(As of 3 June 2008--Subject to Change)
Keith Lenz, University of Kansas, and Janis Bulgren, KU-CRL
The time required to learn, plan, and implement Content Enhancement Routines effectively can be daunting. What can we do to help teachers become more comfortable and fluent in the use of responsive, systematic, and intensive instruction that can benefit all students? New Strategic Enhancers represent one approach to addressing this challenge. We believe that the robust, varied, consistent, and frequent use of graphic devices help organize and focus student attention on critical content. However, processes related to learning how to learn critical content also must be an important instructional goal. Strategic Enhancers--templates of graphic devices that can be reproduced and used with the GIST software--are based on the use of graphic organizers that help teachers and students strategically leverage the principles of Content Enhancement to increase learning. They have been organized into logical sets related to common learning goals to help students quickly acquire knowledge of facts and concepts as well as ways to manipulate information. They are used when a full-blown Content Enhancement Routine is not deemed necessary, but when some component of background information or understanding is needed for learning to proceed. Various ways of incorporating Strategic Enhancers into instruction will be presented, including: a) ways to emphasize the learning that takes place in parts of Content Enhancement Routines; b) ways to signal learning relationships; and c) ways to prepare students to apply and generalize learning. Materials related to this session will be available for purchase at GIST table, but purchase is not required to participate in this session.
Don Deshler, KU-CRL
Patty Graner, KU-CRL, & Michael Faggella-Luby, University of Connecticut
Schoolwide implementation of the Content Literacy Continuum™ (CLC) requires substantial knowledge of the Content Enhancement Routines and the Learning Strategies Curriculum. However, to meet the needs of all learners, complementary scientifically research-based interventions are necessary. This presentation will review a variety of complementary research-based practices at each of the five levels of the CLC for middle and high schools. The presentation will conclude with a framework for assessing implementation efficacy and resources for further information.
Charles Hughes, Pennsylvania State University
This session will present a recently developed and validated strategy that helps students edit writing projects generated on a word processor. The strategy, EDIT, is a blended update of the Error Monitoring Strategy and the InSPECT Spell Checker Strategy. In addition to describing the strategy steps and the instructional methods, the presenter will describe a recent randomized control study in which 20 fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-grade students with learning disabilities were taught the strategy. Results showed that students who mastered the strategy detected and corrected significantly more spelling and grammar errors than students in the treatment group. Additionally, they performed as well as a group of 25 students without disabilities.
Joe Fisher, Grand Valley State University, Michigan
Edge Enterprises researchers have developed a series of e-learning programs for professional development on the Concept Comparison, Concept Anchoring, Question Exploration, and Concept Mastery Routines. Beyond a review of data on the effect of these e-learning programs, participants will explore and experience their instructional features first hand. Participants also will discuss ideas for applying e-learning programs as part of preservice and inservice professional development. Don't forget to bring your laptop!
Janis Bulgren, KU-CRL, and Keith Lenz, University of Kansas
Teachers implementing Level I of the Content Literacy Continuum™ have a wealth of needs and opportunities to enhance content area instruction, but day-to-day demands often mean the school day flies by without the opportunity to think deeply and plan for quick, meaningful ways to enhance instruction. This session will explore the differences between emerging strategies and embedded strategies. Emerging strategies are those that naturally evolve through the use of Content Enhancement Routines; that is, students learn the strategy because the teacher repeats critical processes. Embedded strategies are literacy strategies that are incorporated with Content Enhancement Routines or general content instruction in an effort to have the students learn and practice them in authentic ways. Teachers also need a flexible and efficient planning and teaching routine that fits these strategies. The steps of such a procedure also will be presented.
Doug Adams, ALTEC/KU-CRL
Integrate Internet resources into classroom instruction. Take advantage of these free, easy-to-use tools on the Web to organize Internet resources into online lessons with associated assessment instruments. Make rubrics, online quizzes, and Web pages, then organize them into lesson plans to guide your students through the lesson. Presenters will demonstrate TrackStar, RubiStar, Web Worksheet Wizard, and QuizStar. Integrate "Google Docs" into your projects and support collaborative online research with NoteStar. It is all free and available to everyone online.
