NM PED 2026 Literacy and Humanities Summer Conference

This engaging session bridges the gap between spelling assessment and high-impact instruction that leads to lasting student learning. You will explore how to use screening, diagnostic, and formative assessments to uncover student spelling strengths, analyze errors, and plan targeted instruction.

The session features real classroom examples demonstrating how to move from data analysis to informing your instructional decisions. You will discover strategies for creating a responsive instructional cycle where ongoing assessment informs your daily teaching and accelerates student progress. You will walk away with research-backed practices that ensure spelling instruction sticks with your students, transforming assessment from a periodic task into a powerful tool for academic success.

If you are ready to rediscover the joy of writing and make daily practice feel meaningful and manageable, this session is for you. In this session, you will explore practical and easy-to-use writing strategies designed to make writing across the curriculum clear, consistent, and meaningful in every subject area.

You will learn about a specific framework that aligns naturally with DOK levels, supports deeper comprehension, and elevates journal writing so it becomes a powerful part of learning rather than a task students rush through. This system is designed to be set up once and used all year long to provide you with a dependable structure from start to finish. You will also discover how this strategy makes it simple to pull small guided writing groups, target specific skills, and gather quick, authentic formative assessments that help you adjust instruction with confidence. You will leave with a writing tool that strengthens literacy, boosts student thinking, and makes daily writing a natural and joyful part of your classroom all year long.

You can empower your students’ academic language development by using morphology to support skilled reading comprehension. Vocabulary depth, breadth, and precision are essential components of the language strand in the Reading Rope, and in this session, you will learn to apply structural analysis using common affixes and Greek and Latin bases to expand student vocabulary.

You will explore how explicit and systematic instruction of morphemes enables students to accurately and automatically analyze academic vocabulary in grade-level texts. To help students prepare for sophisticated reading and standardized assessments, you will focus on the three layers of the English language: Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and Greek. The session emphasizes the use of semantic clusters, which are groups of words that share a common base or characteristic. As your students progress to upper grades and encounter increasingly complex multisyllabic words, you will be equipped with the tools to teach them how every word part aids in analysis, comprehension, and spelling.

Successful structured literacy implementation requires more than adding evidence-aligned practices; it demands the intentional removal of practices that dilute clarity and coherence. In this interactive session, you will examine de-implementation as a core leadership responsibility within your Science of Reading initiatives. As a district or building leader, you will explore how to identify misaligned literacy practices and anticipate the adaptive resistance that often accompanies change.

Through guided reflection and the use of practical planning tools, you will develop a strategic phase-out plan aligned to your district’s specific priorities. You will leave with actionable tools and the precise language needed to reduce initiative overload, strengthen system coherence, and create the necessary conditions for structured literacy to thrive. By focusing on streamlining your instructional efforts, you will gain the ability to protect your staff's time and ensure that your literacy goals lead to lasting student success.

In this session, you will focus on the exploration of Generative AI tools to create effective materials for planning interventions. You will begin by defining and understanding the difference between AI inputs and outputs, ensuring you have a clear grasp of how these tools process information.

Using a specific protocol, you will learn how to craft high-quality inputs that lead to precise and useful results. You will also explore how to critically analyze the quality of the output from the AI tool to ensure it meets the rigorous needs of your students. By the end of the session, you will leave with a practical framework for leveraging AI as a time-saving partner in your instructional design, allowing you to generate targeted intervention resources that are accurate, engaging, and aligned with student goals.

Discover how explicit instruction, as championed by Anita Archer, can transform vocabulary learning in any classroom. This session provides teachers with research-backed strategies for teaching words with clarity, structure, and repeated practice, ensuring students understand, retain, and apply new vocabulary.

Grounded in John Hattie’s Visible Learning research, participants will explore instructional practices with high effect sizes, including modeling, guided practice, scaffolding, and activating prior knowledge before introducing new words. During this interactive session, teachers will learn how to:

Identify and prioritize high-impact vocabulary for instruction.

Activate students’ prior knowledge and build background to support comprehension.

Incorporate multiple exposures and active student responses to ensure retention.

Whether you teach elementary, middle, or high school, this session equips educators to accelerate learning, close achievement gaps, and make vocabulary instruction measurable, visible, and impactful.

In this session, you will learn how to develop a "What I Need" (WIN) model that fits the specific needs of your students through the effective triangulation of data. You will move beyond simple test scores to look at how multiple data points inform a comprehensive view of student growth and instructional needs.

You will work with a model of the Multi-Layered System of Support (MLSS) framework to develop or refine a personalized structure for your own school or classroom. By working collaboratively with your peers and the presenter, you will identify how to schedule, group, and track interventions that actually work. You will leave with a clear, actionable plan for your MLSS framework, ensuring that your intervention time is purposeful, data-driven, and designed to close achievement gaps for every student.