Special Education Classroom Teacher, Registered Psychotherapist,  and Course Instructor at Trent University

About the Webinar: This presentation will discuss mental health practices to support students, as well as a bit on self-care for educators in order to support students more effectively. It will give practical examples, supported by research, to help educators understand their student's mental state and set them up for success. Help reduce stress, anxiety, and negative behaviour while supporting the mental health and well-being of unique and diverse students.

These practical skills and strategies will be beneficial for the mainstream classroom environment and the small class environment to reach our Tier 1, 2 and 3 students respectively. This presentation will help educators create a more inclusive environment for all students.

Coordinator of Secondary Mathematics and Academic Pathways, TDSB 

About the Webinar: Academic streaming has led to the disproportionate representation of students from historically and currently marginalized groups in lowerstream programming, leading to poorer outcomes. When streaming is removed, students of varying abilities will be in the same class, so differentiation is key. This webinar will explore the moral imperative for destreaming, the benefits of destreaming, and the changes that need to be made to instruction to ensure that all students in your class can access the curriculum.

With the release of the Right to Read Report, educators are learning more about Evidence-Based Instruction and are implementing new methods in the classroom to help improve their ability to teach reading.  This webinar will focus on some ways that the recommendations included in the Right to Read Report will change our thinking about how we use IEPs for struggling readers. Ultimately, we will explore whether an IEP for reading is required at all.

Please join us for this thought-provoking and interactive session, presented by LD@school's Educational Consultant, Martin Smit and Speech-Language Pathologist, Allyson Cousineau-Grant.

Martin Smit is the English Language Educational Consultant for LDAO.  He has over 30 years of experience as a classroom teacher, music teacher, administrator, and system principal for the Hastings and Prince Edward and Greater Essex district school boards as well as the Provincial and Demonstration Schools branch.  Martin has facilitated workshops at a number of education conferences including Quest, Educators’ Institute and ASET. He was a member of the LD@school Advisory Committee for five years and served more recently on the LDAO Board of Directors. Martin is a strong advocate for all students and supports school-wide, data-driven strategies for addressing learning needs.

For more than 13 years, Allyson Cousineau Grant has worked at the Conseil des écoles publiques de l’Est de l’Ontario (CEPEO) with children and adolescents who have a variety of communication difficulties, including difficulties in speech, language, reading and writing. Ms. Cousineau Grant also provides assessment and intervention services with preschool- and school-aged children, at a private office. In these varied contexts, she collaborates with the teaching staff and special education technicians to support them in their interventions with special needs students in the classroom setting. This strong collaboration allows her to identify and integrate winning strategies for supporting such students. In recent years, as part of the Master’s Programs in Speech-Language Pathology and in Audiology at the University of Ottawa, Ms. Cousineau Grant has taught the following courses: Troubles du développement du langage en milieu scolaire [Language development disorders in a school setting], Développement et fonctionnement typique de la communication [Development and typical functioning of communication], and Concepts d’orthophonie pertinents à l’audiologie [Concepts of speech-language pathology that are relevant to audiology]. She is also delighted to provide the course in Développement de la lecture et de l’écriture, évaluation et intervention en milieu francophone en ligne [Development of reading and writing, assessment and intervention in a Francophone online setting] for the University of Alberta. Passionate about teaching and about the education of apprentices in speech-language pathology, she participates in supervising interns in order to give them the necessary tools to apply theories, strategies and effective priority interventions in a school setting. She has many areas of interest as a speech-language pathologist, but Ms. Cousineau Grant focuses her efforts on language, reading and writing disorders, as well as on augmentative and alternative communication (AAO).