Don Deshler, KU-CRL
The last few years have seen dramatic developments in both the national education environment and our own expanded research interests. A recent federal emphasis on adolescent literacy has opened new avenues for our exploration. In light of these changes, are the accomplishments of our past still relevant? Fortunately and emphatically, yes! In this session, Don will string together the pearls produced in the KU-CRL oyster, positioning these gems in the context of the Center's continuing focus on struggling adolescent learners in secondary schools.
Download Don's handout notes (Word file)
Jim Knight, KU-CRL
Students who are able to identify and paraphrase main ideas and details are more likely to understand and remember what they read. Unfortunately, for many students, finding main ideas and details and paraphrasing are not easy tasks. The Fundamentals of Paraphrasing and Summarizing is designed to provide the fundamentals students need to learn those important strategies. Fundamentals contains lessons on paraphrasing words, phrases, and sentences, as well as lessons on identifying main ideas and details in paragraphs and short essays. Professional developers who are looking for a step-by-step approach to improving some important elements of reading comprehension should benefit from this presentation.
Mike Hock and Irma Brasseur, KU-CRL
During this session, we will present an overview of one of the Center's newest evidence-based reading programs. Fusion Reading™ is a comprehensive two-year reading program organized into three components: 1. Motivation, 2. The Bridging Strategy, and 3. Comprehension Strategies. Each of the key components will be highlighted. Additionally, the presenters will share results from three experimental studies conducted with struggling readers in grades six through 10. Professional development requirements, activities, and planning also will be discussed.
Aaron Sumner and Amber Hoffman, KU-CRL
You've joined a Learning Labs group, mastered online discussions, and maybe even shared an article or two in a file repository. But that's just the tip of the iceberg! You can add wikis, multimedia, assessments, community glossaries, and more to your Learning Labs group. Join us in exploring these options and discussing how to use them for effective online collaboration.
Janis Bulgren, KU-CRL, and Keith Lenz, University of Kansas
As professional developers, what do we emphasize in our workshops and coaching that helps teachers and administrators understand what is good implementation? How well are we helping teachers see how to use Content Enhancement Routines, Strategic Enhancers, GIST, our fidelity checklists, and our other professional development resources to send the right messages? Do we model high-quality implementation? Do we agree on what is good implementation? How well do we set teachers on the path to using the tools and principles of Content Enhancement as the overall structure for an entire course? Is implementation a once-in-awhile event, or do we see integrated, continuing, and flexible use of Content Enhancement? This session is an updated version of last year's popular session and will examine the dimensions of high-quality Content Enhancement implementation at the course, teacher, department, and school levels that need to be considered in determining "good" implementation.
Sue Vernon, Edge Enterprises
The focus of this presentation will be to describe and demonstrate an interactive multimedia (IM) program for teaching social skills to at-risk adolescents. The program provides self-paced instruction in skills that are basic to communication, are important when dealing with authority figures and peers, and are typically listed as areas of skill deficits for youth with social-adjustment issues. The skill lessons developed to date include Dealing with Critical Feedback, Coping with No, Accepting Advice, Negotiation, Apologizing, Involving Others, and Responding to Peer Pressure. Participants will have an opportunity to preview the program on their laptop computers. Some laptops will be provided. A "special edition" of the CD will be available for purchase at the conference, but purchase is not required to participate in this session.
Nanette Fritschmann, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Penn.
The purpose of this presentation is to provide information about a research study designed to develop, evaluate, and validate an instructional program for teaching the Inference Strategy, an inferencing and reading comprehension strategy. Further, participants will learn the steps associated with how to teach the Inference Strategy in various classrooms. The goal associated with teaching the Inference Strategy is to improve students' ability to comprehend reading passages and to improve their ability to respond to inferential questions as required in most of their subject-matter classes as well as on state assessments. Specific outcomes of the study and student data will be presented, including the results from a standardized assessment. At the end of this interactive session, participants will have learned the procedures of the Inference Strategy and the outcomes related to a study of a reading comprehension strategy focusing on inferring meaning from narrative text.
