2025 Iowa Adult Education and Literacy Summer Conference

During this workshop, attendees will learn five insights about neuroscience and what they mean for adult learning. Attendees will also learn how to take those insights and apply them in the classroom through the Learning Partnerships Model.

This session will focus on vocabulary and reading strategies intended to facilitate growth in CASAS scores. Hands-on activities and resources for you and our students, employing a variety of reading formats will be shared. Short stories, essays, music, and poetry will also be included, because as Robin Williams in Dead Poets' Society said, "That's what we stay alive for."

With limited instructional time, what vocabulary words warrant explicit attention? Which words will give your students the biggest bang for their buck? In this session, we’ll discuss how to leverage corpora (databases of written and/or spoken language created to analyze linguistic structures) and materials derived from them to level-up your vocabulary instruction. As adult educators, we can use these powerful tools to make purposeful, data-driven decisions about which vocabulary to teach and how to approach teaching them. Corpora allow us to go beyond teaching vocabulary that we subjectively “think are pretty common”.  

In this session, we will:

• Discuss what corpora are, their history and development, and how they can be used as tools for informing classroom instruction.
• Get an introduction to how to access and utilize the basic functions of Corpus for Contemporary American English (COCA).
• Discover corpus-derived word frequency lists and discuss how to pick the best list for your instructional context.
• Examine ways to incorporate word frequency lists into classroom activities and practices.

Do you have students who just seem to be spinning their wheels?  Are they encountering obstacles that are keeping them from crossing the finish line?  Learn about some of the unique barriers that stand in the way of student progress and discover how you can engage in creative, out-of-the-box approaches to help them overcome them.  Come prepared to share some of your own unique strategies so that everyone walks away with new, innovative ideas to test back home.

Two cornerstones of successful outcomes for adult literacy programs is improved learner reading fluency and comprehension. Yet few literacy workers know about the way fluency supports comprehension, nor how reading fluency can be developed in-class with learners. This workshop will focus on the important fluency-comprehension relationship. Some simple, easy-to-use methodologies will be demonstrated using authentic, high-interest literacy-supporting books. Participant input and commentary will be encouraged and welcomed.