Plenary Speakers

Re-Envisioning Writing Assessment for Teaching and Learning
Dixie Goswami, Professor of English Emerita, Clemson University; Coordinator of courses in writing for the Bread Loaf School of English; and Co-director of the Bread Loaf Teacher Network. She is co-editor of Reclaiming the Classroom: Teacher Research as an Agency for Change (Peter Stillman), as well as Electronic Networks: Crossing Boundaries/Creating Communities (Rocky Gooch and others), Writing to Make a Difference: Classroom Projects for Community Change (Chris Benson and others).

Michael Armstrong, Visiting Professor at the Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College Vermont; former Headteacher at Harwell Primary School, Oxfordshire England. He is author of Closely Observed Children and Children Writing Stories

Steve Seidel, Bauman and Bryant Chair in Arts in Education, the Harvard Graduate School of Education; also Director of Project Zero and Director of the Arts in Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is co-author of Portfolio Practices: Thinking through the Assessment of Children’s Work (with Joseph Walters and others), as well as Making Learning Visible: Children as Individual and Group Learners (Reggio Children), and Teaching as Inquiry: Asking Hard Questions to Improve Practice and Student Achievement.

Assessment Issues for English Language Learners
Kate Menken, Assistant Professor of Linguistics and TESOL, Queens College, and Research Fellow, Research Institute for the Study of Language in an Urban Society, City University of New York Graduate Center. She is author of numerous articles and book chapters concerning Language Policy, Bilingual Education, English Language Learners, and High-Stakes Testing, and the recent book, English Learners Left Behind: Standardized Testing as Language Policy.

Wilma Ortiz and Karen Sumaryono,Co-Directors of the ELL Network for the Western Massachusetts Writing Project. Ortiz teaches at Amherst Regional Middle School, Amherst, MA. She is also a member of the National Writing Project’s ELL Leadership Team.  Sumaryono teaches ESL and leads workshops in the schools of Ware and Granby, MA.  They have co-authored "Preserving the Cultural Identity of the English Language Learner," in Voices from the Middle, 11.4 (May 2004), written Massachusetts Department of Education-approved SEI Category 1 and 2 courses, and led summer TOT institutes to build ELL Leadership in Western Massachusetts.