Oregon Response to Instruction and Intervention
2022 Virtual Reading Symposium
December 8, 2022
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General Information
There is no pre-registration for individual sessions. Use the session descriptions to decide which sessions you would like to attend. All session times are Pacific Standard Time.
For each session listed below, you will find:
A Session Description and Presenter Bio
A Zoom Link to access the session
A Presentation Resources link with access to materials in a Google Folder
There will be a 15-minute break between the Keynote and Session 1 (9:15 - 9:30) and between Session 1 and Session 2 (10:45 - 11:00).
All sessions will have Closed Captioning available.
All sessions will be recorded and will be available the following week on our website.
Join the conversation on Twitter! #ortii2022vrs
Use the button below to provide us with feedback on the conference. Completing the survey provides you with access to the Certificate of Professional Development Units (PDU's) for attending this training.
WELCOME & KEYNOTE (8:00 - 9:15 AM)
Keynote Description
In this keynote, Emily Hanford, host of the new podcast Sold a Story, will discuss what she's learned from five years of reporting on how kids in the United States are taught to read. Emily will tell the story of how she became interested in reading research after more than a decade of reporting on education mostly at the secondary and post-secondary levels. It’s clear there are no silver bullets in education, but Emily is convinced that improving early reading instruction is the closest we’ve got.
Please Note: Due to a scheduling conflict with our keynote speaker, this keynote address will be pre-recorded, so there will be no Questions & Answer section during the keynote.
Keynote Presenter Bio
Emily Hanford is a senior correspondent for American Public Media. Her work has appeared on NPR and in The New York Times, Washington Monthly, The Los Angeles Times and other publications. For the past several years, Emily has been reporting on early reading instruction. Her 2018 podcast episode “Hard Words: Why aren’t kids being taught to read?” won a public service award from the Education Writers Association. You can find all of her reporting on reading at apmreports.org/reading, including her podcast, Sold a Story: How teaching kids to read went so wrong (soldastory.org). Emily is based in Washington, D.C.
CONCURRENT SESSION 1 (9:30 - 10:45 AM)
Session Description
The United States is facing a national literacy crisis, a systemic problem that plagues our society and disproportionately impacts Black children. This workshop uses a historical lens and applies the analytical framework of social identity to the experiences of Black students experiencing the literacy crisis. Through an analysis of data and personal narratives, this session recommends meaningful action toward equity.
Speaker Bio
Resha Conroy is the founder of the Dyslexia Alliance for Black Children, a non-profit organization working to eliminate the amplified inequities for Black children experiencing unaddressed dyslexia and related learning disabilities.
A mother of two children with learning disabilities, including a son with dyslexia, Ms. Conroy is motivated by her family's journey to pursue her lifelong passion for education reform. She has over a decade of experience in education and non-profit management, serving on school leadership teams and as a consultant for charter schools in Washington, DC and New York City. Ms. Conroy has shifted her career to a clinical and direct service role; she is currently a speech-language pathologist and an executive functioning coach with a strong interest in language, literacy, and culture. She has a BA in economics from Smith College, an MPA in non-profit management, and an MS in communicative sciences and disorders from New York University.
Session Description
Learning to read and spell words requires knowledge of the alphabet and grapheme-phoneme correspondences, proficiency in phoneme blending and segmentation, and accuracy and automaticity in decoding and encoding. This session will examine these foundational skills that beginners need to become proficient readers and provide practical, evidence-based strategies for building each of these skills.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Holly Lane is the Director of the University of Florida Literacy Institute and a professor of special education. Her research focuses on effective reading instruction and intervention and helping teachers develop the knowledge and skills they need to teach reading effectively. Dr. Lane has directed more than $17 million in grants to support reading research and the development of teachers and researchers, and she is the author of numerous publications related to literacy.
Session Description
Syntactic knowledge, the ability to understand a variety of grammatical structures within the context of a sentence, supports students’ comprehension of text. This session presents research on syntax and explains its critical role in comprehending complex text and writing a variety of well-constructed sentences. Armed with this understanding, educators learn how to teach their students the functions of sentence parts—words, phrases, and clauses—in order to show them how to unpack the meaning of sentences they encounter in text and to write well-written sentences that convey their thoughts.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Margie B. Gillis, Ed.D., CALT, is the founder and president of Literacy How, Inc. , a non-profit organization that provides professional learning opportunities and coaching for educators on how best to implement evidence-based practices in the classroom. She has worked at the policy level through the Connecticut State Department of Education and is an advisor for ReadWorks, Understood, and the International Foundation for Effective Reading Instruction. She is on the Editorial Board of IDA, Perspectives and The Reading League Journal. Margie believes that learning to read is a civil right and that all children can learn to read and benefit from evidence-based instruction.
