Consulting

The following is a partial list of topics for presentations and workshops. If you are interested in a topic or service not listed here, please let me know, and I will be happy to combine or customize the content to fit with your goals for teachers, staff, and students:

• Best Practices
• Comprehension Strategies
• Balanced Literacy and Learning Framework
• Learning Centers
• Critical Literacy
• Readers Workshop
• Writers Workshop
• Literacy Strategies for Content Classrooms
• 21st Century Literacies
• Surviving Change:  Tools and Strategies
• Maximizing Student Learning
• NCLB
• Guided Reading
• Vocabulary
• Benchmarking and Assessment Tools

Workshops

Managing Guided Reading:  What Are the Other Students Doing?

This session will focus on effective and efficient ways to support independent learning with students as you work in small groups.  Learning can manifest itself in many ways.  The goal is for all learning to be productive and challenging.  We will address the following topics to help create independent opportunities for children to explore, think, and practice the critical literacy skills necessary for success. 

• What is a literacy center?
• What do I need to get started?
• How do I manage centers?
• What about assessment?
• Do I need special resources and materials?

Nonfiction Matters:  Developing Students Understanding of Expository Text

When children read and write in expository material they have opportunities to enhance the knowledge of the world while they learn reading and writing strategies.  Success in expository text is fundamental to academic success, upper-elementary through high school, and we must start at the earliest levels.

This workshop will provide opportunities to explore expository learning across all areas of a balanced literacy program (shared book experience, guided reading, independent reading, read alouds, and writing).  The emphasis will be on interactive, classroom-ready strategies which will build learner excitement, increase your students’ repertoire of reading/writing strategies, and bring the natural curiosity of young children into instructional program.  The workshop objectives will be as follows:

• Clarify the attributes of informational texts which need to be explicitly taught and supported.
• Consider issues in supporting diverse learners.
• Develop text “wiseness” strategies to improve student performance with informational passages on achievement tests. 
• Learn how to help children find joy and personal meaning in reading for information. 

Lessons for Teaching Comprehension:
Comprehension Doesn’t Just Happen ...It needs to be taught. 

In this session we will explore various strategies for deepening reading comprehension.  Teachers will learn to demonstrate to students the complex thinking involved in the reading process.  By exploring quality children’s literature that can be used to support the teaching of comprehension strategies, teachers will work in groups to plan and implement lessons that TEACH comprehension.

Writing For Real

Writing is a basic skill of the literate individual, and teaching children to write is a critical component of the elementary classroom.  The structures of writing workshop lead to effective teaching of writing skills and produce young writers who capably and confidently craft written language for a range of purposes.  In this practical one-day workshop we will review the basic structures for establishing writing workshops and address strategies for improving the quality of student writing.  Following are topics we can address:

• Starting a writing workshop and developing an effective structure
• Developing skill in conducting writing conferences
• Demonstrating strategies for revising and crafting writing
• Showing students how to write concisely, clearly, and with voice
• Teaching the mechanics of written language and editing one’s writing
• Encouraging reflection and self-evaluation
• Connecting writing to reading development
• Helping writers make the most of children’s literature

Teaching Reading with No Child Left Behind

This workshop will give clarity, support, and specific demonstrations to educators so they can teach and assess reading in a manner that is consistent with research and learning theory as well as being respectful of all students’ needs interests, and abilities.  The focus will be on excellent teaching as well as putting the fun back into teaching and learning.  Possible topics of discussion and demonstration lessons are as follows:

• Applying components of researched based practice
• Understanding how kids learn best
• Reducing isolated skills work
• Organizing an outstanding classroom library
• Monitoring and evaluating students as readers
• Integrating ongoing assessment into daily teaching
• Teaching comprehension sensible and effectively
• Applying shared reading across the grades and across the curriculum
• Planning guided reading lessons in a meaningful, manageable way
• Connecting reading with writing

Understanding the Invisible: The Explicit Teaching of Comprehension

This workshop will invite participants on a journey through the intricacies of the mind, particularly in relation to how we comprehend text.  Angela will demonstrate how to help students become thoughtful, independent readers who can not only negotiate their way through print, but can probe the depths of its content and themes.

Angela will describe the thinking strategies known to be used by proficient readers and will show how K-12 teachers have embraced the strategies for themselves and their students.  The workshop will help teachers infuse in-depth, meaningful instruction in reading into literature based and secondary content area classrooms where teachers and students explore, learn from, and react to a wide variety of text.  The workshop will address the following topics:

• Discovering a new reader in ourselves
• Redefining reading from content to context
• A close up look at one comprehension strategy
• A new instructional paradigm – in-depth, long-term instruction
• Issues concerning text selection
• Making it your own: a checklist to focus your follow-up in the classroom

Reading First:  What Does NCLB Mean for Me?

Teachers across the country are talking about Reading First.  What is it?  What impact does Reading First have on my classroom teaching?  Reading First is a program passed under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.  The program is based on the exhaustive review of scientific research conducted by the National Reading Panel.  The panel’s findings supported the knowledge that literacy success centers on five key components – Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Fluency, Vocabulary, and Comprehension.  These five components of reading are the foundation upon which Reading First is structured.  Using these findings, Angela has developed this unique workshop to provide you with the strategies and resources you need to put these components to work for your students. 

