​​As a literacy coach, I work with elementary teachers to enhance their literacy instruction. My goal is to build their self-efficacy, help them effectively teach children to think, read, write, listen, and speak, and improve these teacher’s classroom practice by equipping them with tools and resources they can use as needed. I do this both with one to one coaching and professional development of the whole group. I am fortunate to have a group of excellent educators in my cohort, so my job is always an awesome experience. I am blessed to see these teachers in action. It is inspiring to see the impact these teachers have on the future of our children. As I observe their classroom instruction, I look for ways to add what I have learned from reading research, observing other educators, my personal experience, and from conversations with colleagues to their everyday practice.


One of the biggest ideas (debates) in the reading research world is centered around reading comprehension and how best to teach it. Leading researchers are at odds. The debate is between whole language and phonics instruction. My stance is that children need both language comprehension and word recognition skills to become skilled readers. To me that means to be effective to teach children to read classroom instruction needs to have a healthy balance of systematic phonics instruction, for word recognition skills and vocabulary instruction for language comprehension. I also believe this needs to be done in authentic ways. According to A recent systematic review published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest explains why both methods are important: Phonics, for early readers and for learning to write, as well as whole language instruction, to help children understand complex meanings.

Fortunately, I believe that we can agree that reading comprehension is about making meaning as one reads texts, but just how to get this taught is where the differences come in. Those differences trickled down to the curriculum resources, and supplemental material that classroom teachers use to aid in their instruction. In my work, I do not suggest any changes to the curriculum resources that my teachers have access to as per their schools and school districts, that is not my locus of control, however, my feedback for teachers follows the lines of research and good teacher best practice. I most often give recommendations to help my teacher’s guided reading time and during their whole group instruction.

I have often suggested that teachers choose a good mentor text. I have been trained by professionals who were a part of the Reading First Movement. As a result of that training my love for the use of the read-aloud as a mentor text was revived. As a classroom teacher I used the read-aloud because it is widely accepted as a means of developing vocabulary (Newton, Padak, & Rasinski, 2008). I have since learned that a good read aloud can be used as a mentor text that teachers can use to show students a strong model of how a skill they are learning is supposed to work. A good mentor text can be a supplement to a curriculum that may be lacking or can be an added benefit to your classroom instruction. Feedback to my teachers has included ideas that help them get started. Here are a couple of resources I have found. Mentor Text for Grades k-5 and Teaching with Mentor Texts . Mentor text serves as an important role in instruction, which needs to have a thoughtful and intentional selection process. A mentor text might be a poem, a newspaper article, song lyrics, comic strips, manuals, essays, almost anything (Baker, 2013).

Another of my recommendations centers around guided reading. Again, I don’t propose any one model or structure of guided reading, but I do believe that guided reading has some basic practices that make it meaningful. Readwritethink.org says guided reading gives teachers the opportunity to observe students as they read from texts at their instructional reading levels. Guided reading is subject to many interpretations, but Burkins & Croft (2010) identify these common elements:

• Working with small groups
• Matching student reading ability to text levels
• Giving everyone in the group the same text
• Introducing the text
• Listening to individuals read
• Prompting students to integrate their reading processes
• Engaging students in conversations about the text

To this list I add the recommendation that during the introduction of the text teachers give students a peek at words that they will encounter in the text that they may not know the meaning of nor how to decode. During this time helping students make meaning as they read and decode words they don’t know will help them do this as they attempt to read and make meaning of the text they are reading independently, but still during guided reading. I believe that students can never have too much practice learning to decode words and make meaning of them because they need both to become independent skilled readers. Students start out with books that have images in them that carry meaning so it’s easy to fall back on them as students try to guess what the word means, but teaching them to decode those words helps the student read that word when the pictures are no longer there to help them.

Thank you for reading...

It's time for an update. I have been in my new role for about a month now. I am learning a lot. It is encouraging and empowering to be around people who are considered to experts in their field. I have already been on my first business trip and my next trip is schedule for the end of next month. In my role as literacy coach I will be able to share my expertise in all things literacy with educators from two of our local school districts. This is ideal, because it brings practice and study to life for me. It helps me further connect what I am learning and studying with what I do daily. I get to live in my passion for teacher education with a much broader audience. Everything I have been doing and learning in the last 3 years has prepared me for this opportunity.

I have already told you that my last two courses are in June. I am trying to mentally prepare for balancing that, my new role, and business travel. This is a very welcomed challenge. I am looking forward to working though all of that plus June is my birthday month, so I am also looking forward to seeing what year 49 has in store for me. I believe big things are going to be happening. July will be equally as challenging because I will prepare for my comprehensive exams and will be looking at that very rough first draft of chapters 1, 2, &, 3 of my dissertations. (I misspelled dissertation the first time, should I be worried? Lol)

When I began working on my doctorate, I made the choice to join organizations that would put me around people who love, live, and study literacy. I joined and began doing presentations and volunteering to peer review papers for publication in their journal and even joined one of their committees. I have attempted to have a paper published in their journal as well (My first rejection). Last year, I ran for one of the organization’s At-Large Board of Director positions at the prompting of one of the board members, but did not win. That same board member encouraged me to try again this year. I am excited to share with you that I won this time. For the next two years I will serve as one of the At-Large Directors on the Board of TALE (Texas Association for Literacy Education) in this role I plan to advocate for my passion for teachers and teacher education.

