Jan Bryan’s educational tenure includes K – 8 music teacher, primary classroom teacher, and university professor at the undergraduate and graduate levels, Director of the America Reads program at North Texas University, and curriculum author and co-author for the Texas Department of Education career tech division. Jan now serves as VP and National Education Officer for Renaissance Learning where she researches educational trends and initiatives and writes about her passion; the well-being of students. She has authored white papers focusing on the Power of an Effective Educator and RTI: The Next Generation of Data-Fueled Decision Making, and has been privileged to work with education professionals across the United States, in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Quam and Pago, Pago.
AAPF17 Sessions:
The Life-Changing Power of Abundant Reading
Dr. Jan Bryan, former professor and current education officer for Renaissance, will lead a session focused on differentiated and individualized instruction for reading and the use of multiple metrics to quantify reading growth. Attendees will explore practices proven to yield achievement and growth gains. Further, they will explore reading’s impact on vocabulary acquisition and how that impacts job advancement outside of school to understand why wide abundant reading is the surest route out of poverty.
Past AAPF Sessions:
Personalizing Instruction for At-Promise Students SIATech continues to lead the way in changing the conversation about schooling from assessment for the purposes of sorting students to assessment for purposes of personalizing instruction; from assessments that lead students to proficiency toward standardized benchmarks to skillfully using assessment data to guide students to drive their learning. In this session, we apply the groundbreaking work of Todd Rose and his book, The End of Average, to our determination to personalize learning. We begin with a new way to explore data—finding the jagged edges of talent within each learner’s data. Next we look Rose’s claim that traits are a myth. In doing so, we look at David Shenk’s book The Genius in All of Us. Shenk takes personalized learning to the molecular level; shattering what we think we know about nature, nurture, and learning. Finally, we look at how learning progressions coming into play at the end of average, where each learner walks a road less traveled.
