Systems for Change in Literacy Education: A Guide to Professional Development

Twice before, Carol Lyons and Gay Su Pinnell teamed up as coauthors and helped tens of thousands of literacy educators transform classroom practice. Now, with their latest collaboration, Lyons and Pinnell turn their eye to K-6 literacy teachers’ professional development, offering the theories, designs, guidelines, examples, and materials needed to bring about schoolwide, long-lasting change. Lyons and Pinnell asked themselves: What if we could create more and better ways for teachers to learn from their own teaching? What if we could provide high-quality, ongoing professional development and coaching for literacy teachers that result in improving their students’ achievement? Well, they could…and they did. Systems for Change offers specific - and, quite often, unique - suggestions for planning and implementing a literacy professional development course. Everything is covered, including how to get started the right way, what materials are needed and where to find them, what are the best activities for effective, hands-on practice, and how to develop K-6 inservice courses throughout the year. Particular emphasis is placed on how to help teachers of the reading and writing processes improve via coaching. Most books about teacher-education processes are generic in their descriptions. This one is different. It is uniquely designed to enable staff developers and teacher educators to help teachers become effective in their teaching of the reading and writing processes. A framework for conceptualizing professional development programs is presented, along with guidelines, descriptions, and examples for using this framework to create a comprehensive K-6 professional development literacy program.