Learning, Teaching and Growing Together

My brain is full. Between this amazing, thought provoking text and my first PD read of the summer, Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matters  by Kylene Beers and Robert Probst (reflection blog post to come soon) I am rethinking ways I can support teachers as they grow their literacy practices and respond to students' needs. Focusing on the first few chapters of Vicki Vinton's book, I am finding myself thinking about ways to incorporate problem-based approaches in all of my coaching cycles - whether they are math, science, social studies or literacy based.  Our job as educators is to discover what our students need to grow as independent learners, help them determine their goals, guide them through a process of creating or co-creating a learning path to reach these goals, and then send them off to practice and attain their goals with our support. In my experience, the most challenging part of this process is when we send students off to practice. How do we know if w...