Summit: August 2023

Meet Our Exceptional Speakers

Dr. Anne Cunningham

Anne is Author of Booksmart, a Scholastic Education expert, a literacy development scientist and a special education professor at University of California, Berkely.

Phonics and Phonological Awareness

• What is the difference between Phonics, Phonemic Awareness and Phonological Awareness?
• Why are they the most important skills for beginning readers?
• What are the specific skills and how do you teach them in a play environment?
• Which skills do we teach first? How do they interplay in the classroom?

Dr. Tim Rasinski

Tim is a multi-award-winning author and international expert on fluency and word play. His Kent State University lab has proven the value of daily fluency with all age levels Pre-K to 12.

Fluency, Comprehension and Word Play

• What is reading fluency or automaticity and why is it important in the early years?
• What is the connection between fluency, comprehension, and word play?
• How can primary teachers use song and poetry to teach oral fluency skills?
• What is the five-day plan that embeds fluency into daily classroom joy?

Dr. Maria Walther

Maria’s recent ideas-packed book Shake Up Shared Reading should be on every teacher’s bookshelf!

Shake Up Shared Reading, Comprehension and Vocabulary

• How do we link rich read-alouds to target key skills and understandings?
• How do we teach comprehension skills and build vocabulary through joyful reading?
• What role can re-reading short bursts of text play in building enthusiasm for reading?
• How can we use investigation and conversation to shed light on deeper thinking?

Chelsea Mytko and Nathan Reist

Classroom Play-based Strategy Specialists

• How can we integrate active and playful practice centres to move children to skill mastery?
• How do daily fluency infusions energize and inspire even the youngest children to read aloud?
• How can a theme-based approach incorporate all this skill learning into classrooms invisibly?
• What is the blitz intervention strategy and how do we use it so no learner falls behind?t

Dr. Janet Mort

The NEW Sprig Reading App Powered by Joyful Literacy

So Many Skills! So Many Children! Such Urgency! The Simple but Elegant Solution and the Perfect Companion to Any Good Reading Program. Now we can close gaps easily!
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• How can we track struggling learners and design interventions skill by skill?
• How do we organize small groups with the same needs for practice activities?
• How do we meet the 90% proficiency goal if we don’t know who and what to target?
• How do we make assessment, tracking and targeting a pivotal part of our weekly planning?

Summit Program

Thursday, May 11, 2023
8:15AM – 3:45PM

* Pacific Time Zone (PT)

8:15 – 8:45

Waiting Room Opens

8:45 — 9:00

Opening Comments

9:00 – 10:30

Dr. Tracy White-Weeden

How to Implement Systems Change for Sustainable Literacy Transformation – A Blueprint for Success (Grade Level: All)

Sustainable literacy transformation is made possible when systems are prepped for change by doing the right work. Learn to prepare your system for measurable growth in student achievement, teacher knowledge, and leadership capacity through the application of the science of reading. This presentation will also position you to ensure your vision includes a strategy to address the upstream issue of teacher and leader preparation programs.

10:30 – 10:45

Nutrition Break

10:45 – 12:00

Joan Sedita M.Ed.

The Writing Rope: A Framework for Explicit Writing in All Subjects (Grade Level: 3 - 12)

This workshop includes an overview of The Writing Rope model for writing instruction (Sedita, 2019). Many teachers do not recognize that effective writing instruction must address multiple components, represented as strands in a rope in this model. An explanation with references to research findings will be provided for the five strands: 1) Critical Thinking (generating ideas and information, stages of the writing process), 2) Syntax (syntactic awareness, sentence elaboration, punctuation), 3) Text Structure (narrative, informational, opinion; paragraph structure; patterns of organization, 4) Writing Craft (awareness of task, audience, purpose; word choice; literary devices), 5) Transcription (spelling and handwriting fluency). This workshop addresses writing instruction across grades 3-12.

12:00 – 12:45

Lunch

12:45 – 2:00

Breakout Rooms (3)

Dr. Margie Gillis

How and Why to Bring the Science of Reading and Structured Literacy into Every Classroom: A Call to Action (Grade Level: PK - 5)

Why is the opportunity gap so persistent and how can we accelerate students’ reading and writing achievement to close it? Schools and districts are supporting their teachers as they learn how to apply the science of reading by using a structured literacy approach in all tiers of instruction. This session will describe a systematic and engaging approach that integrates the elements of language into literacy instruction throughout the day. Designed for all teachers who are charged with teaching essential literacy skills, participants will learn about critical pedagogical principles, the core components of comprehensive literacy, and a few key instructional strategies to explicitly teach phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and comprehension.

