Workshops
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT RESOURCES
In the fields of language and literacy
Workshop Introduction
How do we move from instructional excess to instructional excellence? How do we bridge the long-standing divide between content areas and utilize a system-wide approach to teaching literacy and numeracy skills? How do we contextualize learning the literacy and numeracy skills needed to process the college and career standards, inclusive of social studies, English, Math, Career & Technology Education, and Science as well as the science and engineering practices, Art, and Physical Education and Health Sciences, so that they become more than decontextualized and isolated skills, facts and figures?
Dr. Beryl Irene Bailey offers a solution to help with these age-old issues. Below is a menu of Master Classes to educate, equip, empower, esteem, and edify educators to provide content-based rigorous instruction using her literacy & numeracy-based CLOSE Reading process.
The Anatomy of CLOSE Reading
Audience: 3rd-12th grade educators, Literacy Leaders, and Administrators
Time Frame: 3–6-hour session
Description: Deficits in reading comprehension can always be linked to a student’s inadequate understanding of words in text, inadequate background knowledge of the domains in the text, lack of familiarity with semantic and syntactic structures that help predict the relationship between words and inadequate verbal reasoning-inferring skills. Through a series of anatomical essential questions, such as, how is a CLOSE read of text like when the doctor gives you a physical examination? How is complex text like the muscular system? How are text dependent questions like the skeletal system? Dr. Beryl Irene Bailey builds teachers’ conceptual knowledge of CLOSE reading and offers them a research-based solution to helping students to construct comprehension.
Educators learn to use Bailey’s CLOSE Reading Process and metatextual markers and code levels of text complexity. The brain creates a visual mental pattern for coding complex text using five neo-colored highlighters and establishes a daily regimen for lifting the text by strengthening the language muscles through frequent workouts. The teacher provides authentic text and text dependent questions and sets a purpose for reading. Yellow is used for vocabulary, orange for key details, green for text features, pink for text structures, and blue for author’s craft. Eventually the brain no longer requires the use of the visual colors. It naturally identifies the elements of text complexity because its language muscles have been conditioned.
Feeding Two Birds with One Worm: Using CLOSE Reading and Authentic Children’s Literature to Navigate the Science & Engineering Practices
Audience: 2nd -6th grade educators, Literacy Leaders, and Administrators
Time Frame: 3–6-hour session
Descriptions: The eight science and engineering practices present as complex text for elementary students and teachers. They are a blueprint for engaging in inquiry, experimentation, evidence gathering, and explanation. Numerically stated, the science and engineering practices require that educators and students learn to execute some 45 skills and comprehend myriad of academic and domain specific vocabulary. This workshop promotes the use of interdisciplinary teaching and learning through Bailey’s CLOSE Reading process, which teaches students to become sentence surgeons, dissecting text using five imprinted neon-colored highlighters. Educators learn to use science-based children’s literature and strategically crafted text dependent questions to teach the science and engineering practices. Students gain a conceptual knowledge of engaging in scientific research and learn first-hand how real-world scientists and engineers moved from inquiry to investigation.
Determining the Meanings of Unknown and Multiple-Meaning
Words & Phrases
Audience: 3rd-12th grade educators, Literacy Leaders, and Administrators
Time Frame: 3–6-hour session
Description: Unknowingly, many educators miss opportunities to engage their students in explicit vocabulary instruction. Often-times instruction mirrors students being told by the teacher, what the word means, writing definitions from the dictionary, or writing sentences using a list of words provided. These activities are mainly low level and recall and don’t require students to use analytical thinking skills to use context to determine the meanings of unknown or multiple-meaning words or phrases. Dr. Beryl Irene Bailey provides a solution that empowers teachers and students to use CLOSE reading as a process to problem solve the meanings of unknown words and phrases, word parts, roots and affixes and figurative language. In this full-day workshop teachers will learn to:
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Unwrap vocabulary standards across all content areas to identify specific objectives to teach.
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Identify the types of contextual clues and how they work, using her FACADES Word Meaning Strategy.
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Utilize the READ Strategy to determine the meanings of unknown and multiple meaning words and phrases in context.
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Teach roots and affixes using a predictable contextual structure.
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Identify and interpret figurative language using think alouds.
It’s ALL-LITERACY! The Pedagogy of Pregúntas, Proposition, Punctuation, and Performance Tasks in K-5 Classrooms.
Audience: K-5th grade educators, Literacy Leaders, and Administrators
Time Frame: 3–6-hour session
Description: Isolated and decontextualized instruction in the conventions of writing will not help our students to be effective, engaging, and efficient writers. Writing is just not relegated to the reading and language arts classes. Twenty-first learning expectations require that students construct viable arguments in mathematics, science, and social studies. Punctuation marks reside within these subject areas and often double as symbols. Our students today need relevant and engaging instruction in the use of punctuation marks through authentic text to promote, comprehension, composition, and coherence across all content areas.
Dr. Beryl Irene Bailey offers a solution to providing teachers with opportunities to create authentic writing tasks for students across all content areas using informational text sets and engaging in horizontal articulation. Students learn that literacy and numeracy are skills within all subject areas and learn to construct a viable argument for how they interpret a table, chart, or graph by writing about it. During social studies, it's not uncommon for students to employ knowledge of sentence structure, use of punctuation marks, and providing evidence for how they interpreted a text feature inclusive of quantity, operations, or measurement.
Taking Reading Comprehension into Our Hands
Audience: 2nd-12th grade educators, Literacy Leaders, and Administrators
Time Frame: 3–6-hour session
Description: “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 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 builds capacity in educators and administrators to connect their students to the world of literacy using her brain-based CLOSE Reading process and metatextual markers. Through deliberate practice in coding the text for levels of complexity, students learn to develop an established routine, self-regulation, and executive functioning skills when they conduct critical, analytical, and rhetorical analyses of literary and informational text. Teachers and students learn to drive a CAR through text.
CLOSE Reading is FUN-but-MENTAL!
Audience: 3rd-8th grade educators, Literacy Leaders, and Administrators
Time Frame: 3–6-hour session
Description: 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 that students have a solid knowledge of how language works. Although math is calculations, numeracy is analysis, interpretation, synthesis, and application. Every educator is a teacher of literacy and numeracy.
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. Dr. Beryl Irene Bailey takes educators and administrators through a cognitive conditioning workout where they engage in exercising language muscles to lift complex text across all content areas. Complex texts, like the muscular system are language muscles made up of myriad of structures and layers intertwined to give strength to the body of what the author has written.
Using CLOSE Reading to Develop READsponsible Students
Audience: 3rd-12th grade educators, Literacy Leaders, and Administrators
Time Frame: 3–6-hour session
Description: Educators around the country are feeling the need to respond to a clarion call for the inclusion of culturally responsive 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.
Dr. Beryl Irene Bailey cross pollinates character, comprehension, and communication and demonstrates for pre-K-12th grade educators and administrators how to embed diversity and equity, and social emotional learning into literacy instruction using the college and career ready ELA and Social Studies standards and multicultural literature.