Kristen Painter is Vice President of Professional Services for the International Center for Leadership in Education, a division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. As a teacher, Kristen saw the power of workshop structures for students, and at Columbia University in New York she worked as a staff developer for the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, helping area schools establish and sustain effective reading and writing workshops in classrooms. As a teaching assistant to author and educator Lucy Calkins, the founding director of the project at the Teachers College, Kristen had the opportunity to influence pre-service teachers’ philosophies of what it means to effectively teach literacy. The author of Living and Teaching the Writing Workshop (Heinemann, 2006), Kristen is also a former district literacy director and a consultant. She has been with ICLE for seven years.