Voyager Sopris Learning EDVIEW360 Podcast Series

The evidence is compelling – early identification and intervention is key to providing the greatest opportunity to “close the gap” among struggling and successful readers. However, the stark reality is that many older students are reading below levels which enable them to comprehend grade level, and content-area texts.

Although an approach to intervention for older students may require some modifications, the components of explicit instruction, structured literacy, and ample opportunities to practice to fluency remain the cornerstone of good instruction. Join Dr. Julie Klingerman as she explores these facets of intervention unique to older students:

• How do the components of a structured literacy approach apply to older, struggling students?
• How can intervention be accelerated in both word recognition and language comprehension to prepare students for the rigors of content-area reading?
• Which kinds of practice are most motivating to students in grades 4 and up?

Participants will engage in the research and practical application of these topics and more, as Dr. Klingerman explores the unique needs and challenges of working with older students with complex literacy profiles.

Would you like your students to be more motivated, more engaged, more on-task, and learn more in your lessons? If so, the answer lies in increasing the opportunities to respond.

In this webinar, Dr. Archer, a respected authority on literacy teaching and learning, will share the research on opportunities to respond and practical procedures for implementing verbal, written, and action responses in all lessons. You’ll learn useful strategies and inspiring tips to help you better engage your students, and therefore they’ll learn more from your teaching.

Join us for this useful webinar with the always motivating Dr. Archer, and you’ll leave with practices you can immediately apply in your classroom. 

Join this fascinating, useful presentation as Dr. Leslie Laud shares the most powerful evidence-based practices for raising literacy outcomes—while emphasizing the role writing can play. As Dr. Laud calls on an abundance of current research, much of it just out in 2020-2021, she will help you understand its impact and how the research sheds new light on what works in explicit, Structured Literacy instruction. This webinar will present the latest evidence-based practices so you can best help your students get caught up following the gaps in instruction they may have experienced during the past year.

Attendees will learn:

• The latest advances in the science of writing
• The five keys of the science of writing
• The most promising practices you can use tomorrow
• About resources that can help you continue to grow as a writing teacher
• The overlap between reading and writing, and why writing can lift overall literacy outcomes 

Join education and assessment expert Dr. Kelly Powell-Smith of Acadience Learning as she examines the critical issues educators face when making assessment decisions. Which assessments are necessary to support schoolwide Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) in the area of literacy, and when should they be used?

You’ll walk away from this informative session with newfound understanding of:

• The various purposes assessments serve and what kinds of reading assessments are needed in a MTSS
• How to connect reading assessments to critical questions educators need to answer in a MTSS
• How to design an effective and efficient reading assessment system that results in actionable data leading to improved student outcomes

Dr. Powell-Smith will share application of these ideas in pre-K–8 settings, and she will provide specific examples and recommend resources.

We hope you’ll join us!

For our middle school English Learners, special considerations must be made based on the stages of language acquisition, literacy levels in their native language, and support needed to learn to read and write in English. As an educator, are you doing everything possible to change the trajectory of literacy challenges into success?

During this informative and eye-opening presentation, Dr. Antonio Fierro—an esteemed literacy expert and an English Learner himself—will illustrate why teachers of older English Learners must be diagnostic in nature with their approach to reading intervention. Attendees will also learn:

• To apply techniques that build on language components
• Why a Structured Literacy approach is essential for grades 5–8
• The language elements necessary to teach academic vocabulary and improve oral and written discourse
• How small-group and age-appropriate intervention succeeds when other approaches may not

We hope you’ll join us!

Join us for this enlightening conversation as our Acadience^® Learning experts discuss how to implement formative assessment of content-area reading in the middle school environment and why that is important. Lessons learned from successful implementation of Acadience^® Reading assessments in K–6 will be shared. We will discuss how and why implementation of formative assessment may differ for middle school. A framework for decision making, called the Outcomes-Driven Model, also will be shared and its use in middle school will be illustrated.

Attendees will learn:

• Useful information about formative assessments of content-area reading skills for use in grades 7 and 8
• How the use of these formative assessments within a decision-making framework focused on improving outcomes
• The benefits of this approach and the structure of these assessments
• Why it is imperative to focus on students in middle school