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Welcome to Our Blog

Season’s Readings: 2025 December Holiday Books 

December 12, 2025 Nikki Drury, Literacy Trainer

The holiday season is a wonderful time to spark joy, build community, and celebrate some of the traditions your students bring into the classroom.

Tags: Teaching

Reaching All Learners Matters More Than Ever

December 1, 2025 Wendy Vaulton, Associate Director for Reading Recovery & Early Interventions

Classrooms are full of potential, bursting with students who each bring their own strengths, ideas, and perspectives. This year’s Reaching All Learners Speaker Series, kicking off in January 2026, is designed to equip you with the tools you need to make the most of every student’s potential—celebrating diversity, sparking engagement, and discovering ways to make learning meaningful for every student.

Timing is Everything: Moving from the Writer’s Notebook to Draft Paper

November 6, 2025 Nikki Drury, Literacy Trainer

How do you know when to move from the writer’s notebook to draft paper? The writer’s notebook is the heart of a writer’s daily life. Just like gardeners plant seeds without knowing which ones will flourish, writers collect ideas.

Tags: Teaching

Igniting a Year of Learning: Building Momentum as a Literacy Coach

September 30, 2025 Linda Murphy, Associate Director of Literacy Programs

For literacy coaches, this is a powerful moment – the chance to move from introductions and early connections into purposeful collaboration that will carry the year forward.

Spelling: Harnessing the Power of Word Knowledge

August 26, 2025 Heather Rodman, Literacy Trainer

Becoming a strong speller requires much more than memorizing words. Good spelling is a result of good teaching.

Tags: Teaching

Reading to Learn While Learning to Read

August 1, 2025 Nikki Drury, Literacy Trainer

Is it reading to learn or learning to read? In reality, these two processes develop together, not one after the other. As children are learning how print works, they are also learning from what they read. They are making sense of language.

Tags: Teaching

Beyond Right and Wrong: Cultivating Deep Comprehension Through Teacher Listening

June 23, 2025 Heather Rodman, Literacy Trainer

What do you listen for during comprehension conversations? The answer to this question might be the key to facilitating conversations that evoke and foster deep, meaningful, stimulating discourse during whole group, small group, and individual conversations.

Tags: Teaching

AI Prompting with Purpose: 5 Tips for Teachers 

June 13, 2025 Linda Murphy, Associate Director of Literacy Programs

AI has been increasingly integrated into our daily lives. As we learn how to use AI in productive ways with students and for instructional planning, an important skill to develop is effective prompting.

Rethinking Reading Proficiency

May 28, 2025 Wendy Vaulton, Associate Director for Reading Recovery & Early Interventions

As educators, our understanding of proficiency shapes the way we teach, assess, and support learners. If we define proficiency narrowly, we risk overlooking not only important aspects of literacy, but the larger purpose of education itself. We seek not only to prepare students to perform well on tests, but to help them build the skills to engage critically with the world around them.

How Will They Learn to Read if They Never Read? 

May 5, 2025 Cindy Downend, Associate Director of Literacy Programs

Four ways that school leaders can encourage children to read every day, in and out of school.

Tags: Coaching

Upcoming Professional Development

January 28, 2026

The Six Essential Elements for Systemic Literacy Improvement (Complimentary Webinar)

Join us for this 45-minute webinar to explore what it takes to improve literacy outcomes across your school or district.

Complimentary Webinar
March 25, 2026

Joyful Writing: Fostering Young Writers in PreK and K

This workshop guides early childhood teachers in building joyful writing communities through play, storytelling, book making, and drawing. Participants learn to view children’s early writing with fresh insight and plan purposeful lessons that build confidence, develop craft, and support foundational writing conventions.

$295 (Includes professional text)
January 29, 2026

The Power of the Prompt: Using AI to Support Effective Literacy Teaching

Clear, high-quality prompts make AI a useful teaching tool. Explore how well-crafted prompts enable AI to support instructional planning, scaffolding, and differentiation to promote student success.

$150

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