Your power tools for making the complex comprehensible
Now more than ever, our students are being asked to do highly advanced thinking, talking, and writing around their reading. If only there were ingenious new tools that could give our students the space to tease apart complex ideas in order to comprehend and weld their understandings into a new whole. Good news: these tools exist―Mining Complex Text. You’ll learn how graphic organizers can:
- Help students read, reread, and take notes on a text
- Promote students’ oral sharing of information and their ideas
- Elevate organized note-making from complex text(s)
- Scaffold students’ narrative and informational writing
Diane Lapp, EdD, is a distinguished professor of education at San Diego State University where her work continues to be applied to schools. She is also an instructional coach and teacher at Health Sciences High & Middle College. Throughout her career, Diane has taught in elementary, middle, and high schools. Her major areas of research and instruction regard issues related to the planning and assessment of very intentional literacy instruction and learning. A member of both the California and the International Reading Halls of Fame, Diane has authored, coauthored, and edited numerous articles, columns, texts, handbooks and children’s materials on instruction, assessment, and literacy related issues. Diane is the recipient of the ILA 2023 William S. Gray Citation of Merit, a prestigious award reserved for those who have made outstanding contributions to multiple facets of literacy development. Diane can be reached at lapp@sdsu.edu. Follow her on twitter @lappsdsuAs a teacher for online courses hosted by the University of Central Florida, Dr. Thomas DeVere Wolsey is interested in how the interactions of students in digital and face-to-face environments change their learning. While much of his research centers on how visual information, such as graphic organizers, works in tandem with text to improve learning, he is also intrigued by the intersections of traditional literacies with digital literacies, specifically focusing on how those literacies affect teacher preparation and professional development.
Dr. Karen Wood has been training literacy specialists for over 25 years at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she is a Professor in the Department of Reading and Elementary Education. Dr. Wood is a published author and former reading teacher, reading specialist, and K–12 instructional coordinator, and much of her writing focuses on translating research and theory into classroom practice across all subjects and grade levels.
Dr. Kelly Johnson is currently a faculty member in teacher education at San Diego State University and an instructional coach in the San Diego Unified School District. A Nationally Board Certified teacher, Kelly devotes much of her work to literacy teaching and learning in classrooms. Dr. Johnson is passionate about the teaching and learning connection that results from proper teacher modeling, productive group work, formative assessment, and student engagement.
