We’re thrilled to introduce this year’s exceptional lineup of speakers, featuring respected voices from across Canada and around the world. From thought leaders and researchers to experienced practitioners, our speakers bring diverse perspectives, practical strategies, and inspiring ideas grounded in the science of reading. Whether you are new to the science of reading or already implementing evidence based literacy practices, this conference offers valuable learning, actionable insights, and opportunities to deepen your impact in classrooms and schools.

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Nathaniel Swain

Teacher, Instructional Coach, and Writer

Dr Nathaniel Swain is a Teacher, Instructional Coach, and Writer. He produces a blog for teachers called Dr Swain’s Cognitorium and is co-host of the Chalk Dust Podcast with Rebecca Birch. Nathaniel works directly with schools and systems and through an online learning platform called Luminary.

Session: Walking Together: Transforming Literacy Through Relationship and Responsibility

As educators, we are often called to lead change from the ground up – while holding learners, families, and communities at the center of our work. As we collectively rewrite the story of education across Canada, moving reconciliation forward requires more than land acknowledgments; it asks us to transform how we teach, learn, and relate to one another.

The First Nation School Board’s journey is grounded in Yukon First Nations values that honour relationships, respect, reciprocity, and connection to land and community. These values invite educators to slow down, reflect, and engage in authentic relationships – with ourselves, our colleagues, our learners, and the communities we serve.

Now in our fourth year of system-wide change, we have learned that meaningful literacy improvement begins with trust, shared responsibility, and deep listening. This keynote will explore how the First Nation School Board has strengthened literacy outcomes through change-making leadership and instructional practices rooted in science and Yukon First Nation values.

We invite educators to walk this path with us – to reflect on your own role in reconciliation, to lead literacy change that is grounded in relationships, and to take courageous, community-centred action in your classrooms and schools. Together, we can create literacy learning that is meaningful, equitable, and rooted in respect for learners, land, and future generations.

Keynote Speaker: Melissa Flynn

Executive Director, First Nation School Board

Keynote Speaker: Megan Norris

Manager of Instructional Leadership, First Nation School Board

Collaborative Problem Solving: Data Precision to Improve Outcomes

Join the UCDSB Team as they share their journey (glimmers, warts and all things in between) into Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) as a means to increase educator efficacy and improve student data across the district. The UCDSB’s Collaborative Problem Solving model, adapted from ONLIT documents, has guided elementary school teams through a collaborative process that focuses on precise next steps for classrooms and for individual students. These school-based teams have included classroom teachers, special education teachers, school leaders, and system staff. This process has empowered school leaders and classroom teachers to identify and action next steps and proactively discuss and problem-solve potential barriers to this important work. Inspired by IDA’s philosophy that every child can learn to read and the UCDSB’s belief that every instructional minute counts, our work is making meaningful school improvements through impactful and precise educator moves and Progress Monitoring.

Amanda Nieman

Superintendent- Curriculum and Assessment

Crystal Doherty

Reading Intervention Teacher

Johanna Graham

Reading Intervention Teacher

Kaitlin Thompson

Intensive Support Teacher

Developing Flexible Decoders: Preparing Students to Read Beyond Controlled Text

English is a complex language, and becoming a fluent reader requires cognitive flexibility. Students must learn to blend sounds, while also flexing between possibilities to find words that make sense. Early on, this flexibility develops in small ways—such as trying more than one sound for a letter—and is best supported through decodable texts that offer carefully controlled practice. As students progress, they need opportunities to move beyond highly controlled texts and apply flexible word-solving skills in more authentic reading. In this workshop, teachers will delve into how the English language works, learn practical strategies for building flexible decoding skills, and explore how to choose the right texts at different stages of instruction.

Lee-Ann Lear

Author, educator, OCT, A/OGA

Boosting Early Language Skills: Integrating Vocabulary Resources & Routines

Recent research shows early learners face language development challenges, reinforcing the need for explicit phonics instruction and word knowledge. This professional learning session will examine key principles of language development, with a focus on vocabulary acquisition. Although UFLI Foundations lessons do not explicitly teach vocabulary, educators often seek ways to integrate word meanings. This session offers practical strategies for embedding explicit and incidental vocabulary instruction during UFLI lessons and across the reading block.

Explicit instruction and practice in reading, spelling, and word learning support orthographic mapping—connecting written words to meaning—which benefits all students, particularly those with limited early language exposure and emergent multilingual learners. Participants will explore effective vocabulary strategies and learn to use the UFLI Vocabulary Resource, an open-access, supplemental tool for vocabulary development.

