Mining Complex Text, Grades 2-5: Using and Creating Graphic Organizers to Grasp Content and Share New Understandings (Corwin Literacy)

Your power tools for making the complex comprehensible Now more than ever, our students are being asked to do highly advanced thinking, talking, and writing around their reading. If only there were ingenious new tools that could give our students the space to tease apart complex ideas in order to comprehend and weld their understandings into a new whole. Good news: these tools exist—Mining Complex Text. You’ll learn how graphic organizers can: Help students read, reread, and take notes on a text Promote students’ oral sharing of information and their ideas Elevate organized note-making from complex text(s) Scaffold students’ narrative and informational writing

Diane Lapp--Like Doug and Nancy, she is a professor at San Diego State University who teaches English and does instructional coaching in a public high school, San Diego, CA-Health Science High & Middle College High School.  This is a very rare, but ideal combination of public school teacher and academic; teachers can tell when an academic who isn't in the classroom doesn't understand what their teaching lives are about. Doug, Nancy and Diane have credibility with teachers that many professors lack.

 

Diane has done editorial work for all of IRA's journals, including, The Reading Teacher and Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, and she is currently the co-editor of NCTE's middle school journal, Voices from the Middle. Among many her many awards, she's recipient of the 2011 John Manning Award from The International Reading Association, for Public School Service.

Her dozens of books have been published by IRA, ASCD, Solution Tree, Teachers College Press and many others; several have been co-authored with Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey.  The three of them collaborate regularly on chapters and journal articles as well.

Thomas Wolsey--Dr. Thomas DeVere Wolsey is a program director for the literacy masters programs at Walden University, where he teaches and supervises graduate courses related to literacy and technology. He worked in public schools for more than twenty years, teaching English, social studies, and other elective classes. He earned his doctorate at the University of San Diego/San Diego State University, and he also holds a masters degree in educational administration from California State University at San Bernardino. His articles on literacy and technology have appeared in The Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Action in Teacher Education, The California Reader, The Journal of Educational Administration, The International Journal on e-Learning, The Journal of Education, andThe Journal of Literacy Research and Instruction. He serves on the review boards of several journals, including The Reading Teacher and The Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. His recent books include Learning to Predict and Learning from Predictions: How Thinking about What Might Happen Next Helps Students Learn, Literacy Growth for Every Child, and Transforming Writing Instruction in the Digital Age: Techniques for Grades 5-12.

Wolsey is interested in how literacy intersects with online and physical learning spaces, writing as a feature of learning about disciplines (e.g., mathematics, social studies), and reading in digital environments.

Karen Wood--Karen D. Wood, PhD, is Professor in the Department of Reading and Elementary Education at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. A former middle school reading teacher and K-12 literacy specialist in the public schools, she is the author of over 200 articles, chapters, and books on such topics as integrating literacy across the curriculum, meeting the needs of diverse learners, vocabulary and comprehension development, and translating research and theory into classroom practice. Dr. Wood began writing the "Research into Practice" column for the Middle School Journal in 1986 and continues as its author today. She was a member of the authorship team of the McGraw-Hill Basal Reading Series from 1989 to 2004 and was the former coeditor, along with William E. Blanton, of the journal Reading Research and Instruction.