Pre Conference
Brain Frames
This training is for grade K-12 special education or general education teachers of any subject area who want effective tools for teaching students to actively organize their language and thinking in academic tasks. Brain Frames are a set of graphics that organize, but they aren’t traditional graphic organizers.
This workshop introduces the six Brain Frames and provides participants with hands-on practice in using each of them for a variety of instructional purposes.
Forget about pre-made handouts — a blank piece of paper, a pencil, and the right strategy will do the job. By drawing their own Brain Frames from scratch, teachers and students can show what’s in their brains by constructing a visual “frame” so they can see, reflect on, and share what they know and understand. Thus, they can visually capture their ideas graphically without being constrained or frustrated by someone else’s pre-made organizer.Brain Frames are visual-spatial displays of the patterns underlying basic things we do with language every day.All day, every day, from a very young age, we:
- tell what we know
- sequence ideas
- show contrasts
- identify causes
- recognize effects
- categorize
- show relationships between concepts
Awareness of these patterns is largely unconscious to most people but directly influences comprehension, and academic success.Brain Frames give students organizing frameworks needed for academic success. They are a manageable set of graphics that will help them “do school.” They can use them in any subject and any grade level. Similarly, Brain Frames give teachers a manageable set of effective graphics that they can use across their curriculum.
Workshops
Supporting Students with Verbal Working Memory Limitations in the Classroom
This presentation will outline five guiding principles for the design of effective interventions for students whose language and learning are constrained by verbal working memory limitations. A multidimensional model is offered that considers both the knowledge and abilities of the student and the language-learning demands they face in the various contexts of a school day.
ASSERT: A Systematic Intervention for Teaching Students to Self-Advocate
Self-advocating is a challenge for many students with learning challenges. They adopt a passive stance rather than ask for what they need to be successful. The ability to self-advocate requires the coordination of numerous cognitive, affective, linguistic and meta-level skills. This session presents a framework called ASSERT that can be used to systematically teach students to self-advocate and promote their interpersonal and academic success.
Bio
Bonnie Singer, Ph.D., CCC-SLP is the Founder/CEO of Architects For Learning, where she trains educators, consults with schools world-wide and directs a staff in the Boston area that provides academic intervention, assessment, and consultation services.
In partnership with Dr. Anthony Bashir, she developed EmPOWER™, a method for teaching expository writing, and Brain Frames®, graphic scaffolds for language, literacy, teaching, and learning. Her primary research and publications focus on the relationship between spoken and written language, cognition, spatial processing, and self-regulated learning.