Essential Coaching Practices

Essential Coaching Practices for Elementary Literacy

The purpose of literacy essential instructional practices is to improve children’s literacy in Michigan. This set of research-supported literacy coaching practices should be a focus of professional development throughout the state.

Literacy coaching the essentials can provide powerful job-embedded, ongoing professional development while enhancing literacy instruction through teacher expertise. Effective literacy coaching helps teachers successfully navigate the daily challenges they face in their classrooms. As a result, instructional capacity and sustainability increases within schools.

Expert research suggests that each of the 10 practices outlined in this document can have a positive impact on literacy development. The use of these practices in every Michigan classroom every day can make a measurable, positive difference in the state’s literacy achievement.

This document is intended to be partnered with Essential Instructional Practices in Early Literacy: Prekindergarten and Essential Instructional Practices in Early Literacy: K to 3 as well as Essential School-Wide and Center-Wide Practices in Literacy.

Essential Coaching Practices for Birth to Age 3 Literacy

The purpose of this document is to increase Michigan's capacity to improve the foundations of children's early language and literacy skills in settings serving children ages birth to three. Michigan's youngest children arrive in early learning settings with important and varied experiences and understandings of the world gained from their families and communities; these families and communities are highly diverse in their cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic backgrounds and in their values and experiences around early language and literacy. Birth to three educators strive to meet each child where they are in each area of development and to nurture their growth across a wide range of important skills. Among the most important of these skills are receptive and expressive language, which undergird emerging competencies in social, cognitive, and emergent literacy skills crucial for academic success. To build this critical foundation for emergent literacy skills, it is important that early childhood educators engage in practices that support young children's receptive and expressive language, as well as practices that support the communication, motor, and social skills that later combine into the complex skills of reading and writing.

Essential Coaching Practices for PreKindergarten Literacy

The purpose of this document is to increase Michigan's capacity to improve children's emergent language and early literacy in prekindergarten by highlighting the most effective research-supported practices that early literacy personnel and leaders can use in their coaching work with prekindergarten educators.

When Michigan's young children arrive in prekindergarten, they bring important and varied knowledge from their families and communities, which are highly diverse in their cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic backgrounds, values, and experiences around language and literacy. Prekindergarten educators strive to meet children
where they are and to nurture their growth in a collection of important literacy-related skills; the role of coaching is to support educators.