Melissa will want to learn more about your school in order to tailor a training or coaching cycle to best meet your needs. Below are some examples of PD workshops that Melissa has recently offered in schools:

​21st Century Classrooms: Adding the 4 Cs to the 3 Rs: Creativity, Collaboration, Communication & Critical Thinking
Bring the 3 Rs into the 21st Century. Learn what each of the 4 C’s means and what each can look and sound like in your classroom. Discover ideas for developing creativity, collaboration, communication, and critical thinking skills when you teach.
 
21st Century Skills: Teaching Tomorrow’s Leaders…Today
Prepare your young students to become tomorrow’s leaders! Melissa discusses why it’s important not to rely on rote memorization and shares how to focus instead on developing skills for critical thinking, problem-solving, decision-making, and cooperation. You’ll learn, have fun, and return to your classroom ready to inspire your students to learn.
 
6 Ways to Wake Up The Brain That Beat Traditional Teaching
Say goodbye to boring, traditional teaching and adopt fresh, new ways to wake up your student’s brains and increase retention. Melissa introduces six innovative strategies you can use tomorrow. Planning multiple ways to address engagement, representation, action, and expression in your room just got easier!
 
Adventures in Close Reading
Explore the concept of close reading and how it can assist students in reading and comprehending complex texts. Learn what close reading is, what it entails, and what it looks and sounds like in whole group instruction and small group activities. Discover strategies for explicitly teaching students how to read a text closely and tips students can use when reading independently.
 
Adventures in Close Reading: Strategies for Student Success
Meeting the informational text requirements of the standards can be challenging. Don't let that slow you down! With the close reading strategies Melissa offers, you'll have all the tools you need to help your students read and to support them as they discover how to research information.
 
Are You a H.O.T. (Higher-Order Thinking) Teacher?
Up the level of higher-order thinking (H.O.T.) in your classroom—easily and immediately. See how H.O.T. teachers help students get comfortable with constructed response and text-dependent questioning while supporting their thinking. Fire up achievement with Melissa's simple techniques.
 
Becoming Reading Detectives
Help your students deepen their comprehension by returning to the text and supporting their thinking with textual evidence. Leave with easy, effective methods for strengthening your students’ understanding of text by providing multiple close readings.
 
Building Vocabulary Doesn’t Have to be Boring
No more yawns when it's time to build vocabulary! Join Melissa and see fun and engaging ways to help your students build, retain, and retrieve vocabulary. Banish boredom and turn every learner into a word wizard using Melissa's energizing strategies!
 
Cheer It, Chant It, Sing It, Dance It: Energizing Vocabulary Learning
Improve your students’ spelling and increase their vocabulary through fully engaging word wall activities, fluency-building techniques, and vocabulary strategies. Melissa shows you how to make learning vocabulary fun for your students by infusing movement and vocalization into your instruction.
 
Child-Friendly Centers
Liven up your literacy centers with engaging and meaningful activities. Join Melissa as she shares fresh ideas for creating and managing literacy centers that support and enhance your curriculum. Discover how to minimize the work, maximize the FUN, and reap the benefits of child-friendly centers. Come prepared to walk away with loads of ideas you can use the next day!
 
Climbing the Ladder of Complex Texts
Learn what makes a text complex and how you can use such texts with emergent and developing readers. Discover specific strategies for using increasingly complex text in direct instruction, in small groups, and across content areas. Explore ideas for increasing comprehension of complex text by scaffolding for students who need it.
 
Comprehension Strategies That Work!
Emergent and early readers have a hard enough time trying to make sense of letter-sound connections, let alone developing the skills needed to comprehend. Melissa will share ways to teach both phonics and comprehension through stories, songs, and pictures, allowing you to return to your classroom with strategies you can implement immediately.
 
Critical Thinking Skills That Boost Student Achievement
Prepare your students to become tomorrow’s leaders! Melissa discusses why it’s important not to rely on rote memorization and shares how to focus instead on developing skills for critical thinking, problem-solving, decision-making, and cooperation. Learn, have fun, and return to your classroom ready to inspire your students to lead tomorrow.
 
