2025 Literacy Convening

Join us for this engaging session designed to help you boost vocabulary development for multilingual learners. You’ll walk away with practical strategies and AI tools you can start using immediately to support your students’ language growth and confidence. Get ready to explore these topics combined with AI-powered support:
-Bilingualized teaching – Bridge languages for deeper understanding.
-Word-building – Expand knowledge through morphological families
-Natural language use – Teach word relationships using collocations.
-Cognates – Leverage familiar words to boost learning.
Turn proven strategies into everyday classroom success, empowering your multilingual learners to thrive!

Allison will demonstrate how a well-planned read-aloud of any text can connect to all strands of the reading rope.

Maggie Toulouse Oliver with staffers present a few initiatives that are proven to be good programs in many states for civics education.

Students, particularly those in grades 6-12, spend most of their instructional time in content area classes (e.g., science, ss, math). If we want to accelerate their progress, we must embed evidence-based literacy instructional practices in every class.

In this session, Student Achievement Partners will review Quarter Turns, which are research-based instructional practices that can easily be embedded into any content area class. These routines are quick and easy to manage and help teachers who may not feel confident working with complex text, engage students in the important work of reading and writing.

In this session, Nystrom Elementary's principal and coach will share how we've built a school-wide model for literacy instruction that fosters adult collaboration, prioritizes data-driven decision making, and has deepened our staff's commitment to students' success.

We'll share how our model for instruction has evolved over the years and the steps we've taken as leaders to sustain the work.

Join us for a discussion about our vision—'At Nystrom we believe reading is a civil right'—and the concrete steps we take to make that vision a reality.

In this engaging session, participants will explore actionable strategies for teaching foundational literacy skills to older students while bridging the gap to grade-level standards. This session will provide best practices and tips for addressing the unique challenges secondary students face when mastering essential literacy skills. Attendees will gain insights into utilizing instructional-level texts to scaffold learning and create meaningful connections to grade-level content. Additionally, the session will showcase resources and strategies for fostering the transfer of foundational skills to connected texts, ensuring students build confidence and competence in applying what they’ve learned. Leave equipped with tools and ideas to empower students on their pathway to literacy proficiency.

If you are a secondary ELA teacher, odds are you have readers who need some extra support. However, you might not have the diagnostic data you need to drill down to the specific strands of reading that they need strengthening in. Diagnostic assessments are key because in the upper grades we may already know which students are struggling (which alleviates the need for a screener), but we do need to know specifics of what supports they need. In this session, we will explore diagnostic assessments that can be used with older students, and recommendations for how to intervene based on the diagnostic data. This session is intended for all 6-12 literacy educators to strengthen their current practices in assessment and intervention for older readers.

Participants will:
define assessment types in context of secondary ELA and adolescent literacy.
explore diagnostic assessments that can be used with older students.
explore recommendations for how to intervene based on the diagnostic data.

Participants will gain access to a digital repository of related resources, and will participate in collegial discussions and reflections about their own current system.