The Wisconsin Branch of the International Dyslexia Association is pleased to announce our 2021 annual conference, titled, “Facets of Dyslexia”!

Please Note: This year’s virtual conference consists of recorded sessions that will be available to registered participants from 10/16/21 through 12/16/21. 

Instructions for accessing the Facets of Dyslexia Conference will be emailed to registered participants prior to October 16. 

Conference Presenters:

Keynote: Dr. Marcia Tate – Worksheets Don’t Grow Dendrites

Dr. Marcia Tate is the former Executive Director of Professional Development for the DeKalb County School System, Decatur, Georgia. During the course of her 30-year career with the district, she has also been a classroom teacher, reading specialist, language arts coordinator, and staff development executive director. In 2001, she received Georgia’s Distinguished Staff Developer Award, and her department won the Exemplary Program Award for the state.

Currently, through her company Developing Minds, Inc., Marcia serves as an educational consultant and has taught over 450,000 administrators, teachers, and parents, as well as community and business leaders, all over the world. Participants in her workshops often refer to them as the best they have ever experienced.

Marcia received her bachelor’s degree in psychology and elementary education from Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. She earned her master’s degree in remedial reading from the University of Michigan, her specialist degree in educational leadership from Georgia State University, and her doctorate in educational leadership from Clark Atlanta University. Spelman College awarded her the Apple Award for excellence in the field of education.

Dr. Laura Raynolds 

Session Title  : Disability, Difference or Gap? Assessing the Literacy Skills of English Learners.
This presentation will describe the multiple factors that contribute to difficulties in learning to read and write in a second language. Attendees will be introduced to the types of reading problems ELs experience.   Reading and writing products will be analyzed to determine the causes of students’ literacy difficulties. The intended audience is reading specialists, classroom teachers and special education teachers. 

Dr. Laura Raynolds received her undergraduate degree in Spanish from the University of the Virgin Islands, and master’s degrees in English as a Second Language and in Reading. She has teaching certifications in Spanish, ESL, Reading, and Bilingual Literacy. After many years of teaching reading and language skills to English learners, she went on to complete her Ph.D. in Language and Literacy from Fordham University and a post-doctoral fellowship at Haskins Laboratories. She is currently professor and graduate coordinator of the graduate reading program at Southern Connecticut State University, which is dually accredited by the International Dyslexia Society and the International Literacy Association. Dr. Raynolds has published research concerning the early English literacy development of bilingual children and is currently completing a book on English learners to be published in 2022 by Brookes Publishing.

Jennifer Hasser – Moving from Muddled to Magical: Building Prerequisite Skills for Oral and Written Expression

Jennifer Hasser, M.Ed. is a nationally recognized speaker and trainer in the field of reading and dyslexia. She is the founder and Executive Director of Kendore Learning, which provides training, curriculum, and materials to educators across the nation. Jennifer’s passion for education began in the high school behavior disorder classroom, where she was awarded Special Education Teacher of the Year. Her ongoing interest in the literacy challenges facing schools and has led to the design, development, and implementation of comprehensive programs for public schools. She is a regular presenter at literacy and dyslexia conferences and serves as an educational consultant to schools across the nation. Her training and curricula are accredited by IMSLEC and IDA. Jennifer is also the founder of Atlanta-based Syllables Learning Centers, where she has helped thousands of struggling readers across the globe. While serving as President of the International Dyslexia Association’s Georgia Branch, she founded the now nationally recognized Dyslexia Dash 5K and twice received the Outstanding Service Award for her contributions to dyslexia awareness. Most recently, she launched Kendore Cares, a nonprofit organization devoted to providing literacy services to under-served students and communities.

Robert Meyer 

Session Title: Pictograph Mnemonics – Integrated (Embedded) Pictographic Mnemonics and Sound Proficiency
In this session, key findings and questions from four recent Randomized Controlled Trial studies (Roberts, 2021) comparing generic approaches including the use of Embedded Pictograph Mnemonics to teaching beginning alphabet knowledge to preschool students will be presented.

Ventris Learning President & Publisher Robert Meyer has 25 years of K-12 publishing industry experience. In prior positions, he worked in product marketing and development positions with leading publishers including the Scholastic Corporation, Renaissance Learning, and MetaMetrics. He has presented at numerous state and national early childhood, special education and literacy conferences including National Title 1, National Head Start, the International Literacy Association Intensive Conference on Equity, HighScope International, Neuhaus Education, National Black Child Development Institute, and the Education Research & Development Institute. Meyer holds a music education degree from the University of Iowa.

Kelly Steinke 

Session Title: Why I Should Teach Spelling Rules and How I Should Teach Them
Learning to spell and learning to read require much of the same knowledge.  Attend this session to learn WHY it’s important to teach spelling rules in an explicit, systematic, and reliable manner and HOW you can teach spelling rules in a way that not only improves spelling, but also phonics, phonemic awareness, word structure, and syllable knowledge.  The Silver Moon Spelling Rules supplemental program will be used as an example.

Session Title: Success with Executive Functioning Skills
Executive functions are the set of mental skills that help us complete daily tasks. Many students and adults with executive functioning deficits have difficulty with time management, planning, organization, focusing their attention, staying on task, completing tasks and meeting deadlines. This may appear to be due to laziness or lack of motivation, but most often is due to a lack of skills.  In this presentation, participants will learn what executive functions are and leave with practical visual strategies that can be used immediately to build independence, improve accountability, reduce frustration, and increase daily success.  

As the founder of READ Learning Educational Services, LLC and the author of the Silver Moon Spelling Rules (R) curriculum, Kelly Steinke works with students, families, teachers, and school districts through her private practice to improve student learning outcomes in literacy.  Additionally, Steinke is a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh as well as Carroll University and serves as president of the Wisconsin branch of the International Dyslexia Association. 

Earlier in her career, Steinke was a special education teacher working in school districts in the Midwest, East Coast, and Pacific Northwest. During her time as a classroom teacher, she earned National Board Certification in Exceptional Needs and a Master of Arts Degree in Education with an administration and leadership focus.  Kelly Steinke is an insightful professional who finds great joy helping stakeholders reach students who struggle with reading and spelling.

Nancy Mather – Assessment Dyslexia: The Construct and the Challenges

Nancy Mather is a Professor Emerita at the University of Arizona in Tucson. She has served as a learning disabilities teacher, a diagnostician, a university professor, and an educational consultant. She has published numerous articles and books and conducts workshops on assessment and instruction both nationally and internationally.

Dr. Mather is a co-author of the Woodcock-Johnson IV. Her most recent book on dyslexia is:  Essentials of Dyslexia: Assessment and Intervention. She is currently working on the Tests of Dyslexia, a comprehensive measure designed to help identify individuals with dyslexia.

Kelly Kuenzie – Dyslexia Simulation & Conference Panel Moderator

What a person with dyslexia experiences is often a point of curiosity for those who do not identify as such. While a person’s experiences with dyslexia vary widely since there are no two alike. Beyond understanding how the reading mind works in order to help we want to better understand the emotional resilience and understanding needed to succeed. Simulations often have 6 different experiences. Kelly will guide you through 2 common experiences, including auditory discrimination and automaticity of sound to symbol and decoding.

A native of Milwaukee, Kelly received her BA in psychology and MFA from Winona State. After moving to Madison, she ran a business and began her first O-G training in 2003 at Children’s Dyslexia Center Madison and continued with advanced (now practitioner 2) training and advanced trainer. She has clocked over 10,000 hours of tutoring children of 6-years-old to a 25-year-old opera singer and 60-year-old veterans. She has been the director of the Children’s Dyslexia Center-Madison since 2014.