Kansas lawmakers recently made a significant advancement in addressing literacy challenges with the passage of the Kansas Blueprint for Literacy legislation.
Dr. Barbara Foorman
Ph.D., Emerita Kraft Professor of Education Emerita Director, Florida Center for Reading Research Florida State University
What Happened to Using Data to Inform Instruction and Intervention in Grades K–2?
Join us for this informative and applicable presentation during which our presenter, renown researcher and literacy expert Dr. Barbara Foorman, will share the facts, research, and strategies surrounding using data to inform classroom instruction and guide intervention. As Dr. Foorman explains the use of data to identify strengths and weaknesses in students as they learn to read, she will share the critical nature of informed approaches that help educators truly change student outcomes.
Attendees will learn:
- What language and reading constructs predict reading success and how they can be measured reliably.
- The definitions of certain assessment terms (sensitivity/specificity; positive/negative; predictive/predictive power) and how they relate to diagnostic utility.
- The most-asked questions educators ask about assessment systems.
- The challenges of assessment—and possible solutions.
- How data from formative assessment can inform evidence-based literacy practices to differentiate instruction in the classroom and in intervention.
- Why intervention is necessary beyond additional core curriculum.
Illuminating Text From the Inside Out: Using Text Structure To Improve Comprehension for Older Readers
What’s the best approach to teach comprehension?
What makes expository text so challenging?
The use of text structure to improve comprehension is a powerful, yet often underutilized approach to help students integrate the big ideas across text. During this presentation—aimed at students who may be struggling in grades 4 and beyond—you’ll learn to connect research with immediate application about teaching various text structures to scaffold students’ ability to incorporate relevant ideas and content within narrative and expository texts.
Defining text structure, the research behind it, and cognitive integration theory—“We learn better if we have a frame or structure to attach that learning to”—helps all students, including those in middle school and beyond, succeed with reading comprehension and fluency.
Join this fascinating and applicable presentation during which our literacy expert shares the research and helpful Knowledge Acquisition and Transformation (KAT) framework that can be a game changer for so many striving readers.
Attendees will:
- Connect the research base about general cognitive learning to text structure specifically
- Understand the significance of teaching text structure in an explicit and consistent manner to improve comprehension
- Receive information and resources to incorporate text structure learning into current classroom practices
Five Essential Strategies for Distinguishing Core Instruction From Intervention
New
Join us for an engaging webinar exploring the critical differences between core instruction and intervention within a Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) framework. Core instruction provides universal, evidence-based, grade-level teaching for all students, while intervention targets specific skill gaps for selected learners through intensive, data-driven practices. Discover how these components work together to create a comprehensive system that ensures equity and addresses diverse student needs. We’ll cover five key strategies for distinguishing core from intervention, including determining what students need, pacing, focus, audience, and the use of evidence-based curricula. Don’t miss this opportunity to enhance your understanding and improve student outcomes.
Attendees will learn:
- The key differences between core instruction and intervention, including focus, audience, and intensity
- Why more core instruction does not replace the need for intervention
- How core instruction ensures equity through evidence-based, grade-level teaching for all students
- The role of interventions in addressing specific skill gaps using targeted, data-driven strategies
- Practical insights about integrating universal screeners and diagnostic assessments to identify and support student needs
- Strategies for aligning evidence-based curricula to maximize the effectiveness of both core instruction and intervention
Dr. Linnea Ehri
Distinguished Professor Emerita of Educational Psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Instructional Guidelines for Orthographic Mapping: Examining Ways to Teach Literacy
New
Join this interesting and informative presentation led by a true literacy legend, Dr. Linnea Ehri, a renowned researcher and respected leader in the teaching of reading. Dr. Ehri will discuss her theory of orthographic mapping, which involves the formation of letter-sound connections to bond the spellings, pronunciations, and meanings of specific words in memory and explains how children learn to read words by sight, to spell words from memory, and to acquire vocabulary words from print.
You’ll learn from the master herself as she explains how her theory lends itself to effective ways to teach reading. Her presentation is instructive, applicable, and inspiring for all educators who want to better understand reading instruction and improve their students’ outcomes.
Attendees will learn:
- How sight words are learned and the course of acquisition
- What skills to teach to enable sight-word learning
- How to teach grapheme-phoneme relations, phonemic awareness, decoding, and spelling skills
- Ways to improve vocabulary learning
- How readers store the spellings of sight words in memory and the research behind grapheme-phoneme relations
- The skills needed to perform orthographic mapping
- And much more!
We hope you’ll join us as we learn from a true changemaker in literacy instruction.
Writing as an Integral Part of the Science of Reading
Released: Thursday, December 12, 2024
Writing is the most challenging literacy skill to teach and to learn. Teachers who understand the connection of the science of reading and the reciprocal impact of reading and writing are ready to meet the challenge of teaching this complex skill.
Join us for this fascinating discussion about the symbiotic relationship between learning to read and writing. Our expert, a career educator and writing expert, will share how both reading and writing require systematic, explicit instruction that can and should be an integrated part of daily student life.
All students can benefit from strategic reading and writing strategies that focus on the foundational writing skills from basic to complex sentence writing, an understanding of text structure, paragraph, multiparagraph, and essay writing. Let our expert tell you how!
Our expert will share:
- The connection of writing to the science of reading, based on the Reading Rope
- How the research (by Graham & Herbert, 2011) illustrates how reading and writing support one another and how writing about reading leads to improvements in a student's reading ability
- Why systematic and explicit instruction is critical to build skilled writers
- How writing instruction supports all populations of students—general education, those with IEPs, English learners, gifted and talented, and emergent young scholars
Dr. Steve Graham
Regents professor, Mary Emily Warner professor, Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University
Writing to Reading: Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading
Released: Thursday, January 16, 2025
For decades, researchers have emphasized the strong connection between reading and writing, both in theory and practice. Multiple studies demonstrate that writing improves comprehension. What has been less clear is what particular writing practices research supports as being effective at improving students’ reading.
Our guest, respected researcher and author Dr. Steve Graham, will discuss the research he conducted (Graham and Hebert, 2010) that illustrates how writing, and the way it’s taught, improves students’ reading comprehension, and the strategies educators should apply to ensure literacy success.
Join us for this lively conversation where you’ll learn from a true trailblazer when it comes to writing and how it impacts learning to read.
Attendees will learn:
- How infrequent writing and lack of explicit writing instruction can negatively impact learning to read
- Why teachers of reading need to emphasize writing in the classroom in the earliest grades and across content areas
- Why writing is a critical skill, important in its own right; consistent writing time and instruction improves reading comprehension
- Why more classroom time is necessary for writing