WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2014   

7:00 p.m.  

The Speaking and Listening Standards in the Collaborative Classroom with Linda Rourke  

• Suggested Reading: The Core Principles of the Collaborative Classroom 
• Description: The Collaborative Classroom is an intentional environment in which collaboration and social development are infused into academic learning. The CCSS Speaking and Listening Standards are addressed in and essential to student success in the Collaborative Classroom environment. The CCSS define student collaboration as going beyond conventional cooperation and compliance to becoming invested, caring members of a learning community. To build such communities, teachers need to incorporate authentic ways for learners to collaborate in order to deepen their learning and promote intelligent discourse. They must also ensure that students are equipped with the social skill sets needed to support classroom discourse, extend their own thinking, and expand on the thinking of their peers. The session will focus on the importance of and strategies for creating a collaborative community of speakers and listeners where students communicate in thoughtful, deep and meaningful ways.
• Questions explored include:

• How have the CCSS changed the way we think about speaking, listening, and collaboration in classrooms?
• What's hard about incorporating the Speaking and Listening standards into what we teach?
• What do we know about the interrelationship between speaking and listening and academic development?
• How do we shift our practice to help engage in authentic conversations and deepen their skills and knowledge?

• Bio:  Linda is a National Education Consultant for the Developmental Studies Center, a nonprofit organization based in Emeryville, CA committed to fostering the social, emotional, ethical, and academic development of children. In her role, she offers keynotes, workshops, presentations, and professional development for administrators, literacy coaches, and teachers serving diverse populations at all grade levels across the country. She presents at local, state, and national conferences and helps teachers implement best practices for teaching and learning.  Linda began her career in education over 30 years ago as a High School English teacher, an experience that shaped her lifelong commitment to literacy education. She holds a B.A. in English and an M.S. Ed in Literacy Education from Northern Illinois University. 
• Website: http://www.collaborativeclassroom.org http://www.devstu.org
   

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2014
7:00 p.m.   

Listen Hear! with Mike Opitz    

• Suggested Reading:  www.listen.org 
• Description: Listening is the first stage of language development and continues throughout the development of all other language stages. In fact, discriminative listening begins to develop as early as the third trimester of prenatal development. The brain converts sounds heard in the environment into meaningful information. As development continues, children begin to discriminate the basic speech sounds that will allow them to imitate speech. Eventually, listening facilitates language play and nurtures phonological awareness. This awareness of words, syllables, and phonemes enhances speaking development and emergent reading skills.  But that's only the beginning! Learners continue to use listening for a variety of purposes throughout their lives, perhaps now more than ever given newer technology, which capitalizes on students' ability to critically listen. Most recently, the authors of the Common Core Standards (2010) have catapulted listening into the language arts spotlight by giving it equal attention to the other language arts; it is no longer neglected.  Here are five good reasons for explicitly teaching listening to help readers reach their full reading potential. 

1. Learners develop an ability to discriminate sounds. Listening involves the identification of the differences among sounds. This identification and discrimination leads children to the understanding that sounds are grouped together to form words.
2. Children realize the value of listening. Listening makes up a great percentage of a child's day in and out of school. Expanding children's views of listening and the benefits of using good listening skills can impact how they use listening. For instance, listening precisely to verbal instructions has a direct impact on children's success in the classroom. They know exactly what they are to do as a result of being able to perform this type of listening.
3. Students listen for a variety of purposes. Listening serves many purposes. Students can be taught to use listening to enhance their understanding of the environment, conversations, music, and stories read aloud.
4. Listening enhances children's ability to use the other language arts. Teaching listening allows students to follow directions, understand expectations, and make sense of verbal classroom communication. As children improve as listeners, they learn to use the same strategies to improve their command of the other language arts.  
5. Students understand the relationship between listening and reading. Listening, like reading, is an active process. Listening and reading require the use of similar thought processes such as predicting and self-monitoring to attend to the conveyed message for the construction of meaning

• Adapted from: Opitz, M. & R. Schendel. 2010. 25 Essential Language Arts Strategies to Help All Striving Readers Succeed. New York: Scholastic.
• Website:   http://www.ascd.org/Publications/ascd-authors/michael-opitz.aspx  

Are you and your students looking for a good book to read?  May we suggest the 82 titles on the Illinois Readers' Choice Awards lists for your reading pleasure?  The Illinois School Library Media Association's Monarch, Bluestem and Abraham Lincoln Illinois High School Book Award and the Rebecca Caudill Young Readers' Book Award selection committees have gathered nominations, reviewed titles, and created their lists of nominations for the students of Illinois to read and vote on next spring.  (Many of these committee members are already reviewing titles for the 2016 lists.)

If you work with students in grades Kindergarten through third, please take a look at the 20 Monarch Award nominees.  For grades third through fifth, please check out the 20 Bluestem nominees.  If you have older students (grades nine through twelve), please browse the 22 Lincoln Award nominees.  All three of these awards are sponsored completely by the Illinois School Library Media Association.  Information about registering your school or library to participate in these awards can be found on the left hand side of the page at www.islma.org.

If you have students in grades four through eight, you might also want to visit the Rebeca Caudill site at www.rcyrba.org.

Registration fee for each award is $10.00 and must be renewed each year to participate in the statewide voting in the spring. The books on each list are available through various book services as well as most book stores.

"What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of a difference you want to make."  ~  Jane Goodall

Educators make a difference in the lives of the children they teach by inspiring their students to become lifelong readers/learners.  Once the school year has begun, teachers are entrenched in the day-to-day grind of teaching and it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the level of energy, excitement and passion necessary to inspire students to become lifelong readers/learners.  Active involvement in a professional organization can help educators refuel and maintain the positive focus on learning necessary to impact on student growth.  But how does active involvement in a professional organization impact student achievement? And more importantly, why does this matter?

Changes to the teacher and leader evaluation systems are mandated through the PERA law (Performance Evaluation Reform Act) and Senate Bill 7.  Performance evaluations must incorporate professional practice ratings, a model like Danielson's Framework for Teaching (four domains with a four rating category system), and indicators of student growth.  For educators to receive the highest ratings in Domain 4 - 4a: reflecting on teaching, 4d: participating in a professional community, 4e: growing and developing professionally, and 4f: showing professionalism - active involvement in a professional organization is critical.  But active involvement is not enough; educators need to be able to include meaningful data that demonstrates an impact on student growth as a result of the professional development provided by organizations like the Illinois Reading Council.

The Illinois Reading Council's statewide Studies and Research Committee is beginning a longitudinal study in an attempt to answer the question, "How does active involvement in a professional organization impact student achievement?"  IRC understands that this is an important question that educator members must now be able to answer during their annual evaluations.  If you are interested in joining the statewide Studies and Research Committee or participating in the study, please contact the IRC Office for more details.  This study is one of several IRC Strategic Plans that will be highlighted throughout the year.  The Illinois Reading Council is committed to increasing membership value by focusing on topics that are relevant to both our members and the students and families they serve.