Presenters: Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey
Dates: October 11, November 1, 15, 29 (Tuesdays)
All webinars start at 3:45 p.m.
One credit available (Graded)
Every brain needs to be taught to read. And over the past 100+ years, there have been hundreds of thousands of studies that comprise a science of reading. During this workshop series, Dr’s Fisher and Frey will unwrap the research around the science of reading, and provide clear and concise plays around strategies that have the highest influence on reading development for young children.
Target Audience: Teachers, Leaders and Coaches- grades K-3 – but anyone involved in early childhood literacy would find these sessions beneficial.
Session 1 – What’s New and What’s Enduring in Reading Instruction? (October 11, 2022 with Doug Fisher)
Research in reading dates to 1865 and is the oldest form of educational research. Knowledge of best practices continues to evolve over the last 157 years. In this opening session, we use Hollis Scarborough’s reading rope as the organizer for the playbook as well as the series. We provide an overview and grounding in word recognition and language comprehension and their reciprocal nature. In addition, we focus on newer elements of reading research to build the constrained and unconstrained skills of reading. Doug Fisher, a past president of the International Reading Association, hosts this session.
Session 2 – Word Recognition: The Foundational Skills of Reading (November 1, 2022 with Nancy Frey)
Readers must develop the skills necessary to quickly and accurately recognize words. In this session, we turn our attention to phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition. In addition, we expand on the reading rope by adding specific strands on fluency and alphabetics as essential components of word recognition. Nancy Frey, a member of the Literacy Research Panel of ILA, leads this session.
Session 3 – Language Comprehension: Understanding What is Read (November 15 with Nancy Frey)
At the same time that foundational skills are being built, language comprehension instruction must also occur. This session focuses on vocabulary development as well as morphological awareness. This session includes a focus on language structures, in particular the syntactic and semantic dimensions of sentence- and text-level comprehension
Session 4 – Metacognitive Awareness: Becoming Increasingly Strategic and Fluent Readers (November 29 with Doug Fisher)
Effective readers are active and self-aware readers. In this final session, we examine the metacognitive dimensions of the reading rope, with special attention to verbal reasoning and literacy knowledge. As well, we examine the role and development of background knowledge necessary for comprehension of texts. We end with exciting newer research on the role of a theory of mind in reading, and the ways word recognition and language comprehension are braided together to build strategic and fluent readers.