Made for Meaning: Updating and Extending Cambourne's Conditions of Learning

Debra Crouch and Brian Cambourne

Teachers shape the physical, social, emotional, and intellectual spaces that support student learning. But what are the classroom conditions that make student learning more likely to occur? And what decisions will teachers make to bring these conditions of learning to life? This session updates and extends research and thinking about the Conditions of Learning, explores language and literacy development, and illustrates teacher decisions that nourish a discourse of "meaning-making."

Distance Literacy Learning

Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey

Effective teaching is effective teaching, no matter where it occurs. In this session, Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey focus on effective ways to lead literacy learning from a distance, including things like maintaining teacher credibility and providing empathetic feedback to students. Using videos from distance learning classrooms, the coauthors (with John Hattie) of the #1 best-selling Distance Learning Playbook share evidence-based strategies for foundational skills instruction, comprehension, and more.

Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey appear courtesy of Corwin Press

The Pandemic, the Protests, the Fires, the Election, the Teaching, the Fatigue: How We Move Forward From Here

Cornelius Minor

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 questions such as 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?

Speak a Different Language: Changing the Grammar of Schooling

Yong Zhao

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 both reimagine education in terms of today's context and tomorrow's needs and advocate for schooling that prioritizes the perspectives of our children.

A.S. King and Nic Stone in Conversation

A.S. King and Nic Stone

Printz Medal winner A.S. King (Dig) and #1 New York Times best-selling author Nic Stone (Dear Justyce) come together for a conversation about identity, injustice, and the intersection of the two in their writing. Includes a Q&A session with the authors.

How Do We Best Support Children's Vocabulary Development? Lessons From Research and Practice

Susan B. Neuman

We know that early vocabulary development is central to learning how to read, and that the size of a person's vocabulary correlates to the strength of reading comprehension. In this session, Susan Neuman highlights key research on vocabulary development and shares strategies for promoting it in classrooms for young children.

The Research–Practice Conversation: Understanding and Bridging the Divide

Rachael Gabriel and Kate Roberts

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. In this session, Rachael Gabriel (a literacy researcher) and Kate Roberts (a teacher of literacy) explore 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.

Writing Makes Better Readers and Reading Makes Better Writers

Steve Graham

Writing supports reading, reading supports writing, and the two together support learning. Steve Graham examines why this is the case conceptually and shares data from multiple meta-analyses that support these interconnections among reading, learning, and writing. The session primarily focuses on providing examples of successful classroom applications.

Family Literacy—Past and Present

Patricia A. Edwards and Marliese R. Peltier

It has been proven over time that students' academic success depends on building relationships with families and communities. In this session, Patricia A. Edwards and Marliese R. Peltier focus on how family literacy can bridge the connection between home and school in meaningful ways.

How to Build a Culture of Literacy Live or at a Distance

Lisa Forehand

Research shows that the greatest variations of instruction happen within a school building as opposed to between school to school. How does a school leader create a culture of literacy that is collaborative and consistent among teachers? In this session, Lisa Forehand, the 2020 recipient of the Corwin Literacy Leader Award presented by ILA, shares strategies for building a culture of literacy live and at a distance.

Opportunity-Centered Teaching in the "New" Focus on Race

H. Richard Milner IV

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 H. Richard Milner IV calls opportunity gaps in education through opportunity-centered practices. In this session, he describes and discusses major features and examples of these practices with connections to language and literacy.

Pushing on Multiple Levers to Meet the Needs of All Readers

Emily Solari

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. In this session, Emily Solari looks at how the education system uses the existing evidence base in reading acquisition, assessment, and intervention to thoughtfully plan instruction and examines 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 focuses on those levers, with specific attention to students who demonstrate difficulties with reading. The role of translational science is also discussed in the context of bridging the research-to-practice gap.