Dr. Emily Solari

The Evidence Base for Early Literacy Development for Monolingual and Spanish-speaking English Learners. (Grade Level: Primary)

This presentation will address the evidence base for early literacy development for both monolingual and Spanish-speaking English learners. The broad evidence base for explicit and systematic instruction will be highlighted, and individual studies as meta-analytic findings will be covered. Her presentation will reference her work with intervention development and trials with students who have early profiles of reading difficulties, individuals diagnosed with autism, and English language learners. Her work has included intervention development and trials with students who have early profiles of reading difficulties, individuals diagnosed with autism, and English language learners.

Dr. Anne Cunningham

The Pivotal Importance of Phonemic Awareness Integrated with Phonics
(Grade Level: Primary)

The science of reading has demonstrated the pivotal role of phonemic awareness in a structured literacy program for K-3 reading development. The NELP Report (2009) specified that Alphabet Knowledge and Phonological Awareness are the two most important skills to be mastered by early learners in order for them to become fluent readers. In this presentation, we will discuss why phonemic awareness is so important to early learners, what the phonemic awareness skills are, outline specific strategies for integrating phonemic awareness with phonics instruction and detail the corresponding modifications in instructional materials that are important. Publications include Book Smart: How to Develop and Support Successful Motivated Readers, co-authored with Jamie Zibulsky, published by Oxford University Press. Edited volumes include Developing Early Literacy: Report of the National Early Literacy Panel (NELP).

2:00 – 3:30

Dr. Julie Washington

Teaching Reading to African American Children: Incorporating Variation (Grade Level: All)

Teaching any child to read requires attention to language use and development. For children who speak varieties of English, in this case, African American children, it is important to recognize, affirm and include the language variety that they bring to reading instruction. Extending the language expertise that African American children bring to school with them to include the language of print is critical for developing strong readers. This has not been our approach to date. This presentation will examine the potential role of translanguaging approaches for improving the reading outcomes of African American children who use African American English.

3:30 – 3:45

Closing Comments

Summit Program

Friday, May 12, 2023
8:15AM – 3:45PM

* Pacific Time Zone (PT)

8:15 – 8:45

Waiting Room Opens

8:45 — 9:00

Opening Comments

9:00 – 10:30

Dr. Louisa Moats

Explicit Language Instruction is the Heart of Structured Literacy (Grade Level: All)

Reading comprehension is the product of word recognition and language comprehension. Each part of Hoover and Gough and Tunmer's "simple view" equation can be taught explicitly and systematically: phoneme awareness, phonic decoding, spelling, word recognition fluency, vocabulary, and text reading for meaning. We will contrast Structured Literacy components and teaching techniques with popular approaches that are not aligned with reading science, with the goal of ensuring that all students, especially those "at risk," can beat the odds and become readers

10:30 – 10:45

Nutrition Break

10:45 – 12:00

Breakout Rooms (3)

Dr. Sonia Cabell

Content-Rich Literacy Instruction in the Primary Grades (Grade Level: Primary)

This presentation examines what research says about integrating content-area instruction into English Language Arts (ELA) to improve students’ oral language and content knowledge in the primary grades. From a careful synthesis of the existing literature of efficacious content-rich literacy approaches, several recommended practices emerge. These practices include: planning ELA units around science and/or social studies topics, using conceptually coherent text sets ordered to build content knowledge, engaging in discussion and writing focused on building knowledge, and teaching relationships among words. Special attention will be paid to the role of responsive classroom conversations in promoting language learning.

Dr. Louise Spear-Swerling

Beyond Phonology: Using Structured Literacy Interventions to Address a Variety of Common Reading Problems (Grade Level: All)

Structured Literacy interventions are best known for their effectiveness with students who have dyslexia or other reading problems based in phonological skills. However, Structured Literacy can also benefit students whose reading problems are based entirely or partially in comprehension. This presentation begins by describing common profiles of reading difficulties that teachers encounter in the elementary and middle school grades. It then reviews the features of Structured Literacy, how these features differ from typical practices in reading instruction, and why Structured Literacy can be effective with different profiles of reading difficulties. Multiple examples of Structured Literacy activities for helping struggling readers in the K-8 grade range, including those with problems based in vocabulary, syntax, or text comprehension, as well as decoding, are provided. The presentation concludes by considering some challenges involved in implementing Structured Literacy and possible ways to address them.

