Keynotes

Five keynotes. One body of work. Every one ends with something your teachers can do Monday morning.

Built from the Five Engines framework and its companion volumes — Decoding to Discourse, Mentor Text Moves, Written for Impact, and History Unbound — each keynote delivers the version of the work its audience is positioned to act on. Every talk features a live demonstration the audience performs themselves, and every research claim is pinned to a named source. No talk requires another; together they form a deepening series.

The Reflection Wall

Making Thirteen Years of Literacy Visible

For: Visible Learning conferences, leadership institutes, and any audience fluent in surface–deep–transfer, teacher clarity, and evidence of impact.

The hook: The most important assessment your students will take this year is the one where they grade their own September — and discover they can no longer read it.

A fourth grader holds two pieces of paper: her writing from the first week of September, and the piece she finished this morning. Her teacher asks one thing — "Read me your September" — and she can't. Not because she's emotional. Because she can no longer read it. Nobody told her to get better. She did it by writing. And until that moment, she had no idea.

This keynote argues that the cheapest, most powerful intervention available to us is making learning visible to the person doing the learning — and that literacy, of all subjects, hides its learning best. Audiences meet the five engines every reader and writer runs, watch one skill travel live through surface, deep, and transfer, and then perform the September-versus-now protocol themselves with real student work at their tables.

Participants leave with:

• Five engine questions that function as learning intentions a whole system can share — and fit on an index card

• The surface–deep–transfer phase logic that sequences strategies without a pacing guide

• Single-point rubrics, student-voice success criteria, and inference-based exit tickets they can use tomorrow

• The Reflection Wall protocol — and one September decision that makes March possible

Pairs with breakout: The Unit Audit — Running, Idling, Dormant (hands-on protocol session)

Source First

History Unbound and the End of the Neutral Document

For: NCSS, state social studies councils, and district social studies leadership.

The hook: We are not teaching students to read documents from the past. We are teaching them to ask who wrote this, and why, and for whom — before they believe it, share it, or vote on it.

Hand the same document to a working historian and a straight-A senior. The historian glances at the attribution and sources the document before reading a word of the body. The honor student dives into the content and considers the author last — if at all. The student can read every word. The historian is the only one reading the document.

This keynote makes the case that historical thinking is not a literacy add-on to social studies — it is the most rigorous literacy framework the school already owns. Built on the T.R.A.I.T.S. framework and the SPEC research sort, and mapped explicitly onto Wineburg, SHEG, Seixas and Morton, and the C3 Framework, it turns sourcing-first from a rescue into a routine — one that scales from a thirty-second glance to a full investigation. The room finishes by sourcing a hidden-author document themselves in the live Missing Context Challenge.

Participants leave with:

• Six letters, six historian's moves — a framework students can run on any source

• The SPEC sort and three-time-band protocol that make impact research, not recall

• A collaborative studio design — roles, walls, gallery walks — where analysis is public and no one is a passenger

• The cheapest diagnostic in the discipline: a two-sentence exit ticket that tells you who can reason from evidence

Pairs with breakout: A Full T.R.A.I.T.S. Investigation (workshop on a complete source analysis)

The Assigned Subject

What Happens When We Finally Teach Writing

For: NCTE, state English councils, and ELA departments K–12.

The hook: Walk any hallway during fourth period and count where writing is happening: everywhere. Now count where, this week, it was taught. Not assigned — taught.

Writing is the most assigned and least taught subject in American schools. In one room a lab conclusion, next door a paragraph on the causes of the war, across the hall the essay on the novel — and almost nowhere the instruction that belongs between the content and the assignment.

This keynote supplies that missing middle: five composing moves, taught through the mentor texts already on your shelf — the class novel held together with tape, the one the whole grade fights over. Audiences perform a live Slice (a mentor sentence read flat, then true, then stolen into a sentence of their own in ninety seconds), meet the diagnostic index that turns familiar stack frustrations into named fifteen-minute lessons — and then this keynote names the thing keynotes never name: the grading load. Because a framework that works in theory and drowns teachers in practice is not a framework. It is a guilt-delivery system.

