Practical Literacy Coaching: A Collection of Tools to Support Your Work

Strengthen your effectiveness with proven tools developed by coaches who have "been there"!

This rich compilation of ready-made tools will enhance your literacy coaching by building skills across a wide range of responsibilities such as communication, literacy research, and technology. In an engaging, no-nonsense style, veteran coach and literacy consultant Jan Miller Burkins describes how to use each tool, provides action steps with reflection questions, and explores important aspects of coaching, including:

• Defining roles―what you are, what you are not
• Finding your "fit" in new coaching environments
• Using forms in ways that motivate and support teachers
• Assessing your impact based on a school′s or district′s mandate

Jan Miller Burkins is currently completing her sixth year as a full-time coach at Chase Street Elementary School, Athens, Georgia. She has worked as a language arts consultant for a regional educational service agency, a district-level literacy coordinator, a reading specialist, and an elementary classroom teacher. Her work as a consultant has taken her into elementary, middle, and high schools where she has helped school leaders examine their reading instruction, modeled lessons, and facilitated professional learning.

Burkins is also a part-time assistant professor at the University of Georgia, where she teaches classes to students pursuing graduate degrees in literacy education. She has also developed a series of courses for educators interested in becoming literacy coaches. Burkins is the author of Coaching for Balance: Meeting the Challenges of Literacy Coaching.

In 1989, Burkins received her undergraduate degree in early childhood education from Birmingham-Southern College in Birmingham, Alabama, and in 1993 her master’s from the University of Alabama. She later earned her reading specialist certification and her doctorate from the University of Kansas in 1999. Her dissertation, which was a meta-analysis of the research on phonemic awareness, was the Dissertation of the Year for the University of Kansas School of Education and one of three finalists for the International Reading Association’s Dissertation of the Year.