FEATURED SPEAKERS
Sunday March 30
Session I (March 30, 2008; 8:30-9:40 AM)
March 30, 2008 8:30-9:40 AM
Venue: Swyer Theater (at the Egg)
Title: Using Literacy to Support Children's Acquisition of Science--Synergy in Action
Presenter: P. David Pearson
Audience: All
Conference Themes: Assessment, Language Development and Literacy; Educator Preparation
In his presentation, Professor Pearson discusses the ways in which Science and Literacy can support one another: Both how reading and writing and oral language can support the acquisition of knowledge in Inquiry-Based Approaches to teaching Science AND how science content can provide the occasion for fine-tuning the development of writing, comprehension, and academic language.
P. David Pearson’s research interests include practice and policy in literacy instruction and assessment. A member of the National Academy of Education, he is a former dean of the College of Education of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also co-directed the Center for the Study of Reading. Before coming to Berkeley he was the John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor of Education at Michigan State University. He has served as president of the National Reading Conference and on the boards of directors for the International Reading Association, the National Reading Conference, and the Association of American Colleges of Teacher Education. His honors include the William S. Gray Citation of Merit from the International Reading Association, the Oscar Causey Award for Contributions to Reading Research from the National Reading Conference, and the Alan Purves Award from the National Council of Teachers of English. Among his books and articles are the Handbook of Reading Research, now in its third volume; and Learning to Read: Lessons for Effective Schools and Accomplished Teachers (with B. Taylor, 2000).
March 30, 2008 8:30-9:40 AM
Venue: Clark Auditorium (at the Museum)
Title: Making High Poverty Schools Great: The Hi-perform School Design
Presenter: Stanley Pogrow
Audience: Pre K-8 Grade
Conference Themes: Promoting High Intellectual Growth and Enrichment, Leadership Strategies for the 21st Century
This session will describe a powerful, yet practical new design for restructuring high poverty schools K-8. This design incorporates the three most effective strategies for reducing the learning gap. The Hi-perform School design provides the potential to dramatically improve the performance of high poverty schools because a) each of these uniquely powerful techniques has never been used jointly in a school to get a multiplier effect, and b) they do not exist today in high poverty schools. In addition, the design can be built around a school’s existing curriculum and allows for local customization. The three gap reduction techniques will be described, along with the strategies for implementing the design.
Dr. Stanley Pogrow is currently the William Allen Endowed Chair and distinguished visiting professor of Educational Leadership at Seattle University, while he is on leave from the University of Arizona. Dr. Pogrow specializes in school reform policy and the application of technology. His work over the past twenty-four years has focused on using technology to produce more sophisticated forms of learning after the third grade. This work started with the Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) program for Title I and LD students. Using the lessons learned from the Hots program, an alternative approach to teach math for all students, called Supermath was developed. Supermath provides interesting opportunities for districts to better meet the accountability challenges of No Child Left Behind, while also producing the types of reflective mathematics learning.
March 30, 2008 8:30-9:40 AM
Venue: Convention Hall
Title: Reading Strategies for the Underachieving Reader
Presenters: Kylene Beers and Robert Probst
Audience: All
Conference Themes: Assessment, Language Development and Literacy; Educator Preparation
This workshop offers a rationale and strategies for teaching reading and literature with underachieving students. It assumes that, despite the difficulties such students may have, if they are offered proven strategies for attacking texts and texts that are worth reading, both appealing to and challenging them, and they are in a classroom environment that encourages them, they will learn.
Kylene Beers, author of When Kids Can’t Read: What Teachers Can Do, is a former teacher, a former editor, and a senior reading researcher at Yale University. She currently serves as the President of NCTE.
Robert Probst was a former junior and senior high school English teacher before becoming Professor of English Education at Georgia State University. There, working with both experienced teachers and teachers in training, he designed strategies to respect the interests of the students and their responses to what they read, while also leading into thoughtful analysis of texts. He wanted the literature classroom to become a community of readers and writers who, by sharing their thoughts about significant works, grow intellectually, aesthetically, and emotionally. That work led him to write Response and Analysis: Teaching Literature in the Secondary Schools. He has also served as columnist for Voices from the Middle, an NCTE publication.
