Pat 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 Pat has recently offered in schools:

​Arguments and Evidence and Narratives, Oh My! Working with the Writing Standards  
Give your students the skills and confidence to successfully use evidence-based argumentative and narrative writing techniques . Join Pat and gain a wealth of ready-to-use lessons, frameworks, strategies, and techniques for encouraging every student to reach for and achieve writing excellence.
 
Assessment: Get Your Students Ready to Succeed!
Tackle the next generation of assessments head on! Unpack simple strategies for teaching students how to analyze and fully respond to multiple choice, constructed response, and non example questions. Leave with activities and ideas that can be implemented immediately in your classrooms to help students succeed with the new Common Core assessments.
 
Boosting Comprehension Strategies That Work 
Help your students become thoughtful readers by teaching them how to interact with text—not just “flip through the pages.” Pat shares hands-on strategies, prompts, and manipulatives to boost your students’ skills in visualizing, making connections and working with story elements. Please bring scissors, markers, and glue.
 
Boosting Fluency Development
Join Pat as she shares specific strategies for boosting your students’ fluency development. You'll gain ideas and techniques that will help your students read smoothly and easily. And, you'll leave with a repertoire of strategies you can implement tomorrow!
 
Boosting the Achievement of Your Struggling Readers & Writers              
Eliminate the line of students at your desk by learning ways to help your students apply reading and writing strategies independently! Pat introduces innovative strategies, ideas, and activities to help your struggling students make those important reading and writing connections.
 
Can Students Ask Thought-Provoking Questions? YES!
Teach your students how to ask thought provoking questions—the kind that build knowledge and comprehension and address the speaking and listening standards. Pat demonstrates how to move students from asking simple questions to asking questions that spark opinions and rigorous, critical thinking. Please bring scissors, markers, and glue stick.
 
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 student comprehension of complex text by scaffolding for students who need it.
 
Close Reading with Textual Evidence: Making It Fun & Easy
Foster your students the ability to read thoughtfully and attentively. Unpack strategies, activities, and ideas for getting students back into the book to confirm answers and predictions. Leave with tips for showing your kindergartners how to cite textual support and evidence for their thinking.
 
Comprehending Content-Area Texts
Take advantage of tons of ideas, activities, and strategies for increasing your students' understanding of the science and social studies concepts introduced in texts. Plus, learn practical ways to use graphic organizers to increase your students' comprehension of both vocabulary and information.
 
Comprehension Strategies: Reading for Meaning            
There are certain keys that unlock the treasure of becoming a lift-long proficient reader. The presentation will look at specific, research-based activities and instructional strategies that are used by highly effective readers. Some specific areas that may be focused on are: • Retelling • Story elements • Main idea • Summarizing • Comparing/contrasting • Using context clues • Drawing conclusions • Making connections • Asking and answering high level questions • Vocabulary development
 
Creating Independent Writers
Teach your students to love writing. Pat offers developmentally- appropriate ideas and strategies for moving your emergent and beginning writers away from “How do you spell it?” to independently getting their ideas down on paper. You’ll leave with easy-to-implement ideas you can use immediately to create motivated, successful writers.
 
Effective Reading Strategies For Struggling Students
Learn several practical strategies for improving the reading achievement of your struggling students. Pat shares proven methods for building sight vocabulary and decoding abilities. Plus, you’ll explore powerful questioning techniques and highly effective self-monitoring strategies.
 
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 theses foundational skills fresh, exciting, and interactive with games, centers, projects, and rich literature and informational text. Explore options for differentiation with a variety of materials and tools and techniques and best practices for small group, focused instruction in foundational skill development.
 
Engaging Young Readers in Whole Group & Circle Time: A Treasury of Mini-Lessons
Gain specific strategies and activities to use in your whole-group instruction, including hands-on mini lesson ideas that allow students to manipulate the texts they’re working with. Explore how to work with your standards through practical, research-based instructional strategies in your whole-group instruction.
 
Flexible Grouping Strategies
Join Pat to gain effective and practical ways to implement flexible grouping into your literacy instruction. Explore whole class, small groups, pairs, and individual learning situations. Identify strategies for the management and scheduling of small groups, as well as how to use and organize background groups. Pat gives you practical, easy-to-use tips and strategies on making and keeping flexible groups in your classroom!
 
Formative Assessment & Feedback
Explore and practice techniques designed to make on-going assessment and feedback simple and effective. Identify the concepts and skills that need to be assessed regularly and discover specific strategies for conducting informal assessment on a regular basis. Learn how to utilize those observations to inform your planning, grouping, and instruction. Explore how to give descriptive feedback and why it is critical to student success. Delve into ideas, scenarios, and strategies for providing students with that feedback in a low-risk, high-impact way.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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 range of text types across content areas.
 
Increasing Language Development for Learning Success
The greater language abilities young children possess, the greater their chances are of becoming successful readers and writers. Pat will show you how to increase the language acquisition of your students through descriptive activities, retellings, vocabulary games, and asking and answering questions.
 
