Welcome!
Hello, I want this site to help you lead learning for teachers and students. My focus areas are educational coaching, professional learning teams, and administrator leadership. On this page, you will learn a little about me and my work. By clicking the links above, you’ll find practical strategies, tools, and perspectives to help you engage in Learnership---leadership for learning--as well as notices of upcoming workshops. Please browse, and be sure to sign up for newsletters. As always, I aim to be of service and would love to hear from you. -- Cathy Toll
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Cathy Toll, My Story
Parker Palmer writes about each person’s “birthright gifts,” those qualities
that are with one throughout life and appear to be inborn. Among my birthright gifts are a sense that people do not have to be miserable and a desire to reduce the misery in the world. Growing up, I knew I wanted to be a teacher, but it was when I was in high school that I realized my mission as a teacher. I looked around and saw that many, many students were miserable in school, some showing it by being passive and others by acting out. However, I noticed that the teachers seemed unhappy as well. I had good teachers who tried to engage with students, but there was something wrong. For all too many students and teachers, school was a place that didn’t make sense. As a lifelong educator, I have come to understand why it is that school makes some people miserable. Too many of those who spend their days in schools, both teachers and students, feel unseen, silenced, disconnected from what matters to them. No one intended schools to be like this, but they often are. My professional goal has been to help make school make sense for the children and the adults who spend their days in them. I began my work as a classroom teacher and taught students in elementary, middle, and high schools. During that time I accepted opportunities to serve as a teacher leader, thus working toward my goal of making a difference for teachers as well as students. This work continued as I became a curriculum leader, reading specialist, school principal, university professor, grant director, and consultant. In several of these roles I began using coaching tools as I partnered with teachers and supported them to meet their goals. When it was time to pursue doctoral studies, I knew from the start that I wanted to focus upon teacher professional learning. My attention centered upon questions about how to support teachers’ learning, as well as questions about why so many efforts toward “professional development” were unsuccessful. At that point in my career, I had no doubt that teachers were the key people in helping students to succeed in school, and I knew that I wanted to devote the rest of my career to considering how to support teachers’ work. An exciting turning point in my efforts occurred when I began coaching educational coaches. In this capacity, I found myself helping teacher leaders to partner with teachers in ways that were unique to my work. I recognized that I had a book “in me,” a book to help literacy coaches understand coaching and develop strategies for effective coaching. This book, The Literacy Coach's Survival Guide: Essential Questions and Practical Answers for Literacy Coaches, became a best seller, and I discovered with joy that I was helping to define the field and the work of coaching in schools. I have since written four more books for coaches and those who support them. My work has now expanded beyond educational coaching to include work with professional learning teams. As I have studied teacher professional learning and developed the Ancora Imparo Model (AIM) to describe it, I have come to understand that learning rarely, if ever, occurs in isolation. Rather, learning is often made possible and almost always enhanced when people interact with others. In the workplace, professional learning teams offer this kind of collaboration. Overall, the task that is key to life in schools is learning, yet too often educators and students get distracted by other matters. Ensuring attention to learning and providing leadership for enhanced learning is what I call Learnership. It is the priority task of effective principals, curriculum leaders, educational coaches, and teacher leaders. The practices and perspectives for enacting this task are provided in my fifth book, Learnership: Invest in Teachers, Focus on Learning, and Put Test Scores in Perspective. I am available to guide school administrators and teacher leaders in: enacting Learnership in their schools; ensuring that professional learning communities/teams lead to greater student learning; or providing support to programs of educational coaching. As always, I am also available to provide workshops and consultation to educational coaches themselves. |
About Toll and AssociatesToll and Associates was founded in 2004 to focus on support for literacy coaches and their leaders. The work of Toll and Associates has expanded to include work in all areas of teacher learning and partnerships with learning leaders at the school, district, regional, and state levels. The lead consultant is Dr. Cathy Toll; she is supported by associates who provide additional services on an as-needed basis. The work of Toll and Associates is worldwide in scope, with clients in the United States, Canada, and Australia.
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