LightSail & Literacy Workshops

Building Strong Discussion & Debates

In this workshop, teachers will learn how to cultivate habits that teach students to be active and respectful listeners during reading discussions, debates, and seminars, as well as how students can eventually drive their own discussions around a text with minimal teacher prompting using the platform’s embedded tools.

Building Independence and Increasing Motivation with Literature Circles

In this workshop, teachers will gain strategies and product knowledge of the LightSail platform and library to support increasing their students’ motivation, accountability, confidence, and literacy skills.

Conferencing to Maximize Student Growth

Reading conferences provide the most useful opportunities for formative assessment ofstudents' reading behaviors. In this workshop, we will discuss the components and protocol of an effective reading conference, how to provide strong feedback, and how we can take our meetings with students to the next level by individualizing instruction and setting strong, meaningful goals.

Close Reading for Meaning

In this workshop, we will discuss how to choose texts that are appropriate for close reading and discuss strategies for instruction and higher-level thinking that support students to engage deeply with rigorous the text.

Connecting Reading and Writing Using LightSail

In order to be strong writers, students must be strong readers. This workshop will take students to the next level by providing targeted supports based on instructional best practices. Teachers will learn how they can use LightSail features to support students in crafting strong responses through the writing process.

Engaging Our ELL (ESL, ESOL) Students

Support your English Language Learners by selecting and assigning culturally relevant texts that build and shape social and academic language. This workshop will also support your development of text-response options that allow students who are reluctant to speak or are in their silent period to engage in rigorous textual conversation with you and their peers. For those teaching bilingual education, we will explore our English and Spanish texts for differentiation.

How to Hold Strong, Data Driven Team Meetings

As a school, grade, or classroom leader, using data-informed decisions to drive instruction is one of the most fundamentally sound Best Practices to ensure your students’ unique learning needs are being fostered. Learn how to access, use, and interpret your student’s LightSail data to maximize their growth, grow their potential, and raise their accountability.

Increase Student Vocabulary Acquisition Using LightSail

Students at all levels can benefit from specific, targeted vocabulary instruction. In this workshop, we will discuss how teachers can develop meaningful vocabulary instruction using the platform’s tools like Word Work and Add Thoughts to practice research-based best practices for vocabulary acquisition.

Motivating Reluctant Readers

In this workshop, teachers will gain an understanding of how the LightSail platform can be used to motivate even the most reluctant readers with tools for engagement, guidance, and celebration.

Motivating Readers through Book Talks

In this workshop, we explore how foster a love of reading in your classroom and develop peer-to-peer discussion techniques through building protocols. These protocols will be based around student-centered book clubs and book talks.

Promote and Support Diversity in your Classroom

In this workshop we will model how to develop strong stations-based teaching where teachers will learn how to evolve their practice including insight from the research to align their curriculum and literacy choices and use the platform’s features to promote a diversity of learning styles and learner’s needs.

Purposeful Student Annotations

In this workshop, teachers will learn how to develop a more complete, qualitative view of learners’ progress by leveraging the annotation tool in the LightSail platform. Teachers will be guided through the process of adding thoughts to texts to guide instruction or scaffold the reading process for groups of students. We provide guidance to select “just right” for whole-class instruction or a small reading group. Teacher will leave ready to challenge their class with thoughtful, focused questions or an opportunity to moderate their written, textual dialogue.

Who is the Reading Teacher? Literacy in the Content Areas

Since our partnership with Rosen Publishers, LightSail is excited to share a growing library stocked with engaging and informative content area books. These texts allow all teachers to maximize a student’s exposure to critical reading and writing strategies while gaining knowledge about subject-specific content. We will teachers will leave this workshop with books prepped, assigned and a plan for monitoring student responses. We are all reading teachers!

Writing effective IEP Goals with LightSail

This workshop will focus on how to write student and parent-friendly IEP goals that are tailored to the student, and how to use LightSail comprehensive data to measure and assess growth and devise interventions when necessary. This workshop will also focus on empowering the student to set and track their own IEP goals using LightSail student data.

Using Data to Differentiate Instruction and Propel Growth for Teachers

During this workshop, teachers will analyze their data to inform instruction, form targeted small groups, and learn strategies to engage and provide additional supports to struggling readers. Teachers will leave with action plans to keep high fliers challenged, push higher level thinking within the text and intervene.

Unit Planning: Selecting Key Standards, Defining Essential Questions, Choosing Core Texts and Supplemental Texts

An Instructional Coach will work with you to customize your units using backwards design and the features of the LightSail platform to ensure strong teaching and strong learning with our literacy tools.

Classroom Modeling

30 to 60-minute classroom lessons for students but with teachers watching or co-teaching to model using the various tools in LightSail to support areas of weakness and meet school’s instructional goals. Topics can include helping students set goals and track progress, improve vocabulary, build strong reading skills like summarizing or citing evidence, or develop strategies to improve cloze scores and more.

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