March 30, 2008 8:30-9:40 AM
Venue: Room 6 (at the Convention Center)
Title: Increasing Reading Ability Through Cognitive Clarity
Presenter: Gwen Lavert
Audience: All
Conference Themes: Assessment, Language Development and Literacy
Many children approach reading instruction in a state of cognitive confusion about the purposes and features of language. This presentation will help educators foster accountability and help students taking and retain information that they learn in order for them to have complete comprehension.
Gwen Lavert the author of twenty-five books for children and is an Assistant Professor of Education at Indiana Wesleyan University.
Session II (March 30, 2008; 10:00- 11:30 AM)
March 30, 2008 10:00-11:30 AM
Venue: Convention Hall
Passing of the Torch Ceremony
Keynote Title: Letters To A Young Teacher
Presenter: Jonathan Kozol
Audience: All
In reviewing Jonathan Kozol’s twelfth book, Letters To a Young Teacher, Stacy Teicher Khadaroo, writing in the Christian Science Monitor in September, 2007, said: “…But never before has he addressed teachers as directly as he does in Letters to a Young Teacher, based on letters he wrote to a new teacher he calls Francesca, who welcomed him to her first-grade classroom in Boston – the city where he began teaching 40 years earlier.
Kozol has made a career of advocating for inner-city students. He has observed their schools, spent time with their teachers and families, and told their stories to the world. Those stories, intertwined with his own, inform his trenchant critique of an educational system that continues to segregate children and relegate low-income minorities to overcrowded, underfunded classrooms…
Now he's making his battle cry even more explicit, urging young teachers to take a stand if they, too, see injustice in their students' lives. But his weapons of choice are peaceful ones – the teachers' own creativity and their commitment to nurturing their students' sense of delight…”
This best selling author returns to podium as a keynote speaker in the Teaching For Intelligence series for the sixth time; this time speaking to the issues raised in Letters To A Young Teacher.
In the passion of the civil rights campaigns of 1964 and 1965, Jonathan Kozol moved from Harvard Square into a poor black neighborhood of Boston and became a fourth grade teacher in the Boston Public Schools. He has devoted the subsequent four decades to issues of education and social justice in America.
Death at an Early Age, a description of his first year as a teacher, was published in 1967 and received the 1968 National Book Award in Science, Philosophy, and Religion. Now regarded as a classic by educators, it has sold more than two million copies in the United States and Europe.
His 1995 best seller, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, described his visits to the South Bronx of New York, the poorest congressional district of America. Praised by scholars such as Robert Coles and Henry Louis Gates, and children’s advocates and theologians all over the nation, Amazing Grace received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1996, an honor previously granted to the works of Langston Hughes and Dr. Martin Luther King.
His next book, Ordinary Resurrections, was a more introspective work about the spiritual and moral qualities of children he had come to know in the South Bronx. A favorite among schoolteachers because of its narratives of daily life seen through the eyes of children, the book was described by The Washington Post as “an eloquent love letter to a set of children” whom Jonathan had “grown to know, cherish, and delight in.” The New York Times described it as “deeply moving…the most personal of Kozol’s efforts.” The poet Gwendolyn Brooks praised it as “a magnificent gift to us all.”
In The Shame of the Nation, Mr. Kozol returned to the battle with his strongest, most disturbing work: a powerful exposé of the conditions he found in visiting and revisiting nearly sixty public schools in thirty different districts in eleven states over five years. Virtually everywhere, he found that inner-city children are more isolated racially than they have been any time since federal courts began dismantling the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.