CONCURRENT SESSION 2 (11:00 AM - 12:15 PM)
Session Description
The most recent controversy in the so-called reading wars is whether what is sometimes called “reading science" applies to English learners. Compounding the problem is a lack of clarity about what “reading science” actually means. But regardless of whether we call this body of knowledge “reading science,” “research on reading,” or something else, what we know about how learners learn to read applies to English learners no less than to English speakers. However, there are important differences educators need to take into account when teaching students learning to read in a language they are simultaneously learning to speak and understand. Providing needed support throughout the grades is a must, and this includes making sure their fluency with foundational literacy skills continually improves.
Speaker Bio
Claude Goldenberg is the Nomellini & Olivier Professor of Education, emeritus, at Stanford University. He received his A.B. in history from Princeton University and M.A. and Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has taught junior high school in San Antonio, TX, and first grade in a bilingual elementary school in Los Angeles. A native of Argentina, his areas of research centered on promoting academic achievement among language minority students, particularly those from Spanish-speaking backgrounds. He continues writing, volunteering, and consulting on literacy research and policy and on promoting literacy development among students not yet proficient in English.
Session Description
Intensifying intervention instruction is best supported by a Multidisciplinary team that oversees the access and effectiveness of Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions. This session will focus on Tier 3, the most intensive level of intervention support. A process to evaluate student response to intervention instruction to design either group or individualized intensive intervention plans will be shared with participants.
Following this session, participants will be able to:
List the things a Multidisciplinary team needs to do in preparation for reviewing intervention data
Describe the steps for evaluating student response to intervention instruction
Outline the process for a Multidisciplinary team to design intervention adaptations to develop either a Group Intensive Intervention Plan or an Individualized Intensive Intervention Plan
The session would be appropriate for administrators, ancillary staff (e.g., school psychologists), and teachers.
Speaker Bio
Dr. St. Martin is the director of Michigan’s MTSS Technical Assistance Center and co-director of the state’s federally funded State Personnel Development Grant (SPDG). Previously, she was the co-director of a federal adolescent literacy model demonstration grant and co-principal investigator of an Institute of Education Sciences (IES) grant evaluating a state-level initiative to implement supplemental academic and behavioral interventions in an MTSS framework. Dr. St. Martin has been a panel member for the IES Practice Guide, Providing Reading Interventions for Students in Grades 4–9. Dr. St. Martin also collaborates with the National Implementation Research Network (NIRN) in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Effective Implementation Cohort. She also works with the National Center on Intensive Intervention (NCII) as a Center Trainer. Dr. St. Martin is the primary author of the Reading Tiered Fidelity Inventory (R-TFI) and co-author of implementation capacity assessments for districts and Regional Educational Agencies to guide their supporting infrastructures for an MTSS framework. She has more than 22 years of experience in the field of education.
Session Description
The importance of phoneme awareness for acquiring the alphabetic principle and for learning to read has been documented since the 1970s, gaining broad recognition when the National Reading Panel Report was published in 2000. In turn, instruction to foster phonological awareness has become routinely recommended for the early grades. The widespread practice in schools is to target awareness of larger phonological structures such as words, rhymes, syllables and onset-rimes before focusing on phonemes, with attention to the phoneme not occurring until well into the kindergarten year or first grade. In this talk, I will discuss studies that raise questions regarding whether following this ‘continuum’ is necessary or beneficial for students. In addition, the developmental sequence of phoneme awareness per se and the implications for instruction will be addressed.
Speaker Bio
Susan Brady received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Connecticut in 1975 and presently is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Rhode Island. She has held additional positions at the University of Sussex, St. Andrews University, and Haskins Laboratories. Concentrating on topics in the field of literacy, her research has focused on linguistic underpinnings of reading development and the nature of language weaknesses for struggling readers. In addition, she has been committed to translating the implications of the larger body of reading research for practice and has conducted professional development projects for educators.
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