Teacher Webinars - Literacy Strategies Consulting

Webinars Based on Jennifer Serravallo’s Award-Winning Books

Webinars provide practical, flexible, and engaging opportunities for you to collaborate with colleagues, learn research-based strategies, and confidently apply what you learn to your school and classroom. 

All webinars are led by experienced literacy specialists mentored and approved by Jennifer Serravallo. We cover a variety of topics that lean on Jennifer Serravallo's award-winning and bestselling books, such as The Reading Strategies Book 2.0, Teaching Reading Across the Day, and The Writing Strategies Book. In each webinar, you'll learn how to translate research into actionable steps, respond to data and individual student needs, and apply proven teaching methods effectively.

Earn CEU Credits and Learn to Enhance Your Literacy Instruction

Teacher webinars are an opportunity to earn district-approved credits through a blend of live (synchronous) sessions and offline (asynchronous) assignments and application opportunities. Flexibility meets practicality! Information meets hands-on and engaging learning!

As part of each 15-hour webinar series, you'll join live, synchronous sessions to learn about research-based strategies and methods in an engaging format. You'll learn from Jennifer Serravallo's approved literacy specialists and other participants from around the world to build your knowledge and improve your practices. During each live session, you'll unpack content and engage through the use of video, hands-on activities, lesson planning, data analysis, and authentic reading and writing experiences from a student's perspective.

Between the live sessions, you'll engage in offline asynchronous activities to help you practice and apply what you've learned with your students. You will also be presented with meaningful extension activities to help you cement what you've learned. For example, you might be asked to implement the lessons you planned during the live webinars, plan new lessons, collect and analyze data to inform teaching decisions, and/or read selections from a professional text and reflect on your practices. When you return to a live session, you'll have time to share your experiences, ask questions, receive feedback, and learn even more!

Our goal is to help you make quick, effective classroom decisions that will elevate student learning to the next level. No matter what approach to literacy you use or the grade level, developmental levels, or ages of the students you teach or will one day teach, these online courses are exactly what you need and want. Come learn with us.

Scheduled Webinar Course Descriptions and Learning Results

Full Course: Find Teaching Joy by Weaving Together Art and Science of Reading Instruction (15 hours, 1 CEU credit)

Participants will learn about compelling research on how to best support each student's literacy development throughout a literacy block and across content studies, from foundational skills to comprehension. In addition to the science, you'll explore the art of teaching - developing teacher creativity, decision-making, and responsiveness to individual student needs to ensure engagement. Participants will learn to embrace their teaching experiences and hone their expertise to make quick, effective classroom decisions that take student learning to the next level.

Resources: Teaching Reading Across the Day, The Reading Strategies Book 2.0

• Translate the research (or the science of teaching reading) into high-leverage moves you can count on to deliver powerful lessons again and again

Full Course Learning Outcomes (15 hours):

• Participants will develop an understanding of the why and how behind using high-impact structures effectively in your instruction—no matter what approach to literacy is used, the grade level, developmental levels, or ages of the students you teach.

• Participants will learn about predictable lesson structures for explicit teaching to support all areas of reading development for students in grades K-8.

• Participants will learn how to teach strategies and build knowledge at the same time.

This full course will be drawn from Jennifer Serravallo's newly released book Teaching Reading Across the Day, K-8, and her bestselling The Reading Strategies Book 2.0. You will need copies of both resources to participate. It is offered as one full course for 1 credit/15 CEU hours or three separate 5-hour mini-courses.

Part 1: Explicit strategies, assessments, and skill progressions (5 hours)

• Deepen your understanding of commonly used research-based reading models, including the Simple View of Reading, Scarborough's Rope, and the Active View of Reading (Duke & Cartwright, 2021)

• Develop an understanding of the decades of research supporting reading strategy instruction, goal-directed instruction, and elements of effective reading instruction (reading goals)

• Learn practical strategies for assessing and evaluating reading skills.

• Use skill progressions to identify strategies and track progress.

Part 2: Supporting foundational skills: lesson structures for phonemic awareness, phonics, spelling, and fluency (5 hours)

• A quick review of relevant research related to foundational skills (how the brain learns to read words and how to encourage fluent reading as students progress)

• Elements of effective, explicit, engaging phonics and spelling lessons, supporting thoughtful and accurate word reading skills

• Utilizing shared reading lessons to support foundational skills: word reading and fluency

• Utilizing reader's theater lessons to increase engagement and support fluent, accurate reading while also developing comprehension

• Text considerations, including untangling the debates around decodable books, leveled texts, and other trade books–for each lesson type

• Understanding ways to prompt and scaffold readers during all lesson types

Part 3: Supporting comprehension: lesson structures for helping readers with complex grade-level text and developing a rich independent reading life (5 hours)

• A quick review of the research related to comprehension instruction, including the importance of strategies alongside vocabulary and knowledge building

• Explicit instruction in vocabulary–vocabulary lessons and weaving vocabulary into all lessons

• Planning and delivering engaging, explicit lessons to support reading of grade-level texts–close reading lessons, shared reading lessons, and read-aloud lessons

• The intersection of comprehension and conversation: supporting dialogic processing of texts in whole class, small group, and pair discussions to improve speaking and listening skills as well as deepen comprehension
  

Customized Teacher Webinars for Schools and Districts

With customized webinars, you can choose the topic(s) the number of sessions, and work with your assigned literacy specialist to find mutually convenient meeting times. Customized webinars are often offered at a discounted rate compared to the per-person rates of scheduled online courses, depending on the number of participants. 

Click to download a copy of some of the topics we can support you with, including, but not limited to, explicit instruction, content area literacy, effective reading instruction, assessment, instructional coaching methodology, analyzing assessments to inform instruction, foundational skills, the science of reading, and more. 

Click to download.