LAURA ROBB

Author, teacher, coach, and speaker, Laura Robb has completed more than 43 years of teaching in grades 4-8. She presently coaches teachers in grades K to 8 in Virginia and Pennsylvania. Robb always works with those students who need the most support from teachers. 

Laura Robb has written more than 25 books for teachers. In 2016, two new books were published: The Reading Intervention Toolkit, by Shell Education in April 2016 and Read Talk Write: 35 Lessons That Teach Students to Analyze Fiction and Nonfiction .published by Corwin Literacy in October 2016. Corwin Literacy also published Robb’s Vocabulary Is Comprehension: Getting to the Root of Complex Texts was available in September 2014.  Her newest for Heinemann is a First Hand Curriculum: Smart Writing: Practical Units For Teaching Middle School Writers and a book, and a professional book, Teaching Middle School Writers: What Every English Teacher Needs to Know. For Scholastic, Robb has completed Unlocking Complex Texts; the book provides teachers with detailed reading and writing about reading lessons.  Robb has designed classroom libraries for Scholastic for grades 3 to 9. She developed, with Jeff Wilhelm, XBOOKS for middle school readers: nonfiction print texts with an online curriculum organized by themes such as forensics, tyrants, war, medicine, and strange. 

Robb is a keynote and featured speaker at conferences and leads workshops all over the country and in Canada. She writes articles for education journals. Her blog for MiddleWeb, “Our # 1 Reading Problem: Persistent Inequalities” was published in April 2014, another MiddleWeb Blog was published in March 2016, “Ten Motivators to Promote Playful Learning.”  Look for her new blog to be published by MiddleWeb the end of December 2016: “ Democracy Needs a Nation of Readers & Thinkers.”

 Her article on motivation and engagement was published in the fall, 2015 issue of Literacy Today. Robb has a new article that will appear in the May 2017 Voices From the Middle: “ Read Write Think: Developing 21st Century Skills.”

Keynote:  Read, Talk, Write: Building Analytical and Critical Thinking Skills With Literary Discussions and Writing About Reading

In this active-learning keynote, participants will experience how talk and write about reading to  improve comprehension, clarify thinking, and build vocabulary. Participants will learn how to create guiding questions and teach students to pose their own open-ended, interpretive questions. In addition, participants will use guidelines for keeping a discussion going using a short story and experience a whole-class discussion and small-group discussion. Robb will model strategies that move participants deeper and deeper into texts, exploring meanings through analytical and critical thinking.

 

Morning Workshop: Unlocking Complex Texts With Interactive Read Alouds

After explaining the benefits of having an anchor text to teach reading, Robb will actively involve participants in a lesson with an informational anchor text and one with fiction. In addition, Robb will show how interactive read alouds can enlarge students’ vocabulary and build their mental models of what expert readers do.