Guest Speaker Series

Date: Wednesday, October 23, 2024

Time: 8:30 a.m. - 3:30 p.m.

Content area writing often focuses on restating facts. This can help you check for understanding but is it helping to push your students ready for more? This full day professional development session will help you do just that! Help deepen content understanding through a variety of creative and engaging writing strategies. Leave ready to turn your students into historians, scientists, mathematicians  - all through writing!

Participants will be able to use and apply Depth of Knowledge (DOK) with writing across the content areas

Participants will be able to apply DOK through product choice writing menus

Participants will be able to create a strategy repertoire of writing strategies that cross content areas. 

Lori G. Wilfong, Ph.D., began her career in East Los Angeles, CA, teaching English as a second language to 6th, 7th, and 8th graders for the Los Angeles Unified School District. This sparked her interest in motivating adolescent readers and led to positions in Rootstown Local Schools and Maple Heights City Schools as a literacy coach and literacy specialist. Upon completion of her doctoral degree in Literacy Education from Kent State, Wilfong taught for 17.5 years in the Middle Childhood Education program at Kent State University at Stark. In 2020, Wilfong assumed the role of Director of the National Writing Project at Kent State. Beginning in 2024, she transitioned to the Kent Campus to serve as Director of the Reading and Writing Center as well as Program Coordinator for the graduate literacy program. She remains an active consultant in several area school districts, furthering her research interests in the teaching of writing, vocabulary, and small group instruction.

Time: 8:30 a.m. - 3:30 p.m.

Based upon her book, Vertical Differentiation, Dr. Mofield, will share strategies designed to foster deep inquiry and conceptual understanding by guiding students to justify conclusions, apply critical and creative thinking, develop solutions to real-world problems, and transfer learning across contexts

Emily Mofield, Ed.D., is an Assistant Professor of Education teaching courses in gifted education and in the Ed.D. Program for Learning Organizations and Strategic Change. Dr. Mofield is passionate about equipping teachers with high-quality resources to use to identify, serve, and teach gifted and high-potential students. Dr. Mofield has co-authored award-winning curriculum for gifted/advanced students (with Vanderbilt Programs for Talented Youth). Her co-authored book, Collaboration, Coaching, and Coteaching: Sharing Strategies to Support Gifted Learners was recognized as Book of the Year for 2021 by the National Association for Gifted Children (with Vicki Phelps). Dr. Mofield is regularly invited as a featured speaker at various conferences and leads professional learning addressing rigor, differentiation, social-emotional learning, and instructional coaching for school districts and special groups. Emily's research has been published in prominent journals including Gifted Child Quarterly, Journal of Education for the Gifted, Roeper Review, and Gifted Child Today. She enjoys spending time with her wonderful husband, loving daughter, and her sweet "pandemic" poodle.