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Meet Leslie Preddy
July 5, 2005
A.B. You recently presented a conference on adolescent literacy. Please explain how people working in education could understand and access the "latest developments in the area of literacy for students ages 10 to 18." What are the skills needed for understanding this?
L.P. "I presented at the Adolescent Literacy Conference a session on SSR with Intervention and co-presented another session related to Information Inquiry. There are two major issues to understand about adolescent literacy.
1. First, it was an exciting conference because they recognized that there is more than one literacy. To reach the whole child and develop citizens functioning in a democratic society students need to be literate with reading, information, media, cultural, art, etc.
2. Second, educators need to recognize adolescents that are reading below grade level and provide strategies that allow those students to overcome their deficiencies and mental roadblocks. To develop some background knowledge and intervention strategies, I would suggest reading,"
a. Jim Burke’s Reading Reminders and School Smarts
b. Laura Robb’s Reading Strategies that Work and Teaching Reading in the Middle School
A.B. What are your expectations having been in attendance at the ALA conference? Were there any 'AHA' moments for you?
L.P. A friend, Robyn Young of Avon High School in Indiana, and I were talking on the drive home from ALA Chicago in June about how important attending conferences are for those ‘aha’ moments! Our experience has been that seeing something in the exhibit hall, attending a session or keynote, or having a casual conversation with others related to the field at a state or national conference has triggered some spark in us that is a catalyst for developing a program, change or improvement in our home school. We agreed that sometimes the catalyst that triggers the concept that germinates in our mind is only distantly related to that catalyst, but somehow being in the conference environment with the experiences, conversations and training it entails causes something to trigger a connection.
Posted by Amy Bowllan on July 5, 2005 | Comments (19)