Differentiated Instruction: Reading Comprehension
Discover effective techniques, management suggestions, and everyday materials that can help you differentiate reading comprehension instruction for the wide variety of learners in today’s ELA classrooms. Learn simple strategies that can be implemented immediately and explore long-term practices for differentiating what students are reading and how they are showing what they know and understand. Interact with lesson ideas for strengthening whole-group listening and reading comprehension instruction, and mini-lesson and small group activities will reach every learner. Plus, explore comprehension tips and tricks you can teach your students to use when reading alone.
 
Differentiated Instruction: Writing Strategies
Explore and practice instructional techniques designed to strengthen all students’ ability to become successful writers. Discover specific strategies for utilizing rich literature and informational text to exemplify and develop the practices of good writers and learn whole and small-group strategies and activities for reaching writers at every level of development. Combine writing and drawing and examine a variety of writing formats that appeal to a wide range of learners. Plus, discover simple, effective conferencing techniques and learn how technology can enhance students’ writing and make success possible for more students.
 
Differentiating Reading Strategies in the Content Areas
Enhance your students' reading skills—even if you're not a reading specialist! Melissa demonstrates effective, research-based strategies for accelerating vocabulary acquisition and comprehension in any subject. You'll learn dynamic techniques for helping all your students access prior knowledge and understand new information!
 
Emergent Reading Foundations: Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, and Fluency for All
Empower your emergent readers and writers with sound, symbol, and sight word skills that will give them confidence in all their literary activities. Discover how to make teaching and learning these foundational skills fresh, exciting, and interactive with games, centers, projects, and rich literature and informational text. Explore options for differentiation with various materials and tools and techniques and best practices for small group, focused instruction in foundational skill development.
 
Empowering All Writers with 6-Trait Writing Instruction
Take advantage of practical introductions to the 6 Traits and suggestions for teaching them to your students. Discover mentor texts that exemplify each trait and understand how to use them to create effective lessons. Learn research-based strategies, activities, and projects to make your writers more successful. Explore interactive activities that will help get your students to apply the 6 Traits in a variety of writing genres.
 
Fluent (Not Fast) Reading
Too often, students confuse fluent reading with speed. Join Melissa to explore proven fluency-building activities you can use in your classroom, including Reader’s Theater, timed readings, choral reading, singing, and more. Plus, learn how incorporating these innovative ideas into your classroom will have your students reading with prosody in no time!
 
From Remember to Create – Building Comprehension through Critical Thinking
Learn how to build deep comprehension of text from the bottom of Bloom’s Taxonomy to the top. Explore whole-group lesson ideas that develop students’ ability to compare, contrast, summarize, paraphrase, and make connections to and between texts. Discover small-group activities and projects which allow students to deepen their comprehension of text read both aloud and alone. Learn strategies and questioning techniques that foster critical thinking in all reader levels and interact with specific titles that can facilitate deeper understanding.
 
Games, Songs & Stories: Keeping Learning Fun
Fun plays a powerful role in helping the brain remember information. In this make-and-take, you'll discover fun games, songs, and stories to help your students learn and remember instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary building, and reading strategies and skills.
 
Getting to the Core of Reading Comprehension
Explore and practice instructional techniques designed to strengthen students’ ability to better understand the variety of print they interact with. Discover specific strategies for utilizing rich literature and informational text to develop the practices of good readers in both read-aloud and read-alone situations, and learn whole and small-group strategies and activities for utilizing text features and imagery to determine central themes and point of view, making inferences, comparing and contrasting, and more.
 
I Get It! Listening and Speaking Strategies to Increase Comprehension
A classroom where talking is happening is a classroom where learning is happening. Examine the reasons behind getting students to talk through what’s been read and how to structure those conversations to deepen student comprehension. Explore whole group lesson ideas, open-ended questioning examples and techniques, and specific texts you can use to begin developing this habit in your classroom. Interact with small group activities and project suggestions that provide students opportunities to talk about, process, re-create, analyze, categorize, summarize, and paraphrase what’s been read to build a more global understanding of the information shared.
 
I Say/You Say: Strategies for Developing Listening and Speaking Vocabularies
Teach listening, speaking, and the general academic vocabulary called for in the Common Core State Standards in a way that your students are sure to enjoy. Discover how students learn new words, how to select words, and how to squeeze vocabulary instruction into your busy day, no matter what subject you teach. Learn research-based techniques for using informational and literary text, category word walls, artwork, games, and more to increase vocabulary acquisition and ownership and reading comprehension levels in your students, no matter their reading level or native language.
 
