Staying Focused in Literacy Workshops (VIDEO)
Clare Landrigan
In this video, Clare Landrigan meets with a group of 5th graders to talk about what's going well in literacy workshops, and to set individual goals. Stamina is an issue many of the students are dealing with, so many of the goals involve strategies for staying focused while reading and writing. . . .
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Running and Reading Logs Part II (VIDEO)
Clare Landrigan
In this second video in a two-part series, Clare Landrigan meets with a group of 4th graders to talk about reading logs and goals. In this excerpt, Clare confers with students over their logs and debriefs with their teacher. . . .
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Running and Reading Logs (VIDEO)
Clare Landrigan
In this first video in a two-part series, Clare Landrigan meets with a group of 4th graders to talk about reading logs and goals. In this excerpt, Clare uses the analogy of how runners use logs to chart progress and set goals. . . .
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Triangulating: The Importance of Multiple Data Points When Assessing Students
Clare Landrigan and Tammy Mulligan
We went to a professional development session a few years ago with Elizabeth City and she gave us a name for something we have always believed - the importance of "triangulating" our data. Triangulating data means you use multiple sources of data to illuminate, confirm, or dispute what you learned from an initial analysis of one piece of data. . . .
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Sharing Data with Families at Parent/Teacher Conferences
Clare Landrigan and Tammy Mulligan
For many of us who teach, the change of the seasons to spring or fall brings glimpses outdoors we love - of flowers newly in bloom, or leaves turning to vivid bright colors. Unfortunately, in many schools the coming of spring or fall also means administering assessments and preparing for 20-30 early morning and/or evening parent/teacher conferences. Work can become unmanageable, as teachers spend many hours interpreting assessment results and culling through piles of completed student work in order to prepare for conferences. . . .
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Creating Data Teams
Clare Landrigan and Tammy Mulligan
A concern that arises in thinking about the collection and use of data is the number of schools that are assigning the job of "data manager" to their reading coaches/specialists. A good portion of the "data manager" job includes sorting and distributing paper; data entry; photocopying; filling in paper work; and walking around gathering assessments from teachers. We need to ask ourselves, "Are these the right duties for the most knowledgeable teachers of reading in our buildings?" . . .
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Tips for More Effective Debriefing Sessions
Clare Landrigan and Tammy Mulligan
We do a lot of demonstration lessons in our coaching work. Lately we have been reflecting on how we structure these sessions. We find the debriefing of the lesson to be the most difficult aspect of the demonstration lesson. This type of professional development is not about us being good teachers, it is about a group of teachers sharing a common classroom experience and then reflecting on what happened. Yet the debrief session after the lesson is often awkward for the coach . . .
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Challenging Advanced Young Readers:
Harder Texts Aren't Always the Answer
Clare Landrigan and Tammy Mulligan
As we work with primary grade teachers during reader's workshop, many ask us how to challenge the advanced readers in their classrooms. These young students learn to read quickly and quite naturally -- in fact many were reading before they entered kindergarten. Teachers sometimes find themselves struggling to challenge these students in a developmentally appropriate manner. How do we facilitate these students' continued development as readers while concurrently allowing them to embrace the joys of being 5 and 6 year olds? . . .
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Understanding Students in Intervention Programs
Clare Landrigan and Tammy Mulligan
Using data to make wise decisions about students who are struggling is one of the most important tasks in schools. In one district we worked with, the data team wanted to monitor the progress of students in reading intervention. The district collects data on this subset of students on a monthly basis. so it was essential for the team to sift through the data and find patterns to research in more depth. . . .
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Moving from Data to Practice
Clare Landrigan and Tammy Mulligan
Data is now being used by many different constituencies and for many different reasons in schools. Districts are reporting data to state or federal agencies to meet grant requirements; school committees who want to evaluate the effectiveness of curriculum, programs or interventions; principals who want to monitor the progress of their school; curriculum directors who want to determine areas for professional development; and teachers who want to inform their instruction. Too often districts are duplicating efforts, trying to provide slightly different versions of similar data to all of these sources. The paperwork seems endless and overwhelming. . . .
