LAURA ROBB

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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 appeared in the May 2017 Voices From the Middle: “ Read Write Think: Developing 21st Century Skills.”

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Keynote:

 

Differentiating Reading Instruction

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In this session Robb will make the case for differentiating instruction when teachers have limited time to teach reading. She ‘ll provide a sample framework for planning units organized by genre and theme, pointing out that when you teach genre structure, you’re also teaching writing. Participants will see how using literary elements, genre structure, and a theme can offer students a wide range of discussion points that work with diverse books. She’ll explain guidelines for pairing students throughout a unit and discuss how to support students reading three or more years below grade level. Participants will experience this type of differentiation by selecting a text in the handout that differs from their partner’s text. Partners will summarize, pair-share, use literary elements, and text structure and see how weaving informal writing about reading improves comprehension. In addition, Robb will suggest ways to ensure that initial partner conversations are productive. The session will close with participants debriefing the process. There will be time to ask Robb questions.

 

Afternoon Workshop:

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Writing To Improve Reading

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Robb will share the compelling research that shows the correlation between improving comprehension and writing about reading. In addition, Robb will explain the importance of talking prior to writing and why creating oral texts is an important prelude to writing.  Participants will experience this informal writing about reading with a read aloud, a poem, and a short informational text.