Spotlight on Dyslexia Event Speakers

Shane Saeed

Shane Saeed

Learning Coach and Curriculum Specialist, St. Vrain Valley School District

Shane Saeed is currently a district-level instructional coach in St Vrain Valley Schools in Longmont, Colorado coaching and facilitating professional development for educators K-12. She is a lifelong learner having started with receiving her Bachelors in Psychology with an Elementary Education Licensure from the University of Colorado at Boulder where she received the Dorcas Diana Wolf scholarship. When she graduated, she received a teaching position in Erie, Colorado as a fourth grade teacher. Next, she earned her first Master’s Degree in Curriculum and Instruction with a focus on Literacy from CU Boulder and her second Master’s Degree in School Leadership with a Principal Licensure from CU Denver. Currently, Shane is working on her doctorate in Executive Leadership with a focus on Educational Equity and is slated to defend her research and graduate in Spring 2024. In 2022, Shane was nominated and chosen to be one of 20 educators around the world to be an ASCD Emerging Leader. Shane is a big believer in community and collaboration and shares through social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.

Sessions

Build

Structured Morphology: A Big Word Decoding Strategy to Support Vocabulary in Upper Grades

The goal of this presentation would be to share the why and the how of structured morphology instruction in intermediate grades. The structured morphology program we are building encourages readers to shift from decoding by sound and syllable to seeing words as having meaningful parts. Through this learning, students will gain “big-word reading strategies” that support their ability to comprehend what a word means through word analysis. Leveraging what students know from their explicit and structured literacy learning in primary and connecting it to develop the skills to become word detectives and linguists.

Through structured morphology word study and analysis, students will begin to see words based on their associations and interconnections, which, in turn, facilitates word storage. These words are stored as a part of a network of related meanings. This allows students to manage the rapid learning of content words that increase in the upper elementary grades. Morphological Awareness is a strong predictor of reading ability, vocabulary knowledge, and comprehension–structured literacy in the fourth and fifth grades is an essential part of the trajectory toward reading success for our students.

Shane Saeed

Shane Saeed
Learning Coach and Curriculum Specialist
St. Vrain Valley School District

Carolyn Storz

Carolyn Storz
Literacy Specialist
St. Vrain Valley School District