Using Data and a Knowledge of Reading and Writing Development to Be Confident, Clear and Decisive in Supporting Your Students’ Growth

Date: Tuesday, October 1, 2024

Time: 11:00 AM - 3:00 PM ET

Location: Online, via Zoom

Who Should Attend: Grades K-2 teachers and coaches

Cost: $150 per person

For teaching to stick, it is important that you teach with confidence and power. That can be hard these days when the ground on which we stand as teachers has been shifting. This conference day is designed to help you draw on reading research, on your data, AND on all that you know about teaching well so that you can teach with the confidence, clarity and decisiveness you need to move your kids forward. 

The day will help you learn from all your assorted assessments and combine what you see with a basic understanding of reading and writing development, so that you can cluster your kids and support each cluster’s progress with assurance. The day will, in a sense, be a giant if-then chart, helping you to know what the most significant indicators are that you should be looking for, and helping you have a ground plan for how to support each cluster of your students–in phonics, reading and writing–in unified ways. 

One topic that will be addressed is this: Given research on the science of reading, what type of instruction is – and isn’t – ”allowed”? You listen to a child read, and think, “Holy cow! How, exactly, can I help?” Whether you are a kindergarten, first-grade, or second-grade teacher, you will walk away from this day with “go to” resources to support this work. 

Across this day, expect to:

• Be supported as you make doable plans for administering assessments, exploring time-saving tools and receiving guidance on priorities. Consider ways to avoid redundancy in the assessments you give. 

• Examine how you can most efficiently learn from early assessments, such as Letter/Sound ID, Concepts of Print, Phonological Awareness, and Phonic Decoding, in order to recognize whether students are getting stuck and to plan next steps.

• Consider common obstacles that come up as readers go through Ehri's beginning stages of reading development, pre-, partial, and full alphabetic phases, and plan next steps to draw upon as you teach.  

• Learn strategies Nell Duke offers for supporting readers who can segment but struggle to blend. We will build off Duke's various ways to scaffold blending and share small groups you can try in your classrooms immediately. 

• Study transferable coaching prompts that will help you support early reading behaviors around concepts of print, word solving, and monitoring. Using the pictures still matters, but learn how this strategy has shifted.