Independent Literature Circles
Discover outstanding ways to create, organize, and manage successful independent literature circles. Learn techniques for assigning student jobs and roles. Learn tips for generating active participation from all your students. And, learn the secret to establishing a quality, independent literature circle environment that requires no supervision.
 
Informative Writing
Explore and practice instructional techniques designed to help students produce a wide range of text that informs or explains, in a variety of formats and across content areas. Discover specific strategies for developing all students’ ability to write with an audience and purpose in mind and to include visuals and other text features in their work.
 
Intervention Strategies with Word Work Using Word Walls
Discover how to have your students use word walls independently on a daily basis to help with literacy development. Pat shows you how to differentiate the ways you use word walls in your classroom. You’ll learn intervention strategies for increasing acquisition of sight words and boosting achievement in decoding, spelling, and more.
 
Interventions for Struggling Students
Join Pat to discover the characteristics of effective interventions. Plus, learn specific strategies for instructing your struggling students in reading and writing during small groups and individual lessons. Come learn how to help all children learn by implementing interventions that proactively meet their needs. Please bring scissors and markers.
 
Keynote: Increasing Achievement For All Students
Teachers will see how working with a wide range of learners can be manageable and how to increase their own delivery of instruction. Educators will leave Pat’s keynote enthused with practical ideas and strategies.
 
Keynote: Making a Difference in Students’ Lives
Educators touch the lives of so many children. Our enthusiasm and expectations play a critical role in students’ success. Pat shares strategies and activities that create a positive learning environment for all.
 
Let's Get Them Writing!
Get your students writing—and loving it! Pat shares specific ideas, strategies, and prompts to inspire your young students to write and activities to help them write with ease. Plus, pick up ideas for incorporating essential skills into your writing program. The result: Writers who can think critically, solve problems, and are passionate about writing!
 
Literacy Centers
Guide your students to success using Pat's exciting center ideas and activities. Explore how to incorporate rigor into assignments and activities. At the end of the session, you’ll have a wealth of easy to use, engaging center ideas for addressing the English Language Arts standards.
 
Low-Prep, High-Impact Writing Centers
Create and manage effective writing centers in your classroom—with minimal preparation time! In this hands-on session, you'll learn how to meet the needs of a variety of learners. And, you'll explore writing activities that work with any curriculum area.
 
Make a Good Case: It’s My Opinion and I’m Sticking (Writing) to it!
Give your students the skills and confidence to write high-quality opinion texts. Explore many different forms of opinion writing. Gain tools for helping your students share their viewpoint and make a strong case using examples, details, and textual support. Leave with a repertoire of techniques for building this essential Common Core ability.
 
Make Circle Time a Fun Time
Make circle time fun, engaging, and successful for all your emergent learners. Pat offers specific ideas, activities, and strategies to use when working with your whole class. Learn how to easily manage read-alouds, morning messages, and mini-lessons and ensure everyone actively participates and learns.
 
Mastering Essential Sight Words
Learn quick and easy ways to assess a student's basic sight word vocabulary. Your students will thrive as they develop a concept of words through games, movement, and fun activities. Leave with activities that emphasize word fluency and are easy to incorporate into your daily literacy lessons.
 
Monitoring Progress Daily: Easily & Effectively
Learn how to use assessment tools on a daily basis, so that each week you have assessed each student multiple times. Pat shows you how to easily and effectively manage assessment using rubrics, teacher observation notebooks, and anecdotal records. You’ll be on your way to data-driven instruction in no time!
 
Motivating Your Struggling Readers
Learn new strategies to increase the reading achievement of your struggling readers. In this hands-on session, consider how to help young students build sight-word vocabulary and develop comprehension skills. Plus, discover great activities students can do when they're not able to read or write independently.
 
Narrative Writing: Capture Your Audience and Keep Them!
Realize the many simple and effective ways you can guide and support narrative writing in your classroom. Pat shares specific strategies and activities you can easily apply to encourage your students’ writing of different types of narrative texts. These ideas will help your students find a topic, capture their audiences, use specific details, include strong vocabulary, and discover the joy of narrative writing!
 
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.
 
Opinion or Argument Writing
Discover the importance of getting students to form and state their point of view, and how this translates into the ability to state and support opinions in writing. Investigate the expectations of the new writing standards and what they mean for classroom instruction. Explore lessons designed to give all levels of writer purposeful opportunities and effective strategies to form, state, and support their opinions in writing.
 
Phun Phonics & Phonemic Awareness Foundational Skills
Join Pat to examine the key elements of phonemic awareness and phonics instruction, and the effect of each on writing and reading achievement. Discover activities, props, and materials that promote phonemic awareness by tapping into your children's natural enjoyment of playing with language. Leave with terrific teaching tools for promoting phonemic awareness and phonics! Please bring scissors, markers, and glue.
 
Reading Complex Text: Bring It On!
How can you teach your students to read complex text when they struggle with everyday text? Come to this session for the answer! Learn how to determine the quantitative and qualitative factors of text complexity. Plus, take home scaffolding strategies that will ensure every student—including your strugglers—excels at text complexity.
 
