Dr. Peter Bowers is the founder of WordWorks Literacy Centre and a passionate educator/researcher from Wolfe Island in Ontario, Canada. Near the end of his 9th year as a classroom teacher, he attended a 45 minute workshop by Real Spelling. From that point on, he and his Grade 4 students became word scientists who rejoiced in making sense of making sense of the spelling-meaning connections of words. After seeing spelling transform from a frustratingly irregular system students had to memorize into a fascinating domain of scientific inquiry, Pete started his graduate work at the Faculty of Education at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario to test the effect of this instruction. He has earned his PhD and since published a meta-analysis of research (Bowers, Kirby, & Deacon, 2010) which shows that teaching about the morphological structure of English spelling benefits elementary students and even more noteworthy -- counter to decades of untested assumptions -- this instruction brings the largest benefits to younger and less able students. Since 2006, through the WordWorks Literacy Centre, Peter has worked with teachers and students around the globe to help them bring scientific inquiry about the written word, also known as “structured word inquiry” (SWI) (Bowers, & Kirby, 2010) to K - 12 classrooms. The question of morphological instruction and specifically SWI, has become a particularly focused question in current research sparked by articles in major journals Bowers & Bowers (2017, 2018), chapters (Kirby & Bowers, 2017, 2018) and even a recent article in the Washington Post (Bowers & Bowers, 2019). (Click HERE for information and links to some of this research.) In addition to work with schools and districts around the US, Canada and the world, he has been invited to present keynotes prestigious conferences around the world including the main annual educational conference in Australia (ALEA, 2019) and the annual Literacy Conference hosted by the Hong Kong International School (2020).
Learning Opportunities
Structured Word Inquiry (SWI): Advanced Workshop
Presented By
Peter BowersSession Details
| Date | Time |
|---|---|
| October 10, 2019 | 9:00 am to 3:30 pm |
Location
Grade Levels
AllStructured Word Inquiry (SWI) is an approach that allows teachers and students to study the English spelling system using a combination of etymology, word structure, word relatives and graphemes. This approach is different than focusing on phonetics to teach spelling. Instead, the emphasis is on connecting word origins to word meaning that can provide clues to help students understand spelling rules and reading for meaning.
The advanced workshop builds on the concepts addressed in the introductory session, or for those who have already been practicing SWI in their classrooms. This session has more time to practice doing SWI activities that can be adapted and used the next day in classrooms. There will be deeper exploration of how to independently investigate words, how to read and use etymological references, and how to use SWI in the context of reading instruction, and to deepen understanding of any subject area. As a prerequisite to attend, teachers should be comfortable analyzing words with word sums, constructing matrices, working with etymological references and know the important difference between roots and bases. Even teachers with substantial SWI background are encouraged to attend both days if they can. The review of the introductory course is extremely valuable.
This hands-on workshop will use lessons Dr. Bowers regularly uses in K to 12 classrooms to help teachers get started in investigating English spelling in their own teaching contexts. Participants can learn how to draw concepts and terms from content areas from and use SWI lessons as leverage for students to learn content area vocabulary, to decode and spell words in any grade, and to deepen their understanding of literacy strategies to use during reading.
Target Audience
Teachers (Grades K to 9); Instructional Coaches; District Leaders/Consultants
Also Recommended For
School-based Administrators