Sharon Walpole is associate professor at the University of Delaware. She teaches undergraduate courses on language and literacy development in kindergarten and first grade, master’s courses on content area reading instruction and on organization and supervision of the reading program, and doctoral seminars on literacy and educational policy.  She has extensive school-based experience, including both high school teaching and elementary school administration.  She has also been involved in federally funded and homegrown school-wide reform projects.  She has been studying the design and effects of school-wide reforms, particularly those involving literacy coaches.  She works closely with the Reading First initiatives in Delaware and in Georgia.  She is co-author of The literacy coach’s handbook: A guide to research-based reform and Differentiated reading instruction: Strategies for the primary grades as well as recent articles in Reading Research Quarterly, Journal of Educational Psychology, Reading and Writing Quarterly, Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Services in the Schools, Early Education and Development, and The Reading Teacher.