Increase Rigor in the Questioning Classroom
Explore how to increase critical thinking skills by examining specific approaches that require students to process content by answering and formulating questions at higher levels of thought. Look at multiple questioning structures that can be applied across all content areas.
 
In-Depth: Text Types and Features
Learn how text types and features facilitate students’ comprehension of a text. Discover the range and types of text that can be used in instruction and specific strategies for digging deeply into the features that each type incorporates. Examine whole and small group strategies for identifying important features in each text type, teaching students when and how to use them, and reinforcing the use of text features in a range of text types across content areas.
 
Intervention: Support for the Struggling Reader
Readers struggle for many reasons. Join Melissa to learn how to diagnose and prescribe high-quality, explicit instruction and interventions. Discover “fix-up” strategies to support your struggling readers in the areas that trouble them. Leave with dozens of ideas to add to your intervention toolkit.
 
Interventions for All
Investigate how interventions can help your students succeed throughout their school careers. Learn what factors determine who needs intervention services and identify characteristics of successful interventions. Discover specific teacher and student-friendly intervention strategies for both reading and writing, in small groups and individual lessons, which incorporate the use of a variety of materials, tools, and techniques and interact with some options for progress monitoring student gains. Explore simple strategies for reaching struggling students during whole group instruction and how differentiation in direct instruction can decrease the number of students in need of intervention.
 
Interventions: Diagnosis & Prescription for Struggling Readers
Readers struggle for a multitude of reasons. Melissa shares strategies for diagnosing reading problems and prescribing high-quality, explicit instruction and interventions that support the reader. You’ll leave with dozens of ideas to add to your intervention toolkit.
 
It’s Not Always about the Content: Non-Cognitive Skills that are Essential to Student Success
Students need more than just good academic skills in order to succeed in college and career. Understand what other factors impact a student’s success and how to develop these skills in your students. Discover how to develop traits such as perseverance, self-regulation, and motivation in students, with purposefully planned whole group and small group activities. Explore books whose characters exemplify such traits and games and projects that give students a chance to strengthen and refine their own non-cognitive skills in a low-risk environment.
 
Just Right Comprehension Mini-Lessons that Get Results             
Discover how to use data to drive instruction, pull flexible groups, provide anchor activities, AND teach your students how to comprehend what they are reading! Join Melissa as she shares mini-lessons using pictures, videos, songs, and books to support your students’ understanding, whether they’re working in whole class, in small groups, or independently.
 
Language Acquisition: Research-Based Strategies for Acquiring Vocabulary
Discover why building all levels of students’ vocabulary early is crucial to their future success as readers and writers. Learn what kinds of vocabulary you should focus on in direct instruction and how to ensure students’ success in acquiring and retaining reading, writing, listening, and speaking vocabulary words. Interact with whole group, small group, and individual lessons, games, and application activities that encourage language development in every level and type of learner, and how interaction with literary and informational text can impact and enhance students’ language skills.
 
Let Them Be Heard: Innovative Strategies for Presenting Knowledge and Ideas
Enhancing the way your students share information has never been more exciting! Understand the speaking and presentation expectations brought by the standards and what they mean for your instruction. Discover direct instruction strategies that model and reinforce sharing ideas in a variety of ways, for multiple purposes and audiences, and explore project ideas designed to allow students opportunities to develop and refine their skills for doing so. Investigate templates and formats that will scaffold students’ efforts and discover some easy-to-use digital options that can optimize the information your students want to share.
 
Literacy Stations are NOT a Vacation!
Liven up your literacy stations (centers) with engaging and meaningful activities. Join Melissa as she shares fresh ideas for creating and managing stations that support and enhance your curriculum. Discover how to minimize the work, maximize the FUN, and reap the benefits of kid-friendly stations. Plus, come prepared to walk away with loads of ideas you can use the very next day!
 
Lively Literature Circles
Nurture your students’ love of reading through literature circles. Melissa offers effective management tools you can use to create engaging and lively literature circles in your classroom. Plus, get ideas that support quality discussions and help you make great book choices.
 
