It is just after 7:00 Monday morning when Leslie Peters pulls into a nearly empty parking lot behind Elm Street Elementary School. The only other cars in the lot at this hour belong to Amy Burton, the school's other literacy coach and Teddy Miranda, Elm Street's principal. When Leslie joins them in the faculty's professional library, a reconfigured storage space near Teddy's office, Amy is reviewing a bibliography with him and he is laughing, shaking his head and suggesting that she call Nancy Zelenka in Cleveland to ascertain how she gets all that grant money for classroom libraries. Amy insists that Jane, the teacher with whom she is working intensively, will find it difficult to refine her teaching practice without a huge infusion of books for her classroom library.

Teddy glances up at Leslie and asks with a laugh how she plans to spend the school's money today. Leslie wonders aloud, agreeing with Amy that the school's classrooms as well as its central library need immediate expansion, if the district's 15% commitment to Cornerstone schools, might be used for this purpose.

They look up briefly as Maria Ford, the Critical Friend, enters. She tells them that she is working with three other Critical Friends and Debbie Miller to update Cornerstone's professional and children's literature library and that they will be able to use its new annotated bibliographies later in the year.

Three other teachers, an instructional assistant and two parents join the group and Elm Street's Leadership Team meeting is in full swing. Chairing the meeting this week, Maria reviews the agenda that begins with a discussion of burning issues followed by a "tool kit update” (a brief review of new and revised items on the Cornerstone website) and the weekly review of the coach's journals and two samples of children's work.

Teddy is jotting notes on the Literacy Action Plan progress check and wonders aloud if any other teachers have followed Amy's lead and begun home visits to explore ways in which parents might be invited to share their expertise and experiences in Elm Street's classrooms. Amy reports that she has accompanied two third grade team members on their first home visits and that they were very successful. Teddy swings around in his chair and records the home visits on Elm Street's monthly asset map next to one of the school's four goals which reads: The Cornerstone Community promotes meaningful communication and interaction among the school, parents, and the community - the school actively learns from the parents and community as well as teaches the parents and community.

By 8:30, Leslie has switched on the lamps around her classroom and thrown the shades open casting a soft, natural light onto six clusters of desks and a "living room”, a large group meeting area with a rug cordoned off by three low book shelves. She sets up six adult sized chairs for the observers who will soon join her for the literacy block. They begin to filter in, notebooks ready, even before the children arrive and help Leslie set out cans of pencils, writer's notebooks and plastic baskets of books at each table group.

One of the teachers hopes aloud that Teddy remembers to have the children in her class write in their writer's notebooks this morning.

"He covered for me last week,” another teacher remarks, "and he was fabulous. The kids loved it. He wrote in his own notebook and shared it with them. I'm teaching determining importance and he asked the kids to help him make decisions about what was important enough to leave in his writing and what could be deleted. I've never seen so many kids talking about taking out superfluous words. It was great for them.”

Leslie writes a morning message on a wipe off board to her 24 first graders as they burst through the door. It's November and Leslie only has to remind only DeShawn and Jessica that the stories they are bursting to share with her should be captured, "before they drift away like a loose balloon” in their writer's notebooks.

"I knew that,” DeShawn says, "I just forgot for a second”. "I understand, DeShawn,” Leslie replies, "and in your writing today, I'd really like to challenge you to create visual images in your readers' minds. Do you remember when we talked about that in a Crafting session last week?” One of the observing teachers points out that DeShawn didn't even remove his jacket before he began to write, one foot tucked under him and leaning intently over his notebook. Within a half hour, Leslie has turned on a cd, the signal for her children that they should put away their writer's notebooks and join her on the rug for a Crafting session.

Down the hall, Amy and her colleague teacher, Jane, are bent over a diagram of Jane's classroom trying to decide how to separate the Invitational Groups meeting area from the clusters of desks where children will work during independent work time -- Composing.

