INVESTed – amazing value conference in Gippsland

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I’m madly reading up on phonological awareness so I can say interesting things about it at the InvestEd Inverloch conference on Saturday 29th February (an extra day, hooray for leap years). The full title of this conference is INVESTed: Sharing Best Practices, Supporting All Students, and it will be at the RACV Inverloch Resort by the beach in South Gippsland.

Like last year’s Sharing Best Practice conferences in Melbourne and Sydney, all the organisers and speakers are volunteers, to keep registration costs low at $88 concession/$99 full. A whole day of high-quality PD for under $100! TV advertisers would call it mad ape bonkers.

Here’s a summary of the agenda, more details are here:

  • 8.30 Registrations
  • 9.00 Welcome, Welcome To Country
  • 9.10am Getting your school moving & improving through the power of instructional leadership with Stephen Dinham, Emeritus Professor, Melbourne University Graduate School of Education.
  • 10.00am: Three options:
    • Practical phonological awareness with me, Alison Clarke, mere Speech Pathologist.
    • Decodable and predictable texts reflect theories about how to teach reading with Associate Professor Tanya Serry, who now (excitingly) works at the La Trobe University School of Education.
    • Orton-Gillingham Math(s!) with Ron Yoshimoto, Orton Gillingham International Trainer.
  • 11.10: Three options:
    • Sharing what works: the common elements of evidence-informed instruction with Steven Capp, Principal of Bentleigh West PS.
    • Better problem-solving with Catherine Scott, Psychologist, education academic and networker-organiser extraordinaire.
    • Evidence-based mathematics instruction: from concrete to pictorial to abstract with Dave Morkunas, high-performance Teacher at Bentleigh West PS (watch him in action here).
  • 12.00 noon: Three options:
  • 12.45pm: Delicious lunch.
  • 1.15pm: Three options:
  • 2.05pm: Three options:
  • 2.50pm: Cognitive Load Theory and learning disorders: is there a connection? With Mandy Nayton, Psychologist, AUSPELD President and DSF WA CEO.
  • 3:55 Thanks and close.
  • 4.00pm Drinks and networking in the groovy-sounding Zenith Lounge.

I am absolutely kicking myself that I can’t stay for the afternoon, as my tiny primary school at the other end of the state is having its 150th celebrations that night.

Registrations for INVESTed close on 20th February, and if you’d like to make it part of a weekend at the beach, please book your accommodation soon, before it fills up. You might also like to stay on for two days of multisensory math(s) with Ron Yoshimoto. Ron will also be presenting courses on Orton Gillingham Basic in the week of 2-6 March and Orton-Gillingham Advanced (morphology) on Saturday 7th March (for which the Basic course is a prerequisite).

Finally, a huge THANKYOU and massive credit to Kerry Harvey, Catherine Scott and the other South Gippsland Learning Differences volunteer organisers.

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6 responses to “INVESTed – amazing value conference in Gippsland”

  1. Danni Hilder says:

    Hey can you please let me know when you have This in Sydney? Thank you.

  2. Hello Allison, You may read my many articles and comments about ‘Phonological awareness deficit’ not being the cause of dyslexia by Googling ‘phonological awareness Luqman’. Most of the articles and comments were written in 2010 when every week one would see some article on PAD being the cause of dyslexia.
    Many research students visited my blog in 2010/2011 and that theory was debunked in 2015.

  3. As for how to teach reading and to end the ‘Reading Wars’ I request you to please subscribe to my YouTube channel and see what I have shared from my 15 years of teaching so-called dyslexics.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycJJFf57EdY

    I wish you the best in your presentation.

  4. Isabel Redwin says:

    Hi Alison,

    I’m with Danni and need this conference to be in Sydney! It looks really useful and relevant. I had a look at the link to the Sydney Conference from 2019 and will listen to these sessions so I hope it stays up for a while. Is there any possibility that after the conference in Gippsland that some of these sessions will be published? Thanks.

    • alison says:

      Hi Isabel, it’s a volunteer-organised conference with no funding apart from registrations which will be used to cover costs, so I’m not sure they will publish sessions, they haven’t asked whether they can make my session available in print. It is a lot of work to publish conference proceedings, that’s one of the things that make most conferences a lot more expensive than this one.

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