Equitable Access Strand

This session provides an engaging discussion on best practices for literacy instruction in the autistic support classroom. Through case profiles and video examples, presenters provide recommendations for assessments, curriculum materials, and instructional strategies to meet students’ needs.

According to research, English learners spend less than 2% of their school day in meaningful oral interactions. English learners need to productively engage in classroom discourse and express their thinking related to content-learning goals. This session will connect the components of the Scarborough Rope, the principles of language development, and the framework for oral production for English learners at the elementary level.

See the Sound - Visual Phonics^© is a system of 51 unique hand prompts and symbols that represent the sounds of English without the ambiguity of English orthography. Included are the sounds commonly referred to as vowels, consonants, diphthongs and digraphs. The See the Sound- Visual Phonics^© strategy is most appropriate for anyone who works with students who are struggling in their beginning reading and writing development, auditory discrimination abilities, and speech production abilities (e.g. struggling students in the general education classroom, students who are in special education, who are deaf and hard of hearing, bilingual). This session is an introduction to Visual Phonics^©. Participants will have a hands-on introduction to a few of the sound prompts, review validating research, and view video of the strategy being implemented in a variety of settings and age ranges of students. Due to the brevity of the session, participants will not be qualified to use See the Sound^© - Visual Phonics in instruction, however, information on how to receive the full training will be shared.

Do your students have diverse learning needs? Of course they do! Learner variability is the rule, not the exception. Join us for an overview of the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Framework and get started in applying it to develop your students into expert learners. We will identify potential barriers that inhibit learning and brainstorm ideas for designing instruction to reduce or eliminate those barriers as we address engagement, representation of content, and student action & expression.

Designing and facilitating meaningful classroom talk is essential for secondary English learners to develop more extended and sophisticated language use, while simultaneously learning subject matter. This session will address the components of the Scarborough Rope and connect them to the role of social interaction in language and literacy development, while exploring student interactions focusing on quality learning

As we understand the impact of trauma on child development, the importance of reading and language becomes even more clear. Learn to see the special place reading and language hold and how we can leverage them to respond to trauma and stress.