JSD | www.learningforward.org April 2015 | Vol. 36 No. 2 20 theme INDIVIDUAL & COLLECTIVE LEARNING G o to any school board meeting and you will hear about the projects, goals, and initiatives taking place in the district’s schools. School-based staff must continue to learn and enact more effective instructional practices to ensure that students are reaching higher benchmark expectations. Research highlights the importance of individualized approaches and coaching to ongoing professional learning (Darling-Hammond, Wei, Andree, Richardson, & Orpha- nos, 2009). An initiative that set out to help all students become proicient readers by 3rd grade demonstrates how coaching can support both collective and individual learning. Lit- eracy coaches in the project balanced the goals of the initia- tive with professional learning that addressed the varying needs and aspirations of individual teachers. he project was a three-year partnership among six schools (both public and charter schools), a research uni- versity, a nonproit organization, and a private corporation in the Twin Cities metropolitan area of Minnesota. Four components bolstered the work: enacting quality DATA DRIVE THESE COACHES LITERACY PROJECT MERGES SCHOOL GOALS WITH TEACHERS’ LEARNING NEEDS By Anne Ittner, Lori Helman, Matthew Burns, and Jennifer McComas