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  Guidelines for Writing a Commencement Address The draft you write for consideration does not need to be a final version, but should give the panelists a clear idea of what you plan to say in your speech. The traditional commencement address has had content which reflects back on the class's experiences and also gives advice or guidance for the future. The tone should be one which inspires and motivates the listeners. Although the Commencement Address is directed at the graduating class, the message needs to be meaningful and appropriate for the adult audience present as well. Content, language, or style which parents or grandparents might find offensive is not suitable for a Commencement Address. Humor can be an effective minor element of a Commencement Address. The predominant message, and consequently the predominant writing style, should be serious, thoughtful and inspirational.   Format: This a general map of graduation speeches.  It is not required. Feel ...
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AVReading Newsletter March: Disruption

  For many of those who lived through it, the outbreak of COVID-19 brought about a tremendous disruption to daily life.  Virtually all segments of our community were impacted in one way or another. And from this, we are beginning to recognize the many different ways that we took things for granted.  It took a major disruption to our lives to come to this realization.             When it comes to thinking about racism, it often takes an equally jarring event for the white community to become more aware of its prevalence.  For many of us, we were not really aware of the prevalence of police shootings and brutality within the black community until we read about Eric Walters, Michael Smith, and Philando Castille.  Our NFL games were disrupted by the silent protests of players who hoped to bring more awareness to the injustices.  For many of us, it took books like The New Jim Crow and do...
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AVReading Newsletter January-- Make It a Beginning; Not an Ending

  As we become more and more familiar with the way that white supremacy acts and flourishes within our community, we have been able to identify some of its defense mechanisms.  One of which is the mechanism of white fragility.  The concept was originally coined by Robin DiAngelo in the International Journal of Critical Pedagogy (2011) to mean the following:  White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. (54) Though the concept itself is not difficult to understand, the way it operates and how it plays out can be rather complex. Typically, white fragility comes out in a number of thoughts expressed by people when they feel confronted by racist choices they have made.  Sharkey Holie ca...
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AVReading Newsletter January-- The Story of Words

               Because culture is so deeply embedded in language, it is often important that we spend a little time thinking very specifically about the words and phrases we choose to use, and under what circumstances.  While some might bristle at the thought of adapting our language to accommodate the latest trends and thinking, I see it differently.  For the change isn’t with our trends or thinking, but with a greater awareness of inequities that have always existed.   Our goal isn’t to jump onto the next passing fad of buzz words or acceptable terminology, but rather to raise an awareness of language and how it can potentially perpetuate stereotypes or marginalize members of our community.  The idea is that we work harder to avoid the “but I didn’t know” category of mistakes.  And better yet, to help our students figure them out as well.   Here is a case in point.  Not too long ago, some typ...
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AVReading Newsletter December: Spelling, Reading, and Dyslexia

            Last week, one of my colleagues asked me if poor spelling meant that a student was dyslexic.  It’s a great question, and in light of our focus on dyslexia last month, I thought I would spend this month’s newsletter unpacking that question.  The simple answer is “no”.  Poor spellers are not always dyslexic.  To understand this, let’s begin with a quick review.  Reading text involves the decoding process, while writing text involves encoding.  We will see a little later how the two coding processes do correlate and have strong relationships, but they do operate independently, and it is good to remember that the one is more than just the reverse engineering of the other.  It is entirely possible to be a strong reader but a terrible speller.  In fact, there is a related disability more specific to orthography (spelling) known as dysgraphia.  While trouble spelling is certainly an indicator of dys...
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AVReading Newsletter November: Student Read Alounds

  I must admit that my thinking around having students read aloud for me has evolved over time.  Asking some of these vulnerable students to read aloud can truly be an intimidating experience for them, and so for the longest time, I have been hesitant to have them do so.  I also know that for older students, gathering data from their read alouds can be misleading.  In other words, in some cases their oral reading skills are substantially lower their silent reading skills.   However, my recent studies of reading intervention and assessments has changed my thinking.  As I have begun to learn more about reading difficulties, I realized that to truly get a “read” on what the problem might be, we really need to hear the student read aloud.   Let me back up.  Reading research indicates that there are five important pillars of reading instruction that hold up the roof of good reading practices: phonemic awareness, phonics,...
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AVReading Newsletter October: Growing Our Understanding of Dyslexia

  As mentioned in the September newsletter, we will focus our attention this year on some of the earlier pillars of reading instruction to help understand the current interventions being employed within our curriculum and to potentially play with some of their elements in our own classrooms.  To establish some common language, I am going to begin by defining three important terms of reading: dyslexia, phonemic awareness, and phonics.   The first, dyslexia, is an often used, and largely misused term.  Depending on who you ask, you are likely to get a different answer.  In a general sense, people use it to indicate someone struggling with reading.  Perhaps they have observed that the reader or writer transposes letters backwards or flips the order of the letters as they decode.  Perhaps the reader struggles with multisyllabic or unique words.  Or perhaps they read very slowly and deliberately.  While all of these are ...
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