ILA Next Main Stage Sessions showcase an exciting mix of new and established speakers with a wide range of expertise who speak to the complex role of literacy educators through diverse perspectives. This package includes all 13 Main Stage sessions, which cover a variety of topics important for educators and administrators at any level. Learn at your own pace and come back to each session as many times as you want. Access is available on demand through August 15, 2021.
ILA Next kicks off with a power-packed Main Stage Session, featuring keynotes from ILA President of the Board Stephen G. Peters, Caldecott Medal-winning author/illustrator Dan Santat, and Push Through Organization founderJasmyn Wright, and a special presentation from Made for Learning: How the Conditions of Learning Guide Teaching Decisions authors Debra Crouch and Brian Cambourne.
This session features Printz Medal winner A.S. King (Dig) and #1 New York Times best-selling author Nic Stone (Dear Justyce) in conversation about identity and injustice and the intersection of the two in their writing. A Q&A session with the authors follows the conversation.
It has been proven over time that students’ academic success depends on building relationships with families and communities. In this presentation, we will focus on how family literacy can bridge the connection between home and school in meaningful ways.
The session will highlight the research on early vocabulary development, and discuss strategies to promote its development in classrooms for young children.
Research shows that the greatest variations of instruction happen within a school building as opposed to school to school. How does a school leader create a culture of literacy that is collaborative and consistent among teachers? This session will discuss tips for building a culture of literacy live and at a distance.
The Black Lives Matter movement has been amplified dramatically this year, as millions of people in the United States took to the streets to protest police violence. Schools have an incredible opportunity to use this momentum and movement to deeply reimagine the curriculum and teaching in schools. Rather than returning to normalcy—to stale, dated, predetermined, irrelevant, under-responsive, disconnected, and “racially neutral” curriculum and instructional practices that maintain a white-centric status quo—teachers have a chance instead to address what I call opportunity gaps in education through opportunity-centered practices. In this session, I will describe and discuss major features and examples of these practices with connections to language and literacy.
For many years, a profound research-to-practice gap has existed between what we know about reading development and the implementation of evidence-based, effective practices in school settings. This has differential impacts on particular subgroups of students. This session will look at how the education system uses the existing evidence base in reading acquisition, assessment, and intervention to thoughtfully plan instruction, and will examine how we can think about training for both practicing and future teachers in a way that is supported by this evidence. In order to address the reading needs of all students, multiple levers must be pushed simultaneously. This presentation will focus on those levers, with a specific focus on students who demonstrate difficulties with reading. The role of translational science will also be discussed in the context of bridging the research to practice gap.
The COVID-19 pandemic has had an incalculable impact on education—one that is unprecedented in the history of our field. At the same time, the disruption of COVID-19 presents an opportunity to rethink the what, how, and where of learning. In this session, Yong Zhao looks at how we can reimagine education in terms of today’s context and tomorrow’s needs, as well as advocate for schooling that prioritizes the perspectives of our children.
It’s true: 2020 has shifted the very foundations of our profession. Understandably, educators are longing for a return to "normal." In this session, Cornelius Minor poses the question: What if, instead of returning to normal, we returned to better? What are the practices, approaches, and habits that we can abandon, and what are the new kid- and community-centered structures that we can erect in their place? How can we cultivate the heart to hear and to see what our communities need from us? And what knowledge and methods are needed to sustain powerful learning at this time of constant change?
There is constant pressure to use research- and evidence-based practices when teaching reading and writing, but the findings of published research may not always provide obvious or straightforward answers to some of the most pressing questions about practice. Join us for a conversation between a teacher of literacy, and a literacy researcher as they explore and critical questions about the persistent divide between research and practice, the role of evidence in everyday instruction, and what research can and cannot tell us about effective practice.
This session will explore how writing supports reading, reading supports writing, and the two together support learning. Graham will first examine why this is the case conceptually, and then share briefly data from multiple meta-analyses that support these interconnections among reading, learning, and writing. The session will focus primarily on providing examples of successful classroom applications.