Liven up Their Day with Learning Centers
Learn how to integrate a wide variety of exciting center ideas into your curriculum without increasing your planning time. Melissa shares ready-to-use activities that engage students and reinforce new skills. Plus, you'll have a chance to exchange tried-and-true center ideas and management tips with your colleagues. Please bring 2 sheets of construction paper and a marker.
 
Mini-Lessons for Readers' Workshop: Short, Simple & Sweet
Take full advantage of mini-lessons—a key to a successful Readers' Workshop. Discover how to teach short, simple, and sweet lessons to address procedures, skills, and strategies every good reader needs. Learn the types of mini-lessons, experience a variety of mini-lessons in various forms, and find out how to use data to select the best fit for your students.
 
Modeling a Close Reading Lesson
You can't get your students to read text one time. How will you get them to read it more than once? In this hands-on session, experience how to conduct a close reading lesson with your xxx. Learn how to model a close reading of a text that uncovers the layers of meaning that lead your little ones to deep comprehension.
 
Multiple Intelligences
Teachers teach in theirs. Students learn best in theirs. So, what is it? According to Howard Gardner, it is the strongest one of eight intelligences. Join Melissa to learn about each of the eight intelligences, find out which one you prefer as a teacher and learner, and finally learn how to provide lessons to enhance all eight intelligences for your students.
 
No Tech, Low Tech and High Tech Strategies for Publishing and Sharing Writing
Whether it’s informational, narrative, or argumentative writing, students need to publish and share their work with others. Explore innovative ideas, formats, and templates that allow students to polish and present a piece of original writing whether you’ve got all the technology in the world or none at all. Discover specific ideas for whole group, small group, and individual writing prompts and projects that all levels of students can create, and the almost endless opportunities for sharing those in-house and beyond.
 
Organizing and Retelling Informational Text (Gr. 2-5)
Join Melissa as she shares a strategy to chunk the content of informational text while helping your students organize their thinking during reading. After reading, students can continue to use the color-coded tool to easily share their learning with an oral or written retelling. It’s great for research, too!
 
Phonics Fun for Everyone
Empower your emergent readers and writers with phonics confidence and discover how to make teaching and learning phonics more fun. Melissa shares phonics-building activities for large and small groups, literacy centers, and independent practice. Fill your toolbox with strategies for differentiating your phonics instruction to meet the needs of all your little learners.
 
Phonics Phun for Everyone for the Primary Grades
Empower your emergent readers and writers with phonics confidence and discover how to make teaching and learning phonics more fun. Melissa shares phonics-building activities for large and small groups, literacy centers, and independent practice. Fill your toolbox with strategies for differentiating your phonics instruction to meet the needs of all your little learners.
 
Power of Independent Reading
Increase comprehension and the love of reading by making independent reading a priority in your classroom. This session brings you up-to-speed on independent reading focused on student choice. Unpack simple, yet effective ways to begin, structure, and manage a regular independent reading time in your classes.
 
Reading Aloud and Thinking Together
Children never outgrow the love of hearing someone share great literature. In this session, Melissa will show ways to incorporate picture books into your curriculum. Students learn to develop higher-order thinking skills while being exposed to a variety of genres. Through picture books, students learn to predict, draw conclusions, identify main ideas and cause and effect situations, and support their thinking with examples from the text. Teachers will leave eager to share these ideas and books with their students.
 
Reading and Writing Across the Curriculum
Learn the powerful possibilities that exist for teaching literacy skills across your curriculum. Discover how to integrate literary and informational text into subject area lessons, and locate and utilize complex texts that correspond with topics and concepts. Explore project ideas for writing narrative and informational texts that connect to your content area instruction, and exchange ideas with colleagues for teaching specific standards and strands in the subjects you teach.
 
Reading Comprehension: Texts, Grouping Strategies, and Best Practices and Activities
Explore and practice instructional techniques designed to strengthen students’ ability to better understand the variety of print they interact with. Discover specific strategies for utilizing rich literature and informational text to develop the practices of good readers in both read-aloud and read-alone situations, and learn whole and small-group strategies and activities for utilizing text features and imagery to determine central themes and point of view, making inferences, comparing and contrasting, and more.
 
