Inferential reading skills involve the ability to go beyond the text's literal meaning to understand deeper implications, themes, and the author's intent.

Reading Between the Lines

Develop Deep Thinking While Reading in Every Subject

1 Day workshop

Today’s classrooms demand that students utilise inferential reading skills to think more deeply about more complex texts and support their thinking with evidence from the text.

Inferential reading skills involve the ability to go beyond the text's literal meaning to understand deeper implications, themes, and the author's intent. This skill enables readers to make educated guesses, draw conclusions, and make predictions based on hints and context clues present in the text. For example, a reader may infer a character's emotions or motivations from their actions or dialogue rather than being explicitly told.

Developing these skills is crucial for comprehension, as it helps readers connect their prior knowledge with new information, fostering a more comprehensive understanding of the material.

This workshop provides you with simple, concrete activities and engaging structures that guide students to develop metacognition skills to think about how they make inferences daily.

You experience engaging structures to propel students to actively interact with texts—making the complex inferential process a habit of mind for all students.

Workshop Highlights

  • Show students how to read closely to make logical inferences from texts

  • Structure team sharing to explain and describe points of view

  • Have students identify key ideas and details and share them with classmates

  • Use strategies to have students ask and answer questions to demonstrate understanding

  • Develop the skills of describing relationships between varying texts

  • Teach your class to cite specific textual evidence to support conclusions drawn from a text

  • Promote comprehension of complex literary and informational texts

With your attendance, you will receive:

  • Reading Between the Lines Workbook

  • “I can't believe I've taught for seven years without this. I keep thinking how much better I could have served my former students and how well I will serve my future students.”

    —JEN BLUNIER, READING TEACHER

  • “The content has been very helpful to me as a coach. I can take this back and model better reading lessons for my teachers.”

    —CASEY MASSEY, GRADES K–5 READING COACH

  • “Great strategies! I teach computer skills and work with struggling readers. I learned strategies I can use with either group.”

    —ANN KARELS, TEACHER

  • “Never get stuck in the same ole teaching rut. Kagan gives you updated structures that will create a safe learning environment with 100% engagement from your students.”

    -KIMBERY MARSHALL, SPECIAL EDUCATION TEACHER

  • “This Kagan training was eye-opening and inspiring. I have been teaching for a decade, yet I came out of this workshop with strategies to ensure cooperative learning, rather than group work, that I can immediately put to use in my classroom come Monday.”

    -HILLARY REISIG, SECONDARY LANGUAGE ARTS TEACHER

So why Kagan?

  • It's Dialogical

    Cooperative learning is one of the key pedagogical approaches recommended in Teaching to the North East by Russell Bishop. Due to our dialogical emphasis, we ensure all students feel safe to share and be heard

  • It's Relational

    Kagan provides teachers with a practical process to develop relationships between all students - not just with their friends. Social and communication skills are taught and practiced as part of the class programme

  • It's Dynamic

    Teachers are in full control as to the level of engagement they want at any one time - a few, some, everyone. When instruction is viewed through the Kagan lens, teaching becomes responsive, deliberate, and strategic

  • It's Anti-Bullying

    Kagan helps students get to know others they wouldn’t normally choose to work with. When students see past the exterior and into the human behind, they develop empathy and come to appreciate & respect others

  • It's Multi-Faceted

    Schools are inundated with PLD but Kagan’s multi-faceted approach means you can cover an awful lot with just one intervention - Key Competencies, values, behaviour, classroom management, oral language, engagement, brain-friendly teaching, student & staff well-being, attendance, PRT support

  • It's holistic

    We believe unless you have the right culture for learning, your student’s won’t be learning so Kagan’s methodology includes creating a safe classroom through frequent classbuilding, teambuilding and relationship development as part of the normal class programme no matter your context

  • It's Empirically-Based

    Cooperative learning is the most-researched educational innovation of all time and Kagan is the only one that ensures equity, because we structure for it. Kagan is brain-friendly meaning we teach the way the brain likes to learn, and we provide a safe & inclusive learning environment

  • It's Wide-Ranging

    Schools are in crisis as they try to do everything. Kagan can help with that. We are a shared-pedagogical intervention that works across a a whole school or kahui ako, and covers all curricula.