Ticketed Luncheon
March 30, 2008 11:30 AM- 12:45 PM
Venue: Room 6 (in the Convention Center)
Title: Driving the Dream: Literacy and the Arts
Presenter: Lindamichellebaron
Audience: All
Dr. Linda Michelle Baron is a former New York City public school teacher, earned her Master’s Degree in Reading and her Doctorate in Cross Categorical Studies from Columbia University’s Teachers College. Dr. Baron is currently a Professor in the Teacher Education Department at York College in New York City. She is the President and founder of Harlin Jacque Publications, a publishing and educational consulting firm established over two decades ago. As an author and poet, her books include: The Sun Is On (listed as a recommended book for New York State middle schools), Rhythm & Dues, For the Love of Life and Anthony Ant and Grady Grasshopper. The innovative Poetry & Ideas Book Series, published by Harlin Jacque Publications, is Linda Michelle Baron’s written invitation to international audiences. She invites all to achieve, grow, resolve conflicts, love themselves, and love others. Her “idea” books support her creative messages and provide self-reflective “how to” activity guides for life and learning. They include writing exercises that support goal achievement strategies. Dr. Baron’s innovative and expanding educational enrichment program, Driving the Dream: Literacy and the Arts, has been implemented in educational systems across the country. Dr. Baron is also co-author of The Write Direction (Modern Curriculum Press), an instructional writing textbook series published in 1999. Her poems have been featured in a number of poetry anthologies as well as on stage in the recent musical and dance production, The Groove that Got the Move of Us!
Session III (March 30, 12:45-1:55 PM)
March 30, 2008 12:45-1:55 PM
Venue: Huxley Theater (at the Museum)
Title: Language of Schooling: Access or No Access for Bi-Lingual, Bi-Literate and/or Bi-Dialectal Speakers
Presenter: Clara Amador-Watson
Audience: All
This session will allow participants to explore the interrelationship between language, home language use and language of schooling for educational access. Exploring implementation of equity pedagogy in urban classrooms requires the use of differentiated and responsive assessment and instruction in order to provide rigor, relevance and access for English Learners and Standard English Learners. The construct of Language Minority status will be explored via legislative initiatives, policy making, and professional teaching practices within K-12 public schooling.
During the last twenty years, Clara Amador-Watson’s career has centered on English as a Foreign Language, English as a Second Language, Bilingual and Dual Language Education in the US and abroad. She holds degrees in Sociology of Education, Elementary Education, Bilingual Teaching Methodologies, Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis for Culturally Linguistically Diverse Students has allowed her to teach in multiple urban settings from K-12 schools to post-graduate degree programs in teacher preparation for ELLs. She is currently working on Professional Development for in-service teachers and Professional Preparation for pre-service teachers via alternative certification routes.
March 30, 2008 12:45-1:55 PM
Venue: Clark Auditorium (at the Museum)
Title: A Thinking Development Approach to Accelerating Title I and LD Students in Grades 4-8: Research Findings from the 26 Years of the HOTS Project
Presenter: Stanley Pogrow
Audience: Grades 4-8
Conference Themes: Promoting High Intellectual Growth and Enrichment
This session will discuss the conditions under which a thinking development approach can accelerate the learning of Title I and LD students to a greater extent than relying on remedial test-prep approaches This method will emphasize the ability of this approach to produce transfer to a wide variety of academic gains and social growth in the critical grades of 4-8, where early gains typically dissipate. This session will explore the 26 year history of the HOTS (Higher Order Thinking Skills) project and is success with over 500,000 students. The HOTS approach replaces remedial instruction with a unique Socratic learning environment built around the use of technology and drama.
Dr. Stanley Pogrow is currently the William Allen Endowed Chair and distinguished visiting professor of Educational Leadership at Seattle University, while he is on leave from the University of Arizona. Dr. Pogrow specializes in school reform policy and the application of technology. His work over the past twenty-four years has focused on using technology to produce more sophisticated forms of learning after the third grade. This work started with the Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) program for Title I and LD students. Using the lessons learned from the Hots program, an alternative approach to teach math for all students, called Supermath was developed. Supermath provides interesting opportunities for districts to better meet the accountability challenges of No Child Left Behind, while also producing the types of reflective mathematics learning.
March 30, 2008 12:45-1:55 PM
Venue: Swyer Theater (at the Egg)
Title: Learning Deficiencies or Deficient Learning?
Presenter: Rafi Feuerstein
Audience: All
Conference Themes: Promoting High Intellectual Growth and Enrichment, Learning Needs of Boys
The phenomenon of learning deficiencies occupies a considerable place in world educational systems. The increase of the phenomenon raises the question of whether we are facing a trait or a state. A trait is a fixed character feature – in all probability innate – with far-reaching implications and above all, non-modifiable.