I have been thinking about what the next stage in my life will look like. I know what I originally set out to do with this degree, but God has moved mightily in my life since I began this pursuit. The possibilities are endless and much further reaching than I could even imaging. God has shown me that my thinking was too small. He has more in store for me. I have been strategically doing things that lead to the goals I have set for myself and as a result, big things truly are happening.

Thank you for reading,

     Woooooooooow! 2019 has been a year. I have so much to tell you. Things are really falling into place. I have TWO MORE classes, that’s right; just two more. Both will be in the summer I session—so June will be tough— but nothing I cannot handle. I am soooo encouraged right now.  The things I am learning are connecting and so practical. God is so good. I still have lots of work left to do, but I can see the light! I have completed a VERY rough draft of chapters 1,2, & 3 of my dissertation. I will revisit them often between now and August to see how I can make them publish worthy. I may even solicit reviewers to read them for specific and candid feedback. I will dedicate July to organize and study all coursework to prepare for comprehensive exams in the fall semester. After comprehensive exams I will be an Ed.D candidate and officially in the writing phase. My goal is to complete the writing phase in 12 to 18 months. The next steps will be to plan graduation activities.
     Guess what? Who am I kidding? I couldn’t keep this a secret if I tried. After 20 years of teaching in Dallas ISD, I am leaving. Starting tomorrow— May 1, 2019— I will be an employee of Region 10 Educational Service Center. This is a move I am very excited about. It is the beginning of my next steps. I love professionally developing and teaching educators and now I can do it for a broader audience (and in conjunction with TEA- Texas Education Agency). In my new role I will be responsible for a caseload of 60 educators and administrators. I will be conducting professional development with them and providing targeted support that is directly aligned with that professional development. This new role gives me the opportunity to live what I have been studying while studying what I am living. Instead of only working with one ISD (Independent School District) I will be working with school districts in the region. I can see how various school districts conduct the business of educating children. I will have access to more teachers in those districts which in turn gives me the opportunity to reach more students and positively impact student academic achievement.

Thank you for reading, I will be in touch soon.

As an instructional specialist, I work with teachers daily. I synthesize what I am learning in coursework to use in daily practice, I continually think of my research topic and how I can make my work and course work meld together. I want to tell the story of educators while being educated myself.  I choose to research teacher practices when they are teaching vocabulary because of the demographic of students I work with. I am interested in vocabulary instruction because as a classroom teacher even my best students struggled with vocabulary. I honestly believe that what I see the "highly-effective" educators do quite effortlessly when they teach vocabulary can help every teacher. As a result, I am always watching what the highly effective teacher does.

So, I become teacher-researcher-coach as I work with my teachers. I am observed a few “highly Effective educators. I have trained my teachers on research-based best practices in vocabulary instruction and given them a few suggestions on how to incorporate vocabulary instruction in their school day. I presented them with this question: What would happen if you were intentional with your vocabulary instruction? Since that training, they have answered that question with things like:

• have a word for the week that they use throughout the day and add to the word wall for review
• Use academic language in their teaching across all contents
• Choose to read books with rich new vocabulary words to their students.
• They write new words on index cards to add to their word walls and follow-up with the kids later to see that they remember those words and can tell anyone what they mean
• They use technology to show visuals of new words when appropriate

Their students are learning new words and are retaining them to use in their reading, writing, and speaking. The teachers are answering that (what would happen if) question by showing me what their students know. Their own teacher efficacy is growing both individually and collectively, and they are learning their craft. Each of them is a teacher leader and have earned that title because of all the hard work they do for those children every day.

Thank you for reading,

        Okay, it's September (I know, I know) I missed updating you in August. Life got busy and as I often tell you, I struggle with balance (got off track again). I'm taking two of the five courses that I have left in this pursuit and in addition to that I am now an adjunct professor of teacher education at Paul Quinn College, by the way I LOVE it, but with this addition, I have more late nights even still, I continue to press on. Along with my course work, specialist work, and adjunct work, I am also an appointed member of my school districts Racial Equity Advisory Council for the area that I live in. This gives me the opportunity to be the voice for the children in my neighborhood as well as the teachers who work in my neighborhood. I want to use this platform to speak about how to improve the level of instruction that babies in my area are getting. This leads me to what I really want to talk about tonight, teacher efficacy.
         Teacher efficacy is the educator’s belief that they can guide their students to success no matter what challenges they come to school with.  Teachers who come to work believing that they can positively affect student academic success do what is necessary to achieve that. Collective teacher efficacy is the belief that as a school community, working together all teachers can positively affect student success. This is what creates effective, high performing schools. This can sometimes be the novice educator (I’ve seen and worked with some) quite often though, it’s the veteran educator. The educator who has experienced teaching children from differing backgrounds and challenges. The teacher that is continually working on his or her craft.  Here is the real provocation, quite often those teachers don’t work in the areas that need them most – areas with high crime and low socioeconomic status. In my work, I have seen the effects of teachers with poor efficacy. I have seen too often brand-new teachers, and/or poorly trained teachers working with our students who come from low socioeconomic areas. The problem with this is that they are quite often not properly trained to deal with the various needs that these babies come to school with and as a result, performance in those schools is low over all. It is on my mind because I have got to find a way to change this pattern. ACE (accelerating campus excellence) helps, but what happens when those schools still cannot fully staff with good veteran educators, what can we do when the money runs out? What can we do with and for educators and schools in these areas to get and retain veteran educators? Better still, how can we train the educators we have that are willing to work in these areas? These are questions that I am seeking the answers too, because the goal should be and still is, student academic success and we need it to be done equitable.
 
Thank you for reading...