Reading First centers on four important priorities:

• Raising the caliber and quality of classroom instruction
• Basing instruction on proven scientific research
• Supporting professional reading instruction training
• Supplying resources for success

At the end of your day together, Angela will set you on a path to meet these priorities.  You’ll not only learn the research, but real show-me-how strategies to make the research come to life in your classroom.

A Pathway to Partnership: Working with Parents

Working together with parents to support children’s learning is essential.  Children spend a far greater portion of their early years in the home than in the school environment and so it is vital that learning is addressed there.  This session is intended to support teachers and schools in developing this type of partnership approach to learning.  The purpose of the day is to highlight the importance of a parent’s role in supporting their child’s learning and of the value of the activities that they can, and perhaps do, engage in with their children to encourage literacy and thinking skills.

Making the Invisible Visible:  Lessons that Change Readers

This session will explore ways teachers can make reading processes visible and available to students.  Student preparation and motivation for reading results in learning that is deep, lifelong, and connected to the real world.  We will explore what effective teaching, learning and engaged reading look like while examining different motivational, front-loading, classroom discussion and sequencing strategies for readers.  Lessons will be applied and demonstrated!

Getting Started with Guided Reading

This informative session will build on a teacher’s basic understanding of running records and guided reading.  It is designed to assist teachers in understanding how children process text, what kinds of information are found in texts, and the effective “in-the-head” problem solving strategies needed by readers in kindergarten through grade two.  The emphasis of the session will be on powerful teaching for strategies. 

Topics include making good book choices, introducing books to support children’s strategic processing, teaching strategies while children are reading, extending children’s understanding of text, and helping learn about letters and words as they build an effective reading process. 

We will examine story introductions and how they support the readers’ effective processing text, the teacher’s decision making while children are reading texts, and the teaching opportunities that follow.

Teaching Comprehension Strategies in Guided Reading

The emphasis this session will be on deepening students understanding in small, guided groups as a way to enhance comprehension.  You will learn a variety of ways to provide mini-lessons that get students thinking more deeply about texts.  You will also learn about the essential elements of guided reading of fiction and non-fiction texts.  Effective selection and introduction of texts as well as the use of a leveled collection of book in the intermediate grades will be discussed.  In addition you will learn the structure of a guided reading lesson as well as how to work individually with the students using benchmark books to determine appropriate instructional levels and organize students for small group teaching.

Leadership for Literacy

Everyone is a leader of someone.  Principals are in the difficult position of leading teachers who are all strong leaders in their own work.  This workshop will examine a simple framework that will help to look at organizing to accomplish the mission of your school from some different perspectives.  We will investigate critical questions such as: What is reading?  What are essential ingredients to successful reading instruction?  What techniques and teaching methods guarantee success?

Understanding Genre: Exploring Fiction and Nonfiction Texts

Students must have experience with a variety and range of text.  By understanding characteristics of fiction and nonfiction we can help teach students to read, write, and think through a variety of genre.  We can then help students become comfortable with all texts and develop strategies that empower them.  We will explore mini-lessons that build the understanding within each genre.  The Lessons will introduce you to a variety of tools and teaching techniques specifically designed to help all students understand what they read, improve fluency and stamina, and enhance their critical thinking abilities in ANY text they pick up!

Planning for Effective Instruction

To teach reading well, we must have a clear vision and knowledge to make the wisest instructional decisions.  New and experienced teachers can share this effective tool for year long planning using state and national standards.  This user-friendly resource will help you pull together everything readers and writers need to comprehensively understand literacy in a step-by-step, systematic way, which allows you to simultaneously plan and organize your classroom.

This workshop will help you welcome and prepare a new school year, set the tone and establish effective foundations form day one.  The more thorough you can plan and anticipate the more confident and effective you will be.

The Nonfiction Reading and Writing Connection

Why are nonfiction literacy skills so important?

Much of what adults read is nonfiction – newspapers, brochures, magazines, even the mail.  Yet, nearly 80% of what students read in school tends to be fiction.

Without the appropriate strategies to comprehend nonfiction, students may not have the skills to fully understand and nonfiction text they encounter.  As a result, they may be overwhelmed by the challenges of the nonfiction passages on state assessments.  In the classroom, they may also be ill-equipped for writing reports, summaries, and journals. 

But, there is a solution.

In this workshop you will journey with me through the world of nonfiction literacy.  Using materials we will explore how you can explicitly teach the strategies students need to comprehend and write nonfiction.  This unique one-day workshop is designed to build your students’ powerful nonfiction literacy skills and ignite their natural curiosity about the world around them. 

You’ll explore the research and rationale for supporting nonfiction literacy skills and strategies that help boost comprehension.  You’ll also learn strategies to transform the theory into real practices you can use.  You’ll not only equip your students with the tools for higher-order thinking, but you’ll help them construct meaning from what they read. 

You’ll also discover great nonfiction strategies to build content knowledge, make cross-curricular connections, and pinpoint graphic elements (like maps and diagrams) and text features (like headings and labels) to aid comprehension.

Learn how to create an environment that encourages nonfiction reading comprehension.  You’ll see how to explicitly teach the skills and strategies students need to be successful and strategic readers of nonfiction.