About
Who’s behind it
Brett Shiel learned to read late and with difficulty. His mother, a reading specialist, was teaching what is now called the science of reading in the 1980s and 90s, and it worked on him.
He met the problem again from the other side, as a second grade teacher in Houston and then a literacy and humanities teacher in Philadelphia, where he knew what his students needed and did not yet know how to give it to each of them. Most of his career since has gone to closing that gap in partnership with districts and states.
After leadership roles in Philadelphia and Camden, he founded Coaching & Convening in 2017. He has since worked with state education agencies, districts, and foundations in more than twenty states on the policy and implementation of high-quality instructional materials and curriculum-based professional learning, including multi-year coaching of the Rhode Island and Nebraska departments of education, and has helped secure more than ten million dollars for that work. In Massachusetts he is an approved provider for Investigating History, the state’s grades 3 through 7 social studies curriculum.
His essay “Meeting the Harriets on the Country’s 250th” started with a stone wall on his land and ended with a question about who he would have been in 1855. He lives in the hills outside Stockbridge, where he builds trails.
Coaching & Convening
For the Record is a program of Coaching & Convening, an advisory and facilitation practice in Berkshire County, Massachusetts.
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