Participants leave with:

• The five composing questions — the reading engines, turned around

• The Spotlight–Slice–Connect–Challenge routine that turns any beloved book into writing instruction

• A diagnosis-to-strategy crosswalk: every stack pattern paired with a named, phased lesson

• Four load-bearing designs that make the Sunday-night stack a solvable problem

Pairs with breakout: The Grading-Load Redesign Clinic (bring a real assignment; leave with a lighter stack)

Decoding to Discourse

One Continuum, Five Engines, a Thirteen-Year Handoff

For: ILA, state reading associations, and any audience spanning early and adolescent literacy.

The hook: A kindergarten teacher and an AP Language teacher are colleagues in a more literal sense than school structures honor: they run the same five engines, and each holds one end of a thirteen-year handoff.

Room one: a kindergarten read-aloud — schema built before the cover opens, a word's parts delighted over, the shape of the story felt in the body, and whose version do you believe? asked of five-year-olds. Room two, thirteen years later: an AP seminar — a research synthesis, roots traced through the vocabulary of chemistry, an argument stress-tested against a serious counterclaim. The reveal: these teachers are doing the same five things. The engines do not change. The grain size does.

This keynote proves the claim end to end on one engine, runs the room through a live morphology build (dictionaries present and prohibited — the restraint is the strategy), and turns the continuum into something a vertical team can operate: taught explicitly, deepened every year. Not repeated — deepened. It closes with four fences — not a curriculum, not a scope-and-sequence, not a program, not a replacement — because programs deskill, and frameworks equip.

Participants leave with:

• The grain-size continuum: one framework from phoneme to discourse, with no grade level on any of its five questions

• The Decode–Define–Discuss routine — and why it serves multilingual learners best

• A vertical mapping protocol a K–12 team can run in one session

• A five-minute unit audit: which engines run, which idle, which are dormant

Pairs with breakout: The Vertical Mapping Session (one engine, thirteen years, one wall)

Says Who?

Building Literacy Frameworks That Show Their Papers

For: Plain Talk, science-of-reading conferences, dyslexia and structured-literacy organizations, and research-minded district leadership.

The hook: The science of reading was never a side in the argument. It was a standard for how to argue — and this keynote holds itself to it, live.

A framework asks for trust, so it should show its papers. This keynote walks the evidence lineage line by line — the Simple View, the National Reading Panel, the grain-size synthesis, the ETS knowledge-threshold study, the writing meta-analysis — and holds one distinction all the way through: the difference between the evidence shows and this framework holds. Every claim in the talk wears one of those two labels, and in the final movement the audience audits the keynote's own six central claims in real time — including the one this community will respect most: the framework itself has never been tested in a randomized trial, and no framework of its kind has.

Along the way: the threshold finding that should change every planning meeting, the case that the science of reading is a science of prerequisites all the way up, and the distinction that prevents the next pendulum — explanatory models tell you what must be true of every reader; planning frameworks tell you what to do on Sunday afternoon.

Participants leave with:

• The evidence lineage of the five engines, source by source and claim by claim

• The knowledge-threshold finding and its planning implication: the engine is on, or it is off

• The two-kinds-of-tools distinction that keeps models and frameworks from being blamed for each other's failures

• The Two-Sentence Test — a standing PLC routine for auditing any practice or initiative

Pairs with breakout: The Claims Audit Workshop (run the Two-Sentence Test on your own school's initiatives)

Booking

Each keynote is designed for a 60-minute slot and includes a live, audience-performed demonstration. Any keynote can be paired with its hands-on breakout for a half-day engagement, or combined across a multi-day institute. Content can be tailored to your region — mentor texts, primary sources, and examples matched to your standards and your shelves.