Voyager Sopris Learning EDVIEW360 Podcast Series

How do sound walls support the science of reading? Do you know how to best use a sound wall to get your students reading successfully? How can you improve the sound wall you’re already using?

Find the answers to these questions and more when you join us for this useful presentation. Literacy and sound wall expert Dr. Mary Dahlgren will help you build a thorough understanding of how to use a sound wall, implementation tips, and more—everything you need to know and why. This is one more step in understanding the speech-to-print connection to improve outcomes for increased reading skills.

Dr. Dahlgren, founder of Tools 4 Reading, (the original authority on sound wall resources), will share the research that validates reading is a process that requires knowing the sounds and print, and she will illustrate how a sound wall is a pathway to make sense of how print represents those sounds.

She will also share:

• The need and purpose of having a sound wall in the classroom
• How to introduce and teach all 44 phonemes
• How to integrate a sound wall into your daily phonological awareness and phonics instruction
• How and when to add print to a sound wall

For teachers and administrators who contemplate how to make literacy learning more engaging—where the entire classroom is participating and learning with joy—look no further than this inspiring and instructive webinar.

Hosted by Trevor Muir, a teacher and international speaker, this presentation will show you how to tie literacy and a love of reading into authentic and engaging learning experiences. Muir, author of The Epic Classroom and a guest speaker and consultant to schools across the country, will explore strategies and practices to help students grow as readers and critical thinkers while completing purposeful tasks. Muir will share how to plan literacy activities during projects, ways to weave literacy learning into everything you do in the classroom, and strategies for teaching reading and writing in engaging and authentic ways.

Attendees will:

• Discover new strategies to increase a love of reading in their students
• Get new ideas to boost student engagement
• Learn how to choose authentic supportive texts for learning units
   

Phonemic awareness is an essential early literacy skill that underpins a child’s ability to read and spell and yet research demonstrates that without direct, explicit instruction in phonemic awareness, this skill eludes many students (Adams, 1990).

Join us for this instructional presentation exploring the research supporting phonological and phonemic awareness and the theoretical frameworks that underpin it.  

With an emphasis on how to teach phonemic awareness and letter/sound associations with effective Structured Literacy practices, this webinar will share strategies, resources, tips, and encouragement to literacy educators. Our expert will also share assessments to inform instruction and intervention, as well as comprehensive literacy resources to transfer knowledge to practice. 

Participants will be able to:

• Define phonological and phonemic awareness
• Define decoding and encoding
• Transfer knowledge to practice using instructional routines

Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) offers the framework for implementing the science of reading. Improving reading outcomes for all students requires building leaders who create the right conditions for learning, including designing systems for data-based decision-making, assessment, scheduling, and grouping. 

We hope you’ll join this interesting presentation when our experts share how and why reading outcomes improved in a high-needs elementary school through the alignment of instructional systems and student data. There is so much to be learned from this school’s success, and these presenters will walk you through the details. 

Attendees will learn:

1. About the MTSS framework and implementing the science of reading
2. How to use assessment data for systems change and student improvement
3. The role of building leaders in creating the systems, structures, and processes for designing MTSS to improve reading outcomes for all students
4. The challenges and successes of the school’s principal as she helped transform reading for elementary students 

When we look at the profession of teaching, three bodies of knowledge are necessary: 

1. Knowledge of the content to be taught
2. Knowledge of effective instructional practices
3. Knowledge of how students learn

But underlying these essential bodies of knowledge are the characteristics of teachers we must celebrate on this Valentine’s Day. What makes a great teacher? What sets some apart from others? Who lives on in the memories of their students?

In this webinar, Dr. Anita Archer will explore the characteristics as she reflects on the teachers she has known during the past 56 years of her career. Dr. Archer will share stories of the “greats” and their heart characteristics: passion, intention, order, tenacity, compassion, and JOY. We’ll also discuss the recent teacher exodus and what teachers need to stay committed to the classroom.

Please join us to celebrate the human hearts of teachers.

