Day Two at the World Congress

Hello Family, Friends, and Colleagues!

We awoke today, bright and early to get ready for our busy day. Watching the news in New Zealand this morning, we heard a story about two police officers that were shot yesterday in Christchurch. The news anchors discussed the fact that New Zealand police officers do not carry guns, a surprise to us Chicagoans! We also learned that since 1910, only 21 police officers have died by gun fire while on duty in New Zealand. Astonished by this fact, we wondered what might happen if Chicago police officers were unarmed. There was also an interesting story in the newspaper about a woman with a condition that caused her to wake up with a different accent. The story was also on both the evening news last night and the morning news today. Very interesting...

Day two at the World Congress was brilliant! We began our day at the opening plenary session led by P. David Pearson. Dr. Pearson's plenary address was titled Reading Assessment: Still Time for Change. He discussed his "laws of assessment" and how we might use assessment to serve the different "clients of the assessment system." He also stated that we must not forget that our students are our most important client of this system. The best possible assessment tool are teachers, observing and interacting with students while they read and question real texts. He left us with a final quote - "Never send out a test to do the curriculum's job." An important reminder for classroom teachers everywhere in the time of standardized testing and accountability.

As with yesterday, we attended sessions both together and apart. Jennifer attended a symposium at which several doctoral candidates presented their research on instructional approaches that combine book reading with explicit instruction in phonics rules. Pilar attended a session on using folk tales improve the comprehension of struggling readers. Together, we both attended a session focuses on vocabulary instruction and developing our students into "word conscious" readers. We ended our day with an inspiring session by Steven Layne! His talk focused on successful strategies for building life-time readers and the presentation was energetic and full of practical ideas. Aliteral readers were discussed, as we have many students who can read, but won't or don't read. We must reach these students, as well as our strugglers.

We are really excited about the fantastic children's literature we purchased today! For each book that we purchased from the Scholastic book stand, Scholastic would donate a book to schools in Oceania. What a great way to support literacy around the world!

Tomorrow is the last full day of the conference! Until next time...