Author Services

Interactive Lecture Series

Literacy and Leadership: Fulfilling Our Responsibility to Children

            The rancor that has occurred and continues to infect the arena of reading pedagogy represents a significant barrier to literacy attainment for many of our youngsters.  Drawing on his experience as an inner city teacher and principal and his research for the book, Leaving Johnny Behind, the author shows that there is more in the data that unites us than drives us apart, and that building coalitions among reading practitioners is the ultimate expression of child advocacy.

Literacy and Leadership: The New Role of the Principal

            The most successful and highly-acclaimed principals are those who build strong readers even under the most challenging of circumstances.  Accomplishing this goal means that principals must be visibly present in classrooms every day attending to matters deemed most essential and most highly aligned with reading level advancement.  Examples include the most effective ways to preserve the integrity of the language-arts block, how to use the daily gains chart to monitor both student and teacher performance, methods to record teacher prompts and student response rates, and the fastest and most efficient ways to provide regular feedback and support to teachers.

Literacy and Leadership: Embracing the Science of Reading

            The author reviews the most comprehensive evidence pertaining to early literacy acquisition and describes the disconnect between what the data proves and what he had been taught throughout his pre- and post service training.  His experience in Milwaukee’s central city that led to this awakening is interwoven throughout the presentation.

Direct and Systematic: Its Implications for Reading Instruction

            The most expansive outcome-based research on early reading reveals not only what should be taught, but also how it should be taught.  With regard to the latter, the evidence overwhelmingly supports direct, intense, systematic, explicit and comprehensive curricular treatment, methods that when carried out with fidelity can literally guarantee children’s literacy futures.  In this talk, the author describes exactly what is meant by “direct and systematic,” what it looks like in classrooms and factors that tend to compromise our ability to carry it out.

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