William and Mary School of Education - Reading Conference

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William and Mary School of Education Reading Conference, Williamsburg, Virginia - November 6, 2025



Take Aways

I.
Devin Kearns, PhD - A Few Strategies: The Little Things That Can Make All the Difference
  • Top Three
    • Always make a recording of oral reading
    • Do a spelling inventory
    • Always maintain cognitive processing
  • Teach world knowledge and word knowledge
  • DON'Ts - don't ask about prior knowledge, don't use KWL charts, don't spend lots of time soliciting one at a time responses
  • DOs - do use choral response, do turn and talk, do quick write, do fist to five, don't ask questions that are too hard 80% mastery guided practice, 90-95% accuracy independent
  • Getting the gist - Central Idea > Main Idea > Gist - (1) Identify the Who or What; (2) Most important info on Who or What; (3) Create a 10 word Gist Statement
Complete this sentence: We have the societal obligation  to improve literacy because... literacy leads to learning, independence and freedom.


II.
Devin Kearns, PhD - Pol-y-syl-lab-ic Words are Hard - But we can help
  • Top three
    • Turn the wrong thing into the right thing!
    • Only identify the vowels.  Avoid long lessons labeling consonant and vowel and determining syllable type. 
    • Every syllable has one vowel (ESHOV) - focus on long (open) and short (closed) syllables - emphasize features that stand out but don't belabor all syllable types 
  • Peeling off strategy - display chart with affixes - peel off and place prefixes and suffixes to teach pronunciation and meaning
  • Syllabication - before giving the students any words teacher reads the words aloud, then write and divide with identifying the vowel
III.
Mary Murray Stowe - Specially Designed Instruction in the Era of the Virginia Literacy Act

IV.
Rachel Samuels - AI and the Science of Reading
  • Top three
    • Use AI to develop word lists (ask for specific features / syllable types, etc.)
    • Passages - decodables and comprehension passages
    • Cloze reading activities
  • To get acquainted with AI consider using it during team planning to garner the experience of colleagues
  • Format for AI prompts - Role > Task > Context constraints > Format
  • Project Read is an AI platform connected to UFLI
V.
Tammy Williams - Improving Comprehension One Sentence at a Time
  • Top three
    • Write - provide subject or predicate - students complete the sentence
    • Rebuild - provide short kernel sentence - teach conjunctions - students turn kernel into more complex sentence
    • Include - use who, what, when to grow kernel sentences
VI.
Heidi Anne Mesmer and Katie Hilden - There's Research for That: How reading science answers teaching questions about literacy instruction
  • Top three
    • Book promotion for the presenters / authors book of the same title
    • The book is organized by teaching questions as an easy to use handbook for referencing the research (this will likely become outdated fairly quickly)
    • Heidi Anne Mesmer also wrote a book worth looking up titled, Big Words for Young Readers

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