Don Deshler, KU-CRL, and Barbara Ehren, University of Central Florida, Orlando
The field of adolescent literacy has changed remarkably over the past 10 years. The focus now is on discipline-specific literacy requirements. We speak of the literacy of science, math, history, literature, and more, in addition to generic reading comprehension approaches. In this session, professional developers will explore the different pearls of domain knowledge, language processing, and strategic approaches as they relate to specific academic areas. They will experience first hand the literacy requirements of a difficult academic text.
Handouts from this session:
Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar, Jean and Charles Walgreen Jr. Chair of Reading and Literacy, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, University of Michigan
This address illustrates four perspectives useful to exploring success and failure in learning to read and in using reading for learning, knowledge building, and personal growth. The cognitive perspective has focused principally on readers' skills, the acquisition of expertise, individual differences, and issues regarding motivation and persistence. The linguistic perspective has enriched our understanding of the role of language in reading and how awareness of language can inform the design of instruction. In addition, this perspective has enriched the tools with which we analyze text to identify its affordances and challenges and modify text to enhance its accessibility. The sociocultural perspective has been particularly useful to locating reader/text interactions in multiple contexts (both in and out of school), while the critical perspective makes particularly salient the socially constructed nature of reading ability/disability. In addition, it signals the importance of identity, agency, power, and institutional structures in explaining inter- and intra-individual differences in reading and reading achievement.
Dan Boudah, East Carolina University
For some students, the challenge of understanding content often results in failure. In particular, many students have difficulty understanding the main ideas in what they read, especially when they have to "read between the lines." This session will introduce participants to the Main Idea Strategy, a new research-based strategy. In the research, students showed pre- to post-test score gains, considerable improvement through continuing curriculum-based measurement, and changes in state test performance. Teachers and students overwhelmingly provided social validation for the strategy. Session participants will be introduced to the strategy and manual, which includes step-by-step teacher lesson plans, instructional resources, and student practice lessons. This strategy is designed for elementary, secondary, or adult literacy students.
Janis Bulgren, KU-CRL, and Keith Lenz, University of Kansas
Over the past 30 years, we have learned how critical it is to provide responsive, systematic, and intensive instruction to students in special education programs. We have struggled even more with how to broaden use of this type of instruction to general education courses to increase content-area learning for students with disabilities as well as for many other struggling secondary students. As a result, we have learned that Content Enhancement Routines can provide a framework for this type of instruction. Each of the routines may be thought of as one piece of a big puzzle. Each piece is an important and necessary part of the puzzle, but it takes all the pieces to complete the picture. This session will model how Content Enhancement, with its multiple devices, can be integrated to provide an overall framework for course design. Issues related to the benefits and the problems will be discussed, and resources will be provided to help us move ahead toward the goal of helping all students learn.
Melanie Bacon, ALTEC/KU-CRL
MATRIX is a Star Schools Project that uses technology games and simulations in after-school programs to improve middle school mathematics achievement. This hands-on workshop will demonstrate some of the games created by the various MATRIX partners to teach middle school math. Participants will explore various math games and activities designed to teach concepts such as number lines, ratio, coordinate graphs, and linear equations.
Brief, yet excellent, presentations
The Authentic Classroom Learning Opportunities tool (ACLO) is a data-gathering tool developed by the presenters to be useful for coaches and other observers of classroom instruction. Come and learn how to use the ACLO to identify components of teachers' instruction and classroom management that can be targeted for further examination, change, and improvement. Teachers have responded favorably when the ACLO has been used. Participating teachers and coaches have engaged in open dialogue regarding what the classroom data indicate and have participated in problem-solving activities to increase instructional and engagement time for themselves and their students. The presenters indicate that this tool may be foundational to supporting teacher-colleagues interested in maximizing classroom learning opportunities.
