Let’s talk about how I can help you!
What are the literacy goals and/or priorities of your school, district, or organization? Depending on how you answer this, I can assist your through a host of services which include:
Literacy Audits
If you’re not sure where to begin to initiate substantive literacy reform, you may need to begin with a literacy audit. A literacy audit begins by visiting classrooms in schools, reviewing curricula and test data, and engaging in conversations with teachers and administrators. The results of a literacy audit can help you determine what you need to do next to help get the results you are looking for.
Teacher Workshops
Workshops are a great way to inspire teachers’ thinking about teaching and learning and provide a foundation for adjusting and honing classroom instructional practices. A sampling of workshops I offer include:
Reading
- Who’s Doing the Work? Unteaching Learned Helplessness (K-8)
- Helping Teachers Say Less So Students Can Do More–A Course for Administrators (K-8)
- Teaching Students to Mine Text for Its Deepest Meaning (Grades 3-8)
- Jumpstarting Readers When They Plateau (K-5)
- Increasing Vocabulary: A Pathway to Deeper Comprehension (Grades 3-8)
- Improving Reading Proficiency Through Small Group Instruction (Grades 3-8)
- A Fresh Look at Balanced Literacy: Small Adjustments that Lead to Big Change (K-8)
- Reading Conferences that Make a Difference
Writing
- Leveraging the One-on-One Conference to Improve Student Writing (K-8)
- Revising Techniques that Improve the Quality of Student Writing (Grades 3-8)
- Living a Writerly Life: Helping Students Come to Writing Eager and Ready to Write (Grades 3-8)
- Improving the Quality of Student Writing (Grades 2-8)
- Interactive Writing: A Pathway to More Proficient Writers (Grades 3-8)
On-Site Demonstration Lessons
Workshops are the first step to helping teachers understand how to adjust and hone classroom instructional practices, seeing it in action is the second step. Demonstration lessons support teachers as they work to implement new innovations in literacy instruction.
Classroom Coaching
Research shows that teachers who work with coaches are more than ten times likely to actually use the strategies they use in workshops (Joyce and Showers, 2002). Coaching allows teachers the opportunity to try out new ideas with the safety of knowing that an expert is there to provide the feedback they need to fully understand newly learned strategies and techniques.
Curriculum Development
You can’t have great instruction without great curriculum. I LOVE digging into standards and texts and figuring out what to teach, when to teach, and how to teach it.
Parent Workshops
Parents want to help their children be successful in school. My parent workshops are designed in tandem with my teacher workshops so that they communicate to parents the things that they can do to support their kids in becoming stronger, better readers, writers, and thinkers. A sampling of workshops I offer include:
- What Can I Do? My Child Is Struggling to Become a Better Reader!
- The Kind of Help that Helps: Assisting Children in Ways That Help Them Grow as Readers and Writers
