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Shane Safir Credit: Courtesy of Linda Galender, Impact Academy Danfeng Koon's voice is measured and empathetic as she tells me, "I appreciate the positive feedback, but I need you to be more specific and ask reflective questions in order for me to improve my practice."

Published Online: August 16, 2011 It's not hard to find checklists that are supposed to make it easy to improve schools and classroom instruction. What's difficult is locating checklists that you can remember and that are actually useful, as I've written about before. My own list—while not necessarily easy to implement—is easy to remember.

I'm doing a variety of consulting work in New York, and get a lot of questions about what it is, exactly, that I do. In some schools I do math coaching, but here's a summary of a typical day for me when I wear the Literacy Coach hat.

My Colleague Refuses to Collaborate with Us (LITERACY COACH CONFIDENTIAL) A literacy coach writes to us with the question: How do you work with a teacher who refuses to be a collaborative part of a team? She does her own thing without regard for other team members.

Steve Barkley's concept of "backwards planning" shifts the process of teaching practices, coaching, and professional staff development in significant and comprehensive ways. Steve's research suggests that teachers don't cause student achievement; students do, when armed with the right learning behaviors taught and modeled by others. From those behaviors, they become lifelong learners. Receive guidance and insights into specific coaching skills, questioning strategies, and ways to work with principals. The result ensures that teachers are fully supported in the highly complex and challenging world of education.

"In this issue's lead article, Bob Tschannen-Moran and Megan Tschannen-Moran ("The Coach and the Evaluator", p. 10) decry the approach of connecting teacher evaluation with efforts to help teachers grow and improve through a coaching cycle. They call into question such common administrator practices as using coaching to help a teacher achieve specific improvement goals. Although such practices are well-meaning, the Tschannen-Morans claim, they "typically generate little growth… Power struggles, rather than cooperative efforts…often ensue."