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 in the whole group and delve into activities designed to develop those skills in small groups and independent work. 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 for Meaning & Critical Thinking Skills
Learn important before, during, and after reading strategies to share with your readers. You'll gain strategies that you can implement immediately in your classroom to maximize your students' comprehension and to encourage them to ask and answer deep, thought-provoking questions.
 
Reading Is Fun: Games, Strategies & Stories
Is reading fun—really fun—in your classroom? Learn how fun is the foundation of strong reading and explore its powerful role in helping the brain remember information. In this make and take, Pat shares fun games, strategies, and stories that will help your students learn and remember phonemic awareness, phonics, sight words, reading strategies—whatever you teach. Please bring scissors, markers, and glue.
 
Reading Mini-Lessons
Join Pat and get specific strategies and activities that address fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and more. Leave with hands-on mini-lessons that allow students to manipulate the text they’re working with.
 
RIGOR? What’s It All About?
Wondering where rigor fits in your classroom? In this session, you will learn what it means to increase rigor and also HOW to increase it. You'll return to your classroom with your brain buzzing with activities and ideas you can use right away to teach with just the right amount of rigor starting tomorrow. Please bring scissors, markers, and glue stick.
 
Sensational Centers for Winning Writing             
Discover how to create and manage effective writing centers in your classroom—with minimal preparation! In this hands-on session, you'll learn how to develop centers that meet the needs of a variety of learners. And, you'll explore center activities that work with any curriculum area.
 
Show Me! Finding and Using Evidence in Writing            
21st century standards require that students write using evidence as support for their ideas. Learn techniques for teaching 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.
 
Small Group Rotations & Transitions: Smooth & Stress-free
Take a close look at the actual scheduling and management of your guided reading groups, background groups, and center groups – and how to improve them! In this idea-packed session, Pat shares how to coordinate your guided reading and literacy groups so students in each group get the opportunity to work with different peers.
 
Success for ALL Readers: Games, Activities & More!
Examine fresh, new ways to address the specific needs of all your learners, including your struggling and at-risk readers, all while building 21st century skills. Expand your teaching repertoire with fun-filled games, activities, strategies, and prompts for teaching all your strugglers how to successfully read, think critically, and problem solve.
 
Success with Your Writers' Workshop
Learn the best way to develop a successful writers' workshop. Pat shares practical strategies you can use for every stage of the writing process. You’ll discover how to help your students pick a topic, edit, revise, and a whole lot more.
 
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.
 
Supercharging Vocabulary Development              
A strong vocabulary is the key to better comprehension. Pat shares innovative strategies that use vocabulary visuals, bookmarks, cards, and more to equip your students with the skills to master vocabulary. Plus, you’ll take home fun and engaging, vocabulary-based activities you can use right away with your students.
 
Testing Prep Strategies: Take the Stress out of Testing!
Discover a proven way to take the stress out of testing and give your students the boost they need to ace the OAT! Join Pat as she shares engaging, and highly effective strategies for building the specific test-taking skills your students need for OAT success.
 
The Joy of Journal Writing
Boost your kindergartners’ writing skills AND build their enthusiasm for writing! Pat shares the importance and lasting benefits of daily journals. You'll learn how to make reading, science, and math journals fun for kindergartners with drawing, diagramming, and pictures. And, you’ll leave with tips for incorporating journals into your program with minimum fuss—and maximum return.
 
Time-Saving Assessment Techniques
Save time while making assessment an integral part of your instruction! Join Pat and discover powerful, informal assessments and progress monitoring techniques that won’t eat up your time or energy. Come learn how to use no-fuss journals and portfolios to accurately evaluate growth, pinpoint needs, and determine strengths. Assessment has never been this efficient!
 
Using Literature & Story Elements to Build Comprehension
Stock up on activities, strategies, and ideas for understanding and using literature and story elements—an essential reading comprehension skill. Learn how to work with story elements and add rigor to re tellings. Discover creative ways to use re telling strolls, storyboards, and strategy cards. Pat also shares how to help your students identify characters, settings, events, and more to build their comprehension of stories.
 
Using Students’ Names the First 30 Days of School
There are lots of teaching opportunities in names! Pat shows you how to capture your students' attention by having them see and hear their names. Learn how to use names to build reading, writing, and math strategies, as well as help students become a team during the first weeks of school.
 
Words Matter: Building Academic Vocabulary
Learn 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.
 
Writers' Workshop & Mini-Lessons
Learn how to easily create a writers’ workshop and give your students the confidence they need to become better writers. Pat shares specific strategies you can use for every stage of the writing process along with a variety of powerful mini-lessons. Come to this session ready to discover and apply strategies that exemplify a successful writers' workshop!
 
Writing in the Content Areas
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.
 
Writing Workshop
Build an outstanding writing program that will enhance student achievement. Pat will share the important steps of the writing process as well as specific ideas and strategies to use at each step. Key elements include: • Helping students come up with topics • How to introduce specific editing strategies • Revising techniques • Setting up and managing writer’s workshop.

Contact me to learn more about working with
​Pat Pavelka!