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Selecting Texts for Strategy Teaching with English Language Learners in Mind
Clare Landrigan and Tammy Mulligan
Over the past several months we have spent time thinking and teaching with a group of educators whose students are predominantly English language learners (ELLs). During our visits to their classrooms we see teachers working diligently to use the texts in their district-mandated curriculum to teach whole class and small group lessons. Many of the passages, however, are difficult for English language learners to understand even when the teachers spend significant amounts of time building background knowledge and reading the texts aloud. . . .
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Why and Watch Me: Making the Abstract Concrete for Readers
Clare Landrigan and Tammy Mulligan
Researcher Robert Marzano in Making Standards Useful in the Classroom concluded that if teachers simply included why students were learning what they were learning and how it would help them as a learner in every lesson, then student understanding would increase by 80%. This is powerful research that can be applied to any curriculum, program, or set of standards. We find that when teachers explain the purpose of the lesson to their students and tell them how it will help them as a reader, students have a better understanding of how to use the skills being taught strategically to make meaning from text. . . .
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The Bed and Breakfast Model: An Analogy for Schools
Clare Ladrigan and Tammy Mulligan
We often use the lodging industry to explain our thinking around the art and the science in the practice of teaching. When you are going away on a trip, be it business or pleasure, there are certain "essentials" you are looking for when you choose a place to stay. Most travelers would like to have a bed, a lamp, a desk, a bathroom, maybe even room service. When they check in at their destination, they are expecting to find these "essentials." Now if you choose to stay at a hotel chain, you will quickly notice as you walk down the hallway that every room is an exact replica of the next. The same color scheme, the same bed, the same lamp, the same desk, and the same bedspread. Unless you paid for the suite, your room looks exactly the same as the room next to you. . . .
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Making Book Logs Purposeful for Students
Tammy Mulligan and Clare Landrigan
Recently we have been hearing from teachers about their concerns over the effectiveness of book logs. Teachers are finding that they constantly have to remind students to record their reading. These conversations pushed us to think about the purpose of the book log and about how we use logs in our daily lives. Students need to understand why they are logging their reading and how it is going to help them as readers. If students do not understand the purpose of the log, they may view it as laborious or a waste of their time. In order to use the log well we need to adjust it to meet the needs and goals of the reader. Once we make this shift, we find students are not only recording, but also setting goals based on the data collected in their logs. . . .
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What Reading is Like: Sports Analogies
to Use with Parents
Clare Landrigan and Tammy Mulligan
Parent conferences are just around the corner in many schools, and families are eager to learn about their child's growth and needs as readers. We often use sports analogies to help explain our thinking around text choice in school with parents, especially those who expect their children to be reading difficult texts at all times. Here are some of our favorites. . . .
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Talking with Parents about Text Difficulty
Clare Landrigan and Tammy Mulligan
Parents want what is best for their children, but often lack understanding of the importance of matching texts to readers. Many teachers come to us seeking advice about how to help parents understand this concept. Many parents advocate for their children by trying to convince teachers that they are not giving their children text that is challenging enough. As teachers, we know that students need "enormous quantities of successful reading to become independent proficient readers. It is the high accuracy, fluent, and easily comprehended reading that provides the opportunities to integrate complex skills and strategies into an automatic, independent reading process" (Allingon, 2002). How do we help parents understand our decisions around text levels and give them an avenue to advocate for the reading lives of their children? . . .
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Structuring Coaching Conferences
Clare Landrigan and Tammy Mulligan
When we think about the structure of a coaching session for a teacher, it reminds us of the structure of a conference for a student. Lucy Calkins set a structure for student conferences in her book The Art of Teaching Reading: "Research, Decide, Teach: Conferring first involves research in order to learn where the child is as a reader/writer and understand the child's intention, then deciding what we should teach, and then teaching in a way that can influence what that child does on another day with another text" ( p.102). . . .
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Opening Classroom Doors
Clare Ladrigan and Tammy Mulligan
When we begin working with literacy coaches, we often ask for a breakdown of how they are spending their time with the faculty. In many cases, more than 90% of their time is spent outside of the classroom-- at the photocopy machine, with a small group in the hallway, in the bookroom getting resources . . . "anywhere but in the actual classroom," as one individual told us. We are asked time and again, "How can I get into the classroom? No one seems to want me." It is not surprising that coaches are encountering this problem. The culture of our schools does not always support adult learning or open door policies. . . .
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