Feuerstein's Theory of Structural Cognitive Modifiability postulates that learning deficiency is a 'state' - dependent, amongst other things, on the environment in which the person exists and functions, and, most importantly, that this state can be changed dramatically.
Rabbi Rafi Feuerstein will argue that deeming learning deficiencies to be a matter of 'state' stems from perceiving intelligence as a product of culture. Culture conveyed by parents and teachers to the younger generation comprises not only content but also thinking functions. Learning deficiency must be perceived as a state of the difficulty to convey culture, the cause of the failure to acquire necessary thinking and learning functions. The importance of this question is increased enormously when applied to students from culturally different backgrounds. Such students are at risk of being labeled learning-deficient merely because the strategies they acquired in their natural environment are unsuitable for the academic environment in which they find themselves.
The lecture will analyze cases that show the possible effect of cultural difference on erroneous learning deficient labeling and on methods for the cognitive development of various groups of the population who have been branded learning-deficient or underachievers.
March 30, 2008 12:45-1:55 PM
Venue: Convention Hall
Title: Literacy Instruction that ACCELERATES Achievement: Learning from Excellent Teachers
Presenter: Jeanne Paratore
Audience: All
Perhaps more than at any other point in our educational history, teachers today are held accountable for the consequences of their instructional decisions, particularly as they relate to children’s reading achievement. Rightfully, teachers are expected to be able to justify the instructional practices they use on the basis of sound and rigorous research evidence. But not all educators and policymakers agree on what qualifies as “sound and rigorous” research, and often such discussions become bogged down in a discussion of the merits (or demerits) of various instructional programs. Although programmatic materials are important, none matters more than a qualified and excellent teacher. This presentation will focus on the teaching behaviors and conditions that have been found to relate to high levels of reading achievement. The presentation will use excerpts from a video library of authentic, unscripted classroom literacy lessons showing teachers and students engaged in research-based reading practices to support the discussion among session participants.
March 30, 2008 12:45-1:55 PM
Venue: Room 6 (at the Convention Center)
Title: Promoting High Intellectual Performance
Presenter: Ahmes Askia
Audience: All
Conference Themes: Promoting High Intellectual Growth and Enrichment
This interactive session will address the adolescent brain and how teachers can use the latest research on this growing brain to engage and accelerate the learning for their students. Participants will explore the integration of Youth culture, language use, and development, and student voice in planning and delivering instruction to middle and high school students. Participants will develop lessons, share in text-base discussion and practice the strategies learned. Additionally, because of the practice, participants will leave with strategies that they can implement in their classrooms immediately.
Ahmes Askia began her educational career in 1976 with Prescription Learning Corporation (later became Jostens Learning) as an education consultant in Houston Independent School District.
During her tenure with Prescription Learning/Jostens Learning, she became an Area Director. In this role, she was responsible for developing training for both consultants (education and technical) and teachers. She has worked with teachers and administrators in Houston Independent School District, Dallas Independent School District, San Antonio Independent School District, San Francisco Unified, Atlanta Public Schools, Birmingham Public Schools, Chicago Public Schools, Miami-Dade County Public Schools, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Schools, Memphis City Schools, Little Rock Public Schools, and many others.
Dr. Askia is currently the Director of Professional Development for NUA.
Session IV (March 30, 2:15-3:35 PM)
March 30, 2008 2:15-3:35 PM
Venue: Convention Hall
Title: Culture, Learning, and Literacy: How Teachers Help All Students Achieve
Presenter: Sonia Nieto
Audience: All
Using research with caring and committed classroom teachers who work with students of racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse backgrounds, this keynote presentation will explore how they build on students’ identities and experiences, challenge institutional policies and practices that get in the way of learning, and prepare students for life beyond test scores, rubrics, and templates.
Professor Emerita of Language, Literacy, and Culture, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Sonia Nieto has written extensively on multicultural education, teacher education, and the education of students of culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. She has taught at all levels from elementary grades through graduate school and has received many awards for her research, advocacy, and service. |
