Join this fascinating discussion about intensive intervention and how educators can best help students who struggle with literacy, including English learners. Our guest Dr. Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan will share inspiring and useful insights about the topic. As Cárdenas-Hagan says, “Literacy is a human right, and all students, including those who are linguistically diverse, should have access to Structured Literacy.” Our discussion about this instructional approach will illustrate how it is the bridge to equity, because it includes the foundational skills of reading and writing in addition to the development of oral language and comprehension in an explicit and systematic manner. 

This lively discussion with Dr. Cárdenas-Hagan will explore: How students who struggle with learning to read need extended opportunities for learning and practice; Ways educators can appropriately intervene at Tier 2 and Tier 3; How multilingual learners benefit from the use of cross-linguistic features within this instructional approach. 

Listeners will learn:

• Adjustments all teachers can make for ELLs
• How to apply research to practice
• How to collaborate for better results and better outcomes
• Why more interdisciplinary work is needed in intervention

The “science of reading” often gets reduced to “phonics,” but there’s a lot of science that relates to reading comprehension as well. 

If we look at typical comprehension instruction through the lens of cognitive science, it becomes clear that we’ve unintentionally made reading and writing much harder than they need to be by separating them from each other and from content-area instruction. 

But cognitive science also tells us that a content-rich curriculum combined with explicit, manageable writing instruction can provide all the benefits of science-informed instruction and more. If we break down the artificial walls separating reading, writing, and learning, we can enable all students to reach their full potential.

Listeners will learn:

• Why we need to do more than “fix phonics” if we want all students to become fully literate
• How we’ve been making reading and writing harder than they need to be
• Why it’s not possible to apply principles grounded in cognitive science to typical comprehension instruction
• How a content-rich curriculum combined with explicit writing instruction can provide all the benefits of science-informed instruction—and more