"There is just NO space in this room to do everything I want,” Jane comments. "I need to make sure that the kids in the Invitational Groups don't interrupt the others during Composing. When I stood back and observed and took anecdotal notes as you suggested, I noticed that, during Composing, the kids really need things pretty quiet around them. Now that I'm doing better connecting my Crafting Session focus - my teaching intention - to what the kids actually have to experiment with as readers and writers, I find that their focus and engagement is much more intense. I heard Kiesha tell Rachel last week that she was trying to practice inferring in The Cricket in Times Square and that unless Rachel was quieter that was going to be really hard.”

Amy and Jane laugh and return to their diagram to rethink the arrangement. Once they are up and moving furniture, Amy asks, "Jane do you remember if Christoff is in the Invitational Group we have going on inferring? When we conferred with him yesterday, he said he had lots of inferences, but when we really talked to him, he was retelling every last detail in the chapter, not inferring at all.”

"I noticed that and no, we don't have him in that group, but I think we should ‘invite' him today. He has been caught off guard by what we're doing. In the first few weeks of school, Christoff was one of those kids who always had the correct, perfect response before anyone else. His hand was up more than down! It seems to me that he was so much more oriented toward the right answers and very detailed retelling of details in books that he wasn't giving himself time to think. I think he's improving - sometimes I just ask everyone to give themselves the gift of quiet thought during a Crafting Session or Invitational Group - and I notice that he is learning how to stretch his thinking out rather than trying to answer right away, but this is really difficult for him.”

Amy sets up for a demonstration lesson while Jane retrieves the children from Music. The time has been too short to finish their work on classroom arrangement but Amy reminds herself that she isn't running off to try to work with half a dozen other teachers - she'll work intensively with Jane for at least four weeks before moving on to coach another teacher. By then, not only will Jane's classroom be arranged to encourage conversation as well as quiet work time for children, Jane will be using her anecdotal observation notes and the Cornerstone Literacy Framework to create long and short term plans. Jane will then begin to work with her grade level colleagues while Amy begins again with another colleague teacher.

Leslie is writing on a blank transparency, the overhead projector amplifying every word. "OK, writers, today in my writing I'm going to use both of the learning outcomes you've been focusing on. Help me remember what two learning outcomes you're trying to use as readers and writers. Kenta?”

"We're doing images in our heads, listening and seeing, touching and smelling stuff we read about and we're trying to write so the kids who read it will do that stuff too.”

"Why is that important to a writer, Kenta?”

"It is because other writers like Ralph Fletcher in that book Twilight Comes Twice? He doesn't use that many words, but the words he picked make almost a movie come on in your head - you can hear birds, you can see fog on the water, but he doesn't have to tell you that - if you're a reader, it's your job to ask your mind to use images. If you're a writer you have to remind your readers to do that, too. With your words.”

Leslie looks over the children at the observing teachers who are incredulous.

"I know,” she tells them, "it's amazing. Believe me, they didn't start that way. I found that, when we were first beginning to study images and I asked them to describe images they had from books, they really just described the pictures - they didn't really enhance the book's illustrations and text meaning with their own images.

"So, I realized that I needed to do a lot more thinking aloud. I needed to use a wider variety of books in my think alouds and encourage them to observe me using images to actually enhance my understanding of a book before they really got into it like Kenta describes. Now, we're starting to explore how writers write in a way that helps the reader create images. That is a whole new thing and I've found I need to do a lot of modeling - usually my own writing on the overhead like we're doing today - and I'll use conferences during the Composing time today to check their writing to see if they can identify words they have written that are intended to help potential readers use their own sensory images.” Leslie redirects her attention to her first graders.

" Thanks for waiting so patiently while I talked to our visitors,” Leslie says warmly. "Now, Kenta told us that one your learning outcomes right now is to understand books better and write more effectively using the images in your mind. I mentioned that there is another learning outcome on which you are working very hard right now. Anyone remember? Grace?”

"It's that one about making sure our sentences sound like language.” Grace turns around, addressing the visiting teachers which draws smiles from everyone. "You should tell your kids that sentences should sound like language. Sometimes we put in too many words or not enough and you can hear right away that it doesn't sound like language.”