Chase Young

Artfully Teaching the Science of Fluency: Newly Published! (Grade Level: All)

The foundation for this session is based our book, Artfully Teaching the Science of Reading by Chase Young, David Paige, and Tim Rasinski. We explore the empirical research and prominent theories in reading fluency and use them as a foundation for understanding reading fluency instruction and interventions. We learn about whole group, small group, and one-on-one approaches that can develop fluent readers effectively and efficiently. We also work together to develop new, creative, and effective approaches to teaching reading fluency. In the book, we encourage teachers to use their scientific knowledge in reading and generate engaging instruction that touches hearts and minds.

12:00 – 12:45

Lunch

12:45 – 2:00

Breakout Rooms (3)

Dr. Hugh Catts

Reconceptualizing Assessment and Intervention for Reading Comprehension (Grade Level: All)

The poor performance of American students on state and national tests of reading comprehension is a well-recognized educational challenge and one that is difficult to address. Poor comprehension represents a multifactorial problem that is impacted by numerous reader, text, and task factors. Among the reader factors, the role of background knowledge and deep thinking have been particularly absent in conceptualizations of comprehension problems. Also, the specifics of what is read and for what purpose is typically given little consideration. To address these issues, a multidimensional model of reading comprehension is reintroduced and its implications for the identification, assessment, and intervention of comprehension problems will be discussed.

Dr. Linnea Ehri

How Beginners Learn to Read and Spell Words: Phases of Development and Orthographic Mapping (Grade Level: All)

Unfamiliar words may be read by decoding, analogizing, or predicting from context. Words read before are read from memory automatically “by sight.” Sight words are stored in memory when connections are formed between graphemes in spellings and phonemes in pronunciations of words, called orthographic mapping. Children need phonemic skill segmentation, knowledge of grapheme-phoneme (GP) relations, and decoding skill to retain graphemes in the spellings of words connected to phonemes in their pronunciations in memory. Four phases portray the course of development in forming GP connections to retain sight words in memory for reading and spelling, from pre- alphabetic (no GP connections used), to partial alphabetic (partial connections such as initial and final GPs in words), to full alphabetic (complete GP connections formed), to consolidated alphabetic (GPs consolidated to form larger syllabic units used to form connections). Scientifically designed studies will be presented as evidence for the theory. Instructional implications will be identified.instruction across grades 3-12.

De Junne’ Clark Jackson M.Ed.

Creating a Culture of Collaboration: The Mission IS Possible! (Grade Level: All)

The mission is simple. Equip students with the literacy skills necessary to be successful learners through the use of evidence-based reading instructional practices. Empower parents and families with the knowledge essential to become well-informed participants in the decision-making process. Provide educators with the appropriate tools and information critical to effectively teach and reach students. Hearing and assembling the experiences of each of these stakeholders is critical to building a collaborative and inclusive education culture. Each stakeholder plays a vital role in the discovery, identification, and intervention stages of literacy development. When a student struggles, the collective can come together to find solutions, working toward the common and agreed-upon goal – student success!

2:00 – 3:30

Dr. Elsa Cardenas-Hagan

Structured Literacy Among English Learners: What every educator should know based on large scale research for 25 years (Grade Level: All)

Structured Literacy is a term that describes a comprehensive and evidence-based approach for literacy instruction. It includes foundational skills of reading and writing in addition to the development of oral language and comprehension in an explicit and systematic manner. Large-scale research studies have been conducted among English learners for close to 25 years. Every educator must understand the research and its implications for effective practices in the classroom. This session will describe the research and evidence-based practices necessary for the successful development of literacy among English learners. A demonstration of effective literacy instruction for English learners that builds upon first language and literacy knowledge for the development of second language literacy will be modeled and practiced. Participants will learn how to address cross-linguistic features into every lesson and thus implement an asset-based approach to instruction.

3:30 – 3:45

Closing Comments

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Dr. Name Here

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Send Us An Email

JoyfulLiteracy2020@shaw.ca

Visit Download Page

Need Help? Visit Zoom's Help Page

About

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© Joyful Literacy 2021 – All Rights Reserved

Website Design by

Lucas Bell