Teaching Better, Together: Literacy Coaching as Collaborative Professional Development.

In a tribute to Dean Smith, his University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill basketball coach, Michael Jordan described Smith as not only a coach who led him to a national championship and a legendary NBA career, but also a second father who made him a better professional and a better person (Cindy Boren, Washington Post, February 8, 2015). While Jordan and Smith were exceptional in the history of their sport, it is Jordan’s memory of a coach—and how that relationship pushed him to achieve more than he thought he could—that many of us share. No matter how much we practiced, we never became a Michael Jordan; but we became better for it, and we remember that coach and what he or she inspired within us.