Discussions that Matter - Literacy and Learning

Attended a great International Reading Association seminar with several great speakers.  Discussions that Matter: fostering Critical Reading, Critical Thinking, and Critical Literacy Across the Grades.
All had some great things to say about facilitating authentic discussions with readers about great books.  Each of these speakers had much to say -- and have published books that provide additional insight about their work.

Ian A.G. Wilkinson

Ian A.G. Wilkinson contributed to the 1985 report - a Nation of Readers and is now actively involved in a project, "Group Discussions as a Mechanism for Promoting High-Level Comprehension of Text."  His work appears many scholarly publications, and currently serves as co-editor of Reading Research Quarterly.

Kathy Ganske presented a break-out session "Initiating Critical Literacy Discussions" and share many great ideas to stimulate real discussions about books.  Her most recent titles is Comprehension Across the Curriculum: Perspectives and Practices K-12 (Guilford)

Kathy Short presented information relating to global literacy, literature circles, curriculum as inquiry, and collaborative learning.  She has many books in publication and is director of World of Words <www.wowlit.org>.

Barbara A. Lehman has co-authored a book, Reading Globally, K-8: Connecting Students to the World through Literature (Corwin, 2010).  In addition to helping to facilitate, her break-out session utilizing paired reading titles for reading globally was fantastic.  If her book is 1/2 as good as the session, it's well worth the price.         

We will be posting more about this seminar in future posts -- a very interesting topic, overall and one that has great implications for practices in the clasroom.