Reading for Evidence: How Do You Know?
Learn what reading for evidence looks and sounds like in classroom instruction. Explore strategies for teaching students to find evidence in text and delve into activities designed to develop those skills. Examine examples of text-dependent questions and interact with colleagues to design your own. Investigate ideas for building this skill in all content areas, using a variety of texts.
 
Reading in the Content Areas
Learn the powerful possibilities for teaching reading skills in the content areas. Discover how to integrate literary and informational text into subject area lessons and locate and utilize complex texts that correspond with the topics and concepts you teach. Explore digital and print text resources that will enhance not only your students’ reading skills but their content area knowledge. Examine the unique instructional opportunities that content area texts can bring and how the variety in text types and features can help you develop well-rounded, well-informed readers.
 
Reading Test-Prep: The New Genre?
Has standardized testing left you frustrated and stifled your teaching style? Take advantage of Melissa’s tips and techniques to prepare for standardized tests more enjoyable for you and your students. You’ll explore innovative ways to help struggling readers transfer the skills and strategies you teach in the classroom to the test. Plus, you’ll learn effective uses for Test Practice Passages.
 
Search & Rescue: Supporting Your At-Risk & Struggling Students
Help is on the way for meeting the needs of your at-risk and struggling students. Join Melissa to identify the factors that determine if a student is at-risk and/or struggling. And, take away classroom-proven, teacher-friendly strategies and interventions to support both types of students in your own classroom.
 
Sensational Summarization
Students who have difficulty summarizing also have difficulty identifying the main idea. In this session, you'll learn sensational strategies you can use to support students as they learn to identify key points and summarize fiction and expository text.
 
Shared Research: Bringing It All Together
Find out exactly what a shared research project looks and sounds like and collaborate on ways to use projects effectively in your instruction in ELA and across content areas. Discover interactive and collaborative ways to expose your students to digital and print resources for shared and independent research. Learn options for teaching them how to create research questions, search effectively, and isolate and organize the information they gain. Explore fun, creative research projects you can do with your students to explicitly teach and practice those researching and reporting techniques and build presentation and listening skills.
 
Show Me! Finding and Using Textual Evidence in Writing
21st century standards require that students write using evidence to support their ideas. Learn techniques for teaching your students how to use evidence from texts to draw and support conclusions about point of view, author’s purpose, character motivation, source reliability and more. Discover activities that can help build this skill in emergent, developing, and proficient writers, in both whole and small-group settings and across content areas.
 
Strategic Reading: Tools to Deepen Comprehension in all Content Areas
“My students read well, they just don’t comprehend what they read.” Melissa has heard this many times from the teachers she works with as a literacy coach. Join her as she shares dozens of strategies to help develop “active” readers. You’ll leave with new ideas to help your students identify the main idea, summarize, predict, infer, make connections, visualize, and synthesize information across a variety of texts.
 
Striking the Balance: Literature and Informational Text
Explore and practice instructional techniques designed to expose students to a wide range of texts. Discover specific strategies for utilizing rich literature that represents a variety of genres, eras, and perspectives; and for increasing your understanding and use of informational text across all content areas.
 
Student-Friendly Literacy Centers
Liven up your literacy centers with engaging and meaningful activities! Melissa shares fresh ideas for creating and managing literacy centers that support your curriculum. Discover how to minimize your effort, maximize your students’ FUN, and reap the many benefits of student-friendly centers. Please bring two pieces of construction paper and a marker.
 
Summative Assessment Strategies
Understand how effective summative assessment strategies can let every student shine. Determine which skills and concepts need to be assessed and learn the importance of giving a variety of summative assessments to ensure you get a complete picture of exactly what your students know and can do. Discover ideas for preparing students for success on common assessment tasks and for providing them choices of showing what they know. Interact with specific formal assessment strategies that tap into a variety of learning styles and explore how data gained from assessment should form our future planning for both whole and small group instruction.
 
Support for the Struggling Reader
Readers struggle for a multitude of reasons. As professionals, we must diagnose and prescribe high-quality, explicit instruction and interventions that support the reader. Join Melissa to examine common reading problems and the interventions that support each one. You’ll leave with dozens of ideas to add to your “teacher intervention toolkit”.
 