Dr. Rasheeda West

Special Projects Coordinator, University of Florida Literacy Institute

Session: Instructional Routines to Build Young Children’s Language and Literacy

Early language and literacy skills lay the foundation for later reading achievement, and early intervention is key to preventing and reducing the severity of reading difficulty. Young children need access to high-quality and well-planned instruction in preschool and kindergarten. This session will share research results and materials of a seven-year research project focused on developing open-source, multi-tiered, early language and literacy instructional materials. Session participants will receive access to the instructional materials, assessments, family engagement materials, and implementation supports. The session will also describe how these routines have been leveraged to support multilingual learners and children with disabilities.

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Meghan Martin

Assistant Professor, Mount St Joseph University

Keynote Speaker: Amy Murdoch

Assistant Dean, Mount St. Joseph University

Session 1: Crafting Meaningful IEP Goals for Students with Dyslexia

This session aims to empower teachers to make a profound difference for students with dyslexia. This practical session will clarify the definition and prevalence of dyslexia among our students. Educators will learn how to craft meaningful and measurable IEP goals for dyslexic students and learn how to leverage Ontario’s mandated screening tools to monitor progress. Attendees will discover how to confidently use evidence based, valid and reliable data to inform interventions and achieve goals ensuring every child with dyslexia receives a fair and equitable education

Session 2: Your Advocacy Toolkit: How to Prove the Science of Reading Isn’t a Fad

Explicit, systematic and direct instruction in foundational skills are essential so that every child can learn to read, yet unfortunately the policy and practice debates in our schools continue. Many educators still struggle to confidently transition away from entrenched, non-validated practices toward the Science of Reading (SoR). This can lead to challenging conversations with colleagues, administrators, and parents.

Attendees will leave equipped with a practical Advocacy Toolkit to confidently navigate challenging conversations with colleagues, administrators, and parents.

Participants will be able to articulate the evidence, dismantle common skepticism, and become powerful, informed advocates for policy changes that cement effective, equitable literacy instruction for all.

Marlene Perry

K-12 Literacy Consultant

Session: Dynamic Comprehension: What Every Secondary Teacher Needs to Know

Supporting secondary students in comprehending complex texts requires intentional planning and targeted strategies. This session explores how to help students construct and extract meaning from texts by focusing on key elements like background knowledge, vocabulary, verbal reasoning, and language structures. Participants will learn how to use the Reading Rope model to develop a Mental Model of comprehension and walk away with a practical lesson plan framework and actionable strategies to support diverse learners in any content area.

Jeanne Schopf

Literacy Consultant

Session: Making Every Minute Count: High-Impact Routines for Grades K–2

Establishing effective routines in the early grades is one of the most powerful ways to set students up for long-term success. In this interactive session, participants will explore instructional routines that truly matter in K–2 classrooms—routines that build confidence, promote independence, and create a strong foundation for literacy. Through practical examples, educators will see how predictable structures, rooted in the Science of Learning, in Tier 1 whole-class instruction and Tier 2 intervention can lead to deeper engagement and more effective use of instructional time.

Participants will leave with a toolkit of ready-to-use routines and strategies that can be seamlessly integrated into literacy instruction. By refining the “how” of daily teaching, educators will enhance student outcomes, strengthen classroom community, and make every minute of instruction count.

Melissa Monette Smith

Educator, York Region District School Board

Robin Hryniewski

Speech and Language Pathologist York Region District School Board

Sheri Clark

Educator, York Region District School Board

Session: The Instructional Hierarchy: Aligning Practice to Purpose of Learning

This session introduces the Instructional Hierarchy as a practical, research-aligned framework for matching the purpose of practice to how students learn. Dr. Pam Kastner will guide participants in identifying whether students need acquisition, building fluency, generalization, or adaptation support and will model high-impact routines across foundational skills, vocabulary, morphology, and comprehension. Attendees will leave with clear, actionable practices they can implement to strengthen daily instruction and accelerate student progress.

Dr. Pam Kastner

Contributing Faculty Member: Mount Saint Joseph University

Session: The Power of Morphology in Vocabulary Development Across Subject Areas

Discover how to ignite your students’ vocabulary growth by exploring words across subject areas for powerful cross-curricular connections. This session weaves together phonemic awareness, orthographic knowledge, morphological awareness, etymology, syntax, and vocabulary into one dynamic framework. English is a morphophonemic language, where spelling reveals both sound and meaning—a key insight that empowers educators to link phonology, morphology, and vocabulary in every lesson. You’ll see how exploring word structure can transform literacy for all students—from those struggling to those ready to deepen skills. Through vivid classroom examples and authentic student work, learn practical strategies to seamlessly integrate morphology and vocabulary instruction into any subject. Join us to gain ready-to-use tools that make word learning engaging and transferable, empowering all learners to confidently master the rich language demands of school and life.

