About Lauren 

Lauren Nizol (@CoachNizol) is a literacy interventionist and writing center director at a suburban Detroit public high school and Eastern Michigan Writing Project Teacher Consultant who loves books and takes too many pictures of trees when heading for the woods with her family. She has taught a variety of courses over her twelve years of teaching-- from English 9 to IB Theory of Knowledge to English Lab. She has blogged for Oakland Schools Literacy and has been a guest blogger for NCTE, Eastern Michigan Writing Project and Nerdy Book Club.

About This Blog

Many of my formative experiences as a teacher center around my work as a literacy interventionist, working with reluctant readers and writers.  Overtime, I've come to regard these students not so much as struggling, but as striving. 

Take for example a moment I had with one of my writers trying to make heads and tails of an article he was writing about: 

Student: I'm a really bad reader. 
Me: [Glancing at a very complex article from the Times] Hmm. Looks like this is a pretty hard text. 
Student: Yeah. 
Me: Seems like it's the text that's the problem. Not you. 

This exchange represents my passion as an educator: to make learning accessible for students, to help students find ways to navigate tricky and challenging material, and to be a safe haven for students in moments where learning seems like something that's out of their reach. 

One day while talking with a friend and fellow interventionist, we realized that there are not many blogs chronicling the experiences and reflections of those who work with striving learners-- especially at the secondary level. Along with a team of five other interventionists, I support students through the Multi-Tiered System of Support program, or MTSS for short, at our suburban Detroit high school. And as we developed a clear intervention program in our school, it became very clear to us that our needs as interventionists were very different from those of elementary interventionists. And that's how this blog was born.

Interventionists need a community to support their work. What you do is important, and I believe that finding ways to write about this work only serves to make us stronger. 
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