Executive functions are skills that develop during childhood and adolescence. This episode focuses on how executive functions impact an individual’s ability to learn and how we can use this information to inform instruction.

Executive Functions are brain based skills that play a significant role in everyday life and contribute to an individual's ability to learn and function in the real world.

This episode will focus on what they are and how they influence learning.

In this episode I will introduce The Simple View of Orthographic Mapping. I created this concept as a tool to simplify the complex process of orthographic mapping.

Psych-eds tell us about how individuals learn and IEPs are designed to inform how we can meet an individual student’s diverse learning needs. This episode focuses on how we can use one to inform the other.

Listen as Dr. Kathryn Garforth discusses ways to use a student's psycho-educational assessment to inform their IEP. This episode is meant to help parents and educators who want to be able to make the IEP an actual Individualized Education Plan instead of just things cut and pasted from another document.

In this episode, Dr. Kathryn Garforth reviews several different conceptualizations of reading comprehension and literacy development including:

- Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tumner, 1986)

- Scarborough's Reading Rope (2001)

- Active View of Reading (Duke & Cartwright, 2021)

- Simple View of Writing (Berninger et al., 2002)

- Not So Simple View of Writing (Berninger & Amtmann, 2003)

- Writing Rope (Sedita, 2019)

- Language Literacy Network (Wasowicz, 2021)

- Literacy Knot (Brainspring, 2023)

Reading is arguably the most studied topic in the field of education. When we look at the data collected over decades, there is an overall consensus on the essential elements needed for effective reading instruction.

Individualized Education Plans and their meetings are something that many parents and educators dread. The focus of this episode is to provide an explanation of what they are, why they are needed and how to make ones that are useful for everyone.

Contrary to popular belief, learning to read is not a natural process. This episode focuses on why learning to read isn’t natural, and what it means for expectations at school and in the home.