Liisa Freure

Founder of Fundamental Learning; Accredited Training Fellow – Orton-Gillingham Academy

Session: Big Thinking, Small Paragraphs: Research & Practice of Partner Reading

Partner reading is more than just a classroom routine—it’s a research-backed strategy that builds fluency, comprehension, and student confidence. This session explores Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS), a structured and evidence-based approach that significantly improves reading outcomes across elementary grade levels. Rooted in cooperative learning and strategy instruction, PALS provides clear, scaffolded routines that enhance student engagement and support diverse learners.

We will also highlight Paragraph Shrinking, a key comprehension routine that teaches students to identify the main idea of each paragraph, condense information, and verbalize their understanding. Whether used as part of PALS or independently, Paragraph Shrinking strengthens students’ ability to summarize, builds vocabulary, and supports meaningful academic discussion.

Educators will learn how to pair students effectively, teach routines explicitly, and support progress through structured peer interactions.

Dr. Andrea Fraser

Assistant Professor, Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax

Session: Screener Data: A Roadmap to Responsive Early Literacy Instruction

Unlock the power of screener data to transform early literacy instruction! In this dynamic session, you will distinguish between four assessment types, exploring their characteristics and purposes for responsive instruction. You will also deepen your understanding of universal screener data, crucial early literacy skills, the progression of fluency, and common response patterns on screener measures. We will discuss important considerations when interpreting screener data, benchmark scores, and their predictive value. We will consider the stages of the instructional hierarchy and the implications for responsive instruction and practice for students who may need additional support. This session aims to equip educators with the knowledge to implement data-informed practices that lead to measurable improvements in early literacy outcomes.

Dr. Renata Archie

Contributing Faculty, Mount St. Joseph University

Session: Teaching Sentence Writing and Composition to Primary Students

Written composition depends on handwriting, spelling, and sentence writing. However, young writers are only beginning to develop these skills. This session will present two evidence-based teaching methods, and point teachers to resources for each: The Syntax Project-Foundations (La Lievre et al., 2024) provides explicit instruction in writing and expanding sentences; Self-Regulated Strategy Development does the same for written composition (Harris et al., 2017). We will focus on five common challenges: How can we fill gaps in students’ handwriting and spelling skills to prepare them for composition? How can we make writing strategies learnable for young children who are just beginning to read, spell, and self-regulate? How can we teach students to transfer new sentence writing skills to composition? How can we teach students to cope with their individual writing challenges? And how can we efficiently track their progress in sentence writing and composition?

Dr. Perry Klein

Professor, Faculty of Education, Western University

Session: Strengthening Tier 1 within an MTSS Framework 

This session highlights the journey of how one striving school strengthened Tier 1 structured literacy by using universal screening data to drive daily instruction. Participants will see real data that pinpointed instructional gaps, sparked shifts in explicit phonics and fluency routines, and drove small group differentiation that produced measurable gains in early reading for Kindergarten to Grade 2. The session shares from two powerful perspectives, literacy coaches and classroom educators, who reveal the specific moves that changed outcomes, including how data teams were built, how teacher knowledge grew, and how intervention principles such as increased opportunities to respond, scaffolded practice, and systematic error correction accelerated progress for students who needed more. Attendees will leave with practical strategies they can use immediately to analyze screening results, strengthen core instruction, and boost student achievement. See the data, shift the instruction.

Signe Williams

Subject Coordinator, Literacy K-5

Tracy Davis

Literacy Coach

Shyanne McWilliams

Literacy Coach

Sarah Carr

Teacher

Session: Reading Fluency: It’s All About Comprehension—and Motivation!

Helping students read fluently is a focus of the efforts of many teachers and specialists. And that’s a good thing, because research has clearly identified that fluency is “a critical component of skilled reading” (NRP, 2000) and fluency expectations have also been included as an essential foundation skill in most reading standards, including the International Dyslexia Association’s Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teachers of Reading. But…do we really understand what fluency is? Do we understand how to determine which students are sufficiently fluent and which need more help? And what kind of support do our students need to become fluent? In this session, Dr. Jan Hasbrouk will revisit this topic with an emphasis on the purpose of fluent reading: Comprehension and motivation!

Dr. Jan Hasbrouck

Researcher, Educational Consultant and Author

Session: Prevention Science: Scaled Preventative Reading Interventions in Canada

Dr. Robert Savage will give an overview of the support he has given to academic colleagues and the use of the science of reading to support more efficacious practices in early reading teaching. Starting in 2021 with provincial policy drivers (such as the Ontario Human Rights Commission – Right to Read report), Dr. Robert Savage and colleagues have been supporting literacy practices through scholarship, advocacy, and policy implementation supports in schools in 5 Canadian provinces. He describes this work focusing on programmatic scaled randomised interventions both completed and current, that have explored theory-driven questions about the role of vocabulary, morphology, phonology, and mental flexibility in the use of phonics approaches to learn to read. He links these findings to policy and schools practice throughout and describe what we have learned about and through implementation of the science of reading to date.

Dr. Robert Savage

Dean, Faculty of Education, York University

Structured Literacy in Practice: Lessons Learned and Next Steps

Evergreen School Division in Manitoba shifted from Balanced Literacy to Structured Literacy, transforming instruction, intervention, and student outcomes. Join Della Magnusson, Paul Bailey, and Lisa Michaluk for a session that provides a candid look at what it takes to move from building belief to implementing practice—system-wide and in classrooms. Learn how leaders structured professional learning, aligned resources, and supported teachers through implementation. Hear from a Grade 1 teacher will who share how evidence-based instruction reshaped her beliefs about reading instruction and student success. Participants will leave with actionable steps: educational leaders will know how to lead system-wide change, teachers will gain classroom strategies that work, and interventionists will learn how to design effective MTSS frameworks that sustain progress for all learners.

Speakers:

Della Magnusson

Literacy and Numeracy Consultant, Manitoba Evergreen School Division

Paul Bailey

School Administrator, Manitoba Evergreen School Division

Leanne Mager

Early Years Teacher, Sigurborg Stefansson Early Years School, Manitoba

When “Research Says…” Isn’t Enough

In this session, Dr. Nidhi Sachdeva and Dr. Jim Hewitt will give educators a clear, practical framework for evaluating instructional claims before they influence teaching. Using real examples from PD, curriculum resources, and common school initiatives, we will unpack how to spot red flags, differentiate between strong and weak evidence, and ask the right questions when confronted with new practices.

Speakers:

Dr. Nidhi Sachdeva

Sessional Instructor, University of Toronto

Dr. Jim Hewitt

Professor, University of Toronto

Session: Reading Assessment Done Right: 8 Tips For Teachers

Do you have questions about reading assessment? Dr. Stephanie Stollar and Kate Winn are sharing their top 8 tips for teachers from their new book, Reading Assessment Done Right. Screening, diagnostic, progress monitoring, outcome assessment – it’s all covered, plus how assessment fits in the MTSS framework, and how to use your data to change instruction and improve outcomes.

Speakers:

Dr. Stephanie Stollar

School Psychologist, Professor, and Literacy Consultant

Kate Winn

Educator, literacy advocate, and author

Session 1: Strengthening Foundational Skills in Adolescent Readers

Despite progress in early literacy, data continue to show stagnant reading proficiency among older learners. Many adolescents still struggle with inefficient word recognition, creating a “bottleneck” that limits comprehension and increases cognitive load. This session explores how multisyllabic word complexity, morphological structure, and orthographic depth interact to challenge older readers, especially those with dyslexia. Grounded in the Simple View of Reading and the Lexical Quality Hypothesis, participants will learn four practical, evidence-based routines for strengthening adolescent foundational skills: Essential Skills (phoneme–grapheme fluency), Syllabication (vowel flexibility and stress), Morphology (affix and base-word instruction), and Oral Reading Fluency (connected text practice). Attendees will leave with tools to integrate these routines across content areas to improve access and equity for all learners.

Session 2: The Science of Spelling: Routines to Build Strong Readers and Writers

This session bridges research and practice by showing how systematic spelling instruction accelerates both reading and writing development. Drawing on current research in the science of spelling intervention, the session translates evidence into clear, ready-to-use classroom routines that build automatic word recognition and accurate written expression. Attendees will learn how to make spelling instruction more explicit, cumulative, and connected to decoding and composition. Through research-based instructional routines, participants will see how to layer and integrate research-based spelling practices into reading instruction and intervention—from sounds to sentences—to strengthen literacy outcomes. Educators will leave with practical tools to bring the science of spelling to life in their classrooms.

Dr. Brennan Chandler

Assistant Professor of Dyslexia