Leaders of Literacy

Today, Samantha Statler and Becky Lewis sit down with the 2023 West Virginia Service Personnel of the Year, Jessica Grose. During this interview, we take a closer look at what makes Jessica a successful educator. She also shares some great tips on how she builds positive relationships with her teachers and students along with how she keeps her families engaged.

Today, Becky Lewis and Samantha Statler sit down with the 2023 West Virginia Teacher of the Year, Amber Nichols. During this interview, we take a closer look at what makes Amber a successful educator. Not only does she share some great insight into her classroom practices, but she also shares her passion for education and helping her students achieve success.

During today’s episode, Early and Elementary Learning Specialists Becky Lewis and Samantha Statler discuss the five R’s for promoting positive family engagement which include: respect, reassurance, responsiveness/relationships, reciprocity, and reflection. Not only do they talk about what each of these five R’s means, but they also share strategies you can use in your classroom to help strengthen each of these components.

In this month’s Leaders of Literacy podcast episode, Becky and Sam continue their conversation around building positive culture and community in the classroom. This is an important task for all educators, and it truly sets the tone for the learning environment for the rest of the school year. Joining them for this conversation is lead Pre-K Teacher, Claire McCoy. Claire shares some great insight on strategies she uses to create norms and procedures in her classroom along with activities for students and families to build a positive classroom community. If you’re looking for new ways to build positive culture and community in your classroom, this episode is for you!

Tune in to this episode as hosts, Becky Lewis and Samantha Statler discuss the importance of building classroom culture. The resource they use for this episode is the book High Impact Instruction- A Framework for Great Teaching written by Jim Knight. Samantha and Becky walk you through the five recommendations Jim offers in this text which are: co-construct norms with your students, reinforce students when they act consistently with the norms, spread learner-friendly emotions, design a learner-friendly learning environment, and walk the talk.

Tune in to this episode as hosts, Becky Lewis and Samantha Statler discuss teacher clarity. Not only do they discuss what it is, but they also dive into why it is important and how you can ensure teacher clarity in your classroom.

In this episode of the Leaders of Literacy podcast, Early and Elementary Learning Specialists Samantha Statler and Amber Meyers along with special guest, Janie Merendino discuss the importance of number sense and how it can be tied back into literature in the classroom.  Janie shares her experiences working in the primary classroom. and also gives insight to how she used mathematics and literature together in her instruction.

Early and Elementary Learning Specialists Samantha Statler and Brittany Fike reflect on the previous episode where they interviewed Jim Knight. During that episode, Jim referred to his latest publication, The Definitive Guide to Instructional Coaching: Seven Factors to Success, several times. These seven factors include: the partnership principles, communication skills, coaches as leaders, the impact cycle, data, the instructional playbook, and system support. These ladies talk in-depth about each of these seven factors of success and how they all tie together to benefit instructional coaches.

Since the pandemic hit, educational leaders are making every effort to develop and implement new strategies to better support educators and students in all areas of education.  As a result, over the past year or two, there has been a significant rise in interest around instructional coaching as an option to address these needs.

Early and Elementary Learning Specialists Samantha Statler and Brittany Fike speak with special guest Jim Knight to discuss instructional coaching and how to effectively implement this practice it into schools and classrooms.

Early and Elementary Learning Specialists, Becky Lewis and Samantha Statler have a follow up discussion from the previous episode which focused on expanding student learning through strong community partnerships. To get a closer look at a strong community-school partnership, they hosted Marian Clowes. Marian is the associate director for community leadership at the Parkersburg Area Community Foundation. She is also a key member of the Wood County Reads group that helps to promote learning and literacy in all of Wood counties students.