Webinar Series | Close Reading Virtual Professional Development Sessions

Educators around the country are feeling the need to respond to a clarion call for the inclusion of culturally relevant pedagogy and social emotional learning in the curriculum. This heightened sense of the need to triage is spawned by the threat of unsafe and unhealthy practices and environments due to the COVID-19 pandemic and social distress precipitated by an onslaught of racial disparities and inequities among African American and Latino populations within the U.S.

Join Dr. Beryl Irene Bailey as she demonstrates for pre-K-12 educators and administrators how to embed social emotional learning into literacy instruction using the college and career ready ELA and social studies content standards and multicultural literature.

Objectives: Participants will practice:

• CLOSE reading for positive character traits of sense of achievement, self-confidence, self-control, empathy, and/or interpersonal skills
• Making connections to themes of advocacy and agency, goal setting, organizational and social skills, problem solving, and/or metacognition while generating text dependent questions.
• Awareness of how Reading Plus supports comprehensive SEL initiatives within the Reading/English Language Arts classroom.
• Finding evidence in text to support positive character traits and social emotional learning themes.

Oftentimes reading is treated like a subject, and not a skill to access content. Many standards found in today’s math instruction have their roots in language and require students to have solid knowledge of how language works. Beyond calculations, numeracy requires analysis, interpretation, synthesis, and application.

CLOSE Reading is the cognitive conditioning workout for developing language muscles across all content areas, especially math and science content. Children’s literature and informational text contain qualitative and quantitative details that are often overlooked when generating questions to assess students’ understanding of what has been read.

In this session, Dr. Beryl Irene Bailey will model how educators and administrators can take students through a cognitive conditioning workout where they engage in exercising language muscles to lift complex text across the content areas.

Objectives: Participants will:

• Complete word workouts
• Carry key details
• Pull up context
• Lift language structures
• Tackle transitions and text features and
• Knock out numeracy to build knowledge

“The chronic achievement gap in most American schools has created an epidemic of dependent learners unprepared to do the higher order thinking, creative problem-solving, and analytical reading and writing called for in the new [College and Career Ready Standards.]”(Hammond, p.12, 2015) Only through authentic literacy opportunities, skillful scaffolding from knowledgeable others, and cognitive conditioning do students learn to successfully engage in metalinguistics, metatextuality, and metacognition resulting in a metamorphosis of their thinking and actions.

Dr. Beryl Irene Bailey will help educators and administrators extend comprehension skills taught in Reading Plus using her brain-based CLOSE Reading process and metatextual markers. Educators will learn to help students utilize her kinesthetic method to develop an established routine, self-regulation, and executive functioning skills when they learn to conduct critical, analytical, and rhetorical analyses of literary and informational text.

Objectives: Participants will:

• Review the deficits in reading comprehension
• Explore the attributes of CLOSE Reading
• Engage in a systematic process of analyzing qualitative features of text and language structures
• Review what the brain says about learning a skill