Literacy Colloquy

How Research Partnerships Led Me to Abandon Guided Reading

Small group instruction at the instructional level has long been the mainstay of reading education, and curricula based in that practice continue to dominate the educational materials marketplace. Sharon Walpole will describe her journey away from that practice.

She began by replacing guided reading groups with foundational skills groups. She will then describe the school-based partnerships that encouraged her to design and test instruction in challenging text for all students. She will describe the simple scaffolds that have made grade-level text feasible for a range of students, and share outcomes at schools who have embraced these scaffolds.

Register here.

Speaker:

Sharon Walpole, PhD is a professor in the School of Education at the University of Delaware. Dr. Walpole designs and studies the effects of professional development on instruction and achievement in literacy. She works with literacy coaches, reading specialists, and administrators to build schoolwide systems to support teachers, especially those working 8r children at risk. She has extensive school-based experience designing and implementing tiered instructional programs. She is the author of an open-access English Language Arts curriculum, Bookworms K-5 Reading and Writing and 2018 recipient of the Jerry Johns Outstanding Teacher Educator in Reading award from International Literacy Association.