MCTE’s Fall 2024 Workshop
What Matters Most: Helping Kids with Comprehension for Fiction and Nonfiction
with Kylene Beers
Monday, October 28
9:00 AM-3:00 PM
Minnesota Landscape Arboretum
In this session, Kylene will share practices that help all students—but especially those who struggle with comprehension. You’ll leave with specific strategies that students can use before, during, and after reading. Additionally, you’ll spend time learning how to improve students’ vocabulary without having to rely on weekly word lists. Some time will also be spent on the Notice and Note Signposts. If the signposts are new to you, you’ll learn what they are. If you have been using them, you’ll learn how to encourage deeper thinking with them. This is a hands-on session, so you will leave with practices you can take back to your classroom immediately.
Dr. Kylene Beers is currently an international literacy consultant and previously was a Senior Reading Researcher at the Comer School Development Program at Yale University. She began her career as a middle school language arts teacher outside of Houston, TX. She is the author or co-author of many best-selling books including When Kids Can’t Read/What Teachers Can Do; Forged by Reading; Disrupting Thinking; Reading Nonfiction; and Notice and Note – Strategies for Close Reading. Disrupting Thinking, which she co-authored with Robert Probst, is a 2018 recipient of the Teachers Choice Awards.
Kylene has served on committees with the International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of English and is an often-invited keynote speaker to national and state conventions. She has served as president of the National Council of Teachers of English and is currently serving as a board member for the international LitWorld Foundation. She is a recipient of the NCTE Leadership Award and the NCTE Middle Grades Outstanding Teacher award.
Most importantly, Kylene is a teacher who continues to work in classrooms today across the nation as she works shoulder-to-shoulder with teachers and students. When not on an airplane, Kylene lives on her ranch with her husband, Brad, and their fabulous dog, Coda, in central Texas.
* Registration opens at 8:00, breakfast begins at 8:30, and workshop includes a one-hour break for lunch. 5 CEUs available to participants. All participants will receive a copy of Kylene’s newly revised When Kids Can’t Read: What Teachers Can Do.