SCORE Webinar Series
Science of Comprehension for Reading Excellence (SCORE)
Speaker: Dennis Davis, Ph.D., Professor of Literacy Education, NC State University
Date: Wednesday, March 4
Time: 9:30-10:30 am
Cost: Free!
CEUs: 0.1 after participating in the live webinar
Title: Professional learning priorities for effective upper-elementary reading comprehension instruction
Description: Reading comprehension is one of the most complicated things we ask teachers to teach and children to learn. If you are reading this, you are probably effortlessly coordinating all the cognitive and linguistic processes involved in understanding the written squiggles printed on this page (or screen). But what If you were pressed to explain how this text’s meaning is developed in your mind, and to do so in a way that would make sense to a ten year-old and fit within the time constraints of school-day instruction? That is exactly what we expect daily of upper-elementary teachers, who must use precise examples and modeling to make the hidden processes of reading comprehension “visible” to children. This webinar will summarize what research suggests about the specialized expertise needed for teaching reading comprehension effectively. Drawing on examples from a multicomponent intervention designed for multilingual learners, the session will suggest a few priority areas for teacher professional development to maximize the quality of upper-elementary literacy instruction. Participants will learn practical “do’s and don’ts” that can serve as a baseline for school improvement efforts focused on reading comprehension in grades 3-5.