The Literacy Coach's Game Plan: Making Teacher Collaboration, Student Learning,

Literacy coaches, teachers, principals, and administrators alike share the common goal of student achievement but when schools are practically overflowing with assessment data of all types, where do you begin to create a plan for improving literacy instruction across grade levels and content areas? In fact, the answer already hangs on every bulletin board, fills every journal, and is a part of every literacy program a school might choose: Student work is the way in. Instead of using assessments to merely label, grade, or determine whether students should move on to the next grade level and then neatly file the data away, The Literacy Coach's Game Plan shows you how to use student work to better understand how individual students are progressing, to make clear and public grade-level goals to differentiate the curriculum, and to ultimately plot the course of effective instruction. No more waiting for standardized tests to tell you how you are doing as a school! By using the strategies in this book, your individual coaching sessions and professional development workshops can remain continually focused on student progress.

Maya Sadder and Gabrielle Nidus are literacy coaches at the National Teachers Academy in Chicago, Illinois, USA.