"Grace,” Leslie implores, slightly embarrassed, "It's up to our visitors to make that decision. They're working with children that have different strengths and needs. They will know best when to help their children understand the syntactic system.”

Undeterred, Grace turns again to the visitors and says, "It will help those kids, I am for sure.” She nods gravely along with half a dozen other first graders.

It's noon and Leslie and Amy are eating and planning the study group that will convene in Jane's room after school. Amy is rushing off to her own classroom for the afternoon literacy block - the fourth grade team is observing this afternoon while the PE and Music teachers provide their children with an integrated movement and music lesson, freeing the teachers to observe.

Leslie will spend the afternoon working with Simon, the colleague with whom she is working intensively at the time. They have used the Cornerstone Literacy Framework surface structure teaching intentions to plan a lesson designed to help his first graders use as many tactics as possible when they come to an unknown word in text. Too many are freezing if the word is too difficult to sound out. On this particular afternoon, Simon will teach while Leslie observes. Tomorrow they'll switch roles. They'll debrief as they move around the room conferring with children and attempting to discover if they are, in fact, using a great variety of tactics to identify unknown words.

"I'm so glad we're going to meet in Jane's room this afternoon,” Amy says, "I don't want everyone in the study group to think that you create a literate learning environment overnight. They saw the ‘before' last week, they'll see us in the process of converting her room to a more intimate environment this week and by next week, a lot will be in place.”

The coaches are leading one study group on Monday, focused on rigorous and intimate learning environments. The teachers are reading Joanne Hindley's In the Company of Children and reviewing the Cornerstone Framework's Living Language section. The coaches plan to lead this afternoon's discussion with a question they hope will lead to a great deal of sharing. The question - in what ways does your classroom environment encourage independent learning for your students?

"Do you think we should develop a couple other questions?” Kate asks.

"You know, it's tempting to do that, but in a way I think it's over planning. If we do that then we're always stressing about getting to the next question and moving the discussion along. I think they've come so far, we need to trust that they'll keep the discussion going every bit as much as we can.” Amy replies. "Besides, Maria (Ford the Critical Friend) and Sara Kadish (the district's strategy manager) will be here if we get into trouble and they always find a way to pose questions that launch a thousand ships!”

Teddy pokes his head in at this moment and asks if he can observe Simon's lesson this afternoon.

"Sure,” Leslie laughs, "but you should bring some piece of text you can use to model for the kids what you do when you come to an unknown word. Bring some ghastly school law textbook or something.”

"That will be no problem,” I'll be there with ghastly text in hand, Teddy assures her and ducks out.

"What's up tomorrow morning in your room?” Amy asks Leslie. "Jane's kids are going on a field trip. I'd love to try that strategy that Amanda and Yasontas are using in Jackson. Remember? One coach teaches and the other feeds back to her and to the observing teachers during the lesson. Are you up for it?”

"Absolutely. We're working on images and I'd love for you to watch to see if my think alouds are clear and precise enough. . .”

"Speaking of plans, I need to sit down for a minute and record some of the work we did in Jane's classroom this morning in my Coach's Journal or I'm going to forget what we committed to for Wednesday morning,” Amy says, more to herself than anyone else.

Do we have it right? When Cornerstone staff members imagine the daily lives of coaches, principals, parents, district strategy managers and Critical Friends, are we accurate? We realize that the work is (and should be) extraordinarily intense, exhausting, difficult. There are times when I'm sitting at home trying to do my own writing or returning email that I'm terribly envious of you, in the field, having the delicious opportunities to face those challenges. That complexity in our daily work is what keeps us intellectually alive and challenged in our chosen field. Our job is to provide support, through on-site and distant professional learning, the Framework and Tool Kit, even this newsletter, as you manage those challenges. Keep us posted, let us know what you need.

Lucky are we to have work that stretches us to the intellectual limit.

Have a wonderful month,
ellin