Participants will explore student motivation as a central focus of designing learning experiences by merging components of Grant Wiggins' Understanding by Design with Content Enhancement Routines. The shift from planning instruction to designing learning experiences moves from teacher-centered planning to consideration of effective design elements in addressing diverse student populations. Although this adaptation may seem subtle, the implications are remarkable in terms of potential results related to learning. As we construct our understandings of student motivation, we will set our sight on the design features that emanate from our conversation of this important concept. This constructivist session will culminate in generating principles of learning based on our larger conversation. The participants will leave this session with an experience of the application of SIM and Understanding by Design as an instructional approach as well as exploring motivation to design learning experiences.
As school administrators and teachers across the country become more interested, aware, and involved in the large-scale implementation of SIM Learning Strategies, it is increasingly important to address the issues that arise when providing instruction for large groups. In this session, participants will get ideas for dealing with management struggles, providing feedback to students, activities, and differentiating instruction. Participants also will discuss classroom instructional options, including centers, learning partners, and cooperative groups.
The presentation will explore how Learning Strategies are incorporated into the curriculum at Alpha to Omega Learning Centre for children with specific learning difficulties in Chennai. The presenter also will discuss how the tutor trainees have reached students in different parts of India and will share the findings of a research project that used learning strategies related to reading comprehension to enhance the self-esteem of the students at the Centre.
Gail Cheever, Facilitator
Neat Ideas & Nifty Devices for Modeling CE Routines with Teachers
Gail Cheever, Learning Specialist, Trophy Club, Texas
This session will refer to the books Power Standards by Larry Ainsworth and Classroom Assessment for Student Learning by Rick Stiggins. We will discuss how both books support the use of the Course and Unit Organizers in grades K-12. We will discuss how to walk your staff through identifying the state-level "power standards" (for example, learning targets) at each grade level; how to assess for competency of those standards; and how to use the Course and Unit Organizers as a means to actually teach the standards throughout the school year. This is an example of one school's attempt to align curriculum, instruction, and assessment and to improve student performance through the use of these tools.
The presenter will demonstrate how to use the "magic fold" in professional development. This fun manipulative uses two pieces of construction paper, clever cuts, and a weaving technique to create a LINCs table and a neat way to self-test.
Bev Mommsen, Facilitator
This brief presentation will include ideas for practicing the Word Identification Strategy mnemonic and motivating the learner. The use of a couple of tactile tools along with color and movement will be part of the "neatest things."
Anna O'Connor and Mary E. Little, Project CENTRAL, Daytona Beach, Fla.
As a direct result of sustained and systemic professional development, continuous communication among participants as well as state SIM leaders, and the development of deliverables such as mentoring guides, regional planning guidebooks, and numerous checklists, completion rates among potential professional developers in Florida have soared to above 70 percent. This presentation will provide an overview of the success and longevity of the Florida SIM Professional Development Network. Presenters will describe products and resources that have been co-developed by members of the network to support their work. Session leaders and other state leaders in attendance will facilitate discussions.
Ken Geisek and Mary Black
A successful Content Literacy Continuum™ Project--schoolwide or districtwide SIM initiative--consists of several essential elements; however, the most important component is the people involved in the project. The group of individuals working to address the literacy needs of young people is not limited to professional developers and instructional staff but also should include site and district administrators. If administrative staff do not understand the language and ideas underlying CLC and SIM, then the project encounters a substantial barrier to success. Turning the frustrating situation of conflicting viewpoints from a grain of sand to a pearl may be accomplished with developing an understanding of the different roles and expectations of everyone involved in the project. This Pearls of a Successful Project session will share the perspective of a principal and a superintendent on implementing a school- or districtwide CLC project and professional development plan.
