Collaborative Coaching and Learning (CCL) — intensive ongoing staff development that aims to reduce professional isolation and to encourage a more collaborative culture. In each eight-week cycle, a small group of teachers in a school studies together a strategy from Readers' Workshop or Writers' Workshop, observes the content coach demonstrate the strategy with students, takes turns with colleagues teaching the strategy, participates in a debrief after each demonstration, and gets support in their own classrooms.

Change coaches support CCL by helping the Instructional Leadership Team (ILT) refine its work and by encouraging teachers to take leadership roles on the ILT and in looking at student work sessions.

More intensive and more focused than the one day/week coach model that Boston has used since 1996, CCL has many advantages over its predecessor:

• It deepens participants' knowledge and skills in specific literacy strategies
• It is aligned with the district's instructional priorities — Readers' Workshop and Writers' Workshop
• It is organized around regular demonstrations of the strategy in the school's own classroom settings, with their own students
• It is structured so that participating teachers not only observe but also conduct demonstrations with their colleagues
• It expects every teacher to participate in a cycle, not just volunteers
• It engenders collaboration among teachers but still provides follow up with individual teachers in their classrooms
• It begins to transfer responsibility for professional development from a consultant-coach to school staff and builds in opportunities for teachers to learn and assume leadership skills