Supporting Your Struggling & At-Risk Readers with the Right Strategies
Identifying your at-risk students is the easy part. Determining the appropriate interventions to support them is much more challenging. Examine common reading problems and learn the interventions that support each one. You’ll gain the confidence to choose the right strategies to put your struggling and at-risk xxx on the road to success.
 
The Teacher’s Guide to Close Reading
Explore the concept of close reading and how it can assist students in reading and comprehending complex texts. Learn what close reading really is, what it entails, and what it looks and sounds like in whole group instruction and small group activities. Discover strategies for explicitly teaching students how to read a text closely, using close reading strategies with non-traditional text, and how to teach close reading strategies to non-readers and developing readers. Learn the components that make a close-reading lesson effective and tips students can use when reading independently.
 
They Read It, But They Don’t Get It! - Content Area Literacy Strategies That Work!
Are you having trouble getting the content across to your students? Do your students read it, but fail to understand it? You're not alone! Join Melissa as she shares strategies specifically designed to help adolescents “get it”—regardless of what your content is. You’ll leave with a menu of ideas and resources to support your students.
 
Tools to Deepen Comprehension Skills
Discover how to use data to drive instruction, pull flexible groups, provide anchor activities, AND teach your students how to comprehend what they are reading! Join Melissa as she shares mini-lessons using pictures, videos, songs, and books to support your students’ understanding, whether they’re working in whole class, in small groups, or independently.
 
We Are All Teachers of Reading & Writing: Let's Be Extraordinary!
You ARE an Extraordinary Educator! But exactly what does that mean? Melissa starts off this conference by exploring the essential characteristics you need to be an extraordinary literacy leader to your students, no matter what you teach. You'll reflect on the wisdom, compassion, fairness, and other unique qualities you possess and how to let them shine through every day in your classroom as you guide students to develop and refine their reading and writing acumen. Come laugh, learn, and gain amazing "a-ha" insights into the Extraordinary Educator that is you!
 
Word Play: Fun-Based Learning
Whether it’s making words, prefixes and suffixes, learning phonics and spelling rules, word families, or developing vocabulary, having fun increases learning! Experience fun and engaging ways to support word play. You’re guaranteed to enjoy the teaching every bit as much as your students will enjoy the learning.
 
Word Study: Sing It, Dance It, Cheer It, Chant It
Take advantage of creative ways to increase your students’ spelling and vocabulary skills! In this session, Melissa demonstrates easy-to-use word wall activities as well as effective fluency and vocabulary strategies. You’ll return to your classroom equipped with the tools to get your students energized about word study.
 
Word Wizardry – The Magic of Vocabulary Building
Are you still having your students look up vocabulary words in the dictionary, or using other ineffective methods of vocabulary instruction? In this session, Melissa will address the different ways that memory is stored in the brain and model a variety of ways to support your struggling readers and second language learners to build their vocabulary and become “Word Wizards”! Participants will leave with a plethora of ideas for introducing, comprehending, and recalling new vocabulary words. A fun, engaging session filled with easy to implement ideas and strategies.
 
Words Matter: Building Academic Vocabulary
Learn what the terms surrounding language acquisition in your State Standards mean and the importance of developing strong vocabulary skills for college and career readiness. Discover the criteria for selecting words for direct instruction and learn where to find the best sources of rich language to share with your students. Practice strategies to introduce and revisit general academic and domain-specific vocabulary words in each content area with emergent, developing, and non-readers.
 
Yes They Can! Classroom Proven Strategies for ELLs
English Language Learners require purposeful, differentiated instruction. Learn specific strategies in every content area for reaching students who are acquiring language. Discover strategies for scaffolding reading and listening comprehension, building strong science, math, and social studies vocabularies, and creating a low-risk environment. Learn to use realia and manipulatives for scaffolding language skills, encouraging verbal and pictorial response, and incorporating small group conversational opportunities for students to deepen their understanding.
 
Yes, Centers or Stations in Middle and High School
Join Melissa and see how to integrate this amazing instructional strategy in your middle and high school classrooms. You’ll learn how to maintain rigor and differentiate while strengthening the students’ social skills and content area retention. You’ll walk away with ideas to immediately implement and eager to put this into play in your classroom.
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