David Scanlon, Lynch School of Education, Boston College
It is possible to claim an opinion or name a fact without really understanding it. Many students have difficulty stating their knowledge; they also may be challenged to explain that information or to defend it against reasonable challenges. The PROVE Strategy is a process students use to identify their knowledge or belief, provide supporting evidence, and consider alternative perspectives. Teachers use a PROVE Sheet to guide students through the PROVE process as they are learning it. The strategy was validated in research with an eighth-grade middle school team of 98 students (12 with LD). Five team teachers taught the strategy across the curriculum. Findings documented that students with and without LD effectively generalized the PROVE process to academic tasks in different content areas. Propositions stated at pretest were more clearly stated and fully explained at posttest. Student samples will be shared, and session attendees will practice the strategy as they learn teaching tips.
Barbara Ehren, University of Central Florida, Orlando
STRUCTURE Your Reading is a strategic reading approach that has been under development over the past six years. It is called a "strateroutine" because it begins as a teaching routine and develops into a strategy. Students learn what they need to do before, during, and after reading to improve their reading comprehension. It is designed for a variety of implementation scenarios, including collaboration among reading and content teachers and among general and special educators. A variety of studies have been conducted to test its effectiveness in improving reading comprehension. This session launches the publication of the guidebook.
Janis Bulgren, KU-CRL
The ability to write good answers to complex questions is becoming increasingly important across content areas. However, the time content teachers have to develop and teach writing skills in content classes is understandably limited. One response is to combine writing instruction scaffolds with continuing research-based content instruction. One such research-based routine is the Question Exploration Routine with its associated Question Exploration Guide. These focus on a critical question in a content area, helping teacher and students explore, answer, and generalize learning about an important content question. Research has shown that the Question Exploration Guide also provides a way to help students scaffold and write a five-paragraph essay. Results indicate that all students in an experimental condition, including those with disabilities, performed better on measures of content knowledge and on writing when scored with the 6-Trait Writing Analysis than did those in a control condition. Descriptions of the essay-writing scaffold and data will be presented. In addition, extensions to other Content Enhancement devices such as Concept Mastery and Concept Comparison will be explored.
Handouts from this session:
Aaron Sumner and Amber Hoffman, KU-CRL
If you liked the Content Enhancement Library, you'll love Depot, the latest online collaboration tool from Stratepedia. Learn how Depot's new sharing features support Content Enhancement professional development, expand opportunities to collaborate with other educators, and interface with state standards. Bring a laptop and your computer-ready organizers (GIST, pdf, PowerPoint, etc.) for hands-on practice, or just follow along with Amber and Aaron!
Patty Graner and Don Deshler, KU-CRL
Monica Harris, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo
Participants will get the highlights of the Word Mapping Strategy. A literature review on vocabulary instruction with emphasis on generative and non-generative vocabulary approaches will be explored. Results and conclusions of the study will be reviewed and discussed. The study tested the effects of teaching secondary students with learning disabilities who were enrolled in general education classes a morphemic analysis strategy for analyzing and predicting the meaning of words. The two conditions were the Word Mapping condition, in which students learned the morphological analysis strategy, and the Vocabulary LINCing condition, in which students learned a mnemonic strategy. This session will be of interest (but not limited) to researchers, university faculty, administrators, and specialists interested in reading instruction.
Monica Harris, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo
Participants will learn how to use the Word Mapping Strategy. A review of the introductory lessons, practice worksheets, and use of the Word Maps will be described and modeled. The mnemonic MAPS is used to recall the steps of the strategy. The mnemonic device helps students learn and remember the names of the steps. The strategy involves breaking words into their morphemic parts (i.e., prefix, suffix, root); attaching meaning to each word part; making a prediction about the meaning of the unknown word based upon the meaning of each part; and checking the dictionary for the definition. This session will be of interest (but not limited) to general and special education teachers, reading or literacy coaches, and tutors.
Jean Schumaker, Edge Enterprises; Mike Hock and Don Deshler, KU-CRL; and Suzanne Robinson, Strategic Learning Center
This panel presentation will review different aspects of the research conducted on the Center's new reading curriculum, Xtreme Reading™. Presenters will review data collected during a two-year study of the Xtreme Reading course, summarize the official first-year report, and preview future directions.
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