Reading Road Trip

This week, Kate Winn welcomes Irish educator and researcher Dr. Jen O’Sullivan to explore how young children develop the ability to make inferences and how educators can explicitly support this essential skill. From playful, practical strategies to research-backed insights, this episode is packed with ideas to bring inferencing to life in the early years.

Mentioned in the Episode:

The Game by Henry Charles Ten Bears and Shoshannah Greene

RAND Reading Study Group (2002)

Oakhill and Cain (2012) study on inference and comprehension

Tighe and Schatschneider (2014) study on predictors of reading comprehension

Hall et al. (2019) study on inference instruction with English language learners

Jen O’Sullivan’s Substack

Buckle up - it's the Season 4 premiere of Reading Road Trip! Host Kate Winn kicks off the new season with Dr. Leslie Laud of thinkSRSD for a lively and practical conversation about transforming writing instruction. From kindergarten to high school, discover how this evidence-based approach is scaling across classrooms, building confidence, reducing teacher workload, and aligning beautifully with Canadian curricula.

Links Mentioned in this Episode:

Cedar School Decodables by Strong Nations Publishing

thinkSRSD

CommonLit

ONlit.org thinkSRSD resources: Getting Started with thinkSRSD and Grade 3 thinkSRSD-inspired POWeR Cycles

thinkSRSD Facebook Group

Buckle up - Reading Road Trip is back for a fourth season!

Join classroom teacher Kate Winn for a jam-packed season featuring fabulous guests. From researchers and authors to educators and practitioners, they're all sharing practical ideas that can be implemented now in your class, school, board or district!

For this surprise bonus episode, buckle up and join Kate Winn and Una Malcolm for a candid conversation about all things reading! Kate and Una share their "road bumps" and "refuels" along the road to reading for all. 

Stay tuned for Season 4 of Reading Road Trip this summer where we'll bring another carload of fabulous guests along for the ride.

Keen to explore some of the resources Kate and Una mentioned in the episode?

Season 3 wraps up with a jam-packed episode featuring Dr. Amanda VanDerHeyden. Kate and Amanda have a wide-ranging conversation about the science of learning and human behaviour - how do children learn new things? From the instructional hierarchy to incremental rehearsal, don't miss this fabulous episode!

Show Notes:

Curious about Amanda's insights into Kindergarten math instruction? Take a peek at the links she shared:

Paired partner practice

Independent practice

Teacher-directed whole-class error correction

This week Kate is joined by Dr. Amanda Nickerson for a candid conversation about supporting gifted and highly advanced readers. Don't miss this episode that highlights the value of advanced decoding and spelling instruction for skilled readers!

Dr. Andrea Fraser joins Kate to chat about her systems change journey: first in a board central team role, shifting her district's literacy instruction to structured literacy, and then preparing preservice teachers to teach with a structured literacy approach. Tune in to hear her insights on bridging the gap between research and practice at the district level and in higher education!

The Basics of Decoding and Spelling Instruction is a low-cost, asynchronous online course offered by IDA Ontario. Students in Canadian education, EA, or SLP programs, as well as educators working in First Nation schools, can receive free access here.

IDA Ontario partners with Dyslexia Canada to develop ONlit.org, a free website designed to support educators with the revised Ontario Language curriculum. Don't miss the most recent resource - a free embedded picture mnemonic set!

Kate welcomes Dr. Marc Joanisse for a discussion about the neurobiology of dyslexia and other comorbid disorders, including ADHD and DLD. 

Dr Marc Joanisse is a professor at the University of Western Ontario in the Department of Psychology and the Western Institute for Neuroscience. His research examines the cognitive and brain basis of reading dyslexia and developmental language disability in children, as well as typical reading and language and development. His research team at the Language Reading and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab uses a multimodal approach, including eye tracking, EEG and MRI. His research in dyslexia focuses on better understanding the links between poor reading and spoken language and phonology, and the comorbidities of dyslexia with other kinds of learning disorders like DLD and ADHD.

Stay up to date on research and upcoming studies from Marc's lab:

Language, Reading and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab Facebook page and website

Curious about evidence-based instruction for older readers? This week, Kate welcomes Dr. Heidi Anne Mesmer to discuss strategies for helping older readers decode big words and tackle complex texts, focusing on syntactic features like connectives and anaphora to improve text comprehension.

Heidi Anne is the author of several great books, including Big Words for Young Readers: Teaching Kids in Grades K to 5 to Decode - and Understand - Words with Multiple Syllables and Morphemes, and Teaching Skills for Complex Text: Deepening Close Reading in the Classroom. Kate and Heidi Anne also discussed a new article, Time in Text: Differentiating Instruction for Intermediate Students Struggling with Word Recognition.

Find Heidi Anne on twitter at @haemesmer.

Dr. Claude Goldenberg joins us this week. Don't miss this engaging conversation about reading instruction for multilingual students - and keep listening to the end to learn about Claude's real-life road trips inspired by a John Steinbeck book!

Claude is the Nomelini and Olivier professor of education emeritus at Stanford University. A native of Argentina, his areas of research and publication centred on promoting academic achievement among language minority students, particularly those from Spanish-speaking backgrounds.

In the episode, Claude mentioned his work on the National Literacy Panel, an article in Reading Research Quarterly, and his own road trip adventures inspired by John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley: