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Melissa Dickson

Melissa Dickson is an outstanding presenter and educator. She is passionate about providing teachers with research-based ideas and strategies that can be immediately implemented. In her decades as an educator, Melissa has supported all grade levels and has been a literacy coach, staff developer, site-based team leader, mentor teacher, inclusion teacher, classroom teacher and early childhood teacher. She has a Master’s degree in Reading and supports a balanced literacy classroom model. Her ability to provide relevant information with humor and enthusiasm makes her a very popular presenter at numerous district, state, and national conferences.

Categories: Educator, Educator - Assessment and Grading, Educator - Differentiated Instruction, Educator - Leadership, Educator - Literacy and Reading, Educator - RTI / MTSS / PBIS

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View Melissa Dickson's

Videos

Topics

Administrators and Instructional Coaches

-The Seeds for Growing Teachers: A Coaching Model for Change - Join Melissa as she examines the characteristics of effective teachers. You'll leave with ideas for supporting your teachers by setting goals for effective teaching and differentiating, as well as ways to "inspect what you expect" through a variety of walk-through forms. You'll leave feeling more confident in your role as Instructional Leader.

-Assessment and Grading: The Administrator's Role as Motivator and Coach - Do your teachers align their assessments with instruction? Do they offer a variety of assessments for a variety of student learning styles?? Do they know how to weigh an assessment in the overall evaluation of a student? Melissa will explore these questions as well as your role as motivator and coach when it comes to assessment and grading in your school.

Keynote

-Bringing the Joy Back to Teaching: We all spend so much time with our noses to the grindstone that we rarely have a chance to assess our own happiness. Start your day with some great ideas for brightening up the workday. Melissa shares wonderfully useful management, thinking, and working tips that you can use every day of the week to help lighten your load and put FUN back into your teaching. Come learn how to ease your stress, save time-and put a smile on your face!

Assessment and Grading

-Navigating Assessments: A GPS for Success - We've all been told to "let data drive our decision-making," but what does that really mean? Join Melissa in this interactive session to see how pre-assessments, formative assessments and summative assessments drive your instructional decisions. You'll discover ways to use assessment data to guide form flexible groups, determine your students' individual instructional needs, and show evidence of student mastery. Plus, you'll leave with numerous teacher- and student-friendly tools to guide your instruction.

-Formative Assessment: Zero In On What They Really Know - Explore techniques designed to make on-going assessment and feedback simple and effective. 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.

-Shopping for Assessments - Overwhelmed by the time it takes to design, facilitate, and then analyze assessment data? Looking for new ways to assess student knowledge? Join Melissa for some ready-to-go strategies that will not only get you the data you need to make instructional decisions, but also actively engage your students in non-threatening assessments.

-Grading in the Differentiated Classroom - When it comes to grading, how can you be sensitive to students' readiness levels, interests, and learning challenges while holding them accountable for the same standards? What's fair? What leads to real student learning? Join Melissa to gain new insight into averaging, zeroes on the 100-point scale, homework, late work, feedback, re-do's and more.

Word Study

-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.

-Making Sight Words Stick for the Primary Grades - Open the door to sight word fun and exploration! Join Melissa to explore creative ways to build vocabulary, fluency, and confidence in your young readers. Learn how to combine whimsical rhyming verses with practical activities.

-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 tool box with strategies for differentiating your phonics instruction to meet the needs of all your little learners.

Writing

-High-Impact Mini-Lessons for Writer's Workshop - Do you struggle to get your students to write more than one sentence? Discover how to bring out the creative author in each of them! Help your students over the hurdles they face as writers. Melissa shares interventions and mini-lessons appropriate for each step of the writing process. Discover how to form flexible groups based on learning needs, easily keep track of each student's progress, and hold meaningful, effective conferences.

-Oops, Where's Your Proof? Finding and Using Text 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, 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.

-Research: How to Organize and Write About Informational Text - Every student can research informational text-and love it! Join Melissa as she examines the use of text features and explore a graphic organizer that will allow your students to organize information in a logical, brain-friendly way. See how easy it can be to help students research and write reports.

-Creating Better Writers - Wondering how to best increase your students' writing volume so that they're better able to meet the goals of the standards and, even more importantly, the demands of life in the 21st century? Learn how to efficiently use three kinds of writing-provisional, readable, and polished-to increase productivity without sacrificing quality. Work (and write) smarter-not harder!

-6-Traits Plus 1 of Writing - Melissa is a trainer of Ruth Culham's 6-Traits Plus 1 Model of Writing. Participants will be actively engaged as they practice scoring student writing samples and plan lessons on each trait: ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, conventions, and presentation. Teachers will leave with lessons and rubrics to help their students become better writers.

-Using the 6 Traits to Creating Better Writers - Join us as we look at picture books, mini-lessons, songs, and student writing samples that support each of the 6-Traits of Writing: ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions. Teach your students how to "read like writers" and "write like readers."

-Arguing: How to Get Kids to Stop Doing It and Start Writing It! - Argument has been called "the soul of an education." But how do you help your students overcome their preconceptions of what argument is and improve their use of claims, evidence, and reasoning? Join Melissa to 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.

-Incorporating Writing into Your Daily Routine - Think beyond typical writing in response to reading exercises and utilize new ways to make your classroom rich with writing experiences-in all content areas. Discover how to motivate students to write with morning messages, graffiti boards, student-teacher journals, and more.

Response to Intervention (RtI)

-Effective Tier One Classrooms - Finally, we no longer have to allow our students to "wait to fail" before offering them the support they need. Response to Intervention allows us to intervene immediately, providing high quality instruction by the general education teacher. Melissa shares the qualities and characteristics of effective tier one classrooms and strategies to strengthen the tier one classrooms in your building.

-Response to Intervention: A Friendly Look at Implementation - Designed for teams of individuals responsible for leading the RTI efforts in a school or district, this program takes participants through the key components of RTI and focuses on intervention strategies and applications before focusing on a structured Action Planning activity designed to take each school/district from where its current RTI efforts are to plans for the future.

-The DI-RTI Connection: Differentiating and Specializing Instruction in Tiers I, II and III - The DI-RTI Connection takes you to the next step in data-driven instructional design. Designed for participants with at least a basic knowledge of RTI and DI, this session focuses on providing educators a deeper knowledge and understanding of DI strategies in order to enable them to effectively implement and sustain RTI. The activities will guide teachers through the instructional decisions and the thought process necessary for them to meet the needs of students in Tiers I, II, and III.

Reading

-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."

-Guided Reading - While it's true that guided reading in the primary grades focuses more on decoding and reading fluently and guided reading in grades 3-6 places more emphasis on strategies for comprehension, the basic steps remain the same. Join Melissa as she looks at the how and why of guided reading and shares easy-to-implement strategies for instruction and documentation of guided reading groups.

-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.

-Mini-Lessons for Reader's Workshop - 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.

-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 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, and tips students can use when reading independently.

-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.

-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.

-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 at all!!

-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 make preparation 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're teaching in the classroom to the test. Plus, you'll learn effective uses for Test Practice Passages.

Managing the Classroom and Student Populations

-Classroom Management Fit for a Queen (or King) for the Novice Teacher - Breaking into cold sweat thinking about all those new faces on the first day of school? Realizing that you know a lot about lesson cycles, and your content area, but no one told you what to DO with the students? Relax; Melissa will give you teacher-tested, easy-to-implement ideas for classroom management that are fit for a queen (or king).

-Managing the Differentiated Classroom with Flexible Grouping - In a differentiated classroom, students work in a variety of purposeful flexible groups. Explore the what, why, and how of flexible grouping. You'll leave with ideas and strategies for whole-group instruction, small-group instruction and independent practice so your differentiated classroom functions smoothly.

-Strategies for ELL - English Language Learners require purposeful, differentiated instruction. Learn specific strategies in for reaching students who are acquiring language. Discover strategies for scaffolding reading and listening comprehension, building strong vocabularies, and creating a low-risk environment. Learn how to encourage verbal and pictorial response, and incorporate small group conversational opportunities for students to deepen their understanding.

-Help! My Whole Class Has ADHD! - Is it really ADHD? Immaturity? Learned helplessness? Join Melissa and learn engagement strategies for increasing focus and motivation and explore ideas for improving concentration. Return to your classroom with practical teaching ideas you can use right away to help your learners be more successful in school!

-Motivating the Unmotivated Learner - "Is this going to be on the test?" "Do I have to do that?" Motivation and engagement are critical factors in helping our students find success in school. Join Melissa to learn simple ways to keep your students "actively" plugged into your teaching efforts. Plus, discover how to facilitate lessons that not only help your students pay better attention in class, but also help them better retain the content you teach.

Lesson Planning

-Planning for Differentiation: A Step-by-Step Guide - In this interactive, hands on session, Melissa will take you step by step through the process of creating your own differentiated lesson. You'll understand the essential elements of a lesson plan and will leave with an easy-to-use template that can be used for up to three days of instruction. Don't miss this chance to finally understand how to design differentiated lessons!

-Tiering Without Tears - Tiered activities and assignments are one of the best ways to meet the various readiness levels in the classroom. Learn how to create tiered assignments without feeling overwhelmed. Melissa explains tiered assignments in simple and practical terms and leaves you with the confidence to successfully plan them on your own.

Independent Practice

-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!

-Student-Friendly Anchor Activities - Watch learning flourish throughout your classroom! Come discover how anchor activities can help keep your students engaged throughout the day-allowing you to work with small groups or individuals. You'll return to your classroom with terrific ideas and activities you can use right away. Plus, you'll have the opportunity to share "the best of the best" ideas with other teachers.

-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.

Effective Instruction

-Double the Speed of Learning with The Instructional Cha-Cha - Join Melissa to learn an easy pneumonic device to help you, the teacher, remember the steps to effective instruction. When you use these steps consistently in your teaching you can double the speed of student learning. That's what I call working smarter, not harder.

-Content Chewing with the Instructional Cha-Cha: Processing Strategies that Work! - The Instructional Cha-Cha provides the steps to effective instruction. Join Melissa as she reviews the elements of effective instruction with a specific emphasis on the processing activities that strengthen engagement and comprehension. Come prepared to engage in easy-to-implement fun and engaging activities to get your students interacting with the content in deep and meaningful ways.

-Checking for Understanding with the Instructional Cha-Cha: Formative Assessment that Works! - The Instructional Cha-Cha provides the steps to effective instruction. Join Melissa as she reviews the elements of effective instruction with a specific emphasis on formative assessment to match your standards. From cruisin' clipboards to exit tickets, you'll discover a variety of easy-to-implement ideas to check for student mastery that you can take back and use the next day.

-The Nuts and Bolts of Specializing Instruction with the Instructional Cha-Cha - The Instructional Cha-Cha provides the steps to effective instruction. Join Melissa as she reviews the elements of effective instruction with a specific emphasis on addressing the needs of diverse learners through pre-teaching and re-teaching. You'll see how to meet the needs of Rapid Robin and Steady Freddie by changing your pacing, your grouping, or your instruction to ensure the right amount of rigor for your students.

-What Does Research-Based Instruction Look Like? Marzano in Action - We all know that our lessons are supposed to be research-based and engaging. But what does that really look like in a classroom? Be engaged (as a student) in Melissa's classroom for one lesson, then examine it (as a teacher) to see how easy it is to implement Marzano's Nine Instructional Strategies in a real lesson.

-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 own thinking. Fire up achievement with Melissa's simple techniques. -Ensuring the Power of the Reading-Writing Connection in Primary Grades - Writing IS reading from the inside out. Make your classroom rich with writing experiences. Discover how morning messages, graffiti boards, classroom mailboxes, and student-teacher journals involve students in writing. Plus, many more ways to use real-world writing tasks to motivate your students to write.

-The How's and Why's of Cooperative Learning - Research has found that cooperative learning benefits all types of learners and prepares them for college and careers. Join Melissa as she helps you view the difference between "cooperative learning" and "group work" and models structures to help make your class a cooperative one.

Differentiation

-10 Simple Ways to Differentiate - Everybody's talking about differentiation. But how does a teacher begin to differentiate for the students in the classroom? Melissa defines differentiation and gives you 10 simple ways to move from "talking the talk" to "walking the walk." By the time you leave, you'll have 10 easy-to-implement ways to jump-start differentiation-and begin meeting the needs of ALL your students.

-Differentiation in Action: Moving from Talking the Talk to Walking the Walk - We've all heard about the importance of differentiating, but what does it really look like in action? Join Melissa and see how today's teachers are meeting the curriculum requirements and the diverse needs of their students in fun, engaging ways. You will leave this session with a deeper understanding and easy-to-implement methods for assessment, tiered assignments, and anchor activities which will allow you to confidently meet your students' and curriculum requirements.

-Differentiating with Whole-Group Instruction - Whole-group instruction in the differentiated classroom? You bet! Based on the book by the same name written by Betty Hollas, Melissa shares a wealth of practical whole-group strategies you can readily use to keep your students engaged and learning. You'll learn strategies for differentiating questions and for effective ongoing assessment. Plus, you'll learn ways to flexibly group in a whole-group setting to best meet the needs and interests of your students.

-Dancing Your Way to Differentiation - Take the basic steps to quality and engaging instruction and differentiation by following the "Instructional Cha-Cha"-an interactive guide for lesson planning and continual assessment. Examine with Melissa vital topics in differentiation today, such as fitting it all in, anchor activities, flexible grouping, DI in a whole-group setting, assessment, and how to really use and implement data-driven instruction. Deepen your understanding of what it means to differentiate, collect easy-to-implement ideas and strategies to reach every learner, and dance back into your classroom and get started!

-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 Cs 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.

-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. Take a look at multiple questioning structures that can be applied across all content areas.

-One Size Doesn't Fit All - Differentiation Does! - Discover the keys to unlock your students' full learning potential! Differentiation is the answer. Melissa provides an overview of the many facets of differentiation and offers many ready-to-use differentiated instruction strategies you can take back to your classroom.

-Flexible Grouping: The What's, Why's and How's - In a differentiated classroom, students work in a variety of purposeful flexible groups. Explore the what, why, and how of flexible grouping. Melissa shares dozens of ways to flexibly group your students ensuring seamless movement from whole-group to small-group instruction while providing relevant and engaging instruction. You'll leave with ideas and strategies each grouping method so your differentiated classroom functions smoothly.

Books

Teaching With the Instructional Cha-Chas: Four Steps to Make Learning Stick

With foreword by Rick Wormeli

Merging educational neuroscience with a formative assessment process and differentiated instruction, LeAnn Nickelsen and Melissa Dickson developed a four-step cycle of instruction -- (1) chunk, (2) chew, (3) check, and (4) change -- that has the power to double the speed of student learning. Compatible with any subject area, the book's brain-friendly teaching strategies and plentiful tools are designed to help transform students into active learners and independent thinkers.

You can purchase this book here