As a former educator and literacy coach in Title 1 schools for over 20 years, Lori has a passion for growing both students and teachers. She currently serves as a district literacy specialist, college instructor, and staff developer. She also is the proud mother of two struggling readers. While her children are almost grown now, she often thinks back to their experiences as students, in a world of reading instruction, which didn't always meet their needs. Lori believes her children, and all children, deserve expert reading teachers. She has a mission to help teachers transform into expert reading teachers, allowing them to not only provide the best practices of balanced literacy, but diagnose readers and make the instructional decisions needed to treat them. Lori believes all students AND teachers can GROW, one level at a time. Tune in to hear a full interview with Lori Poole in this special bonus edition episode.
Quotables
- Teachers need us to just listen. They don’t always need a solution. They don’t always expect us to have a solution, they need just to help and counsel them right now.
- The best teacher is always the best student. We want to teach them and we want them to try something hard. When they try something hard and they fail as a teacher we want them to try again. For teachers, we want teachers to try, fail, take a step back and do it again.
- Resilience makes a good teacher.
- Not everyday is a step mountain, sometimes it's just a lot of hills. Don’t get stuck playing it safe.
- Spectacular failures (or mistakes) show that we are learning. (Cornelius Minor- We’ve got this).
- My philosophy (Lori Poole) is that we are always working to level up, but I don’t mean doing it at all at one time. Take a step back, reflect, accept where you are and then work to level up. What is one thing you want to implement? Take small steps to level up.
- As a coach, although I might think a teacher can work on many things, I have to treat them like a student. Work on small goals.
- When we want to start everything new and we start to fail, we lose all momentum. You can’t grab all the new things at one time.
- Why do some mistakes hold so much emotional value compared to other mistakes? If we can learn to add some equilibrium, I wonder if we would have more teachers who would be willing to try something new?
- Many coaches weren’t trained live. It’s important for adjusting in the moment and getting immediate live feedback.
- As a teacher you want to see how coaches work with YOUR students with the challenges you face in YOUR classroom.
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