Older readers often have a fixed sense of what reading means (as seen in the work of researcher and author Dr. Peter Johnston), how often reading occurs in their daily lives, and if they like reading at all. As educators, we sometimes have a lot to work against in terms of family dynamics, negative feelings of self as reader, and the sense that “it’s too late.” Even adults who share their stories of striving in reading sometimes carry a sense of negativity about these emotions and experiences. Our goal is to curb that.

This insightful presentation will help teachers and administrators understand it’s never too late, and there are applicable strategies that can address reframing, motivation, and helping all readers see themselves as more than their challenges. Research proves that early intervention is key, and  there are concrete ways to help middle and high school students make gains and improve literacy and confidence.

In this presentation, our expert will share:

• How to develop a framework for success
• Ways to take what is known and tackle what is unknown
• New ways to frame literacy
• Why educators must consider both assets and needs students bring with spoken language, social and cultural awareness, writing and composing, and real-life uses for the content we teach
• Why specific, systematic instruction is needed, going from part to whole
• How instructors can refresh skills for older readers as needed and pay attention to the areas of most significant and critical need by taking what students are already familiar with and adding to it (especially important for working with English Learners)

It has always been a game of catch up. New math standards often appear before there’s enough research to support them. Fortunately, we are a decade out from the last major changes to standards at the state and national levels. Research is catching up, particularly at the elementary and middle school levels.

This presentation will describe findings from a recent federal research synthesis that gives specific guidance for students who struggle in the elementary grades. These findings also have implications for middle school students. Finally, the presentation will provide examples of how standards and research have been embedded in a middle school intervention curriculum.

Participants will learn:

• Why there is an understandable gap between standards and supporting research
• Key recommendations supported by high-quality research for math interventions and elementary and middle school
• What these recommendations look like in an intervention curriculum

We hope you’ll join us!

We all know that fluent reading is an important goal for our students to achieve but how do we develop fluency and how do we help those who struggle?

Join us for this informative session with respected author and researcher Dr. Jan Hasbrouck, who will share an updated and functional definition of reading fluency. The presentation will also include research-supported fluency instruction strategies that you can apply to your own classroom teaching, the updated compiled ORF norms (Hasbrouck & Tindal, 1992; 2006; 2017) will be shared.

You’ll enjoy Hasbrouck’s motivating style as she provides an opportunity for attendees to reflect on how fluency supports reading comprehension and how it should fit into a comprehensive and effective reading program for all students.

 Attendees will:

• Learn the most accurate definition of the complex skill of reading fluency
• Gain an understanding of the current research
• Receive practical guidance for assessing and developing students’ fluency
• Learn new, specific skill-development activities

Interested in improving your literacy teaching and discovering creative new ways to get students excited about writing? Join teacher and science of reading advocate Hannah Irion-Frake for this applicable webinar! Our presenter will explore the reading-writing connection and will share ways you can appropriately increase the amount of writing students do in your classroom. The presentation will span the strands of Scarborough’s Reading Rope and will include strategies for writing related to both word recognition and language comprehension.

We hope you’ll join us as Irion-Frake illustrates how writing can strengthen reading instruction. You’ll learn:

• How opportunities for writing can strengthen students’ reading development
• Classroom-friendly strategies to increase opportunities for students to write
• Science of reading best practices for classroom implementation

As schools across the country implement a Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) framework, an integration of data and instruction is necessary to support all students and ensure success. Specific to math, a schoolwide or districtwide system should include various components, such as different types of assessment for different purposes, multiple levels or tiers of support, and available resources. Accurate assessment data is necessary to examine the effectiveness of instruction at each tier of support. This informative presentation will describe how to utilize math assessment data within a data-based, decision-making framework to evaluate instruction from a systems-level perspective. 

Attendees will learn:

• Why it’s important to conduct systems-level problem solving
• How assessment fits into the MTSS framework
• Ways to use math screening data to evaluate their system of support in math

We hope you’ll join us!